Cape Town
February 9-15, 1994
I anticipated our landing in Cape Town for some time. This in part was a function of its isolation and unique history, as well as some visuals: Jack Putnam, a doctor who had done Semester At Sea years before had shown slides to us and the pictures of the approach to Cape Town, with Table Mountain in the background on a sunny morning were very stimulating. I yearned to take the same pictures.
Pre port tips made the conclusion to our crossing real. The energy of American students arriving to the land of Apartheid was palpable—especially given our timing, months before the first open elections with the expectation that the ANC (African National Congress) headed by Nelson Mandela was going to win. I secretly dreaded what I might see; novels about South Africa painted a pretty tough picture. Wars of liberation? Same. There was to be a diaspora of our students as there were many activities to be had that involved travel out of Cape Town. As the pre port tips wound down, the girls and the kitchen crew presented us all with singing: Tie a Yellow Ribbon, Spanish Eyes, and Hello Dolly had us preparing for the next day as optimists. They were very very cute.
My morning view of Table Mountain was not to be; we entered the port with low clouds obscuring everything beyond a couple hundred yards. I would have to settle on a postcard and a watercolor of the view. We docked in an industrial area. We toured on our own with Keshore (Indian professor) and his daughter Lina. Downtown Cape Town in 1994 was clean and modern. My prejudices about South Africa were constantly tested. The people were dressed well. There were no beggars. The races mixed without obvious rancor or cringe worthy scenes. Finding a place for Keshore to sample Indian food was the big challenge of the mid-day.
We separated and went to the, “waterfront,” a commercial center on the water where wealthy people congregated and regarded their yachts. This was first world, and from our seats, we could regard the good life, waterfront right up to the picturesque Table Mountain. We might as well have been on Rodeo Drive or La Jolla on a good day. The Johnsons had a tour of a township. They were somber on returning. It was stark and dramatic. As I considered the population of Cape Town and looked at what we could see from our day’s travel, there was no way the size of the city and that population could be reconciled. An aerial view of the city clarified the point as Rick showed me where they had gone. There was a vast slum of townships on the other side of Table Mountain.
This contrast and my prejudices starting out found me with dark conclusions. History proved me wrong—mostly. Another annoyance arose in that many of the wealthier students developed a pattern I recognized: they would camp at a nice hotel for time in port and enjoy the surrounding good life. They experienced the third world through the lens of what they knew best. Those not interested in partying on this basis filled the day trips and out of city educational experiences.
A remarkable passage given the times: Desmond Tutu came aboard the ship and spent time with students. Once more, busloads of students made it to a political rally at a full stadium that seated 100,000 people for an ANC rally and were shepherded to the front of the sitting area beneath the stage where they saw Nelson Mandala speak; he addressed them specifically. It was a religious experience for many of the students even as they feared for their lives—- the crowd rushed the stage at one point. And of course, a contingent of the students went to the Waterfront for a nice meal after the event.
I stretched and was a bit out of my element when I “proctored” a group of students to Kagga Kama--a desert wilderness destination on a reservation with wildlife and a place set aside for traditional nomads from this area, the San people. This location was north and west of Cape Town. I had witnessed the shepherding process in two countries and now it was my turn. We had a meeting place and a departure time on the docks. The busses were ready. I was missing a few students. How long do you wait? The missing students had paid a non-refundable $350 for this two night excursion. As a doctor in my office, I always waiting and then saw the late patient. I vacillated but got us going ten or so minutes later with a few MIA’s. I felt good about drawing the line given the experiences with so many young people thinking differently about schedules and processes and to say the least, how they might affect other people. One of the absentees took a taxi to the airport from which we would fly north. This showed initiative —and financial backing—given that we were not going to a normal airport as I expected, but rather, having skirted the townships and then driven through the country, found ourselves on a grassy pasture with a few quonset huts and a small fleet of private propeller driven planes waiting some sixty miles from where we started. I was now a little freaked out. Kernie had made me promise to never fly in such planes when I was a resident because of the occasional, “doctor dies with premie in flight to hospital” stories. I had never been on a small plane before. We four girded our loins and got into the two engine choice (hedge your bets!). I was in the front passenger seat as the pilot, a very serious Germanic looking and sounding man methodically walked around the plane and tested the rudder and then the flaps. The cockpit had dual controls and my knee rested below the steering wheel which was rectangular in shape. When he moved the flaps, the wheel, on rotating, hit my knee and prevented the flap from moving. The pilot alerted and looked worried until I tapped the window and showed him he should try again.
