Roman holiday
Aidan Hartley
Cape Town T have Roger Whittaker's classic song 'Kenya is my country!' jingling in my head as I prepare to return to the motherland, somewhat delayed after my book tour across three continents, My final leg has been South Africa. Chaperoning me from the publishers was Anika, a wonderful person, who kept dosing my hangovers with red bush tea and these to-die-for painkillers called Myprodols. To a white African villager like me, Johannesburg is Rome, with its culture, its wealth and energy. I saw so many friends: Gianfranco and Christina, Maina, Buchizya and Cecilia. Buchizya has a circular, hotel-sized bar in his basement. On the walls are dozens of photographs of him and sundry presidents shaking hands. He's in and out of Congo these days. I found my artist friend Reshada at her place in funky Yeovil, a gleaming cottage covered in flowers. Yeovil was once the haunt of bohemian whites. In the new South Africa, most have fled to richer suburbs where the sewage systems don't work; hence their nickname `Kaka Blanka'. Every year Reshada paints an icon of her daughter on the theme of the Madonna and Child. She says she'll stop after 33 paintings.
In Pretoria I addressed the ladies who lunch in bush greens among the jacaranda and visited the Voortrekker Monument, which is so solid that you'd have to deploy an H-bomb to get rid of it. I'm told the sculptor was a homosexual and that's why the hare-chested black warriors on the frieze are all so attractive. In Durban I loved how the atmosphere was suggestive of Mombasa, with its Asian energy and frangipani. Driving to a reading at a shopping mall, we heard on the radio that a man had been killed during a taxi-rank shoot-out. We had had 81 RSVPs but, as a result of the flying bullets, I thought nobody would turn up. In the event, 40 people appeared. People are used to this sort of thing in South Africa, as they are in Kenya. I felt at home.
In Cape Town, Rian Malan and his wife Constanza had me to stay. One morning I woke up to find Rian standing on his balcony with his collar pulled tight around his throat, watching the whales swimming across False Bay. 'Why don't you write another book, man?' I said. He's like a prophet, if one could only hear what he's saying, since he mumbles. 'Pearls before swine,' I thought I heard him reply. When I was a boy we lived for a while on the neighbouring farm to Ted Hughes in Devon and my mother said the poet looked like 'a man who has been struck by lightning'. Rian is like that, He taught me how to write, to be sure. The white liberals just don't understand him, but he's among the most honest of men you'll ever meet; a revolutionary I should say.
It's spring in the Cape and I saw flamingos and carpets of flowers, drank wine in Swartland, and Anika took me to her alma mater, Stellenbosch. I thought no university in the world would be as beautiful as Oxford or Cambridge until I saw it. In Camp's Bay I enjoyed Lin Sampson's dry and rather tragic sense of humour. Somebody told me that whole communities of South African Jews are migrating to Australia, so that classes are vanishing from schools in Cape Town, together with their teachers, and reconvening in places like Melbourne. 1 ask you.
My South African publisher, Jonathan Ball, has his offices above a strip club called Teasers. I didn't get to go there but Jonathan and his wife Pam took us all out to dinner one night at an excellent restaurant in Constantia. He's a passionate man of Rabelaisian proportions. 'I may not have been any sort of freedom fighter but I will say I never published any books sympathetic to those bastards in the old system,' he told me proudly. The evening we met he was having skin-cancer treatment so his forehead was peeling off shaves of skin like grated Parmesan. 'We won't be having the pizza,' he quipped. He also removed his false two front teeth before eating. His dog, it turned out, had knocked them out when Jonathan was bending down to pick up a newspaper in the hall. The dog gave him a 'Liverpool kiss', dislodging his master's incisors, which the canine then ate.
As the waitress closed the doors to the private room, she said knowingly that the place was all ours. I think they bolted us in because they knew what Mr Ball is like. After several bottles he began singing. 'What do they sing in Kenya, man?! Come 'am, sing, man!' When he rolled up his sleeves I expected him to challenge me to box. He roared the South African national anthem, 'Jerusalem', and a medley of Afrikaner ballads about little donkeys. Rian joined in and they started on Bob Dylan. At some point Jonathan began playing air guitar. He left me behind, I just couldn't keep up with him.
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