The Last Train to Zona Verde Read online

  Phaks had yet another surprise: his van wouldn’t start. He sat wiggling the key in its slot, next to a fistful of wires he’d pulled out, hoping to find the problem.

  “I’ll take the train,” I said.

  “Bus is better.”

  Ten years before I had wanted to take the train but had been discouraged from doing so by the clerk in the ticket booth.

  “I’m taking the train,” I told Phaks.

  He walked me through the back streets to the station and stayed with me and insisted on buying my ticket. When the train arrived we shook hands, we hugged, and he glumly said he’d have to return to his broken car.

  “Keep your hand on your money,” he said.

  The train was fairly empty because it was headed to the city. Returning from Cape Town, it would be full. I looked for potential muggers and, scanning the passengers in the car, caught the eye of the woman in the seat across from me.

  “Why are you here?” she asked.

  “Just looking.”

  “Whites don’t come here. White people don’t live here,” she said with almost boastful conviction.

  “But I’m here,” I said.

  “Because you have that man to help you,” she said. She must have seen Phaks at the ticket office. She looked defiant, almost contemptuous. “You wouldn’t come here alone.”

  “What are those lights?” I asked her, to change the subject, and pointed to the slopes of Table Mountain.

  “Rondebosch, Constantia.” She had answered without looking up.

  3

  Cape Town: The Spirit of the Cape

  NOTHING, APPARENTLY, is hidden in Cape Town: it is a city like an amphitheater. Its air breathing upon me sweetly, I sat in elegant, embowered, villa-rich Constantia, the district on the ridge I’d glimpsed the day before from the shacks of Khayelitsha. I was sipping a glass of sauvignon blanc in the majestic portico that was the tasting room of the main house at Constantia Glen Vineyard. From this vantage point I was able to see over the rim of my wine glass the poisonous cloud of dust that hung above the Cape Flats.

  This visibility is one of the unusual features of Cape Town. The estates in its wealthiest enclaves, in the cliffy suburbs of the middle slopes of the mountain (Constantia, Rondebosch, Bishopscourt, Newlands), have views of the bleak horizontal profile of the suffering squatter camps and poor sprawling townships on the flatland below. The orderly green vineyards look down on brown muddled scrubland, and likewise, through the wide gaps in the plank walls or the rips in the blue plastic of the shacks in Khayelitsha it is possible to enjoy a panorama of university buildings and colonnades bulking on the heights of leafy Rondebosch.

  Gated communities all over these highlands display signs warning any unwelcome intruder of 24/7 MONITORING AND ARMED RESPONSE, yet the poor have an unimpeded view of the rich, and vice versa. And each exposed person, squinting from this distance, looks passive and ubiquitous, like a sort of human vegetation.

  The last time I’d been in Cape Town this winery did not exist — no vines, no casks, no activity except the mooing of cows. It had been a dairy farm, bought by an entrepreneur named Alexander Weibel, who’d had money and been interested in making wine. He plowed the hills and discovered that the land had clayey subsoil, had good water-holding capacity, and was rich in mica that would impart a “distinctive minerality,” as he called it, to the white wine. He planted vines, fenced them, staked them, pruned them. He invested in winemaking equipment, and in 2007 he had his first harvest. His wine was acclaimed. All this within ten years.

  “I know that’s Khayelitsha,” I said, looking down at the townships on the Flats.

  “And that’s Mitchells Plain,” the helpful woman in the wine-tasting portico told me. “And Guguletu, and over there, past Langa, is Bonteheuwel. Coloreds live there.”

  Almost half the population of Cape Town was “colored.” The word had not been abandoned, and neither had “coolie” (koelie), for Indian; though “Bantu,” “Muntu,” “native,” “kaffir,” and “Hottentot” were execrated and condemned. A supermarket manager, technically “colored,” referred to one of his employees as a Hottentot while I was in Cape Town. (He pronounced the word the South African way, “Hot-not.”) Someone overheard this and reported him to a superior. He was fired on the spot.

