‘Depends on who you classed as the criminals.’
She smiled.
Sannie stopped for fuel at a service station just past the Middelburg toll plaza. It was exactly like one of the large complexes he would have encountered on a British motorway. Tom got out to stretch his legs. He yawned, but was feeling okay. There was little time difference between the UK and South Africa and he had slept well on the aircraft. It was good to feel sunshine on his face. Sannie returned with a couple of Cokes and some crisps. ‘How far?’ he asked.
‘ Ag, shame, man, you sound like my kids. It’s about another three hours if we drive fast.’
And drive fast they did. Tom glanced over and saw that the speedometer rarely dipped below a hundred and ten kilometres per hour. The locals had an interesting form of traffic etiquette, where slow vehicles pulled to the left — South Africans drove on the same side of the road as he did in England — to let faster cars pass them. The overtaking vehicle — Sannie in every case — put on its hazard lights as a way of saying thank you, while the car which had just been passed flashed its headlights as if to say, ‘You’re welcome’. It was like a parallel universe, Tom thought. Similar to England in some ways, but so completely different in others.
The road they were on — the N4 — took them eastwards, towards the border with Mozambique, according to the signs to that country’s capital, Maputo. Tom knew Mozambique was a former Portuguese colony, had suffered a long civil war and supposedly had good beaches. Beyond that it was just a name on a map. He thought he would find some books on Africa before he returned with Robert Greeves.
Sannie had the radio tuned to a station called Jacaranda FM, which played easy-listening music, mostly from the eighties and nineties. The announcers and newsreaders switched from English to Afrikaans, sometimes midsentence. ‘Do you and your kids speak Afrikaans at home?’
‘ Ja, and English. There are about a dozen official languages in the new South Africa. My kids are learning Xhosa at school. I figure it’s good for them to be able to speak the language of the ones who are in charge now.’
‘I suppose it’s been tough on… on people like you, since the Africans took over the country.’
She shrugged. ‘First of all, I am an African. I just happen to be a white one. Sure, there was a lot of affirmative action after the ANC took over. I suppose I’m lucky that I’m a woman.’
‘What do you mean by that?’ Tom asked. Traffic had slowed marginally as the road started to descend through a series of sweeping bends.
‘In the new South Africa it’s all about empowerment. Black women have had a hard time, so they’re now at the top of the list for good jobs or promotions, followed by black men. Then it’s coloureds and Indians and then us white women, followed by white men, who are now at the bottom. It used to be the other way around.’
She didn’t seem bitter, he thought, just resigned to making the most of her life. If he was going to judge her, it would be on how she did her job as a police officer, not what she thought of life under black majority rule.
A blurred movement of greyish-green in the grass to the left caught his eye. ‘Bloody hell! What was that?’
Sannie glanced over. ‘Oh, bobos. Baboons — we call them bobbejaans in Afrikaans.’
Tom watched the troops of a dozen or so primates. A large one stared back at him and snarled with long yellowed teeth from its dog-like snout. ‘But we’re not in a national park, are we?’
‘No. You’ll see bobos and monkeys wherever there is still some bush or trees left for them. A lot of this country is taken up with farming, but there are still some wilderness areas.’ The toll road split and Sannie explained that while they could go either way to get to Kruger, the right-hand fork would take them via Waterval Boven, down a steep pass where the high-veld ended. ‘The countryside’s more scenic than on the road via Lydenburg.’
The drive took them along the course of a river which had cut through the rock, forming the pass. Plantation gum trees met their end in a smoking paper mill. Tom saw skinny black workers in baggy overalls, and wondered if the men were ill with HIV-AIDS.
He started feeling drowsy after more than three hours on the road, and Sannie stopped at another garage to buy more Cokes and chips for the two of them. Tom again got out of the car for a stretch and was struck immediately by the change in climate. It was much hotter than Johannesburg and the air felt heavy with moisture. Sannie told him they were approaching Nelspruit, the capital of Mpumalanga province, once known as the Eastern Transvaal. ‘The lowveld. We’re getting close to the bush now.’ She said it with fondness, almost reverence. ‘Some people call it the slowveld, because nothing much happens in a hurry. It’s the heat.’
