South Africa, 1996

In Dutch it’s called Cap Staadt, in Spanish Cuidad de Cabo. In English we call it Cape Town. Whatever language you use, it is without a doubt one of the world’s most beautiful cities. The very name is magic, conjuring up images of ships bringing silk and spices from the Orient to Europe, braving ferocious seas and fending off pirates. I had wanted to visit South Africa for a long time, but this was not to be so long as apartheid continued and the Republic was a pariah nation. As early as 1972 a former professor of mine at graduate school was hounded out of office for having accepted an invitation to visit the country. International aid agencies boycotted the country; thus, there was little work for consultants until after 1993, when free and fair democratic elections swept away the old guard and ushered in Nelson Mandela and his ANC-dominated government.

Everybody has an image of Cape Town, with its trademark Table Mountain looming in the distance. It has been photographed countless times. It is to Cape Town what Sugarloaf is to Rio, the Eiffel Tower to Paris, the Empire State Building to New York, or the Golden Gate Bridge to San Francisco. But what would it really be like, I wondered? Could you go up it? Was it shrouded in fog most of the time? These kinds of things that I wanted to, needed to know, took on an even greater importance than the consulting mission itself. Dare I say, the mission became just a pretext for getting to see a place I would probably never see otherwise. In effect, the chance to visit the Cape was for me the opportunity of a lifetime, so different from anything I had ever done before.

In preparing for my trip, I had read where the government of West Cape Province, where Cape Town is, was the only one where the old style National Party had won. Was I going to find nothing but right wing bigots in the Cape? Would it be a violent place? I had many questions I wanted to ask a close friend who was living there, a Canadian woman married to a South African man. They had moved to South Africa within the past year, and I was dying to see them; three weeks of travelling around in Europe and Namibia was already taking its toll on me: I needed someone to hug, and to unburden my thoughts on. Above all, though, I wanted to know from them whether the New South Africa stood a chance of surviving and prospering, or whether it was going to descend into anarchy.

The Cape from the air is an extraordinary sight. Our pilot zigzagged in and out of the mountains, as if we were on some sightseeing cruise. Off in the distance were more mountains, the jagged peaks of the Hottentot’s Holland mountains in the west, and the snow-capped mountains of Lesotho to the north. Broad expanses of beaches revealed themselves on either side of Table Mountain. As we approached the runway I could see smoke billowing up from the flats which go for miles behind Table Mountain; I would learn later that it was coming from fires that had been deliberately set in a ‘Cape-coloured’ neighbourhood, where residents were protesting what they saw as the lack of police resolve to halt drug gangs. ‘Cape-coloured’ is the old-fashioned term for the many people of Asian origin who inhabit this region. More about these proud people later. Aside from the plume of smoke, all I could really see was row after row of shanties, many of them quite close to the runway. Apparently, some of these illegal settlements, thrown together with corrugated tin and other scrap material, spring up literally overnight. All part of the “New South Africa” I had heard so much about, no doubt.

When I was there, they still hadn’t got around to renaming Jan Smuts International Airport. Could it be that the Afrikaaner leader was considered by the ANC-led government as a legitimate South African patriot, or was it just not much of a priority for a government beset with challenges? I never did find out. When the separatist government of René Levesque came to power in my home province of Quebec in 1976, his followers lost no time in knocking Lord Nelson from his perch atop a monument in Montreal’s Jacques Cartier square. Had Africans done to same to Smuts, I wondered?

The airport lies behind Table Mountain. On the ride into town from the airport I was struck by how fast all those BMWs and Mercedes are going along the four-lane highway, and how much poverty there is just the other side of the fence. Many of them have tinted windows, and none of them are open, I notice. Kieran tells me that a new shanty town has sprung up since his last visit there less little more than a year ago.

We stayed in a lovely, semi-detached bed and breakfast located in Orangemund (sp.) situated on the lower slopes of Table Mountain, facing the bay. It was a lovely neighbourhood, full of apple blossoms, whitewashed homes and quiet streets. No blacks here, that’s for sure, except for the servants, of course. Our host is a polite but bumbling Afrikaaner in his late fifties who speaks impeccable English; his wife, he tells us, is Anglo- South African. There are lots of them around here. We never did get to meet the wife; she was away on holiday, or so he said. No matter, the servant, a very sweet, shy black lady, did all the work, anyway, making us breakfast, cleaning our rooms, even doing our laundry at her home for a small fee ( you gave her whatever you liked! ). Under the apartheid regime, with its infamous ‘pass laws’, this poor lady would not have been able to spend the night in Cape Town. She would have had to go back to the township where she lived every night. Now that the pass laws were abolished, she could stay if she wished, but economic discrimination took over where the law left off. The overwhelming majority of blacks, or coloureds, too, for they were discriminated against as well, could nowhere near afford to stay in the centre of Cape Town.

