Teacher on Two Wheels

Above:  Grilling on Dean’s porch in Pretoria.

Saturday 3/7/09  Gulu, Uganda

**Taken from journal.  About my time in South Africa**

Not even lions and giraffes could keep me awake.  We had been driving for more than 10 hours and I couldn’t hold my head up any longer.  The two Czech climbers in the front seat of our car had, however, tapped into superhuman reserves of attentiveness and energy.  Like the predators they stalked, the climbers too scanned the horizon for animals.  For hours and hours, they looked into the thick rain-nourished grasses of Kruger National Park, one of Africa’s most famous game reserves.

“Andrew!  Wake up!  Wake up!  Five giraffes to the right!” one would scream.

I’d spring from my sleep and stare out the window.  Sure enough—five giraffes lumbering through the bush, a fleet of yellow necks and heads bobbing in a green sea of dense brush.

At first I felt guilty about nodding off during the drive.  My two Czech friends had eagerly explained the night before how Kruger was one of the highlights of their trip to South Africa, how they planned to drive for 12 hours in the park to maximize their chances of seeing as many animals as possible.  To them, my napping toward the end of our ride must have seemed fueled by uninterest.  Exhaustion, thankfully though, slaughters preoccupations and worries, and it soon left me unconcerned about what my two wide-eyed companions thought of me.  I was tired.  A relentless sun, music-less driving, and 10+ hours sitting in the same position left me spent.

South of a camp called Lower Sabie, for a magical stretch of road that lasted for about 25 miles or so, a thin band of black, baked pavement rolled over undulating stretches of tree-spotted savannah, verdant moss-green scenery brightened with outcroppings of rust-colored rocks.  The animals, apparently, also thought this part of the park was particularly beautiful and decided to congregate here.  Sometimes in a single clearing, we spotted warthogs, impala, an elephant or two, and a pack of buffalo—all grazing or drinking in the midst of one another.  All were quiet.  Even us two-legged animals in the car were left speechless.

By the end of the day, I realized I had seen my fair share of exotic animals because I stopped taking pictures.  When a pair of black rhinos 15 feet to the right of the car didn’t motivate me to pull out my camera, I knew it was time to head to camp and call it a day.

In a place like Kruger, a place so soaked in sacredness that the interconnectedness of all things is as easy to see as a lone giraffe in a field, I was reminded of my place in the universe, that I am no more or less a creature than the impala at the waterhole or the lion in the shade.  In the park’s diversity I saw time herself at play, a slow pulsing force that has used its long wake of passed minutes like a sickle to carve teeth into tusks, skulls into horns.

*****

Race emerged into conversations like a thick haze descending upon a valley.  Without any overt instigation on our parts, the R-word awoke from the soft safeness of our introductions, our anecdotes, and charged our sentences, pulling us fast and hard toward awkward moments of stalled conversation, moments when something honest flares and shuts up a crowd.  It was race that spun stories and blushed faces; it made the cooling of food pass unnoticed.

I wasn’t surprised.  In South Africa, a place long cloaked with the smothering rags of racial inequality, a country only recently exposed to the raw reality of newly unrestricted interracial coexistence, race was not something alive solely in the intellectual confines of the mind.  It permeated one’s essence.

Over smoking barbecues, hostel dinner tables, and long drives, I talked about race with South Africans.  Someone told me things were far better now for blacks, easier now, thanks to apartheid’s end; whites were struggling to fit in to a post-apartheid society.  In South Africa, this person explained, the government has installed a type of affirmative action policy that forces companies to meet ‘race quotas’.  Because of this pressure to have certain percentages of black and white employees, blacks are often favored when applying for jobs.  (One political party went so far as to post campaign posters that read ‘Too white to work?  Vote for us.’)

Someone else told me that these race quotas apply to universities as well, and because universities are accepting black students who aren’t necessarily qualified enough to attend the university, the university’s diplomas and its reputation are, in the words of the person I spoke to, becoming ‘watered down’.

One man asked me why I was riding in a local taxi van, a type of transport commonly used by only blacks in South Africa.  When I told him it was the quickest way to get to where I wanted to go, he didn’t totally accept my answer.  He became suspicious and stared at my face, looking for hints as to my real reason for being in the cab.  Two men later called one of these taxi vans a ‘kaffir taxi’, as in, “Why in the world did you take a bloody kaffir taxi?” (In South Africa, the word ‘kaffir’ is a pejorative word for blacks and is as strong or stronger than the N-word in the United States.)

One woman explained how happy she was to see whites and blacks finally communicating, finally walking down streets and working and eating together.  “We’ve come so far since the end of apartheid, it’s impossible not to be excited about the future,” she said.

