C: African Interlude One

She runs as if chased. Long, legs, slim but toughly muscled, take
each pace at full extension, arms pumping in steady time. Her form is
perfect; a sprinter's reach with the regular, road devouring rhythm of
a distance runner. She runs as if chased, her elegant face tight in a
mask of concentration; turning neither left nor right, but focussed on
the road ahead. She runs as if chased, but the road behind her - which
is a long and winding costal hill street - is clear.

It is not yet six a.m on a Saturday morning in the South African
summer, and the sun is only just breaking across the horizon. Saturday
morning and the inhabitants of Hout Bay, one of Cape Town's most
exclusive neighbourhoods, are still fast asleep. In the next hour, the
streets will begin to fill. Not with the people of Hout Bay themselves,
but rather their house-helps: a large collection of cleaners, cooks,
gardeners and nannies; at this moment emerging from Hout Bay's very own
town-ship on their daily route to work.

Because this work-force is entirely black, in contrast to Hout Bay's
almost totally white community, and because our runner has golden brown
skin, bright green eyes and tightly woven dread-locks; a sleepy
observer, from behind the curtain in one of these all white homes,
conditioned to South Africa's racially divided economy, might be
forgiven for coming to the conclusion that our lone runner was one of
said cleaners, cookers or child-tenders. Slightly unusual perhaps in
choosing to jog to work, but hey, these are progressive times, and why
shouldn't the blacks be concerned with fitness also, eh?

A closer look, though, and some details contradict our imaginary
Afrikaner granny's initial hypothesis. For even the most liberal of
Cape Town employers is unlikely to pay even the most loved of nannies
enough to afford a pair of custom designed Oakleys sunglasses, still
less an Apple Ipod; currently playing the Aimee Man classic
"Amateur":

I thought you'd be better than this
But you're an amateur
I thought you'd be better than this
But I've been wrong before.

She had first heard the song whilst an undergraduate at Oxford,
introduced to Aimee Man by an older, post-graduate student; a beautiful
Ghanian woman, who looked like she had been carved out of a block of
ebony and who, in a ganja filled set, wore horn-rimmed blue glasses
worked on a never finished thesis re- interpreting John Donne through
post-feminist sensibilities. She broke of the friendship when, late one
hash-rich night, in the middle of an impassioned discussion on the
empowerment of African woman, the Ghanaian tried to kiss her, but she'd
never lost her love for Aimee Man.

Thandie Esan, MA (Oxon); PhD (Georgetown) and recently appointed
Director of Policy at the Southern African Institute for AIDS Orphans,
reaches the top of the hill, and slows to a halt. Hands on hips,
breathing heavily, her impressive chest heaving, she shrugs her
headphones loose, the better to appreciate the view in silence. And
what a view: to her left the squatting monolith that is Table Mountain
rises deliberately, vertically across the harbour. In front and below
her, the rays of the risen sun frame the bright blue harbour in
startling yellows and ochre. And in the centre of the harbour, a daily
reminder for the majority of Cape Town, of how recently and how
painfully freedom has come to their lives, is Robben Island - which for
twenty seven years was home and prison to the man they now worship as
Mandiba, "Father of the Nation", Nelson Mandela.

Thandie has only lived in Cape Town for eighteen months, and so -
whilst she feels more at home here than she has anywhere else - the
extraordinary beauty of the city and the every present immediacy of its
past still retain the power to startle and inspire her. She does this
run every morning, both for the exercise, and for the sustenance she
draws from the view.

A daughter of a militantly Methodist Nigerian oil baron, and an
indifferently Church of England homeopath; Thandie has perhaps
inevitably grown up an atheist, but in her job, in a country where 30%
of all adults are HIV positive, but in which ignorance of the disease
is so endemic that it is still widely believed that the rape of a
virgin will provide a cure to a sufferer, she finds it necessary to
believe in something. So she has come to believe in the hope that this
view gives her, in the infinite patience and determination of the men
who for decades sat within the island prison below, planning and
working the freedom of their people. Despite all the real problems of
the post-Apartheid South Africa, there is still such a deep sense of
hope in its people and in its government, Thandie likes to believe,
that the hope originated in the prison she sees before her, and that
its well-spring runs still. She breaths it in, the view and the hope,
for a few minutes longer, and then; cinnamon skin glistening from her
exertions, she begins the run back.

We will leave Thandie now, but it was important that you meet her
early; for she is our nemesis.