Trip to S.Africa - the elephant that plays rugby

A TRIP TO SOUTH AFRICA: THE ELEPHANT THAT PLAYS RUGBY
By R. Eric Swanepoel
Copyright 2000 Robert Eric Swanepoel

'The blind men were led, one by one, to meet the elephant. One felt an
ear. Another felt a tusk. A third wrapped his arms around a leg. A
fourth only encountered the tail, and one felt the belly. Later they
discussed what manner of beast an elephant was. They could not agree.
One said an elephant was like a sheet. Another maintained it was like a
huge curved needle. It was also likened to a pillar, a brush and a
barrel. They argued late into the night...' (A tale I remember my
father telling me, from the Bhagavad-gita.)

Do not believe them when they tell you they know the whole truth about
South Africa, for they are all blind men, and South Africa is an
elephant, too big for any single man to know. Do not believe any one of
them. Believe them all if you must, and swallow the contradictions
whole, or believe the women for they have carried Africa's burdens, or
believe me, because I am not one person. I am the chameleon whose eyes
look in different directions, simultaneously, watching out for the
venomous tree snake and the juicy fly, and then... the juicy fly and
the venomous tree snake. I am the pretentious know-all who gets carried
away with only marginally appropriate metaphors. I have the time and
the money for idle philosophizing. I am the hypocrite who was partly
educated by the apartheid state, and then deprived the free country of
his skills, and yet presumes to claim that he was, and is, opposed to
apartheid. And I sit here luxuriating in mea culpa, in this first class
train compartment, as the people in the shanty town outside huddle
under their caddis fly canopies of detritus and hope that the rains
don't come today, and the people up north, at the other end of South
Africa, and in Zimbabwe, know that it is too late for the rains to do
any good this year, even if they come, for the surviving dogs are
picking at the donkey carcasses, and the mielie [maize] stalks are
dead. The dogs feed, and the tourists are sated with the sight of stone
and wood carvings, and won't buy any more and you sit by the side of
the road, in the heat and the dust, next to your would-be curios, and
watch them drive past in their German and Japanese cars... But I stop
myself here - how patronising to imagine that I can identify with the
poor people waiting by the road.

The train left Pretoria yesterday morning and soon we shall be in Cape
Town. I say 'we' because there are two other men in this compartment.
One of them is about 60, an Afrikaner, and I can't quite put my finger
on why, but I sense he is a good man. He hardly says anything, he has
no books with him, and he has a lost, humble, dignified air. Possibly
his wife has just died, and he is going to visit his sister in Cape
Town. This naive church-going man was one part of the monster of
apartheid, I think... He was always civil to the black men in his
charge, but half of them would have been several rungs up the ladder,
and he would have been calling them 'Baas' if they'd been given a fair
chance... and part of me wants to say 'if they'd been given a fair
crack of the whip!' But he is no longer secure in his baas-skap, and
his church has apologised for apartheid.

The other man here is a boyish 40-year old English speaker, who has
made some drinking buddies on the train, two of whom drop into our
compartment for a chat. I learn the 40-year old has been on a hiking
trip in the mountains somewhere and is returning to his family and job
in Cape Town. This story, and his desperate comradeship with the young
Australians on their way to the rugby, tell me that he is going through
his mid-life crisis. There is something pathetic about the way he
presses his phone number on the Australians and offers to show them
around. Still, he is doing his bit for the reputation of South Africans
as hosts. White South Africans as hosts of white visitors.

I have said nothing about the countryside seen from the train. You may
assume that South Africa was living up to its reputation as a land of
contrasts:

'South Africa is a very flat, very dry country, a mile above sea-level,
covered with brown grass, which burns once a year, and then lies black,
before turning green.'

'South Africa is low-lying, bushclad, and malaria-infested. If you
sleep outdoors at night your face will be torn off by hyenas, but at
least you will have seen the stars as you will never see them anywhere
else.'

'South Africa is nothing but beautiful green hills.'

'South Africa is a crime-ridden urban wasteland whose air would choke
an inhabitant of Los Angeles.'

'South Africa consists of barren rock mountains, stacked on bare stoney
mountains, with some extra rugged crags thrown in for excitement, and
sprinkled with a smattering of greenness which trickles down, sticking
here and there, to accumulate in the folds.'

'South Africa consists of a vast rolling landscape, dotted with
dirty-green knee-high bushes as densely packed as the curls of its
president's hair, amongst which occasional sheep move like lost
lice.'

'South Africa is hundreds of square miles of flowers, and empty
desert.'

'South Africa is vineyards, pastures, fruit and oak trees, and the
whole European rural idyll.'

