The living and the dead

In the African bush, where the clay grew tall. At Eco Training’s Karongwe camp. Scouting for a possible Athenian school trip. Listening to the sounds of unfamiliar bugs and birds as a deep darkness falls. Two black African women set up the outdoor tables for dinner. The nine students here for a 55-day ranger training program and their instructor have not yet returned from an end-of-day game drive. They are all white.

My host, Liz, lives on a property that was formerly a bed and breakfast. It has a communal layout. Originally there were six little cabins in a circle around a central lawn and pool. Then the government changed the zoning laws and the number of allowable units was reduced to three. The owner combined some adjacent units by constructing connecting buildings and so Liz’s unit was expanded. For an extra 500 rand a month (about 50 US dollars), she now has three bedrooms and three baths to herself.

Liz’s compound is one of the few places I’ve been in southern Africa where there are not bars on all the windows and doors. Liz has a large sliding glass door that opens onto a patio overlooking the lush lawn and pool. I love sitting out on the patio. Beautiful trees grace the property with three large date palms next to Liz’s patio. Only the peace is shattered every few moments when a hard dates crashes onto the ceramic patio roof.

The other residents, all white, love their patios as well. I see them sitting there singly. Liz says that some of them never seem to go anywhere.

Wandering about the lawn are dogs—it seems that every white person in South Africa has at least one–and chickens and even a peacock. There’s also the black help. This morning I waved hello to a woman wearing a light blue maids uniform and white apron. I hadn’t noticed the male gardener, wearing a dark blue uniform and rubber boots, until a woman at another unit loudly called him over. Apparently, she wanted to know whether protests had closed a certain road.

Like Tanzania and Zambia, you often see black people here walking walking. At the end of the day, there will be groups of black people, outside workplaces, by the side of the road, waiting for public transport to get them close enough to home to walk the rest. You almost never see white people walking. They can afford cars and use them, traveling from one safe place to another. The new office buildings in Johannesburg all have large parking garages as the bottom floors. People drive to work, glide past the guard into the garage, ride the elevator to their office, and never need to leave the premises until they drive home.

It began raining yesterday morning. Not the passing showers that I’ve experienced regularly in the last two months, but a persistent steady rain. As we sat on Liz’s patio eating breakfast, a large palm frond came crashing down. Only her patio roof kept it from hitting us.

We took the scenic route to Karongwe, partly for the views, but partly because a protest, a truck accident and flooding may have blocked the alternative. We didn’t stop at God’s Window because we assumed there would be no view because of the low clouds.

It rained throughout our game drive this morning, soaking us and the striped zebra, guinea fowl and impala that we passed.

A gentle rain keeps falling on us here in the bush. Maybe it falls generally on the black townships and white neighborhoods of Mpumalanga. The other residents at Liz’s compound are probably sitting on their patios still, silent, surveying their safe slice of Africa. The buildings, circled up, perhaps to protect them, like the voortrekkers’ wagons at Blood River.