A Fork in the Road Read online

  The journeys to my grandparents were always occasions for discovery and rediscovery. My beautiful cousin Stella was one of my first loves, in the category of adoration from afar. The closest I ever came to indicate my special interest was to assure her at bedtime, on the evening before her family was due to return to their home in Johannesburg, that I would make every effort to get up in time the next morning, ‘because I want to kiss you goodbye’. But the lady was not for kissing and in the early morning rough and tumble there was not even time for a shared moment away from everybody else. Which may have been the beginning of a lifelong hunch that the mere existence of love already presupposes an ending. Still, we did see each other at many year-end holidays, and we sometimes exchanged letters, and when I was at university I once actually spent a few days with the family, which was not the same.

  There wasn’t room enough in Oupa’s home for the whole family to converge at the same time, but there were always enough of us for a festive atmosphere; and as the oldest grandchild I was often accorded the special privilege of sleeping with the grandparents in their room – on a special narrow striped mattress stuffed with dry maize leaves which made such a rustling racket that sleep did not come easily.

  The time we spent in Malmesbury was crammed with adventure, most of it provoked spontaneously by the interaction among so many cousins. At home, one had the choice between Ouma’s pantry, an Aladdin’s cave of simple treasures as she never ever threw anything away, and Oupa’s garden in which chickens scratched and turkeys strutted and Muscovy ducks hissed, and from which an endless supply of vegetables and fruit found its way to the great table that could comfortably seat the eighteen or twenty or, upon occasion, twenty-four family members assembled at mealtimes. On the underside of the table my father had written his name when as the firstborn child he was invited to make his pick from the heirlooms on offer; unfortunately some of the other family members got there first after Ouma’s death, which occurred within a few months of Oupa’s. They carted away whatever took their fancy before anyone else could make a claim. And so Auntie Kochie, the most pious Christian of them all, went off with the loot. She was the strictest and tidiest person I have ever known, always smiling the smile of the redeemed, while sharpening knives in her steel-blue eyes. Unable to bear the merest suggestion of untidiness in any form, she used to spend hours every night making sure the whole house was spick and span before she went to bed, ‘just in case the Lord comes in the night and finds us unprepared’.

  When we were not in or around the house, we went on picnics – to shady spots in the village, including the graveyard; or to surrounding farms where some of the other pleasures of harvest time in the Boland were on offer, or even, on a few unforgettable Saturdays, to the flanks of Table Mountain. Or to the sea, the fearsomely cold Atlantic Ocean at Melkbos, where Ouma’s sister, Great-aunt Anna, would wade into the waves in her kabaai, a huge, billowing white nightdress that ballooned up around her in the wind, a truly unforgettable and side-splitting sight. Poor Aunt Anna suffered in her old age – and she really was old, two years older than God, my friend Daantjie Saayman would have said – from dementia, and once attacked Ouma with a carving knife in the kitchen, after which she had to be taken away to the mental institution of Valkenberg in Cape Town. This shaped in me a lifelong apprehension of a deep, dark welter of forces lurking just below the surface of the most ordinary, boring or funny experiences in our lives.

  Boisterous moments, interspersed with good, deep silences, all of it stewed in the searing summer heat of the Swartland region as the holidays finally drew to an end; and then someone would take us to the Cape Town station and deposit us back on the train, and we travelled ever more deeply into the night, towards the flaming explosion of a new inland dawn.

  The first time Cape Town truly became part of my consciousness – in my childhood and youth it was merely part of the unexamined life – was in early August 1961, when Estelle and I arrived in Table Bay on the Something Castle (was it Warwick? Edinburgh? Windsor?) The previous two grey weeks at sea, the great majority of the grey passengers had spent in the grey smoking rooms, smoking. But in the early hours of that morning of arrival, there appeared a streak of lurid red in the sky, as if some great hand had taken up a pencil to score out the erroneous writing of the immediate past and turn the page to start again. On this page was gradually inscribed the ink-black mass of the mountain above the ink-blue wash of the sea; and as the ship drew nearer and the sky became luminous, the sprawling city assumed a recognisable shape under tumbling gulls. One of those incomparable winter days when the rain clouds dissipate to reveal, in blue and gold, the sight that already struck dumb Sir Francis Drake, as it must have Diaz and Vasco da Gama before him, and millennia earlier, Phoenicians on their way to unimaginable new worlds. Before our eyes the picture came to life. And then the Capeness of the Cape exploded in my ears with the trumpet voices of coloured harbour workers gleefully coaxing us ashore. ‘Jus’ look at these pale outjies coming down the gangway!’ shouted one to a distant friend. ‘White like blerrie maggots. Aitsa! Bring on that sun to give them a spot of colour, man.’

