Fire on the Mountain

Parts of Cape Town were on edge yesterday evening after a minor fire near the top of Table Mountain - started by a British tourist who reportedly tossed a cigarette out his open car window - turned into a very big deal. One hiker died on the mountain, apparently of smoke inhalation, and the flames were creeping in two directions yesterday: down the slope toward a posh residential neighborhood that overlooks the city center, and over the top of a pass that leads to a beachside suburb called Camps Bay.

Table Mountain usually looks like this when viewed from the city, though I am not always in the foreground:



But this is what it looked like yesterday:







There still might be hikers who are missing, but the firefighters managed to keep teh fire from reaching any houses and the fire is under control now.

This all happened several miles from where we live, and around a bend in the mountain, so we couldn't see the flames out our front window. But we could see the smoke, and as the sun was setting behind the mountain yesterday, it was burning through the smoke with an amazing bright red intensity. Every once in awhile, a helicopter trailing a big water-carrying device went flying past the window. In fact, teh helicopters are still out today, putting out the last of it.

Further news reports from IOL here and News24 here. News 24 was the source of those pictures.

You are WRONG!

We've got another offering today in the Is-It-Wrong-to-Laugh-at-Idiots-When-Their-Idiocy-Did-So-Much-Harm? category. And it's a doozy. It certainly tops last week's media criticism from the apartheid government.

But first, to understand why what we're about to share is so cringe-worthy, we need to do a quick review of some South African history. A quick profile, if you will, of one of the good guys: a brilliant Anglican priest by the name of Father Trevor Huddleston.

Father Huddleston was born and raised in England, but sent to South Africa as a missionary, and ended up running a school in Sophiatown, the black community that was once located near downtown Johannesburg. In his 13 years in South Africa, he became more and more outspoken about the way the government treated black people, and he aligned himself with the African National Congress long before it was fashionable to do so.

His activism eventually attracted the attention of the National Party, the group that ushered in formal apartheid. And partly because of his protests over the forced removal of thousands of people from Sophiatown (which was eventually torn down by the less-than-brilliant urban planners of the National Party, who decreed that it was to become a "Europeans only" area) Father Huddleston was banned by the government and called back home by the spineless church leaders in England.

But when he got home, he wrote a book called "Naught for Your Comfort" that blew the whistle to the international community about what was really happening in South Africa and attacked apartheid as being a moral evil. It argued -- long before such sentiments were commonly held in South Africa, England, or, for that matter, the United States -- that any person with a conscience could not favor the policies being advanced by the government of South Africa.

"Any doctrine based on racial or colour prejudice and enforced by the State is therefore an affront to human dignity and ipso facto an insult to God himself," he wrote in his book. "There is no room for compromise or fence sitting over a question such as racial ideology when it so dominates the thought of a whole country."

And he attacked his own church, and its adherents: "It is not that white Christians are bad," he wrote, "It is simply that they fail to see the relevance of their faith to social problems."

When Huddleston died in 1998, two Nobel Peace Prize winners weighed in on his legacy. Archbishop Desmond Tutu said: "If I had to choose one person who got the anti-apartheid movement onto the world stage, that person would be Archbishop Huddleston without a doubt. The world was a better place for having had Trevor Huddleston." And Nelson Mandela said: "At a time when identifying with the cause of equality for all South Africans was seen as the height of betrayal by the privileged embraced the downtrodden. He forsook all that apartheid South Africa offered the privileged community. And he did so at great risk."

So it is in this context that I present to you the cover of a book that Katie found in our local used book store, which was written shortly after the publication of Huddleston's "Naught for Your Comfort."



Wow. Talk about being on the wrong side of history.

And are you ready to cringe some more? (First, a reminder that the word "Bantu" was used to describe black people in South Africa back when the book was published in 1956, and is considered wildly insulting now.) This is from the inside jacket copy:

DESPITE the world-wide publicity given to Father Huddleston's campaign against the South African Government's native policy, the public in this country has had little opportunity so far of hearing the case of those who truly believe that in apartheid lies the most hopeful solution of South Africa's problems.

