Still, you can’t be too harsh on people who want a beautiful dream without the harsh reality. I was like that once… when I was 9. But nothing is black and white unless you’re Malema at a press conference.

The funny thing is how few 9 to 18 year-olds actually give a toss. I sometimes feel like my generation was the last politically aware one (and many of them don’t care either). Some might think this is a good thing, moving forward and all that, but just look at the way Julius subverts history and politics to suit his own agenda. If the teenagers he was targeting knew the real story of how we got here, they might not be singing “Kill the Boer” with him.

You’ve got to understand the roots of hatred and resentment before you can overcome it. Otherwise everything is just rhetoric.

White tendencies

Funnily enough, the first time I experienced hatred and resentment wasn’t in South Africa, but another famously racist country.

We moved to Australia when I was five. Even though my parents were Zimbabwean, most Aussies assumed they’d been killing black babies and using their blood for paint. Neighbours wouldn’t talk to my mother. I was made to stand in the Brisbane sun for hours by a particularly sadistic teacher. Down Under was a pretty but miserable place.

We came back in 1988, at the height of the emergency. We could have stayed. People (white people) thought my parents were nuts to return, but their family was here. Blood is stronger than fear.

Soon after arriving home, we went to Muizenberg. I was 7 years old and didn’t really remember anything before I was 5. My earliest memory is still hiding under the bed in Brisbane so I wouldn’t have to go to school. There were no black people there. The only black person I knew was BA Baracus.

So I’ll never forget the first time I saw a black woman on the beach with some pasty white guy. She was gorgeous and dark against white sand. I remember people staring. We think kids don’t notice but they pick up on everything.

I very excitedly grabbed my mother and pointed, “Look Mommy, it’s a black lady, like BA in the A-Team!”

Long walk to a real education

I went to a government school, which had recently become Model C. There were a few coloured girls and eventually black girls too. I was too preoccupied with trying to catch up academically to notice. The Australian education system was abysmal compared to ours. Everyone else was writing and I barely recognised letters. My thick Aussie accent also meant nobody understood a word I was saying.

I sensed big things were happening outside, but they were completely removed from the realm of blackboards and netball. The first time I realised there was a whole world I didn’t understand was the day Mandela was released.

Sitting with my mother’s cousins in a facebrick townhouse in Somerset West, we watched our future president walk free. The adults were saying things along the lines of “what now?” I just remember how exciting it all was. I had no idea why, but I wanted to know. Obviously someone had treated this man unfairly. My idealistic sense of justice kicked in.

Being a precocious and politically aware kid between 1990 and 1994 was certainly interesting.

I’d been completely insulated and disinterested until seeing Mandela but after his release I started to learn as much as I could, reading the newspaper every day and asking the teachers awkward questions. What was happening? Why was this so important? Why had white people done bad things to black people? Why did people hate each other so much? Who was this guy in khaki on a horse?

I knew there were important talks and violence. I knew people were dying. It was still far away though. In 1992 our drama teacher scared the shit out of my class by telling us to make sure our parents voted “Yes” in the referendum, otherwise there would be civil war.

I frantically phoned my mother from the tikkie box, “Vote Yes Mom! Vote Yes!” Completely pointless since she wasn’t a South African citizen. I think she would have voted yes though; she was enjoying the cricket very much and didn’t want it to end.

Of sunset clauses and bombs

I gradually started piecing together who was who and what was happening. I developed a highly idealistic world-view. I thought most people should be like Mandela and didn’t understand when they weren’t. I saw the world in black and white. I made jokes about it mixing and everything becoming grey (the teachers didn’t laugh). CODESA had collapsed and everything was uncertain, but I believed it would all work out in the end.

A year later two friends died in the St James Church attack. Their parents still place memorials in the classifieds section every July 25th. 100 metres down the road from my parents’ business, four people were killed inside the Heidelberg Tavern. I realised then that it would never be a question of just forgetting the past and getting along.

Soon afterwards, my uncle and his wife emigrated and didn’t return until a visit 16 years later. Sometimes blood is not stronger than fear.

In 1994 I began high school. Our teacher taught us Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika. She said it would be our new national anthem. I didn’t even know we had one. For some reason our school never taught us Die Stem.

