Glimpse - Your Stories from Abroad

The rounded patio stuck like a tongue out over the bush, its shaded interior licking the blazing heat of an African afternoon. When we arrived, the thickness of the heat was just beginning to ease into soft, pink dusk. There were eight of us all together, on a wilderness safari in South Africa’s Kruger National Park.

We turned awkward little circles on the patio, the German girls kicking up dust with their boots, the Dutch boys punching each other and pointing with exaggerated enthusiasm at the grazing wildebeests. The tall, awkward Afrikaner loomed in the corner like a melting statue. He had a goofy mustache, the kind you might find on a befuddled sheriff in a Western, and he wore the traditional pointed boots of conservative Afrikaners.

He approached me, the other loner. With a slightly concerned, fatherly grin he asked, “How old are you? Eighteen?”

“Twenty-three.”

“You don’t look a day over 18.”

The ranger approached at that moment, the army green of his uniform setting off the darkness of his cocoa skin. He held out his hand and introduced himself. His name, he said, was Kali.

The moment he left, the Afrikaner turned and whispered, “A black ranger. Great. Well, you can forget learning anything now.”

Two hours later, the rangers led us around to choose our huts. It sunk in as we sent the last pair of Dutch boys off: Alan and I would of course be thrown in together. I thought I saw a bemused smirk flicker across the ranger’s face. We dropped our packs in hard lumps on the doorstep.

“So… ”

“I’m gonna go wash up.”

We awoke the next morning at 4 a.m. Single file, our group marched out of the camp and into the bush. The only hint of day was a shade of navy slightly lighter than the pitch black of a flat sky. There were shuffling noises and the whispers of the grasses as we passed. And then, little by little, the day began bleeding red, pink, and finally, yellow.

We stopped for our second breakfast. Alan occasionally offered a dorky joke, which was deliberately ignored by the Europeans, and followed it with a clumsy laugh. As an unexpected result of our cohabitation, I felt slightly protective of Alan. I offered him a little laugh to acknowledge that he had, in fact, spoken. Because of this small act of charity, I got privileged status as Designated Recipient of Alan’s Jokes from thereon out. But somehow, I didn’t mind.

In the lull of late afternoon, Alan and I lounged quietly under our mosquito nets, until finally he coughed and threw out a question.

“What brought you to safari, anyway? A young girl like yourself, doing this trail all alone?”

I would normally have been irritated, but I could feel the genuineness of the question. He wasn’t castigating; he was curious. “I wanted the adventure,” I explained. “Something different from the typical safari. Seems really boring to me. I want to explore the bush, to know it on foot. It seems much more intimate.”

He nodded enthusiastically. “Most tourists come up here for the Big Five. They see the big African game and they take their pictures and then they go home and talk about them. But me, I’m much more interested in the little stuff. Especially the birds. There are so many incredible birds and no one realizes it. If you look out from this balcony, you can see amazing species that you can’t find anywhere else in the world!”

I was a bit taken aback by this passionate spiel in favor of our avian friends. I agreed, “The real understanding is in the details. That’s what I’m here for.”

We returned to our silent musings. After having written Alan off nearly the moment I met him, I now felt something like a question mark stir, vaguely, in my mind.

That night at dinner Alan followed the conversation uncomfortably, allowing himself a chuckle of something like condescension from time to time. I suddenly saw that he was a foreigner in our group. He himself was realizing this and it made him awkward, threw his assumptions off. His only compatriot, the ranger, was black. This put him between two worlds equally distinct to him: that of the international tourist and that of the black South African.

The next day I lay on my bed, reading Nadine Gordimer’s The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and Places, a series of essays about South Africa from 1959 to 1986. Alan was watching birds from the balcony.

He came in from our cramped patio, reeking of used boots, and caught a glimpse of the book.

“Hmph,” he mumbled, half-smiling, half-irritated, “a little leftist propaganda, eh?”

My blood heated. I could feel it rising in my throat. So far on this trip I had managed to control myself fairly well, and although I knew that this restraint was creating a well of resentment in me, I had long since decided that Afrikaners were a hopeless lot of bigots to be ignored at best— and despised at worst.

“It’s very interesting.” I tried to sound coy, but my voice had a sharp edge.

“Rubbish. Selling a bunch of lies. That woman is a nut case.” He tried to sound goofy; it came out bitter.

