buy generic isotretinoin online cheap Got up late this morning, after breaking the fever and soaking through my clothes. Feeling much better, in general. Got a “map” – really a kind of travel guide to South Africa with decent maps, as I can’t even be sure that maps, say of the various provinces of the country, are actually commercially available. The book we got is hardly great but will have to do. South Africa is odd in this way: it will seem utterly modern and civilized in one sense – water-systems are excellent here, for instance, and there are malls which look exactly like ours – but then some other thing we might consider normal will just be absent here. The central heating which is lacking at the house where we are staying is apparently lacking everywhere: I met a woman from Greece who is teaching at the university here, just arriving two weeks ago. She was a bit scandalized that there was no heat anywhere – it was cold, and there was really nowhere to go to warm up. She would have to wait another month for the brief winter to end.
We drove across the desert – I suppose not technically a desert, rather a semiarid plateau – which is featureless and bare. It looks like many of the blander places in the American West. The physiological demands that aridity places on plants are so extreme that the vegetation of these places seems to bear a general resemblance: brown grasses, gray-green twiggy shrubs, and occasional small thorny trees seem to be the template. Almost all the land on either side of the highway was fenced, and I presume is used for cattle: we saw cows but also camels and ostriches.
Here in Kimberley now, and staying at the Kimberley Club, the old imperial hub of the country, which is a bit fallen from grace, being listed as a budget accommodation option for the likes of us. Cecil Rhodes was one of the founding members and the establishment is littered with memorabilia of the Boer War. This is the border today of the Cape Province, then the limit of the British sphere of influence. Dutch Afrikaaners established their own republics beyond this limit in the 19th century to get away from British control – the Orange Free State and the Transvaal Republic – and only later, in the 20th century, were they brought under British sovereignty, largely because, much to their enrichment and grief, great veins of gold were found in their republics.
In the Kimberley Club.
The club is refreshing to my eyes: South Africa is not a timber-producing country, and wood is only rarely found in interiors (and almost never used on exteriors). But this club is all oak panelling and mahogany details. There is nothing really exquisite – Mark Twain probably visited five hundred clubs of this architectural quality over the course of his travels – but everything has that solid, late 19th century comfort and polish to it. It ages beautifully too. We took our dinner in the dining room here, which was excellent and for us very cheap – a glass of wine with the meal was $1.50.
The town itself feels quite past its glory: even the Kimberley Club has closed off its main entrance, for “security reasons,” and is accessed only by its back door, which is closer to a parking lot. The 19th century buildings around the club have been mostly ripped down, and replaced by ugly modernist things, without ornament and without beauty.
I am a slave to beauty in the end. I mostly forgive Henry Frick because of the museum he left us; Justinian is acceptable to me as an emperor because of Hagia Sophia; Omar I take because of his mosque. The 19th century imperialism left us fine things, which have a chance now of outlasting the misdeeds. But the wealth created in Kimberley in the 20th century – mining still goes on here – has not paid us sufficiently in beauty, and for this I blame it. As much as we can root into the injustices behind the great works of art, in the end there is something right about something beautiful, which justifies itself. I imagine the Taj Mahal would never have been certified Fair Trade, but it makes no difference anymore.
But Rhodes is still a controversial figure here – his statue at Cape Town University was recently taken down due to protests. All I can say about the protests is that I hope they put a better statue of a better man in his place. Of Rhodes we can say that at least he threw a few billion to conscience, and did it the honor of considering it worth the buying off. And he had his hand in things of beauty, and left them behind him for others to enjoy. Elsewise I don’t think there’s much there. Politically, his legacy is being taken as part of the larger question, which is, whether the colonial project in Africa will endure, and in what form. In terms of cultural prestige, it probably is stronger than ever – most people on earth would want their children to be Rhodes Scholars, which is more or less to be an ambassador to the colonial project – but politically, we will see what happens. The locked front door felt like a symbol: there was a siege mentality, and a sense that places like the Kimberley Club, with oak panelled dining rooms and mahogany banisters, were not guaranteed a place on the continent.
But Rhodes certainly is guaranteed a place in African history. He turned De Beers’ farm into DeBeers, a company virtually synonymous with engagements in the western world. To this day mining is 60% of South Africa’s exports. And after driving across the eastern part of the interior of South Africa to get here, I must say, this is an area well-made for the extraction industry. Dry and barren – the sort of place where you take what you can get and hope to retire to some other, nicer place.
Post a Comment