Johannesburg airport
Dear Folks, I watched the first presidential debate at the farm, the debate of the vice-presidents in the waiting lounge of the Boston airport, and the second presidential debate at 3 this morning (Johannesburg time) in my hotel. CNN is making me feel close to home!
I am becoming a political junkie. Even at 3 AM after two nights on airplanes, I couldn’t shut my eyes. The attraction is that of a World Series or Superbowl, and the language of the commentators is sports language. Here’s what the coaches are trying now. Will the strategy work? We expect Bush to come out swinging. It’s time for Clinton to stop absorbing body blows and fight back. Does Perot have the endurance to stay in the race? Bush is facing the critical performance of his career (as if his behavior in an entertainment spectacle were more important than his performance over four years as president!) And, most ludicrous of all, WHO WON??? — with no clarity whatsover about what winning means.
This way of choosing a leader through sports analogies was driving me crazy, and I was going to write a satirical column about it, but something happened when I began getting on planes. I detached from the whole business. I let down my eternal guard against the pollution and perversion of the public information stream, and I began to view the whole business as a fascinating cultural phenomenon — which is how the Europeans and South Africans see it. Finally I just let myself become a simple sports fan, cheering my team. It’s a heck of a way to discuss crucial national issues, but it is fun. Especially when, as seems to be the case at the moment, my team is ahead. It’s been a long time since any political team that I could stomach has been ahead.
Anyway, I left behind, ready for Diana to file, two final columns about the campaign, and that’s enough. Let it rest. I voted an absentee ballot the day I left. For me the election is over. The interesting part will begin as the new regime gears up after the election.
Actually I left behind FIVE completed columns, which is a record. Five columns ahead! Three of them are scheduled for the next three weeks, which should give me time to figure out how to connect my modem to German phones and send files across the ocean. The other two are insurance, for Diana to turn in if there’s ever a glitch. I feel an unaccustomed sense of security, knowing I don’t HAVE to write a column for five whole weeks — though I turn them out so habitually that I’ll probably have one drafted by the time I get to Germany.
It was pretty hectic, getting ready for this trip. I was writing columns, canning tomatoes, sending off proposals for Balaton funding, getting six chapters of my textbook to the publisher, completing the conservation easement for the farm, packing three suitcases (one for Germany, one for Switzerland, one for South Africa), baking squash muffins, doing laundry, digging up dahlias, planting narcissus.
The farm already has hundreds of spring flowers, but never enough as far as I am concerned. They peter out after awhile and have to be renewed, all but the daffodils, which multiply. Last year with the Beyond the Limits blitz I didn’t plant any bulbs at all. So this year I went slightly crazy and ordered 150 more narcissus, 50 more tulips, and dozens of crocus and eranthis and galanthus.
Bulb-planting provided breaks from the computer and excuses to glory in the fall. I have NEVER seen the autumn colors so bright. I walked around in ecstasy, especially last Sunday, when the farm’s maples hit their peak.
It was a warm, cloudy day, and the colors showed up at their best because they were the only lights on. I had lifted all the old bulbs out of the gardens near the house and put in new ones, so my task for the day was to replant the old bulbs somewhere else. (As they multiply, they get too crowded and stop blooming, but if you separate them and put them in new soil, they can renew themselves). I decided to plant them out by the road, at the edge of a sweeping new lawn John has cleared out of a chaos of brambles — so they can be seen both from the house and from the road. I was out there quite awhile, busily working in the earth, before it occurred to me to look up. And then I SAW the house, from a distance, our dear old white house, with the new green trim Don has painted on it, and with maples ablaze all around it. It was one of those heart-stopping sights that one remembers forever. I felt so blessed, to live in this beautiful place, and to have been allowed that precious day of bulb-planting in the midst of glory-covered trees.
John was out back that day, building a chicken palace. Our old chicken house, which we salvaged 15 years ago out of a milkhouse from an abandoned farm, is not only decaying, it’s also too small for Sylvia’s chicken empire. So she designed a new one, double the size of the old, with separate enclosures for three or four generations of chicks, as well as mature hens. John is working hard so we can tuck the biddies into their new home before the snow flies.
