The Luxpats

Tag: South Africa

  • That Kind of a Woman

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    I asked my mother if she ever thought she’d find herself sitting naked on a toilet in Africa with a shaved head and a tattoo on her hip. She thought about it. No, she hadn’t, she said. She and Dad have come to visit us and their grandson for three months. Her head was not…

  • Where Are You, Gary? Have You Killed Anyone Yet?

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    It was Valentines’ Day. David and I didn’t have plans, but that wasn’t unusual. Holiday celebrations are a luxury of the settled. We’d spent the past three months so disoriented by this land of opposites, by driving on the wrong side of the road and by Christmas in the summertime, that holiday traditions felt like…

  • Poor Customer Experience is a Design Problem

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    Yesterday, I had the conversation below with a Telkom customer service agent. I learned many things from this conversation, including that if you ever want to look deranged, all you have to do is laugh hysterically at the same time that your eyeball is twitching uncontrollably. Me: Hello, you just installed my internet yesterday but…

  • Conversations: Gypsy Bar

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    One evening, I had drinks with a black friend at a gypsy pub at the foot of the mountain. I say black because it would matter, when he said, unprovoked, “What some people don’t understand is that the whites came and built everything. Some black people just want to take it all without working. They…

  • Conversations with the Tribe

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    “The gardener is Luke. He’s wonderful, he’s from Malawi.” I follow Bronwen’s elegant pointer finger to the smiling man on the lawn. His grin splits his face into deep lines. “How are youu?” he calls. … “Don’t worry about making friends,” Amanda says.  “We’re not as cliquey with foreigners as we are with each other.”…

  • The Sangoma

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    The clapping of their feet on the pavement reached a crescendo as they rushed into the alley where Prince hid. They looked wildly to the right and left. They wailed from deep in their gravel throats, the beads clacking in their hair, on their necks, on their arms. Prince crouched in the weeds, knowing that…

  • Dear Aboda: The Carousel of Houses Part IV

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    The money they suddenly wanted to charge us is more than David makes in a month. On that restless night in windy Vredehoek before we finally moved into the mansion, David and I had been asleep when the agent called from Seattle. She wanted to confirm our move the next day. From the bedroom I…

  • The Carousel of Houses: Part III

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    In the afternoon we sat together on the couch, waiting to move again. Including hotels, it would be the fifth and hopefully final move in two months. We fanned ourselves in an amicable silence. We don’t always analyze our fights anymore, at least not right away. Before Spencer, we performed constant maintenance. Ours was a…

  • The Carousel of Houses: Part II

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    Green Point, where we’d been living, is an upmarket little neighborhood that slopes gently up from the beach. Cool breezes dry the sweaty foreheads of its residents as they enjoy sundowners on their porches, and there is little real wind there. In Vredehoek, where we moved the next day, you are perched upon the steep…

  • The Carousel of Houses: Part I

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    On New Year’s Eve, David was in the middle of his nightly relaxation routine, putting a rack of ribs on the barbeque, when we got a call from the rental agency woman. “I just wanted to make sure you found accommodations for tomorrow,” she said. “I wouldn’t want you to be homeless!” We were supposed…