Helena was tall and lean, with a mop of brown hair and a collection of tattoos from a high-end parlor. The queen of hearts banded from hip to knee around the outside of her right thigh. On one wrist, a swallow took flight. On the other, time ran away with her.
She sat across from me in the garden on an autumn evening in Cape Town, a green beer bottle intertwined in her long, elegant fingers. The hands of an artist. I’d known her for only 10 minutes, but maybe she could sense it—our shared love of adven-ture.
“We’re going out to the vineyard this weekend for a birth-day,” she said. “You should come.”
The next day we were off to a vineyard in the Swart-land, one of South Africa’s premier wine growing regions. It was the birthday of the vintner, a 28-year-old Afrikaaner named Jasper.
Jasper wouldn’t have been out of place in an American frat house. Built like a rugby player, he wore short shorts, a cut-off tee, and no shoes. In his left hand he carried a can of cheap beer. In his right, he helped haul a massive grill, cut from an oil drum, out onto the lawn.
“Braaing tonight,” Jasper said. “Hope you came prepared.”
A South African braai, or barbeque, says a lot about the culture and the history of the country. As in Argentina or the western United States, the Europeans who settled South Africa found rich agricul-tural land and wide, open spaces. The Dutch settlers spread over the land as homesteaders, building self-sufficient farms for extended family units. They lived alongside the indigenous Xhosa, Khoi-San, and Zulu populations—some-times peacefully, more often not.
The braai evolved out of this lifestyle, local families gathering to share in a meal and build community.
I say ‘meal,’ but what doctor could honestly condone a diet consisting of eight pounds of meat and a lettuce leaf or two? Because that’s all it is. Meat, meat, more meat, a token salad that no one touches, and enough booze to float a medium-sized shipping vessel. Did I mention the meat? Chops, steak, and boerewors, a South African specialty—thick beef sausage a couple feet long, lightly spiced and
spiraled around into itself.
The centerpiece of any braai is the grill, traditionally a wood-fired behemoth that could roast a small horse. The braai master builds the coals lovingly over the course of several hours, carefully tending the infant flame. It is as much skill as art, approaching, at times, almost religious devotion.
There is ritual in the braai, and it is man’s ritual. Only men are allowed into the inner sanctum. They are expected, nay required, to devote their time and energy to the braai while partaking of the sacrament—an ice-cold South African lager.
A woman who dared to approach the braai for anything other than to receive communion in the form of chop or boerewors would be shouted down for heresy.
Patriarchy is alive and well in South Africa, and there’s no more tangible example of it than the backyard braai. Women stay with women and gossip about whoever couldn’t make it. Men drink. Men talk rugby.
It is a bit different in the more liberal Western Cape, where I traveled with Helena. At Jasper’s vineyard we mingled like younger people do. We weren’t laborers or professionals, and we had yet to approach the age when family, children, and career define one in the social hierarchy. Instead, we were artists, travelers, volunteers, and wine connoisseur.
They are part of the new South Africa—the generation that has come of age in the years since Mandela’s release and the birth of the “Rainbow Nation.” They’re only one part, however. I had to get on my bike and pedal east and into the South African heartland to truly get a taste of South African food, hospitality, and culture.
In the tiny farming community of Dordrecht in the Eastern Cape, I rolled up to a gas station and the only bed-and-breakfast in town. It was full. The woman who ran the place called up her father, a local farmer, who threw my bike in the back of his bakkie (pick-up truck) and took me 11 kilometers down the road to his ranch.
High up in the golden foothills of the Maloti Mountains, Kurt raised cattle and mohair sheep. He was built like an ox, with meaty hands and forearms, and a round, wind-burnt face. He was alone in a massive old house, his children having grown up and moved out. His wife was posted as a guard at a distant women’s prison.
Kurt had an indoor gas braai. Winter was settling in, and it was too cold to be outside after dark. Even inside, he wore a heavy camouflage jacket and thick boots.
“These are the kudu boerewors—my own recipe,” he said in a kitchen illuminated by a dim fluorescent bulb shining on stark, pale blue tile. “Just got these in today. From a hunting trip up north, ya. I’ll cook you some extra. You’ll need to take them along with you on your journey.”
As we drank beer and brandy he offered his philosophy.
“Discipline. That’s what you need to have in your life. Discipline and direction.”
He continued: “I will tell you something—whenever I come to hire one of these blacks, the first thing I ask them is, ‘Hey, go over there and grab that bucket.’”
Kurt stood up and shuffled over to the wall.
“And if he just wanders over, picks up the bucket, and strolls back—well, I’ve seen all I need to see.
“But if he hustles over”—Kurt jogged to the wall and back—“and he brings it back quickly, I will hire that man right there. I would rather have someone who steals from me but works hard than an honest man who doesn’t do the job.”
I tried to change the course of the conversation.
“But, hey, your daughter just had a baby,” I said. “You’re a grandfather. That’s got to be a pretty great thing!”
He looked away for moment.
“Well yes, that was a bit of a surprise. She dropped out of school, and she hasn’t been back. The father, we’re not too sure about him.”