“She won the Nobel Prize for a reason. She’s not an idiot,” I said.

“She hasn’t said one bloody true thing about this country. She’s a traitor. South Africans don’t read her books.”

“They were banned.”

“For good reason! No loss to anyone.”

And then, suddenly, I exploded.

“I am appalled,” I declared, “appalled at what I have found here in South Africa. I cannot wait to get out of this country!”

I suddenly realized what I had said was true, and for a moment I felt overwhelmed. The last month had been hard. And not, I realized, because I had written off white South African society as evil. Rather, because the overwhelming warmth and intelligence of the white South Africans I had met were so hard to reconcile with the way that they had of speaking about blacks, and the ugly legacy of apartheid they had fought so hard to protect.

And now here I was, trapped in a hut in the bush with such a man, a white South African who considered blacks not so far removed from animals.

“Go already,” he said, chuckling.

I stormed out of the hut into the blaze of heat, fought the sun to the patio, sat angrily, and stared daggers out into the bush. Wildebeests grazed on the plain. I felt caught somewhere between crying and screaming. And yet in these feelings there was no hatred—no easy, comprehensible hatred, not even a shred of the disgust and self-assurance I should have felt. Instead, I felt a deepening sadness and a seemingly absurd sense of guilt.

That night after dinner, Alan and I lay silently under our mosquito nets.

“Do you really think I’m awful?” he asked. It was as straightforward a question as I could imagine.

“No. I just don’t understand.”

He didn’t attempt to explain it to me. I didn’t attempt to explain it to him. We lay there, the space between our beds pregnant with silence.

“Good night,” he said finally.

“Good night,” I replied.

The next morning we drove for hours back to the rest camp. In the Satara Camp parking lot, Alan and I found ourselves alone again as everyone paired off for new destinations. We stood awkwardly, poised over our gear.

“Where are you going?” he asked, without quite meeting my eyes.

“Jo’burg,” I replied hesitantly. “Or,” I added, “wherever.”

“I’ll give you a lift if you want.”

I looked down over my filthy T-shirt, boots, and backpack lying in the dusty lot. He lumbered awkwardly over to a gleaming silver Beamer.

“Come on, get in!”

I threw my bag in the trunk and hopped in the front seat, feeling, somehow, relieved.

The afternoon was settling in, and Kruger’s vast plains and plateaus spread, numbingly green in the haze of heat. The car’s interior was metallic and cool. We were silent awhile.

Suddenly Alan pulled the car off to the left and pointed. “A European roller. See it?” I peered up into the bare branches of a tree and spotted a flash of blue feathers. We hovered a moment before Alan twisted the car back to the road.

Cruising through the hot, flat semi-arid landscapes surrounding Kruger, he spoke up again.

 “So where do you get all of this liberalism? Your parents must be a bunch of bleeding hearts.”

“I’m sorry about yesterday,” I said. “I was out of line—I was just so angry.”

“I’ll say! You called me a racist pig!” Snort. “You really got yourself excited.”

I winced.

“I just find it very difficult to deal with here, the way people talk, the attitudes I see and hear so often,” I explained, plaintively. “You don’t find that in the States. It’s hard to constantly be told, don’t go here, don’t go there, the blacks this or that. There’s so much paranoia and hatred.”

“Yes, but it’s the same in the States. It’s just hidden,” Alan said. “We’ve grown up under a different system. Everyone has their place. I don’t hate the blacks. The maid in our household was very dear to me. I knew many blacks growing up, probably more than your grandparents ever knew, or wanted to.”

He had a point. The conversation unraveled slowly and deliberately from there, laden with real, raw thought, unmarred by pretension or attempts at persuasion.

In the inch of awareness that our momentary ideological truce opened up, I found out these things:

Alan had a weakness for sweet, white peppermints. He bought three two-pound bags in the course of eight hours and we ate them all.

He was xenophobic and extremely shy. The predominance in our group of young, liberal foreigners had made him extraordinarily uncomfortable.

He was changing. He’d given a black man a position in his office, and for the first time he was seeing a black man as an equal. He admitted that he relied on this man more than anyone he knew.

And me: in my willingness to bend my mind and all my assumptions backwards, I saw hope.

I listened.

I am writing this.

And I am still trying to live in that inch.