THE GRIN ON MY FACE stretched from the deck to the point where you could just make out the last of the ship’s wake in the moonlight. I had one glass of red wine, just one. Well, and that frozen sweet-melon cocktail at this little beachfront bar in Mykonos, but no more.

Yet, on my fifth night at sea, I had an unbridled need, even with this small dose of alcohol, to tell someone, anyone, how great this all was: the ship, my Jacuzzi bath, the spa, the food, oh my god, the food, and then there was that man who kept coming around to my penthouse suite asking whether I wanted anything, anything at all — and even when it was that I merely mentioned I had a sore throat, he said he’d bring me some salt, an old-fashioned remedy, he said in his cute Turkish accent and voilà, there it was and voilà, my throat was better. But the only guy at midnight at the aft of the lido deck was the Filipino guy steam-cleaning the chairs and I was fairly certain he wasn’t feeling the overwhelming joy I was. So I kept quiet.

I went back to my room to celebrate my new-found happiness and ordered a little midnight snack from the 24-hour room service, all part of my all-inclusive deal. I had white albacore tuna salad, a side of French fries with ranch dressing and a pitcher of hot chocolate. Because I could.

Let me be clear. I did not begin this 12-day Black Sea explorer cruise on the Crystal Serenity without a conscience. I knew about the environmental impacts of cruise ships in ports, their exploitation of Third World workers, the well-fed international crowds that frequent them. In my 20s I hated them as much as the next backpacker. You’d never see me on a cruise ship. Until I was there, grinning like an idiot.

It was one of those all-expenses-paid gigs that only regular travel journalists get, courtesy of the cruise line and the local agent. They said I’d have the editorial independence to write whatever I wanted. But, I mean, really.

It started with those brochures: the Crystal Serenity’s six-star service, how it was the biggest ship in the luxury cruise category, that Nobu’s restaurant Silk Road was part of their all-new, all-inclusive deal — basically, food, wine, spirits and gratuities. There were seven dining areas, five bars, two swimming pools, a casino, a computer lab, four boutiques, a library and a gym with yoga and spinning classes. Did I mention the spa?

It was an all-you-can-eat-and-drink-and-sit-in-the-sun fiesta, all the while travelling on a funky little tour that would take me from Venice through the Mediterranean and the Adriatic to Katakolon and Mykonos, and then through the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus Straits into the Black Sea for Yalta, Sevastapol, Odessa and ending, finally, in Istanbul. You see, I had no choice but to go.

The problem was my research. It included location material from Lonely Planet (a throwback to my post-university travelling days) and some reviews from cruise websites. Then there were the stories on the Costa Concordia disaster and a report that detailed al-Qaeda’s plans, buried inside a porn video marked “Sexy Tanja” (no relation) and found in the underpants of one of their operatives, to seize cruise ships, dress their passengers in Guantanamo orange jumpsuits and execute them one by one. On camera.

But it was the essay by David Foster Wallace that appeared in Harper’s in 1996, the same year he published Infinite Jest, that really had me. Now, some might say taking holiday tips from a chronic depressive who committed suicide in 2008 and filed this particular essay among his collection of essays, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, is not ideal planning for a luxury cruise. But there it is. I could not, after reading the essay Shipping Out: On the (Nearly Lethal) Comforts of a Luxury Cruise, put it out of my mind.

Here’s what my tour guide had prepared me for: 1) I would be faced with masses of fleshy bodies in various states of deterioration; 2) There would be an abundance of cheese; 3) My unreasonable expectations of perfection would be crushed; 4) Despair, sadness and loneliness would permeate much of my days at sea.

So, then you can imagine how the unrestrained joy I felt did not factor in as much as I had anticipated.

Abundance

From the time I boarded the ship in Venice until about a week after I was back in Jo’burg I felt like I was floating — which, duh, I was when I was on the ship. But even when I was on land,  or way under it in the World War II catacombs in Yalta, I felt that way. It wasn’t an altogether great feeling, this floating sensation.

What you must understand is this: the ship acts as a bubble, protecting you from the big bad world, taking care of your every need. The crew pick you up from the airport and transfer you to the ship. They accompany you off the ship when you reach a port, taking you in for a few short hours and bringing you back to the safe, sanitary, glorious bubble and keeping you there until it is time to go back to your (inevitably and, from this day forward, inadequate) home.

While you are in the bubble, the outside world is visible (as you choose to see it through, say, TV news or from the inside of your tour bus or from the deck of the ship), but it doesn’t really affect you. This appears to apply to various port destinations.

For example, whether you happen to be visiting Greece or Italy, whose economies are about to implode, or if you learn, as you are floating on the Black Sea on your way to Istanbul, disturbing news in an SMS from your husband that says he “hopes Turkey doesn’t bomb Syria” because they just shot down a Turkish plane.

All that matters while you are in the bubble is the bubble, and our bubble was undoubtedly and seriously upmarket American. In which case it seems to be slathered in hand sanitiser and is, overall, not a bad place to be if you happen to be on a cruise. (I was told repeatedly, and not tinged without a bit of jealously, by everyone to whom I mentioned it was my first cruise: “Well, you started at the top.”)

In the bubble, tea-time canapés were served promptly at 4.30pm by the Turkish butler and there was an unlimited stock of Perrier and Coke Light (or almost whatever else I could have asked for) in my fridge. There were Aveda bath products, which I put at the centre of my two-sink granite-topped hand basin (shutting my own shoddy toiletries in the drawer away from sight) and a pillow menu from which I could choose from four types for maximum comfort. There were two robes; one a light linen, another a thick white cotton, and soft white slippers.

Are you getting all this? What I am telling you is that I had two massages (one deep tissue, one 75-minute hot stone) and a pedicure and sat in the hot and wet saunas, and doused myself in pricey Elemis products in the changing room.

I had room service daily, lobster twice, filet twice, caviar three times and the best beef carpaccio and the best sashimi I have ever had in my life, and more wine than I usually drink in a year. I had so much fantastic food and wine at every mealtime and other times that weren’t mealtimes but merely snack times (also in between snack times, tea times and mealtimes) that I found myself constantly resolving not to eat dinner or lunch or my tea-time canapés. It rarely worked.

Group on a stick

Wallace did not warn me about the hand sanitiser. It was every­where. It was not something that even existed in 1996 (along with text messages or Facebook or Twitter or 9/11 or the common usage of the term “global economic collapse”), or surely he would have mentioned it.

It was especially visible outside the ship, encased in round, space-age machines that dispensed the stuff in invisible blobs before you headed out into the real world, preferably safely accompanied by a Crystal Cruises minder and local tour guide.

To stay in the bubble, I learned, is the preferred behaviour.

I ended up impressing (or shocking?) my fellow passengers over sushi the night we left Katakolon when I told them I took the bus with the Italians from one of the other two cruise ships (read: not “luxury”) from the port to ancient Olympia where, along with a handful of museums, are the awe-inspiring ruins of the village where the first official Games were held in 776BC. That I figured out how to get there on my own they found “interesting” and appeared to be in awe (horrified?) that I did this with a few pages from Lonely Planet.

I did the same in most of the other ports but found out why, when you are in a place for a half-day or a day and a half, to go with the group on a stick tour is not a terrible option. You are bound to get lost, especially in the Crimea where nearly everything is in Russian, and by the time you find out where you want to go the day is over.

I spent most of my $300 tour allocation on one full-day tour in Yalta and surrounds (this is not part of the all-inclusive and neither, sadly, were my spa visits), mostly because of its name: The Saints, Czars and Authors of Russia. So, on what must have been the hottest day of Yalta’s illustrious history, I joined the first group tour of my life and jumped on a not-really-air-conditioned bus with Alexy, a suspicious, sour-faced tour guide who used “practically” incessantly, a sort of tic he would use in place of “actually” as a way of stretching out his commentary, which was nonstop from the time we entered the bus to the time he left us at the ship.

Our trip turned out to be mostly about the czars — we went to the Voronstov Palace and the Livadia Palace, the summer retreat of Nicholas II, where the 1945 Yalta Conference was held — and Alexy, always with the Crystal Cruises tour stick, gave us helpful instructions like “That is the place to take a picture,” so we could have an optimal photo experience.

We finally ended up at Anton Chekhov’s house — the one where he lived at the end of his life and wrote The Three Sisters — but by the time we arrived we had to sweep through and rush back to the ship for our impending departure. We hardly said goodbye to Alexy, bolting off to the comfort of our bubble (after a squirt of hand sanitiser) because travelling on a Crystal Cruise ship means never really ­having to leave air-conditioned, abundant America — at least not for too long.

The view from the pool

My first day at sea was so busy. I went from a massage to a lecture on ancient Olympia to a spinning class, somehow missing the shopping director’s presentation, which I was sad about because I wanted to know what a shopping-director lecture entailed (in summary, he helps guests to locate where to shop — the really expensive stuff —in port). Wallace had warned me about the busyness.

“They’ll micromanage every iota of every pleasure-option so that not even the dreadful corrosive action of your adult consciousness and agency and dread can fuck up your fun,” he wrote. But I was worried. I was missing out on the whole relaxation part because I didn’t want to miss out on the ­activities.

This is why, on my second day at sea, I landed in the front row of the Seahorse pool. I was faced with dozens of bored-looking men and women — almost all 50 and over, white and slightly burnt, save one Middle Eastern-looking family and a few Asians — whose bodies were in the aforementioned various states of deterioration and who were snoozing under the tangerine umbrellas or were buried in their iPads, their Kindles or their books, the authors of choice being Mario Puzo or Ken Follett.

The Crystal Sextet — six Filipino men in Hawaiian shirts and white polyester slacks — played The Girl from Ipanema, Wild World, Margaritaville and Otis Redding’s Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay. I tapped my feet and, at some point, realised that I was reading my book without glasses. I was healed!

But no one seemed particularly joyful except me and the teenager with the lanky body and long brown hair, who told me she went to school at Santa Monica College in California and that her mother was the masterclass teacher on the ship (part of the performance from the Music Centre in Los Angeles). I had to tell someone so I blurted it out: “This is amazing, isn’t it?”

“I know, right?” she replied, ­grinning.

I looked up and saw Richard, a short, greying man in his 60s, his belly protruding over his blue swim trunks, shuffling over. We had met a few nights before in the hallway outside the Hollywood Theatre, our “muster station”, which is where we were assigned to go if the ship was sinking (think: Costa Concordia; every­one else was) or on fire or (and this was just me, I think) raided by terrorists. I knew from our conversation, during which we were all strapped into our bright-orange life jackets, that Richard’s wife was from New York and although he sounded like a New Yorker he was from Montreal, where they both now live. They have been retired ever since he sold the family clothing business and now they cruise — on Crystal exclusively — twice a year.

By the pool he confided in me, a fellow writer, that he was writing a book “that’ll never see the light of day”.

“Mine neither,” I told him.

“Confessions of a Clothing Maven is the title,” he told me.

I told him it was a great title.

“Do you know what a maven is?”

I nodded, confused.

“Good,” he said. “I’m going to have a Yiddish glossary for all the goys.”

And with that he shuffled off.

Repeat offenders

The “ex-South Africans” who lived in England were on to me.

“Isn’t the Mail & Guardian a rather serious paper?” the woman asked. I nodded and smiled and made a note to avoid them for the rest of the trip.

You’d think it would be difficult in a confined space — at capacity the ship could hold 1 070 passengers, but this particular cruise only had about 650 on board. But somehow you’d see some people daily and others just the once and never again.

For example, I bumped into eighty-something Mama Lee, as she is known on the ship, several times. The first time I met her she was wearing a pink T-shirt with sparkly jewels, pink earrings, pink nail polish, pink lipstick, purple bejewelled sandals and purple shorts. I showed her my hot-pink toenails and we bonded.

She told me how she and her late husband, who made their money in Fort Lauderdale real estate, used to cruise together (their first was in 1962) and the day before he died he told her to keep on cruising. So she did.

She now lives in 7052, one of the basic staterooms — no verandah, says she doesn’t want it, it would make her stay in her room — and was celebrating her 100th cruise, after three and a half years of going pretty much nonstop, on that very trip. She does needle­work all day by the pool and every evening from 5.15pm she dances in the Palm Court to the tunes of the Crystal Sextet (who slip into formal wear at night), takes a break to eat dinner and then comes back to dance, sometimes until midnight.

I asked her whether she went into port often. “Sometimes I go because I think I should,” she told me. But every time she does leave the ship she remembers why she doesn’t do it more often. Mama Lee loves the bubble so much that she only goes home to Florida to see her kids and grandchildren a few days a year.

