That is how James McQuade was feeling when he walked off the tarmac into Jan Smuts Airport in Johannesburg and heard South African accents again. Ivor Nathan was there to meet him, looking as much like Groucho Marx as ever. They had been at university together. Nathan gave him a bed for the night and tried to cheer him up: South Africa wasn’t as bad as it used to be, Nathan said, Apartheid was unenforced almost everywhere now, except in the rural districts where the Hairybacks still thought the world was flat. ‘But it’s all still on the bloody statute book,’ McQuade said.
‘The Sex Laws have been repealed,’ Nathan said. ‘The Immorality Act and the Mixed Marriages Act. The government is trying to reform but it daren’t repeal them all at once, for fear of a backlash, but give them time, my boy, my life.’
‘Just another decade or two?’
‘Well, we’ve got a Coloured House of Representatives now, and an Indian House of Delegates. I tell you, things are changing.’
‘But no Black House. It’s all too little too late. And what about this right-wing AWB mob, stomping around with their bloody swastikas and armbands?’
‘Lunatic fringe,’ Nathan said.
‘They don’t sound so fringe in the overseas press! It sounds as if the whole country’s turned Nazi.’
‘Lunatic fringe,’ Nathan insisted.
McQuade sighed. ‘Anyway, what about the war on the border – that’s my problem. What about 435? Is South Africa going to grant independence to Namibia? That’s the question. If so, the fishing industry goes down the communist drain and I’m bankrupt.’
‘No way is South Africa going to implement 435 as long as the Cubans are there, and no way is Castro going to withdraw them because he wants to go down in history as the Scourge of the Afrikaner. Independence is a hell of a long way off, so your fishing’s safe for a long time.’
‘Is it, hell. The fleets of the world are out there raping the Benguela current because South Africa daren’t enforce Namibia’s two hundred-mile maritime belt because of goddam 435.’
Nathan sighed. ‘What’s Australia like?’
‘Australia’s great,’ McQuade said, ‘and it’s got no Black Problem.’
‘Because the Aussies shot most of them. At least we were Christians.’
‘We? You’re a closet Goy, Nathan.’
‘Once a South African, always a South African.’ Nathan sighed. ‘You can’t expect too much of us.’
The next day McQuade flew to Cape Town. Even beautiful Table Mountain rising up seemed to be only a monument to Afrikanerdom, and God he was glad he was washing his hands of the lot of them. He was an Australian now. He checked his house. He felt no pangs when he saw the nice old place, and he was glad he was getting rid of it. He visited half a dozen estate agents. Then he bought an old Landrover. That afternoon he set off, driving north, out of the beautiful vineyard country with its grand old Dutch architecture, heading for the Orange River and South West Africa-Namibia beyond, the Land God Made in Anger.
You probably don’t know that bridge over the Orange River. The road curves down out of the dry, stony hills at Vioolsdrift where there is a general dealer’s store, a gas station and a police post. Then suddenly there is the river, the water muddy orange, a belt of green, then the flinty desert rising up beyond: hot, hard, dry as hell. McQuade saw nothing beautiful in that desolate vista, but when he was halfway over that river he felt his depression lift. Man, this was dramatic country, he had forgotten how magnificently dramatic it was. And the Republic of South Africa was officially behind him and there was a feeling of youthfulness on this side of the river, a frontier feeling of wide open spaces, as if the long arm of Pretoria had to pull its punches here because of 435, and everybody knew it. He stopped at Noordoewer, which is a little hotel on the other side. There were a score of Coloureds squatting around, doing nothing. He filled up with diesel and drank a row of cold beers, and the Afrikaans words he had not used for twelve years came flooding back to his tongue without thinking: and, by God, it was a strange but nice feeling. These were people he just naturally knew and understood, and he almost felt like an African again.
He bought a six-pack of beers and set off north again. And there was nothing beautiful in that flat, hard, grey-brown desert stretching on and on, blistering hot, and maybe it was the beer he was drinking as he drove, but he found himself almost happy, and it almost felt as if he was coming home. At Keetmanshoop he turned west, towards Lüderitz on the faraway Atlantic, and now he was driving through thorn-tree country with sparse yellow grass, and he saw wild horses and ostriches. Near Aus he turned north again, through the vast cattle country, ranches thousands of square kilometres in size. That night he slept beside his Landrover, under the stars, near the oasis called Sesriem, where the creeping sand dunes are three hundred feet high and change colour from pink to mauve to apricot to gold in the shifting light. Maybe it was because of all the beer, but it seemed there is no feeling like an African night, no stars so bright, no night sounds so intimate and significant, no smell and light of fire so true to life. And even the next afternoon, when he came grinding down out of the hot hard hills of the Namib desert onto the vast sand-duned plains, and then the distant hostile Atlantic began to show through the shimmering haze, until finally, the flat white smudge of Walvis Bay, one of the drabbest ports in this world, began to coagulate in the distance – even then he still felt better about coming back. As Nathan had said: ‘Once a South African, always a South African – you cannot expect too much of us.’
Nowadays, beyond the cold horizon, the Atlantic is lit up like a fairy land at night with the fishing fleets from around the world raping the icy Benguela current; the Russians, the Japanese, Norwegians, Spanish, Portuguese, the South Africans, all with the most sophisticated gear, and factory ships for refrigeration. The South African boats bring their catch back to Walvis Bay, and the smell of fish hangs like a cloud. Yet it is said that you only cry twice in Walvis Bay: the day you arrive, and the day you leave. McQuade couldn’t understand it: the town was an eyesore, row upon row of squat, drab dwellings with corrugated iron roofs standing in dismal plots of desert sand, stretching back from the odiferous wharfs and the railway line. The shops are aggressively unattractive, and the sand blows down the streets and banks up in the gutters. Forty kilometres up the coast, beyond the enclave’s invisible borders, is the town of Swakopmund, with old Bavarian architecture, elaborate old public buildings and homes and nice hotels with gemütliche bars with flowering, shaded courtyards under the desert sun. Both sun-blistered towns were built at the same time, at the start of this century: the difference being (according to McQuade) that Swakopmund was built by real Germans with culture behind them, whereas Walvis Bay was built by Afrikaners who had been detribalized from Europe for three hundred years. Yet he was always happy when he saw the flat, drab port come up over the horizon and he felt an extraordinary affection for the place. Maybe that was because anybody would be happy coming back after four weeks on the heaving Atlantic, or maybe it was the steamy thighs of the Stormtrooper awaiting him – (‘When will you marry me, you englisches Schwein, you cad, you unspeakable bounder?) (‘Liebchen, I’m still married.’) (Liar …) Or maybe it was the magnificent desert. But it was more: there was a colonial youthfulness about this ancient land, a sense of optimism, a comradeship amongst its people, almost a conspiracy against the heavy hand of faraway Pretoria. He had been back two years and the company was still in debt, but although it was still the plan to
