Columns in the historical city of Palmyra
Helen Zille touches the tarmac of Cape Town International Airport with her toe as if to sense whether it is of colonial quality. Happy with the strength of it — imported rock, hopefully, mixed and smoothed over under strict supervision, probably — she lowers her full weight on to her foot, all the while holding on to the terminal building until she let’s go, but not without a fight.
Clutching on, her fingers linger for a moment before they break free to follow her body on an arduous journey straight into a stiff southeaster pushing in from the sea. Welcoming the trade wind under her arms she mulls the many virtues of colonialism: that wondrous system that proved, much like current-day waterboarding, how forcing something down someone’s throat for long enough can bring them around to your point of view.
She pauses and turns toward the Hottentots-Hollands Mountain in the east to take in a phenomenon, perhaps not the direct result of colonialism, but emblematic of the early settlers’ grace when they gave the indigenous folk the honour of at least half its title.
She turns on her axis ever so slightly to the north, facing Franschhoek now, not without at least some awe for a colony within a colony blasting holes in the earth – naming the holes after themselves – and bringing to these shores remarkable words for unremarkable things such as garages and cul-de-sacs.
Prolonging the inevitable, she turns to the south to face Boulder’s Beach. “Now that’s how you colonise!” she wants to shout but who will hear, who will — can — appreciate the pin-point organisation of a penguin colony — black and white, mind you — that shares its survival know-how brought all the way from the Antarctic with the desperate birds of Africa?
Pensive now, Helen looks at her leather shoes — Rhodesian — the cross around her neck — Christian — the DStv dishes attached to the shacks of Khayalitsha and it fills her with sadness to know that somewhere, right now, another street name is being changed, piece of land is being marked for redistribution, a blue gum tree is getting chopped down to size.
Disgusted she walks on, apparently the last of the clear-thinking white imperialists left on this dark continent, toward an American-made twin-engine Cessna – the irony – to fly off into the sunset of her political career.
Climbing the steps she turns to look at her province riddled with progress for one last time. She boards the aeroplane and sets off to her next destination — her next port of call — that, as a leper colony, does not perhaps have the same joie de vivre as the Western Cape, but is a colony nonetheless and one, without a doubt, with the foresight to know a good idea when it sees one.