People tend to look at me askance nowadays and wonder what I am doing in Johannesburg. ”You’re always travelling,” they say. ”We thought we’d be hearing from you from somewhere else.”
I am half-tempted to defensively pull out my dompas and say back to them: ”Hey, check, I was born here, I live here.” But that is not the full story and they know as much as I know about it.
The truth is that, voluntarily or involuntarily, I have been grounded back on native soil for most of the last couple of years. It’s not that the wanderlust trickled out. It’s more like the urgency of personal and professional matters left unattended for the best part of a lifetime have started to make themselves felt, and home, whether it is where the heart is or not, is where you have to face the music.
”What happened to that whole Air Afrique business,” they persist. ”That was kind of entertaining.”
It’s not that I particularly miss Air Afrique. I miss the dream that it stood for — not far removed from missing the original dream of African independence, which was emerging at about the time I was born, and which is now stranded somewhere between a faded hope and a bloodthirsty nightmare.
Air Afrique took me to many of those extraordinary places on my psychological map. So did Ethiopian Airlines, the continent’s first airline network, and the flagship of those dreams of African pride and unity.
Nowadays, virtually the only game in town is our own national carrier, South African Airways. South Africa, the last territory to finally take its place on the map of realised aspirations for Africa, has somehow nudged aside all the other dreams of the fiery continent.
So there we have it: ”South African Airways — fly the South African dream.”
I do a lot of SAA, but nowadays it’s mostly local.
The dream starts on the highway to the airport. A race-track without rules, where juggernaut trucks racing to Benoni on none of their own business can drive a tannie trying to get on track for Brakpan off into the wilderness and never know it. Hell’s Angels bent on their own destruction, and passengers late for check-in to far-off places gripping their seats and raising their hair as the hotel shuttle driver tries to reassure them that everything is okay: this is the New South Africa.
Check-in is smooth, but hectic. Too many backpackers of uncertain age vying for space in the ever-extended halls of what used to be Jan Smuts Airport, but is now, more than ever, the gateway to the rich, native-free south of the African continent. Nothing between you and the pleasures of the coast but the Big Five and a couple of smiling, charming Negro game wardens to keep you alive.
Upstairs, of course, as you wait to be called to your plane, there is last-minute shopping to be done, and a bar where you will be brought to your senses at the end of your native-free holiday by the extent to which the natives have been allowed to take over at least one tiny corner of the airport — and a lucrative one at that.
Here, even a Model C education is a far cry away. This is raw, undiluted Africa. You stand at the counter and wait while the barman turns away and nibbles at his loaded plate of pap. The room is roaring with thirsty strangers from all corners of the known world, but they are all subdued by the cool arrogance of the African, standing on his own turf behind a well-rounded belly, leaning slightly forward as if to counterbalance his equally full hindquarters.
There is a gasp of anticipation around the room as the barman slowly turns away from his plate, still chewing meditatively, ruminatively. Everyone, from Japanese business people to the Jewish granny from Slough on a visit to long-lost relatives from Lithuania via several generations stranded in Johannesburg, who only just now had been trying to seduce the check-in clerk into not charging for her excess baggage on her return trip to chilly England, is now trying to catch the barman’s eye and grab a final gin and tonic. There is a lot of unseemly smiling going on.
This is a different world from the one we grew up in. It is a welcome thing, but, as the Chinese saying goes, don’t wish for your deepest dreams, because they might just come true. We dreamed of freedom. But its reality is somewhat different from what was fleetingly captured in our separate, searching, desperate dreams.
The old Jan Smuts Airport was a nightmarish triumph of Fascist/Stalinist organisation and architecture. Some of my worst moments were lived out there in days gone by, suspended between returning to my native land and, when faced by the reality of a dream come to life, struggling to get back out of it.
They say that Johannesburg Airport is soon to be renamed after struggle hero Oliver Tambo. I have mixed feelings about this. In the old Air Afrique days, I flew in and out of too many airports named after vanished icons — Murtala Mohammed in Lagos, Houphouet Boigny in Abidjan, Leopold Sedar Senghor in Dakar. The names represent nothing to those flying in and out of their hollow, flaking halls. If anything, rather than giving history its deserved dignity and meaning, they lend it their own hollow, self- serving echo of the present and many dreams deferred.