Sylvia and Don were reconstructing the fence around the barnyard, preparing for the time not too long from now when we move the sheep and geese up from the pasture. Heather helped me plant bulbs for awhile, until she got bored, turned herself into a pony, and galloped off.
I can’t get my thoughts away from the autumn farm, even though I’m now in another hemisphere, where spring is in high gear and the streets are littered with fallen purple jacaranda blossoms! Anyway, as I left, things were proceeding in good order toward winter. Thanks to my farm-mates the rest of the fall chores will get done.
Getting ready for this trip was complicated by the Pew Scholars meeting, which took place in Oregon just a few days before I left. I can’t possibly go, I thought, and then I went. I couldn’t miss the opportunity to spend time with that outstanding bunch of people — field ecologists, most of them, on the front lines of the biodiversity battles. I only get to go to three meetings before my scholarship is over; how could I miss one?.
We met at the Timberline Lodge, 6000 feet up Mount Hood outside Portland — pretty spectacular, though I spent most of the time inside, talking and listening. The ten new scholars gave presentations of their work — studies of how increased UV-B light under the Antarctic ozone hole is affecting the DNA of zooplankton — the organization of a sustainable campesino community on the Chaco plains of Argentina — the legal battles to save the spotted owl in the forests we could see stretching out for miles outside the windows. I talked nonstop all weekend with the scholars about their passions — stopping the overfishing of the bluefin tuna — getting the Endangered Species Act strengthened — figuring out how tropical trees make those big buttresses on their stems. I missed only the field trip on the last day when they went out to see the clearcuts and the forests and the owl — I had to get home to pack for the next journey. But it was an exciting interlude. I came home with my head buzzing with ideas for columns and textbook. Thank heaven for that Pew Scholarship, and not only because of the money!
Well, somehow in the next two days, nearly everything got done. As far as I know, I only forgot one small item — a South African visa. It never entered my head until I was 30,000 feet in the air on the flight from Nairobi to Johannesburg. I don’t know how I could have forgotten. Last time I came here I even went to the trouble of getting a special passport for my South African visa, so black African countries would honor my regular passport. It wasn’t easy to arrange all that. South Africa was more or less a garrison state at the time and viewed the entrance of strangers, even white strangers, with some suspicion.
Fortunately, things have eased up since then. I got off the plane, went to the customs station, and announced that I had no visa. They were upset, but they had a procedure, forms to fill out, stamps to stamp. Within a half hour (and without paying a fee) I was allowed into the country. I suppose they will let me out again.
Two Johans were at the airport to greet me. Johan Strumpfer had been at the Balaton meeting in Hungary the month before, and Johan Grobbelaar had been my host the last time I was here in 1984. They both work for the Institute of Futures Research (IFR) in Stellenbosch outside Capetown. Stellenbosch is an elite Afrikaaner university, the place where future power-holders are traditionally trained. IFR is a private institute located there, something like a cross between Resources for the Future, the Hudson Institute, and Innovation Associates. Strange bedfellows, I know, but IFR attempts to bring together threads of resource analysis, systems analysis, and New Age transformationalism, all in a way that remains acceptable to Afrikaaner conservatism. There in one of the bastions of apartheid, it has been working for years to provide the data and analysis that demonstrate the utter stupidity of apartheid.
IFR is funded by corporate clients, who come to it for help with long-term strategic planning. It runs an annual conference on the larger global forces that surround and shape South African business. My purpose in coming was to speak at this conference, as I had done eight years before.
Johan Grobbelaar drove me across the brown veld to the outer suburbs of Johannesburg and the hotel where the conference took place. This part of South Africa — the high plain of the province of Transvaal — is similar to western Nebraska or Kansas, only warmer. It’s in a severe drought. The land is dry and dusty. But in the suburbs of the rich whites the big houses are shaded by purple-blooming jacaranda trees and the swimming pools are full. (Though only the beginning of spring, it is already in the 80s every day.) Every now and then we could see the tailings pile of a gold mine — there are mines even downtown among the skyscrapers. Also every now and then we passed one of the black townships — shacks and stores jammed together, climbing a low rise, home to tens of thousands of people, looking in the distance like a huge scab on the veld. Black women with bright-colored scarfs on their heads waited for buses in the dust beside the highway, or held up their embroidered tablecloths for sale.
