I went cage diving in South Africa. I was lowered into a narrow pen made of chicken wire, something you might keep rabbits in. I could have reached through one of the sizable gaps and touched the bleeding fish head that served as bait. When the sharks came, big as cars and blank eyed, they brushed the wire with their toothy grins, sloshed water over our heads with their tails. One bit the cage. Mostly they sunk silently back into the dark.

Sometimes they wouldn’t even take the head. See, sharks want only to survive, as efficiently and quietly as possible. Their dull eyes hide nothing.

Their finger-long blade-sharp teeth are nothing compared to the mess of pride and greed and anger and shame and hunger our bodies are armed with.
On Long Street my first night in Cape Town a boy asks for “a real South African drink.” The barkeep begins pulling down bottle after bottle, mixing every thing from every shelf into a glass. When he’s done he drops something in and lights the whole glass on fire.

We all have a round. One of us vomits. All feel the searing, the rush of fuzzy madness. The catchphrase that evening is “1 in 3.”

“1 in 3,” every time a girl is dancing up too close to a local. “1 in 3,” every time a guy slips an arm around a local. “1 in 3,” as we walk the streets. It refers, of course, to the population with HIV/AIDS, that presence which stifles everything.

A woman grabs my arm. “Wear your purse in front,” she tells me, shaking her head. Then she cups her hands, “change, change, change.” I shake my head.

In the bar I meet a large white man dressed as a nun. He’s trying to promote his comedy show. We start talking about homosexuality in Cape Town. “It’s fine as long as you are vocal,” he assures me. “It’s the black lesbians who really struggle. The men just say they need to be raped.”

When I go he tells me to remember that whenever I feel threatened to run to the men in yellow vests on the street corners. I thank him, feeling slightly assured.

I end up leaving Long Street and end up in a dark alley with a friend. We clasp hands, trying to find the light, jumping at every movement. I see a figure ahead, note it’s limping and feel less afraid. It’s the woman from earlier. I see now the swell of her belly, the way she grips the place the child is curled, innocent yet. I give too many rand and her lined face looks a little pleased as she limps on, bent under all that weight.

When a man starts following us, we run to a yellow vest. He grabs us a cab, and my friend and I jump in as a rather ominous looking group approaches. I find out later the men in yellow were only street cleaners, and my sense of security drops again. “Assume everyone in this country is armed,” he warns. I pay him too much, and my friend and I race toward the lights of the harbor.

In the harbor the buildings are tall and white and cleancleanclean. You can buy bottles of wine shaped like Table Mountain. You can buy lobster. You can buy 500-rand pairs of jeans. You can buy little wooden masks or zebra pelts or other things to call “African” and take home. You can wear your purse and no money pouch and be a woman and alone.
You can see Table Mountain from the port, and some of the taller buildings. You can see the really tall buildings and the swath of mist we call the Table Cloth. You can see the white shining facade which is the scab across the townships. You can see the port and see nothing else. And be pleased.

The Malawian man who tells us his name is William wants to know what I think of President Obama. No, that’s not what he really wants. He wants me to tell him it’s true, what the people say, that he will change everything for Africa. He wants, I think, for me to tell him that he will return to Malawi a rich man, and all his family there will be rich too, and alive, and happy, and none of them will ever have to leave again. He wants me to tell him that my people know how wealthy we are, and we know how desperate he is, and that maybe we see it as being as senseless, as insane, and as inevitably unsustainable as I do.

“I don’t know,” I tell him. “A lot of people have to approve of anything Obama wants to do. A lot of people think they have a lot of problems in my country.”

He nods his head, but his smile is wilting. It’s hot out, and we are tired and the dead sea nearby is stinking. Obama is change. He tells me to keep believing

It was the Congolese man who told me why the men rape babies. “Doctors” tell them that if they have sex with a virgin it will cure their AIDS. This is why four-month old babies are mutilated. This is the deadness in eyes and limbs. This is what robs little girls of their voices.

I shut my knees and touch my hair and wonder if the world will ever make sense again.

Her name was Julia. We were in the township to weigh children for a project called Operation Hunger. I was in the baby room and kept trying to wipe her endlessly runny nose. I held her small body and tried to feed her. She grabbed the mushed-up banana in her baby fingers and tried to push it between my lips.

I think it hurt her to eat. She couldn’t breathe well, and every few seconds made a deep cough that sounded like it must have come from a larger person. Her eyes were fluttering shut and so I held her close and rocked her. Her whole chest rattled and cackled like a tiny fire, and she would choke a bit every few breaths. All I could do was keep rocking her and wiping her nose.

The whole time I kept remembering the horrible statistics, the cruelty and the disease and the crime and everything I was going to leave this girl to face, this often wretched world we had provided her with. The world all of us might ignore from the lights and swept streets of the port, from our neat homes and our bodies well fed and our families who can sleep so well at night.

It’s simple but it doesn’t seem right. You can’t think of it like that, people keep telling me. And you can’t, if you want to keep moving. You can’t, if you will ever be rid of that soft warm weight, trusting in your lap.

That evening, before I board my ship for good, I sit at the bar with an Irish man. He came to this country as a young boy, and saw all the insanity and injustice of apartheid, lived in that strange limbo which was the place of white non-Afrikaners under the apartheid system.

We talked about the townships, about the areas we students were told never to enter alone, the “dangerous” parts. He said the important thing is to talk to people, that once you can get them to see you as a person, and not just a color or a wallet, you can be safe. Yet in a country where the wounds of apartheid are still so fresh, I can’t help but see this as daunting.

A writer who I heard read on my first day in port spoke of the internalization of apartheid’s inhumanity, how self-loathing transforms men into monsters. This is the fear I speak of when I explain why the sharks do not scare me, why for me a night on Long Street represents a shakier cage — no cage at all, even — where with a wrong turn one might be devoured by this evil which is part of humanity, the same sort of monstrosity that nearly destroyed South Africa under the guise of apartheid.

Yet, this is a country where there is hope. There is possibility; there is opportunity for a nation not just to prove itself, but to prove something about humanity as a whole.

When I think of Julia I must try to see that. I remember the volunteers I met at Operation Hunger, who were so eager, so passionate to promote change. I remember the refugees from all over Africa I talked with who came here to begin again — the people from all over, really, whether it be Ireland or India or Kenya or the Congo, who came ready to work to this beautiful place of mountains and strife and sea and waterfalls and change, change, change.

The question, for me at least, is only whether that change will come soon enough for Julia, for all the Julias in this country, all the children who need health care, who need food, who need an education — and who, most of all, need love Love, to overcome the self-loathing, love to overcome the violence, love to overcome all the hardships of poverty and terminal illness. Love, to overcome all the hatred of history.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 at 7:00 am and is filed under Away From Home. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.