'South Africa is abject rural poverty, internecine tribal warfare, and
bigotry on every level.'

'South Africa is a maritime country, whose coastal scenery ranges from
that of the most vertiginous sections of the Mediterranean's shore to
that of the best beaches on Sue Lawley's desert island.'

No, we didn't see quite all of these from the train. Only most of them.
Now we are arriving in Cape Town...so the next words have to be: Table
Mountain.

Table Mountain. It really exists, and now I know why it's called Table
Mountain: it really is a mountain! But I can't go there now, because I
have to find somewhere safe for my luggage. Cape Town station would be
medium-size by British standards, but in this country it's pretty big.
It should be, because Cape Town is the joint capital, together with
Pretoria. It's surprising to me, then, that the left luggage place
closes at 4 p.m. and there are no lockers. The bored young white man
manning the left luggage centre reluctantly agrees to watch over my
baggage for a few minutes as I go to phone my Capetonian friend. The
things which are 'manned' in this country often involve a lot less work
and better pay than those which are 'womanned' but then that applies to
most countries. I return from making my phonecall. My luggage hasn't
disappeared, though the left-luggage-place-man has left the left
luggage place, or at least he is not visible - big surprise! So much
for the criminals, the skorrie-morries of South Africa - I ought to
have been mugged at least twice and they can't even be bothered
stealing a suitcase! But now I have the address of my friend's
workplace, where I shall leave my theft-evading baggage. My cases are
expertly manoeuvred on to a cumbersome-looking metal framework
wheelbarrow to join other burdens bound for the taxi rank. The expert
manoeuvrer is a 'Cape Coloured'. These people (in South Africa most
sentences must contain 'these people,' as in 'Ja, the things you
visitors will never understand, is that these people are not like you
and me. I tell you, you can take the monkey out of the bush, but you
can't take the bush out of the monkey.' (But, in describing people like
this, I wonder if I am as guilty of stereotyping as the people who say
this kind of thing?)

To get back to the story, 'these people' are largely the descendants of
Javanese labourers imported by the Dutch East India Company, with
various other bloods thrown in. In the cavalier fashion typical of
imperialists (the British and the Dutch), the Cape Coloureds were
dubbed Malays, and The Malay Quarter of Cape Town, with its 'splendid
colourfully painted square bungalows' is one of the many tourist
attractions. Most coloured people have Afrikaans as their mother
tongue. One feels obliged to use words like 'rich' and 'vibrant' when
describing their Afrikaner-Javanese-Hottentot-Bantu-British, so-called
'Malay' culture. Their annual street festival, Die Kaapse Klopse,
generates almost as much local fervour as the Rio festival does in the
breasts of that other melting-pot's inhabitants. But Table Mountain is
more impressive than Rio's Sugarloaf.

And now I fast-forward to the day of my delayed assault on Table
Mountain. On my walk through the now familiar streets of Cape Town to
the lower slopes, I divert through an arcade and take a left turn into
a hair-shearing establishment, for my locks are lanky, and could do
with some truncation. This is a two-woman affair. The owner is a
Greek-accented ex-Hararean, who shares this last distinction with
myself. Her assistant, who sweeps the clippings, and prepares a cup of
coffee for me as I wait my turn, is an
Afrikaner-Javanese-Hottentot-Bantu-British lass, a 'coloured' in other
words. I try to ignore the girlie magazines as I sip my coffee, and I
reach for a copy of Newsweek. I read of the Rise of the Radical
Religious Republican Right in the good ol' US of A, which gives me an
opportunity to pRRRactice my AfRRRikaans R's: RRRadical RRReligious
RRRepublican RRRight. My turn for de-hirsutification arrives, and sees
me discussing Harare. It turns out that both of us have recently
re-visited our former homeland, and both us saw few changes on the
surface. 'On the surface' describes our conversation as we manage to
avoid revealing where we stand on Majority Rule and other racial
issues. There is always an awkward period of sizing-up when one meets
white ex-Rhodesians as their views might not be as PC as yours. A
subdivision of this category of ex-Rhodesian is known as 'The When
We's', as in 'When we were in Rhodesia we would go tiger-fishing on
Kariba every year.' The pruner of my mane is fortunately not a 'When
We'.

