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Outside Magazine, June 2004

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Technicolor Darkness (cont.)


	Between worlds: rock jock Thulani Mazibuko left the Waterval Boven township for a teaching job with Afrikaner climbing instructor Gustav van Rensburg (Jimmy Chin)

THE GEM OF SOUTH AFRICAN CLIMBING is the Milner Amphitheatre, east of Cape Town in the Hex River mountains. A double-tiered cliff the size of El Capitan, the face boasts a host of 5.11 and 5.12 free climbs that parallel a 2,000-foot waterfall plunging over flint-hard quartzite the color of a Florida orange.

I'm with Tinie, Andy, and Tony Dick, a fifty-something Cape Towner who still climbs 5.11. To the dismay of the other two, Andy's brought along his parachute and a Birdman wing suit. His friends always worry when Andy brings along his BASE-jumping rig, especially at 2,900-foot Milner. He's broken his knee on the landing here—twice.

We're a noisy bunch, cackling and joking on the three-hour hike to the cliff. Andy has hidden a 15-pound rock in my backpack, which I carry uphill for two hours before discovering it. As I fish it out, Tony, who is something of a raconteur, tells a story.

It's Angola, circa 1975, and his platoon is taking a break during patrol. They've lit a braai, or barbecue, and they're brewing tea and frying boerewors, spicy Afrikaner sausage. Next second, teapots and sausages explode into the air, and the rat-a-tat of small-arms fire sends everyone diving for cover.

"We'd made our bloody fire over an ammo cache that some rebel lads had buried," he quips.

That war comes up a lot among middle-aged climbers. It's a generational tag: Young South Africans who are cranking hard routes talk about cranking hard routes; climbers over 35 talk about politics, apartheid, and Angola. Forged discharge papers, wildebeests stampeding patrols—these tales are told casually around campfires and on drives across the veldt.

After a long day on the rock, Andy scrambles to Milner's highest point. He pulls out a cigarette, then calls his mother on his cell phone to wish her a happy 68th birthday.

"Where are you?" she asks.

"Milner."

"Are you going to jump?"

"Right now."

"Then be safe!"

He hangs up, steps off the edge, flies for 25 seconds, and deploys his chute. Tinie and Tony breathe a sigh of relief.

Andy is not alone in his cavalier attitude toward danger; in fact, most South Africans seem to share it. One afternoon, I arrive at his furniture workshop, in an industrial park in Kommetjie, a half-hour drive from the city. I'm fresh from reading newspaper reports of a survey by the national police. South Africa is one of the most murderous societies on earth, one story proclaims: 21,738 murders in 2002, compared with 16,204 murders in the U.S., a country with six times the population. To me, the statistics warrant a minor freak-out.

"Why are you so hung up on doom and gloom?" Andy asks.

I look around the shop. Andy was padlocked behind a steel door when I arrived. Electrified wire and Armed Response security signs ring the building. He locks his tools in a safe every night.

"Looks like you're in prison to me," I remark.

"Ah, it's the Wild West out here," he says, shrugging it off.

Andy reluctantly accepts crime as a function of township poverty, which has persisted in the post-apartheid years. "My neighbor was burgled last winter," he tells me. "You know what they took? Food. And warm coats. They left the television."

He takes a thoughtful drag of his smoke, then says, "You should visit a township."

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