Buffalo City
So after leaving Joburg behind without a whiff of regret,
what we find is this.
It seems a bit odd to say that my first impression upon
setting foot on the tarmac of the East London airport was that the weather
finally seemed to be warming up. It
wasn’t cold up on the plateau in the north, but the warm, moist coastal air
with just a hint of a sea breeze was a welcome feeling. After leaving the terminal building, it
really started to steam. Much as it had
in Toronto, London, and Joburg, our arrival had been preceded by cold, damp,
and other symptoms of meteorological misery.
Each place has hitherto rebounded from such unhappiness, but none with
quite as much zest as East London. The
searing sun punched through a cloudless powder sky, blasting the temperature
into the +30°C range.
It was also a refreshing change to see my Uncle Reuben
again. His sense of humour is a whole
different tangent apart from the rest of my father’s side of the family, and
it’s nice to hear some irony, sarcasm, and litotes once in a while. Keeps the metaphorical literary juices
flowing.
Of course, this is the part of the journey where a lot of
the pieces are intended to fall into place.
Thus far, there have been rumours, hints, subtexts, and clues about a
series of familial condundra that underpin the actual reason for this whirlwind
tour of South Africa. There have been
deaths in the family, wills, title deeds, and murmurs of dread legal
battles. Joburg only entailed meeting
Uncle Sid, my grandfather’s younger brother, who through an overlap of
generations common in societies where families strove for double-digits of
children to have a solid household workforce, is actually younger than my uncle
Melvin, despite being my great-uncle.
Sid talks like Mathazar.
It’s not really a factor until your mind makes the connection. It’s like reading Emily Dickinson’s
poetry. Until you sing one of her poems
to “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” it all sounds quite deep and meaningful. As soon as you hear that tune and read her
words, every single poem that she’s ever written becomes trivialized. Subject to floccinaucinihilipilification, one
might say. Hey. I finally used that word appropriately in a
sentence. I give myself bonus points.
In any event, Sid is a bit of an eccentric fellow, but given
the context of my family, that’s eminently forgivable. His driving skills are a bit terrifyingly
unorthodox, and his analyses of South Africa’s socio-political landscape should
probably not be mentioned in polite company.
They should certainly not be mentioned in impolite and unruly company.
Now that we’re in East London, we get to hear all of the
various other sides of the stories that Sid spun over many long hours of coffee
shop refills. Joy. This just seems like a preamble to a frenzied
series of diplomatic negotiations and mediations. Having an inordinate number of far-flung
relatives that spin stories and bandy them about like some kind of
transatlantic gossip telephone game just lends itself to artificially-created
crises and conflicts.
In the meantime, East London meant one specifically
important thing to me: laundry. Considering that I’ve only got my computer
bag and a single carry on for luggage, the continually diminishing amount of
clean socks and/or underwear acts like a countdown doomsday clock. And we were pretty nigh close on midnight,
dear readers. Damn nigh.
But before we could reach the shelter and clothing-purifying
sanctity of Villa Radloff on Browning Street, we first had to take my father
and uncle on a tour of old memory lane.
Considering that my uncle Mel hasn’t set foot in South Africa since
1963, a few things may have changed from his perspective.
The first thing that I noticed is that every block had some
sort of family name associated with it.
Every time the car hit an intersection, my aunt Jenny or uncle Reub
would gesticulate toward some structure or other and indicate that it used to
belong to, house, or was frequented by some family or other. That family would invariably have moved away,
sold the place, left it to some ungrateful children that wrecked it, or cursed
the place from the afterlife after the entire family line was extinguished by a
particularly virulent strain of tooth decay.
But a stranger pattern began to emerge. These were shops. On every corner. Every family owned a shop. Or two.
Or three. It was like Napoleon’s
“nation of shopkeepers” remark come to fruition. With this sort of density, the only way that
all of these shops could have been profitable would have been for a swarm of
consumers desperate for tomato sauce, pilchards, and mangos to descend on these
sleepy areas on a regular basis. The
only other economic model would involve some an odd ouroboros-like series of
transactions in which all of the shopkeepers bought one another’s stock in
turn. Surely you can’t have a community
in which everyone owns a cornershop. Or
perhaps you can. And I’m looking at it.
In any event, it’s great to be back by the sea. The salty hint in the air is refreshing, and
the powder-silt-fine sand feels almost like a liquid between one’s toes. There are also animals frolicking about in
these environs that I don’t recall from my last visit here. For example, there’s this little fellow that
I spotted from one of the beach boardwalks:
I wondered what this sort of sand rat might be until I
realized that I was taking a zoomed-in photo.
Zooming out, it is readily apparent that there is an explanation of
exactly what this little duffer is, and all of its various
characteristics.
Interesting point:
phylogenetically, these little beach bunnies are closer relatives of
elephants than they are of any fuzzy rodents.
Aside from driving around and looking at the shops that
everyone used to own, monkeying around at the beach, and dropping into
Hemingway’s to do some shopping and casino-dwelling (thanks to Platinum VIP Ted
Radloff), the other port of call to note near East London is the old farm,
which my great-grandfather owned, and was the seat of the family in this part
of South Africa for a while. This means
that my grandfather, two of his brothers (including uncle Sid), and three of
his sisters grew up there.
The place was a bit more desolate back in the 1920s, with
more dirt and scrub than trees and grass, but time and care have made the place
a lot more habitable since great-grandfather first started to scratch out a living
on dry and poorly moisturized soil.
There is one thing that tips me off that this dirt farm undoubtedly
belonged to my family or some of their friends.
Unsurprisingly, my great-grandfather built a shop on the corner.
Until next time, good night, England and the colonies.
Cheers,
—mARKUS
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