Cape Town

I knew I had been in Cape Town too long when people started asking me why the freeway overpass near the waterfront had never been finished. It stopped abruptly, just at the bottom of City Bowl, as the city and inner suburbs are known, and didn’t start again for another kilometre or so. It left an unsightly and dangerous drop of thirty metres at both ends, and for some reason I had taken a vague interest in why. Now – sadly – when visitors asked hostel managers about it, they started sending them to me. In just ten days I had become the backpacker community’s leading expert on Cape Town’s unfinished freeways.

There were several theories. Some said it was because the city ran out of money before the freeway was finished. Others, in hushed tones because it reflected badly on South African engineering, spoke of a miscalculation that meant the two ends would never meet up. My favourite theory was the one that said it had been abandoned because the overpass would have blocked the view of Table Mountain enjoyed by old retired seamen in the Salvation Army Hostel. The really disturbing thing wasn’t that there were so many different theories about the two ugly bookends of concrete and exposed metal reinforcement. It was that I knew them.

In retrospect, my decision to start my grand African adventure in Cape Town had not been a smart one. It is a stunning city of white beaches and tall leggy blondes bearing an uncanny resemblance to Charlize Theron. Beer is cheap and good, and the parlous state of the rand meant that I could feast on rump steak as thick as a phone book for less than four bucks. Table Mountain provided a dramatic landmark – no matter where I went in the city it brooded, craggy and flat-topped, in the background, or at worst, peaked out seductively from behind a building. And everywhere the good folk of Cape Town went about their business with an assurance that comes from living in one of the most beautiful cities in the world.

Nor did it help that I was dossing with Clive and Leanne in their flat in Gardens, a pretty suburb nestled at the base of Table Mountain. Clive and Leanne ran the southern Africa division of Worldwide Adventure Tours, an overland trucking company that specialised in taking travellers to Zimbabwe through Namibia and Botswana. Leanne, a determined blonde from Perth, made sure travellers got on the trucks. Clive, a English mechanic with a ginger beard that was a touch demonic, made sure the trucks were capable of making it there and back.

Clive and Leanne hardly knew me – it was a friend-of-a-friend doss – but that didn’t stop them from telling me I could stay as long as I wanted. I had my own room (no long term couch-related injuries). I had an immediate and lively social circle (they introduced me to their friends). I had unfettered use of a television and a sound system (including a selection of half-decent CDs). And the fridge was full of beer (including half a dozen bottles of prized Primus lager from the former Zaire.) If I wasn’t in dosser heaven, I was only a couple of clouds off.

It didn’t take long for a daily routine to form: When they left for work in the morning I’d still be in bed. And when they came home they’d find me sitting on the sofa, drinking beer and watching TV soaps.
I’d like to think that my soap opera fixation was because I was still in a funk over the split with the GND. I was finding consolation in the trials and tribulations of people with big hair and shiny teeth, convincing myself that in comparison my own problems were insignificant. Sure, I’d broken up with the GND, but at least I hadn’t found her in bed with her half-brother who was secretly also my own father.

It was a local soap, Isidingo, that really had me hooked. Evocatively subtitled The Need, it chronicled the lives and loves of a mining community called Horizon Deep. The show was cast along demographic lines to reflect the new ‘rainbow nation’ and it was South Africa’s most popular television show.

‘You’re not watching that crap are you?’ Clive would ask when he came home.

I’d nod, eager not to get distracted from the latest carryings-on between Maggie Webster, an attractive 25-year-old with a bit of a weight problem, and Constable Leon du Plessis, the solid and incorruptible local policeman.

‘You know it’s a real place, don’t you?’ he said. ‘I pass the sign every time I go to Harare.’

I said that was all well and good, but if he didn’t mind, they were just about to take a group of visiting VIPs on a tour of the mine. And if the dramatic promos that had been shown all week were anything to go by, there was going to be a major explosion that some characters would not survive!

‘You really ought to get out more,’ said Clive, only half joking. ‘You’re beginning to scare me.’

That was a little unfair. My stay in Cape Town hadn’t been all bizarre love triangles and Windhoek Lagers on a comfy couch. I had left the house. A number of times. It was just that they were short trips so I’d get back in time for my shows. It was unfortunate, too, that the time Clive and Leanne walked in after a hard day’s work at the office coincided with the prime soapy time slot.