The run-up to 27 April was a blur of euphoria and violence. There was a bloody state of emergency in Natal, Jan Smuts Airport was bombed, the IFP pulled out of the election (then in again), AWB men died on TV in Bophuthatswana. But on the day, everyone was happy. Our domestic worker wore an exquisitely beaded ANC skirt. My parents voted for the first time. We got the rest of the week off school. And I was relieved (no, not about school).

I never voted for the Nats

When Chris and I visited the Apartheid Museum last year, I was surprised by my visceral reaction. I know all this stuff, I read the books, so why the hell am I crying? Because years of accumulated knowledge doesn’t compare to a concentrated four-hour journey. And as these new ads for the museum indicate – a history forgotten is a future lost – the brightest of the “freedom generation” don’t seem to get it. Maybe they never can.

Still, I won’t raise my kids in ignorance and just let the history syllabus take care of their knowledge. Our past is both shameful

Graffiti on the wall at the Regina Mundi Catholic Church, Soweto.

and extraordinary, but at least it’s out all there (I certainly never learnt about the lost generation of Aborigines in Australia). And if you don’t understand it, if you don’t know what people endured so we can go overseas without being hated and relax on a beach no matter who we are, it’s a lot easier to buy into the bullshit-baffles-brains sensibilities of a Malema or Visagie.

South Africa was built on hatred and fear. But there is a commonality. We may not be bloody agents, but we’re all bloody-minded. We carry on debating, arguing, laughing and working, because despite our whining and misgivings, we actually give a shit. It’s that warped, fatalistic hope that keeps us going.

Bloggers For a Free Press

I’m sure you’re aware by now of the slander campaign launched by the ANC Youth League’s spokesperson Nyiko Floyd Shivambu against journalists they perceive to be against the Youth League. This campaign is especially directed against City Press journalist Dumisani Lubisi. You’ll remember that he was instrumental in exposing Julius Malema’s interests in various companies.

Floyd Shivambu. "You want some of this? Huh? You want some?"

The move taken by the ANCYL is disturbing, especially their response to the letter written by 19 of the country’s most influential political journalists, asking the ANC to distance itself from the actions of the Youth League and Floyd Shivambu, where they basically told these journalists to sod off. More than that, Shivambu then threatened the journalists who refused to run his slanderous story.

This is a definite step towards dictatorial rule. I for one, am not willing to sit idly by as people in our ruling party flagrantly infringe on media freedom and other Constitutional rights.

I’ve invited a number of South African bloggers to publish a message to the ANC and the Youth League on Wednesday, condemning the actions of Shivambu and calling on them to distance themselves from such practices. We also reminds the ANC of the vital role played by the the press in the liberation struggle.

If you’re a South African blogger and are interested in joining, then drop me an email at sipho.hlongwane@gmail.com. Alternately, you can reach me on Twitter (@ComradeSipho). I’ll fill you in with further details and put you on the SpeakZA mailing list.

If you’re on Twitter, the hashtag is #SpeakZA. Let’s get the word out there.

Sipho Hlongwane

And if I can add to Sipho’s post – the ANCYL-biters might think, stupidly, that they can control the mainstream press, but they have absolutely  no chance whatsoever of understanding, let alone controlling, bloggers and social media writers. So mail Sipho at sipho.hlongwane@gmail.com, and join with us in putting down a marker for online freedom of the press, as well as registering our disapproval of the moronic tactics of the ANCYL.

Chris Roper
[Read the letter from journalists, and the ANCYL's amazingly mature response]

Karabo Keepile

Zuma Soapie

I met a male Zimbabwean journalist recently who was quick to come to President Jacob Zuma’s defence, stating that he couldn’t entirely blame him for his sexual antics, seeing as South African women are just plain irresistible.

“It doesn’t matter if she is Xhosa, Tswana or Zulu, they are all just beautiful,” he confessed, a huge smirk on his face.

A couple of days later, I met a Nigerian man raised in England who couldn’t agree more. He recently moved to South Africa and his statement “I already love this place” appeared to be closely related to what he termed the “caramel honeys”.

So yes, we South African “honeys” are gorgeous, but does that give our president, culture and other men the right to shuffle us around like cards?

Women are naturally territorial and all the women I know say they’d never be able to share their husband.

So how do the president’s wives do it? It’s exactly the question I was wondering when I got my very own “Deep Throat” the other day, from a secret source in Zuma’s inner circle.

The gossip she told me, under strict condition of anonymity, would have provided fodder for at least three episodes of a standard soapie.

