The last thing I remember, I was casting rather cold words on the spectre of Johannesburg’s billion points of electric light sprawled smugly across the dark Highveld, rising up to meet me as I prepared for my final descent after months of adventuring into the real world of Africa.
I would later have reason to look back on those
sparks of light on the prairie and count them in my delirious sleep like a billion lucky stars. But let us not rush ahead of ourselves.
I was still dreaming of the lazy, semi-Mediterranean lifestyle of Malabo, the Spanish-African village tucked on a northern slope of Bioko Island, just off the Cameroon coast.
Why not stop the world and get off at this remote backwater? I had been asking myself. Why not take time out from the senseless roller- coaster of history?
The lethargic surrender of paradise versus the practical, mechanical realities of South Africa. Courtesy and humility versus 4x4s trying to ride you off the N1 highway, arrogance everywhere in the face of a sliding currency and a looming human disaster of pandemic proportions.
Why not just drop out in Malabo? I had noticed this dangerous seduction creeping up on me during my all-too-brief stay on the island. It had been getting under my skin.
In fact it was Tayo, my self- appointed guide, who pointed out the little bumps just beneath my skin. His eye had been drawn by the way I was scratching away at my irritated flesh.
“Ha, so the mosquitoes bite you?” he asked. “It’s nothing,” I countered confidently. “I read somewhere, though, that there were no mosquitoes on the island.”
Books (damned, lying, white-trickster books all over again) had described how centuries before, the island had been chosen as a comfortable haven for slave traders because of the sweet mountain breezes that kept the speechless menace of malaria-carrying mosquitoes at bay.
“I don’t know,” said Tayo genially. “I think we get mosquitoes here. Us, we been here too long, they don’t bother with us no more. But you!” He pointed to my itching forearms again. “Blood nice and fresh. Still plenty of … how you say? Vitamins!” And he laughed a throaty laugh and took me out into the steaming streets to get breakfast.
Fourteen days after landing in Johannesburg, I feel as if my body is crashing through the floor. I’m alternately chilled to the marrow, like a human rag doll dying on the south face of the Eiger, or I’m burning up like a fire in a timber yard. My head is thumping.
I feel terribly tired, but sleep is out of the question. Something is keeping me suspended between day and night, my mind racing, my appetite gone.
In all these years of roving this continent, I have somehow escaped malaria. Now, unmistakably, I recognise the symptoms.
I give it another day, just to make absolutely sure, to be certain that I am not just wimping out in the face of a silly little attack of sub-tropical summer sniffles. Then I turn myself in.
This is where the hard-nosed practicalities of Johannesburg slip into gear, the electrified prairie versus the romantic, fatalistic heartbeat of the tropical jungle. Count your lucky stars…
Quite frankly, I could go either way.
To survive is a primal human instinct. Johannesburg pulls out all the resources that modern medicine and technology can lay at my feet to help me do it.
At the same time, the rapidly multiplying parasites pricked into my blood, sing a remarkably potent siren song from within the chambers of my own body, lulling me into surrendering to the natural laws of the cycle of life — the laws of Africa.
I hover between them in my bed in an intensive care unit in Sandton, the powerful quinine now in full cry, causing its own counter reactions in my overloaded body — bells ringing in my ears, dreams flowing in a beautiful kaleidoscope of shapes and colours as I drift between “yes” and “no”.
During rare moments of wakefulness, I hang over the side of the bed, arguing with my wife about obscure characters in a television programme called Big Brother, which I have never seen in my life. Her eyes are filled with a strange compassion.
Twenty-four hours later I had no recollection of this conversation.
I think the turning point was when someone (or no one) showed me the latest copy of the Mail & Guardian. “John Matshikiza will be ill for an indefinite period,” it said. In my place, a tract on Hegel, Thabo Mbeki and the ANC, penned by one Pallo Jordan, MP, had been insinuated into the pages of the sacred texts, while I hovered between life and death.
I hit the floor in my bare feet, the hospital gown flapping open in an unbecoming fashion all the way down my naked back.
“I’ve got to go, Doc,” I said, as the worthy and brilliant young man and his nursing staff pursued me through the hospital gates and down towards William Nicol Drive.
“But you’ve scarcely… ,” the doctor murmured.
“Don’t worry, Doc. It’s an African thing. You wouldn’t understand.”
My legs, flowering under the impact of their own inexplicable African renaissance, just kept on running.
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