For example: I’d caught the Rotair cable car to the top of Table Mountain and marvelled at the spectacular view out over the city to Signal Hill and towards Table Bay. Onboard entertainment was provided by a large Afrikaner who couldn’t come to terms with the rotating floor, designed to spin slowly so that everyone could enjoy the view. He insisted on holding on to the rail no matter how many times it dragged him to the floor.
Then there was my day trip to the Cape of Good Hope Nature Reserve. Here I wandered along the sandstone cliffs, amongst the proteas and past the pounding surf, before spending an hour or so in the car park watching a pack of baboons competing to see who could put the biggest dint in the roofs of the cars parked there. I finished the day at Hout Bay, eating fresh fish in a cafe overlooking the fish markets and the sheer slopes of Chapman’s Peak.

Another day I visited the seaside town of Muizenberg to see the brightly coloured bathing sheds. I ate my lunch beside them and enjoyed a lively conversation with a coloured woman who told me a story about being busted by police while she was naked. ‘I hope they like blue movies!’ she kept muttering. Apparently the whole raid had videotaped.

At other times you’d find me down at the Victoria and Albert Waterfront, wandering through the smart shops and restaurants, trying hard to convince myself that I wasn’t back home at Darling Harbour in Sydney. Most days I’d sit on the docks, flicking food at the seagulls or watch them harass the Mandela huggers – all clutching their battered copies of Long Walk to Freedom – getting on boats heading to Robben Island.
I shouldn’t have been surprised to find it difficult to leave Cape Town. It has always been a town that seduces visitors to stay a little bit longer than they planned. In the days when Dutch trading vessels passed by on their way around the Cape of Good Hope, it was a refreshment station for the ships of the Dutch East Indies company. It was an amiable halfway point where captains could stock up on fresh provisions before heading off for the Far East again.

That it was also known as the ‘Tavern of the Seas’ indicates the kind of ‘refreshment’ the sailors were indulging in. To them Cape Town was a place have a few ales and wink at some wenches before hitting the lonely seas again. I suspect that a lot of those sailors, like me, would have quite happily stayed in Cape Town. But at least they had made a start on their journeys. I hadn’t even begun my grand adventure to Cairo yet.

Before I left Cape Town though I wanted to visit a township. Not because I thought the shanty towns out on Cape Flats was the ‘real’ Cape Town. (I’ve never understood how one facet of a city could be any more ‘real’ than another.) But more out of interest in how things have changed since apartheid unravelled in the early nineties.

Cape Town’s black and coloured populations had been moved to Cape Flats, 25 kilometres from the city centre, by the white government back in the eighties in an attempt to ‘clean up’ an area called District Six. It had been a vibrant district, close to the centre of town, where people from all over South Africa came to live and work at the harbour and in the factories nearby. But District Six was bulldozed and now its former inhabitants are forced to travel to work each day on buses or trains or in taxis and then return at night to makeshift huts in shanty towns like Khayelitsha, Nyanga and Gugeletu. In Khayelitsha alone, 1.3 million people are squeezed in 12.2 square kilometres filled with the huts, humpies and lean-tos you see in a World Vision ad.

I had first spotted Khayelitsha on my way into the centre of Cape Town from the airport. From a speeding car it looked like an indiscriminate pile of corrugated iron, plastic and cardboard. It was only when I saw small children playing amongst the rubble that I realised the place may be inhabited. Then I noticed power lines and tall, slender poles topped with searchlights. Clive told me the lights had been used to illuminate the area when the army came in to flush out ANC rebels in the old days of apartheid.

Of course, the ANC were running the country now. Nelson Mandela was swept to power in the first free elections in 1994, and his successor, Thabo Mbeki, managed to hang on during the last election in 1999. But affordable housing continued to be a problem. Joint ventures between the government and private sector had seen some success – the townships were dotted with tiny two-bedroom homes gaily-painted in yellows, reds and blues that had been built cheaply and sold to the very poor at heavily subsidised rates. In fact, since 1994 1,324, 886 such houses have been built, 159,676 of those around Cape Town alone. That most township dwellers were still living in such deplorable conditions indicates the vast scale of the problem.
I’d read in the weekend paper about a woman in Khayelitsha who had turned her shack into a down-at-heel Bed &Breakfast and decided a visit would be the best way for me to experience township life. Her name was Vicki and when I called the number listed in the article she gave me her address and instructions on how to get there.

