We talked about many things during the six or so hours we walked towards the light: family, politics, the crocodiles potentially waiting for us up ahead, the electric fence (which we would later crawl beneath on our bellies, like warthogs), interracial sex, the untimely death of Orlando Pirates striker Lesley “Slow Poison” Manyathela, and Hustler magazine. Phillip said the first thing he would do when he got to Johannesburg – he was still working as
a diesel mechanic, he claimed, in Thohoyandou – would be to buy a copy of Larry Flynt’s skin mag. I still haven’t asked Phillip if he has seen a white woman naked.
THE FENCE #2: Composed of two separate parts, South Africa’s elaborate border fence system delineates the country’s political boundary with Zimbabwe and Mozambique. The two fence systems look very similar. Measuring roughly five metres in width, they both comprise an electrified pyramidal core flanked by two barrier fences to prevent wildlife from touching its lethal electrified centre. Each is about three meters tall. Erected in the mid-1980s, the 62-kilometre Mozambican fence runs from Komatipoort, at the Kruger Park border, to Jeppe’s Reef near Swaziland.
The Zimbabwean fence is four times longer. Originating on a farm known as Eendvogelpan, 20 kilometres west of the Pontdrift border post on the Botswana border, it meanders in a westerly direction for 268 kilometres, to the northern Kruger Park border with Zimbabwe.
Inspired by Vito Acconci’s cryptic walks and Bas Jan Ader’s search for the miraculous, I spent a whole afternoon looking for the western origin of the Zimbabwe fence – because looking is proof and finding something with your own eyes very often contradicts what you read. It was evening when I found the underwhelming origin of the Zimbabwean fence between two small hills, near the Limpopo River, which gurgled, audibly alive but invisible.
PHILLIP #2: The rules are simple: he phones me. Whenever I reciprocate, which is rare, a female voice will tell me that the user is not available. Currently I have two numbers on my phone for Phillip. Had I kept all the others, the list would run to ten, twelve, possibly more. Phillip usually calls at night, or on weekends. Actually, there is no pattern. He calls when he feels like it. “It’s me Phillip,” he will say. Mostly he phones just to say hello. He will ask how I am, and then press me for money, or some form of assistance, a job even. I am writer, I tell him: I don’t employ people.
Once he called to say he’d read a piece I’d written about the slain musician Lucky Dube, who was shot by Sifiso Mhlanga in 2007. Initial news reports suggested that the perpetrators were Mozambicans. In fact, only one of the three accused, Ludwa Gxowa, was Mozambican. In May 2008, during the height of the xenophobic violence that swept across South Africa, Phillip called again. People, he said, Zimbabweans and other foreigners living on the East Rand, were being butchered. He told me he loved me, adding that he didn’t know what to do. Neither did I.
THE FENCE #3: Variously known as the “kaftan”, “nabob” and “Norex” fence, and reportedly once nicknamed “snake of fire” by Mozambicans, South Africa’s border fence was the product of the security innovations and general culture of fear that characterised apartheid’s last decade. In 1980, responding to sabotage operations by the African National Congress, and enabled by the new Key Points Act – security legislation aimed at protecting strategic state assets – the power utility Eskom developed and installed 30 kilometres of lethal electrified fences at various facilities.
Initially all the hardware (poles, insulators and barbed wire coils) came from France, but as demand grew Eskom refined a locally manufactured alternative. In an unpublished 1992 masters thesis archived in the University