What We Lose

My father says that he has been keeping busy. He has been volunteering every month at the community garden on Christian Street, turning compost and watering kale.

“And I’m starting a petition to hire another black professor,” he says, stabbing his glazed chicken with a fire I haven’t seen in him in years.

He asks about Peter.

“I’m glad you’ve found someone you like,” he says.

“Love, Dad,” I say. “We’re in love.”

He pauses, stirring his noodles quizzically with his fork.

“Why aren’t you eating?” he asks.

I stare at the food in front of me. It’s the closest thing to comfort food since my mother has been gone. The unique flavor of her curries and stews buried, forever, with her. The sight of the food appeals to me, but the smell, suddenly, is noxious; the wisp of steam emanating from it, scorching.

“Are you all right?”

All of a sudden, I have the feeling that I am sinking. I feel the pressure of my skin holding in my organs and blood vessels and fluids; the tickle of every hair that covers it. The feeling is so disorienting and overwhelming that I can no longer hold my head up. I push my dinner away from me. I walk calmly but quickly to the powder room, lift the toilet seat, and throw up.

PART ONE (#ulink_4e28ca17-48f4-5d52-8dae-4c309af0574f)

I was born as apartheid was dying. In South Africa, fervent national pride and multiculturalism were taking hold as the new national policy. I was born in America, my mother was born in Johannesburg, and my father in New York.

My mother’s entire family still lives within twenty minutes of each other. They are middle- to upper-class coloureds—mixed race, not black. Although my mom involved herself in some of the political unrest (she proudly saved a newspaper clipping from 1970 that has a photograph prominently featuring a handwritten sign she made), my family was quiet and generally avoided the brunt of the conflict.

My father was raised in New York and went to college in Philadelphia. In the year after his graduation, he went on a trip volunteering in Botswana. My mother was there, partying with some of her militant friends. Ostensibly, they were there collecting literature to distribute back home.

“Your mother was inescapable,” my father told me. Not that she was ravishing, or enchanting, but that he simply couldn’t get away from her. “When I went back to Philadelphia, she called me. And she called me again. When I called her back, she asked if she could come to America to live with me.”

My mother befriended people aggressively. She was extremely opinionated and often abrasive. I sometimes hated the rough manner in which she dealt with people. Her favorite words were four-lettered, and she liked to yell at waiters in restaurants and people in line at stores.

My mother’s roots were deep and strong. Her relationships with others were resilient; she had friendships that persisted over decades, oceans, breakups. Her best friends were all former boyfriends.

Most of her friends (and she had many) spoke of her offending them shortly after they met. One story my mother told often was when one of her best friends threatened to commit suicide after her boyfriend left her. She went to my mother for comfort, and my mother slapped her across the face, as hard as she could. Her friend’s face was bruised for a week. My mother used this story as an illustration of how to be a good friend.

She had close bonds with the other black nurses at her job, with whom she could affect a West Philly accent to match the best of them. And she had a coterie of South African expats from our area, as well as some from Washington, D.C., and Boston, whom she sometimes invited to our house for dinner or to watch a soccer game. They called our house at all hours and begged my mother for medical advice in Afrikaans or Zulu. Their child had a fever, or their mother-in-law was acting crazy again—was it dementia, or just moods? Many of them lacked green cards and insurance. My mother was the reliable center of their ad hoc community.

My father was a mathematics professor for many years before he was promoted to the head of the department at the college. He was flown around the country to give talks and make inflated speeches about their research. My mother migrated upward from nursing assistant to head nurse at the university hospital.

I have never personally been a victim of violence in South Africa. I remember a neighbor who was stabbed when I was little—the neighbor knocking on my grandmother’s door late at night; the enamel bowl, with water turned pink and hazy, that my grandmother used to wash his wounds. My mother was the victim of a smash-and-grab in the hills around our vacation home. The assailant broke the car window and snatched her purse from her lap. She never drove alone again.

But most of what I experience is secondhand, from my family and the news. Together, the stories and pictures constitute a vision of death and carnage that is overwhelming, incongruous to the plainspoken beauty of the country. I see no evidence of the horror, which is what makes it terrifying to me.

This is the secret I have long held from my family: South Africa terrifies me. It always has. When I am there, I am often kept awake in bed at night, imagining which combination of failed locks, security doors, and alarms will allow a burglar inside, inviting disaster. I fear that we will be involved in one of the atrocities we learn of daily.