I didn’t push much further. Discipline has its limits.
I rode northeast, traversing the foot-hills of the Drakensburg Range, to the old Orange Free State. This was “God’s country.” I had to make a stop in Bethlehem, one of few cities in the area with a bike shop.
My host that evening took me to dinner at her parents’ place, a large house on the shore of a wide, placid lake. Her father was a surgeon. He had an indoor, wood-fired braai. I spied a cross hanging above the fireplace.
“Oh, are you Catholic?” I asked.
“No,” my host said. He seemed confused. “We’re Christian.”
We held hands and prayed before tucking into chops fresh from the braai.
The Transvaal Republic and the Orange Free State made up the Afrikaans heartland before the English annexed the two countries at the turn of the 20th century. Following the Second Anglo-Boer War, the Dutch Reformed Church—the largest Christian denomination in South Africa—resisted British attempts to Anglicize the defeated Afrikaaners. At a time in world history of rising nationalism, the popularizing of eugenics and increasing fear of bloody socialist uprisings, the Church’s safeguarding of Afrikaans culture quickly turned from protection into exploitation. Identity was constructed in opposition, first to the English, then to the indigenous Africans. It led directly to some of the most notorious abuses of the apartheid era, including the segregation of the church based on the color of one’s skin.
“Now I’m not racist, but…” my host started. I knew how this sentence would end. Even if there was no individual malice based on race, the institutions of apartheid had existed for the better part of the past century. Even 20 years on, hundreds of subtle prejudices still exist. My host was a younger woman as well, but here, in the old Orange Free State, tradition, God, and country held firm, but with that unexpected baggage.
I pushed farther north from Bethlehem, and in every town and city I passed, I inevitably found myself on Kerkstraat—Church Street. Spires from these massive houses of worship, made of stone from distant sandstone and granite quarries, pierced every skyline. The people that I met were overwhelmingly warm, generous, and welcoming. They told me to “Go well, and God bless.”
By the time I reached Limpopo, the northernmost province in the country, I’d been through South Africa’s industrial heartland. Open pit coalmines fed power plants belching smoke and steam. The air had a brown tint to it and tasted like soot.
Natural resources powered South Africa’s economy throughout most of the 20th century. Diamonds, gold, coal, iron ore, chromium, and platinum still contribute nearly 60 percent of South Africa’s exports. Manufacturing and agriculture make up a heavy chunk of the country’s GDP. These blue-collar industries were reflected, once again, in my time around the braai.
I came off the Highveld north of Lyden-burg on the road to Tzaneen, descending over 2,600 feet within a mile or so. I slept that night at a campsite at the base of the Escarpment. A younger guy, shirtless with a pot-belly and a big smile invited me over to his campsite. He and his family were having a braai that night. He said he had to hear about my trip so far.
“Come, join us.”
He cracked a beer for me off the inside of a cast that bound his right wrist.
“How’d you get the cast?” I asked him.
“Ach, I punched my brother in the face and broke my hand.” He laughed. “It’s alright. He deserved it.”
My host was a farm manager, a diesel mechanic by training. He’d worked in the mines and some factories, moved from place to place. Now that he was married, to a woman a few years his elder, he’d settled down into a quieter life.
“I used to do some real crazy things.”
“Crazier than punching your brother in the face?”
“Much crazier. Just running around, you know? Drinking too much. Fighting too much. You can only do it for so long.”
He cracked open another beer, and then another…and another. I’d learned from several other hard-drinking Afrikaans men that if you can’t keep up, they get a little angry. We moved from beer to brandy and from brandy to rum. I had to ride the next day, and the only thing that kept me on the sober side of completely bollixed was the amount of meat I ate to soak up all the booze.
He was lucky he’d found this work, he said. The blacks would do it cheaper, and you had to hire the blacks because of all this affirmative action.
There wasn’t anger in his voice—he was probably too young for that—but there was frustration. As if the “new,” post- apartheid government had deliberately targeted them, an attempt to wipe away the people who had built this country.
As an outsider, it’s impossible to change this viewpoint. You can mention the oppression and the violations of basic dignity under apartheid, how specific policies treated some groups as sub-human. But you will never convince a staunch apologist that the country needed healing after decades of self-imposed wounds.
Much of the genesis behind apartheid came from policies specifically designed by those in power to shore up white, blue- collar support. Blacks were not allowed to work in certain professions. They were not allowed to own shops even in their own Bantustans. In order to build a cross-cutting coalition to maintain racial segregation, Afrikaner elites had brought in an ill-served underclass by guaranteeing full employment.
Now, with staggeringly high unemployment and some of the worst inequality and crime statistics in the world, blue-collar whites who’ve lost their jobs look around and ask, “What happened?”
You can read about this in books like J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace or see it in films like District 9 or Skin, but for me, the best way to experience South Africa was to meet around the braai for a couple of beers. It doesn’t take too long before the stories, the history, and the culture of the country start to come out.
Sterling Carter work is currently working as an international protection officer with Nonviolent Peaceforce in the South Sudan.
Read his blog at: http://sterlinginafrica.blogspot.com