The Last Train to Zona Verde (5 page)

“They shouldn’t have taken the money?”

Archie said, “That was the badness.”

I remembered the name Ntsikana and later looked it up and found that there was a Xhosa prophet by that name, his life well documented. Indeed, he was a pioneer of “black theology,” a self-created Christian (he’d had contact with missionaries, though he was never baptized and never studied with them) who had flourished in the late eighteenth to early nineteenth century. In 1815 Ntsikana had an epiphany, “an illumination of the soul,” that confirmed in him a belief in monogamy, river baptism, and Sunday prayer to a sovereign God. He wrote hymns and composed poems. Because his conversion had occurred without any missionary intervention, so he said, his followers “claimed a pedigree for Xhosa Christianity independent of missionary influence.”

“I am sent by God, but am only like a candle,” Ntsikana said, using a felicitous image of illumination and finiteness. “I have not added anything to myself.” Furiously proselytizing, he established rural congregations throughout the Eastern Cape. One day Ntsikana foretold the coming of a race of people to the shores of South Africa. He described them as people “[through] whose transparent ears the sun shines redly” and “whose hair is long as the tail-hairs of a zebra.” Since he had previously seen whites, this prophecy proved accurate, and he apparently did warn his followers not to
put much faith in the new people. Ntsikana died in 1821, and his grave, near Fort Beaufort in the Eastern Cape, is a place of pilgrimage.

Although Archie had a few details wrong, his sudden parable introduced me to this powerful sect, which still had many adherents. We were walking along the broken paving of littered roads that ran between a pair of two-story cinderblock buildings that had the prison starkness of much public housing. They had once been, Archie said, the hostels of migrant workers — all men — who were employed as field hands, common laborers, and domestics in Cape Town during the apartheid era. An effective way to control them was to house them in an isolated place, require them to carry the
dompas
, and separate them from their wives and children, who remained in distant villages.

Behind these beat-up hostels were small wooden shacks piled against each other. Ragged children, their noses running on this chilly morning, lurked in the doorways.

“More people,” I said. “More shacks.”

“Informal settlements,” Archie said. The name always brought a grim smile to my lips because it conjured the image of people in bright bungalows, sprawled on sofas. “The name for them is
siyahlala
.”

I asked him to spell it, and I wrote it down.

“It is Xhosa,” Archie said. “It means ‘We are staying here.’ ”

He said five or six people lived in each shack, though there seemed hardly room for two. Scattered around the edge of the settlement, beyond the hostels, beyond the shacks, were shipping containers — great rusty steel boxes — and people were living in those, too, recent arrivals, Archie said. Some containers had been divided into two- or three-family dwellings, doors and windows blowtorched as crude openings in the sides. In front of several were stalls selling blackened sheep heads.

“We call them smileys.” Archie explained that when the severed
head was thrown on the hot grill, “the lips shrivel up in a smile.”

The locals ate them with “train smash,” he went on, and laughed. “Tomato sauce.”

As we strolled, teenagers stared at us from where they sat on benches or rubber tires. Some glowered from doorways, others glanced up from card games or from kicking a soccer ball, still others simply stood the way herons stand, motionless, on one leg, the other leg crooked behind it. All of the youths were idle, not a dozen or so, but scores of them, perhaps hundreds, apparently with nothing to do. A few of them began to follow Archie and me, but they quickly tired of this — maybe we were walking too fast for them. One of my rules in an apparently insecure place was to walk fast and look busy.

Archie said the hostels had been renovated in 2002, which perhaps meant that was when they had been painted the dull yellow I saw. He showed me inside one of them — a hive of dirty two-room apartments crammed with filthy mattresses.

“Six rooms here,” he said at another of the hostels. The places were crammed with damp quilts, old clothes, broken shoes, and children’s plastic toys, as well as CD players and radios.

“How many people live here?”

“Thirty-eight.” He could see my incredulity. He said, “Some sleep on the dining table. And under it.”

Misery acquaints us with strange bedfellows. The smell grew riper as we penetrated to the last narrow room, where there were two small beds. It housed a family he knew.

“Nine people in this room,” he said.