So it was not until I went to the Avenue Saloon (next to the Pulse nightclub and the Stardust Club) after dinner one night that I finally allowed myself to really absorb the undeniable despair of the cruise ship experience that Wallace had told me about. It came to me as the piano man played cover versions of American Pie, Sweet Caroline and Runaround Sue.

A woman in pale pink with diamond drop earrings and thin, greying hair pulled back into a bun held her hands up and swayed to the music, her eyes closed. She was not smiling. She looked German and in her mid-60s and she was on her own, and I thought maybe she was wondering where the time went. I felt my own hair (thinning, not yet grey) and pictured myself at her age. Only 20 years to go. The world will be another place then and I will not be on a cruise ship, not least a luxury one, not unless I decide to pursue my new-found unbridled desire to be a cruise-ship writer and never leave the bubble again.

Disembarkation

On day 11 I woke up completely depressed. The previous night some jerk dropped my “travel documents” by my room and suggested I watch Crystal TV to find out “helpful” tips for departing the ship. I suddenly realised that it was all coming to an end. For lunch I decided to get some Rocky Road to cheer myself up.

I noticed the hand sanitiser next to the ice-cream bar and was grateful for the protection (turns out the norovirus is a particularly nasty one and can spread fast on ships) from the outside world.

That evening I turned on the Crystal TV channel to see them all waving goodbye to me: the South African tour director, the Norwegian captain, the Austrian hotel director, the Portuguese food and beverage manager, the Italian maître d’, the Filipino pool guys, the bartender from Croatia, all as It’s a Wonderful World played in the background. Bastards.

I disembarked in Istanbul and was sent packing to the Istanbul Ataturk Airport, finally landing a few hours later at Charles de Gaulle, only to be told by an unfriendly French woman that our flight was cancelled. No apology. Bubble popped. Forced like cattle on the airport shuttle to a sterile hotel with cheap sheets and dinner of rice and something resembling chicken stew. And then, the next morning before dawn, on the aeroplane back to freezingly cold Johannesburg.

Wallace had called the cruise brochure text “positively Prozacian”, which is just about right. If you can manage your own bubble within the bubble it is the sort of antidepressant one could OD on. But it’s not forever.

Sigh. All I have now is my personalised Crystal Serenity stationery and my hot-pink pedicure (fading), the three kilos I gained (unattractive), remnants of my George Hamilton tan (gone any day now) and a crick in my neck, which I am convinced has something to do with my own inferior pillow selection and the lack of a pillow menu from which to choose a new one.

–

This piece ran in July 2012 in the Mail & Guardian

Victor is HIV+ and probably has AIDS, as he told me he is on anti-retrovirals and they don’t give those out until you are very sick. He told my husband that his wife, back in Zimbabwe, also has HIV and is very sick. She has never visited, I have never seen her, but I am sure she will die first. At least he has access to some fruit and vegetables here in South Africa. She does not. Zimbabweans now have to send home bags of mealie meal via the malaishas, along with sugar and other basic foodstuffs. They put the food in the taxi and give the driver some money, along with the address of their family, and the driver will cart the food to Zim in an old weathered minibus. It is not good for sick people to eat just mealies and drink tea, especially not people with HIV, so I am sure she will die soon. Surely she does not have access to anti-retrovirals like he does. Victor is lucky. In his cramped room with the cement floor and no windows, he is lucky.

Victor’s landlord – like ours – is Douglas. Douglas lets Victor stay in the room, one of two “domestic quarters”, although they are not quarters, they are rooms, dingy cramped rooms, because he was the gardener for Douglas’s parents for many years. The front house, where we live, is no paradise, unless of course you compare it with Victor’s home and then our place is a palace. There is also the one-bedroom cottage, which, since we have been here, has housed a Pakistani family and a single man who worked in television. The other room, the one next to Victor’s, is occupied by Douglas’s parents’ old domestic worker, Renee.

The front house has three bedrooms and two bathrooms and has not been painted, inside or out, for more than twenty-five years. When we pulled up the carpet we found newspapers underneath it that dated back to the seventies; we did not stop to read the papers, did not search them for evidence of apartheid, only glanced at the dates and threw them in the bin. We thought of painting the inside of the house when we first moved in but didn’t think we would stay longer than six months. It will be two years in April and it’s still not painted.

When we arrived, the curtains hung thick and stiff with dust. Brown dirt sat a half-inch thick on the top of the cupboards. We thought Douglas would clean up, touch up, paint, something, anything – we didn’t expect a makeover, not for the rent we’re paying, but thought the thing to do is to clean up a bit. He did not. It took two weeks of cleaning every day to make the place livable.

When our new backyard neighbour moved into the one-bedroom cottage not long ago, he sprinkled ant poison on the window sills and Douglas came in and had an allergic reaction, freaked out, and told the man to move out immediately. He called the neighbour later to apologize. The neighbour will not forgive him. He will move out soon.

Douglas is a thin, pale, reed of a man. He is a strange man, a ghost of a man, beaten down by years of people telling him he was not strong enough or good enough. He is a weakling, a man with little backbone, a miser. He would like to sell this place, his parents’ home, the home he grew up in. He would like to get the most he can, every penny, and believes he can get a lot, but he will not because the housing market has plummeted – it falls more and more with each month that passes. But no matter, his sister wants the place. This place with the crumbling pressed ceilings and the plumbing that backs up every other week, running sewage onto the stoep in the backyard. His sister, with the sour, wrinkled face and stringy brown hair which always looks like it needs a good wash, says she has an emotional attachment to the house but in fact, she does not – she shows no interest, does not come around and lets it fall into the sad disrepair in which it now sits. I am sure it was no better when their mother was alive. When we moved in, less than a year after she died, it was not just dirty but it stank of urine and old food. It took three months for the smell to finally dissipate.

The emotional attachment that Douglas’s sister has is related to the real estate value of this old house. While the front house may be a knock down, the cottage a major rebuild, and the two rooms where Victor and Renee stay surely in violation of some health code, the property, this big stand in this leafy, upmarket neighborhood in Parkview – the only neighborhood in the city, maybe the country, where they celebrate Halloween, and which has the best public school around – is worth a lot. Not as much as Douglas and his sister would like to believe but a lot anyway.

I am sure his sister was one of the people who taunted Douglas as a child, maybe even as a man, a man unable to protect himself from the weight of the world. He has another brother who lives in the Cape. This sibling does not want to get involved. After all, the estate has been finalized. The sister would like to buy this house, but Douglas does not want to sell it to her because he wants to get the most he can and he does not want to give his sister any breaks. She has to sell her house in a neighboring suburb, but the real estate market is bad and she is struggling. So we wait. We all wait. We wait to see if she will sell her house, if they will put this house on the market, if we will have a chance to buy it ourselves; we wait to find out when we will have to move out and find a new house, a nicer house that will surely cost more than this one.

Victor works for Douglas on weekends. The deal is, Victor works one day a week in the garden so he can live in his small room with no windows. One recent weekend, Douglas had him at his place to paint. He painted Saturday and Sunday, all day long, from morning to night. Douglas did not pay him extra. Douglas has Victor over a barrel. After all, who else would let this forty-three-year-old alcoholic gardener with HIV, probably AIDS, live in their nice suburban backyard?

Oh yes. Victor is an alcoholic. Wouldn’t you be? The alcohol must make it all easier to digest. Besides, Victor is a nice drunk. He doesn’t get aggressive or anything; he’s friendly all the time. Polite, too. When I asked him if he was tired from painting all day at Douglas’, he just shrugged and said, “That is life.” He says that a lot.

When we first moved in, Victor scared me a bit. We have a young daughter and you hear of rape, all those rape statistics here in South Africa, the highest in the world from what I understand, and often, too often, the rape of very young children. So I told my daughter she was not allowed to go into the back part of the property without me or her father accompanying her. It was also an issue of privacy. Renee and Victor were living there along with the other people that lived in the cottage then, the young Pakistani family, the father studying engineering at Wits, the young mother in her traditional clothes, not much English, many smiles, and the baby, two years old by the time they left two months ago, when he took a job on a mine in Welkom, a desolate Afrikaans town in the middle of exactly nowhere.

But Victor would not harm my daughter. I cannot say the same for his friends, the men that come and go on odd nights, who he shares his small room with, shares his drink, perhaps his body. I do not know. I do not ask who the men are; he never brings a woman. The men have different faces and the same. They do not make noise, he does not invite more than one or two, sometimes two, but mostly one, and I do not usually even hear them, only see them walk out with Victor in the early morning, quietly departing just as the sun emerges bright and bold in the clear sky.

Victor is Kalanga, a mash-up of Sotho, Shona and Ndebele people. A colleague from Zim told me the Kalanga, from the southwest of the country, often try and pass off as Ndebele. Joshua Nkomo, the founding father of Zimbabwean nationalism, was also Kalanga but he’s been assimilated into Ndebele as well. The Kalanga people are, I am told, a conquered people, embarrassed about their heritage, and they readily attach themselves to the Ndebele – as if to be part of a major tribe would somehow make them relevant.

I have come to like Victor. He asks us for money sometimes, and we always give it, and he usually doesn’t pay it back, even though he says he will. I don’t mind. What is R50 to us when he has nothing? It is the very least we can do for our neighbour. And surely we should do more. But we don’t. We are cordial. We exchange greetings. My husband has given him wine as well on occasion, and we share our food on holidays. It is not right to give wine to an alcoholic but my husband says, why not? What else does he have?

When we first moved in, I was on my back foot with Victor. He was clearly an alcoholic and I did not want to make friends. But since then I have come to like him. He works hard, keeps to himself, talks to my daughter when he’s in the garden, opens the gate for me if he’s outside and I’m pulling in with the car, always greets us, always in his blue overalls. Victor has nothing. He reminds me of how much I have. He reminds me of the palace in which I live.

I must tell you something. I must be honest. I have not been in Victor’s room. My husband has. He says I shouldn’t go there because it would make me cry. And I am a sissy, am easily brought to tears, so I know he is right. I would cry, we would all cry, to see it, the cramped space, the smells of eighteen years of life in a small room, a room where you live and eat and cook and sleep, a room with no windows and bits of dirty old blue carpet.

I know Renee’s room is much the same. This I know. I have not been in their rooms but I have walked by, peered in sideways, greeted them as I go into the backyard to pick up the clothes from the line or to take the trash to the bins. I have gone back to call for Victor when his friends ring the bell, which is connected to the front house. I have talked to Renee outside her room about the electricity which trips every few days in this old house, and for which the main power switch is inside.

If this were our home, if we owned this home, I would not sleep at night knowing that another person had to live in that cramped room with no windows. I don’t know if Douglas and his sister sleep soundly or if their parents before them slept soundly or if they did not, if the state of the maid and gardener’s housing was the reason for how they slept or did not sleep. I think it would not have mattered. I think it does not matter still.

If it were my responsibility to provide their housing, if it were my agreement, I would not sleep. Surely, I would not sleep. I could not allow for rest. If we bought this place, I would have to knock the edifice to the ground and destroy it. Demolish it, disappear it, so it could never stand again, so that it never even existed. And then what? Would I then send Victor packing, back to Zimbabwe with his blue carpet and his blue overalls and a bottle of red wine to drown my sorrows? Because after the room was demolished, his home for eighteen years would be erased and I would not be able to pay to build a proper home for him. After all, I can barely pay for my own home in suburbia. How would I pay for his? How could I destroy his place? How can I ever sleep again?

—

This essay ran in Chimurenga’s Power Money Sex Reader

THERE ARE TWO WAYS TO ENTER DAINFERN. One is through the Broadacres gate. It looks much the same as the William Nicol entrance — both have grand white wooden facades with grey roofing and boomed lanes for “visitors” and “residents” — but the Broadacres gate is a more fitting way to arrive.

If you try to enter on William Nicol, you might miss the turn and travel down the single lane road over two rolling hills and hit Diepsloot and be reminded that Dainfern — a nod to the sewage pipe that runs through it — the Green Zone, the Truman Bubble, home to the Real Housewives of Dainfern (oh go ahead and throw it at ‘em, they’ve heard it all before) is actually part of Johannesburg and not a gated community somewhere in southern California’s sprawling, sunny suburbia.

You could, of course, try to enter through the points where the Jukskei River weaves in and out of the estate on the eastern and northwestern perimeter but you would not, very likely, be successful. There are thick metal beams set in concrete at 45 degrees to block such uninvited entrances and, at night, I am told, a former 32-battalion soldier is on guard at each side.