The hotel was in an oasis of trees and flowers and singing birds. (How strange to go from October in New England with silent troops of birds gathering for migration, to October in Transvaal, with birds singing mating songs!). I hit the sack. When I awoke it was time to go to dinner with the corporate clients of IFR.
Executives of mining companies, Shell South Africa, the state electric company, retail and trading companies. All men, all Afrikaaner. (Afrikaaners are the descendents of the Dutch settlers, the most conservative and powerful group in the country. The other South African whites are mostly British descendents. Both groups are bilingual, often switching from English to Afrikaans and back in the middle of a sentence. Most of them also speak Zulu or Xhosa or Tswana). These businessmen are unfailingly polite, but not entirely comfortable carrying on a substantive discussion with a woman. South Africa always reminds me of America in the 50s, which was, come to think of it, about the time when South Africa began to be isolated from the world.
At dinner I sat next to Rowan Cronje, a remarkable man, born and brought up in Tswana territory, eventually a minister in the last white government of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Though white he has been for years now a member of the cabinet of one of the black homelands, Bophuthatswana. He is also one of the group that is trying to hammer out a new constitution for South Africa, and he is deeply, deeply discouraged. In fact despair was the mood of everyone at the table. They say the African National Congress (the party of Nelson Mandela, one of the two large parties of blacks, the other being the Inkatha Party of the Zulus) is not negotiating in good faith, and that the process has degenerated into a raw power struggle. The whites are trying to find a form of government that protects minorities — majority rule would disenfranchise the whites almost as thoroughly as the blacks have been disenfranchised. They believe that the blacks have been taken over by Communists. They don’t know how to stop the violence in the black areas. They don’t trust that the blacks have the capacity to run the country. Yet they are forging ahead, in wild uncertainty, scared, but too far into the transition to stop it now.
The mood of cynicism and impatience and fear reminds me of the mood in Eastern Europe and especially Russia. The old, hated, unjust, unworkable system is dead. But there is not one bit of rejoicing. When you take apart a system, and you haven’t yet put another one together, you have chaos. You open the field not only to decent people, but also to every kind of charlatan. It’s a time of complete unpredictability. The system will go in the direction of the loudest and most authoritative-sounding voices, the biggest bankrolls, the most intransigent negotiators. It’s like an open forest floor after the old, dominant redwood trees have been cleared away. There’s much more sunlight and freedom, but any old seed may germinate, there’s a scrap for the newly released resources, and the advantage goes to the low-lying, aggressive crabgrass.
Well, after staying up all night to watch the debate, I gave my speech the next morning, telling these apprehensive people that they not only have to figure out how to make common cause with the impoverished and angry 80 percent of their people, but that they have to do it in a world that is beyond its sustainable resource limits. To give them credit, they listened politely and a few of them even thanked me.
October 18, Hermanus, Western Cape Province
After the conference I got on a plane with the IFR staff and flew to Capetown, where the temperature was 20 degrees lower and the sea wind was blowing. Johan Grobbelaar took me to his home for the night — we arrived during a dinner party for the 21st birthday of his youngest daughter — and the next morning he and his wife Beulah and her mother whisked me off to this little beach resort an hour along the coast.
I guess I’ll tell you about Hermanus first, and then about the Grobbelaars.
You must promise not to spread the following information to any tourism developer.
Hermanus is a little fishing town on a huge bay, which is the winter home of much of the remaining population of the southern right whale. The whales summer in Antarctic waters, feeding on krill. As the ice forms in May they migrate north to here, living on their own fat for months, to have their babies. Now in October the babies are quite large and they’re nearly ready to head south again. Any time you look out in the bay, you see whales. They come especially close to Hermanus harbor, rising and blowing just a hundred yards off shore. As we sat in a restaurant eating our lunch, I saw one breach into three big jumps in a row. It must have been a baby, just fooling around.
What a wonder, to see these enormous black shapes — about the size of two railroad cars — rising and disappearing, throwing up tails and fins! What a mystery! It is a sacred experience, and fortunately the people around here think of it that way. On nice days the harbor is lined with people watching the whales for hours at a time. There are strict laws forbidding boats or swimmers from going closer to them than 300 feet. There are handouts and educational exhibits about whales and about how to support the international whaling agreement. Because of South Africa’s isolation, just about all the whale watchers here are South African. Because apartheid remains strong through habit, rather than through law, they are almost all white.
