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Finland in the Dark Continent A Journey Through Southern Africa Copyright 1989-1993 by Richard Bollar - All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form, by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except brief extracts for the purpose of review, without the written permission of the publisher and copyright owner.
South Africa I walked through the opaque sliding doors into the arrivals hall. John was there to meet me along with my host in Johannesburg, Vernon Alder. Vernon was holding a cooler and after the introductions had been made, Vernon opened the cooler and handed me a can of Castle lager. It's virtually the only beer in South Africa, but fortunately it was very tasty. Also, it happened to be five point five percent alcohol. Yummy! As bad as I felt, I knew that John looked worse. His flight had been full, and flying Economy, there wasn't too much room to stretch out. His head was cocked at an angle, which I attributed to sleeping with his chin on his chest. We walked into the parking lot and loaded ourselves into an Opel with right-hand drive. This leg of the journey was nearly at an end.... The drive to Vernon's house was short, about fifteen minutes. I had two Castles on the way and enjoyed the strikingly different scenery. Everything was so brown. It doesn't rain much in this part of Africa and it shows. The only grass is really found in lawns. It isn't quite as bad as Arizona but it is similar. A couple of things struck me as we drove. Every house had a wall around it. An ornamental one, certainly not one that could keep anything out. Also I noticed that there were many blacks walking along the streets. Vernon told me that they were probably walking to or from work. As for the walls, it's sort of a fad, he said. Vernon's house had the wall, a pool and a housekeeper named Beauty. Vernon is an executive with the First National Bank of South Africa, East Transvaal (formerly Barclay's) and this house is one of the perks. Income taxes are so excessive in South Africa that most people are not well paid. Instead, their employers 'perk' them to death. Cars and housing subsidies are most common. Unfortunately the government has caught on and has just instituted a 'perk tax' that threatens to be as onerous as the income tax. Another sign of a country going down the tubes. Vernon's house is small, it has three tiny bedrooms, a bathroom and a shower room. The living room is spacious and that was the first room that I saw. Pam was asleep on the sofa and the remainder of Vernon's family was there as well. Phyll (for Phyllis) and Gavin were expecting us. Both of them were as nice to meet as Vernon, but didn't seem to be as much fun as he was. We spoke about the trip for a while, John and I comparing German pilsners to British ales. Vernon brought out some more Castle and prepared the braai. A braai is a barbecue and the South Africans love to roast things. Today's menu was boerwewoeurs (pork sausage). The smells coming from the grill were incredible! I've always found traveling West to East to be a chore. In my first afternoon in Africa staying awake was the chore. I took my Castle out to the Braai and watched the roasting woeurs. When I landed, it was raining; a rarity in this arid part of the world, but now the sky was clear. Johannesburg is over a mile high and the sun warmed the sky quickly. I could feel my face burning in the first couple of minutes outside, so I quickly found my sunscreen (an act that I would repeat many times over the course of the journey) and got relief. The temperature reached eighty, which was normal. It was late autumn, after all. The woeurs were soon ready and we ate them on hard rolls with margarine and chili relish. I could call the relish a salsa or a picante sauce, but I don't think that would be completely accurate. It was much too sweet, very British. For those of you who have eaten catsup in Europe, it was similar. Not very tangy, but a wonderful accompaniment to the sausages! I ate as many as I was allowed and sat in a lounge chair as the sun set at an early 1830. Vernon had invited some friends over to meet the 'Americans.' I guess that you could say that they were a broad cross-section of privileged, successful, Whites. We talked politics. Everyone wanted to know more about U.S. views on South Africa. They felt that our news broadcasts sensationalized the situation there. One person suggested that South Africa might have to turn to the Soviets for aide. There was agreement throughout the living room. Gavin was there. He had taken my video camera and was recording conversation around the room. Reviewing the tape later, I found that it consisted mostly of conversation with his cat. Too bad. Finally, I could hold out no longer. It was about 2130 and I was not going to stay awake any longer. It was now that I learned that I was to sleep in the family caravan. I walked outside and was surprised by how very cold that it was! The thin atmosphere let temperatures drop rapidly and as I walked to the caravan I wondered how warm I would be. I shouldn't have worried; there were enough blankets to keep me warm in much worse weather. The width of the bed was my only problem. It was obvious that if I rolled over, I would more than likely roll off. It probably didn't matter as I was so incredibly tired I wouldn't even notice. I took off my clothing for the past three days and threw them on the floor. I then remembered that I might have to wear them for a while longer and I dutifully picked them up and hung them to air. I crawled into bed and closed my eyes. No dreams for me and I did not awaken until 1100 on May Day. Well, there might have been an early morning stroll to the bushes to give some of those Castles back to nature....