Should you want to go over some part of the 8km fence that surrounds the estate, or under it, you would probably not be successful either. Much of it is double-skinned — that is one palisade and one concrete — two metres high, with two layers of 21 strands of electric fencing, placed 15cm apart. Along the fence, there are steel rods, also placed 15cm apart, shoved one and half metres into the ground and topped with concrete. There are more than 60 perimeter cameras, some of which have heat sensors so sensitive that if something as small as a rabbit moves 400 metres away, it will hone in, track it, and follow the potential invader’s every move until its certain demise.

The point is that you are not getting into Dainfern. Not without an access code from a resident, or without having your car’s registration and your driver’s license scanned in and your phone number recorded by a security guard in khaki pants. Only then will you see the red neon sign, welcoming you inside, perhaps telling you what’s on for dinner at the clubhouse — maybe it’s braai night! — or when the next gardening club is meeting, where you can get tips on how to prune or grow beautiful roses.

***

I’m split with a binary emotion,” one expatriate spouse, whose husband works for an oil company and who lives in Dainfern, tells me as we sit on the grand clubhouse terrace overlooking the lush green course and the meandering Jukskei. “One day it’s great. One day it’s terrible. It’s similar to how I feel about the country, actually. One day I’m positive about the politics and the next I think, oh God, this thing is just not working out.”

She initially spoke to her husband about moving to Melville. It’s much more central to things. But they had moved to South Africa during the height of the power cuts, and when her husband brought up how the power could go out for two weeks and he’d be out of the country, well, she opted for Dainfern.

“I feel really safe here,” she says, knowing full well about all the nasty things that are said about the place. “I feel like I should defend it.” She gets the ‘Oh you live in Dainfern’ look that comes with a roll of the eyes when she tells new friends where she stays. “I don’t get it. Where am I supposed to live?”

It’s such an easy target, though, isn’t it?

The headlines in the estate’s eponymous glossy magazine say so much about the Dainfern state of mind: Maserati Passion, My Personal Trainer, Convert to a Convertible, Yacht Club Bliss. The pages are drenched in Hublot watches and golf tips and European holidays and whiskey tastings. It’s the estate we love to hate — the one that, in the 20 years since it launched, has come to define the country’s luxury golf estate living and all the ugliness that comes with it: the surreal perfection, the us and them security reminiscent of a past we’ve tried to forget, the incestuous Stepford-wife lifestyle, the overfed golfer, an entirely removed material world running roughshod against the South African project. For outsiders, it seems to be a place removed from reality, imbued with the sense that somehow, this has got to be all wrong.

Even David Goldblatt took his shots at the place. His 2002 series jeered at the estate, putting the sewage pipe central to its existence, emphasising exactly what those who market the place have tried so hard to avoid. But the sewage pipe is Dainfern. No matter how well manicured the golf course is, how quaint the nature trails, how secure the perimeter, the fact remains: shit flows above it all. It permeates the place.

Beneath his prints, Goldblatt published selected blurbs from the marketing material of the time: “If you demand that each breath you take will fill your soul with the fire of life, then demand a piece of heaven. Demand a piece of Dainfern.”

Which leaves the rest of us howling, right? Who, exactly, wants a piece of Dainfern?

****
It’s a Friday afternoon in December and Debbie Macaulay is putting up her Christmas decorations. There are stuffed Christmas teddy bears, giant poinsettias, a plastic tree waiting for decorations and stockings on the fireplace adorned with elephant tusks. The kids, you see, are coming home for the holidays.

“I suppose I’d probably leave the country if I didn’t live here,” Macaulay tells me. “Without the kids, I mean. It was like pulling teeth to get people to come over to my house when we lived in Bryanston. They just didn’t dine in private houses. They were too afraid they something would happen. They come here now because they can take their golf cart.”

Macaulay, whose husband owns a mining company, has a long, thick blonde mane that reaches to the middle of her narrow back and small, soft blue eyes. She tends toward animal prints and high heels or tight-fitting tracksuits and purple and black Nikes. Despite living in Africa for 26 years — she and her husband lived in Lagos for 13 before moving to Johannesburg in 1999 — she has kept the wide East coast vowels from her hometown of Boston.

She likes parties and people, and Dainfern has lots of both. Her four-bedroom home has two domestic quarters which house three of her full-time staff, including a driver. Spread between her two garages: a Ferrari, a silver Mercedes ML6, seven sets of golf clubs, 47 pairs of golf shoes and the requisite Yamaha golf cart.

Her dining area stretches from an open kitchen with granite countertops to a formal dining and lounge with a big screen TV. The house opens up to an outdoor terrace with a pool table and a fully stocked bar, complete with a gold Buddha and a humidor, which all looks out to the pool, a putting green and the nature reserve beyond. A spiral staircase leads up to three bedrooms, the master with a jacuzzi bath and an ozone machine.

“It helps to detoxify you,” she says by way of explanation, “which is important part of life here in Dainfern.”

These days, with the kids at Northeastern University in Boston, her daughter the youngest intern ever at Goldman Sachs, a typical day might go something like this: meet a seamstress for a dress for an African-themed party; chose a piece of jewellery for a charity auction; attend a wine event at the Westcliff Hotel, followed by a lecture on champagne; finish off with a cocktail party. Rinse. Repeat.

“Look, I’ve been a professional expat for 26 years,” says Macaulay unapologetically. “I don’t want to take ceramics or read to kids in Diepsloot. I’ve done all that stuff. I want to clean my closets.”

***
To really understand Dainfern, though, to get to the soul of the place, you will need a golf cart. From there, on a sunny afternoon you might find nannies driving primary school children to their classes at Dainfern College, and teenage girls crammed three in a two-seater, their knees up, hair floating in the warm Dainfern breeze. There are young boys in Ed Hardy baseball caps with “whatever” on their T-shirts pushing handmade go-carts and housewives powerwalking along the nature trails. There are armies of gardeners in green taming the lush landscape, and caddies in white attending to golfers on the course.

As you glide along the expertly maintained concrete paths that run by the river and past weeping willows and palm trees and pines and over rolling hills, you might think you’re on a Disney ride. You’ll find villages named Sawgrass or Highgate and roads occasionally covered in cobbled brick with names like Woodchester Place, Milford Avenue or Fernwood Close. You might pass a Mediterranean villa, an English cottage, a home with Greek columns that has a sandblasted flamingo on its front door or some burnt orange box-like monstrosity with a gaudy fountain in the yard.

You’ll pass corner parks and peer into expansive verandas and get right up close to one of those double-skinned fences with Danger Gevaar Ingozi and a bolt of electricity and a hand to remind you that there is an end to all this and another reality on the other side.

“Your image of South Africa is what you see on TV. If you start googling, you get terrified. And then people tell you stories. We were horrified.”

It’s a hot Wednesday evening in November at a wine and cheese night in Dainfern and it is clear that Tania Oddi, two years on, has changed her mind about the country.

“I feel safer living here than living in Melbourne. It’s like the Truman Bubble,” she says. “It’s got the manicured lawns and geese walking on the golf course. We walk with our dog and there is guinea fowl on the lawn. The weather, the wine, the food — it’s fresh and organic — and the house? You are never going to get this anywhere. If there was a beach here? You’d never leave.”

Oddi is one of the estimated 30% of residents who are expatriates that live on the estate. Many of them, like Oddi’s husband, are employed by multinationals who have strict security requirements. Executive families from companies like Coca-Cola, Nokia, Ford and Walmart populate the place. For them, Dainfern is the ready-made security solution that comes complete with, well, everything.

Louis Engelbrecht goes through it all. In his tidy corner office, the estate manager faces a big screen TV that is turned to a patchwork view of 16 cameras, all trained on some point of the estate. He is a big man who speaks with a thick Afrikaans accent, his moustache rigidly trimmed under a ruddy nose.

He talks through the basics: 18 villages, 1 234 homes, 18-hole Gary Player golf course, 320 hectares, a halfway house, a restaurant, a bar, four tennis courts, two squash courts, two community pools, a games room, a volleyball court, a soccer field, a skateboard track and Dainfern College, the private school with its own golf cart lane into the estate.

There are rules. No razor wire, no spikes, no audible alarms. There are vehicle and foot patrols, cameras everywhere and criminal background checks on all residents and staff coming onto the estate. There is armed security with five reaction vehicles and 75 security officers.

Engelbrecht’s team has registered more than 7 900 residents and staff — au pairs, butlers, gardeners, nannies, cleaners, cooks — for the new Biometric Saflec Database, which should be working early next year.

“Even if I cut your finger off, the requirements are a 25-point analysis,” says Engelbrecht, sketching a finger on a piece of scrap paper and dotting various points to illustrate. “You see? The heat sensor won’t allow it.”

From his laptop he can access information on every person who stays in every house on the estate. He can call up, by stand number, their names, photos, postal address, their work phone numbers, cell numbers, golf cart numbers and the registration of their private vehicles. Engelbrecht knows who went out and came in and when, down to the second.

I ask, but he doesn’t want to talk about the incident in September that I read about in a recent newsletter. The information followed the picture of the week, submitted by Dee Dickinson, who won a breakfast voucher for two at the clubhouse for her photo of the Jukskei with a bridge running over it.

It seems, the estate regretted to inform residents, that the night before, four men, dressed in SAPS-like uniforms, somehow got onto the estate and shot a Chinese national outside his home at 1688 Honiton Drive. After the shooting the suspects hijacked a security vehicle and exited the estate through the main gate “obliterating the boom at high speed”. The abandoned security vehicle was subsequently recovered outside Diepsloot. The man, apparently, died later in hospital. It looks, by all accounts, like a hit.

We don’t talk about the other recent security incident either. It seems some “perpetrators” of petty theft may have gained entrance to the estate through manholes. But, the newsletter promises, there will be grids placed on all the storm water drains moving forward.

It all seems to say something about ingenuity and determination in the new South Africa. It also says something about the illusion of what is secure and what is not, and that even when you cap every point of entry to its extreme, there is always another way in.

“Some will say Dainfern is not freedom, that it’s their own prison-like place that they have created so that they can feel free,” says Karina Landman, a senior lecturer at the department of town and regional planning at the University of Pretoria, who has been studying gated communities for the past 10 years. “But for those that live there, freedom is inside. They can leave doors open, they have this wonderful landscape and they can stroll in evening. But the thing that gives them that is this strict security with the patrols and the CCTV cameras, and strangely enough those are things we do not normally associate with freedom. Those are things we associate with prisons where you want to keep people in. I’m not saying that is right or wrong, it’s just an interesting fact.”

***
There are other interesting facts. There are secrets, too, unspoken things. Things talked about in whispers or howling laughs or sideways smirks — a sort of wink, you get the picture, right?

“What people have to understand is that when someone is not getting enough sex at home, they go and get it somewhere else,” one resident tells me matter-of-factly.

I am told of affairs, of a swingers club, of men going for jog and passing a woman on the track at 10am to “have her back at the house” minutes later. I’m told of a “fucking slut beyond comprehension” who was married to an executive who used to follow married men into bathrooms at parties. I’m told of one particular village on the estate with smaller townhomes where men move after the divorce so they can still be close to the kids.

There is petty theft and tales of insurance fraud. One woman told me of a domestic worker who was physically abused so badly she ended up in hospital. There is teenage drug use, alcohol abuse and stolen golf carts that are run into the river. There are youth who damage signs and light-fittings and spraypaint everything in sight. Not long ago, I am told, a group of especially bad kids lit a house on fire and burned an observation deck to the ground.

“It happens everywhere of course,” one mother tells me. “But here a lot of parents ignore their kids. Kids are left at home for the weekend to have a party and parents think Dainfern security will just take care of it. It’s almost like too much freedom. People drive around drunker than drunk can be. They take this perceived idea of safety and freedom to the extreme.”

It’s the village gossip, though, that gets to most.

“That’s the one thing I hate about this place,” sneered another resident. “Everyone in Dainfern knows everything about your life. There is a lot of bored housewives that have nothing better to do than talk shit.”

Daniel Ngoma has seen much of what has unravelled over the years, but he’s not a man to talk shit, at least not to outsiders like me.

He sits behind the long desk in the hallway in front of the men’s and ladies’ change rooms just behind the golf café and the proshop wearing a lime green golf shirt with the Dainfern emblem. He’s been working the concierge desk since before Dainfern was Dainfern, and it was just the Fourways Golf Club. He probably doesn’t need the reminders that the other staff members have as reference, taped down on the desk: “Treat the guest on the phone in a way which shows Dainfern is a five-star experience. Mention that you look forward to seeing them on the date they booked.”

