Last week I took some time off to recharge after the culmination of a big project that had sapped my appetite for life. I went to Wilderness in the Western Cape, a beautiful area of natural beauty as it’s typically described on the tourist sites.
Wilderness is still holding on to that description and that name, though the proliferation of humans moving to the area is starting to hint at a certain irony. Like those small, original houses in Camps Bay called things like “Sea View” or “Ocean Breeze”, which now only have a view of the backside of some schmodel-infested Stefan Antoni-designed monstrosity that towers over them.
No therapy is complete without the retail part, so I went to the Outeniqua market in George to see what local fare was on offer. Reader, there was a lot. It gave me hope. I bought a bucket hat made out of that classic blue and white striped dish cloth you find all over South Africa, from a brand called Rust. You get a red and white version of the cloth too. Such a clever idea, and so impeccably South African.
There was the usual one-man band with a backing track playing crowd-pleaser songs from a wooden stage, though in this case it was two men, a guitarist and a singer. When I arrived they were doing a cover of JJ Cale’s Cocaine, a song whose refrain goes: If you got bad news, you want to kick them blues, cocaine/When your day is done, and you want to run, cocaine/She don’t lie, she don’t lie, she don't lie/Cocaine.
A Muslim family walked past, the father pushing a pram, the mother clad in a full burka; a stall opposite sold wooden plaques with homilies from the Christian Bible hand-burnt into them. Ah, South Africans. So weird. Later, an old couple started lang-arming to Dozi. Add a mince jaffle to the experience, some delicious samosas, and you’re starting to appreciate life again.
I arrived home a week later to find that Busi, who works as my domestic, had not been in to work as scheduled. Her sister phoned later that day to tell me she was dead. She’d been shot in a house in Capricorn — part of Muizenberg, another seaside area often described as picturesque — where she had been visiting a friend. The friend had reportedly previously been abused by her partner, who seemed to be connected with the shooting in some way. (I’m not giving Busi’s surname, as I don’t want to intrude on the family’s privacy.)
I don’t need to tell you about the awful condition of being a woman in South Africa. As News24 drily puts it: “Police are far from winning the fight against gender-based violence, according to the latest crime statistics presented on Friday. Between April and June this year, 895 women were murdered, 40 more than the same quarter last year. Child murders also increased to 293, 50 more than the previous year.”
These were some of the crime statistics for the first quarter of financial 2024, presented by police minister Bheki Cele. Murder: 6,289. Sexual offences: 13,205. Attempted murders: 6,192. Assault with the intent to inflict grievous bodily harm: 43,090. Common assault: 49,226. Common robbery: 11,744. Robbery with aggravating circumstances: 34,460.
According to News24, “Cele said there seemed to be ‘green shoots’ and that it ‘looks like they are turning the tide’.”
When we run out of anger, it means we’ve started to give up hope of ever finding a way out of our terrible morass
In times of distress, many of us turn to books. There’s a vendor’s stand outside Olympia Bakery in Kalk Bay, where a bearded fellow sells books, weather permitting. It’s a small, highly curated selection, with some relatively obscure intellectual tomes rubbing shoulders with the pick of that brand of self-help book that disguises itself as cod-philosophy.
Walking past, I noticed a book by Daniel Klein, who uses humour to explain philosophical concepts. This book (co-authored with Thomas Cathcart) was called Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates: Using Philosophy (and Jokes!) to Explore Life, Death, the Afterlife, and Everything in Between.
Idly browsing through it I came across a quote from Woody Allen: “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work, I want to achieve immortality through not dying.”
For some reason, this struck a chord. Imagine living in a place where death is a thing to joke about, rather than an ever present possibility, a constant threnody to your daily existence.
In the hope that the book would have, if not answers, at least new ways to frame the ageless questions, and with a few jokes thrown in to perhaps leaven the process, I asked the bearded bookseller the price. He said all the books were R100 each, an attractive simplicity. But then it turned out, perhaps predictably, that he didn’t take credit cards. And I had no cash.
He slipped a postcard into the book, and handed it to me. That doesn’t matter, he said. My bank details are on the postcard. Do an EFT when you sit down and start reading the book.
I could have asked him where this trust came from, and how often people let him down and don’t pay as promised. But that would have sounded churlish, so I said “thank you” and walked away without expressing surprise. I wanted it to be an ordinary transaction, an everyday trust. I imagined a tourist observing the interaction, and saying to their companion, “Look, what a lovely country, where people can be trusted, and where people trust.”
The postcard depicted Greenmarket Square in the centre of Cape Town in 1997, a time when you could buy interesting locally produced goods there rather than the ubiquitous Afrotat that now lures tourists looking to stock up on fake masks, cheap beads and a baker’s dozen of assorted wire animals. It also had his name, J Vosloo, and his bank details.
In this day, this broken age, to find someone who still has trust in his fellow South Africans is quite a thing. Common assault: 49,226! Common robbery: 11,744! The word common is doing a lot of work there. It’s trust that is uncommon.
When I learnt of Busi’s murder, I felt a deep sadness, and a heavy despair. All too many of you will know those feelings. But what I didn’t feel was anger, and that troubles me.
A recent study by the Norwegian Research Centre found the link to climate activism was seven times stronger for anger than it was for hope, but that the best predictors of behavioural change were sadness, fear and hope.
When we run out of anger, it means we’ve started to give up hope of ever finding a way out of our terrible morass. If we can’t work out who to be angry with any more, usefully angry that is, it means we can’t fight back. But perhaps anger as a political tool can only ever be a limited one. Maybe to drive change, anger needs those small sparks of hopefulness in the midst of sadness.
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