Homefield disadvantage

A weird combination of events and anecdotes came together yesterday to remind us that in South Africa home doesn't always signify love, or safety, or even quiet privacy. The Cape Town Stormers hosted a New Zealand squad in the three-nation Super Rugby semifinals - but much of the talk in the week leading up to the game focused on the fact that the visitors actually enjoyed considerable support in the Cape Town stands, because of lingering resentment regarding the Stormers' slowness in integrating. Red Crusader uniforms were common in the Stormer stands. Meanwhile, one of L.'s colleagues went out for an hour, only to find that while she was gone a burglar had somehow removed the protective iron bars from one of her windows, shattered the glass, and made his way into her home. And just as L. was receiving that news, I happened to be reading about an infamous series of murders committed in eastern South Africa, in 1983-4, by the Hammer Man, who broke into a number of white homes and... well, I think I'll spare you the details. But I have to add this: an hour later, I got a call, as well, and learned that my credit card had been used fraudulently in a number of attempted transactions. Home field, home, wallet: all easily infiltrated.

So if the private isn't really very private, what do you do? Many South Africans respond -like many Los Angelenos, after the Rodney King riots - by heightening their walls, by redoubling their hired security, by ordering a new layer of razor wire. That's one approach. But we prefer, in our naivete, a simpler one. If home isn't any safer, in the end, than the world at large, than why not simply embrace that larger world? On a day that began with a dense fog that entirely hid the mountain and that then gave way to brief showers, spates of sun, and several rainbows, L. and I played a sort of city parents' tag-team. She took Cleo to an old biscuit mill, now a lively, yuppified morning market, and I then took Cleo to lovely Kirstenbosch, where we played in the small piles of dirt at the base of an imported oak. And then it was time to head south; as L. joined her students for a day tour of the Cape Peninsula, Cleo and I drove through several fishing towns and then peered at the nesting penguins at Boulders Beach. At about 3:30 we met up with L's group at Kalky's, a locally famous fish-and-chips joint where the owner took our order and threw in an apple juice for the thirsty toddler.

I can't say that we weren't a little nervous, later in the day, when we were locking our doors and putting out our lights. But the night passed uneventfully, and the sun rose clear and strong, and now we're making plans for another day in the world.