Tom smiled, but he was learning more about Nick and it wasn’t good.
‘I’m so gatvol of men these days.’
‘ Gatvol? ’ he asked. She had pronounced the ‘g’ as though she was about to spit at him, so the word, whatever it meant, seemed to match her sentiment.
‘Like “I’ve had enough” in English. But no offence, hey?’
He laughed. ‘None taken.’
From a map he’d glanced at, he knew the airport was on the eastern fringe of Johannesburg, and the factories, warehouses, mine slag heaps and outlying gated communities of townhouses hiding behind high whitewashed walls soon gave way to open grasslands and farms. Sannie explained that Johannesburg was on the highveld — at a higher altitude than where they were headed. Kruger was in the lowveld. ‘Hotter there. Stickier. I hope you brought your mozzie muti with you.’
‘Insect repellent?’ he checked.
‘It’s malaria country where we’re going, and quite bad this time of year — it’s the wet season.’
When they neared the exit for a town called Wit-bank he noticed his first car-jacking sign. It said, Warning — hijacking hotspot. Do not stop beneath a huge exclamation mark.
‘What do you do if you break down?’ he asked.
‘Pray,’ said Sannie, ‘and aim for the centre body mass.’
In Tom’s experience, most people living in supposedly dangerous parts of the world tended to talk down the perceived threat, usually issuing a few common words of warning such as, ‘Avoid such-and-such an area at night and you’ll be okay,’ or, ‘It’s not as bad as the media makes out’. From what Sannie had told him so far, the reverse seemed to be true in South Africa. People here were under no illusion about their local crime problem.
‘A lot of it is organised crime here, and the whites aren’t blameless. Also, we have people from all over Africa living in this country. The Zimbabweans who cross the border are dirt poor and some of them turn to theft — same with the Mozambicans. The Nigerians are the worst — they control the drug scene. It was different in the old days, when I first joined the police — back then we had the death penalty.’
And riots in Soweto and police opening fire on civilians, Tom thought, but said nothing. It was her country and he wasn’t here to make judgments.
‘I know what you’re thinking. But we’re not all mad racists, you know. I didn’t agree with a lot of what happened under apartheid, but we did have the crime problem under control.’
‘Depends on who you classed as the criminals.’
She smiled.
Sannie stopped for fuel at a service station just past the Middelburg toll plaza. It was exactly like one of the large complexes he would have encountered on a British motorway. Tom got out to stretch his legs. He yawned, but was feeling okay. There was little time difference between the UK and South Africa and he had slept well on the aircraft. It was good to feel sunshine on his face. Sannie returned with a couple of Cokes and some crisps. ‘How far?’ he asked.
‘ Ag, shame, man, you sound like my kids. It’s about another three hours if we drive fast.’
And drive fast they did. Tom glanced over and saw that the speedometer rarely dipped below a hundred and ten kilometres per hour. The locals had an interesting form of traffic etiquette, where slow vehicles pulled to the left — South Africans drove on the same side of the road as he did in England — to let faster cars pass them. The overtaking vehicle — Sannie in every case — put on its hazard lights as a way of saying thank you, while the car which had just been passed flashed its headlights as if to say, ‘You’re welcome’. It was like a parallel universe, Tom thought. Similar to England in some ways, but so completely different in others.
The road they were on — the N4 — took them eastwards, towards the border with Mozambique, according to the signs to that country’s capital, Maputo. Tom knew Mozambique was a former Portuguese colony, had suffered a long civil war and supposedly had good beaches. Beyond that it was just a name on a map. He thought he would find some books on Africa before he returned with Robert Greeves.
Sannie had the radio tuned to a station called Jacaranda FM, which played easy-listening music, mostly from the eighties and nineties. The announcers and newsreaders switched from English to Afrikaans, sometimes midsentence. ‘Do you and your kids speak Afrikaans at home?’
‘ Ja, and English. There are about a dozen official languages in the new South Africa. My kids are learning Xhosa at school. I figure it’s good for them to be able to speak the language of the ones who are in charge now.’
‘I suppose it’s been tough on… on people like you, since the Africans took over the country.’
She shrugged. ‘First of all, I am an African. I just happen to be a white one. Sure, there was a lot of affirmative action after the ANC took over. I suppose I’m lucky that I’m a woman.’
‘What do you mean by that?’ Tom asked. Traffic had slowed marginally as the road started to descend through a series of sweeping bends.
‘In the new South Africa it’s all about empowerment. Black women have had a hard time, so they’re now at the top of the list for good jobs or promotions, followed by black men. Then it’s coloureds and Indians and then us white women, followed by white men, who are now at the bottom. It used to be the other way around.’
She didn’t seem bitter, he thought, just resigned to making the most of her life. If he was going to judge her, it would be on how she did her job as a police officer, not what she thought of life under black majority rule.
A blurred movement of greyish-green in the grass to the left caught his eye. ‘Bloody hell! What was that?’
Sannie glanced over. ‘Oh, bobos. Baboons — we call them bobbejaans in Afrikaans.’
Tom watched the troops of a dozen or so primates. A large one stared back at him and snarled with long yellowed teeth from its dog-like snout. ‘But we’re not in a national park, are we?’
‘No. You’ll see bobos and monkeys wherever there is still some bush or trees left for them. A lot of this country is taken up with farming, but there are still some wilderness areas.’ The toll road split and Sannie explained that while they could go either way to get to Kruger, the right-hand fork would take them via Waterval Boven, down a steep pass where the high-veld ended. ‘The countryside’s more scenic than on the road via Lydenburg.’
The drive took them along the course of a river which had cut through the rock, forming the pass. Plantation gum trees met their end in a smoking paper mill. Tom saw skinny black workers in baggy overalls, and wondered if the men were ill with HIV-AIDS.
He started feeling drowsy after more than three hours on the road, and Sannie stopped at another garage to buy more Cokes and chips for the two of them. Tom again got out of the car for a stretch and was struck immediately by the change in climate. It was much hotter than Johannesburg and the air felt heavy with moisture. Sannie told him they were approaching Nelspruit, the capital of Mpumalanga province, once known as the Eastern Transvaal. ‘The lowveld. We’re getting close to the bush now.’ She said it with fondness, almost reverence. ‘Some people call it the slowveld, because nothing much happens in a hurry. It’s the heat.’
In the distance Tom could see a few tall office buildings, but Sannie turned left before they reached the town proper. They began climbing into some hills.
When they reached the town of White River, all the traffic signals were out. A black policeman was directing traffic with the exaggerated movements of someone doing a robot dance. ‘He seems to be enjoying his job,’ Tom said.
‘ Ja, but it’s no laughing matter. The electricity is out — again. Our power company, Eskom, calls it “load shedding”. They switch off entire districts so the whole system doesn’t collapse. Supply can’t keep up with demand in South Africa, and not enough money’s been spent on infrastructure in the last decade.’
Leaving the town they wound through hills forested with plantation trees — pines and Australian blue gums. They crested a high peak and, looking ahead, the forests vanished, replaced by a vista of red dirt and mud-brick shacks of the same hue. There wasn’t a tree in sight. ‘Townships like this are where a lot of our people still live. The government is building new homes through the regional development program but they can’t keep pace with demand. On one hand they’re spending tens of thousands of rand to change the names of towns from Afrikaans to African names, and Jan Smuts Airport to OR Tambo, but they can’t put a decent roof over their own people’s heads or keep the country’s electricity supply working.’