In a quiet, unemotional carefully reasoned book, Mr. Seward -- who from childhood has lived in close and (it is apparent from his writing) affectionate relation with native people -- makes clear the purpose of the present policy as a design for the long-term benefit of white and black alike.

He shows that direct competition with the more advanced European imposes severe limits on the self-realization of the Bantu...

Inside, in case you weren't sure what apartheid was about, Mr. Seward is kind enough to draw us a picture.



Viewing that picture, the incredulous chuckle sort of dies in your throat a little bit, along with any feelings of moral superiority. Of course when this book was published in 1956, segregation was alive and well in the United States.

A Wikipedia profile of Father Huddleston is here, and an entry about him in a South African history website is here. His obituary in the New York Times, from which some of this information is drawn, can be read on the ANC website here.

How to Write About Africa

I winced a little when a copy editor headlined one of my travel stories about Cape Town with the words "Urban Safari." It seems a rather too obvious choice. But now, thanks to a fantastic journal called Granta, I am happy to report that using the words "Africa," "Darkness" or "Safari" in the title happens to be the first rule of writing about Africa. Literally.

Among the other rules:

* Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize.

* In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates.

* You'll also need a nightclub called Tropicana, where mercenaries, evil nouveau riche Africans and prostitutes and guerrillas and expats hang out.

* Always end your book with Nelson Mandela saying something about rainbows or renaissances. Because you care.

There might be a touch of sarcasm in this piece. Maybe. Judge for yourself here.

Crying in the Rain

Our friend Nicole went off on a "walking safari" through Kruger park and the surrounding area the week after she visited us earlier this month.

She may have had a bit of bad luck in trying to hit the tourist attractions in and around Cape Town, what with everything being either closed or sold out, and she may have encountered some difficulty in trying to cut butternut squash in our kitchen, but her real nightmare was just beginning.

Poor Nicole. She's a Brooklyn girl at heart. She was not made for the bush. Especially when it's raining in the bush.

Here's what she wrote to us yesterday:

To put things simply, I was so miserable during the safari trip that I would have given up several key teeth to be back on the beach with you guys, a bottle of Riesling and a squishycooler full of tuna-and-pickle sandwiches and olive chips. I would have offered the contents of my backpack, hypoallergenic tampons and all, to be able to curl up on your futon for a relaxing night's sleep. I would have run six miles on full-bore cankles for an ice-cream-coated fudge brick at the Spur.

When we left Johannesburg for the five-hour drive to the game park, it was pouring rain. When we got to the game park, it was pouring rain. The entire first day, it was alternately cloudy and pouring rain. And freezing cold. And windy. The next morning, when we woke up, it was overcast and windy and freezing cold and fucking pouring rain. It rained while we drove around in the land rover. It rained while we ate breakfast. It rained while we went to the bathroom. (It rained in the bathroom.) It rained while those of us who were able to brave the cold for a shower (not me) took a shower. And it rained while we walked, which was not often, due to the rain.

I had no rain gear.

I literally spent the first two days walking around Kruger wearing a black plastic garbage bag into which I had cut a head hole. Rain came through the head hole. When I was not wearing the bag, I had to hang it up to dry. But I was mostly wearing the bag. I ate brunches while wearing the bag. I searched around the open camp kitchen for apples while wearing the bag. I peed while wearing the bag. Doing this kept my solitary fleece relatively dry -- if it had instantly become a green sponge, I would have been screwed -- but my sneakers got soaked on the first day and never dried out. Eventually, there was so much water in the bottom of each one that stepping down on them sent a small flood out through the mesh air vents on the sides. This may sound like a process that would gradually improve their condition, but no. They refilled quickly enough that there was always more water to squeeze out.

There was nowhere to go where the water wasn't. And it drove me to the brink.