May Day is a holiday in South Africa. I mention this because, like every country aside from the United States, South Africa completely closes down. You can compare the holiday to Christmas here. Only Chinese restaurants and cinemas are open. I woke up and thought of this. I realized that I wasn't going to be able to get any new clothing today. I crawled out of bed and looked at my clothes. The airing did them good, and they looked almost presentable. It was also good that my undies had a chance to air, too (ahem). I dressed and walked into the main house to find that John and Pam had just gotten up. Vernon handed me a mug of coffee loaded down with milk and sugar (more milk than coffee, I'd say) and a box of rusks. Rusks are dough sticks that have been baked hard. They are usually loaded with sultanas, uh, I mean raisins and taste horrible unless dunked in coffee. It didn't take me long to get the hang of that. After coffee, I took a shower. Lots of hot water and it felt great! John had given me one of his rugby shirts so at least I looked a little bit different. I certainly felt better! Outside, lunch preparations were underway. More woeurs, grilled tomatoes, and eggs made to order. We made this meal on a skittlebraai. It's one of many different shaped grills that they have down there. This one was a gas bottle with a wok like surface on top. It worked very well. I must also add here that the chili relish goes with eggs as well as the woeurs. As I ate, I noticed that the labels on everything in front of me were in Afrikaans and English. The country is very democratic about using the languages. Street signs are in one language or the other. If you count the number of signs in each language they would be even. In currency, the one, five, twenty and hundred Rand notes are in Afrikaans. The two, ten, fifty and five hundred are in English. Since everyone speaks both, it really doesn't matter.
After the beers, we watched a demonstration of making gold bars, which was really neat! The workers took molten gold and poured it into an ingot shaped (what else) mold. As the host described the mining process, the bar cooled. Only five minutes later, the workers inverted the mold and a block of gold fell out. We were told that it weighed forty pounds. Let's see: At three hundred and eighty US dollars per ounce, that would be a pretty good chunk of change. They mill two tons of rock for each ounce of gold, so you can see how they justify their mark up. We were allowed to try to lift the bar and though it could be picked up, it
was deceptively heavy. I decided not to take it as a souvenir. It was time for
tribal dancing, so we left (reluctantly) the gold.
Another beer and there was but one thing left to do. We entered the mine.... The mine cost extra. Why wasn't I surprised? As I recall, it was about four Rand ($1.50) so it wasn't going to break my back. In the holding pen, we looked at an exhibit of gold mining in South Africa. Their view of the mining process (mainly of the treatment of workers several hundred years ago) differed from what I had the opportunity to learn in school. We waited for only a couple of minutes before we were ushered into the mining area. I had figured that we were going into some mockup, so I was rather surprised to be handed a mining helmet along with a lantern and a hellacious battery pack. As we put the gear on, we were led to the elevator. It looked like a cattle car and once the thirty of us were on board, it certainly felt like one. We were warned to hold on and then the elevator dropped. We went down about five hundred meters and arrived at an unloading point. This was a higher platform on the mine and a chart on the wall showed that the shaft descended another twenty-five hundred meters! After we squeezed out of the elevator, the tour began. Wandering down a corridor about two meters high we learned about South African mining history. Most interesting was the fact that all of the mine workers spoke a common language called {I forget}. It consists of only a couple of hundred words and covers everything that one would need to communicate in the mines. This language was necessary because the miners and supervisors spoke over fifty different native languages. Also along the way were safety posters conveying messages in pictures, English and Afrikaans, not to mention {whatever that language was}. We also saw a demonstration of drilling for gold. Actually I guess it was really