  The township of Bonteheuwel was created when the old, lively, multiracial District Six, in central Cape Town, was bulldozed, and the different races were dispersed and resettled, each to a specific place with its own racial hue. That was how, with refugees and exiles, Bonteheuwel grew. It is known as much for the distinctiveness of its people as for the violence of its crime. Much of Bonteheuwel is controlled by street gangs, and unlike the rest of the townships with their random shootings and beatings, the Bonteheuwel gangs are organized, with menacing names, and engaged in endless drug and turf wars. What Bonteheuwel had in common with the other townships was that, with all its hardships and disorder, it was also a place with a life of its own, where music and art filled the clubs and galleries, and where residents set off in the morning to work in central Cape Town or to attend school.

  It was from Bonteheuwel that twenty-two-year-old Donna-Lee de Kock traveled each morning with her mother to the Old Mutual Insurance building in Pinelands — a one-and-a-half-hour commute — to attend the Tertiary School in Business Administration. That’s where I met Donna-Lee and her classmates. Ostensibly I was there to give a talk, but my deeper motive was to find out about the school and perhaps discover, after my time wandering around the townships, something promising.

  This tertiary school, known by its acronym, TSiBA (the Xhosa word for “jump”), was good news. It was privately funded and nonprofit. I was particularly interested because the school had opened in 2005, since I had last been in South Africa. In the beginning 80 students were enrolled; there were now 320. No student was required to pay any tuition or fees, though it cost $10,000 a year to educate each one — for food, textbooks, transportation, computer, and writing materials. All the pupils were studying business administration or economics, and all were aiming to start businesses. The school’s mission was to make something good happen. I liked its self-sufficiency, and its being a purely South African endeavor — not an institution imposed by a meddling Mrs. Jellyby, a foreign philanthropist, or a parachuting pop star. Nor was it connected to any government or politician.

  Allowances were made for students from deprived educational backgrounds. If someone applied and was found to be worthy of consideration, but deficient in any academic area, a “bridging year” was provided to sharpen needed skills and bring him or her up to standard. The aim of the school was to provide a college education for young people who otherwise would not have access to it — those who were too poor or out of touch or badly prepared.

  The school was founded by Leigh Meinert, a young woman from Cape Town who had degrees from universities in South Africa and Great Britain. Idealistic, white, from a winemaking family, she was committed to making a difference in South Africa. Her father, Martin Meinert, learned winemaking at his family’s Devon Valley vineyard and also had a degree in viticulture and oenology from the University of Stellenbosch. With her father’s encouragement, Leigh Meinert worked on a plan for higher education in South Africa that would reach out to ambitious, intelligent, but overlooked youths.

  “I saw how insular my generation was, how little we knew about each other and how isolated we were from the richness of different cultures around us,” Leigh Meinert had told a newspaper interviewer the year before I visited, summing up the situation she’d been born into in South Africa, at the time of Nelson Mandela’s release from twenty-seven years in prison. “I wanted to do something to change that. Particularly at that exciting time, I wanted to be involved in building the nation, and to work specifically among people of my generation to integrate and build leadership.”

  These were rosy generalities, but she went to work to make them real. She had been developing the school for seven years a
nd was still only in her early thirties. When I met her she was eight months pregnant, but she laughed at my suggestion that this might be a reason to slow down.

  “Do you get any money from the government?” I asked.

  “None at all — no government money!” And she laughed. “It’s a free university. Maybe it’s not a good idea to say that!”

  “So how does this operate?”

  “Old Mutual gives us space, and we get donations from companies, who also act as mentors. It’s not complicated, though it took us a year just to plan it. It takes a lot of cooperation. And work.”

  “What happens to the graduates?”

  “The companies that are our donors often hire them, or they might join other companies or start businesses of their own. The guiding philosophy is that after they get their degree they’ll pay it forward. They’ll give money or support or time — they’ll give back. Because their own education was paid for by someone else.”

