Letter from Johannesburg

“Do not give strangers a ride under any circumstances.”
—Around-About-Cars, South African rental agency instruction

“A wanderer in a foreign country cannot easily find his proper place,hence it is a great thing to grasp the meaning of the time.”
—I Ching, “The Commentaries,” Hexagram 56

{In 2008 I spent nine weeks in Africa, where I lived as a child. Here, the 2nd of four articles written as letters to the hometown newspaper:}

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa--Where Southern Africa is concerned, the truism about not being able to "go home again" crashes headlong into another: The more things change, the more they stay the same.

My American parents, returning in 1983 to the Witwatersrand region of South Africa, where we lived in 1948-1950, found our name still listed in the Johannesburg phone book. It's not there now. Our old house at 45 8th Avenue, Highlands North, is there, as I find on my own return visit. But this formerly all-white suburb is today a stretch nearer the now-black - and crime-ridden - city center, the whites and the money (whites still have most of it) having moved further north and constructed opulent malls to accumulate in.

My old bedroom. where a thief with a long, razor-blade-embedded, hooked pole was surprised by my father one night pulling my jeans and the blanket off my bed through the latch hole of the window burglar screen - that is now hidden behind a landscaped swimming pool and the whole thing walled in and barely visible through an iron security gate. My push on the intercom buzzer goes unanswered, though cars line the driveway. Then entirely open to the street, the neighborhood is now entirely walled in, strung with razor wire and guard-posted. So is the whole city.

But the suburbs are now democratically, racially mixed. "Everything is!" says the white proprietor of a "bottle shop" in the Wal-Mart-style "hypermart" nearby, who is old enough to have benefited from the now discredited "apartheid" system of racial separation. (The center then was a produce stall on a truck farm.) "That's a good thing in a way. On the other hand, you have to keep a sharp look out: Look behind you, but also look on your left, look on your right, look ahead. You must be very careful now."

The vacant lot where my father introduced American-style tent evangelism to a recalcitrant Union of South Africa (U.S.A.), is now a Shell station. But the church his efforts built still adjoins grassy Patterson Park, the iron fence seven feet higher than then and topped with the ubiquitous razor wire. The primary school I attended in back has actually expanded, but all its students but one are now black, white parents having gone elsewhere when the end of busing, a few years ago, exposed them to the real risk of carjacking; the curriculum now includes Zulu. Our unannounced arrival ranks as something of a Second Coming, bringing instant recognition and a room-by-room tour.

The Doll House drive-in on Louis Botha Avenue, which we visited after Dad's four-nightly services, still serves the same whopper cheeseburgers and banana malts thick with real fruit; the expanded menu includes a "Dagwood sandwich" and window service, and the carhops and most of the customers are black. We look to the right and the left across the parking lot, snapping photos. Is this dangerous? Later we get lost, threading the maze of walled streets still carrying the Afrikaans designation of laan (lane), picking our way from place to place on the instruction of gate security people, all black and invariable friendly. Unfamiliar birds in unwonted profusion squawk and twitter on all sides and above - in the midst of danger, a tropical garden. Did I mention the electric fences?

Johannesburg, Africa's commercial capital, lies far to the north, on a southern latitude equivalent to Havana, Cuba, near 6,000 feet in elevation; nights dip briefly to the 40's now in mid-winter, but days are warm and the winter sun hot on the skin. We drive north from here on a toll road (on the left side, in a "hired" car) through a scrubby landscape that strongly resembles the view from Airport Road east of Redding, California, but with baboons. We are bound for Botswana and, from that country, into a corner of another - Zimbabwe - one week before the scheduled "runoff" election (ultimately reduced to a single candidate, the President).

Road signs are still the same schizoid combination of English and Afrikaans (the Dutch-based creole of South Africa's first white population), but now the towns themselves are being stripped of their Afrikaans names in favor of Bantu ones, so we are directed first to Nylstroom ("Nile stream," a geographical confusion of the first-arriving Boer farmers), then to Modimolle, but the signs indicate the same turnoff - to Ellisras and Laphelale, again one and the same place.
Victoria Falls town, though, in the corner of Zimbabwe whither we're bound, shows no sign of budging from the staid colonial character with which it has been endowed since its "discovery" by missionary David Livingstone. It shows no sign, either, of the racial - and tribal - tensions dominating the news from here. A (white) woman on our tour bus to the Falls turns in her front seat as we park outside some shops. "See how it is here?" she demands rhetorically. "In spite of what you read - look, everybody is friendly and there's no trouble at all. It's the same in Cape Town. It always depends on where you choose to go."

I personally am looking for the initials I tried to carve in a tree outside the staid, posh, colonial Victoria Falls Hotel when I was 9 before being stopped by a policeman. (I was dead certain then of being carted off to prison.) No luck with that, or course. But I note that the trees that are likeliest candidates for honors have lost many of their branching trucks - my name doubtless with them.

Back again at our northern Botswana base for the Falls excursion, round an open bar opening on the Chobe River, we strike up conversation that night with a (white) woman leathery of complexion and about my own age. She is nostalgic, savoring earlier milestones in a life spent entirely in Zimbabwe (Southern Rhodesia), Zambia (Northern Rhodesia) and Botswana (Bechuanaland): driving with her children to Maun across the red Kalahari Desert and scraping sand from under her wheels with her hands when she got stuck, so as not to damage her freshly done nails.

"It was very different then," she says. "You could go anywhere on a whim, without all that fuss over papers and documents at the crossings."

She recalls the days spent on her father's tobacco farm in Southern Rhodesia - the occasional all-night gatherings of white farmers of the region, adults below and children segregated inside a grass shelter made for them in a nearby koppie (hill) of their own, with their own cadre of servants. "It was all separate then - the kids and the adults. We never knew what the big people were doing, you know." Her account reminds me at once of the Booker Prize-winning memoir by another child of Rhodesia, Alexandra Fuller: Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight.

"Yes!" she exclaims. "She was just here last week, that woman, asking questions and trying to find someone who knew her parents. She was looking for clues that would explain why her mother killed herself. She only just left the other day."

My own parents died in 2000 and 2003, rich in years but, to their terrible disappointment, short of the expected Second Coming of the Lord (Nkosi in Zulu). In their place I am leading my own Redding-bred family - a wife and two daughters of the Video Age - through a home in my own remembered past - stepping gingerly - looking this way and that. It's like picking your way across a minefield in the garden of Eden.

(Did I mention the white lions, the herds of elephant? The two blown tires from a single pothole in Botswana? The distance trucker/angel who kept us going by rigging a transfusion from his airbrakes tank?)