The Lion Sleeps Tonight

Rian Malan

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781611859942
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

For Rian Malan, the blessing of living in South Africa is that every day presents him with material whose richness astounds those who live in saner places. Twenty years after the publication of his bestseller My Traitor's Heart, he is still strongly committed to the struggle against suffocating political rectitude. Malan eviscerates politicians, provokes rabid fury in Aids activists, pursues justice in the music industry, and exults in the company of an extraordinary cast of characters from truckers to tycoons.

Part One
Politics

The Last Afrikaner

The early 1990s was a time of agonizing crisis for Afrikaners. After 350 years in Africa, we’d come to the end of the line. Nelson Mandela was free, the country was burning, and President F. W. de Klerk was negotiating the terms of our surrender. Some Boers were willing to follow him into an uncertain African future. Others said, Over our dead bodies. It was in this climate of massive psychic dislocation that I stumbled upon the parable of Tannie Katrien, a little old lady whose experience defied at least some of our myths about darkest Africa.

Once upon a time there was a British colonial family named Hartley who had a magical farm in Africa. It lay on the slopes of Mount Meru, a cool green island in a sea of sun-blasted yellow savannah. Twice a year, monsoon winds deposited heavy rains on Meru’s leeward slopes, which were clad in dense rain forest, full of rhino and buffalo and elephant. Several swift, clear streams came tumbling out of the jungle and meandered across a level plain where the soil was so rich and deep that anything you planted bore fruit in astonishing ­profusion—peaches, apricots, beans, maize, and the sun so close you got two harvests every year.

The Hartleys bought this farm in 1953. Their homestead lay on the shoulder of the volcano, so high that it was often above the clouds. Sometimes they would wrap themselves in blankets at night and sit on the veranda with the clouds at their feet, watching the moon rise over the glittering summit of Mount Kilimanjaro, forty miles away. In the morning, it would be burning hot again, and you could sit on the same stoop with a pair of binoculars, tracking the movement of elephant herds across the parched plains far below. “I loved that house,” Kim Hartley told me. “The veranda was ninety-nine feet across. It had big white Cape Dutch gables, and the previous owner had left a portrait of Hitler in the cellar.” I didn’t have to ask who’d built it. It had to have been a Boer.

In 1902, in the aftermath of the Anglo-Boer war, disaffected Afrikaners sent a scouting party up the spine of Africa in search of a place where a Boer could live free of British domination and rid his mouth of the bitter taste of defeat. They found Mount Meru. Two years later, the first ox wagons came trundling across the savannah, carrying Afrikaners who settled in a giant semicircle around the northern base of the volcano. At first they lived by the gun, but in time they cleared the land and began to till it with ox plows. In the beginning, they dreamed of linking up with Afrikaners who’d settled in Kenya and resurrecting the lost Boer republics, but there were too few of them, so it came to nothing, and what they had was fine, anyway: perhaps the best farmland in the world.

By the time the Hartleys arrived, the Boers had created a paradise under the volcano. The lower slopes of Meru were dotted with whitewashed farmhouses, shaded by blue gums and jacaranda trees. Around them lay a mile-wide belt of orchards and wheat fields, segmented by whitewashed wooden fences and crisscrossed by irrigation furrows. Below the cultivated lands, literally at the bottom of the garden, lay the dusty savannah, teeming with antelope and big game, and on the far horizon was Mount Kilimanjaro.

A few days later, I met Kim’s mother, a grand old white Kenyan, charming, well preserved, and full of astonishing tales about good chaps who’d been gored by buffalo or died in light plane crashes. Mrs. Hartley was fascinated by the Boers, whom she clearly regarded as a subspecies of noble savage, almost as exotic as the Masai. Their leader was General Wynand Malan, a dapper old fellow with a white goatee, remembered for his suicidal commando exploits behind English lines in the war of 1899–1902. General Malan was rich and fairly civilized. So was Sarel du Toit, the haughty man who built the Hartleys’ hilltop mansion and dreamed of becoming governor of Tanganyika. Mrs. Hartley was more interested in the wild Boers, the biltong hunters and farmhands on the community’s fringe.

They were tall and strong and very good-looking, she said, but when they smiled, their teeth were black, stained by fluoride in the river. Some had never seen electric light, or talked on a telephone. The men wore funny hats and home-crafted shoes called veldskoens, and women seldom ventured outside without a kappie or bonnet. They were full of obscure bush lore regarding edible plants and geneesblare, healing leaves. They quarried their own whitewash and made their own soap from elephant or hippo fat. They’d disappear into the bush in battered old trucks and return weeks later with loads of biltong and ivory. On market day, they’d pass by in ancient Fords piled high with wheat, oranges, beans, and geese, heading toward Arusha.

