Glimpse - Your Stories from Abroad

The bar is packed to the seams. Alison takes a beer from the bartender and we move toward the back. To our left, there are 16-year-old girls, drunk and rebellious and petite, sucking alcohol through pierced lips. To our right, a man at the pool table sinks the eight-ball in the corner pocket and ends the game. Outside, taxis have lined up, shining red and yellow against the wet, black streets. It is nearly two a.m. and the blood is running strong in this African port city.

We step outside: Long Street is alive with people. I can still feel the bass beneath me, beating deep and hard on the tar streets as we push our way through the crowds. A man sells skewered kabobs and the entire block smells like a Persian home at New Year’s. A little farther up, there are shebeens—unlicensed bars—filled to capacity. Nearby, women stand about and watch, waiting nervously for their men to return.

We pay 15 rand each (about $1.75) and walk through the big black-metal doors of Mama Africa. Abakhaya, a boisterous marimba band from Khayelitsha, is mid-set as we find seats at the long, candle-lit bar. Coke bottles hang from the ceiling, forming a grandiose chandelier, casting reflective shadows across the walls. Someone lights a cigarette and the strong smell of rich, earthy tobacco rises around us. The space between us and the band has suddenly been filled with white foreigners—German, Dutch, British, American.

It isn’t long before we realize that the only black people in the place are serving food, music and sex. A young woman, quietly beautiful, is seated at the far end of the bar. Her dark skin is soft and taut across her cheeks. Her lips are red with lipstick and her eyes smoky and warm. She lifts her drink to her lips and turns her face toward his, lusty and pink and flush with alcohol. I can't help but stare. His eyes are drooping, lids closing, and I pray he will be too drunk by the end of the night to follow through. That hopefully she can just take her money and go back to her home in Crossroads or Langa or Gugulethu. That tonight she can hold her children without the dirty reminder of his skin on hers.

We step outside and into our car, when a taxi comes screeching around the corner. It lurches up onto the shoulder and then, too fast for the sounds and images to meet, it smashes, metal on metal, into a streetlight. We hear glass shatter. The old man in the front seat of the taxi is bleeding. The windshield is shattered from the impact of his skull. Before any ambulance or police arrive, he and his passengers are gone. Scratched, bleeding, and limping, they are herded into another taxi and shipped away.

This is the new South Africa. Fifteen years ago, it was just whites running in these streets and bars; now, it is the whole nation and all 11 languages. Apartheid is dead, but the city feels ready to explode.