pseydtonne | Voortrekker without the xenophobia

I have decided on a new medium-term goal, after all this mortgage debt is arranged: I want to spend three weeks driving stick around the cities of South Africa next October or so.

When I was a kid, South Africa was a metonym for abject racism. I reached puberty before Nelson Mandela was freed from Robben Island prison. I spent a lot of my time watching the news and documentaries about apartheid. I was fascinated by the idea 15% of a population could keep the other 85% in terror when the 85% made the 15%'s meals, cleaned their homes, raised their children and otherwise could have had a viral affect on their children. The honkies were outnumbered and didn't even like themselves (the Anglos see the Boers as rednecks, the Boers see the Anglos as unilingual effetes). It's like Quebec with a third class!

Then apartheid ended, the government changed hands but was not overthrown (unlike other African nations)... and now 20% of the place has AIDS. It stopped having the romance of being fucked up psychologically and moved into the "oh, it's like Detroit with sun and scarier deer". I lost interest, like a lot of Americans did.

Then I stayed in a hostel in London this time last year. I met two white guys and one black girl from South Africa. The girl was hot and was also a sharp schtickster. She would pretend to be stupid and conjure the most asinine responses. However she was too awake about it, so I could tell she was fucking with anyone not in her crew. I loved it, obviously: when she gave you a fucked-up response, it meant you were talking down to her and she would talk back down to you.

The white boys were not so bold but definitely could care less to impress anyone. We got to talking because they were working door-to-door sales gigs for British Gas in the various London suburbs. I always love to talk shop with salescritters and salescritters love to talk. It's easy to get a work permit in the UK if you're from a Commonwealth nation. Thus these kids had been schlepping around the southeast suburbs for three months and were about to start a nicer but related gig in a different part of town.

They had left home to work abroad for a year. A lot of Commonwealth subjects go to the UK where the money is ridiculously good but they have no desire to stay. They hate England for one big reason or another. They hate what the Pommies did to their ancestors, so this is payback. They hate the lack of sun, the pissing rain, the expensive apartments they wind up sharing with four other subjects. When they go home, they have sent so much cash back that they can't help but be set. It's like a Brazilian working in Boston, except both parties speak English fluently and no one wants to admit they're cousins.

To paraphrase the Durkadurka from Team America, I liked their balls. Each of these kids was maybe eight years my junior, thus aged 23 or so. They grew up in both times but came of age after the end of apartheid. I did not expect them to have anything in common, maybe even avoid each other while out of country. Instead they were thick as thieves, happy to milk a Pommie of his pay and yank some Yank with the usual line about "isn't all of America a TV show?" Then you shark someone at a pool table and life is good again.

I wanted to see their nation after listening to them talk. Their advice was "don't go alone; have friends there" and "you're too white to take public transport there; hire a car." Oh, and "you gotta go! It's amazing and we miss home."

I then met one other guy closer to my age. He sounded a lot like an Australian to me because I was still learning how to tell the accents apart. We got into a very deep conversation about emotional growth when he said to me "I apologize if I do not know the right words in English. It's not my language." I would never have guessed if he hadn't mentioned it.

His mother tongue was Afrikaans. He felt guilty about a proficiency that made me jealous of his English. He had learned English throughout school but never spoke it at home, so it was hard to transpose emotional states to English.

We spent two nights hanging out with the Scottish girls I mentioned in the past. He was a good person to drink with and to sober up with. He was juiced because he had scored a bartending gig in one of the upscale clubs off Oxford Circus and because he was moving out of the hostel and into a shared studio around Bloomsbury. I couldn't understand how he wanted this so badly.

We were walking back from a night of carousing and passing the British Museum at 3 am when he upbraided me. "You think we all weren't you back home? I was a banker back in South Africa. I had a comfy job, bucks to spend. I was going out of my mind from boredom. I decided to shove it all in a bag or my parents', get a ticket and figure it out when I got here."

That line infected me. I knew I still needed to travel. I was going home the next morning and didn't want to anymore. I wanted to start going east, nation by nation. I wanted to mail an entire bag of stuff home and start walking the Earth. I also wanted to snog one of those girls before I left for the States. Neither happened: I got on my plane and had a quesadilla in Central Square.

I have a One Year Rule for big goals: if I still feel the desire to do something crazy and expensive a year after I first think about it, then I will allow myself that thing and work my ass off to make that thing happen. That's why I have a studio-quality condenser mic and a portable sound baffle as well as an acoustic guitar.

South Africa is a nation one visits by car, much like Texas or California. It's far cheaper to fly into Johannesburg than Cape Town but it's the Cape I want to see. I want to see these places I saw on the tube every night for half a decade. What's it like in Durban, Port Elizabeth (where Stephen Biko was cuffed to a police car grill for a day, then had his head bashed in and left in a cell for much of a month before dying), East London? Why fight for a place like that? What's so effing amazing about this large nation where the Atlantic meets the Indian? I need to see it for myself.

-off to get some dinner and plan some more, Dante