In the distance Tom could see a few tall office buildings, but Sannie turned left before they reached the town proper. They began climbing into some hills.
When they reached the town of White River, all the traffic signals were out. A black policeman was directing traffic with the exaggerated movements of someone doing a robot dance. ‘He seems to be enjoying his job,’ Tom said.
‘ Ja, but it’s no laughing matter. The electricity is out — again. Our power company, Eskom, calls it “load shedding”. They switch off entire districts so the whole system doesn’t collapse. Supply can’t keep up with demand in South Africa, and not enough money’s been spent on infrastructure in the last decade.’
Leaving the town they wound through hills forested with plantation trees — pines and Australian blue gums. They crested a high peak and, looking ahead, the forests vanished, replaced by a vista of red dirt and mud-brick shacks of the same hue. There wasn’t a tree in sight. ‘Townships like this are where a lot of our people still live. The government is building new homes through the regional development program but they can’t keep pace with demand. On one hand they’re spending tens of thousands of rand to change the names of towns from Afrikaans to African names, and Jan Smuts Airport to OR Tambo, but they can’t put a decent roof over their own people’s heads or keep the country’s electricity supply working.’
Tom heard the bitterness in her voice. Most of the houses had rusting tin roofs. Some looked as though they were made entirely of homemade mud bricks and old packing crates. He smelled wood smoke through the aircon’s inlet and guessed it was the trees which had once stood on these hills. Toddlers walked barefoot, their lower legs spattered with red mud. A skeletal woman carried a baby on her back, wrapped in a piece of stained cloth tied around her midriff. Sannie kept her speed up and ignored the malevolent stares of a group of teenage boys dressed like American ghetto dwellers, brightly coloured boxer shorts protruding above low-slung jeans. Plenty of bling. Would-be gangsters.
‘We don’t want to break down here,’ she said. They passed a turnoff to the Kruger Park’s Numbi Gate, but Sannie said they were headed further north, to an entrance closer to the park’s internal police station. ‘I just wanted to show you how some people live, so you can maybe understand the crime problem a little better.’
Tom nodded. Something Sannie had said before, about African women, reminded him of his brief informal investigation into Nick’s disappearance. ‘Did you ever notice Nick taking an interest in black African women?’
Sannie sniffed. ‘That man would take an interest in a cobra if you held its head. Why do you ask?’
‘I think one of the last people to have seen him was a South African woman.’
‘A hooker?’
‘You really don’t like him, do you?’
‘How can you guess?’ Sannie asked, giving him a deadpan look.
‘Actually, she was what we might in polite circles call an exotic dancer.’
‘A stripper? Sounds like him. He and a couple of the male cops went to a table-dancing club in Pretoria one time. My colleagues told me Nick was particularly interested in the one girl, and she was black.’
‘I wonder if it could be the same one,’ Tom said, thinking out loud.
‘Could just be that he was into any girl who would talk to him — even if he had to stick money in her garter, you know.’
They had passed back into rural countryside, lush farms which covered the mountains in different shades of emerald in the afternoon sun. Tom noted banana farms and tropical fruits such as avocados and mangoes for sale on the side of the road. Fertile country. ‘I grew up near here, on a banana farm,’ Sannie said as they passed through a small but chaotic town — a ‘ dorp ’ she called it — named Hazyview. ‘I was a real bush baby. My family took my brothers and me into the Kruger Park every school holiday and many weekends. But I never got sick of it.’
Workers heading home thronged the sidewalks, and pick-ups laden with farm produce and fertilizer queued at the robots in a mini peak-hour traffic jam. Loud hip-hop blared from giant ghetto-blasters parked outside an electrical goods store. A gaggle of school-girls in starched uniforms giggled at something.
‘Did you stay at a lodge like the one we’re heading for? From what I’ve read it’s very expensive.’
