Friday beatings

Cape Town's Bo-Kaap neighborhood, a mostly Muslim ('Cape Malay') neighborhood with distintive architecture.

A former prisoner at Robben Island talks about his years there.

Max McBride, former youth activist with the ANC during the bad old days.

CAPE TOWN, South Africa – Not that I asked, but a disgruntled Cape Towner, who went by the name Little Brother, explained South Africa’s main problem: “We South Africans love violence. We love killing, we love rrrape and we love rrrobery,” he said with that peculiarly South African way of rolling rs for an absurdly long time to punctuate speech.

Little brother was getting drunk while awaiting the start of a comedy show, but he wasn’t kidding. All of the comics at the show that night interspersed stories of crime into their acts.

One comic, whose father is a witch doctor, said he always leaves his dad’s calling card on his seat. “Once, someone smashed my window before seeing the card. When I came back, I found a note on my seat with 500 rand: ‘Please, sir, accept my deepest apologies for breaking your window and please accept this money for repairs.’”

The country’s cities are littered with billboards advertising anti-theft alarms, tracking devices to find your car after the alarms fail, and armed security to kill people trying to steal your car.

Driving into Johannesburg always feels slightly apocalyptic – a sinister haze hangs over the shabby skyline and numerous warnings rattle around in my head: “Don’t take the minibuses,” “Don’t go out at night,” “Don’t carry a camera,” or, simply, “Don’t go.”

And seventeen years after Apartheid there’s still an ugly strain of racism, especially among South Africans of a certain generation, and the unreformed use crime as proof of some Mengela-like racial logic.

“You can take the black out of the bush, but you can’t take the bush out of the black,” a middle-aged Afrikaner, traveling with a black woman, said quite audibly on a bus full of mostly black passengers.

Most Africans I talked to in other countries point to South Africa as the continent’s heart of darkness. Mentioning that I was traveling there elicited looks of terror and concern.

The headlines and statistics bear this out and I don’t know a South African who hasn’t been robbed, in many cases at gunpoint. It’s a country of fortress cities, with streets dominated by high walls, barbed wire, and fear.

“I don’t know if I could live here,” Connie said. “Too many bars on the windows.” For once, I had no retort.

There’s a lot to dislike about South Africa and really, there’s no sugar-coating the ugly crime in the big cities. And yet, there’s a vibrancy, a history unfolding, a culture that draws me back again and again. Sure, half my family lives there, but I’d visit if I knew no one.

Despite the ultra-violence, many South Africans live and thrive in and love their country. They possess the wicked gallows humor required in such a place.

“It’s our National Anthem,” my cousin Julian muses every time we hear police sirens (and that’s often).

And yet, he doesn’t want to live anywhere else.

There's also a living history. You don't have to talk to the elderly or even the middle-aged to hear first-hand accounts of life under apartheid.

"I was beaten every Friday," said Max McBride, a black South African with the white undershirt, flat-brimmed cap, and gold chain of an early '90s gangsta rapper and the quiet, elegant articulation of a philosopher. "The ANC would put the young people up front with the thinking that they (the apartheid government police) wouldn't open fire on the young people."

Max is 32 years old. He witnessed a suspected informer get "necklaced"* when he was just 13, was a veteran activist by 15, and had fled to Namibia with his family by age 16. Now, he says he's had it with politics.

He visits South Africa often and considers it home, but the country's crime makes him hesitant to move his family back and the bad memories are still fresh.

"When you hear the tires screaming, you run (from the cops)," he said. "In Apartheid South Africa we were not afraid of the white cops. We were afraid of the black cops because they knew where we lived."

Amid the bigotry, the violence, and the poverty, there’s a frank discussion about race that’s still years away in the states. The young comedians at the Cape Town bar, black, white, and colored (the South African term for mixed-race people) discussed race easily and naturally and the equally mixed crowd ate it up without so much as a gasp. The District 9 generation makes me hopeful.

The incredible thing about South Africa (other than the pristine landscapes and accessible, scary wildlife that is not to be missed) is that all but the youngest people you talk to have straddled the divide of one of the most dramatic political events in recent history. Even those in their late 20s can remember a school curriculum full of racist ideology or no curriculum at all in the black and coloured ghettos called townships (they still exist and they’re still grim – and you can even tour them, if you’re into that kind of thing – one of the many promises not kept by the majority government).

The country’s history is still being written, in many cases by people who once fought each other, and if you stop five people in the street you’ll probably get five different takes on post-apartheid South Africa.

