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!
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