Haresh Shah
An Emotional Journey Of South Africa
As long as apartheid ruled, Christie Hefner wouldn’t allow us even to think of doing business with South Africa. The management team totally respected her for her stand. But soon as Nelson Mandela was released from prison in 1990, and when the South African President F.W. de Klerk repealed the remaining apartheid laws in 1991, I felt free to follow-up on a couple of leads that had landed on my desktop. I took my first exploratory trip to the country. Even so, something closer to home was nagging at me. Because if you are born of my generation in India, taking a trip to South Africa has to have some emotional undertones, for that’s where Gandhi’s Satyagraha movement first took roots.
The reason I was full of apprehensions on the night I boarded the Johannesburg bound Lufthansa flight from Frankfurt. I wasn’t quite sure of the kind of welcome that awaited me. As usual, I had read up on the country and was a fan of J.M. Coetzee fiction, who would go on to win the Nobel Prize for literature in 2003. And had just finished reading one of the most disturbing books about the country, My Traitor’s Heart by Rian Malan – a former crime reporter who fled his country after witnessing unimaginable atrocities, returns in search of the truth behind apartheid. He finds the answers – not in the way black and white South Africans live, but in the way they die at one another’s hands.
The heat and humidity hits me as soon as I deplane in the tropical Africa. Standing in front of me in the immigration line is a young black family of four. The husband shuffling all their passports clamped in his right hand. I could feel, or I was just imagining a certain nervousness on the faces of the couple as they moved up in the line. Kids, the daughter of about five and the son a few years older were just being kids, jumping and holding onto their parents’ fingers. The passport officers are all whites, dressed in shorts and short-sleeved shirts, like in Australia and New Zealand. I watch the officer check all their passports and ask the man, how long were they gone? I could only hear “years” and then “England.” The officer handing him back their passports and flashing a big smile, saying: welcome back home. Both the husband and the wife said in unison, Thank you very much, and I see expressions on their faces relaxing and then their faces contorting as if about to break down and cry. When the officer yelled out “next” I could see sudden smiles appearing on their faces. I too had my misgivings up until then, knowing that I too fell in the category of coloured in the country I was entering for the first time. But having witnessed the graceful reception of the black family relaxed me too as I stood in front of the immigration officer.
‘First time in our country?’
‘Yes.’
‘Hope you have a great stay.’
I am met by Greg Psilos, an aspiring independent publisher who had shown interest in publishing Playboy in South Africa. I check into Carlton Hotel in downtown Johannesburg, walk around the Saturday morning shopping hoards. I don’t see a single non-black soul all through my hour and a half of walk, not even a brown skin one like myself. It feels strange, but hey, I am in their country. I would soon find out that not many white South Africans would dare come into the city center over the weekends. The weekdays were a different story, but that too, after work every evening, they would fly away like migrant birds and into their gated secure homes in suburbs. In fact, I was warned against walking around outside my hotel after hours. But that wasn’t enough to deter me from doing just that. How else does one get to know a new place?
On Sunday, along with a small group of other hotel guests, I take a minibus tour of the notorious segregated Johannesburg slum of Soweto, guided by Opa James. James is your weathered young-old man – probably in his early to mid-forties – who has now taken upon himself to show the visitors the soft side of Johannesburg’s riotous township. We visit a typical Soweto family and have a beer with them. The idea is to make us feel that they are like any other regular family.
So far so good. I spend three days in Johannesburg before boarding my first domestic South African Airways flight bound for Durban. If not exactly nervous, as I approach the business class cabin of the plane, I can’t help but think of that image of the movie Gandhi, in which he is kicked out of his rightful place in the first class compartment of the train on which he was traveling from Durban to Pretoria.
But my fear is immediately expelled by the stewardess who takes my boarding pass and flashes a big smile at me with Welcome aboard Mr. Shah. It’s just a short flight from Johannesburg to Durban and the service provided onboard is as good as that on any other airlines in the world.
I knew that Durban is where Gandhi had first arrived at the invitation of Indian Muslim businessmen to provide legal services. And I am also faintly aware of the fact that Durban has the largest population of the people of Indian origin anywhere outside India. So much so that had I been brought there blind folded, I would certainly not believe that I was anywhere else but in an Indian city. The publishers I was meeting in Durban and elsewhere in the country were all white South Africans. That is: with exception of Anant Singh, of Video Vision, priding in calling himself the first black movie maker from South Africa. That meant, despite my pleasant reception in the country, the separation or apartheid as it is called in Afrikaans had to be real, still. I didn’t have to wait too long to find out myself.
Upon my arrival in Durban, I am met at the airport by Christopher Backerberg of Republican Press. We have a drink together in the hotel bar and then I have a free evening. I have checked into Maharani Hotel, situated on Snell Parade right on the Indian Ocean. As the name suggests, it’s ornate with lot of gold and glitter. The lobby floors are all shiny marbles and tightly upholstered burgundy red leather couches in the lobby remind me of an English library. The reception area is dark paneled wood and behind the counter are three or four young and pretty girls of Indian origin, with sparkling smiles on their faces. And I am quite pleased with my large room with a large bed, overlooking the beach and the ocean. I get goose bumps thinking that if I were to jump into the ocean and swim into the diagonally opposite direction, I could wash up on Chowpati Beach in Bombay and walk home to Mama Shah for dinner.
