The Last Train to Zona Verde (10 page)

Given that “Shoot the Boer” advocated the killing of white farmers, it was another dire statistic that, since apartheid was banned in 1994, more than 3,000 white farmers had been murdered by black assassins. Most of the victims had been ambushed on isolated farms in the veldt. The anthem’s lyrics in Zulu were brutally simple:

Except for the misguided folk who sang this with Malema at his political rallies, the song was condemned in newspaper editorials and by many citizens as hate speech, calling it an embarrassment and a backward step for the country.
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But wait: one voice was raised in defense of Julius Malema, fat and sassy in his canary-yellow baseball cap and canary-yellow T-shirt, his fist raised, shouting “Shoot the Boer — shoot, shoot.” This supporting voice was the confident brogue of the Irish singer Paul Hewson, known to the world as the ubiquitous meddler Bono, the frontman of U2. He loved the song. The multimillionaire rocker, on his band’s “360-Degree Tour” in South Africa in 2011, had squinted through his expensive sunglasses, tipped his cowboy hat in respect, and asserted that “Shoot the Boer” had fondly put him in mind of the protest songs sung by the Irish Republican Army.

“When I was a kid and I’d sing songs,” Bono reminisced to the
Sunday Times
in Johannesburg, “I remember my uncles singing … rebel songs about the early days of the IRA.”

He treated the reporter to a ditty about an Irishman carrying a gun, and added, alluding to “Shoot the Boer,” “It’s fair to say it’s folk music.”

So willing was Bono to ingratiate himself — and, in his haste or ignorance, oblivious of the grotesque murder statistics and the horror of people who feared for their lives — that he went out of his way in his approval of the racist song, bolstering his argument with
the observation that “Shoot the Boer” was a thoroughly Irish sentiment. Maybe so; though many disagreed, Irish and South Africans alike. His comments caused howls of rage by people in South Africa who noted the paradox that, just the year before, in April 2010, Bono (sharing the stage with former president Bill Clinton) had been honored by the Atlantic Council, which conferred on him the Distinguished Humanitarian Leadership Award.

And here I was, reading this in a bus headed north through the high veldt, with a man who might well have been a Zulu in the seat in front of me, an elderly black woman behind me, and two men who were undoubtedly Boer farmers conversing in Afrikaans in the seat across the aisle.

Into the heartland we went, down the main streets of small towns that were lined by the arcades and porticoes of hardware stores and old shops, past the immense farms and spectacular landscapes of the Northern Cape — a great relief, and uplifting after my experience of the dense dogtowns and squatter camps and townships and the fortified suburbs.

Many of the South Africans I’d met had wanted to be reassured. How are we doing? they’d asked, but obliquely. How did South Africa compare to the country I had seen on my trip ten years before and written about in
Dark Star Safari
? I could honestly say it was brighter and better, more confident and prosperous, though none of it was due to any political initiative. The South African people had made the difference, and would continue to do so, no thanks to a government that embarrassed and insulted them with lavish personal spending, selfishness, corruption, outrageous pronouncements, hollow promises, and blatant lies.

The new prosperity was evident as we traveled up the N1 highway past Century City, which was still being developed when I was last in South Africa and had grown to an enormous complex of houses, high-rises, and “the largest shopping mall in Africa,” Canal Walk, with hundreds of stores, resembling its sister stereotype, the residential
community and shopping center in Florida or California, after which it had been modeled. And serving the same purpose: the middle-class flight from the city, seeking space and security. Well-funded and well-swept Century City was the opposite in every respect of the improvisational townships ten miles to the south of it.

Past a power station, a prison, and Corpus Christi Church
(REFUEL HERE AND CONNECT WITH GOD
confidently lettered on its sign out front), we swung north on a new road, passing more suburbs — and I noted that the more expensive-looking the home, the higher the perimeter fence or brick wall. In a republic of open country, one that celebrated the freedom of African space, every substantial dwelling was surrounded by walls, every house a fortress.

Up a road lined with gum trees through Durbanville, we passed the first heights of the green bosomy veldt, the gentle Tygerberg Hills, covered with grapevines in orderly rows. They were the extensive plantings of D’Aria Vineyards, composed of two wine farms, Doordekraal and Springfield. The first vintage of this winery was a sauvignon blanc, produced and offered for sale in 2005.

This fact I found out in the next town, Malmesbury, where the bus stopped for half an hour and I was able to talk to one of the Boers in the seat opposite.

His name was Hansie, a miner, headed to Springbok, but he had come this way often, noting the settlement and expansion of Durbanville and the nearby farming towns. This vineyard was no more than ten years old.

“There was nothing here before, just veldt and some old farms,”

Hansie said. “Now’s it’s a working wine farm.”

He asked me where I was from. I told him.

“You could have stayed at D’Aria instead of the city — it takes guests as well. Nice and quiet.”

Over the past decade he had seen the towns here grow, settled by Capetonians looking for a serene life in the hills. The place we
had stopped, Malmesbury, was an example, a market town in an old farming district, surrounded by wheat fields, on Hansie’s route to Springbok. This town, too, had grown.

“Lots of new people here,” he said. “Lots of new shops. It’s coming up. And, ach, only thirty kilometers from Cape Town.”

Thitty
kilometers, he said, and added that we were in Swartland, so called because of the
bleck
soil.

I wanted to ask Hansie about Julius Malema but did not have the heart to speak the name of a man who was obviously his nemesis. South Africans are not unusual in being sensitive about reminders of their history, but their recent past was so full of ambiguities none could say what the future might hold for them.

“Catch you later,” he said, releasing me so that he could, as he said, “buy an ass cream cone.”