a demonstration of drilling a hole for explosives. First, two miners hammered a bit into the rock. They made little progress. Then, just one of them took a hydraulic hammer and put a pretty decent sized hole into the rock in just a few seconds. After the explosion, the rocks are loaded onto carts and hauled out of the mine. Remember that several cart loads of rock will yield only an ounce or so of gold. The rock is ground into a slurry and subjected to a bath of acid and mercury. That combination supposedly liberates the gold. It also kills off many of the employees in lesser developed countries, I'm told. Something about becoming as Mad as a Hatter, a reference to the haberdashers who polished top hats with mercury.... The tour of the mine ended uneventfully and we returned our heavy safety gear to the attendant as we left. I tried to get Pam to take some video of me in front of those safety signs, but, as usual, that didn't work out so well, so I've got a few exciting minutes of the floor of a South African mine. Ah, surface after so long underground. It had to be time for another beer. And it was! Vernon met us at the exit with a Castle (what else?) for each of us. We enjoyed it immensely. Being Autumn, it got dark quickly and it was soon time for us to leave. Jet lag and beer fought with my nervous energy and I alternated between sleeping and staring out the window on the way home. Dinner this holiday Monday was spent with some former neighbors of Pam & John's. The drive took us past their old home, but unfortunately, it was dark and we couldn't really see it. Even so, they were obviously excited to be in their old neighborhood. The dinner was quite pleasant, but it was also very European. I don't know what I was thinking, but I guess I was expecting food to be substantially different. No such luck. No kudu, no ostrich, no nothing. Only lamb & beef & pork. The evening was well spent. Good conversation with this elderly couple, combined with good South African wines and I was in a right jolly mood. {Insert Corner Store Visit} I guess we stayed out a little too long, because I didn't see my little caravan again until midnight. I spent the next hour narrating my video tape and found that I didn't remember any of it when I had the chance to replay it upon my return. It was another cold South African night, and I needed every one of the fifteen pounds of blankets allotted me to stay even close to warm. I was allowed to sleep until nine on May 2, where I got to enjoy more of that coffee laden with sugar and cream along with a fresh box of rusks. I was developing a real taste for those things already. South Africa suffers from trade embargoes from many countries, and one of them must be Columbia. It was exceedingly difficult to get coffee what wasn't laced with chicory. I don't remember having a decent cup the entire time that I was there. Dropping by the grocery store, the reason was clear: REAL coffee cost almost twenty dollars a pound. Yeah, I think I could kick the habit very quickly that way. Our morning was another leisurely one. Vernon and Phyll were off to work, Gavin off to school, and Beauty, the maid, was working on doing the wash. I guess that just about any of us could afford a maid there - Beauty makes only fifty dollars a month. It's partly due to the tremendous labor pool that they have, but probably more because of the lack of opportunity afforded Blacks. Beauty was fairly genial, and she did make a pretty decent cup of coffee (chicory aside). I wanted to chat with her for a while, but she wasn't going to let that happen. I doubt that she would have been honest with me in any case, my being a guest of her 'master' and all.... Tuesday, May 2 was the first business day since my arrival in South Africa, and my hopes were high that I would see my bag again today. I called British Airways and they assured me that the bag would be on South African Airways flight from Frankfurt that day. I should drop by in the early afternoon to acquire my bag. I was fairly excited, but I'm sure that you might have guessed that.
Our friend did the flying, which was just fine with me. I just sat back and enjoyed the view. We flew over Johannesburg, as well as the major sights. I was surprised how visible the gold reef was. Jo'burg straddles the reef, and there is little development on the reef. I'm told that's because of the explosions caused by the mining. It's not very good for the buildings!