Freshly divested of my excess keratin, I walk past the Malay Quarter
and up and up, clutching my crumpled Table Mountain cable-car map. I
pass des. res's, and multi-hued hiker's hostels, and I'm not sure
whether they're competing for business on the basis of the magnificence
or the mesmeric mediocrity of their murals. It's bloody hot now, and
I'm glad I'm only walking to the cableway station and not all the way
to the top. Unfortunately, the damn map isn't drawn to scale, and so
I'm in to the 'just-over-the-next-rise' phenomenon of raised and dashed
hopes which seems to accompany ascents in all continents. Things level
out a bit, and a large road comes in from the right to join the one
along which I am traipsing, and here there is a bus stop. As I reach
this point, a small combi pulls up and offers me a lift. I enquire the
price, the 'Malay' driver's assistant tells me, and I join the few
other tourists in the back. One of them is a striking young woman, with
a lot of je ne sais quoi about her. Something tells me that she is
worth speaking to, and I am going to get to speak to her, but there's
no need to rush, because the whole day and the whole mountain lie
before us.

We are fortunate, as we are packed into the cable-car less densely and
with less delay than is the norm, and are soon dangling hundreds of
metres above the rocks and proteas. I am not normally scared of
heights, but the cable seems a tenuous security. From this height and
distance, Cape Town looks much like any modern city under its layer of
smog, but the setting surely cannot be equalled. Table Mountain,
despite the irritant suburbs scrabbling at its lower reaches, stands
grand and clean and real as it has done for aeons. It is not quite as
flat on top as it appears from below, but near enough. There are paths
marked out, there is a mini-museum at the cable-car station, there is a
restaurant, and there are telescope-equipped observation platforms, but
none of these seems tasteless. On a clear day you can observe forever.
To the south the mountains stretch away down to the nature reserve of
Cape Point, and on each side and beyond lies the sea. To the north the
whole of Africa is waiting, and screams at you: 'Do what you will, you
will never escape me now!'

But the lure of the horizon is counterbalanced by more local
distractions, and there are three that concern me. I have air to
breathe, and I am not hungry, but I am thirsty, so the orange juice
vendor and his wares constitute my first concern. He tells everyone his
life story, and I am not sure whether this is an extra thrown in gratis
with the orange juice, or whether having to listen to him and look
interested is part of the price of the beverage. He tells everyone how
he left his native England and made his home in South Africa, how he
was made redundant, and how he set up this orange juice business a few
months ago, during which time he has become acquainted with every
famous resident and visiting personality, how he is on first name terms
with the All Blacks (the New Zealand rugby team), and how he will be
supporting England in the rugby. He reminds me of the 40-year old on
the train, and I wish him well and break away. The other proximate
distractions are the wildlife, and the woman, and I conceive a plan
whereby I can employ the one to get into conversation with the
other.

Dassies, otherwise known as rock rabbits or rock hyraxes, abound. They
are the size of rabbits, but have short ears, and if one awarded
daft-looking domestic rabbits an arbitrary 100 IQ points on the small
furry creatures scale, then judging by the knowing looks on the faces
of these creatures, they would be 200 Stanford-Binet-point geniuses. So
perhaps it is not so surprising that their closest living relative,
other than the tree hyrax, is the elephant who never forgets. A blind
man could easily feel and describe an entire dassie but unless he were
very astute he would not detect that they were related to elephants.
Like elephants, they have but four toes on each foot, and long upper
incisors, though unlike the tusks of elephants these do not protrude
but are ground down in contact with their opposite numbers in the lower
jaw. Their noses are pert, moist and black. Their excreta helped
liberate Zimbabwe, as it yields saltpetre, an ingredient of gunpowder.
It accumulates under the overhangs of rocks where the dassies shelter
from black eagles, where one will find the paper nests of wasps, and
where the San people left their paintings hundreds of years ago. The
dassies survive heavy predation, the hornets still tend their larvae,
but the San were not so lucky, and the only place you can find them
other than the Kalahari desert, is in model form in the Cape Town
natural history museum, exhibited alongside 'other' wildlife.

