Africa & Middle East > South Africa > Gauteng > Johannesburg > Articles > A Reluctant Radical

Extract from 'Happy Sad Land'
During a journey through Southern Africa in 1992, I pitched up on the doorstep of an unusual couple. Alex was a Latvian baron, Geraldine a blonde Jewish liberal from Jo’burg. She was his second wife, he her third husband. They lived on Alex’s rambling estate at the foot of the Tsitsikama Mountains, a few miles from the fashionable stretch of beach at Plettenburg Bay and Geraldine had been attempting to radicalize this man whose favourite occupation was lying in his big armchair with a copy of the Spectator and a large whisky...

Alex and Geraldine had what you might call an active relationship. He talked, she interrupted; she talked, he interrupted; every now and then, in a fit of frustration, she would cry: "I should never have married you!"

Like all white South Africans, they were keen to put me right on South Africa. The worst people, the very worst, Geraldine said, were the Jo'burg liberals.

"I tell you," Alex agreed, "you'll find more racism in the twelve square miles of the northern suburbs of Jo'burg than anywhere."

"The Afrikaner," said Geraldine, "out in the sticks, is basically honest. I'd rather have an Afrikaner than a South African English any day."

"The English are the worst," said Alex. "The bloody colonial English types. They've just stayed out there enjoying the benefits and doing nothing. At least the Afrikaner, however misguided, is doing what he thinks is right."

"An Afrikaner," said Geraldine, "treats his blacks, children, and animals the same. If they do wrong he'll give them a good hiding, he's very paternal, but if they get sick, or need help, he'll look after them."

"And that's what he thinks is right," Alex repeated. "At the end of the week, he can go to church and look his God square in the eye and think he's done the right thing."

"The expats," interrupted Geraldine. "They're actually the worst. The wealthy liberal South African expats. Live in Knightsbridge, say all the right things. Every year, around 15 or 16 December you hear this whirring sound in the distance round here. It's the private planes, coming in from London and Australia and Los Angeles for Christmas. From mid-air, they phone ahead, to Samuel, whose surname they don't even know, to get their gin and tonics ready for them for when they arrive at their houses. They're here for a month and then they go back to Knightsbridge. And if you meet them in London they're terribly liberal. But what happens to all the extra staff they take on over Christmas? What happens to them when they fly back?"

"Are they over there because they're frightened?" I asked.

"They're frightened," said Alex. "God they're frightened. They say they're just spending a couple of years in London because they want to live somewhere where there's some culture," he chuckled his deep chuckle, "but basically, no, they're terrified."

We went through to a big stone-flagged kitchen to have some lunch, and I was introduced to Ernestina and Gertrude. Gertrude was a Zulu, Geraldine's 'special maid' who'd followed her down from Jo'burg.

"She just seems to think I'm the person she should work for," Geraldine told me later. "So here she is, this Zulu alone in a district full of Xhosas and coloureds."

Alex opened a fresh bottle of Chardonnay and we settled down to home-made pancakes stuffed with tuna fish in a cheese sauce and talked some more about hypocrisy and liberalism.

"There was a period," Geraldine said, "when it was fashionable in the northern suburbs to have a black friend. You know, your token black friend. People would sit through dinner parties ignoring the fact that whoever it was would eat their gem squash with their fingers or didn't turn up on time. But I remember saying to this friend of mine: 'Come off it, this person isn't your friend. A friend is someone you can phone up in the middle of the night when you're depressed, they're someone who's known you for years and years, who doesn't mind how you are. He's not your friend'."

She was very down on white hypocrisy, Geraldine. Even to the extent of telling stories against herself.

"I remember I was at this lunch party - in ]o'burg this was -and one of the guests, a black man, got struck by lightning. Now I've been trained in mouth to mouth resuscitation, but confronted by this black guy, lying on the ground, frothing at the mouth, I just couldn't bring myself to do it. Me, the little white liberal! I couldn't do it. Isn't that terrible? Luckily he was OK in the end, but isn't that terrible?"