I tried to imagine where they lay at night on the beds and on the floor of this room, which was no more than nine by five feet. He nodded, satisfied that he had startled me, because some of these township tours seemed designed to shock the visitor. But I also thought that there must be places like this in the United States, perhaps
many, yet how would I ever know? There were no tours, no men like Phaks or Archie to guide anyone to them.

“And what is most disgusting is that they make use of one toilet,” he said, meaning the thirty-eight occupants of the place.

“Where are the people now?”

“Outside,” he said. “It is too small to live in by day.”

This was also a habit of the village, where people spent the day in the open, under a tree or in the informal courtyard, and used their mud huts only for sleeping or for protection against nocturnal animals.

The next places Archie showed me were roomier, and one looked habitable. Certainly it was cleaner, a two-bedroom apartment in which one family lived. The watchful but polite matriarch nodded at me, and a small, stunned-looking boy peered from the side of a doorway. The rent was 500 rand a month, about $60.

More shacks stood nearby, of the meanest sort, just piled-up lumber and plastic sheeting, with low ceilings. It was hard to imagine anyone living in them.

“We call these
vezinyawo
, because they are so small,” Archie said. He explained that the word meant “Your feet are showing” or “Your feet are outside,” because one hut was not large enough to accommodate a whole supine human being.

Some streets adjacent to these shacks were lined with bright, compact bungalows, painted in pastel colors, surrounded by fences, with newish cars parked in the driveways. Other solid houses, some of them just completed, faced the main road, the highway to the airport, and these were the houses that foreign visitors would see as they passed by, perhaps saying, “Doesn’t look that bad, Doris,” never guessing at the shacks and doghouses beyond them that were out of sight. At one of them, a woman had set out on a wobbly table an array of beaded bracelets. She had made them with her own hands, she said. That expression made me look at her hands — the
woman was wringing them in anxiety. She had nine children, and all of them lived in this shack. She looked pleadingly at me to buy, and I came away with my pockets bulging with beaded artifacts.

“And this is a shebeen,” Archie said, parting the curtain that was hung on the doorway of a shack. The ceiling was so low I could not stand up straight, and the air was rank and doggy and warm with stink. When my eyes became accustomed to the darkness I saw six beer-swilling men inside, three on benches, three squatting on the floor, drunk and incapable at noon on a Monday. An old gaunt woman in an apron presided over the place, stirring a tureen of porridgy liquid.

One man grinned at me and drank from a large enamel cup, as a cat laps milk, and then he shook it, sloshing the creamy liquid inside.

“Have a drink,” Archie said. I was certain he was testing me, showing me the worst of the township. I had tried to appear implacable, with my “How do you spell that?” and “Let’s see another.” But this was like a jail cell or the worst room of a madhouse. “This beer is made of maize and sorghum. It is called
umqombothi
.”

“How do you spell that?”

A few days later, I heard this word again, in a lovely bouncy song about a proud woman who makes beer, “magic beer,” performed by an energetic and melodious South African singer, Yvonne Chaka Chaka.

By then we had walked a mile or more and were still in Langa township. But Archie wanted me to see something else, something special, perhaps another shock.

“It is Mr. Ndaba,” Archie said. “He is a traditional healer.”

Mr. Ndaba lived in a room, another low ceiling — I had to stoop to enter, and to kneel to speak to him. The healer was seated on a stool, working his knife against something he held in his other hand.

I took a breath and retched. The room had the stinging smell
of decay, a maggoty odor, and I soon saw why. Hanging from the walls and ceiling were old yellow monkey skulls and jawbones, the decaying pelts of small animals, fur, feathers, more bones, a dead pangolin, snake skins, porcupine quills, mummified birds, and in a corner a newly dead rat being chewed by a small mangy kitten.

“This is all medicine,” Archie said. “He can cure AIDS.”

“What’s that?” I asked, pointing to the spotted pelt of a dead animal, possibly a civet cat.

“It is my hat,” Mr. Ndaba said, and now I could see that he was eating. He spoke with his mouth full, and he was still stabbing and carving with his knife. The scrape of the blade was a dull sustained note. What he held was a lump of yellow bone and gray flabby flesh. He gouged some meat from it and raised the knife to his mouth.