It wasn’t exactly news material, but it certainly made for interesting listening. It turns out that what the media and the general public have been suspecting for some time is in fact true: all is not well among Zuma’s wives, particularly among wife number two, Nompumelelo Ntuli, and his latest wife, Thobeka Madiba.

The details got juicier, if my source is to be believed – and I do.

MaNtuli, as she is also known, reportedly went berserk the day the president invited her to Mahlamba-Ndlopfu — the presidential guesthouse in Pretoria — to announce that he’d be tying the knot again.

Apparently MaNtuli “broke the security gates and demanded a cab. When the security guards came after her, she went to another gate, gate four. The house manager had given instructions to the gatekeeper not to open, but she fought him,” said my source.

While all of this was going on, the president was inside the presidential guesthouse, seemingly unfazed.

“After hitting the police [who guard Zuma], MaNtuli’s personal bodyguard was called. He somehow managed to get her into the car and drove her back to the airport to catch a plane back to her Morningside home in Durban.”

In her rage, MaNtuli had sworn not to attend the wedding to Madiba, but she apparently changed her mind, arriving at Zuma’s KwaZulu-Natal homestead of Nkandla in good spirits a day before the wedding.

Time away had obviously calmed her down, but the president wasn’t having any of it, according to my source.

“He put money on the table and asked her to leave.”

MaNtuli until then was the president’s trophy wife. By all accounts, she appeared the more self-assured wife and accompanied Zuma on most of his international trips.

She apparently wasn’t threatened by MaKhumalo, who is said to prefer pottering around the Nkandla homestead to shaking hands with the Obamas.

Sadly for MaNtuli, the very gorgeous Madiba stands to jeopardise her pole position.

Who knows, maybe from now on Zuma may prefer to take Madiba globetrotting instead?

No wonder wife number two lost it.

I knew I had to talk to MaNtuli to confirm these details. This might be a column, but you still want to verify as much as possible.

But when I called her cellphone the woman who answered said MaNtuli was not around to talk to the media.

I then called MaNtuli’s bodyguard.

After asking me how I had found his number he firmly said he had nothing to say to me.

”My job is just to protect,” he said.

So should we care?

Well, our president dismissed a suggestion from an interviewer at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that polygamy was “symbolically a great step backward”, or inherently unfair to women.

He confidently replied that in South Africa “we follow a policy that says you must respect the cultures of others. That’s my culture. It does not take anything from me, from my political beliefs and everything, including the belief on the equality of women.”

What a load of cow dung.

How exactly is polygamy in accordance with women’s rights if MaNtuli was informed and not consulted on his decision?

Sure, the woman agreed to marry Zuma, but what if she was told she’d be the last wife?

In effect, polygamy dictates that MaNtuli and all the other wives to follow can huff and puff as much as they want but if MaKhumalo agrees and Zuma has decided, he will continue to grow his flock of wives.

(Follow @mrtuckbox on Twitter.)

The other day the Seacom cable had issues, most of SA had little or no connectivity and anger and desperation set in amongst web based businesses, online gamers, bloggers and even those that like the naughty stuff.

This was, according to SABC news, caused by a short or power outage between the “East” African “countries” of Lagos and Abidjan. I was listening to SAFM when I heard it, happened to listen the next hour to 5fm, heard it again, then eventually switched on another syndicated station an hour later to check whether they had changed it and heard it again.

I understand that English may not be the first language of the chap speaking in the clip, nor was he maybe even the person that wrote it, but for heavens sakes, East is the other side of Africa and Lagos and Abidjan are cities and not countries. This is simple geography. We learnt this at school, from atlases and globes on desks, we had no internet to study it, or google to search it, let alone interconnectivity for emailing and proof reading scripts.

Surely our modern day reporters know how to use the internet, when the Seacom cable is working that is?