I can see that one of the observation platforms is festooned with
dassies sunning themselves, and that they are not in the least
concerned about tourists. They are the sort of magnet that no tourist
can resist, so I reason that if I position myself amongst them I have a
very good chance of initiating conversation with the beautiful young
woman. I make my way to the platform, and take some extreme close-ups
of dassie toes, and dassie snot, and a few New Zealand and Australian
rugby fans ask what the creatures are. I spout my knowledgeable spiel,
and talk a bit more loudly when the maiden makes her appearance. Soon
it is just the two of us on the platform, and she's clicking away with
her camera. It's very easy to lapse into conversation about the dassies
and I offer to take a photograph of her with them using her camera. She
has an idea to attract larger numbers of dassies to make a more
impressive photograph. She rummages in the litterbin and extracts some
strands of greasy fried onion. The dassies rush up to her, and I click
away with her camera. So... she's using the onion to attract the
dassies, I'm using the dassies to get to her, and the dassies are using
our desire for their portraits to get food. Very mutually satisfactory.
She has a North American accent, and I make the mistake of asking
whether she's from the States. Of course not - she's from Canada. She
forgives me my solecism, and I soon establish that she's about as far
from the standard tourist as it's possible to get. This woman has spent
months travelling through the most dangerous countries of Africa on her
own. I like to flatter myself that I could tell she was exceptional
from first seeing her, and that's why I wanted to speak to her, but
that's probably not the whole truth. She tells me calmly that it wasn't
too bad as she was only attacked and had everything stolen the once.
She speaks of Zimbabwe and South Africa a mite disdainfuly, as being
'too tame', and not 'The Real Africa', (ah, 'The Real Africa!') though
she says that the most beautiful sight she has seen is the view we are
now enjoying. I look at her, and silently concur. She is one tough
independent woman, and I am immensely attracted to her. I realise that
she must be used to being hassled by men as she's more than pretty.
She's lean, exercise lean, not diet slim. She's blond, and she's
probably around 30, though it's difficult to be sure - the sun has
given her a deep tan. She has a way of holding herself and speaking
that radiates self-confidence, and self-containment, and I think the
last thing she's going to want is another boring bloke asking her out
for a drink, or straining to prolong a conversation, so I say 'Well,
I'm off to walk around the mountain...' hoping that my feigned
indifference might arouse her interest, and that she'll make sure she
meets me again later in the day.

She says, 'Yes, probably see you on the other side.' Of course, I never
see her again.

My hopeful wanderings take me anticlockwise around the mountain top,
and I am soon the only human being I can see. I am surrounded by
apparently pristine wilderness - the dense green of Ericas and Proteas,
members of the so-called fynbos vegetation, one of the great floristic
kingdoms of the world, spectacularly diverse and beautiful. Baboon
barks and birdsong are all I hear, and verdant valleys tempt me.
Intermittently I take photographs and sit and soak it up, and slowly
complete my circuit, spending time on the other side of the mountain,
too, looking down upon super-diverse little Cape Town, with its smart
waterfront restaurants and craft halls, the harbour alive with
sealions, the upmarket fleamarket on Greenmarket Square, the street
musicians, who play their marimbas even when it is pouring and the town
is deserted, the famous flower-sellers, the lusciously-foliaged parks,
the stately museums and Houses of Parliament, the posh district of
Green Point, known locally as kugel country, where wealthy Jewish South
African princesses prospect for wealthy husbands, and, of course, the
ever-present beggars and the poor workers, who are trained in every day
from sundry dismal locations.

That afternoon, after stoking up on excellent and cheap wine, double
espressos and a baguette sandwich, and after being chatted-up over
lunch by a girl who turned out to be stripper, I head for the station,
and buy a third-class return ticket to Simonstown in the south via Fish
Hook. Third-class tickets are sold at a booth very separated from the
one which sells first-class tickets. Apartheid is dead, long live
apartheid, I think. I am already familiar with the fact that in South
Africa there is no such thing as second-class - no British complication
(or avoidance?) of the issues. My third-class ticket seems laughably
cheap - a few pence for a return journey of an hour or so. I sit and
inspect my surroundings. The carriage is sparsely occupied, and plastic
benches run the length of each side. There are a couple of white
schoolkids, a matronly black woman with a knitted hat, and sitting
opposite me a head-dressed, obviously Muslim young woman, and next to
her, a tall thin pale-skinned man of similar stock. They have open
intelligent faces, and over the course of the next half an hour, they
produce an amazing number of what appear to be textbooks from their
bags, which they discuss avidly, pointing out pieces of the text to
each other. They must be students. I am frustrated at not being able to
hear a word of their conversation, which I guess might be in Afrikaans,
nor read the titles of their books. The train stops frequently, and
schoolkids appear and disappear in an array of uniforms. The general
rule seems to be one uniform, one race, but the sizeable minority of
uniforms encasing juvenile bodies of more than one race keeps my
anti-apartheid self happy. We pass Newlands rugby stadium on which much
of the world's attention will soon be focussed. The train is now
moderately full, and our carriage holds a mixture of the ordinary
people of Cape Town, a mixture of mixtures. One can be reasonably
confident that at least three languages are being spoken, but without
overhearing one can't be certain which language any one person is
using. Although I am feigning severe boredom, so as not to look like a
tourist, my attention is drawn to a George Bernard Shaw-lookalike
tramp. His skin is out-in-all-weathers caramel brown, though it must
once have been as light as mine, and the pale blue irises and the
whites of his eyes are dramatic. You can tell by his appearance that he
stinks. When he is not exploring the anatomy of his nasal passages, he
is preparing a roll-up from the newspaper he carries in the hip pocket
of his out-in-all-weathers-for-twenty-years jacket. He coughs and puffs
and coughs. The breast pocket of the jacket is stuffed with many thin
sheets of glossy, colourfully-printed paper, but it will be a while
before I learn their identity. As we disembark at Fish Hook, I see him
stoop to light the cigarette of a young black woman, her baby sleeping
soundly on her back. His gesture is dapper, debonaire - for a moment he
is worth something to someone, and he is every inch the gentleman. The
woman inhales the fumes and briefly forgets her poverty, perhaps.