You see, in 1952, Ngoma, who has close set eyes, high cheekbones and delicate hands, was born on this land. He remembers the Zevenfontein farm when it was occupied with cows and sheep and pigs and horses. His father was a supervisor on the farm, and the family lived on the river in a small brick house. He lived there, in what is now a Dainfern village called Riverwood, with his own family until 1989, when JCI, which later became Johnnic, who bought the land in 1985, started renovations for what is now Dainfern. Now Ngoma lives in a small staff house on the other side of the estate, just under the sewage pipe, next to the dog kennels, with his wife; his three children stay with his mother in Pretoria.

Ngoma knows about things that most people in Dainfern don’t like to talk about much. Like the remaining families that lived on the Zevenfontein farm, some of whom were “relocated” to Cosmo City; others, well, who knows? The point was to wipe the squatter camp from view and it was successful. He also knows about the graves, the ones that were moved when the estate was being built, and were finally reburied at the Fourways Memorial Park in 2006 after years of negotiations. Ngoma, though, still doesn’t know where his own father’s remains might be. But better not to say too much. Word travels fast around here.

****
Some of the photos are kept in a brown, spiral bound album with a gold heart embossed on the cover. In between the photos of leopards and zebras and lion cubs and a few shots of schoolgirls in uniform is a blonde, her shoulders bare, wearing in a black fur coat, looking demurely at the camera. Then another: the bare back of a brunette in jeans, her wispy hair off to one side. There are more on CD: a woman in a black corset and thigh high shiny black boots and red satin gloves stands against a plain background, and a bare-breasted blonde in her late forties lies back on a chair.

Sue Harwood takes photographs. Wildlife, family portraits and semi-nude ones of women who live on the estate, many into their forties and fifties, who, she says, feel they are on the tail end of their beauty and want to capture it before it is taken by age. Some women give their photos to their husbands as gifts.

“This is how life should be — I’m not talking about the botox parties — but you should be able to live like this,” Harwood says, sitting in her lounge with wooden floors and Persian carpets. “You should be able to live with your doors and windows open. A lot of people criticise Dainfern. They say it is full of fake, shallow people. But you can choose who you want to be with.”

It is Friday afternoon and her garage is wide open, the green gate holding in her two dogs — a Jack Russell and a Beagle — is unlatched, as are the doors to her home. Security keeps telling her to be more diligent but she’s never felt it necessary.

Harwood, who has long, chocolate brown hair and wears silver jewellery, says she and her husband and their three children moved to Dainfern in 2000 because she wanted the “safest lifestyle possible” for her kids.

“People say there is a false sense of security, that we live in a jail. But I see it as a safe lagoon. You have to go into shark-infested waters when you leave here. We never feel like prisoners. If I lived outside, I’d feel like more of a prisoner. I’ve have razor wire and a wall. When I lived in Sandton, I was always half awake, one eye open, waiting out for someone to break into the garden.”

A little piece of heaven
This is what you get for R14-million: an ultra-modern glass and metal home on the 10th hole, with vaulted ceilings and glass chandeliers, white marble below your feet and an indoor rock garden with exquisitely-pruned cycads in a sunlit foyer. There are four garages, five bedrooms, all en suite, an infinity pool, remote control blinds and a black marble staircase.

Should you like to purchase this little gem, Brenda Gilbert could show you around. Gilbert moved to Dainfern from Bryanston in 1993 and started selling stands on the mostly vacant estate a couple of years later.

It was tough going in the early days. When the estate first launched, 100 stands quickly sold. Then the lull came. The only thing keeping the estate alive then, most will tell you, was the backing of JCI. Then democracy happened and, in 1995, Gilbert says, things started to fly. Multinationals flooded the market and speculators jumped on board. There were, of course, many bumps along the way. Most say Dainfern didn’t come into its own until the late nineties.

Now, says Gilbert, it’s a fully-fledged community. Sue Ralph, her partner at Pam Golding, who has strawberry blonde hair that she wears in a perfectly-coiffed bob, ticks through all that’s coming up: there’s the squash championships, the running club’s new summer route, the pregnancy yoga classes, the Christmas tree event, the nature association quiz night.

“We’ve got people from every country in the world,” says Ralph. “We have senior executives, entrepreneurs, bootjies from Krugersdorp, ANC officials, and Africans from different parts of the continent. We live in South Africa like it is supposed to be. Our community is integrated, our school is integrated. Dainfern is at the forefront of what South Africa is today.”

What Ralph means to say is that that it’s not just rich white people that live here. I’ll translate: bling entrepreneurs Bruce and Stella Buthelezi and Moeletsi Mbeki live here. They, too, want their little piece of heaven, their slice of Dainfern.

“They are doing what money does,” says Richard Ballard, an associate professor at the school of development studies at the University of KwaZulu- Natal. “You can’t scold them for doing it.”

Ballard, who has studied gated communities in Durban, compares estates like Dainfern to the spatial equivalent of tax havens.

“There is a super concentration of wealth in space in a way that starts to divorce itself from others in society. So in the way that tax havens allow the rich to bypass responsibilities for their compatriots, gated communities result in a collective consumption of water, roads and education, an exchange that only happens between rich people. So instead of making good for everyone, it is for only those who are really well resourced.”

This is what academics like Ballard, Landman and Derek Hook and Michele Vrdoljak, who wrote the 2002 report Gated communities, heterotopia and a ‘rights’ of privilege, have to say: they use the term “semigrating” — that is, emigration without ever leaving the country; they say that those that live in estates fear “outsiders”; that the communities are a “defense against a chaotic and unpredictable postcolonial context”; that those in gated communities are opting out of urban life; that “chance contact is eradicated and public interaction is limited to that between self-defined, homogenous groups”; and that “exclusivity, social status and the assurance of a peaceful, quality lifestyle are all collapsed into a discourse of crime prevention”.

The latter is, of course, exactly the favoured discourse of the chattering South African middle-classes. The rest, perhaps, a commentary on all of the country’s wealthy suburban enclaves. So, you wonder, who can blame them?

****
At the Valley Shopping Centre there is Le Petit Chateau, The Gentleman’s Hair Salon, a Woolworth’s Food Market, an optometrist, a pharmacy, a real estate agency, a beauty salon and a dry cleaners called The Real Don.

At Café Frappe, middle-aged women gather for their morning coffees. A thin blonde with an American accent and a pink baseball cap talks of the ANC and jewellery and holiday destinations with an Asian woman — another expat – who wears a freshly-cut bob. Posted outside of the Woolies are Sotheby’s ads for rentals — R26 000 a month for a plain single story cream house with white pillars or R25 000 for an unappealing brickface home with a balcony.

Just outside the shopping centre are other gated communities that lie on the edge of Dainfern proper, such as Dainfern Ridge, where Phillip Parker, a property development consultant who worked for JCI before they disinvested from the property market, selling Dainfern to the homeowners association in 1999, lives.

Parker has a lean, fit build with green eyes, bushy eyebrows and a strong, square jaw.

We meet at Café Frappe to talk about the early days. He tells me JCI bought the 600 hectares that made up the Zevenfontein farm for R20-million back in 1985. By then, the Fourways Golf Course was already there, in the middle of the bush, and so were the initial plans for the estate. They were drawn up by a town planner by the name of John Rosmarin, who made two trips out to California in the mid-eighties, spending much of his time in Palm Springs where retirement and golf estates have transformed the parched desert landscape it into a sizzling mirage. JCI poured another R40-million into infrastructure, including the perimeter fence and the clubhouse and upgrades to the course. In August of 1991, they started selling.

“The big difference from the US at that stage was that there, the main appeal was a lifestyle offering,” says Parker. “In South Africa, it was about security. We found immediately that the other concerns fell away.”

As soon as Dainfern and its exclusive, secure lifestyle offering began to create its own mirage in the veld, local media trained its eye on the place. Parker says the press has always been hostile towards it.

“We think the journalists were actually envious,” he says. “In 2000, there was the first break-in in five years and it made the front page. But it doesn’t matter. Whenever there is a story in the paper about how badly workers are treated or how long visitors are kept waiting to get inside, it increases sales. Residents don’t care how long someone had to wait. It’s all about the security.”

Since those early days, security has remained the point. Julian Scher was doing his articles at Webber Wentzel when the firm had the JCI property account. Scher was put onto the legal work for the estate.

He and his wife Lianne had been living in a townhouse in Bryanston, but in 1991 they bought one of the first stands, forking out R90 000 and building their first house. It was country living, with hectares of nothing around them and the river running through it. There were no Tuscan villa townhouse complexes, no Ballyesque estates, no Fourways Mall, no Montecasino, not even Diepsloot had emerged then. They can remember jackals running through the estate, and long walks on Sundays through the veld. Back then it was just them, the clubhouse, the course and the wall.

The Schers have since moved from their first home, rebuilding an older house on the course into a glorious four-bedroom French country house with vaulted ceilings, a gourmet kitchen, a Koi Pond, an infinity pool, a private cinema and a fireplace big enough for a family of four to sit inside.

“It’ll never happen again,” says Scher, from his lounge on a rainy summer night, referring to the dying breed of the luxury golf estate.

We talk about how JCI was able to float Dainfern for years – much like, he says, how Anglo American took on Fourways Gardens and Silver Lakes Golf Estate in Pretoria — bringing it through economic lulls and recessions and allowing the estate to fully mature. The economic constraints, along with changes in national housing policy that will require a more inclusive approach to human settlements, and the dwindling supply of land available in a city that will have to cater to an exploding population, may mean developments like Dainfern are, at the very least, very difficult to execute.

But all of that is secondary. The Schers say they aren’t going anywhere, even if life in Dainfern comes with hideous traffic that can sometimes mean his daily commute to his Parkmore office can take up to an hour and half.

“You could give me a house in Hyde Park or Sandhurst but I wouldn’t take it for love or money. I don’t want to live behind a wall and press the button to enter and constantly be looking behind me. Here, it is clean, there is no litter, there are no electric fences, the dogs are on leashes and the parks are full of kids.”

I mention that some say this sense of security, this life, is artificial, that people who live in Dainfern don’t live in reality.

“What reality? Whose reality? Barbed wire and burglar bars and high jackings?”

You see, he’s got a point.

The reality parked outside the Pavilion one recent Saturday is this: one Harley Davidson, seven BMWs, three Mercedes Benzes, two Audis, a VW Touareg, two Range Rovers and a Discovery 4.

The local league cup tournament is on and Man United, Liverpool, Newcastle, Arsenal and Aston Villa are all there on the soccer field in full kit. Inside, the tuckshop is selling donuts, All Sorts, Simba chips, gumballs, toasted sandwiches and cool drinks and a black-haired DJ is spinning Wild Cherry’s “Play that Funky Music (White Boy)”.

Under a white canopy, a soccer mom takes down the registration of boys and girls as a golden retriever darts across the field.

Tania Oddi, in a jean skirt and a black T-shirt, her hair pulled back in a ponytail, stares down at the game, where her 7-year-old son is one of the star players. “It’s stunning,” she says, grinning. “Yeah, it’s the Truman bubble but I wouldn’t live anywhere else.”

The bubble, the exclusivity, the closing off, the shutting down, the life-long holiday, the desire to capture an innocence of a past that never really existed, is what Dainfern is selling. It’s proud red banner with a lion holding a golf flag as its emblem, flaps at the entrance to the guarded estate just next to South African one, attempting to stake its claim in both worlds.

One afternoon, as I am leaving, I meet a bear-size man in long blue denim shorts and a button-up cotton shirt standing in the parking lot in front the brick-faced building which houses the homeowner’s association.

He’s been living on the estate for years, was on the community policing forum for a while. But lately he’s been thinking it’s time to sell up. “I think I’d like to go back to reality.”

- Mail & Guardian, December 23, 2011

ON A RECENT WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON in Kinshasa we sat on a marbled garden terrace waiting for Werrason, one of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s most famous musicians. There were palm trees and red roses and cactuses and, next to a grand entrance with Greek pillars, an oversized vase filled with light pink and beige nylon flowers topped with red and yellow Christmas decorations.

A golden eagle with a two-metre wingspan was perched on a pedestal, ready to pounce on its prey: more than a dozen workers who were busy with refurbishments. They were preparing the new blue-and-white-tiled pool, redoing the brick driveway and finishing the extension in the back where Werrason’s new studio is being built.

In the parking area part of his 10-vehicle collection was on display: a Chevy Suburban, a VW Scirocco, an Audi Q7, a brand-new Can Am motorcycle and a quad-bike. In his employ are five bulky bodyguards and three uniformed police officers; in his band, Wenge Musica Maison Mere, there are 25 musicians and 30 dancers.

