Meeting Mr. Mandela
September 16, 2002 | 12:00am
My problem, when it happened, was doubtlessly the world’s smallest and silliest: I’d just relieved myself in the men’s room at Singapore’s Changi International Airport during a stopover when I discovered – yegads! – that I couldn’t zip my fly. That’s right – I couldn’t find the blasted zipper pull that would draw the two open halves of my zipper shut, and I looked all over the restroom floor to see if it had fallen off, but all I could see in front of me was the harrowing prospect of flying 10 hours over the Indian Ocean with my fly open.
I mean, what if we were hijacked and everyone had to raise his hands? What if Assunta de Rossi decided to take the same flight and lost her mind after munching on the free peanuts and parked herself on my lap? What if the plane crashed and they fished out my body? Thank God my boxer shorts were new. Thank God, too, that I was wearing a longish sportcoat and a black shirt that I promptly untucked to cover my gaping front. I shuffled past airport security to the boarding gate, knees clenched together in the best tradition of Mr. Bean and laptop bag firmly on top of the situation like a Scottish sporran, and slunk into my seat.
The in-flight entertainment and my ever-dependable narcolepsy took care of my anxieties for the greater part of the Singapore-Johannesburg leg. When I woke up, I vented my critical attention on a group of nattily-dressed men a few seats in front of me – slender men all sporting tailored suits, silk shirts, and silk ties, with faces that seemed Thai, seemed Kazakh, seemed Cambodian. I decided for the time being that they were Central Asians – yes, that sounded just about right, Central Asia being large enough to take all kinds – nomads who had traded their horses for a king’s ransom in gold cuff links and shiny shirts. One of them, whom I christened Mr. Mafioso, wore a maroon shirt with matching tie beneath his black suit, and he strutted up and down the aisle like a peacock with an itchy tail.
Now, I realized even then that there was something fundamentally unjust about making snide remarks about other people’s fashions when you can’t even shut your own zipper. So I made a last-ditch effort and fiddled beneath the blanket with my fly – hoping no one was following the action too intently in the half-light of the fuselage, or my grunts and finally my smile might have been gravely misread. My efforts were rewarded by my discovery of the recalcitrant zipper pull stuck under my belt – but of course that’s where it was, how stupid of me! – which I managed to yank down, and to pull back up with the zipper teeth all in place, and – voila! – my problems were over. First thing I’m going to do when we land in Joburg, I muttered, is I’m going to change these pants and toss them into the rubbish bin.
Flash forward another couple of hours: We’ve landed in Johannesburg, gone past through all the "Welcome WSSD Delegates!" streamers and smiles, and passengers are cheerfully picking out and picking up their bags off the carousel like game-show prizes. Yet another half an hour later, I’m the only one left standing, and the carousel grinds to a rumbling halt. No suitcase. No blue suitcase – I’d chosen blue many trips previously, feeling exceptionally smart for having selected an easy-to-spot color among all the generic blacks.
Ten minutes later, I’m filling out a missing-luggage form in front of a laconic young clerk named Johan, asking loudly about compensation and threatening to sue Singapore Airlines, the Republic of South Africa, or whoever was responsible for my wayward socks and shorts. (This has happened to me once before, on a visit to Cambridge. My suitcase caught up with me then just as I was about to leave for home. Previous experience allows me to shrug philosophically, but I’m panicking within, worried about the next time I’d have to run to the restroom, and when the fragile zipper finally gives – or refuses to come open.)
And then I see Mr. Mafioso coming back into the baggage claim area, accompanied by security men, scratching his head and obviously looking for a piece of his lost luggage. I wonder who between us has the worse crisis to contend with: The bum with the open fly, or the dandy without a tux for the evening.
(P.S. I got the suitcase four days later – after it had tumbled all the way to Madrid. Hey, why not me?)
But who can complain about visiting South Africa? It’s a country of spectacular beauty (as well as, let’s hasten to add, spectacular misery, off the tourist path). It’s a country about four times as large as the Philippines in land area, with half the size of our population – 75 percent of whom are black, 10 percent white, and the rest of mixed race or "colored" (mostly Indians and other Asians, including about 1,000 Filipinos). The names of its many languages already tell you something about the variety of things South African: Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, Pedi, English, Tswana, Sotho, Tsonga, Swati, Venda, and Ndebele. Curiously, it has three capitals: Pretoria (administrative), Bloemfontein (judicial), and Cape Town (legislative); Johannesburg figures, I guess, as its commercial center. We were booked at an inexpensive (US$22 per person per night) bed and breakfast called the Sunset View in Pretoria an hour away from Joburg, perched prettily on a hilltop. South Africa’s unit of currency is the rand, going for about 10 to the US dollar.
"It looks and feels just like California!" exclaimed my companions as we rode out of the airport in a rented van, but the scenery reminded me more of Australia, perhaps because of the ubiquitous eucalyptus lining the roads.
Our driver-cum-guide was a beefy Afrikaner named Tienie, who was anything but; he was exceedingly patient and pleasant, charging our party of five or six fairly for the daily commute to Joburg for the WSSD, finally taking pity on us and throwing in a sidetrip for not much more, to see the lions and rhinos or to do some shopping at a roadside crafts market.
Johannesburg is a sprawling inland metropolis, home to nearly five million people. The posh suburb of Sandton, where the World Summit was held in South Africa’s equivalent of the PICC, looked and felt very much like a white enclave, which Tienie assured us it was: "No black businesses here." Apartheid – think of it as a human form of color-coding – was officially abolished in 1994 with the triumph of Nelson Mandela and his comrades, but other, practical forms of apartheid seem to remain. There’s a small black upper class that zips across town in Mercedes-Benzes, but the choicest property is still owned by whites, whose houses in our corner of Pretoria all sported full-height steel fences, behind which lurked the inevitable pair of gargantuan guard dogs who lunged fiercely at every fence we passed. Signs proclaiming "Armed Response" were plastered on every gate or gatepost.
(To be continued next week, featuring the WSSD itself, and yes, Mr. Mandela.)
Mrs. E (Mr. E is writer Silvino) was also a writer and editor, but she was first and foremost a teacher, someone who had that exceptionally rare ability to coax the best out of her students and to inspire them to excel in their professions. I never got the chance to be one of these students, but the testimony and the achievement of those who did – such as theater director and playwright Anton Juan – should tell us enough of what kind of teacher she was. She was, to me, thoughtful and generous, reading nearly every one of these columns and giving me her succinct comments afterwards.
Her remains were cremated yesterday, but it will take a lot more than scorching heat to eradicate her abiding influence in our department and university.
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