  Aitsa: the exclamation derived from the once-hallowed name of Heitsi-Eibib, hunter-god of the Khoi people.

  That was when I knew, with a recognition so fierce it took my breath away, that I had indeed come home. Home, a concept I had never grasped so acutely before: not during the previous years of studying in Paris, nor in those villages in the dusty heart of the country where one never dared grow too fond of anything or anyone, as goodbye was always in the air. Rilke: These things that live on departure. But this, now, suddenly, was home.

  I was heading inland; I had accepted an appointment at Rhodes University in Grahamstown. But this was home. This was where I wanted to be.

  It took thirty years before I could take the step. But when I finally made the definitive move in 1991 when the University of Cape Town found a place for me – even though it meant changing from the Department of Afrikaans and Dutch in which I’d lectured for thirty years, to English – it was like entering more deeply into myself. There was nowhere else I could so naturally be at home.

  And it was defined by those exuberant early morning voices that greeted Estelle and me on our arrival in 1961 – voices spoken or shouted by people who are still not granted the dignity of their own name. Not even coloureds, but ‘so-called coloureds’. A people that began to emerge about nine months after the arrival of the first Dutch colonists, who brought with them a flag of the Dutch East India Company, the VOC; and a variety of dialects; and a very basic, fundamentalist brand of Calvinism, soon fortified by equally fundamentalist Huguenots from France: what a pity, I’ve often thought, that when France decided to dump some of its citizens on us, they could not have been more representative of the Catholic majority, including at least some ‘pagans’ and atheists of the Voltairean mould. When I dared, in passing, to make such an observation in a radio interview soon after our arrival, it led to a period of more than thirty years in which the South African Broadcasting Corporation treated me as persona non grata.

  Be that as it may, the doughty Dutch were instructed to plant a garden for the provisioning of passing ships, tame the fringes of a savage Africa, and introduce miscegenation as the national sport. Nothing homogeneous about the new generation of Cape inhabitants then generally known as ‘Afrikaners’, except perhaps the many shades of brown that separate black and white. How fitting, how emblematic, that in this context the very name ‘Afrikaner’ should have been forged in opposition to the ruling class, as a sign of the heretic – when the unruly, drunken young Hendrik Bibault was carousing in the streets of Stellenbosch in 1707 celebrating the recall of the much-loathed governor Willem Adriaan van der Stel to Holland and the landdrost tried to silence him:

  ‘I shall not leave!’ shouted the youngster, ‘I am an Afrikaner, even if the landdrost beats me to death or puts me in jail, I shall not, nor will I be silent.’

  Very soon language
also became a marker of difference. In this peculiar bredie indigenous peoples and imported slaves – from Indonesia and Malaysia, from Malabar and Madagascar and Mozambique, from Amboine and Angola – attempting to speak Dutch, the master language, transformed it into something new, a local fabrication, soon known as Afrikaans. Which for a century and a half marked the speakers as locals, an underclass, largely of half-breeds, speaking a patois derided as Kitchen Dutch.

