Shorelines (34 page)

Here we found another Bhengu – a powerful, strong-featured man called Kay. He made everything from beautiful cowhide shields to nut-like objects worn at the end of a warrior’s penis – the
umncedo
. Dave provided a little light background:

“In the old days, a Zulu man could be considered fully dressed wearing only this little widget fitted onto his member. It is said that when King Shaka berated his advisors, all their
umncedos
would drop off at the same time ...”

Our last stop of the morning was the Victoria Street Muthi Market, a sprawling outdoor display on a bridge overpass with the Durban skyline in the background. This was the second economy of our country, Africa-to-Africa in full throttle. More than 80% of all South Africans used traditional medicine at some time in their lives. Hundreds of metres of stalls were bunched up next to each other selling powders, roots, barks, shells, animal heads, skins of every description, sea beans, wings, feathers and other body parts – each with a specific medicinal purpose.

I caught up with Dave Charles, who was joyously chatting with a woman about one of her potions. They were inspecting some ‘Zulu Viagra’, and it turned into a crowd-stopping passage involving ribald hand movements, raised eyebrows and much laughter. Everyone passing by had something to add to the conversation, and by the way they leered at me I could see Dave was setting me up for a big sale. I was right. The potions lady scooped together a package of twigs and fine brown powder into some newspaper wrapping and told me, via Mr Charles:

“One tablespoon if you’re brave, stirred into a glass of milk or a cup of soup. But make sure there’s a woman in your arms already, because this thing, it works fast.” Jules had wandered off to a discreet distance from us, but I could see her straining to hear the translation...

We continued to Ballito to visit Dave’s cousin, Michael O – an extraordinary man.

Before dawn every day, regardless of the weather, he slips on his Zulu Thousand Miler sandals (with carved-in ‘swoosh’) and walks the 18 minutes from his apartment to the sea.

Michael’s route takes him past some of the more serious money in South Africa. Ballito (Italian for ‘little ball’), less than an hour’s drive north of Durban, is the archetypal playground for the wealthy. In season it’s madness as the rich and beautiful gather in vast apartments, on fairways and in boutique hotels to celebrate the year’s coups in the corporate world. Out of season, they build. Ballito is about as far as you can go from the Wild Coast, in terms of development. And to the eye that prefers a Pondo hut to a condo squat, Ballito is more than a little charm-free.

But Michael O has found a shrine. It comes in the form of Thompson’s Tidal Pool down by the beach. Michael has become the custodian of the tidal pool. In its own way, the tidal pool tries to look after him, too.

Before he swims, Michael goes to the rocks at the ocean side of the pool and just watches the restless waves for 20 minutes. Then he inserts earplugs (swimmer’s ear is the occupational hazard down here), dons his yellow goggles and announces to us:

“Welcome to my office.”

Standing waist deep in the tidal pool, with the deep-green Art Deco change rooms in the background, Michael smiles as the hardy little blacktail fish come to nibble dead skin from his legs. Recently, when he and his partner Harriet were away for a short while, his tidal pool was drained so a leak could be fixed.

“Every single bit of life in the pool vanished,” Michael says. “They ate everything.” But all is never lost. The neap tide is washing fresh seawater into the pool with each wave. And it seems the mud prawns – which help to purify the water – are on their way back. They have already punched tiny little blowholes in the sand at the bottom of the pool. Soon the other familiar forms of life – Michael’s Tidal Pool Club – will be able to return.

“Normally, you’d find sea cucumbers, an octopus, the prawns, more than 40 varieties of fish and crabs here,” he says, preparing for his laps. “The triggerfish used to know me well. They swam underneath me in convoy. I think they recognised my stroke.”

He swam 17 laps around the pool in a deceptively slow but powerful crawl – freestyle. In 90 minutes he covered more than 5 kilometres. Another wave from the rising tide washed into the pool.

Michael O, a tall man with shaggy, sea-bleached hair, exuded a sense of ease and inner joy. One would expect his partner Harriet, a kind, blonde and trim woman, to have fallen in love with the rich lifestyle of the North Coast. But no, she yearned for the friendlier, more familiar lights of the mining town they’d come from. Harriet found the Ballito Inner Set a little difficult to penetrate. It didn’t help that her beloved partner spent his mornings dreaming besides a tidal pool, but she wasn’t going to say that.

“I’ve got my best friend right here,” Harriet said, hugging the good-natured Michael.

For more than 27 years, Michael O worked in the mining world. His dad had been a doctor on the mines.

“Although we moved on average once every five years, it was a wonderful lifestyle,” he said. “Everyone worked and played together, from the highest manager to the lowest worker.”

He lived through the gathering era of labour problems, faction fighting and a corporate takeover that left more than 12 000 people jobless. As a human resources executive, Michael O found himself on the firing side of the corporate table.

“People didn’t live in the mine village any more,” said Michael. “The new focus was all on profits. It became my job to retrench my own colleagues.”

Jules and I had, in our travels up the Wild Coast, met more than a dozen families who had been directly affected by these very retrenchments.

Harriet showed us a photograph of Michael in corporate days, looking into the camera lens like a tired old rabbit pinned in the headlights of an onrushing car.

His management, seeing their star hatchet man was on the brink of a nervous breakdown, offered Michael some ‘indefinite’ time off. They felt he was taking things ‘too personally’.

“What else can you do? Some things you have to take personally.”

Michael and Harriet came down to Ballito for a break, and this was where he discovered the secrets of Thompson’s Pool.

“Gazing at the sea and swimming in the pool every day made me feel better,” he said. “At the pool, things became simple. There was no one to boss me around – and there was no one to retrench. I suddenly realised I could not remember when last I had seen the stars, or the sunrise. I remembered my dad, who had bought a seaside house for his retirement. He died before he could live there.”

