God’s on the Bus. So close to Gaborone…so far from my travel goal of 192 (give or take) countries before I die. So what to do on a Saturday night but take the Intercape bus to Gaborone, Botswana and Immigration where the travel god will bless me with yet another passport stamp. And it did turn out to be something of a religious holiday. The bus rolls northwest out of Johannesburg through Illinois farm country—the corn is as high as … Right about here the on-board TV comes alive with what appears to be holy roller, fire and brimstone preachers straight from Elmer Gantry—except these have an Afrikaners accent. Through the farm country we go with pro-life ads, Christian pop and, through the small farm towns where only black South Africans seem to be fooling around and shopping and doing their Saturday night visiting. Starts getting dark as the umbrella thorn trees grow green and dense, earth reddens and fat brown and white cows and donkeys snack by the roadside against the sky-mountain purple dusk.

So still…where are endless roadside stands, knots of aimless men, women heading to somewhere with large baskets, kettles, bags perched elegantly on their heads. Where’s the trash? The smell from the smoky fires and the roadside rubbish? This, my friends is another Africa—southern being very different than western/central Africa. THIS IS PEACEFUL ORDINARY EVERYDAY SOUTHERN AFRICA.

  At the bus stop I catch a taxi to the Gaborone Sun. I did try…I did…to find a reasonable normal hotel or guesthouse on line but Gaboronians aren’t big on response to such queries so when I finally decided to go I just booked what I could find easily and American Express-booked a resort gambling ex-pat-in-town-for-the-weekend-from-the-bush camp hotel. DO NOT DO THIS unless you’re coming overland from the deadly jungles of the Congo or have just gone by camel from Cairo to Casablanca. If this is your kind of hotel you should have stayed at home in Amarillo. The hotel staff is very nice however and quite astounded to have a little old lady appear in jeans and a backpack. Tucking myself in for the night to CNN earthquake disaster coverage was already boring…only CNN can repeat so much minutia about every disaster detail of every catastrophic calamity so that even the words and photos of death and destruction of the worst kind have a lulling effect. But I do love you in a kind of obsessive way, CNN.

Sunday Morning in Gaborone. Early, I’m rested, up, showered, out to breakfast. Instead of describing the breakfast myself I’ll let the author of my latest South African murder mystery do it for you. I was reading this while eating and I couldn’t do better myself. “across the deep tan industrial carpet flecked with tiny fern-like organic motifs…into the international-cuisine pine-and-etched-glass emporium with its compound-noun multi-cultural opulence. Sliced melons, German Hams, sausage links, glass jars of muesli and bran flakes weighted down the oversized teak table-top…an endless supply of full, dark coffee….glasses of papaya juice. Globalization. The last time … the juice was called “paw-paw”. Strange fruit.” Author Jane Taylor’s character goes on to describe the guests (except for me), “…Up-country South African parliamentarians, Nigerians, the deputy CEO from a Swiss blood bank attending a symposium on disease control, a French delegation from Rwanda, two Belgian forensic accountants investigating a tax fraud, and an American academic commissioned to write a hagiography of a South African left-liberal novelist. The American’s notebook computer was open in front of him as he jotted down a description of the group mingling around him.”  (Of wild dogs: Jane Taylor, Double Storey Books, a division of Juta & Co. Ltd, Mercury Crescent, Wetton, Cape Town, 2005)

The idea I want to convey is that this crowd in some shape or the other is in every “resort” hotel in every developing country. I have always been so envious of the concept of ex-pat, knowing I’d make a more loyal American abroad than I can ever be at home; I’ve wanted to be one of them but I’m actually not so sure anymore. Whether cultural liaison or AIG rep or missionary or aid worker their lives seem to run parallel in every country. While my bus trip may not exactly introduce me to real life in this or any other country it is a tiny but bona fide experience!

 Sunday morning then. After breakfast I try mightily to gather some ideas from various staff about what to do. “No, no,” they say, “you must rest, you can do nothing, everything is closed, it is the day people go to church and rest, you must rest too.” Now if I were economically-wise I would not be in Gaborone today…but even for me all of the dollars (rands, pula) I’ve spent on the bus and this hotel have to have been for something more than the passport stamp…don’t they? I get a little map of sorts and head for the Parliament and government buildings and the Main Mall. As your trusty Lonely Planet will tell you Gaborone primarily consists of malls and fast food joints but they are closed too on Sundays it seems.