Arusha was the nearest town, population 5,000 or so. To get there, you had to cross a plain covered with fever trees, and then follow a rough track through the elephant-infested rain forest. Beyond the rain forest was a region of coffee plantations, and then you came to Arusha, a cluster of white houses with red-tiled roofs, bisected by a rushing stream in which colonial gentlemen cast flies for trout. After market, the richer white farmers would gather at the country club, where the men told hunting stories and drank too much and sometimes played bok-bok, an extremely violent form of indoor leap-frog introduced by the Afrikaners.

Meanwhile, the ladies sat in the ladies’ lounge, rolling their eyes, sipping gin and tonic, and talking about children and servants. “The Boers had a habit,” said Mrs. Hartley, “of twinning their sons with a black boy. They went everywhere together, a little Boer boy with hair this short and his little black companion. But when they grew up, the white boy was expected to be the master, and take a strong line with the blacks.” Too strong a line, in Mrs. Hartley’s estimation. “They thought I was stupid,” she said, “because I didn’t know the golden rule: if they did something wrong, you had to beat them. They were very hard on the natives.”

And yet, and yet. African laborers seldom stayed long with En­glish gentleman farmers, but they often stayed with Afrikaners all their lives. “It was curious,” she said. “They seemed to understand each other better than we did.”

Maybe so, but when the wind of change began to blow in the fifties, the Afrikaners of Mount Meru grew unsettled. They thought of Africa as a place where only the strong survived, where a white man had to stand his ground with gun in hand or else be overwhelmed. Many were convinced they’d be massacred. As soon as independence day was set, they started packing up and heading south in convoys of heavy trucks, laden with furniture and bedding and prize cattle. Some sold their farms but the market was collapsing so many just locked their doors and walked away.

A few dozen diehards stayed on after uhuru, but life grew tougher and tougher, and utterly impossible after 1967, when Tanzania committed itself to socialism. The Red Chinese were invited in. Factories and banks were nationalized. Most remaining white farmers—the Hartleys included—were given twenty-four hours to quit the country. One of the last Boers to leave was a bearded ancient named De Wet, who had come to Meru as a young boy and could not bear to go. But what could you do? There was no appeal. So he loaded his truck and set out for South Africa, only to die of a broken heart two days down the road. And that was the end of the Mount Meru Boers. “They all left?” I asked. “Yes,” said Mrs. Hartley. “They all died, or went back home.”

It might have ended there, but her son Kim was stricken by longing for the landscape where he’d spent his first years, so he took me on a pilgrimage to Mount Meru. Our first day was dismaying. The Hartleys’ old house was a ruin. The surrounding farmland was turning in part into dustbowl. The Boers’ irrigation pumps lay rusting in the dirt. Their fruit orchards had been uprooted and burned. Here and there, an old Boer farmhouse was still standing, inhabited by people who sometimes had vague memories of the people they called kaBuru. “This belonged to Bwana Billem (boss Willem),” they would say. “He was a kaBuru. We chased him away.”

The kaBuru were not always fondly remembered. “They were a strong, harsh people,” one man told me. “Like this!” He balled his fist and raised his forearm as if to strike me. A graybeard chipped in with an amused demurral. “I worked for a kaBuru once,” he said. “In six months, I saved enough to buy a white shirt and a bicycle.” The first man laughed, clapped me on the shoulder, and said, “You are welcome. Do you want to see the kaBuru graves?”

So we piled into the Land Cruiser, our guide and ten others, and headed off through the bush on a goat track. Storm clouds were gathering over the volcano. We came to a narrow bridge that crossed a deep canyon, in the depths of which there was a swift river with deep, dark pools. A little farther on was kwaJannie, where Jannie Pretorius had once stayed. His house was still standing in the middle distance, unpainted for three decades and now blending into the dusty gray desolation.

As we stopped, a crowd of young men appeared as if from nowhere, wearing ragged jeans and T-shirts and demanding to know what was happening. I said, I am a kaBuru, I’ve come to see the graves of my people. This did not go down well. There were scowls and unfriendly mutterings in a language I could not understand. Our guide said, “Socialism is finished here. Whites and coolies are coming back. Some are reclaiming properties that were nationalized by the Revolutionary Party. These people think you have come to take their land away.”

I said, no way, I’m just a tourist, but they weren’t impressed, so I produced some snaps of a small farm in South Africa in which I owned a one-sixth share. I said, “I’m not interested in your land, I’ve got my own, in Afrika Kusini.” The snapshots passed from hand to hand. They were studied very closely. Aha. Nice. Cattle? You have cattle? Soon everyone was smiling. Their spokesman said, “Up there is what you want to see.”