The whales are the outstanding attraction of the bay, but there are also long, sweeping perfect beaches with big waves rolling in from the South Pole and piles of exotic shells. There is a nature reserve where one can stroll through the native chaparral, which is like nothing else on earth. The Cape Province is climatically similar to coastal California, with cold sea, warm sun, frequent fogs, mountains downwind, and a nearly treeless, tough, waxy brush that restores itself through irregular fires. Many species are endemic to this region, and they are very weird, dry and leathery to survive the sea wind and long droughts.
At this time of year the chaparral, which the Afrikaaners call the fynbos, is abloom with astonishing colors. There’s a pink wild geranium. Four kinds of asters (with papery blossoms like our straw-flowers) in white, yellow, light pink, and hot pink. At least ten kinds of purple or pink heather. Bright yellow, fragrant wild broom. Above all, big bushes of proteas, the national flower of South Africa. The smallest protea flowers are the size of a teacup; the largest (there are many species) is the size of a teapot. Their colors range through orange, yellow, pink, red, and brown. They are complex, like pincushions, or the flowers of thistles. Their texture is like plastic. They last for weeks in a vase without water.
Beaches, whales, shells, fynbos, mountains — and good Dutch cooking. This place is a tourist paradise, and there are no big hotels, no honkytonk strips, not a mall, not a McDonald’s. International sanctions have saved it. There are small clusters of beach houses, most very modest, a few quite elaborate, belonging to white South Africans. In the Hermanus there are teahouses and small restaurants and shops where you can buy seashells, handmade jewelry, local crafts. The beer and wine, the whole-grain bread and apple strudel, are all locally made. The waiters and shopclerks are mostly colored, the clients are white. It’s a sleepy, funky place, like a non-hippy Bolinas California or an uncrowded Provincetown Massachusetts. I hope the Marriotts and Burger Kings and Japanese hotel chains never find it. The black-controlled government to come, desperate for cash, may invite them in with a red carpet.
At least that is the fear of the white population that enjoys Hermanus now. It’s hard to know whether to sympathize with them, to admire them for the way they have protected unique natural resources, or to castigate them for their protectiveness of their own exclusive privileges. It’s easy to get judgemental about South Africa from a distance. From up close nothing is clear.
It’s also not easy to be judgemental about traditional Afrikaaner families like the Grobbelaars. They are the bad guys in South African history, the oppressors, the racists, the inventors of and beneficiaries from apartheid. And they see themselves as the only hope for decency and civilization on this continent. Their houses (I’ve been in three so far) are full of sturdy Dutch furniture made from beautiful tropical hardwoods. Pictures of grandparents and children line the wall (four, five, or six blond, blue-eyed kids is the norm). There are Bibles everywhere, read daily. They are terrific gardeners and farmers, solid and law-abiding, clean and orderly. Beulah Grobbelaar, in the midst of preparing the family birthday party, found time to put a small present on my bed and a perfect rose from her garden on the dresser. I found a tray with hot tea ready for me when I woke in the morning.
Close-knit, God-fearing, hard-working, land-loving people. How can one not like them? You would say they had built a beautiful world here, if you didn’t have to drive past the shantytowns on your way from one of their gorgeous suburbs to another. The ANC is deliberately creating squatter camps on the edge of every municipality, so that when blacks get the vote, they will dominate the whites everywhere. In Cape Town 500,000 black squatters have arrived.
For the moment, under a cloud of fear, the lives of the whites go on as usual. Though the Group Areas Act has been repealed, neighborhoods are not integrating; most nonwhites can’t begin to afford to live in white areas. I don’t suppose they would feel comfortable there anyway. Few nonwhites even venture onto the formerly whites-only beaches. The cozy, exclusive Afrikaaner world is expecting major change, but the change hasn’t come yet.