The landing was a little bit rough, and I attribute that to the extremely turbulent air. The warming action that the high altitude of the African plain has on the atmosphere really takes its toll on the little planes. We did make it back down, though. We took a few minutes to tie the plane down, and walked to the airport snack bar to pick up a soda. Outside the gate to the terminal were five Black security guards walking a forced, double-time march. It is my understanding that they were being punished for something. Being slightly biased about this, I would suggest that someone was being capricious. {expand} The snack bar was another reminder of how slowly things happen in Africa. There was a woman there who was in no hurry to do anything for us. We may have been a bit rude and, of course, that only slowed her down more. John asked, "Do you have a word in Afrikaans that is the equivalent of the South American maņana?" Yes, we learned, there were several such words, but none of them carried the same sense of urgency.... We did get our sodas and decided to go to a favorite hang-out of John's for lunch. "Best club sandwiches in Africa," he would say. They were good sandwiches, and we split them with chocolate milkshakes. These milkshakes were the European variety: Not thick, very sweet. After lunch, Andre dropped us off at Jan Smuts airport. John and Pam went to gather a rental car for the rest of our day and I went to the British Airways station manager's office to collect my bag. Hmm, I wonder why these people don't look happy to see me? Oh, no bag today. Gee, what a shame. The BA people seemed to be fairly upset about the whole thing, but they probably weren't anywhere close to being as upset as I was. They swore that they had found the bag, and showed me a long string of Telexes to prove that they had, indeed, found mine. It was in Nairobi, having arrived on Pan Am's 1066 on Sunday night. For some reason, it was not loaded onto BA's flight to Johannesburg. What a shame. Angela (with the blue eyes) suggested that I could pick up my bag tomorrow at ten in the morning. Well, gee, I'm going to be off 'camping' starting tomorrow morning early and I'll not be able to do that. I guessed that they would have to fly the bag to meet me in Walvis Bay during the following week and I agreed that I would call them as soon as I knew when I would be near an airport. While I was suffering through this pain, John successfully got the rental car and I bundled into the back, enjoying my black mood. First stop on our journey was to the flight catering kitchen. This was where John worked when he was stationed here. Funny thing, but the only thing that was different from when Marriott owned the place was that John was missing. Even Ed Marchand, was the same General Manager, and the mainframe there had 'Marriott International In-Flite' on the logon screens. There were lots of hugs and kisses from the staff. Many people (including the salad makers, no less!) were very excited to see him. I sort of blended into the woodwork, representing the evil empire who abandoned this little installation. {expand on tour and include John's payroll story} After visiting the kitchen, we came to a fairly significant realization. Since I didn't have my bag, I was going to have to buy some sort of clothing to get me through the trip! Let's see, what exactly was I missing? Okay, fifty rolls of film, hiking boots, clothing, my tripod and God knows what else. I obviously had my work cut out for me.... Having practically no clothing other than that in Beauty's wash basin and what had been given me, a return to the East Rand Shopping Centre was obviously in order. Pam and John went shopping for tribal masks and dropped me off at Greaterman's, a store very much like Macy's. And I noticed on the door that they took American Express! A painful hour later, I had purchased 250 dollars of appropriate safari gear and fended off the advances from a fairly effeminate clerk. The guy really insisted on helping me size the underwear. Avoiding that little 'pleasure,' I did notice the tags inside all of my purchases: Jockey, Hang Ten, Hanes - I might as well have been in the States. All of the clothing was made in South Africa under license from the original trade-name owners. I can tell you now that I still have all of the clothing that I bought there, and they have held up well, aside from a pair of Jockeys that have an ugly gash through one of the panels <ahem>. What a bargain! I was starting to get into the swing of being in Africa and must have been rattling on about something from the back seat of the car when John reminded me that we weren't really here to see the cities and the people, we're here to take pictures of the animals. Oh, yeah. The animals. At that point, cruising down the highway in this slightly alien territory, I think that I would have just as soon hung out in the Transvaal, or maybe gone to Cape Town or Durban. After all, who wants to go see some cows and goats out in the field? Cows and goats? You're in Africa, you dumb shit. You're supposed to see Lions and Tigers and Bears, oh my! Well, lions and ostrich and zebra. I started to cheer up when I remembered that. We had pretty much frittered our way through the day, and it was approaching dusk as we returned home. We had too short a rest before it was time to clean up for our final social event before trekking out into the veldt. I remember that shower feeling extra-especially good, and lingered in it only a bit before