Out the door for what turns out to be a perfectly perfect 2 ½ hour morning jaunt in the warm overcast Botswanian morning. Church-goers walking the neatly swept streets to a scattering of imposing and simple structures among the thorn trees and thorn bushes here on the edge of the desert. I know there are other trees but so far Google hasn’t yielded the information I need to name them. The people I can better describe. Race and tribe are obviously surer things here than in South Africa. The people are mostly Tswana, dark sculpted people of facial dignity and strength. They’re dressed very like our parents and grandparents dressed for church. The women in conservative, crisply-ironed, dark or brightly-patterned dresses, the men in suits or white shirts and slacks. Children spit and polished. They walk at a comfortable pace, not fast, not slow, small groups, obviously even here most people are sleeping in on Sunday morning. It’s a mile or two before I reach the government complex.

Government…as it should represent itself. Here a surprise. Pleasant buildings. well-maintained. Modest. MODEST. No armed secrurity—obvious at least. NO ARMED SECURITY. Am I in Africa? I’m certainly not in DC!  Where’s the opulent Presidential Palace where you will be shouted at if you take pictures? It is not like Botswana has nothing anyone else wants. It has DIAMONDS. The biggest building in the neighborhood is in fact Debswana, the conglomerate of De Beers and the government of Botswana, with the majority of profits reverting to the country and apparently not into the private bank accounts of the government leaders. Seretse Khama Ian Khama is the president, son of the first great leader of Botswana who married an Englishwoman and was exiled to Great Britain for some years. The son is said to be quiet, smart, modest, unmarried, a pilot, wildlife advocate and fitness fanatic. Sounds like Barack’s single brother. Well, actually the Obama brother I’ve seen on TV appears to be rather crazy so I take that back. I am so impressed. I am sure this is government as it should exist. With apparently no one, local or international fundamentalist, gunning for the leader. I stroll from this quiet retreat in the heart of non-blood-diamond political power down the Main Mall, a collection of tacky storefronts offering loans, fried chicken, cheap clothing and videos. Only a couple of vendors are about so I purchase my Botswana souvenir, a brown and gold woven wall hanging for about $3.

Sunday Afternoon in Gaborone. I don’t know this yet but the adventure part of this trip is over. I’m back by noon, greeted by awed desk staff who say “you WALKED, wow, you are strong for such an old person is the subtext of course but that’s okay…if I’m going to get to every country in the world I need to be able to walk the streets when I’m there.

The Gaborone Sun. Gift shop. Decide not to buy the $300 ostrich feather scarf but do get one of South Africa’s gossipy fat Sunday papers. It’s not the Times…well actually it is the South African Times…less serious than our Times perhaps, but then a colleague arrived from the states yesterday with the NY Times for me and the Sunday Styles features an article on a new fad, bus-drinking…in comparison an article about Zuma’s fourth wife’s luxury home seems relatively weighty.

•  I read the paper. I nap.
• I watch more earthquake loops (where is Anderson?).
• I read my book I don’t like so much.
• I watch American Idol! I always learn new things about myself on travels. Now I know my tolerance for minutes of American Idol in my lifetime is 43.
• I get an ice cream Sundae but since a waiter must bring it to my room it’s melted by the time it gets there so I eat the bananas and lick the melted chocolate off my plate.
• My walk inspired me so I decide to do some planks. My gym friends would be proud.
• Planks are not mentally stimulating but between the earthquake the planks the bad book, yet one more article about sex in South Africa and a bath (I hate baths but thought I could try one in this decade to see if my mind had changed) the day passed.
• I slept
• I took the 6:30am bus to Johannesburg.

God of nomads, bless Gaborone and the Intercape bus company. No, god bless travel and passport stamps and new countries and curiosity.  And thank you for Sunday in Gaborone oh mighty toothpick tree.

A note: I feel rather guilty about not exploring further somehow in this rather odd and elusive country. Two bits of information then: 1) Read Michael Stanley’s murder mysteries starring Detective Kubu (A Carrion Death and A Deadly Trade). They are much better in my humble murder mystery-expert opinion than the Women’s Detective Agency books. Not quite as simplistic. And then I found this poem on line at Off-the-Wall Poetry, a Western Cape web site. I share it to counteract any sense that Botswana is all mall and KFC.

BOTSWANA MEMORIES

I grew up in the woods at the end of the  gravel road (Minnesota, not Mississippi, otherwise Lucinda Williams Car Tires on a Gravel Road is my childhood memory too). The variety of green available in that world was pretty well covered by the balsam, cedar, spruce, balm of Gilead poplars (baummies to us), aspen/poplars, willows and more surrounding the tiny farmstead and stucco/log house; sometimes in late spring it was seeing all of the world through a kaleidoscope that only included shades of GREEN. And in spite of being rather poor how very secure it was. It was warm in the winter, full of friendly insect life in the summer, big yeasty loaves of white bread baking, maybe cinnamon rolls too, the kind with sour cream topping adding just a touch of tart to the warm sweetness of cinnamon and brown sugar, dogs barked, neighbors came for coffee, an environment that will always represent my version of the nest we probably all need.

