Facing South
Maps where South is up are curiosities (old Arabic maps featured that orientation, before global standardisation stepped in). And of course Flat Earthers put the Arctic North in the centre and the South to the unexplored periphery: apparently if you really made it to the middle of Antarctica, you'd be falling off the edge. Makes perfect sense. Amundsen might have a thing or two to say about it all but he's dead and Norwegian; someone from the far north seeking the far south. Polar bears finally meeting penguins. But spotting the southern cross in winter skies here, pointing to that elusive pole, the south is about darkness for me, the periphery, but emptier somehow: ships heading out of Cape Town harbour and heading south on polar missions, only fathomable because there's so little land between here and there. The hidden places that the sun misses. The still point in our souls that we forget in our insta-lives.
Long ago in London I gained an affinity for the South as a place with a different perspective. Being a southpaw I guess I always had this idea, and 'Sarf of the River' in the nineties definitely had an edgier reputation than North London. Though I gave up long ago on the idea of writing about it. I think prompted by seeing an ironic prize offered for "that rare first novel not set in Oxford or a squat in south London." Note to twenty-something self: a little more life experience still needed.
Crossing the equator for the first time I landed in Johannesburg, and from the tarmac it looked like Africa was supposed to, warm and dry with yellow grass. Cape Town was further south still, cool and raining, suspiciously like the London I'd left behind. But even Cape Town central actually lies in the north of what has become a sprawling metropolis. So I remember my first metro train trip south to Fish Hoek, nearly thirty years ago in a spring storm, with huge swells visible as the train caressed the False Bay coastline. It made me aware of the mystery beyond: and, like all peninsular zones, of the importance of the sea to life here. Before Fish Hoek on the train line there's St James, named originally for Filipino Catholic sailors who were revering a favourite saint (‘Santiago’ would have been a little too wayward for a British colony perhaps). Kalk Bay is next along the way: some of those Filipinos became absorbed into the fishing community there (still dominated by small boats rather than the big trawlers taking too much); a community of brown-skinned people, Muslim and Christian alike, skillfully evading (for the most part) the forced removals that happened elsewhere in the south peninsula.
Kalk Bay beach was one of the few on this coast declared "non white" in the apartheid decades, the white authority's 'generosity' only extended because the beach is squeezed under the railway bridge and looks out at the fish heads of the harbour. My daughters' favourite outing when small was to Kalky's for grilled fish and chips with the mense. Out at sea there were poachers, overfishing and often undetected in these big open waters, off our long coastline: Spanish, Chinese, whoever: far from home and looking for profit. I sat in a house on the hillside looking out at the ocean, discussing fishing quotas and abalone. I dived into the coral at Windmill Beach, saw a curious octopus and pyjama sharks, striped purple and black. Later I returned with a hiking group, beginning to explore the soft hilltops and steep slopes of the south, away from the Table Mountain swarms.
Years later a friend who captains yachts took the kids and me out on a trip across the bay, towards one of the many islands the seals colonize. Even Robben Island, far more famous for political prisoners, got its name from Dutch sailors because of its seals. That thick smell, pungent out of the water but swallowed inside it, a blubbery, visceral smell - variations on it smelt too where the fish are sliced at Kalk Bay harbour, fresh from their unexpected end. Sensory experiences change dramatically under the waves - colours, sounds, smells all reduced to our feeble human sense organs. So it automatically becomes quieter, stiller. So we fear those other beings, hidden and sniffing much more, much further than we can; even if our human cousins are the ones actually getting away with carnage beneath the waves. Perhaps it's all part of us avoiding facing the mystery. I acted in a play educating children about sharks, trying to recapture that underwater diversity on the stage, to reduce the terror; the hidden tragedy of the fish continues to the south, too much out of sight and mind. On the shore smelly redbait is washed up, and friendlier-smelling kelp, whose gentle underwater forests hide mermaids’ purses and crabs. Another natural resource, as seen at the only kelp restaurant along the peninsular coast: if kelp was ever part of the local culture here, it needs reviving, or it will just be another South African export, lost to the north. Meanwhile other edible seaweeds cling gently to the limpet rocks, bright green, soft, nori-like.
Holding onto ropes and leaning out into the waves, a local yacht is as close as I've got yet to the claustrophobia of a sailing life. Cooped up emotions, often masculine, have driven our culture's crossings, where the only obvious community is with the temperamental blue. Friends who've worked on ocean crossings describe those long days and nights, avoiding much conversation because it would drive you madder than you already are. And even with the focus of seasoned hands, there are hundreds of shipwrecks off this coast - in fact, hundreds under concrete, where the Cape Town Foreshore stands, a business district reclaimed from the waves. There amidst the banking blocks also stand statues of Jan Van Riebeeck and his wife, Maria de la Quellerie. Except they don't, for the sculptor was given the wrong image, and instead Bartholomeus Vermuyden, a Dutch merchant who never made it to the southern hemisphere, is immortalized downtown. And Maria is actually just the sculptor's twentieth century wife, as no image of the real Maria remains recorded; she's long since gone into the darkness.