Here’s a lesson in Afrikaans — a sort of bastardized Dutch — from the spice cabinet in Beulah’s kitchen:
whole black pepper — heel swart peper
garlic flakes — knoffel-flokkies
dried mint — gedroogde kruisement
ground cinnamon — gemaalde kaneel
mixed herbs — gemengde kruie
spice for fish — spesery vir vis
baking soda — koeksoda
Beulah runs a nursery school, Johan is a researcher at IFR. Their oldest daughter Carina is a champion gymnast and gymnastic instructor; she is about to marry a nice young man who is studying to be a dominie — a minister in the Dutch Reformed Church. Son Neels is taking business courses at the university; daughter Beulah is studying jewelry design (this is an actual university major in this nation so rich in gold, platinum, and precious stones). A third daughter Una was killed in a car accident last year, and the family is still reeling from the shock.
Beulah’s mother, who lives with them now, spent her life as a farm wife on a 3000-hectare spread in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe. She’s a no-nonsense character. We have fun talking about herbs and gardens and sheep and cattle. She’s amazed that on our farm we do all the things her black laborers did. Her work consisted of planning gardens, managing house and garden workers, doctoring people and animals, and marketing produce. “Are you a good cook?” I asked her. “No,” she said. “I just rang a bell when I wanted dinner to be served, and rang it again when I wanted the dishes to be cleared away.”
These people treat their colored maids and laborers with considerable kindness and constant condescension. Their racism and oppression is different only in degree from that of most white people in the world. The folks who work for a pittance in their factories and mines, as their janitors and assembly-line workers and hotel maids and dockworkers, are closer to them — just over the hill in squatter settlements — than the migrant workers who harvest food in America, the factory workers on the Mexican border, the black communities of our inner cities are to us. The racist statements I hear from the Afrikaaners are identical to the ones I heard in the Chicago suburbs of my childhood.
Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.
At least the white South Africans know they have to change. That’s the big shift since last time I was here, and, of course, a shift that the world as a whole is a long way from making. South Africa has just jumped from being 30 years behind the rest of the Western world to being 30 years ahead. We should be watching their experiment carefully, and doing everything we can to help it work.
October 21, 1992, Zierenberg, Germany
We returned from Hermanus to Capetown via the home of another friend of mine, Elizabeth Dostal, who lives on a magnificent farm, high on a mountain slope overlooking False Bay, Capetown, and the Cape of Good Hope. The farm grows almonds, tangerines, and table grapes. It has towering forests of eucalyptus and pine. It is astoundingly beautiful. The Dostals are not Afrikaaner; he is Czech, she is Austrian, and they have lived here for decades. There are a lot of people like them in this country, especially in the spectacular Cape area. All of them are now thinking about going back where they came from, if the coming changes are too drastic.
Monday morning I gave a lecture on Beyond the Limits at Stellenbosch University to a large audience, including many friends from my last visit. It was good to see them again, though I was losing a battle with a cold virus I had been holding at bay for the whole trip, and my voice was disappearing. Philip Spies, the director of IFR took me to lunch and then on a short drive down the Cape Peninsula and then to my plane. I have used the words “spectacular” and “magnificent” too many times already in this letter — but they certainly apply to the Cape Peninsula, which ends at the Cape of Good Hope, where the Atlantic and the Indian oceans meet. It’s reminiscent of the Big Sur part of the California coast, only more so — higher mountains, bluer sea, bigger waves, lusher forests. When South Africa becomes a place that the world considers safe, this will be the premiere tourist area on the planet.
Except, of course, that it’s so darn far away. It’s a two hour flight from Capetown to Johannesburg (where there were thunderstorms and everyone was excited to see rain at last) and a ten hour flight from Johannesburg to Zurich. By the time my friend Joan hauled me off the plane, back from spring to fall again, I was ready never to step on another aircraft for the rest of my life — though I had to go on to Germany that same afternoon. I had a few hours at Joan’s to sleep and do an interview for a Swiss newspaper, then it was off to Frankfurt, then a two-hour train journey to Kassel, and here I am, ready to settle down at last. Hartmut Bossel met me at the station, his wife Rika had a nice soup ready, and I slept for 12 hours. This morning I still can’t talk, but I feel much better.
I’ll write about Germany next time, by when, I hope, there will be a new president-elect of the United States.
Love, Dana