South Africans are welcoming, honest, and proud of their country, though not afraid to criticize it. And amid all of the politics, violence, and tension, South Africans know when to drop it all in favor of soccer, rugby, grilled meat, and, most especially, beer (go for the Castle Milk Stout). I can get on board with that.

*Necklacing is an execution style whereby a suspected informer - usually a black man suspected of dealing with the apartheid government - has a gasoline-soaked tire put around his neck and is lit on fire. It's well-chronicled in photos and words in the book The Bang Bang Club, if you have the stomach.

Yeti

Still on the Annapurna trail without the connection to post photos, but will be back with exciting stories of squat toilets, avalanches, and even a Yeti sighting.

The brutality of Nam’: sands of shame

The car was pulled free, but who will rescue my battered ego?n

NOT CLOSE TO MUCH OF ANYTHING, Namibia – Before us lay a conundrum. The Abu Huab River was dry, but recently flowing, leaving 100 meters thick, animal-tracked sand of unknown depth.

Our destination lay several miles to the other side, defeat to our rear.

I thought about our dainty Volkswagen Polo and the leaden storm clouds that threatened to fill the riverbed anew and said, “I don’t think we should do this.”

“I think we can make it,” Connie said.

She chucked a few large rocks out of the way, I gunned it, and for a couple seconds I was rally driving through the desert, fighting to keep it between the skids – a badass. Twenty meters in, I was just another idiot in need of a winch.

The afternoon sun washed the desert in a leering white glow and sand stuck to every crevice of my sweating, stinking body as I furiously scooped sand out from under the car.

We had no shovel.

A troop of baboons sat on the opposite river bank, the side where we desperately to be. The alpha lae looked our way. He was not impressed.

We dug and dug and snipped and dug and made no progress.

Fifteen minutes into our miserable, futile excavation, a truck crested the hill on the other side of the river.

The Afrikaans versions of Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh jumped out and immediately began hooking a rope to our marooned car. They towed us to the closest bank – the wrong side. We pondered our options. We would likely have to cross this river again on our way back if we continue. Jerry Garcia piped up.

“I think I can get her across," he said with a look of determination.

Se we let him and he did, barely. Not for the first time this trip, my pride took a savage beating.

Paved roads are the exception in Namibia, a massive, sparsely populated country criss-crossed by gravel roads and 4x4 tracks.

“Unless it’s been raining” is the caveat in guide books before going on to say so and so road is passable by any vehicle. And it’s true – the roads are fine, except that bridges in the country are about out as common as Damara terns, which is to say there approximately four, and the two times a year the river flows means major problems for the non-Land Rover set.

Despite the rainiest rainy season in decades, though, our VW, Petunia, rattled through the washboards and crawled through the swollen rivers almost without incident. We had to stop at many a crossing, move rocks, and, a couple times, turn around completely. But we usually made it, the mud from the roads perfectly covered the acacia thorn paint scratches (handy for our rental inspection) and the exposed rocks came just short of snapping an axle.

We toured nearly the full length of the Skeleton Coast, the yellow dunes of Swakopmund, and the red sands of the Sossusvlei dune sea, with nary more than a slow leak in one tire (also undetected by the rental company).

Then we headed back, Connie behind the wheel, and had to do battle with the Abu Huab once more. There was no other way - trust me, we looked. Connie gunned it, the baboons turned their heads skeptically (well, I imagine they did), and we served and skidded over the sand within 50 meters of the opposite bank. The tires spun, the car made one last pathetic wiggle. We were stuck. Again.

Namibia: And now, pictures of pretty animals ...

Namibia has some of the strangest beauty on earth and with the population of Idaho and not many visitors, you never have to share it with many people. The even have the rare distinction of a damn tasty national lager (Windhoek).  It's one of my favorite places.

Bull elephant, Etosha National Park.

Jackal in rainy season wildflowers, Etosha.

Cape cobra raiding a weaver's nest, just a meter off our hiking trail in Solitaire. It's one of the deadliest snakes in Africa, which is saying something.

Same, trail, different deadly animal. This little scorpion could seriously ruin your day (dead without medical attention).

Ostrich taking a break, Etosha.

Yum.

And they weren't kidding. We saw these rare desert elephants not far from that sign, just hanging out on the side of the road. People pay thousands of dollars to see desert elephants.