Clive was not impressed by my plan to visit Khayelitsha. Like most people living in South Africa his experience with township dwellers was limited to the annoying car space jockeys who roamed the roamed the popular thoroughfares like Long Street and Loop Street on foot, looking for empty parking spots that they’d claim as their own. He’d read articles in the newspapers about the high levels of violence and poverty in townships and considered them hotbeds of crime. When he discovered I planned to stay overnight, he was flabbergasted. ‘It’s different world out there, mate,’ he said. ‘You’ll get necklaced!’

Necklacing had been quite a common feature of life in the townships. Any white person found wandering around a township – or any local suspected of consorting with the authorities – had a tyre put around their neck, doused with petrol and set alight. Clive was even less impressed when I told him that I intended to catch a minivan, or taxi, as the locals preferred to call them. ‘Taxi!’ he spluttered. ‘Do you want me to arrange your funeral now or should I wait until your body turns up in a ditch somewhere?’

Taxis in South Africa didn’t have the best of reputations. They are poorly maintained and often crash. I visited a web site about Khayelitsha (even shanty towns have their own web sites these days) and it confirmed that they were death traps. It also hinted that bald tyres and dodgy breaks would be the least of my worries. ‘Sometimes the drivers do not wash,’ it warned. ‘They just get up and smell awful. Sometimes, they are drunk.’

There was also an ongoing dispute over routes between the taxi drivers and the Golden Arrow Bus Company. It had recently escalated into violence and the local papers were calling it a war. Passengers were being shot and bus drivers were wearing flack jackets, so I guess it was. But I wanted to visit Khayelitsha and there was no other way of getting out there.

The minivan I caught to Khayelitsha came with standard side and forward safety cushioning in the form of the African mamma heading back to their township homes after working in the city. They wore the uniforms of the cafes and supermarkets that employed them and sat chatting and gossiping with their friends. When I clambered in they shut up immediately and stared at me, stunned. ‘What you doing going to Khayelitsha?’ asked one, after an interminable amount of time. ‘Don’t you know it’s dangerous?’

I must have looked startled because she laughed and the other women in the van laughed that big infectious African laugh too. With that laugh the ice was broken and I was included into their little world. I spent the rest of the journey fielding questions about where I was from and where I was going and trying to convince them that not having any children did not necessarily mean that I was impotent.

I steered the conversation towards more comfortable ground by showing the women the address for Vicki’s B&B. They passed it amongst themselves and debated just exactly where I should get off. The consensus was that I should get off at the market in Section C and ask for directions from there. Daphne, a cute check-out girl who worked at the Spar supermarket at Sea Front, said she’d help me. The other women tittered amongst themselves. ‘You be careful girl,’ one teased. ‘He be after your black bootie!’

We both blushed, causing more laughter.

I never got to prove that my intentions towards Daphne were (nearly) entirely honourable. When we arrived at the market area of Section C, one of the other passengers, a drunk woman called Ruth, claimed she knew exactly where Vicki’s house was and insisted on being the one to take me there. She was wiry and muscly and gave me a look that said she was in no mood to be argued with.

The rattling sliding door on the van took an age to open, but when it did it did so with a loud scraping noise that made sure everyone within 200 metres was looking at me. Young guys slouched drinking beer looked up from their card games, the corner of their mouths curling menacingly. Women buying vegetables from stalls gaped at me open-mouthed, one of them letting the potato she was about to buy fall from her hand and drop to the ground. A guy boiling sheep heads in a forty-four gallon drum gave me the kind of look that suggested he was sizing up my head for tastiness and nutritional value. I knew in an instant that I was somewhere I shouldn’t be. And my life was in the hands of a woman who had spent the day necking a bottle of moonshine.

‘Come, we’ll ring that woman from the public phone,’ she slurred, dragging me towards a group of the most dangerous looking guys.