So we walked up the hillside, sloughing through deep drifts of powdery red dust until we reached a tall thorn tree under which lay sixteen old graves. They were buckling and cracking, sliding slowly into a donga. Only one bore a legible headstone: General Wynand Charl Malan, 1872–1953. Three teenaged waMeru girls were standing beside me. I asked, “Do you know anything about these people?” They were overcome by shyness. Two little ones hid away behind the biggest, who giggled and said, “We were not born yet. All we can say is, they were kaBuru.”

And that was more or less that. Kim and I returned to Arusha and checked into a motel called the Tanzanite. The phones were out of order. The power had failed. Toilets wouldn’t flush and there was no toilet paper, but the beer was ice cold and the company was ­interesting —a party of Indian diamond smugglers from Jo’burg, on their way home from an extremely dangerous but lucrative trip to Zaire, and some Zanzibaris who were intrigued to meet a white South African. They assumed I’d come in search of a deal—diamonds, land, a tourist concession, maybe some Swahili pussy. “Our girls are taught to play sex from when they’re this small,” one told me. “You should try.” They were perplexed when I said we were actually looking for relics of the Boers. The Boers? KaBuru? Blank stares. No one reacted save William the bartender, who said he knew someone who’d heard a story and, when he told it, it struck me as wildly implausible. I said, “I don’t believe it.” William said, “Come tomorrow, I’ll show you.”

In the morning, we headed out of town on a road clogged with ancient, listing minibus taxis, all weaving back and forth as if drunk, dodging cavernous potholes. The verges were lined with spaza shops, rickety little wooden shacks with brand-new Coca-Cola signs, vivid splashes of capitalist color against a prevailing backdrop of socialist gray. “I hate Socialism,” said William. “Nothing happened in this country for twenty years. Kenya got rich, and we couldn’t even eat.”

After a while, we peeled off on a dirt road, crossed a vast state-owned coffee plantation, and passed under a derelict archway that said, “Arusha National Park.” Beyond that, we were in rain forest. The canopy closed over our heads. The light was green. There were still a few elephant, apparently, but they hid away on the volcano, and all the rhino had been shot by the park’s own rangers. That’s what William said, at any rate. He waved to a strapping young ranger with dreadlocks and a rifle over his shoulder. “That man,” he said, “reported his boss for poaching rhinos. What happened was, they put him in jail.”

Thirty minutes later, we emerged onto a broad plain covered with fever trees. The clouds parted, and there was Mount Kilimanjaro, looking just like it does on a postcard, save that there were no elephants or lions intervening. This was not the Africa of coffee-table books. This was the real thing, a densely populated zone of mud huts, banana plantations, and mealie patches. The grass was grazed flat as a billiard table. The limbs of many trees had been amputated by woodcutters. William pointed to a distant clump of blue gums, so we left the road and headed in that direction. We forded a shallow river, climbed a short rise, and came upon a landscape dotted with mud huts and patches of cultivation. One of the houses was set apart from the others. It was made of gray mud and thatched with grass from the nearby fields. It had no windows, just planks to keep out prowling night creatures.

Outside the sun was like a hammer. I walked up to the door, upon which someone had scrawled karibuni—Swahili for welcome. I knocked but no one answered, so I went around the back, into a dusty yard full of goats, rubbish, and emaciated dogs and chickens. In the center of it stood a smoke-blackened hut roofed with banana leaves—a Swahili kitchen. I peered inside. There was a figure within, a withered old crone, hunched over the fire. She had sharp blue eyes and a long sharp nose, the face of a bird of prey. There was an old doek on her head, and down below a kanga, and dusty feet in plastic sandals. I greeted her in Afrikaans. She came to the door, squinting at me in amazement. Her name was Katerina Odendaal. She had not heard Afrikaans in three decades. She was the last Afrikaner.

The first recorded use of the term “Afrikaner” took place in the village of Stellenbosch on a wild night in March 1707. The magistrate, a German nobleman named Starrenburg, was roused from his slumbers to deal with some drunk youngsters who were causing an uproar in the town square. When the magistrate ordered them to desist, a teenager named Hendrik Biebouw told him to get lost. “I am an Afrikaner!” he cried—I am an African. “I will not be silent!”

The Dutch colony at the tip of Africa was barely six decades old at that point, but the authorities were already failing in their efforts to stop their minions going native. Biebouw, for instance, came from a family whose European identity was rapidly fading. His illiterate father cohabited for years with a slave named Diana of Madagascar. At least one of his siblings was a half-caste, as were many of his friends. Young Hen...