“And what’s that?”

“I am eating the head of a pig.” As he hefted the thing in his hand, its ears wagged.

The pong of the rancid flesh hit me and I wanted to vomit.

“He is a healer,” Archie said. “He can cure AIDS. He can make someone fall in love with you. He can cast away spirits. He can make you better. We call him an
igqirha
.”

“How do you spell that?” I asked, ducking and leaving the hut.

As I left, Mr. Ndaba said goodbye in a kindly way. And I thought, How easy it is to mock the healer with a civet cat pelt on his head, surrounded by stinking bones and feathers and snake skins. But anyone who entered, wishing to be healed, trusting in the healer, would experience what scientists describe as a therapeutic encounter — the sense of well-being that you feel in the presence of a doctor you trust, one with a kindly, inquiring manner and with monkey skulls instead of diplomas on the wall. The stink itself, like the sight of a stethoscope, might create a placebo effect.

Still, in the intimacy of these shadowy huts I felt self-conscious, almost as if I didn’t have a right to be there.

What is the point of these township tours?
I heard whites in Cape
Town ask again and again, cringing in embarrassed disbelief.
Why do Africans advertise their squalor and sell tickets to their slums?

It also struck me as odd that tourists were invited to see the townships and encouraged to examine the sad inner rooms, because they were just as dirty, disorderly, and crime-ridden as in the days of apartheid — perhaps more so. And the shocking thing was that when the residents moaned about the bad old days, all one could think of was how awful, how unfit for human habitation, they were now. Later in the day, in Guguletu, I saw a vanload of well-dressed Italian tourists drinking beer and mineral water at a grubby chicken restaurant — Italians who, without question, would not have dared enter the slums of Naples (depicted in the 2009 Italian film
Gomorrah
and based on a book of the same name by Roberto Saviano), which resembled Guguletu. There were also a few small restaurants in Guguletu that had been discovered by Cape Town foodies and cautiously visited not just for the meal but for the novelty of the filth and menace of their surroundings.

It seemed that curious visitors, of whom I was one, had created a whole itinerary, a voyeurism of poverty, and this exploitation — at bottom that’s what it was — had produced a marketing opportunity: township dwellers, who never imagined their poverty to be of interest to anyone, had discovered that for wealthy visitors it had the merit of being fascinating, and the residents became explainers, historians, living victims, survivors, and sellers of locally made bead ornaments, toys, embroidered bags, and baskets, hawked in the stalls adjacent to the horrific houses. They had discovered that their misery was marketable. That was the point.

Look how the apartheid system forced us to live like dogs in a kennel!
was the intended message. But the message that reached me was that the miserable former hostels for men were now filthy overcrowded rooms for whole hopeless families, most of them indigent and unemployed.

Phaks was waiting nearby. He said, “We go back?”

“There’s one more place,” I said. “Guguletu.”

“Gugs,” he said, using the local nickname, and off we rattled in his old van.

Ten years before, I had walked around Guguletu, noting how the township had achieved notoriety in 1993, when a twenty-six-year-old Californian, Amy Biehl, had been murdered there by a mob. A Stanford graduate, living in South Africa as a volunteer in voter registration for the following year’s free election, she had driven three African friends home to the township as a favor. She had a ticket to California; she was to leave South Africa the next day. Seeing her white face, a large crowd of African boys screamed in eagerness, for this was a black township and she was white prey. The car was stoned, she was dragged from it, and though her friends pleaded with them to spare her (“She’s a comrade!”), Amy was beaten to the ground, her head smashed with a brick, and she was stabbed in the heart. “Killed like an animal,” I wrote in my notebook then.

Four suspects were named; they were tried and convicted of the murder, and the judge, noting that they “showed no remorse,” sentenced them to eighteen years in prison. Three years later, these murderers appeared before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. They had an explanation for the murder. “Their motive was political and not racial.” They “regretted” what they had done. They newly claimed they had “remorse.” They pleaded to be released under the general amnesty.