This is to say I had a proper nest from which to approach the world. Somehow my apartment in Albuquerque, New Mexico manages to almost equal that early environment: Many trees because I’m near the Rio Grande, just minutes from the Bosque, now they’re cottonwoods and there is never quite the sense of falling into vat of ‘essence of green’, still…, my apartment is small, full of the bright dark colors that everyone says makes rooms seem even smaller, which for me is a goal—just recreated home. So there are not a lot of baking smells, should get a bread machine I guess (sorry, mom) but coffee perking and Amy’s Enchiladas cooking in the microwave supplies a bit of scent to the place.  Besides when I walk by the river in the morning I can smell elephant dung and hear Africa Land awakening at the neighborhood zoo. That is why I do not need to go on safari when in Africa.

HOWEVER IN SPITE OF ALL OF THIS COZY-SOUNDING HOMESPUN RHETORIC, I AM ALWAYS MOVING ON–A NOMAD. Just need a nest to which to return.

Two Kinds of People

There really are only two kinds of people in the world (sometimes the lines blur or the multiple personalities overlap):

1. People who consider their nest as priority number one. I looked up nest in several on-line dictionaries and it is defined variously as “The place in which one’s domestic affections are centered,” “a cozy or secluded retreat [retreat=a place of privacy, a place affording peace and quiet],” “a place affording snug refuge or lodging—a home.”
2. People who must wander, who always want to see what is over the next hill or around the next bend. Here my thesaurus gives me nomad, vagrant, itinerant, traveler, rover, rambler, drifter, rolling stone.

We have, then, the nesters and the nomads. Although again we must agree that nesters sometimes want adventure, to see the world’s sights and experience the world’s wonders—but it is probably not their priority. And nomads want to have a nest to which to return for connections, financial regrouping—as in work, the sheer familiarity of one’s own bed and shower.

In my own family there are examples of people confused about the category into which they fit. Robert and Marsha, you know who you are! Looking for the perfect place. Buying houses in Minnesota, Alaska, Florida, trying to love New Mexico where there’s family, maybe loving Louisiana or Alabama or Georgia…but not quite. Not moving beyond U.S. borders much because there is the DOG. But always always looking for the perfect nest while struggling with their evil nomadic twins

Here’s one way to know you’re a nomad. Two nights ago I was trying to shower, doubled over from the pain of an RA flare-up, vomiting up the sole thing I’d eaten in 24 hours. I was in Windhoek, Namibia—a very long way from home. Supposed to take buses over a couple of days to Johannesburg. Pain won the battle, besides which I could not walk, and I spent an extra day feeling lost and sorry for myself in a very foreign city. Early flight yesterday to Jo’burg, to doctor, massive dose of prednisone, night’s sleep and today I’ve planned and finished booking my bus trip and hotel in Gaborone, Botswana tomorrow!

 We all envy each other. The nesters and the nomads. I wonder if it’s nature versus nurture. My family history includes apocryphal stories of gypsies and reindeer herders which generally I choose to believe, not based on fact but if we nomads only relied on fact where would we be—home saving money. And my dad came over from Norway on a ship. So there’s nature for you. I was nurtured in that snug nest ringed by trees so tightly you couldn’t see the storm until it was over your house. I knew I had to move on from a very early age—since my tiny self could turn the pages of mom’s old grade school geography book with the maps everywhere and big hand-colored photos of Rio and Yellowstone Park. Guess nature wins. Although I discovered after many years that my wayfarer father who had an itinerant fiddler for a great-grandfather really hated to leave his northwoods and my mother, who grew up in the relatively stable environment of the Dakota River Valley, was a closet nomad. I should have known since she remembered every single detail of every scrap of geography and history she ever had in school.

Okay…well I will think of this some more as I head up the road to GABORONE. Yes. With one small backpack. What a luxury for a nomad; usually you must take more than clean underwear a couple of books toothbrush billfold lipstick! Jackets tied to backpack in case the bus is cold. OFF TO ANOTHER PASSPORT STAMP.