This general condition went on from Monday afternoon, all the way through Tuesday and into Wednesday. I'm not an outdoorsy camping-type person to begin with, and the relentless wet took its toll pretty fast. Tuesday found me sobbing alone in my damp bed in my leaking tent into towels that were too humidity-saturated to effectively absorb tears. (They kind of moved the tears around, and that was about it.) I began contemplating means of escape. Things looked slightly more promising on wednesday morning, when the skies lightened up enough that our group could actually begin a drizzly walk with some measure of confidence that we'd stay dry. But when we'd already ventured three hours away from camp in search of lions that never materialized, it started downpouring like a bastard. The roads turned to mud, my sneakers became lace-up ponds, and a continuous river of water invaded my bag's head hole. Our guide acted like nothing was wrong and was still stopping to look for snakes as we became more and more drenched. I reached my breaking point just then andwas in full-scale freakout by the time we finally trudged our soggy way back to camp. I had been wet and cold and unprepared and miserable for 48 straight hours, and I was not having any fun at all. Grayish skin was peeling off my feet from being in the waterlogged sneakers sixteen hours a day. I hadn't been able to shower for two days because of the cold. Everything I owned was wet. I slept in a wet cot that smelled like it came from a hostel without a washing machine. My primary piece of clothing was a trash bag. I was unable to stop myself from hysterically crying. I ended up telling the guide and our tracker that I couldn't take it anymore, that this particular city kid had way overestimated her ability to tolerate the great outdoors and needed to be returned to Brooklyn immediately. That was clearly not possible, but they radioed for one of the office managers to help. She sped out in a silver Isuzu Trooper with actual windows that rolled up and a dry interior. I think they could tell that I was on the verge of being homicidal.

Four hours later, I had abandoned the Kruger entirely and had taken up residence in a bed-and-breakfast in Hoedspruit. I showered. I got myself dry with a dry towel. I laid down on a bed that didn't feel moist. I thought I was going to die of happiness.

It was a once-you-leave-you-can't-come-back situation, so I missed the entire second half of the trip that I'd paid for, but I really didn't care. It rained the entire rest of Wednesday and into Thursday morning, and I know that not getting out of the safari camp when I did would have cost me my sanity. It finally cleared up and became sunny and warm after lunchtime on Thursday, so the seven others who stuck it out had good weather for the final 24 hours of the week, but I'm glad I wasn't around to see it. I spent my nice warm thursday afternoon strolling around boring old Hoedspruit, taking out-of-the-sun breaks to stalk candy bars at the Spar, and reading the bed-and-breakfast manager's copies of South African "Shape" magazine in a patio chair next to their little swimming pool. I didn't care that there were no elephants, because my sneakers had dried. That was pretty much the best thing that could've happened to me at that point.

Fortunately, I did see some cool animals during the half of the safari that I was present for. We spotted impalas, kudus, elephants with one tusk, elephants with two tusks, male elephants in heat (gross), giraffes, hippos, zebras and dung beetles. Oh, and dungloads of dung. We went tearing off at like 80 km/h (in the rain) in our Land Rover in search of some reported cheetahs, which we never saw, but in the process discovered the amazing capacities of the Land Rover. (I have a whole new respect for the brand.) We listened to billions of frogs and toads making wacky noises at night. We saw how nature made fuzzy biltong out of the side of a slain giraffe. It was just that three days of it was all I could take when it had to happen in sopping conditions.

That's pretty much my second week, in a nutshell. I repeat, I had a fabulous time visiting you guys. FABULOUS. That will be the part of my South African adventure that I try to focus on. I am going to try to pretend that Week Two never existed. All of this makes it seem kind of hilarious that at the time, we considered it a major bummer that we couldn't get into Madame Zingara. Hah.

It was our own karma that backfired on Nicole. The good luck that all the rest of our friends and family enjoyed during their visits here came back to haunt our last visitor. Sorry, Nicole.

Anachronistic Calvanistic Afrikaners

Katie's research on the history of South Africa's Drum magazine has turned up some fascinating stuff. First there was Dear Dolly (also discussed here), and now she's stumbled over an amusing passage in a 1964 report on the media written by agents of the apartheid government.

In the name of searching for bias and "irresponsibility" in the media, this report examined each of the newspapers and magazines published within South Africa, and much of the work done by foreign correspondents for publication overseas.

At the time, the apartheid government, run by the National Party, was trying to justify its policies by saying that it wanted simply to provide space for black and white cultures to develop at their own pace. And it labeled much of its political opposition as communist in an attempt to earn the favor of western Europe and the United States.