One man, though, told me about how seeing interracial couples makes him sick to his stomach.  He said that when interracial couples have children, they’re being selfish:  ‘colored people’, people born to mixed parents, are ostracized in South African society; knowingly giving birth to a colored baby, this man argued, is nothing short of reckless and cruel.

Wrapping my brain around the different race issues affecting South Africa was challenging.  In hindsight, actually, I failed miserably at it.  Even coming from the U.S., from a place with a similarly race-loaded past, I still couldn’t figure out how racism was able to thrive in the South African psyche.  The black people I spoke to on the trip were just as kind as everyone else.  While taking various taxi vans around the country, it seemed like black drivers and passengers on the vans went out of their way to watch over me and make sure I got where I needed to go.  The black people I met acted…well…normal.  And in turn, I acted normal.  And we talked.  And when one black man I met at a bus stop refused to let me pay for my bus fare, I thanked him and started up a conversation with him.  And that was that.  Two humans bouncing a small kindness between them, doing what folks do.

How many more generations need to pass in South Africa before the truth that men are men triumphs over the fallacy of racism?

*****

I just wanted directions.  Nothing more.  I didn’t need a map, I didn’t need someone to hold my hand and walk me around—just directions.  When I got off the taxi and asked a barber sitting under his sidewalk tent, the one with pictures of smiling black people with fresh haircuts painted on the side of it, how I could get to a hostel 10 blocks away, he directed me to the police station, just up the road.  At the police station, immediately after I talked to the cop behind the counter, I knew something was up.

“Why did you walk here to the police station?”  the cop asked.  Tall and black, it was only his height that set him apart from the group of his peers working behind him.

“Uh, I don’t have a car.  I left the taxi van depot and headed here so I could find the hostel.  Is something wrong?” I asked.

“No, no, it’s just that we don’t usually get people who just walk in here like that,” he said.  By ‘people’, it was clear he meant ‘white people’.  He paused for a second.  “Let me look for a map.  I’ll show you where the hostel is and we can walk over there together.  It’s safer for you if I walk—”

Before he could finish his sentence, I heard a voice over my shoulder.

“Are you crazy walking around here with that backpack on?  Really, are you crazy or something?”

I turned around.  A squat white cop with beady eyes, small glasses, crossed arms, and a gun strapped to his hip stared at me with a furrowed brow, waiting for my answer.

“What do you mean?  We’re downtown—this area doesn’t seem too dangerous at all.  It felt—” I tried to explain, but the white cop cut me off.

“It’s plenty dangerous.  You walking around like that—it’s like you have a red spot on the back of your head.  You’re a target they can spot from miles away,” the cop said smugly.  He looked me up and down.  He pondered my predicament—being white in downtown in broad daylight—for a moment or two, staring at me, and I almost laughed at how silly the whole scene was.  I wanted to tell him that some of the seedy border towns I cycled through in South America would probably make his quaint beat seem like a particularly clean stretch of Sesame Street, but I resisted.

“OK, hey, I’ll drive you there.  Let’s go, I’ll take you to the hostel,” the cop finally said, surprising me.  “It’s safer.  If you walk there, you’ll never make it.”

I couldn’t help it—I smiled.  Fatalism, when completely irrational, can paint a grin on any face.  Fascinated by this fear-filled chap in front of me, I accepted his offer with hopes that we’d get to talk a bit in the car before we reached the hostel.  Turned out that I didn’t need to do much talking—the cop did enough for the both of us.

When we drove away, he began to explain the flood of warnings he unleashed back in the station house.

“Look,” he said, pulling his car out of the parking lot, “I don’t like black people.  Lots of people here won’t admit that because it’s not politically correct to say.  Lots of people would say they love blacks even when they’re scared to death of ‘em.  I’m just being honest.  I’ve had enough bad experiences with blacks to be able to honestly say I don’t like ‘em.  And if that makes me a racist, so be it.  So be it, really.”

He turned toward me to see what I thought about that.  I didn’t know what to think about that, so I just said, “OK.”

He continued, switching angles and trying to explain his black-people-fear another way.  “I work in the detective unit here.  I went to school for IT, for computers, but I couldn’t find any work because I’m white.  So I became a detective.  Anyway, that’s another story.  My point is that this city isn’t safe.  We have 100,000 people living here and 5-15 house burglaries a night.  All black burglars.  They want what the white’s have—the cars, the houses—everything, really.  It’s just totally out of hand now, I’m telling you.  The crime here is not a joke,” he pleaded.

We came to a red light.  I couldn’t resist telling him about the people I’d met earlier in the day.

