Sunday, 20 July 1986 – The Canned Hunting Sickness & Dining with White Liberals

After spending the night with Peter and his family in Grahamstown, I accompany Peter on an early morning run.  He leads me up and down steep hills for 67 minutes.  I’m bushed.  This guy is in great shape for age 44.  He has run marathons including the Comrades, an 80km bruiser from Durban to Pietermaritzburg.

Henry (another Rotarian) picks me up after breakfast and drops me off at Johnny and Lodene Pohl’s farm, some 35 kms northwest of Grahamstown.  These are people of mixed English-Afrikaner background who mostly speak English.  Johnny is an intelligent and slightly pudgy fellow of about 45.  Although past 40, Lodene is a very striking, thin brunette. 

Johnny drives me out to photograph his bontebok herd.  These are beautiful black and white, hoofed beasties with long straight horns and are somewhat between the size of a mule deer and an elk.  Johnny charges people R800 to R1200 to shoot them.  Trophy hunters come from around the world to get one.  Johnny drives the hunters to within a few hundred feet of the herd which stand around like sitting ducks.  After the kill, Johnny cuts the head off for the trophy hunter, then uses the rest of the body for meat.

While I try to be accepting of subsistence hunting, I just can’t get my mind around trophy hunting – especially canned hunting.  Who could enjoy killing one of these bontebok for fun?

I have mixed feelings about Johnny’s role in this “sport”, as he is managing and maintaining a herd of relatively rare animals.  The trophy hunters strike me as total jerks, however.  They come all this way to spend an hour or less driving out to the herd and shooting an animal which you could almost get with your eyes closed. 
All to have a macho trophy for the den.

Johnny tells me the story of an Italian guy who arrived with a video camera.  He had Johnny film him getting his buck.  It took damn near forever before the guy finally got his shot off.  He hit the bontebok in the heart, but it kept on walking as the Italian screamed for it to fall.  It finally did fall, of course, but the trophy hunter was unhappy because the film wouldn’t show him killing it instantly.  These are sick fuckers.  There should be an open season on them. 

After our “hunt”, Johnny and I head back to the farmhouse for a Sunday afternoon dinner.  I learn that Lodene teaches at a coloured school nearby.  She says that her young students know no Afrikaans (only English and maybe Xhosa) when she gets them.  They must learn Afrikaans if they expect to go on to higher coloured grades.  She brings the kids over to her home once a year so they can see the kitchen, loo, and furnishings of a white home.  They grow up in primitive shacks so white houses are totally foreign to them.

Johnny and Lodene are very “verligte” (politically/socially enlightened).  When you meet people like them with positive attitudes about social change who are making contributions to non-white education and advancement, you sometimes have hope for South Africa. 

The big news on the farm is that they are finally getting connected to the national power grid.  South Africa is very nationalized when it comes to utilities including electric power.  There is only one national government power company – no electric co-ops.  Johnny and Lodene put in an application for electricity 20 years ago, and now the line is finally being extended to their farm.  This is a very isolated area.  There are only two or three white farms within a five-mile radius.  Of course, non-whites in the area have “no need” for power, or so the government would have you believe.  It’s going to cost Johnny and Lodene about R6000 for the connection and to wire the house.  Then they’ll pay about R150 per month in electric bills.  Sounds steep, but it’s still cheaper than what they currently pay for diesel fuel for their generator, anthracite coal for their stove, paraffin (kerosene) for their refrigerator, etc.  It’s interesting that the RSA is 50 years behind the USA in rural electrification, but they’re about 50 years behind in social attitudes as well.

I catch a ride with Johnny back to Grahamstown since he is taking their 18-year-old daughter to Rhodes University.  She is only a 1^st year student yet has a private room in a hostel (dorm).  We help carry her stuff to her room.  The average black family probably has five people living in a room this size. 

We stop off at Johnny’s men’s club for a couple of pints.  After the first round, we get into a conversation with a couple of Johnny’s buddies.  As often seems to happen in South Africa, these blokes push the conversation into politics.  One guy around age 30 or so prefers to stand as he is just recovering from a cyst operation.  He says he used to be radical left but has moderated in recent years.  This chap has come to feel that “You can take the African out of the bush, but you can’t take the bush out of the African.”  He proceeds to relate a litany of failings of black South Africans.  I feel frustrated because, as usual, it’s not his facts that I dispute (although some are very dubious and culturally biased).  My problem is with his attitudes toward black people and his lack of understanding as to why they are the way they are.  But how can I communicate my feelings about this to people who refuse to look at their own shit; to people who have been so bombarded with government propaganda that they wouldn’t recognize the truth if it bit them on the nose. 