I realized that I was not the last to use it that night. From my camping experience (yeah, like I do this all the time) in the States, I had come to appreciate a good, hot shower. I suppose I was just preparing myself for the deprivation ahead. Dinner was nice! We went to a French restaurant off in one of the suburbs and had a splendid time. All the 'regulars' were there, and we spoke of politics, the South African game parks, and the near-by countries who prosper in South Africa's shadow. The South African wines were a delightful complement to the well-prepared food. I had a steak, which didn't taste anything like it does in the States (which I had expected as they couldn't possibly put as many chemicals into their cows as we do), but it didn't taste like a European steak either. That was a surprise as the Europeans get much of their meat from South Africa and Namibia. I guess I was becoming jaded, because I was not surprised by the staffing at the restaurant. There were a number of black guys who would clean tables and serve meals. They did not speak to us, nor did they look at us as they worked around us. Their uniforms were slightly ratty and tattered; a reminder that the infrastructure of the country is disintegrating. A white guy took our orders and came by now and again to ensure our satisfaction. Seems like a fairly easy job to me! We returned home fairly late and slightly inebriated to settle down and watch the late news before turning in for our early start in the morning. I don't remember much of the newscast aside from something about a bomb and some guys getting killed in Soweto. Nothing that you wouldn't hear about on the US news. Hold it! Soweto is only a couple of kilometers from here. I definitely need to sleep. The weirdness is getting to me.... I have never enjoyed wake up calls, so the wake up call at 0430 on Wednesday, May 3 did not endear itself to me at all. I stumbled out of the caravan to find that it was cold outside. I guess I'd never really gotten up early enough up to this point to see that. You can just call me Mr. Grumpy. Phyll had plenty of coffee and rusks, and I sucked down on those for a bit while John and Pam got ready. My stuff was still in the bags from the shopping mall. Round about 0515 I got to meet the infamous Pat Coles. Pat drove up in his Land Rover all painted up in zebra stripes like something left over from 'Doktari' and hopped out to pop open the little trailer he was towing. Despite the fact that I thought it was bloody cold out, he was wearing shorts, tennis shoes and a sweatshirt. His hair and beard stood straight out giving him an oddly mad scientist look about him. He dumped our stuff into the trailer or into the back of the Rover, pushed us through some quick good-byes with Vernon and Phyll (Gavin slept in) and trundled us into the Rover. We were off! Cruising on the Johannesburg bypass on our way to the west as the sun was rising reminded me of just how odd it was. Even if you won't concede 'odd' to me, you've got to admit that driving through a major city in a Land Rover painted like a striped red and black thing is a little 'frontier-like.' "Coffee?" Pat wanted to know? Sure, who would pass up coffee! We sipped coffee from a Thermos and introduced ourselves to each other while Pam and John straightened out the back. The back, you see, was set up for serious photography. The seats had been removed so that there was a substantial area to set up a tripod. All the sleeping bags and ground pads were there for comfort, and John did a decent job of turning the back into a nice little nest. In the far back were an electric/propane refrigerator and some other camping gear. As we drove past the exit for Soweto, I vaguely remembered the news from the previous night. From the main road, though, you would never be able to tell. The Soweto sign with arrow looked just like any exit you would find on an American interstate highway. The only difference was the large number of blacks walking on the road toward Jo'burg from their home, the Southwest Township. The city rapidly dropped behind us and the road quickly went from six lanes to four to two. We drove through brown pastures with cows grazing and saw the landscape open up into the high African plain. The flat landscape was punctuated with huge hills of red soil. Pat explained that the soil was the remnant of earlier mining. For every set of big hills, there would likely be a mine shaft very near by. Pat was full of great information; very knowledgeable about just about everything South African. As we continued, I saw some of the mines. Most looked closed, as though the vein had dried up, but some showed activity. Pat confirmed this for me. It turns out that most of these mines had closed because it was too expensive to mine for the smaller yield here. However, as gold rose in value, it became worthwhile to reopen the mines. Further, because refining processes had improved so very much, the landfills could be re-mined themselves for a quick, though low-yield, killing. You wouldn't often find a nugget in the landfill, but with the right equipment, you would strain out a fortune in gold dust. I heard a voice in the back say, "Castle?" Sure! I'm sure that it's afternoon in Lhasa, Tibet by now... I took the opened can and took a good slug off the beer. It was warm. Incredible but true. I turned to John and told him that we needed to turn the refrigerator down a bit as the beer was cold. He finished off his first beer and pulled out a