Both arguments were simply not true. And apparently, the New York Times reporter based in South Africa at the time was smart enough to see through their crap. This is from page 1,293 of volume two of the Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Press:

97.74 percent of the total wordage of the cabled political and racial news dispatched to the New York Times was dispatched during this period, and of this percentage, the bad reporting accounted for 5.4 percent and the very bad for 91.59 percent. During this later period, the reporting, as a whole, can only be described as sensational and dishonest. The irresponsible and extravagant utterances of all and sundry are used to depict the South African scene. Trivial occurrences are given an importance which they do not enjoy. Isolated social disturbances and acts of violence are represented as being examples and proof of a general course of conduct. The Government point of view and the National Party point of view are virtually omitted. The United Party point of view is also virtually omitted, save for the reporting of some of its more extravagant criticisms of the Government and the National Party. The picture formed from reading these cables is that of a land in a state of perpetual crisis, a land on the brink of civil violence and ruled by an intolerant Government composed of anachronistic Calvanistic Afrikaners who use their out-moded religious beliefs to justify a racialistic authoritarian regime which is used to oppress all elements opposed to it and particularly the non-whites. The cables also create the impression that the so-called oppression of the non-whites is generally approved of by the white people. The whites are represented as having fear of, and having no human feelings for, the non-whites who have no rights of liberty in South Africa.

And, in order to make the views expressed by communists acceptable to the U.S. reader, the correspondents suppress the views of communists or represent the communists as having been falsely labeled as such by the Government for the purposes of discrediting them politically and/or employing the provisions of the Suppression of Communism Act against them.

Isn't that brilliant? Some apartheid government functionary managed to write the most accurate and concise summary of how history now judges the apartheid government, and he managed to do it as that government was only just beginning its cruelest era. I mean, "...anachronistic Calvanistic Afrikaners who use their out-moded religious beliefs to justify a racialistic authoritarian regime..." just about covers everything.

And it makes you think: Which contemporary American media critics who shout about bias will be revealed by history to be anachronistic Calvanistic Republikaners?

Genie Stole My Cash

Have you been missing the Daily Voice?

Here are a couple front pages from recent issues...

Feasting Is Fun -- For Everyone

You can blame me for the fact that, until yesterday, Katie and I had never been to an institution of South African family dining known as Spur. It is, in every way, just like any of the chain restaurants you would find at any mall in the U.S.: TGI Friday's, Sizzler, Ruby Tuesday's, and the like. Being a massive food snob, I was quite prepared to never, ever walk through the doors of their South African equivalent.

All I knew about this place was what I had seen in their advertisements. We don't have T.V., but the ads air with the previews at our local movie theater. And these ads had not led me to form a very good impression. Their restaurant, you see, has a sort of pseudo-American Indian theme. The ad shows kids in a summer camp environment, doing summer camp things like paddling on a river and running in the outdoors while a wildly cliched country music song plays in the background. Then, if I remember correctly, the music swells and the chorus of "Take Me There" hits just as the kids meet a big, smiling Indian chief, and they dance together around a campfire in a long scene that plays on all sorts of insulting stereotypes and exaggerations about the first inhabitants of my home country.

Then the ad cuts to a scene of a smiling multi-racial gathering of families around a table at Spur, being served by a smiling multi-racial staff. The Indian Chief has disappeared, back to wardrobe to rub off the face paint in disgust, I imagine.

If the ad aired in the U.S., and if this was an American chain, Spur would have protestors banging down the doors at every one of their restaurants in about 24 hours. And rightly so. But frankly, when I see it here, I can only laugh. In the name of coming up with a unique theme that the kids'll go for, they've stumbled over something that is so un-P.C. that it isn't even worth wincing at.



They know not what they do.

Nonetheless, I could tell from the ads that this is not my sort of dining experience, and that impression had more to do with the smiling families eating greasy food than the smiling Indian with greasy face paint.

I prefer, instead, to sip wine at such tasteful, understated places as Constantia Uitsig, a fantastic winery about 15 minutes from our apartment. We returned there for the second time yesterday morning, while visiting several other wine farms in the neighborhood, so our visiting friend, Nicole, could buy a bottle of a white wine we had tasted earlier in the week.

