22.00 hours and in the depth of the night the headlights from the Intercape coach picked out the luminous cats’ eyes and exit signs from Johannesburg bus station as it started its four hundred mile journey to Durban. Roughly twenty five quid it cost me, comparable to the Glasgow to London ordeal but a whole heap more pleasant. The seats provided plenty of leg room, the reclining was substantial and comfortable, and once the sponsored TV adverts switched off at about 23.00 the gentle drone and vibration of the engine lullabied me to a much needed sleep.
Nature’s call roused me at about 01.50 and I headed to the toilet in the lower deck. The brightness in the wee-est room on the coach ill-prepared me for my return journey as in the contrasting blackness of the upper deck I stumbled, and in an instant was confronted by a hundred stars and fifty crescent moons suddenly lighting up the gloom like the sky at night; except these stars and moons were the abruptly opened eyes and smiling teeth of everyone else on the coach as my stubbed toe and painful exclamation awoke them from their own slumber.
I was the only white person on the coach!
A pale imitation of their grin crossed my lips and I awkwardly returned to my seat, any residual tiredness now dissipated with the embarrassed rush of blood to my cheeks. Then as with every other sleepless night I remember, the great bane of my life returned; I started to ponder the whys of the world and the hows of life.
The girl in the window seat beside me stirred in time to her regularly vibrating mobile phone that for some reason she always replaced in her cleavage! Five minutes would pass and then the gentle burr would sound again and after a few seconds and a little giggle she would reach down into the depths of that mysterious ravine and retrieve her little pal! She caught me looking; me with a fixed smirk and her with a knowing wink!
I smiled back in that subconscious way that we do when slightly embarrassed, and returned to my contemplation.
Jo’burg had created a whirlpool of questions, doubts, and reappraisal of long-held ignorant beliefs. Irrespective of revealed history it was apparent that wherever South Africa and its neighbours had come from it had never in any sense of the phrase been simply ‘black and white‘. good and bad, just and unjust. It was much more complicated than that.
Bill McIntosh (now re-christened McCluskey by his pals due to a slight typo by myself on the previous blog entry) had told me about his conversation with Margaret Mugabe and her response. The question was loaded but the answer was unequivocal and honest.
Bill : “Margaret, your a Zimbabwean. Given what you know now (a killer condition in any question), how would you vote, Ian Smith or Robert Mugabe?”
Margaret : “Smith! Smith! Mugabe is a bad man”
In the self-styled ‘civilised nations’ how often do we witness exactly the same phenomenon.
The desire and creation of change stems not always just from what is being promised but the intolerable nature of the existing conditions. Unfortunately it doesn’t take us too long to discover that like evolution change is a quite different phenomenon to progress, and we sometimes head down a cul-de-sac of hopelessness before having to fight a bloody retreat back past the hordes of ’me-to-ers’ who are blindly following the initial gadarene dash for greed. To all intents and purposes it has happened all over the ‘first world’, most demonstrably at the time of the disintegration of the Soviet Union. How many millions of people see that what has merely happened is that one autocratic set of despots have been replaced by another, and this time with none of the disciplines that had become second nature to their every day lives.
So progress was needed but all they got was change, and not a change for the better. Now what are they faced with? Obviously it is unlikely that they really want to return to the way things were, but they don’t want to exist in a sad mirror image of that system either. I think they await another sober sensible gradualist Gorbachev rather than a drunkenly ranting Yeltsin. Many undoubtedly pray that they had made a different choice.
Zimbabwe is the same. I doubt really that they would want to return to Ian Smith and his white supremacist hegemony, but just maybe they would like to go back to the starting gun and choose a different answer to the multiple choice question. One modelled perhaps on a Nyerere, one modelled on a Mandela, a Tutu but not a Mugabe. Sadly I think that many people confused the apartheid of Smith with a characteristic of being ‘white’, and similarly assumed that changing that colour-base to ‘black’ would solve the perceived wrongs. It didn’t, it hasn’t and it never will until they change the values and become blind to colour.
