The Last Train to Zona Verde Read online

  “And what is most disgusting is that they make use of one toilet,” he said, meaning the thirty-eight occupants of the place.

  “Where are the people now?”

  “Outside,” he said. “It is too small to live in by day.”

  This was also a habit of the village, where people spent the day in the open, under a tree or in the informal courtyard, and used their mud huts only for sleeping or for protection against nocturnal animals.

  The next places Archie showed me were roomier, and one looked habitable. Certainly it was cleaner, a two-bedroom apartment in which one family lived. The watchful but polite matriarch nodded at me, and a small, stunned-looking boy peered from the side of a doorway. The rent was 500 rand a month, about $60.

  More shacks stood nearby, of the meanest sort, just piled-up lumber and plastic sheeting, with low ceilings. It was hard to imagine anyone living in them.

  “We call these vezinyawo, because they are so small,” Archie said. He explained that the word meant “Your feet are showing” or “Your feet are outside,” because one hut was not large enough to accommodate a whole supine human being.

  Some streets adjacent to these shacks were lined with bright, compact bungalows, painted in pastel colors, surrounded by fences, with newish cars parked in the driveways. Other solid houses, some of them just completed, faced the main road, the highway to the airport, and these were the houses that foreign visitors would see as they passed by, perhaps saying, “Doesn’t look that bad, Doris,” never guessing at the shacks and doghouses beyond them that were out of sight. At one of them, a woman had set out on a wobbly table an array of beaded bracelets. She had made them with her own hands, she said. That expression made me look at her hands — the woman was wringing them in anxiety. She had nine children, and all of them lived in this shack. She looked pleadingly at me to buy, and I came away with my pockets bulging with beaded artifacts.

  “And this is a shebeen,” Archie said, parting the curtain that was hung on the doorway of a shack. The ceiling was so low I could not stand up straight, and the air was rank and doggy and warm with stink. When my eyes became accustomed to the darkness I saw six beer-swilling men inside, three on benches, three squatting on the floor, drunk and incapable at noon on a Monday. An old gaunt woman in an apron presided over the place, stirring a tureen of porridgy liquid.

  One man grinned at me and drank from a large enamel cup, as a cat laps milk, and then he shook it, sloshing the creamy liquid inside.

  “Have a drink,” Archie said. I was certain he was testing me, showing me the worst of the township. I had tried to appear implacable, with my “How do you spell that?” and “Let’s see another.” But this was like a jail cell or the worst room of a madhouse. “This beer is made of maize and sorghum. It is called umqombothi.”

  “How do you spell that?”

  A few days later, I heard this word again, in a lovely bouncy song about a proud woman who makes beer, “magic beer,” performed by an energetic and melodious South African singer, Yvonne Chaka Chaka.

  By then we had walked a mile or more and were still in Langa township. But Archie wanted me to see something else, something special, perhaps another shock.

  “It is Mr. Ndaba,” Archie said. “He is a traditional healer.”

  Mr. Ndaba lived in a room, another low ceiling — I had to stoop to enter, and to kneel to speak to him. The healer was seated on a stool, working his knife against something he held in his other hand.

  I took a breath and retched. The room had the stinging smell of decay, a maggoty odor, and I soon saw why. Hanging from the walls and ceiling were old yellow monkey skulls and jawbones, the decaying pelts of small animals, fur, feathers, more bones, a dead pangolin, snake skins, porcupine quills, mummified birds, and in a corner a newly dead rat being chewed by a small mangy kitten.

  “This is all medicine,” Archie said. “He can cure AIDS.”

  “What’s that?” I asked, pointing to the spotted pelt of a dead animal, possibly a civet cat.

  “It is my hat,” Mr. Ndaba said, and now I could see that he was eating. He spoke with his mouth full, and he was still stabbing and carving with his knife. The scrape of the blade was a dull sustained note. What he held was a lump of yellow bone and gray flabby flesh. He gouged some meat from it and raised the knife to his mouth.

  “And what’s that?”

