Are We There Yet? (26 page)

The profitability of the spice trade was being undermined by the fact that the crew members had the annoying habit of popping their clogs en route. At least one sailor in six died between Europe and the Far East. The culprit was scurvy, a vitamin-C deficiency whose symptoms were an attractive package of swollen gums, loose teeth, lack of energy and bouts of spontaneous bleeding. As scurvy could be prevented by eating fresh fruit and vegetables, the company directors proposed an outpost at the Cape which could grow enough food to sustain both itself and the disease-ridden seamen that popped by.

Thus on 5 April 1652 Van Riebeck sighted Table Mountain and within a week began building the Fort of Good Hope, which still stands on the original site. He was under strict instructions not to lay claim to the land but merely utilise it. He was also was expressly forbidden from keeping anything but the peace with the Khoikhoi or any other powers that wanted to establish an outpost. From the outset the company demanded the settlement show a profit, and what better way to do that than by outsourcing. Five years after the fort was established, the Dutch East India Company slashed nine salaries from its bottom line and granted each of their former employees 11.5 hectares of land. They were exempt from tax for twelve years, given free licence to trade with the Khoikhoi on the provision that they did not undercut the company, and were encouraged to grow crops not already produced in the firm's garden.

With land, monetary incentives and free equipment; all they needed now was labour to produce on a profitable scale. However, the company had outlawed enslaving the Khoikhoi whom the settlement still depended on as trade partners, especially in livestock. Their prayers of subjugation were answered in 1658 when the
Amersfoort
pulled into port with a cargo of 170 slaves, the survivors of 250 taken off a Portuguese ship off the Angolan coast. The farmers were allowed to purchase a few human beings on credit while the rest were put to work by the company.

When Van Riebeck left the Cape in 1662, the original population of 90 had swelled to 463, around a quarter of which were slaves. In the years that followed, ever-increasing numbers of men were despatched by the company to the Cape where they were given tracts of land traditionally belonging to the Khoikhoi.

The indigenous population naturally resisted and in turn suffered retaliation that grew in brutality as the company and free settlers learned how to farm cattle — a commodity that for many years only the Khoikhoi could supply. Two periods of brief warfare and a batch of smallpox later, the Khoikhoi had been subjugated into servitude. It was during their first uprising in 1657 that what many consider the seminal act of apartheid was carried out. In response to raids on farmers' cattle stocks, Van Riebeck ordered the construction of an almond hedge to separate the settlement from the Khoikhoi. Parts of it still stand in Cape Town today.

As the Khoikhoi vanished, slaves continued to pour into the settlement, but from a different source to the initial shipment. Another maritime company – the Dutch West India Company – had acquired sole trading rights (human cargo included) for the West African coast and serviced the growing American colonies. The Dutch East India Company turned to its concerns in the Orient and began importing slaves from Java, Bali, Macassar, Timor, Burma, India and what is today Malaysia. The trade was so extensive that ships' officers returning from the east frequently picked up a few slaves at cost and sold them for a tidy profit in the colony.

Life – if you could call it that – for slaves at the Cape colony was so miserable, degrading and painful that many surely wished they had perished along with those who routinely died in transit. Families were broken up for sale; Van Riebeck made it a condition that any household with slaves had to have a whip or lash on hand for disciplinary purposes; and such was the white fear of an uprising that more than two slaves belonging to different owners were forbidden from conversing at any time. Those who ran away and were recaptured were flogged, branded on the cheek or back with a red-hot iron and condemned to a lifetime in chains. A second bash at freedom resulted in the ears, nose tip or in some case the right hand being lopped off. This practice was later abolished not for humanitarian reasons but out of concern for the innocent people in polite society who had the misfortune to gaze upon such disfigurement.

By the time the nervy British occupied the Cape in 1807 (after an attempt in 1795 when everyone lost interest halfway through) it was mainly to prevent the territory falling into French hands still dripping with the blood of the nobility. The new power banned slave trading and immediately earned the ire of a group of outlying farmers who'd been quarrelling with the Dutch authorities for years and had expanded their properties ever eastwards to do as they saw fit as far from the eyes of authority as possible.