I was feeling singularly depressed when sending off the last two blogs. Things weren’t going to plan, or to any plan I could reconcile myself to. I am not very good at hanging on a beach, and that seemed like the best available option under the circumstances, until I could get my bike home.
Things changed in about three minutes. As I stood up to leave the internet café I noticed that the big guy sitting next to me was wearing motocross boots. No-one wears motor-cross boots in 35 degree heat, with high humidity, unless the bike it pretty big. “Um, excuse me … Are you here on a bike? Where are you from? What are you riding?” I blurted it all at once. I explained that I was feeling pretty depressed about a cylinder head that just didn’t feel like staying on, and needed to figure out how to get myself home. “Horrible feeling” he replied, “I’m riding a Yamaha Tenere 660. I rode up from Durban, but have just spent three weeks in a hammock waiting for a new chain and sprocket to arrive. These came today; I’m riding to Malawi at four thirty tomorrow morning, and you’re free to jump on if you like.” How could I resist? That was it, organized, in less than three minutes. We hadn’t even exchanged names. My plan now was to ride with George (we did eventually get round to the name exchange scenario), for two or three days, and then to get back to Vilankulos by public transport to organize getting my bike home.
I arrived back at the guest-house all smiles, having left there in the morning most clearly grumpy. “It’s all good, I am leaving tomorrow, to Malawi with a friend, on his bike” I sang. The barman looked disturbed. “This friend, did you know him from before?” “No, but he is fine”, I replied. He looked a little more concerned.
It turns out that George is a great companion. He also spent nine months in India on an Enfield, and we have a number of friends and acquaintances in common.
We are not, however, in Malawi. Here’s how and why. Four-thirty the next day, at the appointed time I started forcing myself out of my sleep. No sign of George. Five thirty I decided that I should probably get up and get my gear together. I vaguely wondered if he had thought better of it, and done a runner. Six thirty and I was getting messy with mangos when I heard a comforting rumble. I was thrilled that I was not the only person to swear I was leaving at dawn, and but also that he was a little better at me at keeping a time schedule…We set off North, with me as a pillion passenger.
Now riding pillion was never my intention, but I have discovered that it has some advantages. My coffee addiction, which has been all too irregularly sated on this trip, is less of a problem – I can (and do) have a snooze when I want to. I don’t have to take responsibility for watching the mileage for fuel stops, and I get to see more of the view and haul out the camera whenever I want. When we hit a guinea fowl, my boot takes the secondary knock, and when I get stung by a bee on the throat, someone else can scrape the sting out. I have missed taking the corners, and the pillion pressure sores aren’t the greatest – but the pillow that I have bought to help with these provides great giggle currency for anyone who sees me getting on or off the bike.  
After the first day of riding we stopped to look at the map and plan the onward journey. “Actually”, said George, “This whole trip was about getting to Lusaka, but I am out of time. If I head there I will have to fly home, and find somewhere to store my bike.” I am still not sure if he was suggesting the obvious here, or whether I was just forward, but my automatic reply was, “Store the bike? I’ll ride your bike home!” So that is what we are doing. George flies home today, and I will cross Zimbabwe back to Mozambique. I will sort out the transport for my bike back to South Africa, and will ride on home.
We’ve covered about 1700 kms in the last three days and it is going to be a long, hard ride home. I am expecting at least seven days of very hard riding to get me to Cape Town. That pillow is going to get a lotmore very good use, and I can’t stop grinning.

Balls of steel

Even more regularly than I get told my bike is bullet proof, I get told I have got balls. (Sometimes these are made of steel.) I am, however, not quite feeling the acquisition of these balls myself. In fact, any erroneous sense of being an intrepid traveler I may have had was well and truly was eroded by the cavalcade of South African 4X4s´s, pulling boats and trailers, heading South, back to South Africa.  I have been riding against the barrage of oversized vehicles that made up the 20km queue on the South African side of the border when heading into Mozambique on Christmas Eve. I am certainly not traveling the road less traveled at present and surely that would be what is really ballsy?

The one widely divergent opinion as to my anatomy came from a lady in Pilgrims Rest, who was more concerned about the benefits of the lack of balls. I was meandering along the only street, when a little boy, about 8 years old, called me saying, “My daddy wants to talk to you.” His daddy was sitting at a table with a lady, who, as I arrived leaned in and said, “Come sit next to me. Can I ask you something girly…I have never been on a bike, does it work?”
“Um, she is not working that well at the moment”, I said.
“No, no”, she said, “I mean does all that throaty rumbling work?”
“Ah”, I replied, “Well, no idea about anyone else, but it doesn’t do it for me.”
“Are you traveling alone?” she asked. “You are traveling alone and it really doesn’t work? What a terrible pity!”

It seems like I do not have the best of either world.