The Sesriem canyon in the rainy season. It only floods for a few weeks, if that, every year.

Ancient stone carvings in southern Namibia.

Sossusvlei dune desert, one of the most stunning places on Earth.

And again.

And one more time.

                               Thunderstorm, Solitaire.

                               Skeleton Coast National Park.

Shipwreck, Skeleton Coast.

                               Wrecked oil rig, Skeleton Coast.

                         More rainy season beauty. This river usually flows once a year and that green won't last more than a few weeks.

The ugali truth: food diaries vol. I

Editor's note: I've gone far too long without a food-specific post - an embarrassing ommission.

It’s thick, white, grainy, and though locals claim it should have no taste – prepare for a snicker if you dare salt it – but it is the defining food of Southern Africa. Ugali, nsima, nshima, pap, papa, wusa – it all means a sticky glop of cheap calories in the form of corn porridge.

In a way, one of the liberating aspects of traveling in much of southern Africa is that there’s no gourmet food traditions (a major exception being Zanzibar) and therefore no pressure to seek out the regions great delicacies.

The preeminent regional board game, bao, is entirely about finding food to survive. It’s even played with seeds. When you make a good move and steal your opponent’s seeds, it’s called “finding something to eat.” When you can’t make a move, “you have nothing to eat.” (It’s also often played for money and cheating is not tolerated. If you’re opponent catches you may be the victim of “having no teeth left with which to eat.”)

Ugali (Swahili) is survival food. Corn is a quick, dirt cheap crop to grow, and from the Rift Valley in Tanzania to Cape Town, you will find miles and miles of the stuff planted on every marginally fertile piece of land.

The porridge is often served with a bit of stewed or curried meat and sometimes a few vegetables (my favorite being salty pumpkin greens), but the bulk of the calories come from the corn and a lot of poor people must make do with just ugali for more meals than is healthy. Even in Mozambique, with its Portuguese cooking flair, the perfectly crisped side-of-the-road whole chickens are served with a liberal dollop of wusa.

I grew up with pap (what South Africans call it) and always loved it as grainier, heartier alternative to mashed potatoes and a great side to grilled meats. Apparently I learned improper pap etiquette, though, enjoying it with a healthy (unhealthy?) dose of salt and butter. When I did this in a local restaurant in the tiny lakeside town of Monkey Bay, Malawi, a Malawian in the restaurant laughed and schooled me in the ways of nsima (the Malawian name).

“It’s not supposed to taste like anything,” he said.

If you’re lucky enough to have some accoutrements to your starch, the nsima is there to soak up the flavors, which it does quite effectively. Papa (Botswana) is a no-silverware affair. Despite the fact that it’s served scorching hot, you are supposed to dig in fingers first. You didn’t need those fingerprints, anyway.

Scoop out half a fistful, use your thumb to dimple the bottom and scoop up that fatty morsel of beef you had your eye on. Enjoy, and keep telling yourself it’s beef.

The Tau of Zimbabwe

                                Random hitch-hiking pic.

SIHETHWE, Botswana – This trip did not include Zimbabwe. A virtual coin-toss decided that we would transit through Zambia instead and stop on that country’s side of Victoria Falls. Zimbabwe, though, famous recently for its multi-trillion-dollar notes and political violence, has followed us throughout this journey.

It seems that every other bus ride my neighbor is part of the growing diaspora of educated Zimbabweans who have fled the country in the past decade as economic conditions have deteriorated and along with political freedom.

I met one of these exiles on a hot dry day that started bleakly in Maun, Botswana with the announcement that the only bus to our destination had been mysteriously canceled. Connie and I instead took another bus to what we were promised was an ideal destination for hitch-hiking - we had 500 miles to go to reach Windhoek, Namibia, so it was a crucial gamble.

An hour later we got off at a place reputed to be a town, but which appeared to be little more than a snack stand, a collection of noisy, traffic-dodging goats, and a few slothful cows hogging the precious shade under the acacia trees. Sihethwe was notable one thing: a distinct lack of traffic.

Car after car drove down the shimmering, sun-drenched highway only to turn at the last minute down a road that must have gone to some Valhalla vastly superior to Windhoek, where a cool sea breeze gently tickled the lucky traveler’s feet and the Windhoek Lager never ran out.