Michael O – at the tender age of 49 – took early retirement and went back to his tidal pool.

With every day he spent slowly circling the fringes of the tidal pool, he changed a little. Michael spoke to us about whale numbers in the world, his fascination with sharks and his contempt for shark-fin soupers. He had also begun to train young black kids to swim, and some of the older ones were in his life-saving class.

Dave Charles had begun a news magazine called
Ballito Life & Style
, which was growing in popularity and was now being circulated from the coast to the foothills of the Drakensberg. Michael O had become Dave’s beach watchdog, and every time some developer eased a load of effluent into the sea, Michael would be there to point it out to the readers of
Ballito Life & Style
– getting up more than one corporate nostril in the process.

“I have appointed myself the guardian of this little piece of Earth,” he said. “I take this pool very personally.”

Ballito is big money, but insiders told us the real – and far more discreet – wealth lay across the N2 highway at Shaka’s Kraal. This was where Kumarie Suguna Sundharie Ramesh and her family lived, in modest middle-class circumstances.

“Call me Ragni,” she said, and I relaxed. We’d seen Ragni in action some years before out at The Kingdom, as she danced for the crowd in both classical Indian and Bollywood-style. Jules and I asked Ragni if we could crash their family Saturday night sit-down dinner in the interests of
Shorelines
, and she said sure. Come on in.

Outside, the weather was diabolically sullen. I wondered if Michael O would swim the next day. Inside Ragni’s place, dinner aromas were beginning to waft from the kitchen.

“It’s actually my parents’ house,” she said. “My husband Ramesh, our two sons and I have recently moved in as well.” They’d bought the family home from their parents – a win-win for the whole family.

In the corner of the passage stood a shrine with the photograph of an old lady in the centre, surrounded by candles, family portraits and fresh flowers.

“The spirit of my Aya (grandmother) continues to guide me,” said Ragni as we walked around. “Whenever I pass, I touch her face and pray to her.”

One of Ragni’s first memories was of accompanying her Aya on her rounds of Shaka’s Kraal village, selling fruit and vegetables from the family garden.

Her main obsession was, however, the dance. Even as a small child, Ragni would invent dance moves to entertain the family. And when she turned 11, her mother took her to India, where she danced in a school in Madras (now Chennai) for a fortnight. She begged to return to India.

“When I was 14, I went off to boarding school in Chennai for four years,” she said. Her parents sold off their prized wedding jewellery to fund her stay.

“I had dance classes for three hours and practice for another three hours – every day,” she said. She later met her future husband, Ramesh Gopal, and thus began a chaste courtship, conducted through chaperones. “We decided to come back to South Africa to live,” said Ragni. “I loved my Aya too much to leave her.”

We sat down to supper at a table laden with fragrant Tamil food: mutton curry, prawn curry, chicken curry, fried chicken, roti and basmati rice. We even tried some of the vegan Ramesh’s soya mince curry mix, tucking in with our right hands.

The Naickers began talking about the apartheid years.

“At first, we lived in complete ignorance of the struggle movement,” said Mr Naicker, whose ancestors had been brought over as indentured labourers in the mid-1800s to work on the sugar-cane fields of Natal.

“But we suffered discrimination first-hand – low pay, bad incidents. In 1987, Mrs Naicker and I went travelling around South Africa. At King William’s Town, we stopped at a fish and chips shop for something to eat. The woman behind the counter said we could not sit down. We had to take our food outside and eat it in the car. But enough about that ...”

We finished dinner off with vermicelli – angel-haired pasta that had been fried in butter, sugar and cream – and a dollop of ice cream. And, as we left to return to Ballito, Ragni gave us a box of chocolates, a couple of mangoes from their tree in the front garden – and a little figure of the dancing Shiva ...

“Now hold still,” says the dentist. “I’m just going to insert this little titanium rod into your tooth to bolster it. And then we can build the bridge.”

Titanium? Hmm. That rings a bell. Titanium not only rings bells but is also found in cars, planes, ships, helicopters, missiles, sunscreens, body piercings, surgical instruments, pacemakers, space-exploration equipment, wheelchairs, bicycles and dental implants. But the largest consumers of titanium oxide are newspaper publishers, who use it to whiten newsprint.

“It gives Smartie chocolate beans their cheery bright colours,” Jules informs me.

It also adds insulation to turtle rookeries, improving the sand quality. That’s why we are out here on the beach at Cape Vidal on this summer night in January with a man called Kian Barker and a Mama Loggerhead ready to drop her load of precious eggs.

The lean, intense Barker plays Vivaldi on the sound system of his Land Rover as we head out in the early evening. Tonight we might see either leatherbacks or loggerheads coming ashore. The leatherbacks can weigh more than a ton, and as they lumber onto the sands it’s hard to imagine them scooting through the ocean at 100 km/h. But when you have a hungry tiger shark or mako on your tail, a dash of speed is always the answer. Then they dive deep into the dark, cold oceanic waters, where sharks are not equipped to follow them.

“The leatherbacks hover offshore down in Leven Canyon or even deeper, over the continental shelf, until dark,” says Kian. “A female will come out and lay more than 1 000 eggs over about 10 visits in the space of three months. After that, you won’t see her again for as long as seven years. Some of them go off to the upwellings on our West Coast, others will head towards the east Indian ocean or even as far as the Pacific.”

Turtles are not supposed to lay eggs this far south. The sand below the Tropic of Capricorn does not hold its heat long enough at night to act as an incubator. A long time ago, leatherbacks must have progressively strayed more than 600 km south of the Tropic of Capricorn and started using the beaches in what is now called the Greater St Lucia Marine Sanctuary. They found the sands to be unusually warm and laid their eggs successfully, starting a bit of a turtle trend.