Fish Hook is disappointing. There are surfers in the sea, and holiday
villas on the surrounding hills, and the mainstreet is nondescript.
Fish Hook fails to hook me and I return to the station to await the
Simonstown train. I sit on the benches where the third-class section of
the train will supposedly pull up - but it doesn't. To my right lies
Cape Town, to my left lies the increasingly mythical Simonstown. The
train was due half-an-hour ago. Sitting on the Cape Town side is George
Bernard Shaw, and he is writing with great concentration on the bits of
glossy paper, and putting them in brown envelopes, which he licks and
seals. I see now he is filling out competition entry forms, and dreams
of winning a million rand, or a holiday in Barbados. In some office
somewhere, his tatty envelopes reeking of cheap tobacco will be
discarded. I surreptitiously photograph a cluster of coloured
alcoholics hanging out in the Simonstown direction, where I have come
to accept I shall never go. I have told my Capetonian hostess I shall
be back in Cape Town by a certain hour, and if I don't catch the next
train to Cape Town I might be late.

The train which draws up stays parked for perhaps forty minutes, and I
embark, and disembark, and then get on and off again, and no-one seems
to know why its departure is so delayed, and the station announcement
is indecipherable, even from the first-class platform, where I bravely
venture. Eventually I am on the train, and it is moving towards Cape
Town, but very very slowly, and with frequent inexplicable and
seemingly interminable stops between stations. All the stations on the
way to Cape Town are now packed with commuters, and when we draw up,
desperate humanity bursts in, like water into a breached submarine. I
hang from a piece of luggage rack, the straps long since gone the way
of all human creations, and I try to withstand the pressure, and
prevent myself being forced into the doorless toilet. The WC gapes
mutely, its seat away somewhere, partying with the hanging straps no
doubt, or consulting with the flushing mechanism. The absence of the
seat and the flushing mechanism don't really matter, however, as the
floor has served people as well as the bowl, and the smell in the
stultifying air of the stalled train makes me think, 'Come back George
Bernard Shaw, all is forgiven!' I ask one of the two young coloured
blokes near me whether this sort of thing happens often. He assures me
it doesn't, and we chat briefly in both English and Afrikaans. He will
punish the railways by not paying for his tickets for the next two
months, a gnat withdrawing services from a hippo. We grimly watch
trains pass in the other direction, their passengers amazed at the
spectacle we present. We creep forward twenty yards, and then stop for
twenty minutes, then another half-hearted creeplet... we pass some
superb mansions, whose occupants would never dream of catching a train,
and hear a pampered dog bark from a patio. One of the coloured blokes
is berated good-naturedly in English by a middle-aged black woman, for
smoking in the airless carriage. He puts his cigarette out, but is soon
inhaling from another.

On arrival in Cape Town, I phone my friend, and re-arrange our
rendezvous. She appears outside the tourist information centre in her
yellow Golf, munching cheese and chilli-flavoured popcorn, and
listening to a tape of humorous rugby songs, which I effect to despise.
A few weeks later I am back in Scotland. I watch the Springboks win the
World Cup, and I hear that the whole of South Africa is dancing in the
streets. A black taxi driver is interviewed about the victory of the
93.3 \% white team, and he says: 'Yes, I never used to be interested in
rugby, but they are our team now.'

You could tell a blind man that he was about to touch an animal that
destroys trees, produces more shit than any other creature on earth,
and could kill him with a careless step, and you could be sure that
contact with elephant hide would evoke loathing and disgust, or you
could tell him that he was about to make contact with one of the most
intelligent animals on earth, an animal that forms lifelong
friendships, mourns its dead and indulges its offspring, and the odds
are that the rough reality of elephant skin would amount to a mystic
experience. Take your pessimism and your prejudices to South Africa,
and they will be well nourished, but take your optimism and your hopes,
and let the rainbow country weave miracles.