Bullet proof

There are two things generally said about my bike, by those in the know. They are “bulletproof” and “easy to fix”. I left home half wondering how all these people knew they were easy to fix if they were also bullet proof, but hoping that both statements were, to some degree, true. I am now doubting both statements as I write this from Vilankulos, about 700kms from Maputo. The question on my mind at present is how I travel, home or anywhere else, with a huge bike, that doesn’t go and is not about to.

My bike travails started outside Bloemfontein, with an oil leak that became an oil spill. I thought I got her fixed in Johannesburg and rode happily to Pilgrim’s Rest, but there she burped to a stop. With a bit of nursing, I persuaded her a further 90kms to White River. There she burped and spat some more, and made very clear that that was as far as she was prepared to go. Her right side cylinder head was falling off as a consequence of the tie bolts pulling out of their sockets. This needed specialist attention, the kind that resided in Johannesburg.

I got the bike and myself from White River to the insalubrious Nelspruit train station with the help of three burly bikers. There I boarded a third class train, the only one with freight, to Johannesburg. The trip from Nelspruit to Johannesburg is about a four hour drive – make that 12 hours on the Shosholoza Express on a good night. My trip required an additional four hours for delays on the tracks, and a further three hours for the station staff to figure out how to get the bike off the train and onto the platform, which stopped well before the carriage carrying the bike.

The first plan was to start the train, then pull the emergency brake when the bike carriage reached the platform. This was abandoned fairly quickly. The second (on the advice of a supervisor) was to edge the train forward.  This seemed logical enough, and would have worked had they not stopped with the door of the bike’s carriage two metres short of the platform, but over the line where they were allowed to receive a signal to carry on forward. This stumped staff, and took the examination of a further two supervisors. The next plan was to draw another train alongside ours and to take the bike through that. This was soon abandoned. Then another plan arose to bring a mobile platform alongside, and then another to shunt the train forward from behind. The latter they eventually did with success, after having first tried to shunt the bike and I us off in the opposite direction to the yard. (“Your friend and her bike are already on the platform”, they tried to assure my frantic my friend Julia as she yelled at them from the platform that they were going in the wrong direction.) Eighteen hours after having put my bike on the train in Nelspruit (and twenty since I had seen a toilet I was willing to use) I had the bike off in Johannesburg. I limped into BMW, Boksburg, bike on a bakkie, where I was met with choruses of “What happened?” And then, to drive the exhaustion home, “Why didn’t you call us? We would have been straight out with a trailer to fetch you!”

A mechanic or two later, and I was finally in Mozambique and on the road North from Maputo. You may have other problems, the mechanic had said as I left, but that one is fixed. (Oh, how I wish I could start believing what I am told about this bike!)

Sections are of the road North are beautiful, in others the tar laces between the potholes. In one long stretch the road is being redone, and the alternative is a 70 km sand strip which is sometimes firm, more often softly slippery with my Marie biscuit tyres made for tar. I have, over the last three days, at very least, learnt to fall fairly gracefully. Crashes and skids aside (I am becoming blasé about them now), things got tough yesterday.

I left Tofo beach, Mozambique’s very own version of Goa, and close to my version of hell. I was all too happy to be on the road again, but first needed to pass through the prettily sleepy town of Inhambane, to get another number plate (mine had bumped off at some point). I arrived, and found the town completely shut eyed, and the realization that it was a Sunday dawned on me.  Needing a coffee, I found a small café and pulled up outside. While having a check round the bike, a portly man in a straw hat stopped his morning stroll. “Everything alright?” he asked.
“More or less,” I replied, explaining that my number plate had fallen off.
“Now that, he said, is a problem, you cannot ride without a number plate.” (This I knew; the police in Mozambique are notorious for lashing out the fines at any opportunity.)
“Do you think I can go to Vilankulos and get one there?” I asked, ever hopeful.
“Let me phone a friend of mine, to check”, he said. While on the phone I heard him say, “She is very nice, she is riding a big bike all alone and she is coming from here without a number plate, will you help her get one tomorrow? And please, tell your people to let her pass without problems.” He put down the phone and smiled, “You are in luck. I am the chief of police and traffic for this region, and I have just spoken to my friend, who is chief of traffic in the next region where Vilankulos is. You can go, you will be fine. Now, would you like some breakfast before you leave?”

The chief of police and traffic proved not only to be the provider of my breakfast, he proved to be my saving grace. Just as I finally eased onto smooth road after 170 kilometres of rough riding from Inhambane, and still 120 kilometres from Vilankulos, my blue monster burped a burp I recognised very well. Her cylinder head was falling off again. After a two kilometre push (of all 300 kilograms, luggage included) to the nearest village, I opened her up. One tie bolt pulling loose, one rocker completely snapped. Who would have though that I would be let down by two rockers in one year?

