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The Cafe de Move-on Blues
In Search of the New South Africa
Christopher Hope
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The Cafe de Move-on Blues
In Search of the New South Africa
Christopher Hope
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About This Book
Longlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize, 2019 'Hope writes with extraordinary exuberance and invention.' - Literary Review In White Boy Running, Christopher Hope explored how it felt and looked to grow up in a country gripped by an 'absurd, racist insanity'. In The Cafe de Move-on Blues, on a road trip thirty years later, Christopher goes in search of today's South Africa; post-apartheid, but also post the dashed hopes and dreams of Mandela, of a future when race and colour would not count. He finds a country still in the grip of a ruling party intent only on caring for itself, to the exclusion of all others; a country where racial divides are deeper than ever. As the old imperial idols of Cecil Rhodes and Paul Kruger are literally pulled from their pedestals in a mass yearning to destroy the past, Hope ponders the question: W hat next? Framed as a travelogue, this is a darkly comic, powerful and moving portrait of South Africa - an elegy to a living nation, which is still mad and absurd.
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Part 1
EMPIRE OF DREAMS
1
Itās not often you watch an angry crowd lynching a statue. But that was what I saw, by chance, one autumn morning in 2015. I was in Cape Town, driving along the boulevard that runs below the main campus of Cape Town University, when traffic ground to a halt and I spotted, high above me, surging crowds on the campus. I left my car on the roadside and walked up the hill to the university, to find squadrons of students mobbing the large statue of a seated man, who seemed to be wearing a mask.
The masked man I knew to be Cecil John Rhodes. He was shown in pensive mode, reminiscent of Rodinās Thinker, seated on a plinth, gazing into the distance. I knew something, too, of what lay behind the animated scene. Rhodes had come to be seen by Black students not as genial lord of all he surveyed but as diabolical looter-in-chief.
For weeks there had been demonstrations and threats by demonstrators to unseat the bronze imperialist. His effigy had been jeered, reviled, smeared with human excrement and now the removal truck was on the scene. Behind the wire fence, rigged to protect the memorial from the angry students, workmen in shiny hard hats clambered over the plinth and began securing cables around the statueās base. The crowd chanted, clapped and punched the air in a weird blend of riot and ritual. But then, in South Africa, weird was where we began from, and what started out as crazy often became the new normal. Throughout the tumult the statue remained, as statues will, imperturbable, its eyes fixed on the far horizon.
If you followed Rhodesā line of sight, then, in crucial ways, his gaze traversed, as did his life, the history and the tragedy of South Africa. He looked out, firstly, over the plush green and wooded suburbs, nestled on the skirts of Table Mountain and, for the most part, still home to Whites. Further out lay the dusty Cape Flats, where Coloured people had lived since being banished from the city by the old apartheid regime, in one of its manic spasms of ethnic cleansing. (āColouredā, like āpeople of colourā, āmixed raceā, ābrown peopleā, and recent, and strongly resisted, attempts to label āBrownā people as āBlackā, are deeply suspect terms, hard to define and by no means settled. But they are all we have to go by.) A long way further off, discernible through field glasses, lay the Black African townships, and the sprawling shacks and shanties of the more recent arrivals in the Mother City, often incomers from the Eastern Cape.
Rhodes attacked, Cape Town, 9 April 2015
The gaze of the seated Rhodes ranged further still, unhindered, all the way to the jagged peaks of the far-away Hottentots Holland mountains, looming gauzy blue as if scissored from the sky itself. There was something proprietorial in his look and that was hardly surprising because Rhodes once owned not only a large chunk of Table Mountain, massed behind him, but huge swathes of Africa to the north and he had designs on the rest of it, from the Cape all the way to Cairo.
Cape Town has always been good at deceiving the traveller and, mostly, the traveller liked being taken in. I think thatās because Cape Town has always been good at fooling itself. Among its illusions has been the belief that it was a place apart: liberal, laid-back, ever so slightly superior, beautiful and remote. I once compared it to a ballet shoe on a boxer ā a shapely bit of almost-Europe strapped to the foot of not-quite-Africa.
Cape Town was always a city of illusions, a town with form, as well as a string of aliases: it once called itself the āTavern of the Seasā, and the āFairest Capeā ā none of these disguises were convincing, except one of the oldest, which is not used any longer: āThe Cape of Slavesā. That last name stung too much to stick for long and it was not to be mentioned in polite company. But that was truly Cape Town, during the great slave period from 1652, with the arrival of the first White colonists, until 1834, when, to the consternation of slave-owning colonists, the practice was abolished by the British. In that period more than sixty thousand slaves were imported from places relatively close like Mozambique, Zanzibar, Madagascar, Angola and Mombasa; and from distant India, the Moluccas, Thailand and Japan.