Cape Town is disdainfully dubbed Africa Lite, intended to separate its European ambience from the real Africa of out-of-control cities such as Dakar or destroyed cities like Kinshasa. It is true; Cape Town is surely one of the most delightful cities in the world but the fact that it shares a continent with Mogadishu does not make it less authentically African…does it? Cape Town proper is in the process of getting its best foot beautifully shod and putting it way forward in June for the World Cup. You cannot not sense what this means to all of Africa—a place on the world stage of important game-worthy, tourist-worthy continents. And South Africa, former pariah of the sports world—hosting the cup. Makes Africa-aficionado hearts beat just a little faster whether you care about soccer or not!

I try to figure out my fascination with this country—where I am about to spend over a month, a few days of that traveling by bus just to feel what the non-urban South Africa is like. Of course I am drawn to every corner of this continent with some old-fashioned desire to explore or maybe explore-lite is a more apt term since I’m not exactly sleeping in the bush. But South Africa is unique; it is the country in the world with which we share the most history. We (the US and South Africa) are so alike, almost mirror images of each other in some ways with the colors reversed like one of those old negatives. It’s true that the black minority has never dominated in politics or finance in the US while the white minority in South Africa did for a very long time. But the history of apartheid is similar in both of our countries and white power has never been anything except harsh in either.  Now it’s a new day…and we look at what might be. It feels like both countries could get it right with Barack Obama in our present and Nelson Mandela in South Africa’s past and, hopefully, Joseph Zuma up to the task of South Africa’s future.

I left the US, happy to be gone from endless news of the American fundamentalist forays onto the political battlefield from every ditch and cave. I come here to a society in big economic trouble with a president who is on the verge of becoming a stereotype for bad boy behavior but nevertheless a country that in many ways feels more eager and open than us to discussing the BIG issue which is how to move past race and get on with the work of the nation. Americans said on election night November 2008 we had done that. Wrong. Nelson Mandela hoped it would happen here when apartheid ended. Wrong. Still, considering the relative newness of both countries attempts at color-blind societies, it is amazing that the US has a black president and that South Africa, a country whose leaders once considered Adolph Hitler their political guru, is witnessing a multi-racial society pretty close to working pretty well.

My airline seatmate on the flight from Dakar, a pleasant and successful young white South African who markets expensive liquors and other high-end products in West Africa—what could the Congo possibly need more than high-class gin and vodka—says of course apartheid was terrible but, he also says, instead of simply replacing whites with blacks in as many positions as possible couldn’t there have been some thought given to training and education first.  Of course he’s right in a way, but how does any new leader say to a people who have been hugely repressed and discriminated against for their entire lives that now you must somehow spend the next many years getting educated (as though the facilities existed to do that) before you can have a position that pays you a living wage. Impossible. So the alternative is sometimes putting people in jobs they’re not qualified for but will grow into, and watching the country slip a notch or two on the efficiency ladder. It can right itself, and in fact is, with the government hopefully sincere about paying extra attention to education. While the problem is bigger in South Africa, the US has a ways to go before we reach an educational high ground that includes every kid of every race and ethnicity. More similarities.

My taxi driver from the airport, a black South African, said “Yes, the President is doing some good maybe, but he’s a joke with all those kids and wives and girlfriends.”  (President Zuma just took a new wife, his third, and the news just broke that he has fathered a new baby with the daughter of one of his government officials. “And” says the driver, “Now the blacks are treating the whites just like the whites did the blacks before.” He doesn’t seem to think that ‘turnabout being fair play’ is going to get the country anywhere. But did I know that Thursday was the 20^th anniversary of the day Nelson Mandela was released from prison? “We’ve come a long way,” he says.

Conundrums

I was in Cape Town for more than a week and it is a lovely low-key city. Beautiful old buildings, Table Mountain looming above, the Atlantic right at the city’s edge, full of restaurants and stores and prosperous looking people of all hues. I have been describing it as San Diego with character. But San Diego doesn’t have townships? And on the edge of Cape Town, everyone’s-favorite-city, lies the Cape Flats…where the black, coloured and Asian populations were forcibly moved during apartheid, in fact moved into separate neighborhoods even in the Flats. Now downtown and the ‘good’ suburbs are increasingly home to coloureds and Asians but still not so many blacks. The mythical color-blind society is still a long ways in the future. But, admittedly knowing little of New Orleans, I understand that it is a city of neighborhoods approaching the intensity and color concentration of the townships of South Africa. Am I wrong?

It seems to me from my various conversations that one difference does stand out as the races reconsider who they are. In the US, people of mixed parentage typically identify with the race of color or the “minority” race that makes up some part of their heritage. Two of my grandchildren are half-Filipino and they very much identify as Asian. Barack Obama has described his path to becoming African/African-American. In South Africa, with apartheid’s divide and conquer strategy always in play, the divisions between white, coloured, Asian and black were so clearly marked and so programmed into the minds of the population that the divisions still exist although one would never know it in downtown Cape Town. More complicated than simply being a ‘person of color.’