  “I am eating the head of a pig.” As he hefted the thing in his hand, its ears wagged.

  The pong of the rancid flesh hit me and I wanted to vomit.

  “He is a healer,” Archie said. “He can cure AIDS. He can make someone fall in love with you. He can cast away spirits. He can make you better. We call him an igqirha.”

  “How do you spell that?” I asked, ducking and leaving the hut.

  As I left, Mr. Ndaba said goodbye in a kindly way. And I thought, How easy it is to mock the healer with a civet cat pelt on his head, surrounded by stinking bones and feathers and snake skins. But anyone who entered, wishing to be healed, trusting in the healer, would experience what scientists describe as a therapeutic encounter — the sense of well-being that you feel in the presence of a doctor you trust, one with a kindly, inquiring manner and with monkey skulls instead of diplomas on the wall. The stink itself, like the sight of a stethoscope, might create a placebo effect.

  Still, in the intimacy of these shadowy huts I felt self-conscious, almost as if I didn’t have a right to be there.

  What is the point of these township tours? I heard whites in Cape Town ask again and again, cringing in embarrassed disbelief. Why do Africans advertise their squalor and sell tickets to their slums?

  It also struck me as odd that tourists were invited to see the townships and encouraged to examine the sad inner rooms, because they were just as dirty, disorderly, and crime-ridden as in the days of apartheid — perhaps more so. And the shocking thing was that when the residents moaned about the bad old days, all one could think of was how awful, how unfit for human habitation, they were now. Later in the day, in Guguletu, I saw a vanload of well-dressed Italian tourists drinking beer and mineral water at a grubby chicken restaurant — Italians who, without question, would not have dared enter the slums of Naples (depicted in the 2009 Italian film Gomorrah and based on a book of the same name by Roberto Saviano), which resembled Guguletu. There were also a few small restaurants in Guguletu that had been discovered by Cape Town foodies and cautiously visited not just for the meal but for the novelty of the filth and menace of their surroundings.

  It seemed that curious visitors, of whom I was one, had created a whole itinerary, a voyeurism of poverty, and this exploitation — at bottom that’s what it was — had produced a marketing opportunity: township dwellers, who never imagined their poverty to be of interest to anyone, had discovered that for wealthy visitors it had the merit of being fascinating, and the residents became explainers, historians, living victims, survivors, and sellers of locally made bead ornaments, toys, embroidered bags, and baskets, hawked in the stalls adjacent to the horrific houses. They had discovered that their misery was marketable. That was the point.

  Look how the apartheid system forced us to live like dogs in a kennel! was the intended message. But the message that reached me was that the miserable former hostels for men were now filthy overcrowded rooms for whole hopeless families, most of them indigent and unemployed.

  Phaks was waiting nearby. He said, “We go back?”

  “There’s one more place,” I said. “Guguletu.”

  “Gugs,” he said, using the local nickname, and off we rattled in his old van.

  Ten years before, I had walked around Guguletu, noting how the township had achieved notoriety in 1993, when a twenty-six-year-old Californian, Amy Biehl, had been murdered there by a mob. A Stanford graduate, living in South Africa as a volunteer in voter registration for the following year’s free election, she had driven three African friends home to the township as a favor. She had a ticket to California; she was to leave South
Africa the next day. Seeing her white face, a large crowd of African boys screamed in eagerness, for this was a black township and she was white prey. The car was stoned, she was dragged from it, and though her friends pleaded with them to spare her (“She’s a comrade!”), Amy was beaten to the ground, her head smashed with a brick, and she was stabbed in the heart. “Killed like an animal,” I wrote in my notebook then.

  Four suspects were named; they were tried and convicted of the murder, and the judge, noting that they “showed no remorse,” sentenced them to eighteen years in prison. Three years later, these murderers appeared before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. They had an explanation for the murder. “Their motive was political and not racial.” They “regretted” what they had done. They newly claimed they had “remorse.” They pleaded to be released under the general amnesty.

  Everything they said seemed to me lame and baseless, yet they were freed because Amy’s parents, Peter and Linda Biehl, had flown from California, attended their hearing, and listened to their testimony. They said that their daughter would have wanted a show of mercy, since she was “on the side of the people who killed her.” The Biehls did not oppose the murderers’ being released from prison.

  So the killers waltzed away, and two of them, Ntombeko Peni and Easy Nofomela, were — astonishingly — given jobs by the Biehls, working as salaried employees for the Amy Biehl Foundation, a charity started by Amy’s forgiving parents in their daughter’s memory. Around the time I visited, the foundation had received almost $2 million from the U.S. Agency for International Development for being “dedicated to people who are oppressed.”

  In 2001, a small cross had been placed near the gas station where Amy had been murdered, and on a crude signboard behind the cross was daubed AMY BIHLS LAST HOME SECTION 3 GUGS — misspelled and so crude as to be insulting.

  Now I said to Phaks, “Take me there.”

  The gas station was bigger and brighter than before. A new memorial, of black marble, much like a gravestone, had been placed on the roadside in front of it, on the fatal spot.

  AMY BIEHL

  26 APRIL 1967 – 25 AUGUST 1993

  KILLED IN AN ACT OF POLITICAL VIOLENCE.

  AMY WAS A FULBRIGHT SCHOLAR

  AND TIRELESS HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVIST.

  “They killed her right there,” I said. Phaks grunted, and we drove away. The wording bothered me. “What is ‘an act of political violence’?”

  “Those boys, they had a philosophy.”

  “What was it?”

  “Africa for Africans — it was their thinking.”

  “That’s not a philosophy. It’s racism.”

  “But they were political.”

  “No. They killed her because she was white.”

  “They thought she was a settler.”

  He had told me that one of the chants at the time had been “One settler, one bullet.”

  “But South Africa was full of white people who were part of the struggle. They supported Mandela, they went to jail. Whites!”

  “But those boys said they were sorry,” Phaks said. “They apologized to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. And her parents, they agreed.”

  “But what do you think her parents really felt?”

  “I don’t know. But you can see, they got their name there.”

  “And getting their name there makes up for the murder of their child?”

  “It was political. The parents, they hired the boys to work for them,” Phaks said, and now I could see he was rattled, because he was driving badly along the busy broken township roads, muttering at the traffic, the oncoming cars cutting him off.

  “Phaks, do you have children?”

  “Four.”

  “A daughter?”

  He nodded — he knew what I was going to say.

  “What would you do if someone beat your daughter to the ground and took a brick and smashed it against her head? Then stabbed her in the heart and left her to die?” He winced but remained silent. “Would you say, ‘That’s their philosophy. It’s a political act’?”

  “No.”

  “What would you think?”

  “Myself, I wouldn’t accept.”

  “What if they said sorry?”

  Phaks was very upset now, so I shut up and let him drive, but he was still fretful from my badgering him and kept murmuring, “No, no. I can’t. Never, never.” Nayvah, nayvah.

  The Amy Biehl Foundation had been founded to promote peace and mutual understanding. It had also been instrumental in improving the infrastructure of Guguletu — upgrading huts and bringing in utilities. Doing that was easier than peacemaking. According to data collected by the South African Institute of Race Relations, more than seven hundred people were murdered in Guguletu between 2005 and 2010. This amounted to one murder every two and a half days over those five years.

  My challenging Phaks had had the effect of winding him up. Now he was contrary, as I had been, and he was batting the steering wheel with his palm, pointing out the graffiti, the litter, the men and boys idling at shop fronts and street corners, and perhaps with the memory of the boys who’d been released after murdering Amy Biehl he began to see insolence and misbehavior all over Guguletu.

  “These kids don’t behave,” he said. “They are out of control. They show no respect — and you know why? Because they have too many rights. Everyone protects them! Even the government, even the barristers!”

  “You mean they’re not punished?”

  “Not at all. When I was at school, if I did something wrong, I got a hiding. Then I came home, and when I told my father what had happened, he gave me a hiding!”