Remembering I had no food or drink with me, I went into a large supermarket just off the main road which loomed like a warehouse and was stacked with merchandise, toppling crates and irregular piles of canned goods in ripped-open cardboard boxes.

The owners were Chinese, and their English was almost nonexistent. All I wanted were some bottles of water, which I couldn’t find until the woman at the register, with helpful ducklike nods and nasal yips, guided me from where she stood behind the counter. She and the man piling cans were perhaps some of the new people. They were the first of many immigrants from the People’s Republic that I was to meet on this trip, and though most of them were doing business in remote and unpromising places, they seemed content, absorbed, unflappable, even grateful, their feet squarely on the ground.

After Malmesbury, the countryside widened into an immensity of low hills and surrounding black ridges. As Hansie had said, the darkness of the soil had earned the region the name Swartland. It was only in such a rural place that South Africa made sense. This was its heartland, its food supply, gentle, settled, serene. I described
in my diary the sunlit landscape, cattle browsing in the meadows, the distant farmhouses, the empty roads, the peacefulness.

I held that happy memory in my head, thinking of Malmesbury as a blissful realm, mentioning it later to my friends in Cape Town. And they referred me to a headline in the local newspaper, “Couple Attacked on Malmesbury Farm”:

This assault immediately found its way to the Afrikaner Genocide Archives website, which was dense with accounts of attacks on farmers and other rural crimes, and gave more details about the incident in Malmesbury. The victims were Pieter Loubser and not his fiancée but his wife, Brenda, members of the Wes-Kaap Simmentaler cattle breeders’ club. The Loubsers ran a dairy farm — their milk, sold locally and in Cape Town, was one of the cheaper food items to be found in the townships. The other facts tallied: an early morning break-in by three men, an ax attack in the bedroom, the demand for money, the theft of valuables, the serious injuries. And another detail, something new: “Other news sources also say that Brenda was very brutally sexually assaulted.”

This account concluded: “Farm attacks place the food-security
of this country in great danger. Irresponsible behaviour and statements by radical young black politicians are directly responsible for this — despite the fact that they themselves fatten themselves with food produced by those same farmers which are so badly maligned by these leaders.”

So anyone who believed, with Bono, that Malema’s song “Shoot the Boer” was no more than a harmless bit of folklore, and encouraged it to be sung like an Irish ditty, seemed to me an accessory to such assaults. It was obviously an incitement and made life hell for the people who lived on isolated farms. But by the time this crime took place, Bono and U2 were far away, singing somewhere else in the world, perhaps being awarded another prize for being humanitarians, leaving the local farmers here to face the music.

Back on the bus, we continued through farmland, past Mooreesberg and Piketberg, Swartland leading into deeper valleys until the rocky hills swelled to jagged mountains — no trees at all, only strange piled-up rocks like giant cairns, scattered with low scrub and the sweet-smelling
fynbos
that reminded me of the maquis of Corsica, whole hillsides of herbs among sharp cliffs and slopes of smashed rock — the roughest clusters of granite softened by sprouted wildflowers.

Descending to the town of Citrusdal, I was reminded of a young woman at a winery in Constantia whose grandparents farmed here, and I remembered the name Citrusdal for being so specific.

“Granny doesn’t speak a word of English,” she had told me. “Only Afrikaans. And she never leaves the farm. She’s only been to Cape Town a few times in her life. They think I’m so odd to be here. I’m ‘the grape girl’!”

Orange groves, mile after mile of their dense boughs and deep green leaves, covered the sunny valleys of Citrusdal. If I’d been in my own car, I would have stopped and stayed the night in this
pretty town, among the fragrant trees, at the edge of the Cedarberg Wilderness, so beautiful that my Afrikaner writer friend the late Etienne Leroux, author of
Seven Days at the Silbersteins
and other novels, chose this wilderness as his burial place. It was easy enough to get to, only two or three hours from Cape Town, but for all its proximity a great empty landscape that had once belonged to the San people, who had left their vivid cave paintings behind.

The road was perfectly smooth, looping around the hills, just two lanes of it, the main thoroughfare headed up the left side of Africa. To keep order — and order was the priority — it had been essential for the old white-dominated South African government to create a world-class road system: the army needed it to move with speed and efficiency, to control the population and to fight the long and bloody insurgency in the territory of South-West Africa and beyond. This highway built for jeeps and troop trucks, as well as for moving produce in the bad times, was now a road for sightseers and travelers to Namibia.

In the window seat just ahead of Hansie, an older woman sat reading an article in
Weslander
, an Afrikaans newspaper, with the headline “Hoërskool Brand!,” showing a photo of a school in flames. Squat and plump, with a shelving belly and short white hair, she had the Roman emperor look of Gertrude Stein. On her wide lap she had a brown bag of sandwiches, which she ate as she read the paper, looking content.

We had by now passed the larger groves of fruit trees and the wine farms, and the land looked as though all the topsoil had been blasted from it, leaving only low scrub, prickly bush, and bare rock. But even in this seemingly unpromising place to farm I saw irrigated valleys of grapes and citrus. This was at Clanwilliam and Vanrhynsdorp, the place names suggesting the different nationalities of those who had settled here.

Dorp
was the right designation for the roadside settlements, the
blunt and slightly comical Afrikaans word meaning “village” or “small town.” We pulled in at one, another pit stop at the edge of the much drier veldt, where there were no farms at all, the rubbly semidesert looking like New Mexico or Arizona.

I struck up a conversation with a woman here, in her early thirties perhaps, simply to ask why she was taking the bus and how far she was going. It turned out she was going all the way to Namibia too. Her name was Anke, and she was of mixed race, perhaps part German, part African or Malay.