The racial criss-crossings and animosities and attractions and the very way history records and defines the relationships creates something of a conundrum. If Cape Town doesn’t feel very “African” because so much of its visible downtown population is white and whites are a tiny minority in SA, then does New Orleans not feel very “American” because much of its visible population is black and only a minority of Americans are black? We think of New Orleans as practically our favorite American city, don’t we? Or another way of saying this. Why do African Americans seem completely American and white Africans not quite African? The latter is a topic of discussion and dissension all over Africa, apparently always has been. I’m sure there’s an easy answer like—whites came willingly to Africa, Africans did not come willingly to North America. But I’m not sure it’s that easy.

I mentioned to my Cape Town friend that actually in South Africa it did feel that whites were South African and I’ve never quite had that feeling elsewhere in Africa. Did that make sense I asked. She said, “Yes of course. Think of it this way, whatever good and bad was to follow when those early Dutchmen arrived they came to stay, not to colonize and return home. They started calling themselves Afrikaners early on whereas the French and the Brits never claimed Africa as their homeland.”

The Township Tour!

 I have always felt a little queasy about poverty tours from the old photos of Bobby Kennedy in Appalachian shacks to the favela tours of Rio and on down to me with some other Europeans taking a van into the Cape Flats. I have now been on two such tours in South Africa, a few years ago to Soweto and now to Langa, Khayelitsha and Crossroads. All in all, I guess if it is done respectfully and it brings business into the township and a bit of understanding of what real poverty looks like to a few more comfortable people, it’s worthwhile?

It really becomes important to read a history of this country in conjunction with being here and before doing this. I had just picked up Dominique Lapierre’s 2008 book, A Rainbow in the Night, and spent a mildly-sick day in bed reading it from cover to cover. It’s as even-handed as one could possibly be when considering apartheid is at the heart of this country’s history, and it was an update for me on details that had been forgotten or never known. For example the story of District 6 and the forced removals of its multi-cultural population into their own compounds/ghettos by race: black, coloured or Asian; then the area was razed so the sinful example of races living peacefully and equitably together could be erased from history. And Crossroads where the march against the bearing of passbooks originated, or Landa, the first township and the home of our guide.

The tour was well done. The guide was matter-of-fact and comfortable,taking the six visitors into all but the “informal” sectors where no services are provided among the shacks truly cobbled together from whatever scrap of material can be nailed to the next. Areas within townships are classified by degree of stability and, in a way, prosperity from the “informal” on up to areas where the shacks have gradually been replaced by tiny concrete structures then by larger concrete homes with several rooms, plumbing and small yards. The single men’s dormitories that housed the thousands of men who came from all over South Africa and the rest of Africa to find work in the cities and who were absolutely restricted to hideous overcrowding with no facilities to maintain any measure of privacy, cleanliness, humanity still exist. Woman and children came to join their men, initially living in the same conditions. Now, very gradually, these structures are being turned into apartment blocks; at the low-end a family of six or so sharing a room with bunk beds climbing the walls, shared cooking facilities, pumps in the yard, miserable outdoor toilets. At the high end and the eventual goal, they become two or three room apartments with proper plumbing, etc. It’s  also true that modern life goes on, hard to maintain but TVs are on with teenagers doing homework while their cell phones charge; the mamas are cooking and shooing the babies about and the men are at work.

We stopped at a dirt-floor dark and claustrophobic Shebeen, shared a pail of traditional beer, all yeasty like bread dough in the process of rising; at a traditional healer’s, nasty skins and tiny heads all about; and visited a bed and breakfast where I will certainly stay for a day or two when I return to Cape Town. It’s in an area of Khayelitsha where the structures have all become concrete houses and the dirt streets are trash-free but it’s still smack in the middle of the Township. It is a lovely B and B really, airy bedrooms, neatly made beds with their traditional quilts; you can tell the house is pieced together over time but all the more character because of it. I’ll publish the name of it when I return home.

Art and Stories

This meandering travel commentary needs lots of editing but I must get it on the blog before it keeps me in blog block any longer. Just to finish with a note. The stories one hears from friends, artists, taxi drivers, hotel staff are endless. Like the US, South Africa subjugated more than one race, treated them brutally and will be dealing with the results for decades to come. The complicated consequences are being explored by everyone and—whether the story is of Native Americans and African Americans raising their voices through theater or the young African choreographer I met yesterday talking about the role the history of this country (Namibia, where I am now, was part of South Africa) plays in his work—it is a rich field of inquiry destined for many art, social and political investigations in the decades to come.