White water guide Greg Arminen hangs on tight as his raft enters 4-Man Hole on the Tugela River in South Africa. The members of his crew didn't hang on quite so tight.
The extended finger of the old African pointing toward a black object near the river's high watermark meant we'd found what we were looking for. As white water guides, my friend Greg and I were recruited by the South African police to help them find a dead body. The man had been spotted downstream from our camp on the Tugela River, and the police needed our skills to get them through the rapids. We found the body after searching for an hour, but it had been there for quite awhile and was in a bad state of decay. More apparent than the vulture gnawed hole where his stomach used to be, was the irony of the man's final position.
He was lying on his back, facing downstream, with his knees bent and his arms out at his sides. In the rafting business we call this the "body surf" position. When you find yourself swimming the rapids in a rocky river this position is supposed to help you avoid injury. In South Africa the local guides call it the "cocktail" position. "Just imagine you're lying on a chaise lounge", they would say, "with a cocktail in each hand". But that poor guy lying on the rocks probably never dreamed of white water rafting. And it's not likely he ever lounged around with cocktails in his hands either.
We were in Zululand in post-apartheid South Africa - Nelson Mandela's rainbow nation, miraculously born just a few years before through a negotiated revolution that inspired the world, and made millions believe that a better tomorrow was just over the horizon. Yet the lives of many Zulus, like the man we found near the river's edge, had changed little and they lived in a perpetual struggle to survive. Most rural Zulus - descendents of the people who inspired the term "warrior race" a century ago - are subsistence farmers. They scrape an existence out of the rugged landscape that rolls away from the Drakensberg Mountains. When the heaviest rains in 80 years fell, streams and creeks all over the Drakensberg quickly filled to overflowing and poured down into the Tugela. The rain fell hardest in the dark of night and flash floods swept through sleeping shanty towns, carrying the man we found on the rocks, and many like him, to a watery death.
The Zulu know the river as uThukela. European settlers simplified the name to Tugela and translated it means, "The Startling One." The river begins its life near the border of the mountain kingdom of Lesotho, on the eastern side of the highest peak in South Africa. Then, in three giant leaps it falls 853 metres from the edge of a natural amphitheatre into what has historically been, and is today, one of the most violent and politically turbulent places on earth: the state of KwaZulu-Natal. Rushing through a canyon two miles long, the river then begins its 200 mile journey east to the Indian Ocean.
Paddling a two-man "croc" through the muddy rapids of the Tugela River. Over grazing and deforestation has lead to massive erosion. "You're watching half of South Africa being washed out to the Ocean", said one of the local guides.
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I sat up high in my kayak and strained my neck to see if Greg's raft was coming downstream. Greg was guiding a few English tourists through a rapid called 4-Man Hole, but he was nowhere to be seen. From my vantage point in the turbulent eddy I saw nothing... nothing but the chaos of muddy water, rolling, folding and exploding into huge waves.
Then I saw it. A flash of red as the raft crested the top of a wave and quickly vanished again into the next trough. Something was wrong. They were off course and would surely miss the narrow chute that would let them pass between the huge, horizontal vortex that is 4-Man Hole and the house sized boulder to its right. The raft dropped into the hole instead and capsized in the turbulence. A few moments later the clients were all in the water being tossed around by the waves while Greg rode the upside down raft like a giant surfboard.
Frantically I paddled my kayak into the current, blowing my whistle, screaming and pointing at people to swim to the right hand shore. Downstream lay a long stretch of very rocky rapids and we only had a few moments of relative calm to get people out of the water. If someone was swept downstream they could be carried through several kilometers of continuous, rocky rapids. The swim would be exhausting and a person could easily be overwhelmed and succumb to the river.
Greg had managed to right the raft and was struggling to get it to shore with a broken paddle. Paddling hard through the waves I towed one swimmer, than another, out of the dark current as they held tight to grab loop on the back of my kayak. Greg and the others had made it to shore, so I sat in the calm of an eddy and rested. My heart was still pounding when I caught a glimpse of another person in the water. But she was swimming away from the safety of the shore and back into the waves and swirling currents.