And I prefer such places as Greens, a swank place downtown where we dined on ravioli and an avocado and blue cheese pizza last night.

See what I mean? I AM a snob. And I have no children who would misbehave at wineries or swank restaurants. So between said wineries and said swank restaurant, yesterday had been a fantastic day on the culinary front. Then Nicole--a person with a thirst for unique food experiences that is as strong as mine, if with slightly more catholic tastes--suggested that we top the entire experience off with a stop at Spur for dessert.

I was a little skeptical. But it was around the corner from Greens, and she was our guest, and it was her last night in town. So we went.

It was wonderful.

I mean, it was really, REALLY bad, in every way. And that was wonderful.

The decor was as tacky as the advertisements would lead you to believe. The menu could have come from Chili's. And the placemats had a series of little fables about an American Indian chief who wanted to host a feast where everyone would be happy. I copied down the entire text of my favorite placemat. It said:

Feasting is Fun -- For Everyone

Children who accompanied their elders to the feast had nowhere to play while they waited for the older people to finish feasting.

The Chief made a better plan. When the children next came to the feast, an awesome playground awaited them, where they could explore, play and have fun while the mothers and fathers, aunties and uncles of the tribe talked and laughed into the night.

The playground could also be used as the gathering place for children's birthday celebrations.

The Chief decided then that it would be fun for the children to belong to their very own Secret Tribe, which entitled members to super treats like prizes, gifts and their own website. And to top it all, each member would receive a free feast on his or her birthday.

Soon there was a fun-filled playground at every feasting place, and the Secret Tribe grew and grew.

The people of the land were happy, which in turn made the Chief and his people happy and proud.

I hope you caught the part about the birthday parties. I can imagine parents reading the story aloud to their squirming kids and stopping short three-quarters of the way through that sentence. The kids would say, "You mean I can have my BIRTHDAY here?" The parents would look at each other and quietly mutter: "Shit."

Anyway, just after we settled into our raised booth with faux-cowhide seats, it became clear that Spur had also mastered the most important element of an American family restaurant. The wait staff operated in a way that was so absolutely the opposite of everything Katie and I have experienced in the past nine months that I couldn't help getting a warm glow inside at the eerie familiarity of it.

To wit: Our waiter told us his name. He was wearing a name tag. He walked the floor quickly and brought us what we asked immediately. And he refused to stop smiling. His grin did not waver in the slightest when we ordered two desserts and three glasses of water between us.

The dinner offerings, which we studied but did not sample, looked as mundane as you would expect at any American chain restaurant, and the desserts were as sugary, as processed, as standardized and as indulgent as you could ever hope for. It was incredibly comfortable comfort food, even for this New York food snob. I have been a looooong way from the nearest Cheesecake Factory for quite a while.

Your self-confessed snob-of-a-correspondent got another comeuppance when we ran in to the incredibly knowledgeable and helpful young woman who guided us through our wine tastings at Constantia Uitsig. She was working at her second job... as the hostess at Spur.



Her name was Kate. She's on the left. Please also note the sweat-lodge decorations and the faux-leather placemats.

Witness how un-P.C. Spur can be here. Join the Secret Tribe here. And see a selection of Nicole's pictures from the rest of her Cape Town trip here.

Things Fall Apart

Our friend Nicole, who is visiting us from Brooklyn, swears she is having a good time here.

But the universe appears to be aligned against her this week. None of her plans are working out.

In chronological order, the list of inconveniences, annoyances, and debits from her karma card were:

1. At the airport, before we even picked her up, she realized she had been robbed of her malaria meds, bug repellent, sunscreen and her extra special hypo-allergenic tampons.

2. She got to our apartment and realized that her ankles had swollen so much that they had disappeared. It looked like her calves connected straight to her feet. Nicole calls this phenomenon "cankles."

3. The winery that she most wanted to visit, Buitenverwachting, was closed for New Years. Even when we went to visit on Jan. 2

4. Tickets to see Nelson Mandela's prison cell on Robben Island were sold out the day she got to the ticket booth extra early, at 7:20 am, to make sure she got a ticket that day. It was also sold out for the next day and the next day. She got tickets for tomorrow.