Which all befits a rock star. And that is what the man known as “the phenomenon” is.

His face sells everything from beer to sausages and, in election season, his songs sell politicians. Well, those who can afford him, anyway.

After an hour and half, Werrason emerged, first in a Mickey Mouse T-shirt and later, after asking us what we would like to drink and if we would like to photograph him, in a red-checked, long-sleeved collared shirt, a Cincinnati Reds baseball cap with blue trim, jeans and bright red designer high-tops.

We told him we were there to talk about the elections and about his inclination to sing for le pouvoir, the power, specifically President Joseph Kabila and those aligned to him.

He led us inside his living room, which was lit with a pale glow from the lime-green mesh curtains, and told us, simply, that he was asked by Kabila’s people to sing for the president. And so he did. He sang of the building of roads, bridges, schools and hospitals, and of Kabila’s election promises of a brighter tomorrow.

It is not the first time he has sung for a Congolese president, Werrason said. He sang for Mobutu Sese Seko and for Kabila’s father, Laurent.

“We are artists,” he said. “We are not politicians. I do my art and politicians come to us; they solicit us.” Besides, he said, “I love him. He is our president. We believe if he has more time he will help the Congolese people.”

And the money is good, I mention, gesturing to the refurbishments going on outside and towards his white-and-gold lacquer bar, which is stocked with Mot and decorated with a small plastic representation of Hollywood.

He assures me that the political stuff is “small money”, but he won’t say how much that small money is. He doesn’t want other musicians to see how much more — or less — he gets for his songs.

You see, Werrason is far from alone.

On his blog, Congo Siasa, analyst Jason Stearnsnoted that, “even previously sceptical singers like Koffi Olomide and Papa Wemba are throwing their talents behind Joseph Kabila’s campaign”.

But Olomide’s dedication to his praise-singing might not be so heartfelt. A friend who recently saw him perform in Kinshasa noted that Olomide brought a Kabila-backed politician running for the National Assembly on to the stage — one of the more than 18000 who are trying to win one of the 500 parliamentary seats — and asked him: “Why should the people vote for you?”

Silence. “You don’t know?”, the musician chided. “It’s because you are handsome.” Laughter. The politician finally muttered a response: “I am very generous. What I have I share with people.”

For those sins, the Diaspora — many of whom have been vocal in their opposition to le pouvoir — have protested against musicians who back Kabila when they attempt to perform overseas.

Werrason, who has played in several European cities and in Canada, was physically attacked in Paris in June, reportedly while dining at a Congolese restaurant in the city.

“It is only a group of some guys without documents who are bitter,” he said. “It is not normal to prevent someone from performing. This is a democratic regime. Everyone can struggle to get to power.”

Stearns wrote that in video footage from demonstrations early in the year, the gatherings of less than a few hundred protesters appeared “to be more outraged by the cost of the tickets”, which were going for about €100, than motivated to stop musicians from performing.

Besides, Werrason said, while he sings for Kabila, he’s not so picky about who he’ll back in song. He said none of the other 11 presidential candidates had contacted him.

“It’s not that they can’t afford me,” he said. “They just didn’t imagine that I could bring them support. It’s only Kabila who considered us important as artists.”

Just a few hours after our interview Werrason headed over to take the stage at La Zamba Playa, an old outdoor Kinshasa bar that has been transformed into a rehearsal and concert venue for his band.

That night, Henriette Wamu Ataminia, a member of Parliament who is trying to regain her seat, met the star outside, a mobile billboard with her smiling face and a small army of supporters in election T-shirts in tow.

A crowd had gathered, along with half a dozen journalists with cameras and microphones, ready to broadcast Werrason’s message of support to the country. But people seemed interested only in him. They chanted: “We will vote for you if you pay for our ticket.”

An aggressive crowd heaved forward, towards Ataminia and Werrason, as the T-shirted supporters held them back. Werrason told the cameras that this was the “right woman to vote for”, that she had “done a lot for people in need”.

“I cannot only sing for her because she gives me money. Clap for her,” he commanded the group. And they obliged. One of Werrason’s choreographers, Sankara Dekunta, wearing white plastic glasses, dreadlocks and a baseball cap, bounced on to camera to better explain her traits. “She’s very beautiful and charming!” he told the cameras, to more applause.

Inside, the music pulsed through the excited crowd. On the cement stage with its corrugated steel roof, young women in various states of undress, almost all with fake eyelashes and hair in every colour, shook their backsides and rolled their hips in a way that would make Shakira blush.

As the performance continued to an ecstatic crowd, Ataminia’s pamphlets were handed out by her troops. Eventually, she took the stage with Werrason and handed him an envelope. Inside was $400, to buy everyone a beer, she said.

I turned to Dekunta, who was seated next to me in the front row, and said, by way of polite conversation: “The politics here very interesting, no?” He laughed. “People here don’t care,” he told me. “People here, they just want peace.”

- Mail & Guardian, November 26, 2011

THERE IS SOMETHING ABOUT doing 140km/h on a Jo’burg highway at 4:30pm on a weekday with no car in sight — except for the thousands of poor suckers who aren’t going anywhere, backed up and blocked from every onramp — that screams: hanging out with Michelle Obama is very, very cool.

Africa’s economic capital came to a complete standstill this week; at least, that is, when the United States’s first lady moved anywhere for her scheduled events. Her 20-plus motorcade, led by half a dozen hulking black Chevy SUVs with Maryland and Washington DC plates, were filled with secret service men armed to the teeth and prone to searching every bag and body part as often as possible in an effort to keep Flotus — the First Lady of the United States, as she is known by White House staff — safe.

“That’s how we travel,” the aide next to me whispered as we flew down the highway towards Zandspruit to visit a childcare centre. “I always wonder what it’s really like … we never see any cars.”

Life in the Obama bubble means traffic disappears and speed limits do not apply. The downsides are your pee breaks are monitored, sniffer dogs check you for explosives and you constantly seem to go into lockdown and are told you cannot leave the premises.

You see, the Americans do not screw around. With robotic precision, they move in and out of an area with the help of dozens of well-dressed aides, and men and women in dark suits and ties and little white earpieces, and big men with cropped hair and khaki pants and golf shirts with guns strapped to their calves, and conduct an undertaking of untold magnitude with nearly flawless accuracy.

It’s a nice vantage point from which to take in the sights. And there were many. Obama arrived on Monday night at Waterkloof Airforce Base on White Star — a Boeing 757 that is her ride — with Malia, Sacha, her mother Marian Robinson, her niece Leslie Robinson and nephew Avery Robinson. After disembarking and walking down the red carpet, she nodded to the local press corps who had waited more than four hours for that shot, much of it in the freezing cold, hopped on to the motorcade and sped off into the darkness towards a Sandton hotel.

The next morning, she went to the US ambassador’s residence to shake hands with the likes of Moeletsi Mbeki, Winnie Mandela, Patrice Motsepe, Pregs Govender and Cheryl Carolus, among 100 others. She went on to meet Nompumelelo Ntuli-Zuma, President Jacob Zuma’s second wife (a snub, screeched the international press, as Zuma was “unavailable” to meet). By 12.30pm, she was at the Mandela Foundation to meet Graça Machel and took a brief, sober look at some of the archives — no questions, please. After that, she went to see Nelson Mandela for a short visit — no press corps, thank you.

So it wasn’t until Zandspruit that we could really begin to see what Michelle Obama was selling. When the motorcade pulled down the makeshift road that led to the Emthonjeni Community Centre, the residents of the informal settlement waved excitedly from the sidelines — contained by hordes of national and metro police — their phones held high to get a shot of greatness.

The white press van suddenly came to a halt, the door swung open and Obama’s aide gave the order: “Go, go, go,” she said. And so we went, directed by the police and the secret service who swarmed in to secure the area.

The press corps was herded into a corner on the plot where the daycare centre sat. There was fresh paint on the tyres and the play structure and a group of stunned three- and four-year-olds waited dutifully to perform for the honoured guest.

We were assembled and we waited. And then, on cue, she entered. The cameras went off, clicks circling her like a swarm of locusts. Obama tickled the children, hugged them and then introduced her mom.

“I brought my mommy,” she said. “She came with me.” Then, flashing the Obama smile: “How y’all doin’?”

The kids sang for her and she would read to them. The first lady and first daughters’ choice: Dr Suess’s Cat in the Hat: Americana at its very best.

They practised for this reading. Each of them knew which section was theirs — yellow highlights and black underlining indicated who would say what — and Obama’s animated face and pitch of voice made you know this is what she’d rather be doing. Her mother stood on the sidelines, in a knitted beige sweater and light-blue ballet flats, grinning with pride at her daughter, her grandchildren and the kids at their feet.

We like Michelle Obama, too, Mrs Robinson. And it’s because you raised her so well. Somehow, we can relate to the woman born in 1964 as Michelle LaVaughn Robinson because we can see ourselves in her — even if she is a gorgeous, nearly 1.8m-tall African-American woman with flawless skin and a sense of style that landed her on the cover of Vogue.

Obama grew up in the most American of all places, the Midwest, Chicago, the daughter of a city worker who had multiple sclerosis and worked anyway because that’s what you do and a mother who stayed at home with the kids. Remarkable kids, it turns out. They would both skip second grade and end up at Princeton.

Obama got her law degree from Harvard and in 1992 married the son of an African immigrant and an American white woman, the first black man to hold the highest office of the most powerful country in the world — an even more stunning feat when you consider that blacks make up just 13% of the population there.

We like Michelle Obama because she’s beautiful and smart and humble. We like her because she loves Stevie Wonder and macaroni and cheese and working out. We like her because she’s a woman of the world, even if her future mother-in-law, born Stanley Ann Dunham, saw her differently.

According to the recently released A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother by Janny Scott, Dunham, who was born in Kansas but spent much of her life overseas, wrote in a letter that Michelle was “nice”, “not beautiful but quite attractive” and “a little provincial and not as international as Barry”, the name the president went by for years.

Clearly, some things have changed since then.

After a few games with the kids — which had the first family, including grandma, gyrating their hips to the command of a bossy and undeterred four-year-old — it was game over. Back to the van. One of the administration’s high-ranking African advisors hitched a ride on the leg towards the Apartheid Museum. She spoke about how the president was committed to reaching out to youth on the continent. She talked about the young African women we’d soon meet who were chosen as part of the first lady’s plan to extend leadership opportunities. We’re in the new international order, she said.

“You have these emerging centres of power,” she told the group, “and South Africa is clearly one of those. It’s the economic engine of the continent.”

As the motorcade sped down Beyers Naude, one of the foreign correspondents muttered, mostly to himself, in disbelief at the unlikely placement of the squatter camp next to an upmarket commercial nursery.

Seconds later, trying to work out the conundrum, he gestured towards a sign. “Huh. Ladies kickboxing. This could be Orange County,” referring to an industrial surf town just south of Los Angeles.

The group would have found it fascinating to hear about our other conundrums of late: how the continent’s economic engine, which comes with ladies kickboxing and squatter camps, is kicking around ideas of nationalisation. Or about ANC Youth League plans to take US President Barack Obama to the International Criminal Court for bombing Libya.

But there was no time to chat. As soon as we arrived at the museum, the door swung open.

“Go, go, go,” the aide commanded and we grabbed our things and were ushered into an auditorium.

The young female leaders Obama had chosen — 76 of them between 16 and 30 — were lined up for a photo opportunity. She arrived and promptly ignored the row of cameras to turn to the young women before her.

“I want my girls to be just like you,” she told them.

And you know she meant it. Her girls are at the centre of her and her husband’s lives. It was the potential toxic exposure to the Oval Office that caused them to think long and hard about entering the race. Ultimately, it was the girls who pulled them towards it. “We want them to be able to dream of anything for themselves. I want my girls to travel the world with pride,” she told a crowd at the University of California, Los Angeles, in February 2008, just before 20 primary elections took place.

But truly? Obama knows that life’s more about luck — or the lack of it — than anything else. In The Audacity of Hope, Barack writes about the “hint of uncertainty” he found in his wife’s eyes, “as if, deep inside, she knew how fragile things really were, and that if she ever let go, even for a moment, all her plans might quickly unravel”.

And that’s why we like her, too. For knowing that it’s a game of chance, that not everything is as it seems and that it can all fall apart at a moment’s notice. And yet she forges ahead regardless.