Imagine what Margaret Mugabe is really saying about the horrors of the Mugabe regime.
Lets reverse the struggle, the deaths, the bloodshed, the sacrifices and the terror, all apparently worth it at the time, and all now consigned to the black-hole of worthlessness by a man who has taken the base concept of hatred and used it to divide and conquer his own people. Black versus white. Forget it. This is about power and the ‘white’ factor is only a tool to be used to fire up his Shona tribe, to give an ingredient of injustice to his fascist campaign, and to conjure up terror within the electorate. Margaret would rather choose to live in a state that views her as second class citizen, deprives her of basic human rights, and condemns her from birth to a life of uneducated poverty scavenging on the middens of the rich to eke out survival. In fact she did under Smith and those still in Zimbabwe stilll do under Mugabe. What a condemnation of the farce whose chief comedian is Robert Mugabe. Black humour indeed!
Mugabe is just a magnification of western style democracy’s devotion to lies and spin, spiced by the added ingredient of open brutality in the desperate desire for power. If the white vote was needed Mugabe would court that and sadly the western governments would see that as a virtue.
Instead of being a breadbasket for its own continent and possibly the world, Africa with the greatest resources in the world is steadily becoming a basket case, and don’t let us be in any way stereo typical here, this is allowed, encouraged and driven by the interests of big western conglomerates who shiver at the very thought of a united will and effective administration throughout this most colourful Eden.
Perhaps Mugabe’s inevitable demise will see a branch onto the real path of progress, but I doubt it. The infection is spreading and the treatment hasn’t even been identified.
However when that day does dawn, probably far into the uncharted future, Africa will be restored and recognised as not only the birthplace of humanity but also the founding empire of the future. It will succeed where barbed wire walls of the Grecian, Egyptian, Roman, Ottoman, British, Austro-Hungarian and Chinese imitations failed. Now there’s a prediction.
I’m not naïve enough to think that I’ve even scratched the itch never mind the surface; when I get to Harare I’m sure that a completely new panorama will be presented to me. But the above is a scenario that is regularly voiced by many here who fear that Zimbabwe is a rock tossed into a pool and whose waves will spread outwards to Namibia, Mozambique, Malawi, and South Africa in the years to come. The ripples are already being felt and the waters are rising.
Mind you I’m feeling quite chuffed at the moment.
I arrived a few days ago at the ultimate in back-packers accommodation. The Happy Hippo on Mahatma Ghandi Road (until recently known as Point Road). It has everything a man of the road could possibly desire and most importantly it has a unique welcome offered by Norma and Sunshine, the two wee Zulu girls on reception.
Compliments are a real bargaining chip in this land, and the silver tongue has worked wonders again. Not only am I granted almost open hours on the internet (I pay for one and get three free), but I have been allocated the best suite in the house. None of rooms are numbered but are named after heroes, tribes, battles or landmarks. Mine is simply called ‘Inkosi’ which everyone knows simply means ‘Chief’’! And well deserved it is especially with its echoes back to the Glaswegian Patois…”Aw right Chief?”
There is also Xhosa, Rondavel, Nguni, Ndebele, Kraal, Sangama, Umjondola, and many more but that should be enough to keep you and google going for the moment.
Oh, there is a communal room called Washywashy; No it’s not Zulu, it’s just the laundrette!
Breakfast starts at 6am and I’m sure that the early start led to the journey’s first ‘Monty Python’ moment.
I had decided to have a ‘breakfast Treppanazzi’; basically two slices of dinner-plate sized unleavened bread sandwiching fried tomato, mushrooms, bacon, Italian sausage, and scrambled egg.
I love tomatoes but prefer them raw.
“No tomatoes please” I asked.
A couple of minutes later the waitress returned “Sorry sir, we have no tomatoes. But we have caramelised fried onions instead ”.
“Ok, No caramelised fried onions then”!
“Very good sir”.