I got here, to Vilankulos, in a policeman’s bakkie after 11pm last night. On arriving, I offered to at least pay for some petrol. “No, no!” he replied, “We would never debase ourselves by accepting money for something like that.”

With time and cash having already been chewed up by previously required convolutions and repairs, this looks like it is the end of my riding trip. The question now is how on earth I get myself and my metal (which I am more than ready to lose at this point) back home.

My mother always says I am crisis prone and anyone who watched me getting ready to leave for this trip would be hard pressed to disagree. On my departure morning I lost two sets of house keys and my spare bike keys (all in separate instances); I mislaid a camera lens (re-found in the key-cutting shop), couldn’t get my new driver’s licence, and my house-sitter bailed on me.

All this chewed up time, which wouldn’t have mattered much if my riding partner for the day, Henk, hadn’t been geared up, ready, and at a petrol station on the side of the road. I had met Henk the week before in the yard of our mechanic, and, since were both heading up the picturesque R62 we decided that riding together might be pleasant. (Ok, I admit, I was a touch nervous of my first big ride in over eight years and a friend on the road, especially one who was almost two metres tall and built to match, was extremely appealing.) Henk delayed his trip by a day or two to keep me company, and I insisted that I would ride at dawn on Monday.

Sunday evening I sent Henk a sms, “we might be looking more at nine o’clock”. I had not yet managed to pick up my driver’s licence card. Nine-thirty, on Monday morning, getting into the swing of mini-crisis-manufacture mode, I sent another, “Not going to manage before 10:30”. 11 o’clock I sent another, “Ride without me if you want to get going”. “Napping on the grass next to my bike” came the reply. Twelve o’clock I replied, “Nap away”. Two thirty (and Henk ruing that mechanic’s yard, I am sure) I finally swung into the garage off from the N1 where we had been due to meet at nine.

We got into Oudshoorn just as the sun was setting, and stopped to try to get some feeling back into our buttocks. (The standing up dances we were doing as soon as we slowed down to enter a town just weren’t doing the trick any more.) “Your bike isn’t so fond of the corners, is she?” Henk said to me, with a twinkle in his eye. We had cruised through a good few passes.  Each time he had surged ahead and waited for me when the road straightened out again. “Actually, you’re terrible at corners!” he laughed. And I had to admit he was right. This bike is different to my old Enfield and she is top-heavy with tires and supplies tied on the rear seat. Despite my having learnt to shake a mean samba in Brazil, my hips and shoulders seem to have stiffened in the last eight-or-so years, and I have been tensing up and tapping off at precisely the wrong moments. (Motorbike arthritis caused by insufficient riding, I fear.)

Eight hours and 600km down the R62 from Cape Town, we finally reached the dirt road turn off to our family farm, where I was headed. It was too late for Henk to carry on to PE, so he cut a left with me. We arrived at the darkened house, me, my 230 kgs of metal and at least 130 kgs (I am guessing here) of smooth rugby player. Now, we’re more of a books and mountains kind of a family, we don’t do rugby, and we certainly don’t do rugby players. (And I was rocking up with one I had picked up in a backyard in Kraaifontein a week before.) I assured him the stop-off was not inappropriate.

The family slowly emerged to meet us and we settled in to a farm and life catch-up. My ability to leave on time (I had told my dad I would arrive on Sunday, midday), and my riding panache, or lack of it, became a topic of some sharp humour. My father and I have had a running contest of wit ever since I can remember. I am fairly sure that there are few people he appreciates more than those who can take me down on occasion, and Henk had is tackles at the ready. Twelve hours later when my riding partner for a day packed up and rode off again even the baboons turned out to say goodbye. His gentle wit cut to the quick and left us all charmed to the bones. My dad had found a comrade, and I had my prejudices about rugby players dropped kicked into touch (that’s a rugby phrase, isn’t it?) and I am profoundly grateful.