The public phone was in a ‘telephone centre’ – a shipping container filed with half a dozen phones and a fax too. All the businesses were conducted in old shipping containers – barbershops, shoe repairs, telephone centres – arranged in a line like the shops on a high street back home. I tried Vicki’s number. There was no answer.

‘Don’t worry you can come back to my mother’s house. She has her own phone.’

My first inclination was to wave down the first minivan and pay the driver whatever he wanted to take me back into Cape Town. My second was to get Ruth to ask one of the more kindly looking folk for directions to Vicki’s house. But before I could suggest this, Ruth was out of the telephone centre and striding back through the markets towards the main road.

I stopped for a moment to consider abandoning Ruth and trying to find Vicki’s house on my own. It couldn’t be that hard. But then I felt the hostile stares from the bored young men and started after her again, lucky not to lose her when she dove between two shacks and darted along a tiny dusty path.

Ruth wove a circuitous but assured path through tumble-down shacks and rubbish piles. We passed some children who stopped playing when they saw me, the smallest of them bursting into tears. I tried waving but that only seemed to make matters worse.

We had just left behind one group of small children sobbing uncontrollably when Ruth stopped dead in her tracks. ‘Dagga!’ exclaimed Ruth, pointing to a shack incongruously surrounded by BMWs and Mercedes.
Dagga was the local slang for marijuana – we had stumbled upon the local drug dealer’s house. Terrific! We squeezed sideways between two shacks hoping that we hadn’t been spotted, until we came upon another path.

The drug dealers had spooked Ruth and she insisted that I walked in front of her now. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, unconvincingly. ‘You are safe.’

I didn’t feel like I was. When Ruth’s barked out instructions of ‘left!’, ‘right!’ or ‘straight ahead!’ there was barely controlled panic in her voice. I expected one of those hook-handled shepherd’s staffs you see in cartoons to come out from between a building and drag me off with a whoosh, never to be seen again.
When we reached a small patch of scrub between some shacks that doubled as a makeshift rubbish dump Ruth barked ‘Stop!’. The stench made me want to gag, but I waited silently for Ruth’s next instructions. Instead, I heard the sound of a zip being unzipped and a pair of jeans being pulled down.

Such was my frazzled state of mind that I thought Ruth wanted me to have rough sex with her there on the ground. And I figured that if I didn’t turn around she would get bored, pull up her jeans and continue on as if nothing had happened. Curiosity got the better of me though and I turned to see what she was doing.
Ruth was squatting in the middle of the path with her jeans around her ankles. ‘Just having a pee,’ she said, smiling awkwardly. I felt relief for the first time that day.

We crossed a pedestrian bridge over a freeway that was caged completely to stop kids throwing rocks on passing traffic and Ruth announced proudly that we were in Sandy Flats.

Ruth’s mother lived in caravan with extra rooms built on the side made from cardboard and tin. She was as shocked as anyone in Cape Flats to see a white man standing on her doorstep, but accepted it as something that her wayward daughter was bound to do sooner or later. I tried to call Vicki on Ruth’s mother’s phone but there was still no answer. So Ruth’s mother invited me to watch TV in the bedroom at the back of the van and try again later. Ruth hit me for five rand and went of to the local shebeen (bar).

Ruth’s father was lying on the bed watching Days of our Lives, and made space for me and for Ruth’s mother to sit down. Carrie had just broken into the hospital to change the medical records of her baby. Ruth’s mother tutted sanctimoniously, enjoying a little moment of moral outrage. I asked her whether she thought it was really Randy’s baby.

She started to answer but checked herself. ‘The Church says we shouldn’t watch these things,’ she said. ‘The pastor says they confuse your life.’

A pastor meant that they were Seventh Day Adventists. When I told her that I had been brought up a Seventh Day Adventist she could barely suppressed her delight. A fellow Sev and a soap opera fan – what were the odds of that? She offered to make me a cup of tea, but Carrie punched her sister (who was also the hospital registrar) and we were sucked back into watching the show. The offer of tea was lost in all the confusion.
The credits rolled and I used the ad break before ‘The Bold and the Beautiful’ began to try Vicki’s number again. I was surprised (and a little disappointed) when she answered and she was astounded to hear that I was in Sandy Flats. It was nowhere her house and she had to borrow a friend’s car to come and get me.
Ruth was still at the shebeen when she arrived so I asked her mum to thank her for me.

‘She’ll be too drunk to remember you,’ she said, giving me an affection hug goodbye.

Vicki was a large woman in a flowing kaftan and a scarf wrapped high around her head. The scarf was too high and hit the roof of the car, bending the same way Marge Simpson’s hair does when she’s driving the family car. Vicki told me it was traditional for married women to wear the scarf, but she didn’t talk of her husband. I suspected that he had abandoned her – the practice seemed exceedingly common in South Africa – and this enterprise was her way of feeding her family, a family that not only included her four children, it turned out, but her sister and her two children as well.

It took twenty minutes to drive back to Vicki’s shack. It was a modest building made from corrugated iron with two decorative swans at the door made from old tyres painted white. Inside it was surprisingly homey, with feature wall made from interestingly shaped stones and shelves loaded with knick-knacks. Everything sat freshly dusted on doilies, and in the corner, a television and a sound system had pride of place. The sound system was one of those flashy all-in-one units, with flashing LED lights. Not Japanese, Chinese, probably. But still, by township standards, Vicky was doing all right for herself.

There was no shower. Vicki would bring me a tub of cold water if I wanted to wash. And the toilet was a pit out the back that the whole neighbourhood used. I was given the kid’s bedroom with a big soft bed that all four of them usually slept in. They didn’t mind getting kicked out – it meant they would be sleeping with mum -so I threw down my bag and lay on the bed, studying the school timetable written in pencil on the back of the door. Eventually, finally, I’d made it to my township B&B.

Dinner was served promptly at six o’clock on a small table that the whole family gathered around. We ate chicken stew and drank Coca Cola that was poured from a 1.25 litre bottle placed on the table like a bottle of fine wine. As I ate the children reached across and tentatively stroked my hair. My flat soft hair was a revelation to them, so different from the coarse, springy hair they had. In the days of apartheid hair was used to determine your colour. A pencil was stuck in your hair and if it fell out you were white. If it didn’t you were deemed coloured and sent off to a township.

Vicki shooed them away with a laugh and sat down at the table to eat. I asked her how she had come up with the idea for her B&B.

‘One day I saw a minibus full of tourists driving through Khayelitsha,’ she explained. ‘They were all gawking, taking pictures but too scared to get out. I wanted to show them that we were not wild animals in a zoo.’
It took Vicki a while to bring the community around. The only white people they knew were police and asked Vicki if she was in trouble. Then the local children stopped playing with her children because they thought the house was full of doctors. The only time they’d had any dealings with white people was to get a painful injection. Eventually the community saw the benefits in what she was doing and some neighbours were now talking about opening up their houses to visitors.

‘It’s mainly tourists who stay here,’ she said. ‘We would really like South Africans to come and see what it’s like out here, but they are still afraid.’

As well as running the B and B, Vicki organised a dance troupe of young kids. They performed traditional dances for the tourists who came to Khayelitsha on day tours. She began a support group for women starting up small enterprises and was an active member of the local community’s crime initiative.
When I told her that I got exhausted just thinking about what she did, she laughed. ‘It is up to us to change the future,’ she said.

When I finished my stew Vicki took me across the road to the local shebeen. It was called The Waterfront because it had a tap out front. People came here from all over the neighbourhood to collect water, discussing politics and gossiping as they filled their jugs. Vicki said the owners were also having a sly dig at the upmarket bars at the Waterfront down town.

The shebeen was barely distinguishable from the other shacks, except maybe for the bare power cable illegally attached to the power line out the front to keep the beer fridge running. Vicki introduced me to a guy called Elvis and told him to bring me home when I was ‘finished.’

Elvis was drinking with his friends at a table in the back corner of the bar. They looked like members of an LA hip-hop band who’d had all their jewellery stolen. Judging by the number of bottles on the table it looked like they’d been there all day.

‘In the ghetto with Elvis,’ I joked as I sat down. No one else seemed to get my oblique pop culture reference – I guess the King wasn’t too big in these parts – so I let it slide.