The Happy Hippo bar on one evening (that’s about all I could stand) is an ever changing variety of nationalities Dutch, German, English, West Brit (Bhoy did he hate my Letterkenny Wolfe Tone’s shirt), Afrikaner, French and American whose conversation focusses almost entirely on where they come from, (the delights of winter in Lowestoft anyone), how much they are spending, what they do as a job, and how many of the local shorts they think they can drink before falling over. Converstaion obviously inspired by some as yet unacknowledged Gods!
Across the road is my preferred house of relaxation, The Vic. It’s a Zulu run bar, used mainly by Zulus but with an open handed greeting that sees a fair sprinkling of the fairer skinned folk enjoying the great company and repartee.
Tulthste, (I called him my Spirit Guide) latched on to my ‘Australian’ accent, ordered some food and drink and insisted that I eat my share. I almost said ‘no thank you’, but the words hadn’t even formed when I could see the disappointment in his eyes. I don’t know what it was, but it was green, spicy, meaty and tasty, tasty, very very tasty.
We’ve sat most evenings late on since in a group of six or so, and all they want to discuss is what I think of South Africa, Africa, why I am there, what memories I will take away, what I think will happen to their country and a hundred other subjects.
Tulthste is a university student of history and modern studies, an inspiration and a real beacon of hope for the future.
He and all his friends are desperate for Africa to achieve its true potential and he left me last evening with a little story about his lecturer.
She said to him “When I was young I wanted to change the world, and failed. Then I wanted to change my country and failed. Then I tried to change the government and failed. Finally I tried to change myself and succeeded. Do that first!”
I think that is advice worth heeding!
I’ll get the chance later to test my new found motivation when I dip my toe back in the eclectic mix of the Happy Hippo bar, where the conversation has probably turned to the relative price of their nattily sloganed Primark products of exploitation.
I promise I will rid myself of this prejudice, after all they can’t help being arseholes!
Hail hail
Matt
p.s. Hope to visit Bloemfontein Celtic in the next few weeks. That should be something else!
Monday, 28 September 2009
Friday, 25 September 2009
Bok to the future - Part 1
6000 ft up in the air, with neither wings nor parachute and you would think that my mind might be on something a bit more important than the fact that my nose was constantly blocked up.
Mind you in keeping with my own philosophy, it was a socialist blocking in that it didn’t exclusively favour any one nostril; after each blow it seemed to moved to share its work-to-rule within the recesses of the other nostril, transforming itself from a simple stoppage to a sudden full blown general strike of Synexally Natural Odour Treatment (SNOT).
Three bloody days and it just wouldn’t stop, but I suppose that is what comes from suddenly transferring from a life of sea-level temperance to this lofty existence 6000ft above sea level, up the Highveldt in Johannesburg’s Northcliff district.
With it has come an unusual tiredness that manifests itself particularly at night when I find that as the witching hour takes hold of the moon and the stars, I drift off into a deep sleep only to be awakened 9 hours later by the insistent laugh of the hadida bird (for those who know him, imagine Billy Shannon through an amplifier, for those who don‘t think of your childish reaction to the laughing policeman) or the ‘hoo-ooo-oooop - hoo-ooo-ooop-hoop-hoop-hoop-hoop’ of the surprisingly-named hoop-hoop bird (C’mon the Hoops)! It’s odd how the mind works as in its idle moments it ridiculously suggests that the sleep may be a normal by-product of a (relatively) alcohol free existence and dreams uninterrupted by nocturnal calls to the bladder relief room.
Anyway enough of the physical alterations to a goat-like existence on the sides of the mountain and the liberation from a life tied to Guinness and Sharkeys bar stool.
It had been an interesting journey, more from my own surprise that having been wasted on the Saturday night and then intermittently staying up to watch Mayweather versus Marquez , I was still functioning as Sunday 06:40 ticked into existence. Sufficiently programmed I dragged bags and myself across the road to meet up with Brenda and family for the journey out to the Airport. I was quiet the whole way. My brain was neither sure that it belonged to me nor that I was its normal compatriot. Fortunately Brenda, her mum and Paul kept up a running commentary on life in general and I just left my brain gearbox in neutral, my neural engine just ticking over enough to ensure that life sustaining functions operated in the background. Mind you if it hadn’t been for the help I received to automatically create my boarding ticket, I think I would just have given up and got the bus back to town.
