Homeland

Chapter 3: A Journey with Jimmy

Pondoland, January 2010

Jimmy Selani is waiting for me on the shoulder of the main road to Mthatha, the capital of the Transkei. To the casual observer it is your stereotypical old South African scene: a black man standing on the side of a hot road waiting for a white person in a bakkie to give them a job. The difference here is, I need Jimmy more than he needs me. Over the next week he will be my interpreter, my way in to the local villages, and my guardian warning me of who and who not, to trust. He jumps in and we head off, catching up on the weeks since I last saw him on the hike. Jimmy’s world has been hijacked by the expense of kitting out children for the new school year. I enquire how many children he has.

Jimmy laughs. “Let me just say I was a naughty young man.”

 We turn left at the next shebeen (unlicensed liquor store) and we are soon bumping and bouncing down a dirt road, potholed and scarred by years of rains and neglect. Cows stand lazily and stubbornly in our path, small children on their way to school skip and dance too close to the bakkie’s wheels, yelling: “Umlungu! Umlungu!” and “Sweets! Sweets!”

 Umlungu is what Xhosa-speaking people call white people. It comes from the Xhosa word for the white froth – or scum – that ride the waves of the sea. White people first arrived on these shores via those waves.

 As the last vestiges of urban South Africa vanish into the rearview mirror our conversation turns to rural life and how things have changed. Jimmy talks about the growing promiscuity of village teenagers, of people becoming too lazy to grow their own vegetables, and of those who are forgetting their cultures.

 “The problem is the money. Everybody is focusing on the money,” he says. “Look around and see how beautiful this land is. The land here is very rich, if you plant anything here it will grow. But the people are moving away from that unfortunately.”

 The tarred roads may not have reached this far, but western malaise has.

 Around the next corner I see the first sign of the malady which kills hundreds of thousands of South Africans every year: a gaunt, weak man, his body emaciated by HIV/Aids walking slowly, painfully.

 “Pull over!” Jimmy orders. 

 After a brief exchange in Xhosa, the man clambers into the back of the bakkie.

“We’re not going the whole way now, but we can help him get closer to the clinic,” Jimmy says.

“I’d like to go to there later,” I say. “I’d like to see it for myself.”

 “You don’t go there to get better,” Jimmy warns. “If God permits you, you live, if not, you die.”

*

 We drop off our passenger at a fork in the road, and continue on to our appointment in the village of Gomolo. We ask for directions and a villager waves us up a hill, along a track barely visible beneath long, wispy grass. We pull up outside a metal gate. On the other side of the gate, a modern pink bungalow squats alongside two thatched cream coloured huts. A chalky blue Mercedes with matching blue hubcaps, the kind once popular with apartheid government ministers, shelters from the sun under the shade of a poplar tree.

“Molo!” Jimmy calls, getting out of the car.  

 At first nobody stirs. The only sound is the breeze rustling through the long grass.

 Molweni?” Jimmy calls again. I join him at the gate.

 From behind the bungalow, a young woman in blue overalls and black wellington boots appears. She pops her head inside one of the huts and then beckons for us to open the gate and enter the hut. Jimmy and I glance at each other. We are both a bit nervous. Inside, to the right of the doorway is a row of plastic chairs, one occupied with a man holding a panga. To the left are two plastic chairs, both occupied by elderly women, one resting her upper body weight on a beach umbrella pole, a makeshift walking stick. Further back from the door is a single bed. On it, an elderly woman, dressed in a silky leopard print blouse, a houndstooth skirt, a spotty green hat and pink fluffy slippers, is sitting holding a fat, contented baby. The young woman motions us to sit down next to the man.