  This was both the strength and the weakness of the group. Weakness, because it was easy to relegate them to the margins of ‘decent’ society. Strength, because it meant that the language would remain identified with the deprived and the oppressed, the very roots from which the New South Africa would later grow. Towards the end of the nineteenth century the language was regrettably appropriated as a political tool by a small band of white men to challenge the domination of English and Dutch at the Cape; and when, after sickening humiliations and tribulations, they finally came to power, Afrikaans became, in its own turn, the language of oppression and power. The language of apartheid. But while that was happening, the coloured community retained it as the vehicle in which they could best express their humanity; and eventually their resistance. Which made it particularly depressing that once a democratic, largely black, government came to power, Afrikaans should continue to be suspected by many as an instrument of power, while its long history of association with the coloured downtrodden should be ignored by many of the new power elite. And sadder still is the fact that the people who had kept Afrikaans alive, initially against the battalions of political and military power, later against the hijackers who tried to establish a new language of domination, should still be largely deprived of proper recognition by the new establishment. Previously, they were regarded as too black to be allowed into the laager of power; now, except during election time when their votes are useful, they are often regarded as too white to be accepted as worthy fellow citizens. Given that almost every single coloured man, woman and child in South Africa may well be traced back to an initial act of power abuse – literally to a rape, as one can recognise it in the early history of slavery in the USA, that is, ‘the original wound’ in the terminology of one of the leading critics of slave narratives, Ashraf Rushdy – it remains a festering presence in the conscience of South Africa not yet adequately exorcised, or even confronted, by any regime.

  It was mainly in the Western Cape, with Cape Town as its hub, where the coloured people found their home. This, above all, was what defined for me that homecoming in 1961. And not long afterwards I had the joy of being introduced to the very heart of the Coloured Cape, District Six. By then, the bulldozers had already begun to lay waste the lower slopes of the mountain where ‘The Six’ had teemed and pullulated for centuries. But there were still swathes of the old community left, and my friend Daantjie Saayman would take me on long walks through the once-vibrant quarter which would later form the core of Looking on Darkness and much of The Wall of the Plague. Daantjie himself was the model for the protagonist Andrea’s larger-than-life fisherman father, long before colon cancer finally struck him down. This, like the Malay Quarter on the slope of the Lion’s Rump, is what truly spells Cape Town for me: its indomitable, raucous, rebellious way of confirming a heretic otherness, of saying no – not only to apartheid, but to everything that tried to domesticate and inhibit the human spirit and its wild, affirmative freedom, its laughter, its compassion. And also its outrageous and jubilant way of saying yes to life itself. A yes all the more remarkable for the long darkness it had to traverse in order to return to the sun.

  Much of that darkness – the darkness that lends relief and contours to the emotional and moral landscape of the Cape – was defined by slavery. For many years white historians lulled us with assurances of a relatively benign dispensation affecting slaves at the Cape, since the arrival of the first men, women and children in bondage in 1658 until the abolition of the barbaric practice in 1834. We know today that the experience was both more violent and more widespread, and assumed many more forms, than used to be believed.

  Even when A Chain of Voices was published in 1982 and I wrote an article on the slave revolt that had prompted the writing of the novel, there was a furious and sarcastic letter in the Argus from a woman who found it a waste of time to write about such matters in our day and age, since slavery, she insisted, had never left any real mark on South Africa. Her attitude was a precise demonstration of what had gone wrong with South African race – and interpersonal – relations following the arguments of slave owners at the Cape in 1830. For too long apartheid historians have covered up the scar of this iniquitous practice by arguing that this country had instituted a peculiarly benign form of slavery, which is belied by the evidence.

  In Cape Town, punishment of slaves ranged from the ‘mild practices’ involving the cutting off of noses, ears or heels to the lingering agony, sometimes protracted for six or eight or twelve days, of being left to die on the wheel after having all the limbs of the body shattered, or of being impaled on a long pole thrust up the anus and protruding through the neck, or drawn and quartered by four horses attached to arms and legs.

  This was the punishment meted out to the young woman Trijntje of Madagascar in 1714, when it came to light that she had been forced into a relationship with the brewer Willem Menssink, a violent man who used to thrash his own wife Elizabeth into submission exclaiming, ‘Don’t you know that it is the Cape custom to live by the Old Testament?’: driven to despair by the advances of the brewer and the cruelty of his wife, Trijntje attempted to poison her mistress, and murdered the child Menssink had fathered on her. For this, she was taken to the place of execution at the south-eastern corner of the castle, strangled to death, and her body tied to a forked post where it was left ‘to be consumed by time and the birds of heaven’. Menssink, of course, being white, and indispensable in supplying beer to the Company, went scot-free.