Never mind, I got to Heathrow having eaten breakfast without actually realising that I had done so and while waiting the hours and minutes till my departure for Jo’burg I watched the Celtic v Hearts game on the net, the picture freezing at 1-1 and 1 minute into injury time. I trudged through security, sat down to a pasta meal, checked the final score and lo and behold, a new man appeared at the handle end of the fork. I even phoned Pat! It was gratifying to hear that not only had Celtic grabbed a stoppage time Hearts-breaker, but also that I wasn’t the only one in the world with a grand-canyon sized hangover and memory blank!
And so to Jo’burg and that city’s first encounter with the new Bumblebee - purchased at the last minute from the handily situated airport Celtic shop (tax free I hasten to add - ah the benefits of international playbhoy-dom)!
It was one of those paradoxes in life that Ray (my designated chauffeur) was an East Belfast lad. Oh the banter !!
Bill McIntosh and his wife Gioia, my hosts for the first few days , made my introduction to this new and fascinating culture as smooth as is possible. I can imagine now the apprehension that faces an immigrant, refugee or asylum seeker embarking on a new life in Glasgow. I am the different colour here! I speak the different language. I don’t know where the shops are, what to ask for, what to pay with. I don’t know the safe areas, the dangerous streets, the humour, the intonations of friendliness or threat, and most of all I don’t know where the nearest bar is which sells a decent pint of Guinness - the sole reason I am alcohol free!
Bill’s an ex-pat from Castlemilk; a dealer in gold, diamonds, medical services amongst other activities; Ross, his son is at Uni studying physics - I’ve been a great help to him in his thesis on string theory; Laura his daughter sleeps most of the time, and Gioia or ‘Mrs Bill’ as I call her having picked up the local patois, makes lasagne - but not just any lasagne - not even M&S lasagne - this is lasagne with dreams built in.
They’ve got two dogs - Boorbools - that a pack of Dobermans would do well to avoid, and a maid called Mrs Mugabe that the Boorbools do well to avoid. She makes me breakfast and also fires disapproving looks and grunts in my direction on a fairly regular basis. I take this as a sign of affection.
Johannesburg itself, that is the place that everyone would recognise as Downtown Johannesburg, is a dump and is heading for an implosion as once beautiful buildings, monuments and palazzos are destroyed in an orgy of retribution by immigrant opportunists taking advantage of the efforts to recompense the once downtrodden indigenous black peoples. What must have seemed like a golden age of opportunity for those who had long struggled for recognition or at least acknowledgement, has been decimated by an influx of tenuous kith and kin from Nigeria and Zimbabwe in particular, and that opportunity undoubtedly created has been washed away in a tidal wave of corruption, drugs, murder and Uzis. 50 murders across the country every day!
Businesses by the hundred have deserted their totemic buildings; bohemian city dwellers on a par with Paris have escaped the broken windows and shattered hopes; and societal civilities have been swept into the drains and sewers with each flood of desperate take-everything-give-nothing land-grabbers. The Government is paralysed, confused and leaderless believing that somehow next year’s World Cup is a fairy godmother with a magic wand.
Meanwhile a new city has sprung up, one that is the Johannesburg of old. Sandton is its name and since apartheid’s demise and the decay of the original city (replaced it seems by an epidemic of original sin) it is here that businesses have moved, people have relocated and society has begun its own fight back. But this is no simple like for like replacement for the old regime. Here the hopes of the new egalitarian dawn still shine. Perhaps it is still a bit too glamorous, glitzy and capitalist for me but at least there is no barrier to progress irrespective of colour or creed; and right in the middle sits Nelson Mandela Square (a wee bit more evocative than our very own back in Glasgow), a statue to the great man rising to the heavens as tall as the tallest building but unfortunately bearing a striking resemblance to Lionel Ritchie.