After apartheid, crime in South Africa has been insidious and seemingly limitless. Citizens live behind locked doors, security gates, electric fencing. The more money a family has, the more advanced the methods of protection. I have seen the progression of defense methods in the years I have been visiting. When I was younger, every house, if it was large enough, had a crown of barbed wire atop its high security wall. Since then, the barbed wire has been exchanged for electric fencing. Single fortifications for each property are no longer enough; now many streets and neighborhoods are blocked off with turnstiles and patrolled twenty-four hours a day by hired guards.

The security of my hometown in Pennsylvania was way past anything my South African family could imagine. The town was populated by stately old colonial mansions, most of them worth millions of dollars. When family members visited from South Africa, they would ask, where are the security fences? Our neighbor, an old widow with a stubborn streak, slept with the front door wide open through the night. Is she mad? my aunts and uncles would ask. She may have been, but in that town it barely raised an eyebrow.

In winter, the houses were adorned by twinkling Christmas lights. My relatives asked if they could take pictures on our neighbors’ lawns. We spent hours driving around to find the brightest displays, in neighborhoods miles away from ours. They would never have done this at home, my relatives said, because people would steal the lights. Robbers would climb up on the fences and the roofs and cut them down, then sell them on the black market for the copper wiring.

In South Africa, there was little rhyme or reason to the tragedies of daily life, but there was social order of an old-world type and magnitude. I didn’t respect her, my mother would often say, because I didn’t speak to her like a child should. But I wasn’t any ruder than my school friends, who treated their parents as older companions or siblings. This type of equality was at the root of my mother’s feelings of insecurity. In South Africa, elders were treated with extreme dignity that, in my eyes, bordered on the comical. My cousins never addressed their parents with pronouns face-to-face. Instead, even my middle-aged aunts and uncles with grown children of their own referred to my grandfather as “Da” or “Daddy” instead of “you.” Thus, a casual request turned into an awkward and foreign-sounding statement, as they were forced to say, “Can Daddy please pass the salt?” I could never imagine such a sentence falling from my American lips.

One of my school friends called both her parents by their first names. My mother found her so novel and strange that she actually liked her. She called this friend her favorite, with heavy sarcasm. Whenever I spoke my friend’s name, my mother would chuckle and shake her head, as if delighted at the thought that this girl actually existed.

Fear of flying is most often an indirect combination of one or more other phobias related to air travel, such as claustrophobia (a fear of enclosed spaces), acrophobia (a fear of heights), or agoraphobia (especially the type that has to do with having a panic attack in a place you can’t escape from). Flight anxiety can also be linked to one’s feelings about the destination. It is a symptom rather than a disease, and different causes may spur anxiety in different individuals.

There are many Web sites offering courses or information that treat flight anxiety, many written by pilots or ex–air transportation professionals. One of the sites, promising a meditation-based approach to aerophobia, lists an example of destination-associated flight anxiety.

A woman in Maryland is in a long-distance relationship with a man in California. The relationship has recently turned bad, and the woman decides that on the next planned visit she is going to break up with the man. She has preexisting flight anxiety, but the anticipation of the breakup compounds her symptoms. She is unable to sleep for weeks before the trip, and dreams of the plane she is on falling out of the sky and crashing into the Rocky Mountains. Her anxiety is so severe that she almost decides she isn’t well enough to make the flight, but on further consideration, she decides that the relationship needs to end. Breaking up wouldn’t be right over the phone. So she takes the flight and is nervous the whole time, even though she takes a Xanax just before liftoff, as prescribed by her psychiatrist. She breaks up with the man, which turns out to be difficult but necessary, and notices that her anxiety is much less severe on the returning plane ride.

We were on our way to Johannesburg from Cape Town, where we had just switched planes for the two-hour flight. It was twilight. A rainstorm had been going for the past few hours and thunder was just beginning to rumble far off in the distance. We left the earth moments ago; the plane finished its ascent and was beginning to level off. We were starting to relax in our seats, ready for the flight attendants to return to the aisles with their drink carts. All of a sudden, the plane jumped into the air, as if an invisible hand had pushed us higher. We rocketed upward, our bodies whipped against our seat belts. People screamed. Two people fell into the aisle. One lay there groaning; the other, a young woman of about twenty, screamed, “Mama, Mama!”

Outside the windows, bright light flashed, and inside, the cabin was whitewashed for an instant.

My parents, sitting on either side of me, each grabbed one of my arms. I heard my mother start to pray.

Then the plane righted itself. The passengers around me slowly relaxed, first shakily fixing their hair, tightening their belts, murmuring. Then their voices returned to normal and, smiling at each other, they began pressing the buttons for the flight attendants. “Close call,” I heard someone near me say with a sigh.