Merry Christmas

Christmas eve, four hours out of Nieu Bethesda, six more to go to Joburg. The oil smudge on my right boot has turned into an oil slick from my knee down. An inspection at a garage, (and the ritual cussing) later, I realise that my right cylinder gasket isn’t holding its seal and oil is spewing out. This is the first time I have ever done a long journey without spare gaskets. I have ride hard to catch the shops before they close, and it is just touching on 12:00 noon as I slide into Bloemfontein. The sign in the window of the only BMW parts supplier in town reads, “Closed from 22 December until 4th January MERRY CHRISTMAS!”

(26 December 2009)

The picture was taken on the croquet lawn of Alanglade, the house built for my great-grandparents by the Transvaal Gold Mining Enterprises on the outskirts of Pilgrim’s Rest. It was a house I heard about many times. As my grandmother’s life drew to a close she became the teller, and I the gatherer, of tales. In an otherwise complicated life, her first six years, when her father was the Pilgrim’s Rest Mine Manager (before he was “let go” in the crunch of the Great Depression), were idyllic. It was a life of ponies, tennis and picnics, servants and nannies, and being tied to her potty in the morning until ablutions were complete. (The latter a somewhat less fond memory.)
My great grandmother’s diary is a concise record of the life of a socialite, with even the births of her children meriting no more than a line. On the day my grandmother was born it reads, “9 December 1922. Hot. Humid. Barbara Barry born.”

My imagination has taken me to Pilgrim’s Rest, and Alanglade in particular, many times, and I decided that my bike should take me there for real.

Discovered to be harbouring gold in 1873’s, Pilgrim’s Rest is a place where fortunes were made (very few) and bust (the large majority) and many, many work and died in the sweat and the heat of the depths. Gold is still been hewn from the ground, in the oldest operational mine in the country. This prospectors’ town, however, remains tiny, still divided into an “Uptown” and a “Downtown” which are separated by 400 meters. Dominated by the Royal Hotel, the clearly visible buildings are all from the early 20th century and there are now more museums than restaurants. This is a town tuned to tourism. The largest of the six museums is the old family house, Alanglade.

The morning of the last day of the year brings hard, flat, light. I give up the hope of good photographs and wait for the museum office to open. When it does, on the main desk is a notice. “Due to staff challenges, Alanglade Museum will be closed from the 24th December until the 4th January”. I ask what “staff challenges” are. “Oh, replies the man at the desk, they just wouldn’t come to work.” A phone call or two, however, and a local museum services archeologist, Judith Mason, swings up to the Royal Hotel to take me to the house.

Built in the style of Sir Herbert Baker, between 1915 and 1917, the house sits stately in the rambling gardens. Slightly ramshackle on the outside, with porous gutters, broken woodwork, and a garden run a-mock, the house is due to be upgraded in 2010. Inside, it is a testament to years and years of piecing together history and collecting of period items. Details such as a compartmentalised picnic basket, a cocktail table (lemon squeezer built in) and a breast pump (they had them then), provide an intimate sense of life of opulent colonizers. Almost a century old, the house is an astonishing picture of modernity, with features such as a heated pool, a garage with a pit for servicing cars, en-suite bathrooms and sliding windows. Perhaps the most remarkable feature is a mechanical system where a button can be pushed on one side of the house, and, in a passage on the other side a number pops up in a glass which was used to tell the servants where help was required.

If are inclined towards historical mind meanders, Alanglade, as the fascinating and detailed reconstruction of an affluent existence, provides the perfect opportunity. Indeed the idyll it must have been seems perfect, and it seems that those living there thought so, too: a plaque next to the tennis court reads, “Who needs to go to Wimbledon when you can go to Alanglade”.

Yet there is a niggle that I can’t get rid of as I walk Alanglade house and Pilgrim’s Rest. It is a niggle that increases as I walk the main road, with its ramshackle markets of Africana (where there are urgent choruses of “looking is free”), and its neat craft and antique shops that cater for a budget above my own. It is a niggle that that turns a knife stab when I am sitting at the Royal Hotel, and a mine mechanical specialist sitting opposite tells me, “I can’t wait to leave here, to get away from the racial hatred”. It is a stab, where the knife is twisted, when the staff of the Royal Hotel come out of the kitchen in their caps and aprons to stamp and sing “Shosholoza” and “Siyavuma” to the entirely white patrons, who excitedly snap away with cameras. My meal sits uneasy, and I am not sure what I think of this little town, or my relationship to it.

