DAY 8 - HAVING A MR KURTZ MOMENT

The moment I drove into Bedford it had the feel of a good town. This makes me think though: what exactly makes a good town? Ficksburg and Ladybrand are attractive towns. They fill you with a sense of the old Vrystaat order of things. But there is something menacing and oppressive in this strictly regulated conformity. It feels like everyone in these towns is locked into a role. The Dutchmen are kind and stern - very stern - and the black populace behaves itself like disciplined school shildren. If they are naughty they they are put in clean green overalls and made to tend the splendid vegetable patches in the correctional institutions. I think the Dutchmen find the idea of the kaffers looking after themselves shocking and irresponsible. If you take order and discipline away from a school what will happen? The kids become lazy and shiftless and get up to all sorts of mischief. The kaffer needs to be directed, sternly but kindly; the kaffer, in turn, appreciates this guidance.

The alternative to this scenario presents itself in towns where the townships have sprawled out of control. I wouldn't call these 'good' towns either. Burgersdorp, in a valley surrounded by the Stormberg mountains, is a good example of a proper Dutchman town where the Dutchmen seem to have lost the fight. In the centre of town sits a striking old Dutch Reformed church. It has a domed, corrugated iron roof which blazes molten in the noonday sun. Right beside it is the delapidated old Royal Hotel. When I drove through town its balcony was crowded with apparently drunken blacks. They spilled out of the hotel doors onto the street, and I had to thread the Uno through them while they gave me rotten insolent looks and intentionally got in my way. The white people that I saw drove around with tight inward looking faces, and the yellow cop vans were dusty and defeated looking. The township when I drove out was huge and sprawling and mean looking.

Then there are the almost completely black towns, which have a sense of harmony free from the grinding pressure of racial tension. I found this in Thabanchu, situated in the old Bhoputatswana, where Spud and I spent a night in the tent on the lawn of the local police station. I spent half of the next day roaming around the town, and I found it bustling with a black energy and sense of purpose that I'd only briefly seen while passing through the Transkei. (I was to see more of the Transkei later in the trip, when Spud and I hitched through it following the demise of the Uno).

I had a weird experience in the town of Seymour, which I found up in the Andriesberg mountains an hour or two outside of Queenstown. Seymour has the look of a white town, yet it is solely occupied by blacks. They lolled on the steps of the of the post office and police station, and they loitered and chatted in the entrance to Fred's Bakery. I saw them sprawled on the porches of derelict looking houses. Absolutely no-one seemed to be doing anything. How were they supporting themselves? How was the town functioning? As I drove down the main street and they stared at me and Spud hanging out his window I had the eerie feeling that the town had only recently been occupied; that only last week the white folk had moved out in a hurry, and now this crowd were waiting in a limbo, yet to settle down and establish themselves properly. It had to be a recent occupation. How else were they supporting themselves? Where was the food coming from? I felt like I was experiencing a Kurtz moment - that I was glimpsing something fundamental in the difference between our respective cultures. It wasn't that blacks are lazy and whites industrious. It was more a sense of them being comfortable as a community which does nothing much all day except hang out and shoot the breeze. If this leads to them starving then obviously it's not a good thing. But if they have enough food to get by on then what's the point of stressing? Just park off and be part of the community. Whites on the other hand are thrown into an existential void after a few days of this existence. We vibrate at too feverish a city pitch to ever understand the slower rythms of country life. Can it be this simple? And ... where was the food coming from?
As I drove out of town I saw what looked like a township laid out in neat, barren rows on an adjacent hillside. The grey cinder block building were new, with brightly silver corrugated iron roofs coruscating in the late afternoon sunshine. Apart from one piccanin, running behind a goat and whipping its arse with a thin stick, the houses and streets were deserted.