Some of my favourite people live in almost the Deepest South of all Africa, close to Simon's Town, until 1975 a British naval base (where Nelson would have loved to die, apparently, though the French ended things for him a little closer to home), and since 1986 home to a new colony of jackass penguins instead of British naval officers. Or perhaps they're one and the same from a certain angle. (The penguins used to live solely on offshore islands but the 'successful' extermination of their local predators allowed them to come ashore).
Of course there is a spot further along the coast, beyond False Bay and out into the Indian Ocean, that claims the most southerly latitude in Africa - Cape Agulhas - although there's little there to keep one for long if you're a busy human seeking more thrills than the dune fynbos needs. Arniston, the southern village nearby, has more charm: rocks and sea caves and stories of shipwrecks. But it's the Cape Peninsula that holds more of the history and the remnants of rebels. When the beaches were bizarrely closed a few summers ago amidst the global panic, South Africans did what we do best: found loopholes, and everyone's right to a small fishing quota was the way to do it. Armed with a cheap permit from the post office and a "collecting bag" line or net, we made our way back to the quieter beaches of the south to get fresh in the ocean. Two centuries ago it was runaway slaves trying to find a place; and here are many wild places few tourists make it to on their race to their photo op at Cape Point lighthouse. At one place, Tunnel Cave, you can witness the sun setting on one side and the full moon rising on the other. An ancient place for ceremony, a modern place for reconnecting. Other hills, other caves, other places to drum and sing in the moonlight. Middens of old shells gathered by the people who perambulated through here before the ships stopped and stayed.
My children's great-grandmother was one of the first to live in Scarborough, the southernmost village, facing the cold Atlantic waters that are pushed up from polar regions; an artist and eccentric doing her best to get away from it all. The currents are often brutal, the surfers are much more serious than the beginners having fun on the gentle Muizenberg coast, the rip tides create shoals and banks that appear and disappear as the year cycles. In Scarborough twenty years ago we first got our hands stuck into clay and straw, helping another parent from the suburbs build a house from bales of straw, away from the bureaucracy. Scarborough continues to be built up slowly, but luckily there are village limits beyond which the caracals and the baboons have their space demarcated, along with the fynbos that blossoms yellow, even when the southeaster dusts them with sand. Community groups protect the nesting grounds of the oystercatchers, the rare plants on the dunes. Boardwalks lead to community gardens and recycling depots. A quiet community far from the city bustle. Cape Town municipal limits reaches right to the Point, meaning here is a city with a section that still aspires to be deeply free of the city.
Further south, Redhill holds the remnants of the 'informal settlement' - a village erected in recent decades by migrants from the east, with the tacit acknowledgment of the private landowner: a very different, more human place to set up camp than some of the settlements growing on the Cape Flats. It's currently an interesting dilemma as people are moved out to newly-built 'social housing' that may actually offer less than they had built for themselves.
Hiking down the coast of the national park last year with my partner, we passed the herd of bontebok, avoided an ostrich, saw eland in the distance. Made friends with rare shade-offering trees, and felt at times like the first couple of the world. The only signs of humanity we saw most of that day were far out at sea, also getting away from everyone as part of their day job. The white sands on the Atlantic shore revealed old ropes and dead sponges, and a multitude of shells. I recalled walks with my small daughters, marvelling at the recorded aeons of living calcium creativity, thrown out by the ocean alongside the ephemeral shoreline stings of bluebottle jellyfish, picked up and examined from rock pool to beach. And hiking up on the False Bay side we refound that human touch, the magic of tidal pools where the stillness has been contrived a little more into presence and pensioners can do glorious quiet laps in the water and salt. A salt that is a mystery in itself, the ocean brine like the maternal womb from where we each came and from where life itself came onto the shore.
I don't know whether I'll ever travel physically further south than I've already reached, here from my Muizenberg base that marks the ‘lentil curtain’ - the northern starting point of the bohemian south; perhaps a trip to Patagonia still awaits. But the ocean I can hear when the south-easter pumps is a constant reminder to access the south inside: the quiet, wise, ancient place of midnight. And when I’m still enough to remember, this peninsula holds plenty of magic yet, for me to discover.