About ten years ago, just after I had bought my first proper motorbike, I sent my dad an email. In it I wrote, “I have bought a bike, she is a 350cc Royal Enfield of the Indian variety. Now all I need to do is to shave the hair, get the tats, and get the attitude.” My dad wrote back, “Dear Anna, I suggest you get a bigger bike, isn’t there a 500cc Royal Enfield of the Indian variety? Please keep the hair, leave the tats, and f*k the attitude.”
A bike trip was the idea of my boyfriend at the time. As he had waved me off to catch a plane to Delhi at a London tube station he said, “If I come out, can we get an Enfield?” A couple of months into my trip there was still no sign of him. I realised that he was a bit of a flake, but he had some fine ideas. That was the start of a year of riding 15,000 kms around India and up the Karakoram Highway in Pakistan to China.
My journey was somewhat unstructured. I was guided by a good atlas, a compass, and the ubiquitous Indian head wobble – a response to almost any question once I was off the beaten track, meaning “Yes”, “No”, “I have no idea”, or “My, it is funny to see a foreigner in these parts”.

In Gujarat I had to wait hours for a man passing on a camel to stop and help me lift her
The bike was big (169kgs), beautiful and shiny, unwieldy and of dubious mechanical quality. She snapped chains, broke cables, failed brakes and had an irregular alternator. I loved her dearly. Too heavy for me to pick up, when I dropped her somewhere in Gujarat I had to wait hours for a man passing on a camel to stop and help me lift her.  Too big to throw easily, when I came round a bend in the Western Ghats I found myself sandwiched between the side of the mountain and an elephant. It was a year of racking up experiences, collecting stories and learning to be a hack mechanic.
The boyfriend did eventually join me and through the North Eastern Hill States put my jittery dad on the back, but for the most part I was a lone rider.  I had just hit 21, and in a sense it was my coming of age. Having now just notched up 30 years, the itch to do another trip has become unbearable.
For years I have dreamed of a KTM or a BMW GS, the perfect bikes to take me on rougher roads, but I have had to accept that running an underfunded NGO simply doesn’t provide the financial liquidity to fuel that dream.  My 150cc LML scooter wasn’t quite up to the challenge, either.
I had to make a plan. I contacted an ex-fling, who had an old BMW I knew he was considering selling. This required a bit of a deep breath. He had dumped me unceremoniously, before things had even really started, and I had erased his number while nursing my bruises. (He had almost as many tattoos as I had years, a daughter that wasn’t far behind me in those…I thought he was fabulous.)
History aside, his bike wasn’t quite what I was looking for, and, while he was showing it to me he decided that turning it into a cafe-racer (think low and shiny) was a better idea than selling it at all. He did, however, pull a crashed BMW touring bike out of his garage to show me, and that’s when the hunt started for my own. Roll in my new blue monster, a BMW R80RT. Think traffic cop 20 years ago and you have got it.
An internet find, I was beguiled on first sight. She had a slick back tire, a slight tick from her tappets (normal for these bikes I believe) and the roar of a dicky silencer, but she was shiny and spruce and she’d go with a flick of the wrist. I fell for her harder and faster than I had for the tattoo-covered rocker. (And with this one, I thought, it is most likely me that is going to do the dropping.)
Having done some financial calculations, I made an offer by email that I knew was more than I could afford, and less than the bike was worth. The reply came back: Dear Anna, we can only accept your offer under two  conditions (my heart sank): you please stay in contact (e-mails and pictures while on tour) and you provide full feedback over a glass or two of wine and a braai when you come back. (My heart sang). And with that, she was mine. She isn’t going to take me easily on dirt without some fuss, but if I have anything to do with it, she is going to get me through Mozambique to Malawi, and back to Cape Town via Zimbabwe.
The responses to  my new metal have been varied, from, “you’re insane” and “are you gay?” to “I take my hat off to you, girl.” In fact, I have discovered that there are many men who walk around with imaginary hats on that they are more than ready to take off. Here is an imaginary curtsy to all of them.

Brief Bio – Anna Versfeld
Since finishing school Anna has been travelling solo, on and off bikes, whenever and wherever possible. Her life now consists of attempting to juggle running the capoeira non-profit organisation she co-founded (see www.ceyassociation.wordpress.com) and doing a master’s degree in social anthropology at UCT. For a while she thought that with all of this on the go, the most movement she needed in her life was that of the washing on the line in her yard on a windy day, but she was wrong. Needing a new adventure she is heading off to Northern Malawi on an old BMW tourer for the month of January.