The trouble with writing anything about Cape Town is that a lengthy qualifying preamble is usually required, for the place is a vast cobweb of purple fiction and banal squalor that too easily seduces those who arrive there looking for meaning, or a samoosa, or meaning in a samoosa.
To these people — the sort who gather on beaches to watch unwashed Swedes swinging burning balls of yarn over their heads — one needs to explain that the place is not so much a community as a large exercise yard, less a city than a Tudor-themed retirement village perched on a sandbar in the middle of a slowly disintegrating refugee camp, hemmed in by cliffs to the east, sharks to the south and west, and papsak-guided Datsuns to the north. And one must make it quite plain that this settlement is not run by a municipality, but rather molested sporadically by a band of feral naturals.
For the star-children standing gaping on the beach, watching Otto’s hair-lice crackle and flare like a tiny parasitic supernova around his crusty head, this last point would be irrelevant. In many cultures the phrase ‘local government” is a barbiturate prized by healers for its numbing qualities, and to stand down at street level, looking up at the sun-kissed impassive windows of the municipality’s offices, is to be overwhelmed by drowsiness. Curl up on the pavement out of the wind, and you will feel the throb of the great shredder, the core of all municipal operations in Cape Town, steaming and grinding away deep inside the walls, rendering to pretty confetti the housing lists, the minutes of disciplinary hearings, the provincial budget, the petitions of ratepayers, the votes of some undesirable demographic from some election so long ago it has passed from human memory — 2002, 1652, yesterday. Ek wiettie —
And so it has always been. The seasons change, the wind blows, and the confetti is sold to the poor as a nutritional supplement. Which is why this week a certain Mr Horace Mabandla of Doffodil Lakes (Battery 3, Row 114, Unit 1256B) found himself garnishing his only meal of the day with sprinkles of a manual called Koeberg and How It Works: Minimum Nuclear Safety in the Post-Liability Age. Which municipal clerk put the book in The Chute for Downstairs remains vague, but what we do know is that there was an instruction manual for Koeberg, and now there is not.
We know this because official sources are talking about sabotage. Some fiend, the story goes, got into the heart of the nuclear reactor, felt inside his black velvet cape, twirled his pomaded moustache, readjusted his monocle to a more rakish aspect, and flung a bolt down into the inner workings of a generator. Whoosh! Ting! Crunch! Twang! Gasps all round.
Of course, had anyone in the Western Cape local government passed grade nine science on the standard grade, they’d know that the best way to sabotage a nuclear reactor is to leopard-crawl inside, cause a diversion, and then remove the control rods. I don’t know what this means, not having passed grade nine science on the standard grade myself, but it sounds straightforward enough.
The reality is that there was no sabotage, just as dogs do not eat homework. Some local Homer Simpson, gigantic of buttock and slow of mind, shuffling his feet across gantries, kicked it in there and once again brought the city to the brink of extermination.
But the good news is that another instruction manual is on the way. The writing is backwards, and its cover features a striking pastel illustration of a mushroom cloud expanding over a kibbutz, but the gist is the same, and its authors — respected viziers at Tehran University — know just what to do when you drop a spanner in the works: threaten to cap the wells and string a group of human shields around the reactor. The flyleaf contains a handwritten dedication: ‘For Nkosazana, for being a darling and offering to mediate between we oppressed and the Great Satan. Kisses, Mahmoud.”
Thank God for rogue states.