You could see right away how Cape Town proper had inured itself from the teeming millions of blacks living in hovels outside the gates, as it were. For Table Mountain formed a natural barrier between the wide open flats and the port. The downtown area of Cape Town was therefore an semi-enclave of sorts, a bit like Gibraltar. Since public transportation was not very well-developed in the region, it was pretty difficult, and expensive, for the average black person to even venture downtown. This configuration gave the city a rather artificial air, as if it were a sort of ‘gated’ community. You could see from the quality of the shops and cafes on the Victoria and Albert pier ( check ) that the quality of life could be pretty high for a privileged minority. But, could anyone really enjoy this standard of living knowing that nine tenths of the population living in the hinterlands beyond the mount had bugger all? I somehow doubt it.

The only black I actually spoke to during the whole week I spent in Cap Staadt was a legless, middle-aged man who had been hit by a car near a busy intersection. I saw him lying there in the middle of the road, with all the traffic going around him. I ran up to him. He was lying on his back, and I could see blood trickling from the back of his head. I immediately ran to a nearby convenience store, where I got the proprietor to call for an ambulance. By the time I got back to the poor man, two gentlemen had managed to pick him up and carry him to the sidewalk, where he now lay, muttering and moaning. Passers by would stop and ask what had happened, and indicate their concern. Soon the police arrived, why I do not know. They tried in vain to speak to the man. Finally a black lady came by who managed to communicate with the victim, who, it transpired, was Mozambican. I have no way of knowing, but his legs had probably been blown off at the knee by land mines, of which there are millions in his native country. At this point I left the scene in order to get on with my business. But this episode had a profound impact on me; I was full of mixed emotions over what I had seen.

I asked myself, for instance, what happened to the driver who had hit this pedestrian; this seemed to be a pretty clear case of hit and run. The driver must have figured “What the hell, it’s only some kaffir begging or drunk; either way, it serves him right for being in the middle of the road! In sharp contrast to this callousness, however, was the reaction of other pedestrians, including the two men who dragged the victim to the sidewalk. These were good samaritans indeed. Even the police seemed to bend over backwards to help the wretched chap. I saw this unfortunate incident as a metaphor for The New South Africa: desperate handicapped man gets run over while begging in a prosperous neighbourhood of Cape Town, whereupon good Christian locals come to his aid. It sounds corny, but this seemed to capture the spirit of the times: a random act of kindness in an otherwise callous and hostile environment. If my reading of things was correct, then this was a good omen of things to come.

Alas, my professional encounters with the South African bureaucracy and civil service did not leave me with as much optimism for this land Alan Paton called The Beloved Country. In the course of a week of meetings, what I encountered was a display of racism, incompetence, arrogance and indifference so great it was almost worthy of respect. Don’t get me wrong: some of the officials, businessmen and academics we met with were top notch; somehow they had managed to keep abreast of what was going on in the outside world during the dark years of sanctions and political isolation. Others, however, were antediluvian in their thinking, and they did not take kindly to a bunch of foreigners poking their noses into South Africa’s internal affairs. Meeting with these people, it was as if the ‘good old days’ of apartheid had never been dismantled. I was not ready for this.

Things got off to a bad start with our first meeting at the fisheries ministry, early on a Monday morning. Although our hosts knew we were coming ( it was they, after all, who had arranged for our stay at the B & B ), there was no one there to greet us at the downtown office. Fisheries is obviously a contentious issue in South African politics, because to get to the executive offices of the ministry you have to pass through an iron-bar gate, just like in a prison! We were told this had something to do with the fact that anglers had to come to these floors to get a fishing licence. When someone finally did greet us, we were ushered into the cramped office of a Dr. Van der Zam, who was acting head of department. The meeting with Dr. Van der Zam turned out to be, without a doubt, the worst meeting of a professional nature that I have ever had in fifteen years of international consulting. Basically, we were stonewalled. Van der Zam and his cronies acted like we were from outer space. If we were going to get anything out of these people, we were going to have to fight fire with fire. This is what we did, and it did work, but it was a very gut-wrenching exercise.

Van der Zam started off by pretending that he knew nothing about our mission, its purpose, the length of our stay, or indeed anything at all concerning us. To make matters worse, he showed no interest in learning anything about the mission now that we were here. Essentially, all he did was talk about himself and introduce his policy analyst, a wizened old veteran named Rudi van den Berghe. We had been expecting a full briefing from these people, outlining how fisheries was organised in South Africa, the laws, the economics of it, the types of fish caught, etc. Instead, all we got was the lame excuse that Dr. Van der Zam had only been in the job a year, and that “things are in transition”. I suspect that he was just occupying an office until his retirement, which judging by his looks was due in about a year or two.

After about half an hour of this bullshit, during which time our side spoke nary a word, Van der Zam basically indicated that the meeting was over. I could smell a rotten fish a mile away: There was not even any talk of follow-up meetings with these or other officials. What the heck were we supposed to do for the rest of the week, I asked myself; sightsee? That would have been great, but this was, after all, a US $400,000 mission we were on. All I could think of was those poor Europeans who had been slaving away, paying their taxes so that this study could be done for the poor people of southern Africa. I knew that if we had walked out of that office at that moment that our mission not just here in South Africa but in all of southern Africa would have been a failure. I also sensed that this was the outcome Van der Zam wanted. So, at that very moment, I thought fast, and did the only thing I could think of: right then and there, I hijacked the meeting.