Faced with diminishing amounts of land, the unforseen expense of now having to pay employees, and an oversupply of wheat and wine (neither of which travelled well, causing prices to slump), these battling, uneducated farmers were faced with two choices: remain in the Cape settlement and work as labourers (considered the scantest of notches above slavery) or acquire the nucleus of a herd, a couple of wagons and find a suitable area for watered grazing.

These fiercely individualistic farmers, known as the Trekboers, lacked the capital to buy the amounts of land required for raising sheep and cattle, so they travelled instead to the outer fringes of the colony and took over Khoikhoi pastures. These Trekboers were the forebears of those who would eventually flee British rule and establish independent republics to the north.

Those Capetonians unwilling to endure a harsh and isolated life on the edges of civilisation but who could not survive as farmers mustered their artisan skills. The businesses they created catered to the swelling number of visitors passing through a city that had become known as the Tavern of the Seas. As the nexus of two trade routes – agricultural produce from the interior was sold to ships which had brought in freight to be flogged to the rural community – Cape Town prospered. With a wealthy merchant class came aspirations to culture, and amid the brothels, pubs and early casinos, libraries, concert halls and ornamental gardens began to flourish. Along with the streams of visiting sailors, the city's civic foundations had been well and truly laid.

As early as 1764, Greenmarket Square was a vibrant element of the Cape Town cityscape and 240 years on it's still kicking.

I heard Greenmarket Square before I saw it as the lulling throb of hand-slapped drums echoed through the narrow surrounding streets. And it's not just your
nts-nts-nts
shite either but a synthesis of beat and melody. Above these tiptoed harmonies produced by five painfully shy black girls who couldn't have been more than six or seven. Standing ramrod straight in their neatly pressed school uniforms they let rip with a multilayered rendition of “Nkosi Sikele Africa” so pure and heartfelt that it prompted me to do something I had never previously considered: folding a donation to a busker. I had to wedge said origami under the sparse array of coins in the cap at their feet or it would have blown away in the breeze that had just whipped in from Table Mountain. This brisk southeaster is known as the Cape Doctor as it sweeps away the city's pollution and was purely to blame for the particle that lodged in my eye the moment the choir hit their second chorus. See that's the thing about South Africa: she'll sicken you one minute, seduce you the next and steal your heart the moment your guard is down.

The cobblestoned market courtyard is bounded by handsome deco office buildings and the Georgian Town House that is now a hotel. The wood and stone busts of regal tribesmen you see at every roadside market in the country were here too, along with compact discs, aromatherapy soaps, knock-off Gucci sunglasses and innumerable variations of the Table Mountain motif on everything from coasters to tea towels.

The stalls were separated by a central passageway where vendors sold cold drinks from metal tubs filled with dry ice, grilled ears of corn over iron barrels or enticed passers-by with
sosaties
, one of many recipes that Malay slaves brought from their homeland and adapted to local ingredients in their masters' kitchens. This particular example consisted of lamb chunks grilled kebab-style on a stick then anointed with a spicy apricot dipping sauce.

Jennie and I wandered through the market – which is mercifully a haggle-free zone – then took a seat in the window of a pizzeria that looked out over the square. It was a spin doctor's wet dream: tourists and locals of all races mingled happily beneath a cloud-wisped sky, the air redolent with percussion and barbecue. This was the South Africa that locals wished it could be – a happy bubble and squeak of cultures in which the past was never forgotten but did not infect the future. However, in quiet corners of this vibrant collage, the reality of deprivation and violence seeped through onto the canvas. Haggard street children barely into double figures but with war-veteran eyes hassled anyone with shoes for spare change, simultaneously casing them as a potential snatch-and-dash victim. White beggars, a contradiction in terms in the South Africa where I grew up, squatted on the pavement behind pieces of cardboard on which was scrawled their tale of woe.