We took off and crossed no less than three mountain ranges before landing on a long dirt runway. We exited the plane and found a palapa with a hand painted sign “Kagga Kama International Airport.” We were offered champagne. There was a crew to greet us and drive us to the compound where we would stay; their outfits and accents reminded me of a TV show, The Rat Patrol about the war in North Africa. These guys were Afrikka Corps…….complete with “German” ie Afrikaan accents. They identified themselves as, “trackers.” The vehicles we were to drive in were very large military vehicles designed for off road driving. We arrived at the compound and got oriented. Two women there similarly dressed as the trackers; they were middle aged and found me reminiscing about pictures of guards at Buchenwald’s female section, but a third was cute, pretty, and most importantly, full of personality. They had heavy accents as well and through them we learned that our children had been assigned a bungalow a mile away from ours. As we wrestled with that, old fashioned polka music played over a radio. My prejudice was accelerating at an exponential rate when Michael, lead tracker brought me a beer. I traded it out for a soft drink and we talked. The cute bubbly woman was his girlfriend. He was an anthropology student and would educate us on the San people whose reservation we were now camped out on. His girlfriend was a teacher who had had to bow out of teaching in Black Townships as it had become dangerous. She was the compound’s cook and was establishing a school for San children. I loosened up a little.
The next day found us awake with freezing outside temperatures as we toured the canyon lands and desert scrub. We did not see, “large game” in the traditional sense but did see a wide variety of ungulates and birds. For me, this was a bit underwhelming. A pleasant surprise was found when on the of trackers found a small skull and on teasing it out of the ground, identified it as a relative of the modern elephant. I mentioned my skull collection, and he smiled, handing it over. It is in the library to this day.
Mid day, we met the San. The anthropologist Michael reviewed with us a similar story but an unusual solution. Like indigenous people throughout the world, problems with substance abuse, physical abuse, and dislocation from the new foundational society, led to isolation and an underclass in the modern world. This reservation allowed that if the San wanted a community who would live as they had before Europeans arrived, they would be protected from outside influences. They could hunt on the reservation but had to use their traditional tools and weapons. Medical care was offered and made available when needed. There was a store where their handicrafts could be sold and money credited to them in a manner that allowed purchase to staples (coffee, tobacco, milk, flour, etc) and the rest went into a Trust for a rainy-day, usually medical needs. I was ambivalent about this solution despite the characterization that most South Africans had about them: lazy, usually drunk, pregnant at at early age, uneducated, a drain on the treasury, etc.
There was no schedule for the meeting place. They knew when tourists would be in the compound and they decided when and if they might come. Our luck held. They did show up, initially women with children. These were a people of small stature, thin, even gaunt. They wore traditional garb and were smiling— affable. We watched a number of the women use a hand drill with which they shaped pieces of ostrich egg for their crafts. One of the professors was Dutch and she spoke to some of the women who hesitantly spoke in return. Not much meaningful communication there. We were forty tourists amongst perhaps fifteen San. Kernie, Amber, and Darby honed in on the kids and pulled out McDonald stickers which quickly were applied to their small pot bellies. Fake plastic watches were soon attached to little arms. Someone else brought out balloons and soon there is a volleyball match of sorts with five balloons all going at once in a hut of thatch that had marginal lighting and dirt floors. Some of the professors and students were a bit put off by this exchange. We had desecrated the culture of people living in nature. But did they have fun!
