Holidays in Hell: In Which Our Intrepid Reporter Travels to the World's Worst Places and Asks, "What's Funny About This" (28 page)

Tom's wife had another plan, which I forgot. We watched the
TV news and mixed more drinks. Down in the black townships the
"comrades" and the "fathers"-the young radicals and older moderates-were going at it with necklacings and machetes. But this
wasn't on the news. New regulations had been issued by the
government that day, forbidding any media coverage of civil disturbance. The lead story was about sick racehorses.

The South Africans drink and go on the offensive. Tom and
Bill and I and some other bird hunters went to Jim Elliot's house for
drinks. Jim was a dentist with a den made up almost entirely of
animal heads and skins and other parts. The bar stools were
elephant feet. "A man can live like a king in this country!" said
Jim, petting a Labrador retriever named Soweto. "Like a goddamned king! I've got my practice, a house, a couple of cars, a
shack down on the beach and the best goddamned hunting and
fishing in the world. Where else could I live like this?" He hauled
out a five-kilo bag of ice. "I know you Americans like your ice." He
stuffed in as many cubes as my big glass could hold and filled it
with Scotch to the brim.

"The blacks live better here than they do in the rest of Africa,
I'll tell you that," said Bill Fletcher.

"We like the blacks," said Tom. "They don't deserve to be
treated the way they are."

"We all like the blacks," said Jim.

"Though they're a bit childish," said someone and told a story
about the new maid at his house who tried to make tea in the steam
iron.

"But they don't deserve to be treated the way they are," said
Tom. And he told how last year he'd seen a white motorist run into a
black man and knock him across the road. The motorist stopped
but wouldn't get out of his car. Tom called an ambulance and tried
to get the white man to help, but the man just drove away. "He was
a British tourist," said Tom with some satisfaction.

Later Jim said, "We fought alongside everybody else in World
War I and World War II, and now they all turn their backs on us.
The minute we're in trouble where are our friends?"

And a good deal later somebody said, "Thirty days to Cairo,"
by which he meant the South African army could fight its way up
the whole length of Africa in thirty days. It's probably true. And it
would certainly put the South African army thirty days away from
where it's causing trouble now. But I didn't point that out.

The South Africans drink and get serious. Tom and I were
shooting doves and drinking beer with a Greek car dealer named
Connie. Connie had lived in the Belgian Congo and had been
trapped there with his wife and little children in the horrors of '60
and '61. Sitting out in a grain field at sundown, Connie talked just
a little, just obliquely about people mutilating each other, about the
rape of nuns "by the very ones which they were ministering," about
cattle left alive with their legs cut off at the hocks. "It makes me
shaking to even think what I saw"

That night Tom and I drank with Carlo, who'd come out to
Africa in 1962, a teenager from a little village in Sicily carrying his
mother's whole savings, one English pound and fifty pence. He'd
made his way to Angola, "so rich, so beautiful. You put a dead
stick in the ground, it would grow." He'd prospected for minerals,
gotten rich, started a big-game hunting operation that had, at last,
eighteen camps. Then the Portuguese left. He talked about corpses
hanging in the trees, about men castrated and fetuses hanging out
of the slit bellies of women and, like the Greek, about cattle with
their legs cut off. He abandoned all his mineral claims, dynamited
his hunting camps-"not even the stones were left in one piece"and came to South Africa to start over.

I wondered what I'd think if I were South African and looked
at the rest of Africa and saw nothing but oppression, murder,
chaos, massacre, impoverishment, famine and corruptionwhereas in South Africa there was just some oppression and
murder. "You think the blacks can't govern themselves?" I said to
Carlo.

He shrugged. "It was the East Germans, the Cubans who did
the worst things I saw."

"You know Jonas Savimbi?" he said, naming the head of the more-or-less pro-Western UNITA guerrillas fighting Angola's Marxist government. "I would cut my arm off, here, to put Savimbi in
power." And he pointed to the same place on his limb as the cattle
had been mutilated on theirs.