second before answering. The refrigerator was for the film, and we would buy beer as we went, purchasing often to ensure that the ready supply would be cold. As the trip progressed, I would find that the refrigerator would settle, and there would be room for six beers or so in it. If one were careful and always replaced a beer as one was taken out, there would always be a cool if not cold beer available. As we continued west, I learned more about Pat. Of late, Pat is a professional photographer. John met him at the local photo club when he lived in Johannesburg, and they had been on trips like this before. Pat is apparently independently wealthy, as he spends most of his time traveling in Namibia. Before sanctions, he was a professional race car driver, and I suppose that he did well. I was certainly impressed with his ability to jockey the Land Rover down the road. Aside from a potty break by the side of the road, we did not stop again before we reached the town of Kuruman, right on the edge of Bophuthatswana (one of the so-called 'Homelands'). Our State Department advises Americans to stay out of those areas because of spotty enforcement of South African laws. It's difficult to stay out, though. Referring back to my 1/4,000,000 scale Michelin 'Afrique Centre et Sud' map, I had been in and out of Bophuthatswana four times. Hell, I might as well have visited Sun City. Like most South African towns that I saw, Kuruman is pretty much a one-horse outfit, with about half of the residents working for a near-by mine or supporting it. The remainder were ranchers, tending livestock and small fields on the arid land. The town had all the standard amenities, though; the big sign on the way in indicated the meeting times for the Rotary, Civitan and Kiwanis clubs as well as the locations of the churches. We stopped at a BP station and tanked up the Land Rover. It took awhile because the machine has two tanks holding two hundred and fifty liters of petrol, uh, gasoline, but that gave us ample time to explore. There wasn't much to see, really, but we stopped into the bottle shop and got a couple of cold beers as well as some munchies like salt & vinegar potato chips and Cadbury chocolate bars. After that and another potty break, we were ready to go. It was decision time. For those of you following along with your own southern Africa maps, you can see that Kuruman is a crossroads of sorts. One could go south to the Kimberly diamond mines, west to Upington and Namibia or northwest to Botswana and the Kalahari desert. I would have enjoyed seeing the mines, but Pat had other ideas. We must be in a game park tonight! Not only that, but we must hurry as the gates close at sunset. We headed northwest towards the Kalahari Gemsbok National Park at high speed. Shortly we sped through a town called Hotazel (hot as hell), a manganese mine. Here the road became unsealed, and we entered the Kalahari desert.... To take a road as beautiful as this and just call it 'unsealed' just doesn't do it justice. It's true that it wasn't paved, but it was perfectly smooth. We cruised over it at 110 kph and felt pretty much the same as when we were on the macadam surface earlier.
I wanted very much to stop and take a picture of it, but Pat gave me a look
that very clearly said 'you idiot.' As least it wasn't the 'you idiot American'
looks that I sensed he had given me earlier. It was perfectly clear that I would
see plenty of these suckers later. In fact, I would grow to be tired of them I
learned. I slumped down in the seat only to be hit on the head by a can of beer
thrown from the back. Oh, well, just what I needed.
Being autumn, sunset was early, but I was very tired. I vaguely remember dinner. It consisted of woeurs, new potatoes and baked beans all cooked outside over the fire. After dinner, we sat outside and listened to the animal noises. Pat gossiped about the latest scandal in the photography world. A fairly well known South African photographer had won at an international expo with an extraordinary photo of a mongoose and a snake in battle. He was troubled, because after seeing the photograph, Pat thought it was just too perfect. Right up close, everything was in perfect focus. You could even see the mongoose's teeth and tongue. It was just that the mouth looked dry. You would think that the guy would be slavering a bit. {expand on stuffed animals} Well, enough stories for this night. We all went to bed early. John and Pam in the bedroom, Pat and me in the dining room. I slept well, but woke to an extraordinary clatter in what must have been the middle of the night.... Clatter in the middle of the night? I should be so lucky. It was terribly early on Thursday, May 4 and Pat was making coffee. It was dark outside, but we needed to be at the gate at sunrise so that we could be at the watering hole at a decent hour. I was grumpy, but the coffee helped. Because we had slept in (!) we didn't have time to pack first. We would have to return after the morning shoot. At the gate I was the debriefed. We would shoot until about nine in the morning. After that, picture-taking was useless because that's when the sun got high enough to wash out the colors in the scenery. The gate opened and we decided to head off towards Nossob, a camp directly north, right on the Botswana border, hoping to find a watering hole or other interesting sights. The road continued over small hills and wove along the South Africa/Botswana border.
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