There was a short time at a pool as it was now quite hot. As the sun was settling, we were back on the military vehicles and looking at pigmented handprints thought to be 6,000 years old. People back then were short as they were displayed pretty much at Darby’s eye-level. Darby was fascinated to the point of placing her hand print over the pigmented on. I was freaked out at this “desecration” and the tracker guide almost choked. Amber’s biology teacher had cited “laboratory” as a reason for not working with her. We were in a different kind of laboratory now and we were working it!
Dinner was crowded with a lamb stew that was not very good but the home baked bread more than made up for it. The serious drinking began and we retired about 11:00 to our little bungalow that was a quarter mile away. We brought the kids with us as they otherwise were going to be housed with the beer drinking coeds. The stucco’d building was slightly more than a studio apartment, with large timbers supporting a thatched roof. There was a strong chemical smell—perhaps of creosote. The kids went to sleep, I fidgeted and finally, having been warned about not going outside at night for fear of the lions, I took the dare. I walked out the door, naked at 1:00 and felt a cooling breeze and stared up into a sky with no moon, but the Milky Way as I have never seen it before—or since. Not a sound in the desert. I dared one measured slow walk around the compound and then returned into the hut. I got to sleep by 2:00 AM.
Our flight home was quite turbulent. We were tossed up and down forcefully as we crossed one mountain range and the peaks seemed to be only a couple hundred feet below us. Once over that, there was a lake with whitecaps visible from our height. Any fear I had about small planes was realized as we approached the grass landing strip. I could see it ahead, slowly coming up. The problem was as we flew straight at it, the plane was pointed in a forty degree angle off center—visually, it looked like we were flying almost sidewise. I thought to myself, “just how do you land, when the plane approached the ground sidewise?” The answer made sense as we came to within a few hundred feet—-he accelerated and with this got the plane oriented and aligned until we were almost on the ground and then he cut the speed quickly. The landing went just fine. Arriving at the port in Capetown, whitecaps within the harbor reinforced what a wind storm we were in.
Rick and Jane had driven in a car to the Cape of Good Hope and suggested that we would really enjoy that. We hired a car with a driver and got an up-close-and-personal look at a coastline that clearly was worth fighting for. What a beautiful stretch of coast it was! Coming out of hills and approaching a road that curved along a bay lined with beautiful homes, we saw a school of dolphins jumping on cue. The beaches were virtually empty but for wildlife. The Cape itself was a bit anti-climactic but we could check that box, for now regretting that we did not see the famous baboons. The road home found us at Bolder Beach where I learned that Penguins make their home for part of the year.
Arriving back to port, Rick and I went to a movie at the Waterfront where we saw a Viet Nam War epic, Heaven and Earth. Here I was, on a third world tour, and this theatre was the first I had ever entered where one picked out one’s seat for the show at the time of purchase. The theatre was half-full but only one in five watching were Caucasians. I was dumbfounded at the newsreel before the movie which featured a five minute advertisement for the State of Georgia and the opportunities it afforded—-narrated by a white couple flying about the state in a helicopter. Dreamy sensuous images of comfortable well-dressed white people drinking wine and listening to music on a slow moving paddle wheeler. Wait: a paddle wheeler in Georgia? Which river would that be? I was embarrassed. The piece de resistance? The advertisement for Georgia was sponsored by Chesterfield cigarettes! I had not seen an advertisement for cigarettes in decades. So South Africa, as modern as Cape Town seemed, was a bit behind the times after all…..
Knowing the elections were coming, I had a farewell image at the Waterfront. Two blond women, well-dressed, sipped champagne as they chatted themselves up while spoon feeding their children ice cream. Just a few tables away, two weary appearing black men in business suits, looking about, not sipping beer as I might have expected at the end of the day—-and not saying a word to anyone.
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