The Last Train to Zona Verde (9 page)

The plateau to the south was a national park, where troops of chacma baboons frowned and skittered amid the low-growing, sweet-smelling bushes that Afrikaners called
fynbos
. The land looked blessed, the uttermost end of the earth, a paradise — as it was when its only inhabitants were hunter-gatherers who called themselves the Real People. As a passage to the East Indies, it had been renamed Good Hope.

On
The Spirit of the Cape
we drank beer and ate cold pink prawns
and slices of pizza. We talked about travel, and I learned from my fellow picnickers that the Cape is the home of
The Flying Dutchman
, the ghost ship that sails endlessly and is a lesson to all travelers, especially to those who overreach themselves. And — since the legend was based on an actual overzealous captain — to travelers who don’t know when to stop.

“So, Paul, where are you headed?”

I began fumblingly to describe my itinerary. Several of the men had been to Namibia, but none to Tsumkwe in the remote northeast, home of the Ju/’hoansi people, where I hoped to go. None of the men had seen Angola, though they knew ex-soldiers who’d been — the South African army had fought there, laid land mines there, and bombed the towns, fighting against Namibian guerrillas as well as supporting one of the factions in the twenty-seven-year Angolan civil war. But these days Angola was pretty much terra incognita, noted for its oil reserves, its many unexploded land mines, and its isolation.

“Are you sure you want to go there?”

I said, “Oh, yes. I’m looking forward to it.”

“The roads are supposed to be really awful.”

I said, “I’m not in a hurry.”

“Probably no roads at all in some of the places.”

It would have been pretentious to say “I follow no path, the path follows me,” but it was, pompously, how I felt.

I said, “There’s always a way if you’re not in a hurry.”

“You can see it all here,” the captain said. He switched on the GPS, and soon in lighted segments the west coast of southern Africa appeared on the screen. He dialed it larger and scrolled up.

“There’s the northern part, Namaqualand and the interior,” he said, his fingers spider-walking on the screen. “That smooth part of the coast — there are diamond mines all over it. That hook is Luderitz, where Namibia starts. There’s Walvis Bay — lots of shipping there. And Swakopmund, and the Skeleton Coast.”

“See that line?” one of the others said. “That’s the Kunene River, the border of Angola. I’ve been up there in a helicopter with safari clients, but not over it. No one goes across except the Himba.”

The Himba people were seminomadic herders, venerators of fire, famously traditional and handsome in beads and shell ornaments, red clay clotting the women’s long braids.

As
The Spirit of the Cape
turned near an old, partly submerged wreck at Clifton, and rode the swell back to the harbor, the captain helpfully traced the meandering line with his fingertip, indicating the watercourse border that divided Namibia from Angola. But the map had so little detail, its simple topography glowing on the screen in the wheelhouse, it seemed to depict a land unknown and undiscovered.

4
The Night Bus to Windhoek

L
IKE A SHEEPISH BOY
, round-shouldered and self-conscious, slumping in his father’s expensive car and going off to school, I said, “Yusuf, please drop me here,” as the powerful black Mercedes approached the bus station. The station entrance was indistinct in the early morning mist. I preferred to be anonymous. Well, who wouldn’t? No one is more conspicuous than a person sliding out of a big limo to climb onto a beat-up bus. But the hotel concierge had insisted, wishing to give me a good send-off, and it seemed churlish to refuse. At a discreet distance — Yusuf heeding my request — I jumped out before he could open my door. He was smiling, chuckling softly, as he shook my hand and gave me the morning paper, a neatly folded
Cape Argus
.

“Good journey, sir.”
Jinny
.

“You’re smiling because I’m taking the bus,” I said, breathing diesel fumes from the idling buses.

“Not at all, sir.”

“Why, then?”

“Because you have bought a one-way ticket only, sir.”
Tucket
.

Yes, I did not know how far I’d get, or whether I was coming back this way. It was a leap in the dark, northerly, in the direction of the Congo.

The whole color spectrum of South African racial identities was represented at the station, preparing to board the bus: black, Indian, Cape Malay, “colored,” Chinese, and some beefy Boers, all of us headed to Springbok and the border, and perhaps across it. No formalities except a perfunctory ritual with the driver, who held a clipboard and checked my name. It was casual and orderly, with no security, no delay; as soon as we were on the bus, we were driven out of the city, toward Namibia and
l’Afrique profonde
, into the gut of the greenest continent.

I sat by the window reading the
Cape Argus
, relishing the prospect of the long trip and catching up on the news. All week, in and out of the townships, I had been following the progress of a public battle between disciplinarians in the ruling party, the African National Congress, and Julius Malema, the boisterous president of its Youth League, who rejoiced in his own mayhem. Malema was always in the news for his offensive pronouncements: his shouted threats to whites and Indians, his demands that the mines should be nationalized, that Botswana must be invaded and its government overthrown, that the white-owned farms in South Africa be overrun and seized — handed wholesale to black South Africans — as had happened disastrously in Zimbabwe, a ruined country on the brink of bankruptcy that Malema admired and frequently visited.

Though he was depicted in the press as a buffoon, and had three convictions in South African courts for uttering hate speech, Malema was a possible future leader of South Africa. Indeed, he was a leader now, though a divisive one. Only thirty years old, but wealthy, dangerous, and vindictive, he was just reckless enough to seek the highest office. The current president, Jacob Zuma, who, as his mentor, seemed an older, cannier version of this arrogant bully, had begun to fear him. Like Zuma, Malema had — so newspaper investigations
reported — enriched himself through shady deals and backhanders in state contracts. As a result, he owned a newly built mansion in a posh suburb of Johannesburg.