  This was a paraphrase of something she’d written and published: “Our students do not pay back their scholarships. The model, however, is designed to ensure that they pay forward through the transfer of the skills they have learned, through civic engagement and through social responsibility. We also endeavor to include them in the day-to-day running of the operation, which is not only in line with our endeavors to build leadership and entrepreneurship but also helps us keep the management team lean, flexible, young and innovative.”

  This seemed so hopeful, and consequently so unlikely, that I questioned it. “Do they actually come up with the money?”

  “Yes, look!” she said. We were walking down a hallway as she gestured to the framed pictures on the wall. “These are some of them.”

  Each portrait was headed A Pay It Forward Hero, with details of the former student’s academic history, present occupation, and how money or time was paid back to the school.

  This seemed, in my experience in Africa, one of those rare, grassroots educational efforts that had actually succeeded. Here were clean classrooms, a library with books on the shelves, working computers, lights, running water, with spirited, serious, motivated students — and no foreign patronage. TSiBA had plans to move to a bigger building and was looking for more support.

  The school certainly deserved it. The most sought-after postgraduate grant in South Africa was the Mandela-Rhodes Scholarship, which fully funded two years of study for “young Africans who exhibit academic prowess as well as broader leadership potential, an educational opportunity unique on the continent.” Mandela himself, in inaugurating the jointly named scholarship in 2003, had said, “It speaks of a growing sense of global responsibility that in this second century of its operation the Rhodes Trust finds it appropriate to redirect some of its attention and resources back to the origins of [its] wealth.”

  Only thirty Mandela-Rhodes Scholarships were awarded in the whole of Africa each year. In the short time the school had been open, Leigh Meinert’s students had bagged four of them.

  Like other students at TSiBA, Donna-Lee de Kock, from the distant township of Bonteheuwel, was studying for a BA in business administration. Her mixed ancestry of African, Chinese, Indian, and white flickered in her features.

  “I want to finish here and then go to a cosmetology school,” she told me, “get a degree there, and then start my own business.”

  In the school library with about fifteen of the students, I asked them about their plans. Each one had the ambition of starting a business, and was specific about the time it would take, the study it required, the various steps. They were frank about the slowing economy, the high unemployment, and when I asked pointedly about government corruption, they merely smiled: they knew. They were unanimous on one point.

  “We all have an aspiration to get out of the townships,” one of them said.

  Lingering in Cape Town, looking for more good news, I heard about an older migrant labor camp, called Lwandle, that had reinvented itself as a township and put itself on the map with its new museum. I got a ride there. Less than thirty miles from the center of Cape Town, Lwandle was another example of Cape Town proximity, the poor dusty township visible from the heights of the wealthy green city. In this case, miserable Lwandle in Somerset West was adjacent to the old lovely town of Stellenbosch, with its wineries and its university, under the steep and striated mountain ridge still known as Hottentots Holland.

  The distinguishing feature of Lwandle was its high self-esteem, which was reflected in its self-promotion. Its showcase, the Lwandle Migrant Labor Museum, displayed its history over sixty years. The township had its own historian too, who greeted me and showed me around.

  His name was Mr. Lunga Smile — as, he explained, in “smile for the camera” — and he had been educated at the local secondary school, Khanyolwetho High School. He was a cheery soul with a jumping, loose-limbed way of walking, like a man kicking a ball, and along with his outward energy was an eagerness to inform. He wore a warm plaid jacket and wool cap on this chilly overcast day, which gave an even greater bleakness to the wilderness of huts and hostels.

  Like his counterpart Archie, the historian of Langa township across the Flats, Mr. Smile of Lwandle was able to convert his cheeriness into a sense of outrage when he pointed out the indignities suffered by township dwellers over the years.

  “This was how the poor people lived before,” he said. “Look at the bad construction. No running water. No heating.”

