Houtbaai, South Africa Memoir

This is a photo taken this past summer by my friend Sharon of Houtbaai, South Africa. I have a nearly identical version that I took in 1989 when along with her husband the three of us drove this same path that she just revisited with their two sons.

We had spent the day touring the Cape of Good Hope, an equally breath-taking place. We had seen wild kudus, baboons that came right up to our car, and penguins on the beach. We'd hiked out to the observation platform with spectacular views of the tip of the cape. All this while Nelson Mandela languished in his cell on nearby Robbins Island.

It was a wonderful, long day and on the way home, Russ suddenly pulled the car over, and we picked up a hitchhiker. The car in question was an Opal: not a big car. With Sharon and Russ in the front seats, the rather portly Xhosa woman took the only seat available in the back next to me. Upon entering, she was as profuse with her gratitude as we were inspired by our Good Samaritan naïveté.

She was trying to get home to a segregated apartheid community on the outskirts of Houtbaai. As we drove there she took hold of my hand and stroked the back of it. In near tears she continued to thank us for our kindness, praises punctuated with the phrase "good sirs" over and over again. Her breath smelled of some sweet alcohol. She told us among other things that it was her birthday and she'd been celebrating it, and that she was a widow.

When we arrived at her neighborhood, we entered through an open access road while a “privacy” wall surrounded the entire collection of simple, cement houses with corrugated metal roofs. Once inside, it was like navigating a maze--a very convoluted labrynth. I found my attention drawn away from our guest and onto the numbers of adult men walking around and standing on street corners. Our presence among them got their attention in a way that honestly gave me great apprehension. Our hitchhiker-guest eventually indicated a particular corner far inside the community, and we left her there refusing the remuneration she offered, while accepting a shower of "God bless you, good sirs!"

Once she had disembarked, we suddenly found ourselves--three white people--in a place that was not ours and where we did not belong. The task of finding our way out suddenly felt paramount in a way that I personally had never felt about anything else before in my life. Groups of people were forming along the path we'd used to enter. Were they just curious or angry? I could not tell. I remember at that point slumping down a little and thinking, "what have we done?"

Russ clearly understood that we'd just found ourselves in the deep end of the pool. Somehow, he navigated us out of there without any trouble, with a sense of urgency that I completely shared. At the time it felt almost like a little miracle. I have traveled and lived all over the world and this was the only time I honestly thought I could be in some really deep shit. Perhaps that's why I remember it so well.