  This story was researched by the indefatigable Nigel Penn and published in his scintillating study, Rogues, Rebels and Runaways; and I still remember the little smile with which he offered me the book, saying, ‘You might find something in here.’ Which I promptly did, in The Rights of Desire.

  A decade after Trijntje’s death, in March 1725, the leaders of the only significant attempt at a slave revolt at the Cape were hanged and/or tortured at the same place. Among them was the young man Galant, found guilty of having murdered two young van der Merwes, Nicolaas and Barend, with whom he had grown up.

  These are just two of the slave stories from the Cape that still define the texture of the place. There are so many others still to be written! Among them, the moving account of the handsome slave Titus of Bengal, who was found guilty, in 1714, of having had a relationship with his white mistress Maria Mouton and of killing her husband, Frans Joosten, on her instigation. In this case, Maria was first half-strangled, then scorched, and finally garrotted to death; Titus was impaled and left to die, then his head and right hand were cut off and exposed on a post at his master’s farm.

  The memories persist, like the shapes of fish in murky water. Ghosts not yet laid to rest. And it is no surprise to find that Cape Town is indeed a city of ghosts, shades, spectres, revenants. Wherever one goes, there are stories about hauntings, many of them memorably recorded in an essay by the irrepressible Willemien Brümmer, great-granddaughter of one of the most famous ghost-story writers in Afrikaans, C. J. Langenhoven. Today, the castle is a starting point for this kind of exploration. Another favourite haunt is the once lugubrious Slave Lodge at the top of Adderley Street where important functionaries of the VOC and stout burghers were allowed visiting hours at night to assuage their pent-up lust, father children on female slaves, and with Calvinistic righteousness and a sense of patriarchal duty, ‘improve the quality of the slave stock in the colony’. Even early in the nineteenth century Lord Charles Somerset, then governor of the colony, was said to have imported a Scottish jock, with the very same purpose and function. They must hav
e added a shade or two to the local ghost population.

  Ghosts also frequent the Malay Quarter which still keeps its dark and dangerous memories behind colourful facades now turned into dollied-up showpieces for the chic and the trendy; and Robben Island where the hazy figure of a drowned nun sometimes shows herself in the mist; and in the stately home of Kronendal in Hout Bay to which a beautiful woman forsaken by her beloved returns to rearrange the furniture; on the noble old wine estates of Alphen and Constantia; and in Admiralty House in Simonstown, still haunted by a ‘lady in white’, who had hanged herself in the ‘fisherman’s room’ two centuries ago; and of course the museum in Simonstown, where ghosts are almost as much at home as shadows. Among the regular visitors is the benevolent Eleanor in silky black who invariably leaves behind the scent of lavender; but prisoners in the basement there are also the more ominous shades of slaves, and from a turbulent past with which the present has yet to make its peace.

  Through the ghosts one discovers the obvious: that in this place past and present are not opposites, not even terms in juxtaposition. It is, rather, a matter of the past in the present. There are places in Cape Town which exude a sense of timelessness. The museums naturally belong to this dimension. Today there are many more of these than before, the most moving of the additions being those of District Six, the Holocaust and Robben Island. The entire experience of the latter, from the moment the ferry leaves the quay to the moment it returns, belongs not so much to time and space as to a state of mind, in which the present and the most recent past – the sojourn of ANC and PAC leaders like Mandela or Sobukwe – reach back to a more distant history: to the incarceration of great nineteenth-century leaders like Makana, and all the way back to the early days of Dutch settlement – an era evoked with such remarkable understanding in Dan Sleigh’s monumental novel Islands – when Robben Island was a holding space for prisoners, for lepers, for ‘undesirable elements’. Among these was that forlorn, exceptional woman Eva (or Krotoa), the first go-between in negotiations involving the Dutch and the Khoi, also the first indigenous woman officially married to a Hollander and one of the first victims of the chain of misunderstanding that defined race relations at the Cape.