Malema had presided over the Youth League since 2008, and pictures of him, fist upraised, ranting at a microphone, from year to year showed him sequentially swelling, an intense black wire of a man transformed, growing fatter and balder until his big smooth head was almost without features, like an overinflated balloon with eyes swollen to wicked slits, a face that did not achieve any expression except when, with popping eyes and bared teeth, he succeeded in inspiring fear by spreading racist menace.

Popular among the black urban poor for his unapologetic insults, his bellowed speeches were widely quoted. So were his unruly press conferences, where he went out of his way to humiliate journalists and anyone else who disagreed with him, especially members of the foreign press. His abuse was memorable for being blunt: “stupid,” “imperialist,” “little tea girl,” “go away!” It seemed that no one in the government knew what to do with him, and that malicious thought gave him pleasure, because the more he was censured, the greater was his defiance.

Those noisy obedient souls who were his following had the leisure to show up any time, anywhere they were summoned, to cheer him, wave signs, and jump up and down — his audience’s peculiar display of approval was energetic jumping, giving a Malema rally the look of an enormous aerobics class. These jumpers were nearly all young, unemployed males from the townships — hardly reassuring to Malema’s opponents (of whom there were many) since the largest proportion of out-of-work South Africans lived in the townships. They were the many millions with nothing to do and nowhere to go, for whom Malema offered a diabolical sort of hope in the politics of racial incitement.

Demagoguery in Africa, as far as speechifying was concerned, had never mattered much. Though spitting and screaming speeches
were fairly common among up-and-coming party hacks, a gift for oratory was not crucial to an African politician aiming to be a tyrant. The traditional chiefs and kings did not engage in public speaking, but merely whispered their wishes to their right-hand man — the
porte-parole
in West African kingship, the “chief’s messenger” in East and Central Africa — the mouthpiece who conveyed the words that had to be obeyed.

Though the sympathies and howls of the rabble, the poor, the mob, might be helpful, they were seldom decisive factors in promoting a man to power, unless the mob was also well armed. In every African tyranny it was the army’s loyalty to the leader and its impartial cruelty that made the difference. Once a leader established himself as a dictator, he controlled his country through the army and the police, supplemented by the thuggery of self-appointed intimidators in the ruling party’s youth league. Speechmaking was irrelevant; if you had armed men on your side, no further persuasion was needed. An African dictator could be a mute and merciless enforcer and spend many decades in power without ever being seen in public.

But, oddly and perhaps unique to Africa, music always mattered to the political process. Never mind the speeches — who had the patience to listen to the lies? Along with the gun, music was the most persuasive influence in African political life, as it was in African culture; politics was dominated by rousing songs. This had always been the case. In the early 1960s in Nyasaland (soon to be Malawi) the defining song was “Zonse Zimene za Kamuzu Banda” — “Everything Belongs to Kamuzu Banda,” both a hymn and a prediction, in praise of the incoming prime minister, sung in villages, at political meetings, and by the students at my little school. Banda took power, suppressed and jailed the opposition, and went on to rule (the music still playing) for the next thirty-four years.

South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma had his personal anthem,
which he sang and danced to in public at every opportunity. It was a song from the struggle, about his machine gun.

An inconvenient fact is that South Africa was not liberated by all-out war and certainly not by machine-gun-toting guerrillas. There was no Gettysburg in South Africa, only the waste ground of Sharpeville, which was the site of a one-sided massacre of sixty-nine unarmed protesters. Mandela was not sprung from Robben Island by an indignant mob in a mass, Bastille-storming movement of prisoner liberation. Toward the end of his sentence, Mandela was secretly transferred to a serene, bucolic, country-house setting in the winelands where, with the connivance of the white government, he quietly awaited elections and the transfer of power.

Violent protest, sabotage, and armed struggle had been factors, but not decisive ones, in South African independence, which was gained through stubbornness, labor unrest, paralyzing strikes, public disorder, backroom negotiations, economic sanctions, and especially foreign pressure. The South African army was well armed and overwhelming. Independence was not taken but given, and was long overdue, in the drip-drip-drip of history’s inevitability. Zuma’s machine-gun anthem, and his war dance to its tune, was merely grimly comic posturing, but it had symbolic value to a populace that still felt aggrieved.

Julius Malema — uneducated, corrupt, canny, crazy-acting, and power mad — much resembled Zuma. He was one of Zuma’s supporters and had a personal anthem too, called “Shoot the Boer.” Like Zuma, he sang it with exaggerated gusto, hamming it up. You might be excused for thinking — if you didn’t know the meaning of the
words — that this was exuberant clowning, like a turn in a minstrel show, mimicking an “end man” in blackface, shuffling and playing for laughs; the only prop lacking was a banjo or a tambourine.

But he was serious. A huge headline in the
Cape Argus
I was reading on the bus concerned Malema, denouncing the man for defiantly leading his followers in singing his signature hate song because it seemed he would not stop singing it. “Shoot the Boer” was perfect for a black South African politician on the make — tuneful, with few words, easy to remember, anti-white, and an incitement to murder.

This song, too, had come out of the struggle, but the country had moved on, as it had moved on from
Bring me my machine gun
. Yet there were a great many people in South Africa who liked the message of murder and revenge, because many had yet to find any work, any wealth, any place for themselves, and they were envious of the visibly rich and enraged over them. These disaffected people were the township toughs who stoned trains, hijacked cars, and terrorized neighborhoods with brazen robberies that sent crime statistics soaring. With an annual homicide rate of 32,000, and rapes amounting to more than 70,000, South Africa led the world in 2011 in reported rapes and murders.