The Road to Hell

Hungover and travelling the dopamine highways of  hell 

July 2014. I am on the road to hell. The N10 from Port Elizabeth to Cradock, paved not with good intentions, in fact barely paved at all, but potholed and crumbling at the shoulders, truncated with an annoyance of stops-and-goes. It’s the middle of winter in the middle of nowhere where the mountains are the colour of burnt toast and the flaming orange roadside aloes hurt my bleary, hungover eyes.

I am researching a story on the apartheid days when the land was caught in a bad magic. I was a journalism student in the Eastern Cape in the 80's when the security police unleashed their metaphorical dogs with snapping-snarling-slavering chops… and there came the roadblocks, the round ups, the raids; the torture hideaways, the splash rooms and screening centres, the scrubby badlands behind desolate sand dunes. 

Long, straight roads to a fearful past 

I am not just on the road to hell but flashbacking to the time when this road’s signposts read: Imprisonment, Poisoning, Disappearances, Murders, Torture. And sound-surrounding me, in these burnt toast mountains is the collective scream of that history as people were shocked and helicoptered, chained to the ceilings, had their faces smashed against the walls, as people were dangled over cliffs, beaten into comas, shot in the back, had their penises crushed, their vaginas cattle prodded, brutalised and broken forever in the name of apartheid.  

Eish. I have left the dregs of the whisky at my cousin in PE where I spent the night before trying to process the past, and now I am knee-buckling under what she calls a hondnaaipoesfuck hangover. It’s appropriate to travel the road to hell with a hangover from hell, I guess. “Ever since I can remember”, wrote Laurens van der Post in The Lost World of the Kalahari, “I have been struck by the profound quality of melancholy which lies at the heart of the physical scene in Southern Africa. I recollect clearly asking my father once: ‘Why do the vlaktes and koppies always look so sad?’He replied with unexpected feeling: ‘The sadness is not in the plains and hills but in ourselves.”’

The embankments of disappearance

I am not the only person on the road to hell. Behind me, and he will behind me all the way from the PE turn off to Cradock itself, is the most grim-faced truck driver I have ever seen in my life. He is concrete-jawed, hollow eyed, his brow an anxious concertina. At every stop-and-go he just stares straight ahead. He doesn’t acknowledge me at all. Even when I get out at one stop-and-go, shivering in the miserable winter and give him the desultory sharp, thumbs-up. He just stares straight ahead.

The road to hell is, well, hellish. I nearly get mugged in Cookhouse when I stop at a garage off the highway. As I drive into the forecourt my car is surrounded by a gang of feral tic-head okes, okes they used to call Bushies in the bad old days, half-coloured, half Xhosa. As my windows darken, I put foot and drive off quickly, adrenaline pumping, heart pounding.

Monument to the Cradock Four 

The final stop-and-go is as we approach Cradock and Lingelihle township, on the outskirts of which stands the Brutalist monument to the Cradock Four, heart of my research. Four giant slabs for four men who were brutally murdered by the Eastern Cape security police in 1985. They were beaten, set upon by dogs, stabbed, burnt. It’s a peculiar monument, stark and Stalinist, windblown and empty but full of stories about embezzlement and mismanagement. I sit sadly in my car in front of the grim-faced truck driver, thinking with whisky-breath sadness of the Cradock Four. And then grim-faced truck driver behind me gets out of his cab and as he walks towards the scrub for a pee, I catch a glimpse of his t-shirt and it says: 1 564 days without smiling.