Looking Into the Past

Clifton, just outside Cape Town, South Africa ca 1992

Last night, when I was supposed to be wrapping up and going to bed, I happened across a folder on my computer that contained a bunch of my writing and stories from close to 20 years ago.

Many of the Clarisworks (olde skewl!) files had mysteriously converted to terminal files somehow but not all of them. I opened as many of them as I could and am going to re-save them in, hopefully, more future-proof formats.

Among the things I realized even from just reading the file names of files that were no longer openable is that I used to write. I used to write a lot. I used to write stories regularly on a wide variety of subjects. Some are interesting and some are not. Most of the writing isn't especially great but there are passages here and there that actually make me remember where I was and how I felt when writing them. And that's a power that I'd forgotten words had.

Michelle above Clifton, Cape Town, South Africa ca 1992

A few lines into a story about riding my motorcycle along the waterfront road between Cape Town and Seapoint where I lived and I could close my eyes and be there again. And I feel the rush of memories cascading down upon me from my time there so many years ago. There's my rat trap Suzuki Katana with the dash of red on the seat parked outside of my Kings Rd. flat I shared with an attractive though barmy accountant. The even more rattrappy Honda CB500 "Bushman" I had before it that hated rain and would strand me in the lightest sprinkle. There were the weekend trips to beach houses with friends. There were late night bike rides along the coast road until my calves locked up completely and I'd have to limp home. Working downtown at the Health & Racquet and all the shenanigans that went on there. Michelle. Ronnie. Adrian. Renzo. Sebastian. Rory. Storm. Keith. Dozens and hundreds of others. All these names that came and went and people that came and went. I wonder where they are today. The two motorcycle accidents I was in, the night of agony after the second one and not being able to sleep even on the meds because it was Guy Fawkes Day and fireworks were going off non-stop. The winding down of aparthied and rising up of the ANC, the taxi wars, the random totally hammered hill dude wandering down my street lazily pissing this way and that. Calling trucks Bakkies, stoplights are robots, sneakers are takkies. And those amazing South African accents. The fruit hawker I'd walk by often shouting "Hannepoot-ah, one rand!" (Grapes for a rand). The beggar I saw once who was so scrawny he was pretending to play his emaciated leg like a flute because it was so skinny. The pack of young kids wandering around completely high on modelling glue and incoherent. The drunk guy on the taxi talking about killing white folks until the rest of the taxi pulled him and beat him up. The trip down the Fish River Canyon in Namibia with some loony South Africans. Drinking in bars with Aussie and Kiwi nutters. So many scenes and memories and probably hundreds that have already slipped away forever.

I left Cape Town more than 20 years ago and much of my time there is still vivid.

I'll sift through the writing to see if there's anything worth reposting here or whether the files just get shuffled into a new format to keep getting carried along to the next computer and the next.

But it was a nice little trip down memory lane.

A Most Unusual Taxi Ride

Years ago, back in the early 90's, I spent a year living overseas in Cape Town in South Africa. This was before the first Democratic elections, there was quite alot of strife, violence and general insanity across the entire country. But it was mostly centered around Johannesburg to the northeast.

The cheapest and most convenient way to get around the city without a car was to take the minibus taxis that would run into and out of the city. These were stripped minibuses made to hold as many people as possible and were sometimes referred to as black taxis because the predominant customers were blacks and mixed race folks.

I lived outside the city and worked in the downtown so I took a taxi in more often than not and almost never had any problems doing so. Yes, I'm a white guy but, upon hearing my American accent, any dislike was immediately replaced by questions, lots of questions about America. One rather interesting thing that I learned was that most South Africans seemed to think that America was made up of New York City and Los Angeles and pretty much nothing else. They patently refused to believe me when I would explain that the US was much, much larger than South Africa with fifty states and a whole variety of people across the nation.

But anyway, one day, when I left the health club and caught a taxi heading home, I climbed into the front seat next to a white girl and the rest of the taxi was loaded with blacks and mixed race folks. Most everyone was in a pretty good mood and the driver was a very, very dark skinned man with a bright white smile and a happy demeanor to him.

We stopped again on the way out of town and picked up a quite obviously drunk as a skunk mixed race man. He crawled into the minibus, stepping on people and generally making an immediate nuisance of himself. Once he got settled, he saw that there were two white people in the van and immediately started to talk about the upcoming elections.

And he talked about how he was going to kill lots of white people once the blacks had control of the country. And how he was going to move into a mansion in Camp's Bay. And how he was going to have a white servant working for him. And on and on.

The white girl next to me got very tense and would do nothing but stare straight ahead. The others in the minibus tried to talk some reason to the guy, telling him that he should shut up, that things weren't going to happen like he was saying, that the country needed the white people as much as the blacks, coloreds and orientals (what some called the Asians/Indian population).

But nothing would quiet him down and he took to pointing his long bony finger at me and the white girl, saying that we would suffer like he'd suffer. He said a lot of stuff in Xhosa, a local tribal language, that I didn't understand. But he also said plenty in English for our benefit. The others in the minibus became a bit more forceful in their telling him to shut up, he was acting like an ass, etc.

The previously happy and smiling driver was no longer smiling and was spending as much time looking in his rear view at the drunk rabblerouser as at the road ahead.

I can't quite recall what exactly was said but he pulled over the taxi after something particularly abrasive was shouted by the drunk guy. Four or five of the other passengers grabbed him, the driver jumped out (he was a big, big man), grabbed his whacking stick from behind his seat. They yanked the drunk guy out, dragged him to the other side of the street, up a short flight of stairs, tossed him to the ground and the driver smashed him upside the head with his stick.

He might have hit him again, I wasn't sure.

Then, everyone came back down, climbed back in the van, smiles came back out, the driver said something cheerful to me and the white girl and we went on our way. The other passengers were laughing about it already.

As we drove away, I looked back at where the drunk guy had been knocked down behind the building. He'd gotten to his feet and appeared from behind the wall, blood streaming down his face, shouting and gesticulating with his hands. I couldn't hear what he was saying but it didn't really matter.

The funny thing was that, at no time did I feel even the slightest bit threatened by him. I think it was because all of the other passengers were so strongly telling him to shut up, how wrong he was, how stupid he was being. The white girl sitting next to me definitely felt really scared and worried for her safety but she also visibly relaxed when the drunk guy had been removed.

And that was about the strangest taxi ride I've ever been on.