I looked at the crowd of hopefuls waiting patiently for a ride. There were about 15 of us and I wondered how many days it would be until the snack stand ran out of food. Then, a van approached in the distance. It passed up the first turn, then the second; now, it just had to pass Endless Windhoek Lager Road and we might get a ride – if we could duke it out with the other hopefuls. Improbably, the van pulled up and, even more improbably, it was empty, but there weren’t 15 seats and it was no time to be timid, so Connie and I jostled our way on. One poor bastard was left on the side of the road. He may still be there.

Our luck continued when we found out the bus would go all the way to the Namibian border and became ridiculous when every passenger save Connie, myself, and a bespectacled fellow in the back exited halfway to the border. We stretched out, relaxed, dug into some side of the road stop nshima* and chicken, and watched the Botswanan bush fly by at 90 mph.

I introduced myself to our fellow rider and we didn’t stop talking for the next 400 miles – all the way from northern Botswana to Windhoek. His name is Tau,**which he says means “talkative” in his native Shona, and his parents had some sixth sense when naming him. Tau has a professorial look, talks a mile a minute and has lots to say about his native Zimbabwe, which he fled in the mid-2000s.

He had just returned from a trip to Harare, where he was rewarded for his three-day overland journey from Namibia (his current home) by having to pay a $200 bribe to renew his passport. On the bright side, he doesn’t have to repeat the exercise for another ten years – “A lifetime, especially in this time of HIV,” as Tau put it wryly.

Once a booming crop exporter with an education system that was the envy of Africa, Zimbabwe, as has been exhaustively reported, has taken a nose dive in the past decades, as invasions of White-owned farms have mutilated the agricultural sector and political violence directed at the opposition MDC party and its supporters has turned the country into an international embarrassment.

Inflation got so bad at one point, that people had to bring wheelbarrows of cash to the grocery store as prices rose by the hour and the mint had to print a 100 trillion dollar note – the largest denomination in the history of money (now for sale as a souvenir on both sides of Vic Falls).

Zimbabwe has since dumped its currency for U.S. dollars and, by most accounts, is slightly less disastrous than before, though still far from functional.

All the Zimbabweans I spoke with have issues with the ruling ZANU-PF party and leader Robert Mugabe, an erstwhile liberation hero turned international pariah, but the bottom line in their decision to leave is always the same: no jobs, no money. None of them had any looming plans to return.

Tau, who has a university degree, has managed ok in his self-imposed exile, teaching in Namibia and supporting his family, albeit in a cramped house in a rough neighborhood. Others are not so lucky and tales abound of college-educated Zimbabweans working as housekeepers and guards.

Tau bemoaned the corruption that has metasticized in his country, leading to a hustler economy.

“Even if you ask directions, they want a dollar.”

Those with street smarts can manage, but many honest people suffer, Tau said. If Tau had not figured out who to bribe and with how much, he would have been made to wait months for his passport and may have lost his job in the meantime.

“If you follow the rules, you won’t survive.”

The Botswana-Namibia border was the van’s last stop and so Connie, Tau, and I were back to hitchhiking. Soon I saw the perfect ride pull up – a large SUV whose sole occupant was the driver, a burly, bearded Afrikaner. I made a terribly unfair judgment – I thought having a black man with us would prove an issue.

Connie went to do the talking – let’s face it, it’s much harder to say no to her – and, not for the first time this trip, one of my snap judgments made me look the fool. Stephen, a safari guide and fourth-generation Botswanan whose ancestors fled British oppression in South Africa, took us with little hesitation, took us all the way to Windhoek and refused our money (even dropped Connie and I at our hostel).

Along the way we talked more about the demise of Zimbabwe - “He is like a child who does not want to give up his toy,” Tau said of Mugabe, though he’s not convinced even the death of the 87-year-old ruler will be enough to turn the country around. We discussed the various quarrels, past and present, some quite bloody, between Southern Africans both black and white, as Stephen chain-smoked cheap, Stuyvesant cigarettes.

“Everyone fights each other. No one is clean,” Stephen said.

We puzzled over how to stem deep-seated corruption that is ravaging southern African states, horrific poverty, and ultra-violent crime (Stephen is terrified of his ancestral homeland, South Africa) which makes most African cities no-man’s lands after dark. Of course we came to no conclusions before changing to the cheerier subject of the bush and African wildlife. One thing Stephen said about lions rang a bit too true for many human predators in Africa.

“If you walk at night, they will eat you.”

*The ubiquitous corn meal peasant grub of Southern Africa.

**First name only and no photo or detailed description of what he does, due to ongoing political intimidation in Zimbabwe.