South Africans drink and get nostalgic. I spent the Christmas
holidays on the Indian Ocean in Scotboro-a sort of Southampton
or Hilton Head with its peak season at South Africa's midsummer
Yuletide. There were a lot of old people there, members of the
"Whenwe Tribe," so called because most of their sentences begin
with "When we were in Nyasaland. . . ," "When we were in
Bechuanaland. . . ," "When we were in Tanganyika . . ." It seems
Africa was a paradise then, and the more that was drunk the more
paradisical it became. Though it must have been an odd kind of
Eden for some of its residents.

"You can see why the blacks steal," said one old man, ex of
Rhodesia. He'd been captured by the Germans at Tobruk. "In the
POW camp at Breslau we worked in the post office-stole everything in sight. Only natural under the circumstances." He flipped
his cigarette out onto the lawn, the way everyone does in South
Africa. There's always someone to pick up the butts.

"The only reason blacks have bones in their skulls is to keep
their ears apart," said a startlingly ugly old lady just as the maid,
with expressionless face, was passing the cocktail weenies around.

"Now, wait a minute..." I said.

"Well, of course your blacks have white blood." The ugly
woman shook her head. "I've never understood how any man could
be attracted to a black girl," she said, helping herself to several
miniature frankfurters and looking right through the very pretty
maid. "That kinky hair, those fat noses, great big lips ..."

I would be drummed out of the Subtle Fiction Writer's League
if I invented this scene. The old woman was not only ugly with the
ugliness age brings us all but showed signs of formidable ugliness
by birth-pickle-jar chin, mainsail ears and a nose like a trigonometry problem. What's more, she had the deep frown and snit
wrinkles which come only from a lifetime of bad character. All that
day I'd been driving through KwaZulu, through the Valley of a
Thousand Hills in the Natal outback, driving through little villages
where the Zulu girls, bare-breasted to show their unmarried status, were coming to market. Burnished skin and dulcet features and
sturdy little bodies like better-proportioned Mary Lou Rettons-I
had fallen helplessly, fervently, eternally in love thirty or forty
times.

And the South Africans drink and grow resigned to fate, at
least the younger ones do. At a dinner party full of junior business
executives, the talk was about the olive-colored South African
passport that most countries won't accept as a travel document.
"We call it the `Green Mamba,"' said an accountant, "because you
can't take it anywhere."

The guests discussed countries the way people their age in
Manhattan discuss unfashionable neighborhoods where they might
be able to find a decent-sized apartment.

"We're looking at Australia," said an estate agent.

"Oh, Christ, England, I guess," said a law clerk from Tom's
office. "My grandmother is English."

"The `Florida option' is what most people are thinking about,"
said an assistant hotel manager. "Same weather, strong economy,
and that's where everybody else goes when their governments fall
apart."

They didn't talk about money or careers. They didn't even talk
about apartheid as much as we do.

"If the United States were serious about fixing the situation
here," said the law clerk, "all they'd have to do is give every young
professional in South Africa a green card. Nobody would be left."
At least nobody they knew very well.

"When you don't work with people and you don't live with
people, you don't know them," said the accountant. "Just the
help."

And the help's attitude, lately, has been, as they put it,
"shifting."

"Who can blame them?" said the law clerk.

"They say it's those of us who've been moderates," said the
estate agent, "who'll have our throats cut."

"What about the Afrikaners? Do you blame them?" I asked.

Helpless shrugs all around. "A lot of us are part Afrikaans,"
said the assistant hotel manager. And he told a Van Der Merwe
joke, the South African equivalent of a Polish joke, about an
American, an Englishman and Van Der Merwe the Afrikaner. They can each have a wish. All they have to do is run off a cliff and shout
their heart's desire. The American runs off the cliff and shouts,
"Gold!" A pile of gold bars appears at the bottom of the cliff. The
American falls on top of it and he's killed. The Englishman runs off
the cliff and shouts, "Silver!" A pile of silver coins appears at the
bottom of the cliff. The Englishman falls on top of it and he's killed.
Then Van Der Merwe runs off the cliff, but as soon as he gets over
the edge he looks down and yells "Oh, shit!" A huge pile of shit
appears. Van Der Merwe lands in that and walks away unscathed.

