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READING SOUTH AFRICA
Nikki Barrett discovers the true colours of South Africa.

Text: NIKKI BARRETT

FUNNILY ENOUGH, I WAS SIGNING OUT CRY, THE BELOVED COUNTRY, Alan Paton’s 1948 novel that shook the very foundations of apartheid. Standing there in the southernmost library in Africa, a wee building on the outskirts of L’Agulhas, I wrote down the address of the house I’d be renting for a month.

As I was thinking just how permanent a library card can make a girl feel, the librarian screeched at a little "coloured" kid standing barefoot in the foyer. Clearly an efficient woman with zero time for the lofty notions of Alan Paton, the librarian practically sparked with hostility: She had to live in post-apartheid South Africa, trying to stem the lawlessness of these ignorant Cape coloureds, these cheeky piccanins, who had no respect for books. I didn’t need to understand Afrikaans to gather that much.

I’d been hearing that same cant of barely or rarely controlled racism for weeks. YOU’D THINK THAT AS THE DAUGHTER OF A SOUTH AFRICAN I MIGHT BE LESS SHOCKED BY THE CAPE FARMERS, FISHERMEN, JO’BURG BUSINESSMEN AND UNEMPLOYED UNIVERSITY GRADUATES – MOST OF THEM RESIGNED TO THE ONGOING TURMOIL OF THEIR NEW RAINBOW NATION, THEIR RACISM SURFACING IN AN ODD BRAND OF HUMOUR. People leaning in close, saying with a conspiratorial smile, "I’m not racist; I just hate blacks." How many times had I heard that?

Only 200 kilometres to the west and leagues to the left are the Cape Town intellectuals, the activists and policy makers who are confronting the behemoths of AIDS, corruption and crime and who are sincerely trying for reconciliation. I know that scattered throughout the Boer territory of the Western Cape, there are Afrikaners who genuinely grapple with the searing damage caused by their history. But here in this tiny town, I am faced with extremes of geography and the political spectrum. How to marry the wild, desolate beauty of this place with the violence and poverty that swirls at its edges and the entrenched racism of the Afrikaners?

The other novel I took with me was Red Dust, a stirring inquiry into South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation hearings. I read it in one night while a wild wind rattled my windows. When I woke up the next day, my water heater was leaking. While his wiry assistant was crawling somewhere up in the dank ceiling, my plumber, a stocky, sapphire-eyed Afrikaner with a buzz cut gave me his primer on South African politics. "Truth and Reconciliation is the biggest kak I have ever heard. The guys who were on the ground are in jail and the okes who gave the orders are free. We weren’t fighting the blacks. Jesus. We were fighting communism."

For a while, so enchanted by this landscape – the rugged, pristine coast flanked by smudges of mountains, the dappled blue gums, whirring windmills in dun fields of merino sheep – I wondered if I could live here. A friend suggested he marry me off to a wine farmer or horse breeder in the region. When he started to coach me on how to win the hand of a farmer, I knew immediately, despite the prospect of an endless supply of spicy shiraz, that the project was doomed. Don’t be controversial, he suggested. If you’ve had a prior sex life, best to hide it. Don’t discuss those friends of yours who adopted coloured and/or black children. Don’t swear. Learn to eat more meat.

Knowing the wine farmer route would be a no-go, I thought I’d pursue the local policeman who’d been giving my street extra surveillance. Over a plate of afval – stew made with the trotters and intestines of pigs and pronounced "awful," though it isn’t – he and I ended up discussing his sister, apparently the outcast of the family. I assumed she must be common but I probed, "So why don’t you two get along?"

"Well, she’s a vegetarian." Later that week, my inabiity to eat a steak heavier than his mother’s ditzy dog shattered my already slim chances with the local police service.

Every day I hike the Spookdraai trail, the "ghost corner." Up there in the bracken and heather, the wildflowers glass-bright against the limestone shale, I consider how insignificant my own ghosts are compared with the ones that haunt this country. Apartheid may have fallen in effigy, Tutu’s trials may be over, but this country’s got a long way to go. Could I really stay here? If I were a South African today and not a Canadian, would I "take the gap" like my parents did – funnel my money out of the country and start again elsewhere? Would I carry a pistol in one hand and a vague hope of real integration in the other? Would I speak differently to a coloured child with a book in her hands?

While my water heater was being fixed that day, I suggested gently that my plumber give Red Dust a read. He took one look at the author’s name on the cover: "Gillian Slovo. No way. She’s related to Joe Slovo, that Communist Party leader. Sorry, us Christians don’t like communists."

But he took the scrap of paper with the title and the author’s name anyway. Baby steps…