/ 7 June 2004

Adrift in African skies

The pilot, “P”, says nothing about the disclaimer addressed to the passenger, riveted on to a small, steel plate on the dashboard of the tiny aircraft.

The disclaimer reads like this: “Passenger warning: this aircraft has been amateur-built, and does not conform to federal regulations. It is therefore not a standard aircraft.”

What do I make of this? The “non-standard” aircraft is already airborne over the Magaliesburg, headed out past Lanseria and Hartebeespoort dam towards the shimmering, blue-brown wastes of the northern regions of South Africa, the land now several thousand feet below us.

What can you do? As the passenger you have already signed a disclaimer telling the authorities who govern our post-democratic airspace that you will hold no one — neither the pilot nor the authorities themselves — responsible for any disaster that might befall you during this flight.

As Steve Biko would have put it: “Black Man, you’re on your own.”

Except I don’t feel lonely. Pilot P (who shall remain nameless to protect his identity) is a close friend, and I have signed the disclaimer because we have agreed to set off on an interesting quest that is of deep interest to both of us. His skill in piloting us on a wing — and, if need be, a prayer — in his tiny, beloved, Kit Fox light aircraft is what I have submitted myself to.

(Pilot P, need I add, could be described as a “historically white male”. Me — locked tight into my four-way safety belt in the passenger seat with the ominous warning from the federal authorities staring me in the face — I can best be described as a hysterical black male doing his best to hold his primitive emotions in check as the tiny kite takes to the skies.)

Me and P, we’re not exactly off to find the Wizard of Oz. We’re off to find a real wizard, a wise black man who resides in the depths of one of our country’s former Bantustans. Which is the only place you are allowed to find him, these days.

And the only way we can reasonably find him and be back before supper the next day, P assures me, is to ride off on his perilous broomstick with the federal warning on the dashboard.

I look down at the ground trailing increasingly dizzily below me, the Earth as we know it moving south beneath our flimsy wings as we head due north. It strikes me that I have not updated my will in a very long time. These things, flying off on broomsticks and suchlike, happen almost on the spur of the moment. You do not have time to think of everything. But this self-justification is followed by a consuming, gut-swallowing guilt at your unlimited capacity for seeking after the elusive truth, no matter what the cost, and without regard to the consequences for those we have (temporarily?) left behind.

And so we bounce around the perimeters of several mountain ranges that you never paid much attention to before when you were living down there on the ground.

No visible means of support except the air that we breathe, and that we have always taken for granted. And somehow, thanks to this same air that now breathes beneath our wings, we sail past the mountains, and they leave us alone. Out over the plain now. Most of South Africa, it turns out, is a wide, flat plain, framed by occasional ridges of green hills and mountains. You can fly over it forever.

How high can you go, flying forever like this in a miniscule flying machine that is so basic you can see the ground in the gaps between your feet?

But higher we go, nevertheless. Trust, you say to yourself. And thrust into the blue haze of a beautiful morning. There’s no going back, anyway. It is time to relax.

I slip into a dream world as the former nuclear arms project at Pelindaba slips away to the right, with its myriad minarets of tall, yellow concrete waste-gas cylinders thrusting into the sky like a blasphemous smirk at the gods.

The city of Pretoria is distantly out there even further to the right, the sting cut out of its tail.

“What do they mean, ‘federal’,” I ask myself, almost slipping into a hypnotic daze. “Whose ‘federal’ is it anyway?” South Africa has never been “federal”, and it is obviously not the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, which slumped unlamented into history some generations ago.

Some other federal power has decreed that this drifting bird that is now my only connection between heaven and the shackles of mundane things on the ground should have no “standard” credentials.

Probably the United States federal government, which wants everyone to jump to its tune and in whose country the thing was manufactured. So the heck with them. I will fly in a non-standard, unfederated plane if I want to. I am, after all, my own man.

P has punched a series of commands into his super-simple, super-complicated iPod mini machine, and suddenly the dull buzz of the engine in the headphones is replaced by Stan Getz playing Desafinado.

The sweet tones of Getz and Gilberto, recorded in the early 1960s in New York City, are occasionally interrupted by our contact with each other on the communication system, and with air control somewhere out there beaming up instructions from the ground, guiding our path with their cryptic, coded messages through these perilously empty skies. “Desafinado at 4 500 feet” will become the motif for our journey into the ether.

Two men cut off from civilisation in an unlikely flying machine, headed out to the homelands. Floating on air through the spaces of the undefined: “desafinado,” as they say in Brazil.

We drift on. Somewhere, two hours up ahead, with the whole history of the country behind us, we’ll drift to the ground like a feather. Or drop like a stone.

For now, the only safe policy is faith.