SO HERE WE ARE at the airport, waiting in limbo between landing and being met by our friend Pippa. She and her husband, Alan, had returned to South Africa two years earlier after studying at Columbia University. Pippa Green was working as a journalist and Alan was teaching at the University of Cape Town. We had become close during their time in New York, Kendra having adopted Pippa, full of affection and fun, as a special aunt.
John surveys the surroundings with a somewhat bemused expression, watching scenes still cast in apartheid play out around him: black service workers swish brooms back and forth in wide swaths, garbage bags are pulled from bins and tied up, bowed heads are focused on the tasks at hand, ignoring the affluent travelers who in turn are oblivious to their presence. Typical flat white South African accents that he had often heard me and my South African friends mimic, fill the hall, obscuring the Afrikaans he does not understand and the sounds of Xhosa with its distinctive clicks that he has only heard when listening to the songs of Miriam Makeba.
While we wait, I replay the returning-home scenario I have envisioned. We will drive from the airport along the highway that goes straight as an arrow toward the heart of Table Mountain. The mountain will grow steadily larger as all the familiar folds and crevices and crannies, the browns and grays and dull greens of rainless summer months, come sharply into focus. Once the road merges with De Waal Drive, which hugs the mountain like a low-slung belt heading toward the city center, its slopes will tower over us and Table Bay, the docks of my childhood, will stretch out below. And as its grandeur overwhelms us both, John will at last understand why the mountain—and this city and my country—continue to exert such a hold over me.
I am aware that returning home is far more complex than this scenario. Leaving had not been a simple matter of boarding a plane for a new life. For me apartheid had been a riptide under a deceptively languid surface. I had to swim with firm strokes to get away from it. By returning at this moment, I would be drawn into the tumultuous upheavals after the fall of a brutal regime and the heady anticipation of a future as yet unknown. Mandela is free but South Africa is yet to be. At this moment, though, I want to reconnect with my personal memories, to fill a gaping hole rough-hewn by the longing I carried with me through all the years I was effectively exiled from my country. I want this drive to move me from my yearning for Cape Town to being in Cape Town—to feel the prickling of my skin as it happens. I want to hold this moment and ride the emotions that will tell me: I am home.
One problem: Only I am familiar with the script I have crafted. As we drive toward the mountain, my travel mates obliviously pursue their own paths. Kendra, sitting on my lap in the backseat of the small jeep, scrunched up against one of our suitcases, wriggles with excitement. Eager to see Pippa’s son—her “godbrother,” now two and a half—and generally strung out with anticipation that this five-year-old is incapable of containing, she provides a counterpoint of exhilaration-fueled chatter.
Pippa and John for their part, lose no time in delving into questions that volley back and forth between them in the front seats. They want to know everything at once but must make do with snippets, pointers for later long-into-the-night conversations.
Pippa has disturbing news. Our mutual friend, Pat, lost her brother the previous weekend to a carjacking in Johannesburg. In his thirties, Michael had owned a successful sporting goods store. He was making a delivery in an affluent suburb when two armed men accosted him and demanded the keys to his car. They drove off, but not before one of them shot him in his stomach, leaving him for dead at the side of the road. “A couple who saw it happen stopped to help,” Pippa relates, her voice straining. “Michael died cradled in the young woman’s arms.” This style of crime has become common; we had already heard many similar stories. But this one is of Pat’s brother, not some random incident reported in the news, and it hits us personally.
John’s shoulders tighten. He is the most streetwise person I know—in New York City, that is—where survival smarts have often guided him out of potentially dangerous situations. Here he has no point of reference. In a voice as tense as his shoulders, he asks: “What about Cape Town? Is it as violent as Johannesburg?”
No, I confidently answer in my head. The Cape Town remembered from my (white) childhood was as safe as houses. My teenage friends and I listened as Joburg boys, down for their summer holidays, regaled us with bravado-laced stories about life in the most populated, biggest, baddest South African city with its security guards and burglar alarms. Deeply tanned, they sported a particular swagger, spending their money more freely than their Cape Town counterparts, driving flashy cars, and dating gorgeous “bikini girls” for which Cape Town was renowned. My friends and I felt not a little smug that the need for such security was unnecessary in Cape Town.
When I was a child and young adult the city center and suburbs were a haven for the whites who lived there. No high fences. No locked gates. No burglar alarms. From the age of eight I fearlessly explored my neighborhood on my bike. I was about twelve when I rode with my friends the ten miles to the Muizenberg beach. It meant pedaling along Prince George Drive, past segregated townships and through the windswept sandy flats that could scarcely support a few spindly trees. As a university student I drove my car wherever I chose, paying little heed to my father, who insisted that I never drive alone at night. One time, as I was heading home along a desolate road, the car began to veer off course. Damn, a flat tire. I got out and opened the trunk to remove the jack and spare. Out of the dark, a man approached. Oh Shit! My father’s rape fears that I had derided snuck into my head. In South Africa those fears always cast the rapist as African or coloured, the race of the man approaching me. I froze. He came toward me, smiled a gap-toothed smile, and quietly, without fuss, took the jack from my hands and proceeded to change my tire, placing the flat in the trunk. With no more than a brief Dankie, meisie—Thank you, little madam—when he accepted my tip, he walked on and disappeared back into the dark.
I OPEN MY MOUTH TO assure John that Cape Town is perfectly safe. But Pippa gets in first: “Cape Town is fast becoming one of the most violent cities in South Africa.” She proceeds to emphasize her point. A doctor friend of hers, working in the emergency room at Groote Schuur, Cape Town’s large teaching hospital where Christiaan Barnard pioneered the first heart transplant, says he is treating more and more victims of violent crimes each week. He is particularly unnerved by the way people are being shot gratuitously when they’ve already handed over their goods; intruders in masks rob houses and then shoot the homeowners, still tied up, as they depart with the loot.
This accelerating criminal violence is surpassed only by the political violence between supporters of the African National Congress, the party of Nelson Mandela, and the Zulu Inkatha Freedom Party, which has collaborated with apartheid security forces to destroy the ANC. Just this past weekend, Pippa informs us, Inkatha attacked ANC mourners at a funeral, killing twenty-three people.
Reality seeps in as I take in Pippa’s tales of South Africa’s violence told in the matter-of-fact tones of someone acclimatized to them. The stories swirling around inside the jeep derail my fanciful scenario. I stare out of the window at the row upon row of pondoks stretching back from the road: shacks constructed from metal scraps and wood and plastic sheeting that dire poverty has sprung onto the unforgiving landscape. We pass the long-established African townships of Langa and Nyanga crowded on the sandy, inhospitable Cape Flats, with their small, identical brick houses, cheek by jowl. Under apartheid, they housed a cheap labor pool, where only those who had permission to work in the area stamped into their passbooks were allowed to live. Harsh edges of dissonance between my memories and reality scrape up against the inside of my skin so that it crawls in discomfort. I look again at the mountain and see it from the perspective of those who grew up in these townships. Far, elusive. A symbol of a place where whites live shrouded in privilege. I wonder how much this inequality and discrimination will persist. Apartheid may be over, but its legacy continues as a new South Africa tries to pry itself loose from its stranglehold.
South Africa. My South Africa! How could I have imagined for one instant that I could return to its beauty