There is a continuing struggle, a struggle sadly echoing the days of the ghettos, the days of the shanty towns, the days of apartheid. But this struggle is not one of colour, nor even one of money or haves and have-nots. This struggle is one of law and order versus anarchy. It is a real battle and the locals, those who believed in the country and stayed (the whites and Afrikaaners), those who triumphed through justice (the blacks), and those who have already embraced the new integrated future (the coloureds) fear for a new ghetto-like existence where vision becomes imprisoned behind strictly defined walls and outside the battles for the quick-rand, the quick adrenaline rush and the quick fix become even more myopic as the country flounders in a disastrous magnification of Zimbabwe.
That is the sad sad truth of a future that one as beautiful as this country is, with the most beautiful people in the world, flashing the most inspiring smiles and welcoming with the most warm of handshakes, just simply doesn’t deserve.
The World Cup may be as good as it gets!
I hope I’m wrong.
I’ll be more upbeat next time as the lack of Guinness and too much sleep probably begins to become the norm for my new lifestyle. I’ll also hopefully be in Durban by then.
Hail Hail
Matt
Mind you in keeping with my own philosophy, it was a socialist blocking in that it didn’t exclusively favour any one nostril; after each blow it seemed to moved to share its work-to-rule within the recesses of the other nostril, transforming itself from a simple stoppage to a sudden full blown general strike of Synexally Natural Odour Treatment (SNOT).
Three bloody days and it just wouldn’t stop, but I suppose that is what comes from suddenly transferring from a life of sea-level temperance to this lofty existence 6000ft above sea level, up the Highveldt in Johannesburg’s Northcliff district.
With it has come an unusual tiredness that manifests itself particularly at night when I find that as the witching hour takes hold of the moon and the stars, I drift off into a deep sleep only to be awakened 9 hours later by the insistent laugh of the hadida bird (for those who know him, imagine Billy Shannon through an amplifier, for those who don‘t think of your childish reaction to the laughing policeman) or the ‘hoo-ooo-oooop - hoo-ooo-ooop-hoop-hoop-hoop-hoop’ of the surprisingly-named hoop-hoop bird (C’mon the Hoops)! It’s odd how the mind works as in its idle moments it ridiculously suggests that the sleep may be a normal by-product of a (relatively) alcohol free existence and dreams uninterrupted by nocturnal calls to the bladder relief room.
Anyway enough of the physical alterations to a goat-like existence on the sides of the mountain and the liberation from a life tied to Guinness and Sharkeys bar stool.
It had been an interesting journey, more from my own surprise that having been wasted on the Saturday night and then intermittently staying up to watch Mayweather versus Marquez , I was still functioning as Sunday 06:40 ticked into existence. Sufficiently programmed I dragged bags and myself across the road to meet up with Brenda and family for the journey out to the Airport. I was quiet the whole way. My brain was neither sure that it belonged to me nor that I was its normal compatriot. Fortunately Brenda, her mum and Paul kept up a running commentary on life in general and I just left my brain gearbox in neutral, my neural engine just ticking over enough to ensure that life sustaining functions operated in the background. Mind you if it hadn’t been for the help I received to automatically create my boarding ticket, I think I would just have given up and got the bus back to town.
Never mind, I got to Heathrow having eaten breakfast without actually realising that I had done so and while waiting the hours and minutes till my departure for Jo’burg I watched the Celtic v Hearts game on the net, the picture freezing at 1-1 and 1 minute into injury time. I trudged through security, sat down to a pasta meal, checked the final score and lo and behold, a new man appeared at the handle end of the fork. I even phoned Pat! It was gratifying to hear that not only had Celtic grabbed a stoppage time Hearts-breaker, but also that I wasn’t the only one in the world with a grand-canyon sized hangover and memory blank!
And so to Jo’burg and that city’s first encounter with the new Bumblebee - purchased at the last minute from the handily situated airport Celtic shop (tax free I hasten to add - ah the benefits of international playbhoy-dom)!
It was one of those paradoxes in life that Ray (my designated chauffeur) was an East Belfast lad. Oh the banter !!
