Not fancying an evening of Abdullah Ibrahim on an empty stomach, we looked around for an early quick fix of food and wine.
The concert was at the Cape Town Convention Centre so the Westin Grand Arabella hotel was handy and we found a bar-bistro place with the soulless, expensive bleakness you would expect at that sort of hotel. Also to be expected, I suppose, was that the food was adequate in quality, ungenerous in portion and vastly overpriced.
The wine list matched it, although the wine was even more outrageously exorbitant. We selected Waterford Cabernet Sauvignon 2007 — our only good idea so far. We decided to forget the fact that, at R350, the mark-up was about 300% (uncompensated for by the lacklustre glasses and by being served too warm) and just enjoyed it — immensely.
It’s a particularly fine example of serious modern Stellenbosch cabernet: ripe but not overripe, well balanced and firmly structured but happily approachable in youth (it should be even better in a few years, though, I think) and desirably delicious.
Sipping and supping, we saw through the plate-glass windows a bus-length limousine pull up outside the Convention Centre. Ibrahim himself? It was unclear but it seemed likely – and suddenly I recalled when I had once before seen the great musician in a car — a noisy little Volkswagen Beetle, 37 years ago. What’s more, I was in the backseat of the car, with him in front, and driving it was someone set to acquire in time renown (of a type) nearly matching his own.
In 1974 Ibrahim was still Dollar Brand. He had returned to South Africa for the first time in many years to perform at a concert at Wits University, as part of the Release Political Prisoners campaign that was being run by the then rather radical National Union of South African Students (Nusas).
Getting Dollar Brand to break his exile was a coup but we student politicos (I was then, I think, editor of the campus newspaper, Wits Student) were pretty cool ourselves, didn’t even consider hiring a limousine and sent one of the few of us to have a car to pick him up at the airport. A friend and I tagged along. The driver and Volksie-owner was good-natured, fat Craig Williamson, a member of the student representative council and later to be fully revealed as a particularly foul police spy.
All I can recall of our famous and unceremoniously treated passenger, regrettably, is that we thought him odd, unlikeable and probably high. This all came back to me while waiting for the auditorium doors to open. In South African wine terms 1974 is far distant but, because it was a famously good vintage, some wines from that year (Nederburg Cabernet Sauvignon, for example) are still drinking very well, if you can find it.
The founding of Waterford Estate was well in the future and Waterford winemaker Francois Haasbroek also unborn (though cellarmaster Kevin Arnold was). All are nicer to have in the country than amnestied Williamson.
As for Ibrahim — well, I think I prefer the sounds he was making back in the 1970s with Robbie Jansen, Basil Coetzee et al, to the fine, smoother stuff he is producing with his New York band, Ekaya. We drained the last drops of Waterford Cab and went to listen to the music.