According to a March 2008 profile in the New Yorker, before Obama got an increase at the hospital where she worked as an administrator in 2004 — which more than doubled her salary and came at the same time as her husband was elected to the Senate — she was making $121 910 a year, a respectable but certainly not an excessive salary for someone in her position. In the past seven years, the Obamas have been on one of the quickest rides to the top of the world-power and wealth class, any way you slice it.

It was not long ago, wrote Barack in The Audacity of Hope, that one afternoon when he was still a senator, he called his wife to tell her about important legislation he was working on, which would restrict the black-market arms trade.

She cut him off. There were more pressing issues:

“We have ants.”

“Huh?”

“I found ants in the kitchen. And in the bathroom upstairs.”

“Okay …”

“I need you to buy some ant traps on your way home tomorrow. I’d get them myself, but I’ve got to take the girls to their doctor’s appointment after school. Can’t you do that for me?”

“Right. Ant traps.”

And with that, she was gone, into a meeting, leaving Barack to wonder whether other senators had to pick up ant traps on the way home.

It’s the recent memory of real life that helps keep her honest. But it’s also because the Obamas are unabashedly American middle class. (“March,” she directed her own children at the daycare centre, commanding them to follow the marching nursery school children to the reading area. And her children obeyed. They also reportedly make their beds daily and walk the dog.)

The American Dream tells us if you work hard, go to school, are a good person and pay your bills on time, you’ll do alright. Hell, you’ll do better than that and you’ll certainly do better than your parents. But if you ask many Americans today they’ll tell you that it’s not so.

A recent Gallup poll found that less than 50% of Americans believed it likely that today’s youth would have a better life than their parents — the lowest on record since 1983.

Michelle Obama knows that all too well. In her speeches in the run-up to the election that would crown her husband king, she told stories of a broken America. Of a country where people who are lucky enough to go to university don’t finish paying off their debt until their own kids are in college. A place where if you get sick, you could go bankrupt because of the cracked healthcare system.

It’s no longer the country Obama grew up in, she told those potential voters. Back then, her father’s humble salary supported the family and got the kids through college. In today’s America, that sort of thing doesn’t happen. And she knows it.

Still, we like her. We like her because she is a good daughter, a good mother and a good wife. We like her because she talks straight and can’t seem to help herself from being anything but herself. We like her because she’s a cool customer who once said, according to the New York Times, that the only redeeming part about campaigning for her husband’s 2000 congressional bid was that “visiting so many living rooms had given her some new decorating ideas”.

On Wednesday, the press corps lined up their cameras and their pens to take down her speech at the Regina Mundi church in Soweto, where so many years ago protesters took refuge from the apartheid security forces. From 4am, satellite trucks began lining residential streets.

Alf Khumalo queued up with the rest of the media to pick up his accreditation, to be in the front row yet again to document history.

“It’s symbolic,” he said of Obama’s visit to Regina Mundi. “It’s a historic moment. In some ways, our lives here in South Africa and the lives of African Americans are parallel.”

The pews slowly filled up, mainly with women from across the swaths of the middle classes. They came, young and old, gussied up and proud, and sat to hear Obama speak of hope for a better future, perhaps somehow to be touched by her good fortune, which might finally get them healthcare or a car or university degrees for their children.

Obama came to the podium and faced a packed house pulsing with excitement. As she spoke, she weaved together the shared and separate histories. She spoke of Teddy Roosevelt and Robert Kennedy (the latter visited South Africa in 1966), and of Albertina and Walter Sisulu. She talked about the 1976 uprising and the struggle for freedom. She told us to hold our leaders to account, to stamp out corruption, to speak openly. She talked about her own career and how, when she graduated, she got a job at a fancy law firm with a nice salary and a big office.

“By all accounts, I was living the dream,” she said. “But I knew something was missing. I wanted to be down on the ground working with kids, helping families put food on the table and a roof over their heads.”

She went back to the community, she said, and encouraged others to do the same. “Not fortune, not fame, not your pictures in history books, but the refusal to remain a bystander when others are suffering, and that commitment to serve however you can, where you are.”

At the end, Obama, the woman who once had a clear distaste for politics and who has fame and fortune and her face in history books, had the crowd chanting: “Yes we can!”

Alas, Obama is far from home. Even before she had reached the podium, the claim on South Africa’s future was already staked out by Gauteng Premier Nomvula Mokonyane, who told the crowd at the tail end of her welcome address: “We want freedom in our lifetime. We want economic emancipation in our lifetime.” Her call was met with thunderous applause.

Which is the point. Freedom is ours — now we want our stuff.

What the Obamas are serving up is a big slice of apple-pie America with a generous dollop of hope. That “yes, we can” elect a black man president of the most powerful nation on the planet, so maybe, just maybe, we can change the course of this whole mess if ya’ll pitch in and help out.

The thing is, the American Dream as it was once packaged and promised is now dead.

What we’re working on now — Americans and South Africans alike — is faith more than anything. Faith that the world will get better, that we’ll get to send our kids to college, that the Earth won’t implode and that we won’t be eating cat food when we hit retirement. The Obamas do hope better than anyone.

But it’s not an easy sell. Because once you’ve tried something, once you’ve had a glimpse of the good life, tasted it even for just a moment, it’s hard to go back. It’s like going for a few rides in the first lady’s motorcade and witnessing firsthand the power of the US government, its sheer efficiency and might, so that driving yourself to Soweto on a Wednesday morning before sunrise, even if it is to see one of the most powerful women on the planet, suddenly turns you back into a pumpkin.

- Mail & Guardian, June 24, 2011

I NEVER INTENDED to shop at Walmart. Ever.

After all, Sam Walton and family represented all I was raised to sneer at.

They are well known for stomping out freedom of speech by snatching “offensive” artists such as Sheryl Crow off their abundant shelves and banning any books they deem unfit for popular consumption, including Jon Stewart’s America: The Book.

They are anti-abortion, fund Republicans, trade in firearms, take over towns and squash out the little guy while at the same time Walmartising every quaint village in the process.

Then, of course, there is the well-documented and heinous exploitation of their workers, of which reams have been written, filmed and researched. Crossing over, through its sliding glass doors and over its pale linoleum tiles into its florescent world of glowing consumerism would betray all I believed in. It was just not going to happen. Until it did.

I was visiting my mother in the San Fernando Valley, a suburb of Los Angeles, in 2008, when it became unavoidable.

I needed to pack my books, which had sat in a storeroom on my mother’s property for three years. The cardboard boxes were giving way to damp and without intervention, my books were on their way to transforming to a lumpy mass of pulp. I told my brother’s ex-girlfriend — let’s call her a People of Walmart shopper (please see peopleofwalmart.com) — about my need for plastic crates.

“Go to Walmart,” the People of Walmart shopper advised. “Cheapest place you can get ‘em.” “I don’t really shop at Walmart,” I said, with no small amount of indignation. “I’ll try Costco.”

“Suit yourself,” she said, shrugging.

“Welcome to Walmart!”
I went to a few of California’s big box stores — Costco, Home Depot and Target — and then came home and called Walmart, just to prove the ex wrong. Turns out she was right. They were the cheapest. By more than $5 a go. And I needed 20 crates. That was $100 — at the time nearly R900 — I’d be out, purely on principle. So I shoved principle in my back pocket, put on some dark sunglasses and drove over to get the goods.

A surge of guilt shot through my limbs as the doors whooshed open and a greeter in blue shouted out “Welcome to Walmart!” I felt as though I had just walked into a Michael Moore doccie (just pick one — Walmart stars in both Bowling for Columbine and his most recent, Capitalism: A Love Story). I hunched over and squinted to hide myself better.

The ceilings were high, like an airport hangar, and the brightness hurt my eyes, even at half-mast. The smell of pretzels and pepperoni pizza wafted across the entrance hall and into the clothing section, which sprawled in an endless offering of the cheap and nasty. I tried not to be distracted by the garden supplies, books and CDs, television sets and office stationery, the bureaus and tables and chairs and dry goods, knick-knacks and stuffed animals.

I was there for the plastic crates and I would not support the Walton family in their further exploitation of people and cheap goods.

But the crates were not the cheap sort. They were the good ones, nice and sturdy. I held them with admiration and awe: how did they manage to get them so much cheaper than everyone else? I packed 20 of them on my oversized shopping cart and manoeuvred through the People of Walmart, determined not to buy any other item, even if — wow, look at that, $1,50 for a huge bottle of Johnson’s baby powder. No, I pulled my arms in and headed for the checkout. I took a deep breath as I left the store, my sunglasses back on my face, scanning the parking lot for any old friends who might see me as they left the Starbucks next door.

I tossed the crates in the back of my mother’s car. The next day I began to transfer my books into the new crates and soon realised I had to go back. I needed five more.

Like any dirty addiction, it was easier the second time around.

I went in, got my crates and went straight for the checkout. Before I knew it, though, I found myself lingering next to the cosmetics section to see what else — other than the supersize $1,50 baby powder — I could get. It turned out quite a lot.

Everything was cheaper at Walmart: nail polish remover, lip moisturiser, body lotions, cotton swabs. I moved to the medicine section. The huge bottle of ibuprophen cost less than the cheapest I had ever seen in my life. And the toothpaste? How could they even make a profit at this price? I loaded up my cart before I could come to the conclusion — exploitation of the worker — and made my way out before guilt entirely consumed me.

During my two-week stay in California, I went back three more times. I kept telling myself that it was an experiment, research even. Besides, I was leaving, this wasn’t going to go on much longer. I just needed a few more things to take back.

My sister called during my last shopping trip.

“Where are you?” she asked.

When I confessed, my sister, who lives near Berkeley in California — a nuclear-free zone and certainly a Walmart-free zone — was scandalised.

“Are you kidding?” she spat. “Why didn’t you go to Costco?”

Oh, the naivety of those who have not shopped at Walmart. As if you could go somewhere else and get it cheaper.

So, the thing is, I’m rooting for the unions here in South Africa, I really am. I don’t want exploited workers any more than I want exploited consumers. After all, we already have our banks, car manufacturers and cellphone companies that fill that gap so well.

I’m hoping there’s an African solution to the Walmart problem, that they will be allowed to operate here and that the workers will force Walmart to uphold fair labour practices on our terms.

Because — Michael Moore, please forgive me for my sins, but you do not understand what the other retailers have been doing to us here in Africa — I’ll be there on opening day.

With my dark glasses on. And maybe a headscarf or two.

- Mail & Guardian, March 28, 2011

AS YOU DRIVE INTO KINSHASA, the battle lines become clear. These are not potholes, they are large ponds of water where concrete gave in to time long ago, and cars and trucks and windowless, battered taxis have no option but to exist in a constant state of near collision.

One of the city’s poorest, most densely populated areas, Tshangu — called China by the locals — runs along the road, immersed in grey slippery mud, with the stench of dried fish and urine hanging thick in the wet air. Traders scrape by on a few dollars a month, selling peppers and onions and second-hand shoes next to rubbish piles that form small urban hills.

Then the road changes. Four lanes on each side, freshly paved and painted with straight white lines, and Boulevard Lumumba — named after Patrice Lumumba, the Congo’s first prime minister — emerges in its full glory. Straight ahead there are ultramodern streetlights and an expansive Chinese-themed shopping complex and public square is rising slowly from the dirt.

The man responsible for all this, his supporters in the People’s Party for Reconstruction and Democracy (PPRD) will tell you, is the quiet, shy, 40-year-old President Joseph Kabila, whose face you cannot miss these days. His billboard election posters display images of yesterday — an old boat, a small hut, a ramshackle train — followed by a generously imagined today: a more modern boat, a newer house, a freshly painted train. But the future’s so bright you gotta wear shades. Here is a grand home, a state-of-the-art speed train, a luxury ship.

Some of les cinq chantiers, the five pillars that make up Kabila’s promises of education, health, infrastructure, water and electricity and job creation, are already emerging, thanks to a controversial $9-billion deal he made with the Chinese to build roads, hospitals, schools and dams.

But as his main opponent, Etienne Tshisekedi pointed out the total length of roads built in the 10 years of Kabila’s rule amounts to just a few kilometres.

Most things away from those roads are miserable. Corruption is systemic and feeds on a crippled economy. The largest United Nations peacekeeping force in the world is based in the east of the country, with 20 000 troops attempting to contain conflict in the region. One recent report from the American Journal of Public Health estimated that a woman was raped each minute in the Congo. In 2002 an independent panel of experts reported to the UN Security Council that 85 multinational companies were supporting violent militias to get to the Congo’s rich mineral deposits.

The 79-year-old veteran opposition leader is playing into the massive public discontent. Tshisekedi is widely known as cranky, arrogant — a wild card for the international community nervous about its heavy investment in the country’s mineral wealth. He appears unwilling to compromise, or form a coalition with other members of the opposition before the election, including Vital Kamerhe, a leading opposition candidate widely ­recognised as the man who delivered the conflict-ridden east to Kabila in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s (DRC) first multiparty elections in 2006.

On April 24, at a rally in the stadium where, in 1974, George Foreman took on Muhammad Ali for the world heavyweight title, Tshisekedi drew tens of thousands of supporters. He told them, as he released two white doves, that the Congolese had to forgive themselves for the violence that had wracked the country for so many years. He said he would win this election, but if it were stolen the people had to be prepared to do as their brothers in Tunisia had done.

The groundswell of support for him since then has been impressive. But one does not see Tshisekedi’s election posters very often in Kinshasa.

His Union for Democracy and Social Progress (UDPS) simply does not have the kind of resources that Kabila’s has commanded since being installed in 2001 as president following the death of his father, Laurent, who was killed by his own bodyguard.

The trouble at Ceni
It is a telling image. Voters run crazed in all directions, machete-wielding thugs attacking some of them and Ceni, the National Independent Electoral Commission, lies trampled in the street. The headline above Le Potentiel’s editorial cartoon screams: “19 days of high tension”.

That afternoon, at the headquarters of the Electoral Institute of Southern Africa, which is training 10 350 Congolese election observers, country director Vincent Tohbi explains the enormity of the problem. Questions about bloated voter rolls are wreaking havoc and the electoral commission has been under heavy pressure to postpone the November 28 election date because much of the material has not even arrived in the country.

In an air-conditioned boardroom that overlooks the Congo River, maps that outline the 11 provinces are stuck on the walls. Across the vast country some 62 000 polling stations — a number of which are in remote areas accessible only by air — will have to be erected in the next two weeks to accommodate 32-million voters.

The ballots are overwhelming, too. With more than 18 000 candidates running for 500 seats in the National Assembly, as well as 11 candidates for the presidency, size matters.

In the densely populated Tshangu alone there are more than 1 500 candidates vying to get their piece of the lucrative political pie. The 56-page ballots there will be printed on A3 paper and 1.6 metre-high ballot boxes will accommodate them. Candidates have taken to writing their ballot number and page number on the election posters that dot every available surface in the city.

“People here no longer say ‘vote for me’,” Tohbi says. “They say ‘vote for number 1 378′. We don’t vote for the party or for the person. We are inventing democracy in this country. We are at the forefront!”

Nineteen days before the election and not even half of the ballot boxes have been delivered. The ballot papers — printed by a private company in South Africa — are not in the DRC. Asked about the impossibility of getting the material to the polling stations in time, Tohbi grins.

“It doesn’t matter what you think, or what I think, or what the international community thinks. The Ceni is on another planet.”

Indeed. In late October the head of planet Ceni, Daniel Ngoy Mulunda declared: “There will be no war, there will be no trouble. There won’t even be rain on November 28, we’re going to stop it. I’ve already started praying for that.”

Truth, lies and Photoshop
Every day but Sunday hundreds of UDPS supporters gather from 6am on Dibaya Street in the suburb of Kasavubu. On this Wednesday a group of 100 men speak about Tshisekedi’s recent controversial proclamation on RLTV, the opposition television station.

It has been widely reported that, in a phone call from South Africa to RLTV Tshisekedi declared himself president, causing an uproar in the international community and confusing civil society groups that know him as the man who has been preaching non-violence since the formation of the UDPS in 1982 under Mobutu Sese Seko.

The man with the megaphone says it is not a coup d’état that Tshisekedi was advocating. In fact, it is not at all like the newspapers say. It is the will of the people. “We, the people, have voted for him and we are waiting for December 6 to swear him in,” the man tells the impassioned crowd. “Viva Tshisekedi!”

One supporter holds up the good news to show the opposition newspaper Tapis Rouge’s fantasy headline of the day: “Obama and Sarkozy confirm Tshisekedi as president of the DRC.”

Also circulating in the area are two photos going for 500 Congolese francs (about R4) a piece. One has United States President Barack Obama shaking hands with Tshisekedi; another is of a grinning Obama holding a famous photo of the opposition leader. Above it: “I don’t want to interfere in your election … but in my humble opinion this “huy” [sic] is the best candidate to lead your country into the 21st century.”

The men in blue
At the weekly United Nations press briefing officials are seated in a row before a blue UN flag sticky-taped in front of two big-screen TVs. The officials run through the day’s agenda items, including a report on pre-election human rights violations in the DRC from November 2010 to September.

There have been 188, they note, many of them against opposition supporters that “involved elements of the Congolese national police or the national intelligence services”.

The report also notes the concern of Roger Meece, special representative of secretary general Ban Ki-moon in the DRC and head of the UN Organisation Stabilisation Mission (Monusco), that all politicians and their followers must help to ensure “conditions for a peaceful, open and democratic election”.

At the end of the briefing a reporter raises her hand. “What is Monusco doing to prevent the chaos around elections?” she asks.

The visibly frustrated spokesperson shoots back at the group of 100 or so journalists. “Don’t say the international community is absent. Peaceful elections are not the international community’s responsibility. That’s up to the Congolese people.”

But many in civil society insist that governance in the DRC rests with both the Congolese and the international community. They believe that many Western countries are implicated in the chaos and corruption that rule the region — and they like things just the way they are. “They are sharing the Congo like it was 1885,” one civil society advocate told me. “The Western governments even defend Kabila when people are shot on the street. They tell the media: it’s not good to toyi-toyi because you can get shot.”

No justice, no peace
“Kimia ezali?” is a greeting in Lingala. Literally, the translation is: “Is there peace here?” It is a good enough question to ask. The answer, though, is obvious. In fact, there is a common refrain from anyone you speak to about the elections here, from the local airtime vendor to political analysts: there will be violence.

Dolly Ibefo Mbunga has a round face, delicate hands and sad eyes that look through you, searching, perhaps, for something he has lost forever, something irretrievable.

In his office, which has yellow curtains and a concrete floor, the head of Voice of the Voiceless, a human rights advocacy group, faces a reminder each day of the weight of his work. In front of him is a poster with a photo of the group’s former head, Floribert Chebeya, and his driver, Fidele Bazana Edadi.

Chebeya was killed in June last year, his body found on the back seat of his car, after being called to a meeting with the head of the national police force. The body of his driver was never found.

Mbunga runs through concerns about rising reports of election violence. Among them are claims that the PPRD is recruiting martial arts experts to block opposition supporters when they march. They come, he says, armed with machetes and are supported by police.

“This regime has a culture of killing. The international community should intervene now, instead of counting the numbers of people who die. They should be helping to help prevent it.”

Beaten down
Dozens of men hang around outside the UDPS headquarters, some milling about in the yard, others sitting in the few plastic chairs left in the burnt-out interior of the offices.

The headquarters were petrol-bombed in the early morning hours of September 6. The day before, Tshisekedi supporters had followed their leader on a march to submit papers for his candidacy. On the way back, men armed with machetes and iron rods blocked their way and began attacking the group. The supporters scattered and, at some point in the mayhem, a PPRD office was attacked. The retaliation: the UDPS office and RLTV’s premises were attacked with Molotov cocktails.

In a makeshift room that has been partitioned with chip board, a man lies face down on a dirty blanket, his back burnt, his head beaten. The man, we are told, was attacked in late October after UDPS supporters leaving a meeting were beaten by machete-wielding men.

Benjamin Bajikijaie, a lawyer who has been with the party since its early days, sits behind a wooden desk in a back room, a lone fan his only relief from the heat. He wears a tight, white T-shirt and spectacles, his cheeks full, as if ready to burst in frustration. He cannot, he says, get his own election observers registered. The form is supposed to be on the Ceni website. It is not. He sent someone over to pick up a form from the commission’s offices the day before and was told that Ceni needed an official letter. Today he has written an official letter. Now he is waiting for the response.

Asked about Tshisekedi’s inflammatory outburst, about accusations that UDPS supporters are violent, he spits out: “Someone in this race has a record of violence. You know who will be violent. You know who has the monopoly on violence.”

Then Bajikijaie narrows his eyes and speaks slowly so that I can understand each word he has to say.

“We don’t have weapons. We have nothing. We have practised 30 years of non-violence. We are a party of peace. People know that. They rape women and kill people. They are playing games. They cannot say we are the bad guys. They are infiltrating our movement with bad guys and are saying it is us.”

For the love of Kabila
At the PPRD offices in Kinshasa things look very different.

In a grand house atop a small hill a tiled terrace accommodates visitors on comfortable couches. An air-conditioned boardroom with a shiny new conference table sits at the foot of the ubiquitous framed portrait of Kabila in a smart suit. A slow stream of supporters wanders in and out of the generous premises to pick up their Kabila-blue umbrellas, scarves, T-shirts, caps, pamphlets and vuvuzelas.

Meanwhile, at the side of the newly refurbished section of Boulevard Lumumba, a group of PPRD supporters gathers next to a hill of rubbish nearly 3 metres high. A yellow PPRD flag hangs limply in the humidity and a framed photo of Kabila dangles from a rusted nail stuck to a small tree.

Joseph Ilangala, 39-years-old and unemployed, greets us. He tells of how the Kabila supporters meet here each day, all day long, to talk about what the president has done for the country. It is a calm crowd, without a megaphone, without chanting, without aggression.

“We can see with our own eyes,” he says. “We are eyewitnesses to how the president is modernising the country. Little by little the country will be developed. The people here love him from the bottom of their heart. It’s not for money. Nobody here gets money. A lot of people support him, but most are afraid to show it. They know if you support Kabila you can be harmed.”

What if Kabila loses the election? John Wetshikoy, a 26-year-old medical student, chimes in. “To begin with, we are sure he won’t lose. But if he happens to lose, we are democrats, we will accept the results.”

Leaving the land
Late Sunday afternoon, inside two separate hangers at Kinshasa’s N’Djili International Airport, clear plastic ballot boxes emblazoned with the words “Ceni” and “DRC” are stacked 3 metres high. We are told these enormous batches are just 15% of the total number of ballot boxes that will be distributed across the country.

“In two or three days all of this will be evacuated,” says Alain Tshimanga, Ceni’s logistics agent in Kinshasa. “By Wednesday everything will be out.”

Getting those ballot boxes and their yellow and blue plastic tops from there to the 62 000 polling stations in the next two weeks still seems impossible, even if by now, Tshimanga says, all but one consignment of ballot boxes is yet to arrive.

Tshimanga, a large man in long denim shorts and a white polo shirt, nevertheless backs his boss in the face of the impossible. He shakes his finger and points for emphasis: “The elections will take place on November 28!”

- Mail & Guardian, November 18, 2011

IT WAS NOT UNTIL I READ Life of Pi a few years ago that I realised the extent of my sins.

“It is not atheists who get stuck in my craw, but agnostics,” Pi Patel told his creator, Yann Martel. “Doubt is useful for a while. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.”

There it was, plain as a boy and a Bengal tiger on a raft in the ocean: it was sheer laziness, some sort of aversion to commitment that had led me down the paralytic path of the agnostic.

At various times in the past I have tried to convince myself that if I had my body dunked in holy water, confessed all my sins, imbibed enough scripture and counted enough beads I’d go to heaven and be with my father and my grandparents and live on a cloud for all eternity. Occasionally I think that if I meditated for longer stretches, detached myself from the material, could wrap my head around exactly nothing, breathed deeply enough and without constriction in my heart, I could reach enlightenment and touch God, or at least godliness.

Mine is a sort of touch-and-go belief, an uncertainty of uncertainness, of all gods and none, which apparently pisses people like Pi off. Before I read that passage I thought it was my superior reasoning skills that allowed me to understand so much more than the faithful.

The agnostic is all about reason and who but the unreasonable can argue with that? The Oxford dictionary defines people like me as someone “who claims neither faith nor disbelief in God”. Which is about as close as I can get to an explanation. I am not an atheist — I do not refuse God’s existence — I just know I don’t know and find it all too big for my small brain to begin to understand.

I don’t even remember people asking me about my religion when I was growing up. We celebrated Christmas and Easter in the modern tradition (Santa Claus and the Easter bunny were central to our holidays) and that seemed enough to satisfy most. We did not, however, go to church.

There were two exceptions. When we were very young, one of us four children had to alternate Sunday church visits with my very Catholic paternal great-grandmother.

Nonna would read from her Italian Bible — she spoke no English — and take her communion from the gloriously robed priest as one of her heathen, non baptised grandchildren would wriggle on the wooden pews and gaze up at the vaulted ceilings as she, surely, repeated silent prayers for all of us, destined to an afterlife in purgatory.

Also under duress we attended Sunday school when visiting my mother’s devoutly Protestant family in the summer months. It was there I was taught Bible stories, which I took in much like Greek mythology. I was fascinated by them and separated any connection to historical reality. After all, the stories were fantastical: people rising from the dead, arks filled with animals, the separating of seas and walking on water.

You’d think my parents would have stepped in to explain. But religion, like sex, was not talked about in our house. I didn’t even know my mother cared much about faith until I was 10 and my aunt finally spat it out for me, very likely disgusted by my lack of religious knowledge.

“Your mother was one of the most religious people I ever knew,” my aunt Eunice told me, pulling on a cigarette that hung from her parched lips. “Until your father came along, that is.”

It was meant to be accusatory.

My parents, I learned many years later, married in the Protestant church, away from my father’s family and never admitting to my mother’s parents that he had once been an altar boy in the Catholic church. I suppose when you keep a secret like that from your own parents — something that could have kept true love apart — it’s enough to put you off religion for life.

If religion was discussed in our home, it was to tell us the Catholics sacrificed people to the lions. Or to point to the historical root of some war (pick one, my father would say) as a reference for all the bad things that religion brought about in God’s name. Or to get in a good laugh about some televangelist who landed up in trouble for ripping off his parishioners or spending too much time with prostitutes.

As a teenager I can remember telling my Dad the lyrics to a Prince song. “You can be the president, I’d rather be the Pope. You can be the side effect, I’d rather be the dope.”

He grinned with pride; I got the joke. Religion, in our house, was for the nonscientific.

As an adolescent I went to a predominantly Jewish private school for three years. I loved going to the bar and bat mitzvahs, secretly wishing I could speak Hebrew and admiring my friends for their dedication to a practice that paid off much better dividends than my piano lessons, which resulted in nothing more than a recital and a pretty dress. By my fifth or sixth I could recite the opening lines of the prayer by heart: Baruch atah Adonai Eloheinu.

When I left that school, I knew as much about Judaism as I did about Christianity, which is to say not much other than the holidays and the rituals that came with them. I knew my place among the chosen people, too. I was a goy, a gentile. Still, my sympathies were with the Jews. We spent much of our history lessons on the Holocaust.

It was that and other mounting stories from history which I learned over the years that seemed to cement what my parents had alluded to: religion divides and conquers and ends in grief and destruction and it’s probably best left alone.

Growing up I believed you didn’t ask about someone’s religion; it seemed impolite to pry about something so deeply personal. I still keep this with me today. But it must have been hard for my father to sit in the pews as his eldest daughter was washed of her sins. My sister, a scientist with a degree in dentistry, would marry a Catholic man and he wanted a Catholic wife and Catholic children. My sister continues to be deeply religious and grimaces when I speak of raising my own daughter without her God.

A few years before my father died, my mother started going back to church. During one of the worst migraines of her life she turned to God and pled for him to turn off the blinding pain. Eventually, He did. After that my mother would occasionally head out on Sundays, albeit infrequently, in the face of my father’s snide comments.

“Your mother is a good woman,” he would sneer if you happened to ask where she was.

She now goes every week to a Unitarian Universalist church, which calls itself a liberal religion with Jewish-Christian roots. Its website says it advocates the “freedom of belief” and the “search for advancing truth”; it is a sort of religion without rules.

My mom sings in the choir. I’m certain it’s the community, the quietness, the song, the introspection she seeks and perhaps missed all those years.

My husband and I chose to get married on a private island in an entirely nonreligious ceremony in Mauritius 12 years ago. I wore a red dress, perhaps to mock the gods. They came back and showed me their power: three days after we were married my father died. Sudden-death syndrome, they call it. It means they don’t really know what killed him.

We flew back to Los Angeles and, after my father’s memorial service, were married again in my parents’ garden by my mother’s Unitarian minister, a gay woman in a priestly robe who also had presided over the ceremony for my father, which more than 300 people attended.

My mother was, and continues to be, shattered by her loss. That day, in the bright afternoon sun, she was reduced to what she was before him. She wore her wedding dress, her blue eyes naked and stunned into vacancy.

Me? I meditate, or try to, as much as I can. I dabble in Buddhist beliefs and follow Deepak Chopra and the Dalai Lama on Twitter. I spend most weekend mornings in various yogic positions. I have had my chakras cleansed, my palms read, asked Jesus for forgiveness, read the Tao Te Ching, spent a week in silence, prayed in ancient churches in Rome and revelled in Ramadan in Tunis. But try to pin me down and I’ll squirm.

Unfortunately, my father told me a few too many times, when you’re dead you’re dead. And he is most certainly dead, no matter how many times I have tried to wish him back to life. Although I swear I feel him sometimes, sitting over me as I write, moving with my fingers over the keyboard, telling me he was wrong and he is there. That I should believe in something, at least.

But I end up abandoning those thoughts as quickly as they come as silly and unrealistic and going down the road of rationality.

That I am a writer, a journalist who cannot even attempt fiction, so tied to what I can test in pursuit of a truth that I can touch, seems to attest to my state of being. I am, it appears, cursed with reason.

It’s what Pi accused the agnostic of anyway.

“I can well imagine an atheist’s last words: ‘White, white! L-L-Love! My God!’ — and the deathbed leap of faith. Whereas the agnostic, if he stays true to his reasonable self, if he stays beholden to dry, yeastless factuality, might try to explain the warm light bathing him by saying, ‘Possibly a f-f-failing oxygenation of the b-b-brain,’ and, to the very end, lack imagination and miss the better story.”

- Mail & Guardian, April 21, 2011

MY FATHER ARRIVED in America in 1951, after selling the last of everything the family owned to begin new lives in New York. He had grown up speaking Italian at home, French in school and Arabic on the streets. English was one of the languages my dad didn’t know. He would have to learn a new way to speak, a new way of life at 25 years of age.

They were a gypsy sort of family, roaming from Italy, to Algeria, to Tunisia and, finally, America; first New York, then to California. He was a third-culture kid well before it became part of the global lexicon. I suppose that was partially why my father was never quite clear about his background. He never would readily admit to being Italian, despite our surname, which was a dead giveaway and led straight back to the Sicilian village of Calatafimi. He would say we had a French-Italian background if pressed, adding that maybe the reason he was so strict with his girls was that he had a bit too much Arab in him.

“Can you put some goddamned shit on your ass?” he’d yell after us when we tried to sneak out of the house in a miniskirt in the oppressive San Fernando Valley heat.

We would be American kids. None of my father’s four children would learn to speak Italian. My grandparents were the only ones who spoke to us in the language, and they died when we were young. With his two sisters and younger brother, he spoke French. But not to us. The last thing he needed was for his children to be identified as poor, illiterate immigrants.

In the 1980s, when Scarface came out and everyone with any Italian heritage wore an Italian horn, my father winced when he saw a golden one dangling from my sister’s neck. He would remind us of where we were. “We are hamericans,” he would proclaim. And when I teased him about his accent in my Valley Girlesque whine, he shot back: “Don’t you give me that crap. You are the one with the goddamned haccent.”

Now it’s my daughter with the accent. She tells anyone who will listen she’s American. Mostly because she knows that’s where Mickey Mouse lives and, I suspect, finds it a bit exotic because wherever it is, it takes a really long plane ride to get there. It’s also a place where a lot of strange people kiss and hug her and give her sweets and clap when she does anything, including complicated things like tossing a ball or smiling.

Not that she remembers much about America. We’ve been back in Johannesburg for five years and she’s returned only once. She speaks with a South African accent, one that makes her American cousins giggle when she talks to them on Skype.

Multi-cultural lives
My daughter also has Czech to add to her cultural CV. My husband, who I met in Prague not long after graduating from university, is South African by way of Czech parents. He left his birth country in his young mother’s arms on a train in 1970, his father holding on to his six-year-old sister. It was two years after the Prague Spring and his father refused to stay with the communists. So they defected, closing the doors on their life, their home and their extended family.

When they arrived in Vienna with a few Czech crowns and a small bar of gold, they walked from embassy to embassy trying to get asylum. The South Africans were the first to accept and a few days later they traded communism for apartheid and took up residence in a tiny room in a cockroach-infested Hillbrow hotel.

Depending on whom he’s talking to, my husband will declare that he’s Czech or South African. This appears to be especially convenient in any kind of sporting situation. But he speaks Czech like a child and his cultural link is limited to special occasion knedliky (dumplings) and zeli (sauerkraut), and a predilection for Czech beer.

His parents, after more than 40 years in Southern Africa, which took them from Hillbrow to Parkview to Northcliff, then Francistown and, finally, a sprawling home with a pool and a tennis court in Randburg, are now selling up and returning to the Czech Republic. Their rand will go further there. They will get a small flat, socialised healthcare and a Czech pension. Well into their 60s, with their Czech-laded English, they will head back with their South African-laden Czech and become strangers yet again in a very different country to the one they left.

When I went back to California recently and asked the woman behind the till at a dress shop if she would throw away my cash slip in the “rubbish bin”, she smiled (Americans say “trash cans”) and asked with a thick Spanish accent, “Where are you from?” I chuckled to myself.

In South Africa I am a foreigner, too. I always couch my existence here by saying my husband is South African. I have my built-in defence when people ask why I’m here. I feel bad for those immigrants who don’t have marriage to hang their intrusive immigrant heads on. In general most South Africans are like most middle Americans. They are happy to see you for a while, glad you are appreciating their country and all, but you better be on your way.

Earlier this year in Arizona a stringent immigration law was passed to “identify, prosecute and deport” those illegally in the country. I wonder who will be the ones who “look” foreign in America. We are all a bunch of foreigners, save the Native Americans. That was the whole point of giving us your tired, your hungry, your poor.

“Xenophobic hatred simmers from boardrooms to townships”
South Africa has the most asylum seekers in the world, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. And xenophobic hatred simmers from boardrooms to townships. After all, what are all of us foreigners doing here taking South African jobs?

In some ways, South Africa is much like America. Growing up, my friends’ parents were from all over — Armenia, Argentina, Mexico, Lebanon, Morocco, France, England — and immigrants from Central America, Thailand, Korea and Iran were commonplace. Here in South Africa, my two last employers have been foreigners: one a Serbian, the other a Zimbabwean. Our new neighbours are Canadian by way of Bangladesh and my daughter’s best friend has a Dutch mother and a South African father from Polokwane.

The other day I met a lawyer from America who has four children, all raised in South Africa; his oldest is now at Columbia University in New York. I dream of my own daughter going to the University of California, Berkeley, and fantasise she will arrive speaking fluent Zulu and French and conversational Mandarin. These are my dreams, not hers, and who knows where she’ll end up. But I do know this: if she heads back to the land of her birth, she will be a foreigner in a foreign land just like me. My daughter, despite what her passport says, will be a South African.

Part of being from different places really means you are of none. Your sense of self is fragmented. You know the politics of San Francisco, the panelaks of Prague, the highways of Los Angeles, the malls of Rosebank. You know nothing in its entirety and unconnected strands of everything at the same time. Your memory mixes and fades and your sense of self and attachment to culture, tradition, family and place are a mirage. You reach out for something firm, something to believe in, something that has existed and will always exist and it dissipates as you wave your hand. There is a base — the constitution of your father and mother that is your very skin — but different places, different people make for different ideas.

And nothing is certain. Certainly not the weather. Not capitalism. Not democracy, not tradition, not the merging, mixed cultures and ethnicities and religions. Globalisation and third-culture kids are the present and the future; mutts, all of us, borders shifting, allegiances wavering.

My father used to say your country is where you can support your family. Joseph Oliver Pampalone was American, as red-blooded as they get. When he left Tunisia, he didn’t look back. And he never returned. He always said he wanted to remember it as it was.

The remnants of their life in North Africa are scattered throughout my aunts’ homes and my mother’s; the engraved copper tea set, the worn tapestry of an Arab family in the desert making couscous, the soft leather poofs, carefully preserved photographs of my aunts at the beach, friends dressed in Arab garb, my father drinking tea on what was then Avenue Jules Ferry.

What is my allegiance? I don’t really know. I have never even been able to choose a god, let alone live in a home, aside from the one I was raised in, for more than a couple of years. I am American. It’s what my passport says. For now, my country is South Africa. But where on the map will I live out my old age? About that I’m not at all certain.

- Mail & Guardian, December 23, 2010