I summoned up all my courage, and, voice quavering, I said to our funereal hosts: “ Just a second, please! We have been very patient with you for half an hour. We have listened to what you have said. You have told us who you are. And now we would like you to listen to us. We would like to tell you, one by one, who we are, why we are here, what we need to know, and how you can help us”. It was an old Indian trick I had learned from public speaking, whereby you deliver a simple message by repeating it a number of times, varying it a little each time. Lincoln used the same technique in his Gettysburg address, to great effect. This was my Gettysburg!

It was a very emotional moment for me, and it is hard for me to pinpoint why. I was almost in tears! When I finished, there was dead silence in the room; you could have heard a pin drop. But I could tell from their body language that my colleagues were behind me. As for Van der Zam and Laan, I believe they were utterly flabbergasted! Probably no one had ever stood up to them before, and in such a brazen way. Caught off guard, they had no choice; they had to agree. I had, after all, put it in such a nice way. So, they sat there while we talked. Ever conscious of protocol, I asked Egan, our esteemed Irish team leader, to start by summarising our mission and its terms of reference. This he did in his typical wordy style; but it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that we keep talking; for this was like a ping pong match, and for now the ball was in our court. The others took up the baton, one by one saying a word or two about themselves and what they needed to know. I was last. All the while, Van der Zam had been furiously taking notes. We had obviously turned the tables on him; for instead of us sitting there like stenographers, hanging on his every word, we were now calling the shots. It was the most stunning turnaround in atmosphere that I have ever seen.

When I finished giving my spiel, Van der Zam finished his notes and whispered something in Laan’s ear. For his part, Laan had been sitting there motionless through the entire episode, looking frightfully bored. Then Van der Zam turned back to us, and asked us how long we intended to stay. When we told him a week, he said that two days would be plenty of time to get all the information we needed. As for the information itself, he stonewalled us. With his Peter Seller’s looks and thick Afrikans accent, he pompously proclaimed: “ I am afraid that I am not in a position to answer any of the questions you have asked concerning fisheries at the present time “. Every successive request we made met with resistance; it was either “Unfortunately, this will not be possible.”, or “ You will have to speak to someone else for an answer to that question “. He acted as if we were putting him on trial, and he was afraid of incriminating himself with anything he said. Either that, or he was the most incompetent senior civil servant I have ever met, bar none. After half an hour of this ridiculous game, Van der Zam suddenly got up and left the room, leaving Rudi van den Berghe to launch into a one hour soliloquy on the pros and cons of a fishery in which licences are granted to the highest bidder. This was a topic of great interest to our great helmsman from Eire, but unfortunately was beyond the scope of our mission.

When Van der Zam returned, he had good news for us: the senior fisheries officer in South Africa, who reported directly to the Minister, was prepared to see us in his office right away! For the time being at least, our mission was saved, and we all breathed a sigh of relief. Then the fun began again. We were herded into Mr. xx’s office, and seated in an anteroom for about fifteen minutes, no doubt to impress us with his importance. When he was finally prepared to see us, we were transferred to his office, and seated at a mid-sized boardroom-type table. It was starting to feel as if we had been hauled into the principal’s office for some disciplinary offence. I was tired before the meeting even began. Mr. xx greeted us warmly enough; I think he was terribly embarrassed by the whole affair. He had either been hoping we would just go away without even seeing him, or he wanted to be seen as the ‘good cop’, after his underlings had treated us so shabbily.

It was hard to take Mr. xx seriously. With little wisps of hair sticking up on an otherwise bald head, he looked a lot like Gorbachev. He did not have a big birth mark on his forehead, which made him better looking than the man who presided over the dismantling of the Soviet Union. On the other hand, Gorbachev did not have a hair lip! He wouldn’t really cooperate until I told him success or failure of mission was in his hands: without his department’s cooperation we could not complete our work. I reminded him that RSA had agreed to everything in advance. He claimed that his department was understaffed and overworked. Van der Zam’s predecessor had apparently committed suicide the preceding year. Racist slight of Minister; the New South Africa. Mr. xx’s real problem was that he was as slimy as an eel. You could never get a straight answer out of him. He always wanted to appear to be answering us sincerely and fully, and he was fairly forthright, but none of us trusted him one bit. After one hour of his slippery responses, we broke the code: any time he totally disagreed with us, he would say “You have raised a very interesting point; this is something we must definitely consider”, or “We must make a plan”. The plan bit was the real killer; when he came out with that, you knew your idea was dead in the water. I impressed upon him the fact that RSA played a pivotal role within SADC. Sympathised with Mandela’s reluctance, other priorities, etc. At least he opened doors to us. After that things went very smoothly the whole week.