Cape Town had many faces, many guises: a Dutch fortress, a British colony, and home to a Parliament where every new turn of the apartheid screw was solemnly voted into law. Cape Town called itself āthe bastionā of Western Christian civilization. That was the boast of our old masters and we had the laws to prove it, all of them made in Cape Town by a supine but dedicated band of zealous racists who were not merely pleased with their handiwork, they were noisily proud of it.
I first lived there back in the sixties, an exile from the Highveld, when the city had a quiet and rather dowdy charm, lying as it did under its beautiful, preposterous sawn-off mountain. Capetonians equated topography with virtue; because their mountain was imposing, solid and shapely and they were its disciples, so too must they be saved by living in its shadow. Sacred landmarks and good looks translated into a kind of dreamy superiority.
Coming as I did from āup Northā, the rough country beyond the Vaal River, I got the feeling, which was, perhaps, shared by many up-country visitors, that I had fallen among fundamentalists, hill worshippers so proud of ātheirā mountain that to hear them talk youād think that they had built it. Their belief, unstated but pervasive, was that here was Godās own capital, together with His holy mountain, and He dwelt on the green slopes in a suitably named suburb of Bishopscourt, spoke only to Capetonians and they spoke only to each other. This was the kind of parochial pantheism that Cecil Rhodes shared, the belief that high mountain places were home to, and reserved for, very special beings.
When I fly into Cape Town I see in the distance the kempt and shapely houses of Constantia, Kenilworth and Newlands climbing the mountain slopes. I glimpse oaks, seashore, whitewashed Cape Dutch gables and vineyards. Table Mountain towers and beyond it, looking out to the Atlantic Ocean, the mansions of Clifton and Camps Bay where the feel is faux-Mediterranean, the villas pure Sorrento, but the sea temperature is Arctic and the south-easterly wind is so pugnacious that I know people who must move into their cellars at night to get some sleep.
And then the plane dips down to the airport and below I see the endless squatter camps and shanty towns of the Cape Flats, where drive-by shootings and gangland slayings are so frequent they rate barely a paragraph in the papers. There is nowhere else I can think of that provides a more dramatic ground-plan of the way things have been, and still are, in South Africa: the rich on the hill, the poor on the flats and, midway between the two, the airport. No matter how often I fly in itās something I never get used to ā a city so improbable that it should stand as the primary symbol of a country every bit as improvised, a tale made up as people went along, a story told by a tragedienne with a terrifying sense of humour.
As I watched angry demonstrators assaulting the bronze simulacrum of a Victorian imperialist with their fists, I asked myself why Rhodes, and why now? This brooding figure was so entwined in the history of South Africa that it was impossible to understand the country without knowing something about the man. But familiarity bred forgetfulness. His statue had been such a familiar piece of furniture on the campus for over eighty years that very few passers-by gave it a second thought. He was just there, a permanent presence, unseen, much as Capetonians seldom looked up at the mountain towering over them. But the timing of the attack ā and its target ā made little sense. What was the point of digging up the past like this? From a faint but persistent memory, the arch-imperialist was, once again, centre stage, just as heād been when he had moulded Southern Africa to his will. The crude yellow mask someone had painted across Rhodesā eyes gave him the look of a blindfolded reveller from some strange carnival, a feeling reinforced by the crowds, dancing and chanting around the silent figure.
The mood of the students was a blend of protest and party-going that made it hard to know if they were furious or having fun, or in rehearsal for a piece of theatre. Cape Town University is slotted into the slopes of Table Mountain, on a series of terraces that made natural stages. What was playing out was an epic spectacle with a cast of hundreds. Some students commanded the stage, while others, in orderly rows in stone seats, played the part of the audience.
But there was no script, no director and the actors in this public act of exorcism had to improvise; baying, whistling and covering the face of the masked man with plastic bags, and slapping him repeatedly. All of them would have known that this lump of bronze felt no pain, but they suspended their disbelief and played their parts as priests of the tribe, solemnly punishing the transgressor.