“It’s amazing to hear, day after day, about how much tension there is between whites and blacks here,” I said.  “Maybe I just keep getting lucky, but I’ve only met friendly black people on my rides in taxi vans and buses.”  I knew I was probably coming off as naïve, as someone who is blinded by the ignorance that comes with a short visit to a place, but I didn’t care:  In the face of the cop’s racist negativity, to not speak of my positive experiences with black people just hours before would have been unfair to the people who had been kind to me.  When the black man a few days earlier had bought me my bus fare, he also bought himself the right to be defended in conversations.  “It almost seemed like people went out of their way to be friendly to me,” I added.

The cop shook his head, half in disbelief, half in disgust over hearing I’d spent so much time sitting in cramped vans next to black people.

“You got so lucky,” he said, shaking his head.  “Really, you can’t trust these people.  You were more lucky than you know.”

*****

It was hard to take the man seriously with the cluster of beer bottles sitting in front of him.  There weren’t many bottles—maybe three or four—but there were just enough to form a sort of wall from behind which the man bounced around and fired sentences at me.  He didn’t seem drunk, just energized, wide-eyed.  So when he started telling me about how he sees his Kruger Park wildlife guide job as a sort of advocacy post, one that enables him to deflate South Africa’s negative reputation from the ground up, one guest at a time, I at first didn’t know what to make of him.  As he spoke more and more, though, as he leaned over his wall of bottles and nearly exhausted me with the intensity of his stare, an unblinking fierce wall of a gaze, his words got sharp and heavy, cutting themselves into thick sticky sentences.

“So many guests come to South Africa and expect nothing more than race issues and violence.  They know apartheid, and they know about the murder rates, but they don’t know about how magical this place is,” the man said, smiling.  He had a neat circular goatee that changed into different geometric shapes when he pulled his smile taut or sipped his beer.  “When we’re staring out at a baby elephant rubbing up against its mother as the sun is setting on the horizon, I see that moment as a time to talk about South Africa and how amazing it is.  I don’t sit there and let them take pictures quietly.  I try to use the moments to communicate a message to them, one they’ll take home and tell their friends.”  He paused.  “Everyone loves talking about the murders and the racism, but making time to fight against that stuff and talk about the greatness here—that’s the challenge.  Luckily I’m in a position where I get to do that everyday.”

Later on in the night, when I asked the guide what was the most memorable scene he’d ever seen in his five years of driving through the park, he told me about the time he had seen one or more of each of South Africa’s five most dangerous animals, a group of animals referred to as the Big Five—lions, leopards, elephants, buffalos, and rhinos—drinking from the same watering hole.  “All five in one picture!  Man, the tourists were so happy on that tour.  Got some big tips at the end,” he said, laughing.

*****

As a white principal of an all black school, she baffled her friends.  They didn’t quite understand her.  They asked her why she drove ‘out there’ everyday, into an environment that was so clearly foreign to her.  These kids, she would say, deserve to be helped; without people fighting for them, black students in a post-apartheid South Africa would struggle to shake off the baggage their parent’s generation had heaped upon them.  She expected the job to be hard, but the ways in which her position grew complex shocked her.

“We lost two teachers last year to HIV, and three are sick now.  Three more out of a staff of 24,” she said, her voice trailing off and getting lost in the drizzle of the summer night.  Dinner was long over.  The conversation made room in its sentences for sadness, for honesty.  “And the sad thing is that the teachers won’t tell me their sick.  They’ll try to hide it—calling out sick all the time, leaving work early and saying they just don’t feel well.  Everyone knows who’s sick and who’s not.  It’s impossible to hide.”

She told me about how her staff bonded at funerals rather than teacher workshops.  How when a teacher gets really sick, all of the staff congeal into one mass of support that will surround a teacher stretched out on a hospital bed.  How one teacher was convinced that an evil spirit, rather than HIV, was ravaging her body and leaving her exhausted.  How, as baffling as it may sound, men and women at her school reveal inspiring amounts of motivation and intelligence during the school day, only to take huge risks with their lives at night.

When she told me how odd it sounded to her to listen to her teachers talking about their belief in holy spirits, how she didn’t understand how her staff could believe in such things, I couldn’t help but notice the irony in her remark:  She, as a Christian, someone who believed in the Holy Spirit, thought it was strange that other people believed in holy spirits.

After two incredible days with the principal and her husband, days filled with long drives over winding ridge lines and even longer nights filled with good conversation about traveling, spirituality, and all things South Africa, I bid the couple good-bye and headed for the taxi van depot.  Another long ride in a cramped van carried me on to Swaziland.