  “Was that a good thing?”

  “A very good thing. It has an impact, I tell you. It taught me a lesson. But this” — he gestured out the window; idle boys were everywhere, standing, sitting, eternally waiting — “this is really killing us.”

  “Not enough hidings,” I said, to encourage him.

  “Listen to me,” Phaks said. “Here there is a constitution for children. Can you believe such a thing? If you take your belt and thrash the child, he can go to the police and lay a charge against you.”

  “So what’s the answer?”

  “A hiding is the answer,” he said. “Take the rapist in Khayelitsha the other day. Did you hear about it? He was beaten. He was stripped naked. I tell you” — Phaks whipped his fingers — “he was really given a good hiding. He was bleeding. That was not the end of it. While he was lying there, three women stood over him and urinated on his body. Ha-ha!”

  Phaks was in a good mood now, calmed with this peroration on rough justice. And he pointed out that in this part of Guguletu there were streets of new houses, like the streets earlier he had called “the Beverly Hills of Langa.”

  Improbable, this upgrade — it all seemed a neatened version of what I’d seen at New Rest, fixed and improved and hopeful, the transition from slum to township, the structures braced and thickened and made whole. And after this long day of townships was done, anyone would conclude — I certainly did — that a solution to the squatter camps had been found. Hovels were made into homes, and a kind of harmony was established.

  This was how, throughout history, cities had been built, the slums made into habitable districts of the metropolis, the gentrification of Gin Lane, the bourgeoisification of the Bowery. I thought of old prints I’d seen of sheep cropping grass in Soho Square in London, of shepherds following their flocks through the weedy ruins of nineteenth-century Rome, of cows grazing on Boston Common.

  But the day was not done. We left the bungalows of Guguletu and took a side road into what looked like a refugee camp: thrown-together shelters, sheds covered with tin, skeletal frames patched with plastic sheeting and piled with boulders and scrap wood to prevent the sheeting from blowing away, pigpens, doghouses, crude fences draped with threadbare laundry. The shacks stood close together, with only foot-wide passageways between their outside walls. Smoke rose from cooking fi
res, lantern light glowed in the growing dusk, and improvised power lines hung overhead, like the web of a drunken spider, spun higgledy-piggledy, the visible images of string theory mapped in the twilit sky — squatters tapping illegally into the national grid.

  This settlement was new, housing the most recently arrived people, land snatchers and hut makers and desperadoes. Some had arrived yesterday, more would arrive tomorrow, the shacks stretching for another mile across the dusty wasteland.

  What looked like a refugee camp was a refugee camp — for the poor fleeing the provinces, having renounced the countryside and the rural villages, just coming to squat at the edge of the golden city. They too wanted real homes, running water, and electricity. There was no end to this township: the hostels led to the shacks, the shacks to the hovels, the hovels to the roadside and the bungalows, and beyond the bungalows and the shebeens were the newcomers in the twig-and-plastic lean-tos, straggling across the flatland. No sooner had a solution been found than a new solution was needed. It was the African dilemma.

  “People keep coming,” Phaks said. “There are more townships you have not seen — Bonteheuwel …”

  As he was listing them I saw, chatting by the roadside, in the vilest corner of the squatter camp, three teenage girls in white blouses, blue skirts, knee socks, and matching black shoes on their way home from school. They held satchels that bulged with books and homework. They stood out vividly because of the whiteness of their blouses in the failing light — harmonious and hopeful and a little surprising, like the sudden blown-open blossoms you see in a stricken ditch.

  It was growing dark, and I had to return to town. Phaks said, “But I haven’t shown you the last thing. It is a surprise.”

  We drove back to Khayelitsha. Phaks’s surprise was a hotel, Vicki’s Place, run by a cheerful woman who advertised her home as “the smallest hotel in Africa,” just two rooms in a rickety two-story house. Many foreign journalists and travel writers had publicized Vicki’s Place. Vicki had the newspaper and magazine clippings, all mentioning her good humor, her effort, her enterprise in this township.