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Outside Magazine, June 2004

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Technicolor Darkness (cont.)


	Ed February at his home in Cape Town (Jimmy Chin)

I GOT MY FIRST GLIMPSE of Ed February in 1991. He was clinging to an overhang on Cape Town's Muizenberg Peak, on the cover of the British climbing magazine Mountain. Already the world's best-known black climber, he was famed for his bold traditional routes on cliffs near Cape Town and an ungodly number of first ascents with his protégé, Andy de Klerk. He sported a tight Afro, like a muscular Jimi Hendrix. When I finally met him in the flesh, on a vulture-infested rock tower in Cameroon in 1998, his hair and beard were flecked with gray, as befits a professor.

Ed is voluble, softhearted, irascible, loyal to friends, and drinkative when it comes to single-malts. He's also the most optimistic South African I know, with little patience for those who've given up on the country's teething problems. He prefers to point to the rural villages getting electricity and piped water for the first time, courtesy of President Thabo Mbeki's black-led African National Congress government. At the Mountain Club of South Africa (MCSA), he has been the "intergenerational go-between," as Andy puts it. The bar in the Cape Town club room was Ed's brainchild, as were the monthly Tuesday-night socials. Yet until recently, his fellow members, nearly all of them white, had no inkling of the depth of the anger inside their friend.

To understand where Ed February's head is, you have to know that for most of his life, climbing has been a series of humiliations. Take the time in the Cederberg Mountains, in 1978, when Ed and Dave Cheesemond were denied a hiking permit. The ranger told them they couldn't hike separately—there had to be two people in a party—or together, because mixed-race hiking was also not allowed. Or again in the Cederbergs, in 1983, when Tinie Versfeld fell and cracked his head. Standing at the whites-only entrance at the Clanwilliam Hospital, trying to help his Afrikaner friend stay upright, Ed was ordered to take Tinie to the black entrance. There, another white nurse refused them entry. Like a scene out of Kafka, the two men bounced back and forth for painful minutes until Ed pleaded that the patient just needed a few stitches.

"The system couldn't conceive that two guys of different color could be hanging around together," he remembers. "They didn't know how to handle it."

Under apartheid, which means "apartness" in Afrikaans, almost all interactions between races were prohibited. Laws classified people as "white," "black," or "colored"—for the many South Africans descended from Malays, Indians, and other Asian slaves and émigrés. "Nonwhites," the term still used for anyone who is not Caucasian, were forcibly relocated, their homes sometimes bulldozed to prevent their return. Blacks couldn't vote; the Immorality Act banned interracial marriage.

Ed was born after the clampdown, in the northern Cape Town suburb of Wynberg, in 1955. He describes himself as "black," though the apartheid government deemed him "colored." He knows little of his family history, save that his grandmother was Javanese and that February is a slave name, the month of some ancestor's emancipation. Nevertheless, his skin color meant he was in for hard times. Eighty percent of the country was effectively off-limits, including national parks and game reserves. But each summer, Ed's father, Ronald February, a schoolteacher, and his mother, Helen, who worked at the University of Cape Town library, circumvented the ban by piling Ed and his two brothers into their Hillman sedan and driving over the borders to camp in Lesotho, Swaziland, and Mozambique. "They had the same viewpoints as everyone else," Ed says. "The love of nature, the love of wildlife—primarily because that's what middle-class South African people are into."

Drumbeats of the struggle punctuated Ed's youth: the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre, in which white police shot and killed 69 black protesters; Mandela's imprisonment for high treason, in 1962; the bloody Soweto student riots of 1976. In college, Ed vented his rage at sit-ins that often ended with the police pulling out their quirts—or whips. "The first couple of protests, you get caught and beaten up," he says. "Then you learn to run away."

In 1977, Ed led a class walkout at the University of the Western Cape, a school for nonwhites, over a white history teacher's revisionist lesson, in which Afrikaners were the chosen people. "I turned to the class and said, ‘This is bullshit; you shouldn't be condoning it,' " he recalls. Only a few students followed him out. For outbursts like these, Ed's teachers eventually flunked him, so he hauled up to Johannesburg and trained as an industrial radiographer, testing welds in an oil refinery.

"I think I'm probably more bitter about it now than I was then," he says of apartheid. "Then, it was the system, it was how things were. They had everything; I had nothing. It's how it was. You didn't go around feeling anything about it; you just dealt with it."

Ed's way of dealing was to turn to the mountains. "It was a pretty sick society," he says. "Climbing was normal."

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