I was reminded of the old line on wishy-washy liberalism (the adjective is stuck to the noun like a price tag). Black people, it is said, prefer a straight-shooting Afrikaner to a duplicitous Englishman. What sort of people are these ‘English-speaking South Africans’, how can you trust them when they don’t even have a proper name for their group? You never know where you stand with an English liberal; but you can bet your life on a racist Afrikaner.
I had always been sceptical about this notion, but now I began to think it might be true. We are all caricatures, I decided. Let the houseboy unstrap his kneepads and the madam unbutton her mink, let the freedom fighter lay down his rusty machine gun and the piggy-eyed politician throw his fedora in the river. Who am I to judge them? They’ve taken the punch and now everything’s working out for the best. As for me, the hensopper in the seven-league boots, there’s really no excuse. I didn’t go the distance. Looking on as the country became a symbol of hope — of all things — I couldn’t help feeling I had squandered the chance to make my small bit of history.
For all that, I did not go home as soon as I might have. Apparently, I needed to go on excluding myself a little longer.
I voted at South Africa House. There was a carnival atmosphere, every newspaper would use the phrase afterwards. It’s not often history steps down from its pedestal and comes to meet you in the street. Yes, we were making history too, I could see it that way if I squinted. So what if there were no proper ballot boxes, just bins with plastic liners? People did not want to leave afterwards. They lingered on the pavements around the embassy, greeting friends in the queue, laughing at faces masked in black, green and gold. I bumped into acquaintances I hadn’t seen for years, even swapped phone numbers with a couple I knew from the anti-apartheid rallies way back when.
‘We must keep in touch.’
‘Ja, let’s have a dop.’
Producing the old slang like an expired passport.
We became a tourist attraction. An open-top double-decker drew up and the tour guide spoke into her microphone. ‘Over on the right, ladies and gentlemen, one of London’s most enduring monuments, Nelson’s column.’ The cameras popped. ‘And over on the left, one of its newest and most transient attractions: South Africans voting.’
It was a day for making and accepting gestures. I was embraced by strangers, fiercely, as if they meant to squeeze the breath out of the past caught between us, and I held on as if my life depended on it, to say this is not about me, this is your moment. All around us principles I had nearly forgotten, togetherness, solidarity, engagement, glittered in the spring air.
The broken shale of South African English, an abrupt concentration of flat vowels and sharp consonants, was reassuring and threatening all at once. I wondered what my own speech, worn smooth by ten years of English weather, would sound like to an African ear. If I went home — if — would my compatriots think I was a foreigner?
After I’d voted, I joined the tourists under Nelson’s enduring column, where a babble of other tongues could wash the South African silt from my ears. Trafalgar Square has never appealed to me. I don’t care for the excess of paving like pressed grey linen, it’s too proper I think, a city square in a business suit. But on that day it had loosened its buttons. Even the pigeons, flung like scraps of paper over the roof of the National Portrait Gallery, seemed flightier than usual.
I watched the BBC reports on the elections in South Africa the following day, and the long queues of voters in the country districts, bent around thorn trees and thatched huts, looked like lines of print. My eye was drawn to the exclamation mark — the question mark? — of a white face. As the helicopter hovered to get these shots, some people looked up and waved like flood victims hoping to be rescued, while others flung jubilant fists into the air. Every face was turned to the future, but whether they were elated or proud or wary, I couldn’t tell at this distance.
A few weeks later, my mother sent me a little corner-of-the-eye election story about an old woman at a voting station on the East Rand who had refused a ballot paper. Instead, before the surprised officials could stop her, she had thrown a handful of mealie pits into the ballot box. Chicken feed. She had been mistaken for a lunatic and arrested by the police, but she was a poet. Her gesture sowed nothing but questions. Who would squander their vote, this one in particular, to make a point? Had she used the ballot box as a granary or a rubbish bin? Or were the kernels meant to be planted? And if so, were they the seeds of hope or despair?
The poetry of the moment made me long for the prose of Johannesburg. I went to see a travel agent.
I rediscovered my home town in my father’s car, the Mercedes he’d driven to work until a month before he died. It had been parked in the basement of my mother’s flat for a few years. She didn’t like driving it, she said, just fitting it into a parking bay was a mission. I promised to sell it for her as soon as I found something that suited me better, but then I had second thoughts. After a decade of using the tube, it felt good to be pampered. And it worked wonders on clients — it was a huge, glossy business card.
Then again, the car was expensive to run and reminded me constantly of my dad. The first time I drove it, which I had never done while he was alive, I felt him sitting next to me, a reluctant passenger, telling me to watch out and slow down and keep my eye on the road. He was so vividly present, I could smell him. Later I realized it was no illusion: his aftershave was still in the leather steering-wheel cover and the warmth of my own hands had drawn the scent out on the air.
The pressing need when I came back was to set up a business. I am a photographer, fairly independent, strictly commercial. I’d done a bit of everything in London, from catalogues for department stores to property portfolios, but I found my niche in the women’s magazines. No high fashion, just run-of-the-mill advertisements and illustrations for features, those photos that say ‘Re-enacted by models’, the ones that go with a footnote that says ‘Not their real names’. I was — am — the frozen moment guy. I specialize in things falling, spilling, flying apart. Before Photoshop there was some skill in this kind of thing.
Finding work in Johannesburg, going to every crappy shoot that came my way, took me all over the city. I got lost. There were offices and factories where I expected smallholdings or open veld. What had become of the aerodrome? The Snake Park? The new suburbs were not even in my father’s dog-eared book of maps.
I couldn’t stop driving: I had to see everything again. I went looking for my grandparents’ house in Orange Grove. What I wanted to see was the front stoep, a long slab of polished cement like a pool of cold blood. I found the address but the house was gone, devoured by an overgrown double-storey that barely fitted on the stand.
One Sunday afternoon, I drove out to Bramley with Acker Bilk in the tape deck (the soundtrack of my father’s life had turned up in a plastic case under the seat). My mother had warned me to expect some changes in the neighbourhood, but I was not prepared for Villa Veneto. The estate covered a dozen of the old suburban blocks. Matchbox houses for the middle class. I followed the wall to the corner where our house used to be and found the end of the driveway marked by the stump of an oak. The cross section was the size of a dinner table, you could have seated six people there for a country luncheon. Right on cue, the melancholy strains of ‘Stranger on the Shore’ rose like fragrant smoke from the grills in the dash. I drove on to the main entrance. It would have been easy enough to get past the storm trooper at the boom — another reason to keep the Merc — but the rows of tiled roofs and empty balconies were dispiriting.