Those Afrikaners drink a lot, too, though it looked like just
plain drinking as far as I could see. I spent an evening in a dirty
little bar in a farm town called Humansdorp in the Cape Province.
At first I didn't think the locals even noticed I was there. Then I
realized they had all been speaking Afrikaans when I came in, but,
after they heard me ask for more ice in my whiskey, they switched
their conversations into English-still not saying a word to me. The
bartender regaled one customer with the details of a practical joke
he'd played, putting cayenne pepper in somebody's snuff. The rest
of the bar was trading stories about bad and foolish black behavior.

A kid who'd just gotten back from his two-year army hitch was
saying that Namibian girls smear menses mixed with mud all over
their bodies. (For all I know it's true but no wierder than some of
the ingredients I've noticed in my girlfriend's shampoo lately.)
Somebody else said he kept building houses for his farm families,
and they kept tearing holes in the roofs to let out the smoke from
their cooking fires. There was concerned clucking over the neighborhood black teens. After they're circumcised they're supposed to
spend a month alone in the bush, but instead they spend it begging
beside the highway. Finally one of the Afrikaners turned to me and
asked about sheep farming in the United States. By that time I'd
had enough to drink to tell him, although I don't believe I know
which end of a sheep you're supposed to feed.

Then everyone wanted to have a chat. "Was it difficult figuring
out the South African money?" (There are 100 cents to the Rand.)
"Did people try to deal [cheat] you around here?" "Does America
have a lot of blacks?"

"I want to go to America," said the young ex-soldier, "to see
how you do it."

"Do what?"

"Get along with the blacks."

What a strange place America must be-land of sanctuary for
all beleaguered oppressors, with simple money and endless sheepfarming opportunities, where blacks behave somehow because
they've got white blood. Mike Boetcher, the NBC correspondent in
Jo-Burg, told me his baby's nurse, a beautiful girl of nineteen,
wants to go to Harlem "because everybody is young and rich there"
and because no one in Soweto has enough cows to pay her bride
price. Mike said he tried in vain to tell her most guys in Harlem
don't have a lot of cows. And in the Transkei "homeland" I talked
to a black divinity student who'd visited America. "The most
wonderful place," he said, "so wealthy and beautiful and with
perfect racial harmony."

"What part of America did you visit" I asked

"The South Side of Chicago."

I was pretty drunk myself by the time I'd been in South Africa
for three or four weeks. Not that I'm not usually, but there was
something white African in this bender. I was fuddled. My head
boiled with cliches. I was getting used to being confused. I was
getting used to hearing the most extraordinary things. From this
Irish couple who'd been living in Africa for three decades, for
instance. "There hasn't been apartheid here for years," said the
wife.

"One of the problems is that that word was invented," said the
husband.

I was becoming South African-used to having people all
around me all the time doing everything for me and not doing it
well.

I went in to dinner at my resort hotel in Mosselbaai, on the
spectacular Big Sur-like "Garden Route" along the coast between
Port Elizabeth and Cape Town. I'd had my six or eight whiskeys
with the Irish couple in the lounge and was ready for one of the
elaborate, big, bland and indifferently cooked meals that constitute
South African cuisine. The restaurant was turned out in red plush
and crisp linen. Candles glittered in cut-glass sconces. But when I
sat down at my table there were three teaspoons, two water glasses,
one dirty wine glass, no forks, no knives and no napkin.

"I need a dinner fork, a salad fork, a knife and a napkin," I said to the waiter, who stared at me in dull suprise and then headed
out across the dining room at the speed of a change in seasons. His
feet were sockless below the tuxedo pants and he was standing on
the backs of his shoes with just his toes stuffed into the unlaced
oxfords.

He returned with another spoon.

"I need a knife, a fork and a napkin!" I said.

He came back twenty minutes later with the water pitcher and
filled my wine glass.

"LOOK HERE," I said, "DO YOU SPEAK ENGLISH?"

He thought about that for a long time. "Oh, yes." He disappeared and came back in half an hour with one more water glass.
"Is the master ready to order?"

He was without recourse, voteless, impoverished, impropertied, not a legal citizen in his own nation, yet he had me reduced to
a paroxysm of impotent drunken rage. I left him a huge tip and ate
my chicken with a spoon.