Glimpse - Your Stories from Abroad

An earth-colored pick-up truck was waiting for me outside. My four friends and I were about to embark upon a five-day camping adventure through the Transkei—the famed mountainous region east of the Great Kei River.

Our first stop was the Dwa Dwa Backpackers, situated along the shore of the Kwelega River. It was evening when we began unpacking the car, but the sun still radiated just the right amount of heat for the rock dassies (small badger-like creatures) lounging along the far coast of the river. After setting up camp about 20 feet from the shore, we started a fire and cracked open a few beers.

Just as we were pulling a pan of frying potatoes off the fire, a white-haired man with a weathered face wandered over to our site. Probably in his 60s, he had the broad shoulders of a former athlete. He had a cough that suggested cancer, and a smoking habit that nearly guaranteed it. We offered him a beer and a seat around the fire. He sat down, tossed his cigarette into the fire, and coughed loud enough to make the rock dassies stir on the far shore.

His name, he said, was Christoph. He was retired and living in a camper van, admittedly waiting for his wife to die of breast cancer. He spent his mornings fishing and his evenings, presumably, meeting strangers around campfires.

He went to bed shortly after sunset, and we spent the rest of the night emptying our coolers and filling our stomachs. We awoke on Thanksgiving to the deep-throated cough of our newly acquired friend. Christoph was already up, fishing just outside of our tent. As we got to talking, he told us about his experience as a sniper in the Angola-South African War that “never occurred” in the middle of the 1970s.“I always looked the enemy in the eyes before I pulled the trigger,” he said, proudly. “After I made the kill, I had to run. There was usually a helicopter firing at me in a matter of seconds.”

The fish were jumping, but apparently they were only hungry for the insects above the water, because they ignored our worms. One of us broke the silence with the comment that was on all of our minds.

 “I couldn’t imagine killing anyone.”

“It’s easy,” Christoph said, after an extended drag of his cigarette. “You know, I even killed a kaffir once.” At his mention of this derogatory apartheid-era term for blacks, we uncomfortably turned our attention back to the sunrise. “He was giving me a hard time so I stabbed him. He deserved it. They all do in some sense, eh?”

“What happened next?” I choked out, clutching my fishing rod.

“Eh, the cops told me that I had to knock it off. They said that I probably took it too far, but hell, what had kaffirs ever done for anybody?”

Well, I thought to myself, you mean besides developing the South African economy through mining, suffering through years of forced removals and poverty as they tried to raise their families, and bringing about democracy to the country with surprisingly minimal violence?

I wanted to argue these points, but I how could I convince a man who was raised his whole life to believe he was superior that he was wrong? How could anybody?

“So you’re suggesting genocide?” was all I could say.

“Well, yeah,” he said, coughing and offering a nonchalant shrug.

With that comment, the rest of the camping trip would seem trifling. Though I enjoyed the mornings spent kayaking down the river, the afternoon rock-climbing on the shore, the extended hiking trips at sunset, and the swim races to the far shore at midnight, these activities looked insignificant next to a single conversation that I had during an unsuccessful morning of fishing.