Black Medicine Hermanus South Africa

Car-Guards of the World Unite

I remember some cafés best for the people who don’t use them.

Before dawn on a chill winter morning in Hermanus, if you crave an early shot of decent coffee, Black Medicine the only is café in town that does the job. The town centre is shut against the night, as tightly as only a small seaside resort can be. Windows dark, sidewalks deserted and the sea, just a block away, barely turns in its sleep. But Black Medicine keeps baker’s hours, its baristas, even at this owlish hour, seem pleased to see you, and the shelves are stacked with oven-warm croissants and cinnamon swirls. A temple to good caffeine, it serves a congregation of early risers, dog-walkers, and occasional insomniacs, some still in pyjamas.

Black Medicine  Early morning   Hermanus    Cape

I swing by for an early morning coffee, whenever I’m in town.  An added pleasure is that I get to talk to Wanda, the car-guard, whose pitch is across the road from Black Medicine.  Love them or loathe them, car-guards work the streets and alleys in towns across South Africa, impromptu attendants who patrol the pavements in every city and suburb, often with no more than a frayed yellow safety vest to signal their status.

Wanda believes there is more to car-guards than meets the eye. He defines his job as an act of faith: ‘We are useful’. And in a country where hijackings, heists and warning signs signaling ‘high crime area ahead’ are familiar to every motorist, any form of security is useful.

Car-guards are sometimes assimilated into a town’s municipal security. But often they are freelancers and entrepreneurs, or chancers and parking pirates, depending on your prejudices. They are also gregarious, communicative, well -traveled and multilingual. If you speak a little French, you may learn a lot about the perennially messy politics of the Congo.  Or Burundi.   Home, for many car-guards, is somewhere a long way behind them.  

Wanda, who patrols his pitch outside Black Medicine, is no exception. He comes from a small village in the Eastern Cape, about a thousand kilometres from Hermanus. His mother tongue is Xhosa and he is also fluent in English and Afrikaans.  Did I know Butterworth in the Eastern Cape, he asked me the first time we met, using the original name of the town now called Gcuwa. And what about Qunu?

I did know them and that made for our connection.  Wanda’s home is famous because it was Mandela's ancestral home and he is buried in Qunu. But it is also a part of the country that has been left behind.  The names may change in this part of the Eastern Cape but very little else does so.  Familial association with the great man has done nothing to improve life in the dirt-poor villages around Butterworth or Qunu. Nor in the impoverished hamlets I pass, when I have driven along the rocky, corrugated road that careers for some seventy kilometres, down to the sea at Coffee Bay. The kids run long distances to get to school.  Teachers turn up late or not at all. And the lack of jobs is so universal that no-one talks about it much. The young, like Wanda, get out as soon as they can and head for anywhere else.

Wanda is one of an army of the young who have no work and no future. Statistics in South Africa are shifty, unreliable, and seldom worth the paper they are printed on. The recent census, taken two years ago, was produced at great expense, and lauded with preposterous claims about its accuracy. It was a waste of time and money. The count of the population of South Africa was out by a million or more. For what it is worth, the figure given for those under twenty-five without jobs is over sixty percent. In national elections, earlier this year, the ruling party sent ministers, in armour-plated limousines, into villages like Wanda’s, where they tossed T-shirts out of the car windows and sped away lest they came face to face with jobless voters.

The terrible thing is that Wanda is amongst the lucky ones. He left home and concocted a job for himself. He sleeps in a night shelter, funded by a local charity. Friends and well-wishers provide some clothes. He is at his pitch before dawn each day, spruce and cheerful, and knocks off around mid-afternoon. His customers, he says happily, are ‘good people’.

That may be so. But I think he flatters us. His winter customers are thin on the ground. The tourist trade in seaside towns is seasonal, with brief prodigious bulges during the great feasts of Easter and Christmas but scarce pickings at other times of the year.

I asked Wanda what he would like to be, in a perfect world.

He had no doubt.  ‘I am a passionate car-guard; I do not want to be anything else.’

And what can be done to help him in his ambition?

‘This town, those who run it, they should recognise us, make us official. We do useful things, watch over the cars, help the customers, look after the street.’

So it goes, our conversation. I get him coffee and cake from Black Medicine. He helps me reverse safely when I leave. I tip him. We smile, we shake hands, and we pretend things are not entirely disastrous. We know we are fooling ourselves.

‘Hope I see you again,’ says Wanda.

 So do, I, Wanda, so do I.

Christopher Hope