5. Her alternative plan to visit a mill that still grinds flour on the premises fell through when it turned out the mill was closed from Christmas until Jan. 9.

6. When trying to climb Table Mountain, the wind forced her exit route off the mountain, the cable car, to shut down. And then the people coming down the mountain warned her that it was raining and wet at the top. And there were rumors that someone had been mugged on the mountain earlier. She gave up before she got to the top.

7. A random man on the street kicked her for no reason.

8. She bought an asparagus quiche. It was moldy.

9. On Thursday, we tried to take her to a place on the Atlantic to watch the sunset. The restaurant was so full that we couldn't get a table.

10. On the way to get dinner elsewhere, we stopped off to make a dinner reservation for tomorrow. It was booked up until Tuesday.

11. When we got to the Indian takeout place where we were ordering dinner for the night, they were out of her first three food choices.

12. And finally, just now, she got the serrated knife stuck in a butternut squash.

Tweede Nuew Jaar

January second means more to many Capetonians than the first of the year does, primarily because it is a day that has long been set aside for a series of festivals and parades that take over downtown Cape Town. It's called Tweede Nuew Jaar, or Second New Year. Katie and I went with our friend Nicole, who was in town, to soak up some of the color.

The festivities of the day are the pride of the working-class people who were relocated under apartheid to live just outside Cape Town proper, to an area known as the Cape Flats. On one day a year, the whole city stops and turns its attention to their festival, which centers around a parade. Each Cape Flats neighborhood puts together a troupe of musicians and singers, and spends months practicing their routines and sewing their costumes. Each troupe follows the next as they march through the streets, and there is a competition for the best songs, the best costumes, and the best marionette.

One version of the festival’s origins traces it back to minstrels who arrived on an American ship in the mid-nineteenth century, and were a big hit around town while the ship was in port.

To understand the significance of the festival, I should mention on this site yet again the odd South African racial categories that is a holdover of the apartheid days. There are black and white people in South Africa, of course, but in Cape Town, the majority of people fall into a racial category known as “coloured.” Though they were lumped together by the apartheid government, they come from a wide variety of backgrounds. They are descended from former slaves that were imported from across Asia and other parts of Africa, they have some roots with the indigenous tribe of people who were in the Cape when the Dutch arrived, and they also are the products of more recent interracial marriage (or interracial unions, at least) between whites and blacks.

And though there are coloured people across South Africa, they are the majority only here in Cape Town, and their unique culture is concentrated in those poor suburbs in the Cape Flats

Anthropologists have studied the Coon Carnival music, the lyrics of the songs, the dance steps and the decorations on the costumes, and have found elements of a staggeringly large number of different cultures represented in this unique tradition. There’s Arabic percussion, for example, mixed together with Madagascan choral music. It is truly unlike anything you can find anywhere else in the world, and a product of a mixing of cultures that has happened nowhere else in the world to this degree.

Some of the people who participate in the festival know about these findings, and have embraced them. They are proud to be the only repositories for so many of the cultural influences on Cape culture. When apartheid tried to stamp out the facts about the creolized past of the Cape Colony, they kept that past alive.

But seeing the thing in person was a lesson in another Cape Town tradition: the lack of punctuality. The three of us saw about four groups go by in the hour or so we were strolling along the parade route. The rest of the time we sampled the street food and drank soda, and then we went home.

To see a few pictures from the event, click here.

Happy New Year

We really don't mean to rub this in. I know it's deadly cold on the East Coast and not too pleasant on the West Coast of the U.S. right now. We're hoping it brings you all some comfort to learn that someone you know spent New Year's day drinking ice cold reisling while wearing shorts and sunglasses and gazing out at the ocean.



That's our friend Nicole, who arrived here today after spending the stroke of midnight in midair in route to visit us. We picked her up at the airport at 6:30 am. Her plane had gotten in earlier than scheduled, and by the time we found her in the airport, she had already been robbed. Welcome to South Africa!

But picking her up so early meant that we took it easy at the New Year's Eve party we went to last night, and left at about five minutes after midnight.

Pictures from last night and today are here.