Bill McIntosh and his wife Gioia, my hosts for the first few days , made my introduction to this new and fascinating culture as smooth as is possible. I can imagine now the apprehension that faces an immigrant, refugee or asylum seeker embarking on a new life in Glasgow. I am the different colour here! I speak the different language. I don’t know where the shops are, what to ask for, what to pay with. I don’t know the safe areas, the dangerous streets, the humour, the intonations of friendliness or threat, and most of all I don’t know where the nearest bar is which sells a decent pint of Guinness - the sole reason I am alcohol free!
Bill’s an ex-pat from Castlemilk; a dealer in gold, diamonds, medical services amongst other activities; Ross, his son is at Uni studying physics - I’ve been a great help to him in his thesis on string theory; Laura his daughter sleeps most of the time, and Gioia or ‘Mrs Bill’ as I call her having picked up the local patois, makes lasagne - but not just any lasagne - not even M&S lasagne - this is lasagne with dreams built in.
They’ve got two dogs - Boorbools - that a pack of Dobermans would do well to avoid, and a maid called Mrs Mugabe that the Boorbools do well to avoid. She makes me breakfast and also fires disapproving looks and grunts in my direction on a fairly regular basis. I take this as a sign of affection.
Johannesburg itself, that is the place that everyone would recognise as Downtown Johannesburg, is a dump and is heading for an implosion as once beautiful buildings, monuments and palazzos are destroyed in an orgy of retribution by immigrant opportunists taking advantage of the efforts to recompense the once downtrodden indigenous black peoples. What must have seemed like a golden age of opportunity for those who had long struggled for recognition or at least acknowledgement, has been decimated by an influx of tenuous kith and kin from Nigeria and Zimbabwe in particular, and that opportunity undoubtedly created has been washed away in a tidal wave of corruption, drugs, murder and Uzis. 50 murders across the country every day!
Businesses by the hundred have deserted their totemic buildings; bohemian city dwellers on a par with Paris have escaped the broken windows and shattered hopes; and societal civilities have been swept into the drains and sewers with each flood of desperate take-everything-give-nothing land-grabbers. The Government is paralysed, confused and leaderless believing that somehow next year’s World Cup is a fairy godmother with a magic wand.
Meanwhile a new city has sprung up, one that is the Johannesburg of old. Sandton is its name and since apartheid’s demise and the decay of the original city (replaced it seems by an epidemic of original sin) it is here that businesses have moved, people have relocated and society has begun its own fight back. But this is no simple like for like replacement for the old regime. Here the hopes of the new egalitarian dawn still shine. Perhaps it is still a bit too glamorous, glitzy and capitalist for me but at least there is no barrier to progress irrespective of colour or creed; and right in the middle sits Nelson Mandela Square (a wee bit more evocative than our very own back in Glasgow), a statue to the great man rising to the heavens as tall as the tallest building but unfortunately bearing a striking resemblance to Lionel Ritchie.
There is a continuing struggle, a struggle sadly echoing the days of the ghettos, the days of the shanty towns, the days of apartheid. But this struggle is not one of colour, nor even one of money or haves and have-nots. This struggle is one of law and order versus anarchy. It is a real battle and the locals, those who believed in the country and stayed (the whites and Afrikaaners), those who triumphed through justice (the blacks), and those who have already embraced the new integrated future (the coloureds) fear for a new ghetto-like existence where vision becomes imprisoned behind strictly defined walls and outside the battles for the quick-rand, the quick adrenaline rush and the quick fix become even more myopic as the country flounders in a disastrous magnification of Zimbabwe.
That is the sad sad truth of a future that one as beautiful as this country is, with the most beautiful people in the world, flashing the most inspiring smiles and welcoming with the most warm of handshakes, just simply doesn’t deserve.
The World Cup may be as good as it gets!
I hope I’m wrong.
I’ll be more upbeat next time as the lack of Guinness and too much sleep probably begins to become the norm for my new lifestyle. I’ll also hopefully be in Durban by then.
Hail Hail
Matt
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