Cecil Rhodesā statue being removed from University of Cape Town
One of the students had a plastic bucket that contained, I soon realized, human excrement, and with this he slowly and solemnly laved the statue. It was provocative, it was even shocking, a man with a plastic bucket of shit publicly assaulting a hated idol. But if he meant to be deeply disrespectful, there was a problem because sacrilege was easier said than done. To be really effectively profane, to blaspheme on a Baudelairean level, you needed to know, and to take seriously, the religious beliefs of your enemy. I had the feeling that there were very few in the watching crowd who understood the role of the bucket-bearer.
What Iād been witnessing then was not a morality play or even a ceremony of exorcism; it had really been a festival of ignorance. Because very few in the crowd had the first idea what was going on even though the drama of it all made compelling viewing. The audience was split anyway, divided by that familiar spectre that bedevils South Africa, and it was not Rhodes, it was race. Because race, in the new democratic South Africa, far from being relegated to the past, was now more ubiquitous than it had been in the old days of apartheid, even if the word made people uncomfortable and which, until very recently, few mentioned without having an attack of the vapours. Race was never spoken about, nor was tribe, nor colour, nor identity. Such things were not to be mentioned and our old familiar angst had been replaced, rather suitably, by a new amnesia. In fact, the obsession with race and all that went with it was one of the very few things that in the new South Africa had not changed at all.
When the flimsy plastic noose was produced, and looped around Rhodesā neck, it seemed excommunication was to be followed by execution. It made me think of medieval punishments: of the village stocks, the pillory, the gibbet at the crossroads, or public executions in Iran, where hanged men dangled from construction cranes and crowds looked on. As the crane hoisted Rhodes slowly into the sky, the audience raised their phones or held up opened iPads, like prayer books, in front of their faces, and photographed, firstly, the masked and dangling man, then each other and then themselves.
2
Iremembered an assault on the statue of Rhodes that had taken place some years earlier. An anonymous scribbler, searching for words to sum up what made the arch-imperialist so detestable to so many in Africa, and so admired by others, had scrawled on the plinth: āFuck you and your empire of dreamsā. I liked the āempire of dreamsā bit. In a land where words had been corrupted and emptied of meaning by the linguistic vandals of the former regime, any lyrical lift was welcome. And āempire of dreamsā was apt because it caught the vast, mad vision of Rhodes. It was also rather forlorn because no one had less use for poetry than the great empire-builder. His prodigious ambition might be summed up in another four-letter word, better fitting than the obscenity the scribbler had chosen: that word was āmoreā. And had Rhodes been asked, āMore of what?ā I think he would have replied, simply, āOf everything.ā
That was another notable thing about the crowd. The White students were relatively few, unsure and timorous, while Black students were more numerous and more confident. They made up the centre of gravity with Whites clustered around them like iron filings on a magnet. As Rhodes was winched into the air and hung massively overhead, a mix of demonstrators, Black and White, climbed onto the plinth but Black students made the running; they literally called the tune and, not only did their anger seem real, they seemed to know what they were angry about.
Such anger was never really accessible if you grew up White in South Africa, spoke English and lived anywhere near the diamond fields of Kimberley or the gold mines of Johannesburg. To English-speakers and people of Anglo-Saxon stock, what Rhodes did and what he stood for was exceptional but never scandalous. It was his amplitude that you felt, even if you were hardly aware of the man. Rhodes was not just there, he was everywhere. His ways and values we took in with our motherās milk, without a second thought. Rhodes was ingrained in us, a way of seeing things, a point of view; he was the mirror we looked into and saw ourselves.
Rhodes was held to be the apotheosis of British acumen and ability, whether you knew much about him or not. After all, he owned and ran the mines and the mines made the country what it was, in the view of its Anglo-Saxon settlers. Rhodes was the weather, an all-encompassing background hum, rather like the hiss of cosmic radiation left over from the Big Bang; his presence persisted and filled the settler universe where English was spoken. Rhodesā mark might be detected in the names, customs and thought-patterns in colleges, mining houses, sports teams, scholarships and āfoundersā days in English-speaking schools across the country. It was Rhodes the indefatigable entrepreneur whom his English admirers celebrated, the sportsman, diamond magnate, jolly good fellow. In my family, living as we did in Johannesburg, āon the Reefā, everyone worked, in one way or another, āon the minesā. Rhodes was revered as a man who āmade a mintā, sent clever boys to Oxford on scholarships, and elevated sport into a religious obsession.
Although Rhodes never married and had no children, he had myriad heirs and most White English-speakers accepted as natural and unexceptional the fact that we were they. This familial connection was to be hastily repudiated when, very recently, Rhodes was found to be a monster ā but denial and amnesia have been tradit...