I planted my paddle deep into the water and pointed the kayak toward the bobbing helmet. "What are you doing?" I screamed. "You should have stayed near the shore." Her breathless reply was barely audible over the roar of the river, but it was frightening nonetheless and it quickly became clear why she swam back into the rapids.
"There is a crocodile!" she said. I had never seen one, but the locals told me there were a few crocodiles lurking in the muddy water. Unfortunately, this pale English tourist, on a holiday from her desk, had to get tossed out of a raft into one of the wildest rivers in southern Africa, swim to the safety of the shore, meet a crocodile face-to-face, then swim back into the rapids. Just another day at the office, as river guides like to say, usually between gulps of beer, after a crazy day on the water. And there were plenty of those in Zululand.
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Each day, the action started at Camp Rapid, with the raft rushing down the rocky chute in the cool morning air and crashing into a large wave at the bottom. After Camp Rapid there are 24 kilometres of brown, muddy water (you can't really call it whitewater) careening between boulders, dropping over ledges and rushing through gorges to create 18 class III-V rapids.
Further downstream was the bigger challenge of the Tugela Gorge. This is where the rafts would start flipping. The rapids of the gorge contain huge, unavoidable waves, holes and other assorted obstacles. If someone was injured it would take at least a day to walk over the surrounding hills to some semblance of civilization, and another five-hour drive to find anything remotely similar to a hospital.
If you emerged unscathed from the gorge, however, you could relax again and enjoy the last few class III rapids at Jameson's Drift. From here it is a beautiful 1 hour drive back to camp over the rolling green hills of Zululand. As we drove through the hills, countless groups of kids would run to the roadside to wave at our pickups loaded with tired rafters drinking beer in the African sun
Back at camp, the brai (Afrikaans for barbecue) would be fired up, and huge amounts of meat would be cooked. Each plate would be loaded with steak, lamb, sausages and kebabs, with little or no room left for vegetables. The bar would also be opened and the most popular drink was a triple brandy and Coke. It was here at the camp around the brai and the bar that I gained my deepest insight into the culture of white South Africa. Those glimpses were often dark and revealed the fears, insecurities and ignorance of the "white tribe."
On one of my first days in the camp the owner of the business viciously berated one of the local Zulu staff, and then turned to me and said "you have to treat them like that or they won't respect you."
"Don't hang out with the black staff," said my manager. "They're all thieves and liars."
"You've got to be careful," said a client as I tossed a cold can of pop to a black man on the shore. "They'd just as soon shoot you as look at you."
This boy lived across the river from our camp in traditional Zulu houses called a Krall.
This was pretty consistent behaviour for most members of the "White Tribe" that I met, but In comparison the Zulus I came to call friends showed me nothing but compassion, forgiveness and generosity. Whether I was sitting in a mud hut drinking thick corn beer, listening to drums during a church service, or sharing a meal with a family who had little to share, I learned the meaning of the Zulu word Ubuntu. It means "largeness of spirit" and it was very evident in the lives of the blacks that I met.
During the six months I spent in South Africa it was very difficult to picture a hopeful future for the country. Then one day a mixed group of telephone linesman came to the camp for a "team building" weekend. The group included white Afrikaners, as well as blacks from the Xhosa and Zulu tribes. The men worked hard together all day, and at night they ate and drank together, This was the first time I saw whites and blacks treating each other as equals. The drinks flowed and the men eventually began to sing and dance together. As they raised their voices together and sang the traditional work song Sho Sho Loza, they actually renewed my faith in the new South Africa... the Rainbow Nation. "Work, work, working in the sun," they sang. Their voices soared and echoed through the valley of the Tugela. "We will work as one."
Dancing, singing and sharing cultures is a rare thing to see in South Africa and it made me feel very hopeful. If it was happening here in the valley of the Tugela, were so much racial strife had been born, maybe, just maybe, it was happening somewhere else as well.
All work is the copyrighted © property of Andrew Ross and may not be copied or reproduced in any manner without express written permission. An edited version of this article originally appeared in Outpost Magazine.