I have arrived in Durban on November 12, 1991. I meet with the executives of Republican Press on the 13th and the 14th and have a meeting planned with Anant Singh for the afternoon of the 15th. But Anant has arranged for me a city tour in the morning. I have been up and about for quite some time and have walked around the beach before it got to be hot and humid. The beach is practically deserted and its peaceful listening to the ocean waves. The driver, a young man of Indian origin pulls up in a Mercedes Sports 450 SLC and gives me a comprehensive tour of Durban. Along the way, he asks me whether I’ve already had my breakfast, and I tell him that I have been up for a while, and yes, I did already have a breakfast and that I even had time enough to take a walk on the beach.
‘How long did you walk?’ He asks. A strange question, I think.
‘Oh, I don’t know. Half an hour, three-quarters of an hour maybe.’ I answer. He doesn’t say anything for a while and keeps driving, but his silence is unnerving.
‘Why?’ I ask.
‘You know, you couldn’t have been able to do that a month ago.’ He blurts out. I don’t show it, but I couldn’t help but cringe inside.
It suddenly strikes me that almost a hundred years ago to the date, in 1893 to be exact, not only was Gandhi pushed out of his first class compartment at Maritzburg, but also while traveling by a stagecoach between Charlestown and Johannesburg, subjected to sit outside next to the driver and then when the leader of the coach wanted to smoke, he ordered him to sit at his feet, which Gandhi wouldn’t do. He was denied rooms in hotels, and even the ones who took him in would not allow him to eat in the dining room along with rest of the guests. And here I am, his child two generations removed and flying first class and staying in five stars hotels and no one has stopped me or even given a feeling somehow I didn’t belong. Even then I couldn’t just slough off what the driver has just said. But ever optimistic that I am, I also feel that F.W. de Klerk having signed the end of apartheid’s got to be the first step towards the eventual colorless co-existence.
Unbeknown to me, the sea change is taking place across the ocean in India during the five days that I am in South Africa. Banned from International Cricket by the world twenty one years earlier, the South African cricket team is playing a series of one day international (ODI) games across India. The first country to take them back into the international fold and have been the most gracious hosts. It makes me proud to be born in India and I wish Gandhi were there to witness his children following in the path of forgive and forget – something he firmly believed in along with Ahimsa and Satyagraha.
I would later read about the South African team’s overwhelming reception upon their arrival in Calcutta in the 2010 reminiscence of Kanishkaa Balachandran, sub-editor at Cricinfo: Their reception in Calcutta surpassed all expectations. Upon landing, some of the South Africans mistook the large gathering of people near the airport for protesters, but they had actually gathered to welcome the team. Children waved flags, flower petals were showered over the players, and the 15-mile journey took a few hours. The South African captain, (Clive) Rice summed it up perfectly: “I know how Neil Armstrong felt when he stood on the moon.”
For me the most emotional moment came on the evening of the 14th. As it was, South Africa had lost the first two of the series of three games, in Calcutta and Gwalior. Disappointed but not disheartened, their countrymen are just happy to be playing international cricket. But they win the third game in the nation’s capital, New Delhi. And they win it big. By then I too am caught up in the hype that has blanketed the whole nation.
I stop at the reception to get my key and stop for a while to flirt with the sweet receptionists. I try to make some lame joke about the series that has just concluded. And I hear them say in unison, BUT WE WON! These are the girls born of Indian parents, but I love their pride in their team. And from what I caught on the television, the crowds in New Delhi and the Indian team too were as jubilant that the visiting team had won. That their first time back in the arena, and it wouldn’t bid well for the hosts to send their guests back home downbeat and defeated. Far from it. As I am leaving from Johannesburg’s Jan Smut International Airport on the morning of the 16th.. on my way to Bombay via Nairobi, the airport is swarming with the jubilant crowds – not knowing what had brought them there – I get a peek at the deplaning South African team returning home from New Delhi – all smiles and joy on their faces.
They would reciprocate India’s hospitality by inviting them a year later to play four test series on South African soil, billed as the Friendship Series and universally hailed as the historic tour in more ways than one.
© Haresh Shah 2013
Illustration: Celia Rose Marks
SISTER SITE
Next Friday, May 17, 2013
YES
Thought the time has come to answer something you have been dying to ask since I began writing this blog 25 weeks ago. All is well and good, but where’s the beef? Come on, after all we’re talking Playboy! Well, just one more week and you would know!
playboy stories 
you have given me wonderful time….down memory lane…thanks. You have touched a cord these are not essays now but something in between a novel and biography….eagerly waiting for another Friday.