Later on that evening, I comment to Henry (very liberal lawyer and PFP member) that I’m surprised how few people in the RSA listen to BBC radio news or other short wave radio programs.  Henry says that South Africans have come to feel that their newspapers are relatively unbiased.  Even liberals rely on the local press although they ignore the government-controlled SABC radio and TV news.  But Henry is quick to point out that people can’t get the full story on the South African situation even from the local English-language press because of government censorship.  He talks about how poor an education one gets at the Rhodes University Journalism Department, the only English-medium journalism school in the country.  He says students there get so confused, they can’t write anything objectively by the time they graduate. 

Television wasn’t introduced in South Africa until 1976.  Former Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd (who was assassinated in 1966) had compared television with atomic bombs and poison gas, claiming that “they are modern things, but that does not mean they are desirable. The government has to watch for any dangers to the people, both spiritual and physical.”

Source: http://web.sabc.co.za/sabc/home/tvob/events/details?id=c01a1640-7f2b-4270-82c3-caea284ad8ad&title=The%20First%20Ever%20SABC%20TV%20Broadcast%20in%20SA

 

Now that I think about it, the only person I’ve ever seen listening to short wave radio news in South Africa was a Wits University geography lecturer.  Interesting to note that this man gives the weather report on SABC-TV!  I wonder how many people don’t listen to short wave radio because they simply would rather not hear all the negative stuff that the rest of the world is saying about them.  And, I must add, despite the relative quality of local papers like the Cape Times, they are totally inadequate when it comes to international news.  Even worse than the Denver papers, if that’s possible! 

Johnny is late getting me over to Henry’s home for dinner, a very embarrassing situation for me.  I’m sometimes the victim of my hosts and drivers in these situations.  Henry and his wife, Joan, have been holding dinner for nearly an hour.  They have other guests as well, an older man and his pretty, younger wife.  Henry and Joan’s home is very beautiful and at least 100 years old.  It’s elegantly furnished, but with taste.  Somehow these people have enough class and education to fit into their environment, so I feel comfortable here. 

At dinner, Henry asks me numerous questions about Colorado and the USA.  He says he believes in pumping his guests for information about their countries.  I enjoy his inquisitiveness – a refreshing change from the apathy of so many of his countrymen and mine when it comes to world geography and foreign cultures.

These people are very anti-government.  They have friends who have been detained.  I learn that six white Grahamstown women are currently in detention.  I feel sorry for my four dinner companions, their families, and friends.  They are very astute, progressive white people, but folks like them are totally powerless in the RSA.  I comment on the political impotence of the PFP (the left-wing opposition party in Parliament).  My friends say they are still optimistic because at least they have a choice when they vote in Grahamstown.  Someone mentions a friend from the Orange Free State (the Alabama of South Africa) who didn’t vote for 40 years because there was never any alternative on the ballot to the Nat (National Party) turkeys running for Parliament.  Recently, the HNP (a right-wing racist Afrikaner party) ran a candidate for Parliament in his district, so he voted Nat, figuring it was better voting against someone than having no choice at all.

The older man (of our dinner companions) thinks the RSA government does open some mail to the USA as well as to African states.  He doesn’t think Zimbabwe or Botswana would open mail to the USA but feels they might open mail going to South Africa.  [Note from 4/17/87:  I seriously doubt that Botswana opens anyone’s mail unless they are suspected of being a South African spy.]  He relates how his hotel room in London was ransacked when he was there doing research on attitudes toward South African sanctions.  He never figured out whether the unwelcome intruders were the British police or South African spies.  If they’d do it there, they certainly would do it here.  When he leaves that evening, he warns me to be very careful about protecting the identities of people I speak to.  However, he doesn’t think the government security people will be able to keep tabs on me moving around like I am and mailing letters from random post offices.

Just before retiring that evening, I talk with Joan about my feelings about servants and lack of privacy from them in South African homes.  I also tell her that I sense some of the South African blacks can tell I’m not from here because I treat them as people.  The thinks it’s pompous of me to feel this way, and I admit I may be reading too much into this.  And given that she is a South African with a very humanitarian attitude, she probably feels offended by my comment.

I’m impressed to learn that both Joan and Johnny speak fluent Xhosa (the language of most blacks in the Eastern Cape).  Johnny had a Xhosa nanny. Joan’s maids don’t even speak English and some of her friends think she’s nuts to employ them as a result.