Some locals looked over the rims of their latte glasses, through the faces of Third World squalor that ineffectually beseeched their First World sensibilities, and mumbled, “Isn't it terrible?” Others had their pizza leftovers packaged in takeaway containers which they handed to the hungry fringe-dwellers. It should also be pointed out that a significant few white South Africans also choose to forsake their prima veras for volunteer work in townships where the ricochet of stray bullets no longer warrants a head spin. As with so many other endeavours in the South Africa of the new millennium, stereotyping is a perilous business.

Our next stop was Saint George's Cathedral, a slender and elegant nod to neo-Gothicism designed by Herbert Baker and fashioned from Table Mountain sandstone. It couldn't have appeared more different from the Regina Mundi Church in Soweto but they had striking commonalities. Both were at one time the domain of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, both were symbols of defiance and both offered refuge to protestors fleeing the rubber bullets of police enforcing the apartheid regime.

Saint George's was the starting point for a rally of 30,000 multiracial protestors who made their way to the old City Hall on 13 September 1989. It was during this event that Tutu first dropped a phrase that for some is the catchcry of a new land, while for others rings disappointingly hollow: the Rainbow Nation.

Semantics aside, the pressure brought to bear at demonstrations like this played no small part in bringing about the death throes of apartheid. Less than twelve months later and only hours after walking free from twenty-seven years of incarceration, Nelson Mandela stood on the balcony of the very same City Hall to address delirious crowds.

Watching from Sydney I felt a joy that went beyond mere recognition of a grave injustice made right. It was only the clarity of hindsight that helped me identify the strange and overwhelming new emotion surging through me: I was proud to come from South Africa.

Although the pomp and pageantry of Mandela's inauguration took place in Pretoria, it was in Cape Town that he ended his long walk to freedom. The complicated business of governing majority rule was taking place around the corner in a Victorian amalgam of red brick and white granite fronted by a portico of Corinthian columns. The House of Parliament was a bastion of legally enshrined racism until the newly installed president Frederik Willem de Klerk realised that the inconsequential concessions made by the apartheid regime in the late 1980s didn't amount to squat. The writing was on the wall and it read “One white, one bullet”.

On 2 February 1990 de Klerk announced that from that day on the ANC, PAC and South African Communist Party were no longer banned. Thirty-three domestic organisations such as the United Democratic Front and Congress of South African Trade Unions had all restrictions imposed upon them lifted; political prisoners incarcerated for nonviolent actions were freed, and capital punishment was abolished.

Although he took part in his fair share of duplicitous and underhanded actions, de Klerk's courage is often overshadowed by the lack of vengeance displayed by the man he released from the Victor Verster Prison nine days later. From his earliest days in power, Mandela pointed out that he was no messiah sent to rapidly deliver the South African masses from inequity. He was at pains to use the word “generations” in discussing his time frame for undoing the injustices of apartheid and distributing the nation's wealth more equally. When this message was emanating from a beaming Madiba, it seemed the people were happy enough to deal with their current hardships secure in the knowledge that change was going to come. The generation of ANC hierarchy which took the place of the retiring stalwarts such as Mandela and Walter Sisulu have not enamoured themselves of their constituents to the same degree. Granted, martyrs who spread the gospel of what they would do when righteousness saw them delivered into power have a far easier job than those charged with delivering those promises, but some of the sitting members have been behaving like out-and-out politicians.

For a start, President Mbeki became frustrated at the tedious business of dealing with commercial aircraft flight schedules and plundered the state coffers for R300 million for a private jet. That's a year's worth of AIDS medication for half a million of his countrymen and women. At the time of our visit, the country's premier anticorruption squad – the fabulously named Scorpions – had been sniffing around his deputy Jacob Zuma for months and the ANC's chief whip had admitted to receiving a cut-price prestige four-wheel-drive from a company who just happened to have been awarded a contract to supply the army with hardware.