The pilot came on the loudspeaker to tell us we had been hit by lightning. Despite our fright, no damage had been done to the plane. The rest of the passengers, including my parents, all seemed to forget the incident after this, but I was frozen in my seat, terrified. My mother noticed and called for an attendant to bring me a glass of red wine. The alcohol soothed the circling thoughts of danger and fear, and soon I fell asleep, though something of this moment never left me.

Most of my family lives in or around Sandton, known as the richest square kilometer in Africa. It is a suburb of Johannesburg, home to luxury malls and complexes of mansions so heavily guarded you can’t even see their street signs unless you’re granted access. Sandton lies a forty-minute drive from some of the poorest townships in the country, where many of the gardeners, housekeepers, and security guards who tend these opulent homes and businesses live. This situation—the close proximity and daily interaction of the ever-stratifying classes—has led to the country’s new postapartheid violence.

I have two aunts who live within the neighborhood limits, and an investment banker cousin who will move into one of the million-rand apartments in the grand Michelangelo Towers as soon as they are built. Our vacation home sits just minutes away from Sandton’s busy commercial drag, in a quieter neighborhood that is on a level of wealth nearly indistinguishable for anyone not from the area.

Oscar Pistorius was born and raised here, and attended a primary school just down the hill from my family’s vacation home. When I heard the details of the killing of his blonde model girlfriend, I found his explanation of the crime plausible. American news outlets made headlines out of his fascination with guns. He joked about arming himself when surprised by the sound of the washing machine. This does not shock me or strike me as out of the ordinary. All of my male family members own guns. My most hotheaded cousin sleeps with a loaded pistol under his pillow. (Miraculously, no fate similar to Oscar’s has befallen him.) I can understand the sense of fear—waking in the night, seeing your bedroom window open, the evening air breezing through the curtains. I can understand reacting with the most force, because in South Africa, the worst outcome often happens. Rarely are you overestimating your own safety. It seems fully possible that he responded reflexively, especially given that he has no legs, and must have felt an ingrained vulnerability for years because of that fact.

But that same vulnerability might have produced an ego in Oscar that would propel him to dominate beautiful women, that would drive him to control a woman as desired and independent—as capable of leaving and being with another man—as Reeva Steenkamp. I chose to believe this story, of the athlete ruined by fame, instead of believing my worst thoughts and fears about my other home country.

From a blog post, “Some Observations on Race and

Security in South Africa,” January 6, 2015, by Mats Utas, a

visitor to Durban from the Nordic Africa Institute

But how dangerous is it really? We try to investigate. Talking to taxi drivers is interesting. A black South African says that he would never walk around in downtown Durban late at night because of the immanent dangers.

He states that people are frequently robbed [during the] daytime or pickpocketed, but investigating further he has only once in his entire life been pickpocketed and never robbed. Nothing has been stolen from his home in one of the residential townships. An Indian taxi driver complains about the increased insecurity in the city, but he has never been robbed during the twenty years (!) he has run the taxi. Once his house was burglarized and the thief stole his wallet, phone and cigarettes—nothing more. His response was to raise the wall half a meter. The taxi agency he works for runs throughout the night, and although most of the company’s drivers are Indians, the nighttime drivers are black, actually Nigerians: “they are much smarter at night”. When we ask him if they are robbed, he simply says no.

Kevin Carter was the first professional photographer to document a brutal necklacing execution, in which a victim has a gasoline-soaked rubber tire placed around their neck, and the tire is lit on fire. His photo of a Sudanese child emaciated from famine, struggling to walk while a vulture gazes at her from the background, came to symbolize the desperation on the African continent in the 1990s. Carter, a white South African born to liberal parents, was drawn to the racial conflict going on in the black townships of Johannesburg. According to his friends, he empathized deeply with the plight of blacks under apartheid and experienced tremendous guilt for being a white South African. This guilt, combined with his constant exposure to the atrocities that were part of his job, were reportedly major factors that led him to abuse drugs.

In April 1994, Carter found out that his photograph of the Sudanese child had won the Pulitzer. A few days later, his best friend, photographer Ken Oosterbroek, was killed in the Thokoza township while documenting a violent conflict. Carter had left that scene earlier in the day, and after his friend’s death, he agonized that he “should have taken the bullet” for him. The Pulitzer-winning photograph drew criticism from those who thought Carter should have done more to save the child, as well as from fellow journalists who found him inexperienced and undeserving of the honor.

In July of 1994, three months after his win, he committed suicide by running a plastic hose from his exhaust pipe to the passenger-side window of his truck. In his suicide note, he wrote:

“depressed … without phone … money for rent … money for child support … money for debts … money!!! … I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings & corpses & anger & pain … of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners … I have gone to join Ken if I am that lucky.”

“Some Observations on Race and Security