‘Two years ago you would have been dead by now,’ said Elvis, matter-of-factly, ‘We’d have thought you were from the army and beaten you up, maybe even necklace you.’

He poured me a beer and I smiled nervously, wondering if a little Fight Club action might not still be on the agenda.

‘Now look!’ he said, grinning, raising a chipped glass. ‘Here we are in my shebeen, drinking beer.’
It seemed that drinking was all these guys did. Elvis told me that they couldn’t get jobs, they didn’t have homes and the money they used to buy beer came from mothers and girlfriends or ‘other ways.’ Most days – and nights – were spent here, in this shebeen, at this table.

When it was my shout, I decided to shell out the extra 10 cents for a bottle of Crown to show that the dark days of apartheid were over. I plonked it down on the table triumphantly expecting murmurs of appreciation, but got hostile stares instead. Blokes who had been laughing and slapping me on the back only seconds before were now muttering amongst themselves, perhaps wondering where they could get a tyre and a tin of gasoline at this time of night.

Even Elvis, who I’d considered to be my new best friend, was looking at me with barely concealed contempt.

‘Why did you bring us this woman’s drink?’ he spat. ‘Are you saying we’re gay?’

I knew some people get very tribal about the brand of beer they drink. A friend of mine refuses to drink in a pub with VB on tap. But I’d never heard of anyone’s sexuality being questioned because of it.

Elvis shook his head in disgust. ‘It’s not beer, man,’ he said, indicating for me to try it. ‘It’s wine!’

It was apple cider, actually. Quite tasty too. But by buying it I had cast aspersions on their sexuality and mine as well. My explanation that I thought that it was Crown Lager, my favourite beer back home, was grudgingly accepted, but only after I hurried back to the bar to buy a bottle of Castle. And it wasn’t until I agreed to buy the next couple of rounds as well that my credibility was fully restored.

It was well after midnight when Elvis walked me back to Vicki’s place, ‘just to be safe.’ He knocked on the door and didn’t leave until Vicki opened it and let me in. I sunk into bed that night, my head spinning from the beer, wishing that Vicki had chosen colours a little less lurid when she was decorating the guest room.
The next morning, after a delicious breakfast of hot porridge, Vicki took me on a walk around Khayelitsha. She showed me the schools and the hospitals and introduced me to Rose, a woman who single-handedly ran a soup kitchen. Another mother, abandoned and stuck with the kids, Rose got up at 4 am every morning to serve over 600 meals a day.

She could be forgiven for being tired and grumpy, but when I met her she was beaming. ‘A food company just said they’d supply me with rice,’ she said. ‘That will make a big difference!’

At the end of the day Vicki walked me to the taxi stand where I had arrived the day before with Ruth. It was only a block away from her house – a 500-metre walk at most. We stopped and chatted with women who were helping a friend move, by carrying chairs on their heads, and others who sold bags of oranges hung decoratively on the front wall of their shacks. I remember thinking about all the bad news stories we get out of Africa and wondering why didn’t we hear more about women like Rose and Vicki. They were positive, vibrant women trying to make a difference. Maybe our attitude to the continent would be different if we heard about them instead of the depressing stories about AIDS and corruption.

Vicki put me in a minivan heading into town and waved goodbye. It was full of sullen men heading into town to get drunk or visit prostitutes. They didn’t talk to me like the women had. They sat silently with their heads bowed, avoiding contact with me, sensing, perhaps, that I was judging them. I had met their women and seen the way they were trying to make a difference. The men sat around drinking beer, letting their children play amongst the bare electricity wires. Worse, they would bring AIDS into their homes, contracted, in all likelihood, on nights out like this. By the time I got back to Clive and Leanne’s flat the optimism for Africa that Vicki and Rose had inspired had dimmed.

My mood was not improved when I discovered that I had missed the season finale of Isidingo. As I had suspected there had been an explosion and people were still trapped! Clive took unseemly delight in telling me what I had missed (he had started watching ‘Isidingo’ too, just too see what I saw in it, he claimed) and in telling me that there had also been a report on the news about plans to finally finish off the freeway overpass.

There was nothing keeping me in Cape Town now. It was time to see the rest of Africa.