"You know when I first arrived here," she went on, "I was such a little Jo'burg radical. I ripped the place apart. I went round the whole estate, mending roofs here and fixing leaking taps there. I took all the mattresses out of the house and gave them to the people on the farm, because, you know, how could we sleep on a mattress, and not them - but I don't know, I'm getting less radical. Since I've been here, I've lent the coloured people a lot of money, to do this, to fix that - "

"How much darling?" interposed Alex, with his fond smile, from the head of the table. "Twenty, thirty?"

"A lot of money. And never once have I had a word of thanks. Never once has anyone suggested they might try and pay me back."

We had finished lunch, and I wondered whether it was time to make a move, time to go searching for another dingy hotel.

"You will stay," said Geraldine suddenly. "No you must stay," said Alex. "Really. We've got a guest cottage, you can hole up there and write, or go to the beach and surf, or…"

So I settled into the guest cottage. It had a large four poster bed, on which floated a soft white eiderdown. There were white curtains and when you were out your dirty laundry vanished, the room tidied itself, and your laundry reappeared, ironed and folded, on the mahogany bedside table.

In the evening, Alex was back in his crimson throne, a whisky at his side, a Brahms piano concerto rippling through the room.

"So what about the township?" I asked. "D'you think it would be safe for me to go in there?"

"You want to go into the township?" said Geraldine. She turned to Alex and a look passed between them. "He should meet Majola."

"Well…" said Alex, shrugging.

"No, really, that would be brilliant," said Geraldine. "You want something for your book, you come with me tomorrow morning. Majola's like our local shacklord. You know what a shacklord is? I shan't tell you any more." She looked at her husband and let out a little giggle. "Alex has only once been into that township."

"Not true, darling…"

"Once!" said Geraldine, holding up a finger and laughing. "This was just after Mandela was released, and De Klerk made that speech…god, what a moment that was: at last you felt, right, they're going to get on with it, whatever's going to happen is going to happen… Anyway, you've got Alex here, who's lived for years and years - forever - holed up in this place, surrounded by books, and keeping a real arm's length attitude to the farm. When people have come to him he's been reading. "Go away," he's said,' she giggled again, '"I'm reading." And now all of a sudden he's got this radical young wife, who's come down here from Jo'burg and is redecorating everything and generally going crazy about the place. And there's a march organised. From the township, to protest against whatever - this, that or the other. So up they get, the two of them, at 7 a.m. and they pitch up at the township and there's nobody there. So they wake up the guy who's organising the march. He's fast asleep, but he soon gets up. "Right, yes, the march, yes." And they look around, and there's all these dreamy looking white guys approaching. And they've got all these bowls of water. They're happy-clappies come to wash the feet of their enemy - all these white guys getting down on their knees trying to wash the black guys' feet. And then we're all marching - and Alex, who's never been on a march in his life, is marching into Plettenberg Bay with his banner -i t was so funny - and then Alex gets fed up with it and wants to go home. So he hails this police van - the policeman is a friend of his. And the head of the Port Elizabeth ANC, who's also a friend of his, gets in too, and the crowd are going wild because they think this ANC guy is getting taken away by the police again - it was too funny. Those are the things you should write about, Mark. That's South Africa."

"What you've got to realise," said Alex a little later, when we'd all drunk a little more, "is that all our lives out here we've been waiting for the End. You never knew how it was going to happen, and when - but you knew it was going to happen. So there's never been any sense of permanence or planning for the future. You just can't do that. How long are you going to have? Another two years? Another three years? And meanwhile," he went on, "you get inured to increasingly higher levels of violence. Originally, if one person got murdered, it made headline news. And then, after Sharpeville, you got used to the idea of forty people being shot; and now, if the level is down to forty a month it seems acceptable. It's like the tide coming in. Each time it goes that little bit further."

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