  To demonstrate the former hardships of the residents, one of the hostels, dating from 1958, had been preserved unchanged. It was a cinderblock one-story structure without heat or water, divided into different-sized cubicles, the smaller ones designated for sixteen people, the larger ones holding as many as thirty-eight.

  “They were all men, working in the canning factories,” Mr. Smile said.

  It was the familiar story: men in search of work who had left their homes and families in the Eastern Cape to live in migrant labor hostels outside Cape Town. There, they were employed in the fertile Stellenbosch Valley by farmers as fruit and vegetable pickers and grape harvesters, and by the factories that processed and canned these products.

  But the main employer, the Gant food and canning factory, had shut down in the 1980s, and with the vineyards more highly mechanized, fewer laborers were needed. I had come hoping to find good news, but I was discovering another paradox. The majority of the people in Lwandle were now unemployed, yet the resident population was increasing, and was idle. Lwandle and its nearby squatter camp were now home to eighty thousand people.

  Mr. Smile led me through the old, cold, gritty building, with its dead air, its scorched walls, and its outside toilets with six bucket stalls.

  “They had to empty the buckets by hand, carrying them over there,” Mr. Smile said. “And a woman was not safe here. She could be assaulted when she was doing her business.”

  I clucked, made notes, and walked around the awful place, designated as Building 33, and Mr. Smile continued talking.

  “This is where they lived — see, how close together!” He darted into a back room where some shelves represented beds. “They would say, ‘My bed is my home.’ ”

  I clucked some more, scribbled again, noting the dirty cement floors, the rooms like prison cells, the filthy ceilings, the windows so begrimed and unwashed I couldn’t see through the glass.

  “This is our heritage!”

  Then I saw a hand-lettered cardboard sign and asked, “What’s that?”

  “It was put there by the people who lived here before.”

  “Before what?”

  “Before it was made into a museum,” Mr. Smile said. “They are objecting.”

  I copied the sign. It read: WE THE RESIDENTS OF ROOM 33 DESIDE TO WRITE THIS NOTICE DISAGREE WITH THE PEOPLE ABOUT THIS ROOM TO BE A MESSEUM. FIRSTLY GIVE US ACCOMMODATION BEFORE TO GET THIS ROOM. THANK YOU — FROM ROOM 33.

  So the people who had been living in the hovel, who had been evicted in order to make the place a muse
um piece representing the worst example of a slum, wanted urgently to return and inhabit the hovel as they had always done; bad as it was, they were worse off where they lived now. They wanted their hovel back, even if it meant pigging it there.

  “Where are they now?”

  “Maybe a squatter camp,” Mr. Smile said.

  “So how is this better than it was before?”

  “Now each person has his own space” — and by “space” he meant elbow room in the hovel — “rather than sharing it.”

  Former migrant labor hostels had been converted into dwellings for families, but they were just as crowded, dirty, and unheated. Small children, ragged and barefoot, chased each other on a chilly evening, running past a wall with a painting of Steve Biko, killed by police during the apartheid era, one of the martyrs of the freedom struggle. Not far from where we were talking, a woman was doing her laundry, slapping at wet clothes in a small public sink fixed to a standpipe by the dirt road.

  The museum at Lwandle had been more successful than the cultural committee at Lwandle might have intended, since the whole of the township seemed to be preserved as a grubby reminder of the bad old days persisting into the present. The only difference was that instead of Lwandle serving as a camp for overworked men, it was now a camp of unemployed families, scraping by on handouts and menial labor.

  The Migrant Labor Museum contained a display of photographs of residents of Lwandle, most of them women — “domestics,” Mr. Smile said, explaining that they had been house servants for white families in Stellenbosch.

  They were portraits of older women sitting in rough chairs in humble surroundings. One showed a stout woman in a voluminous dress. Her name was given, Nontuthzelo Christine Makhebane. A succinct caption in her own words summed up her melancholy existence here: