Detritus of an Empire

But Whose?

Detritus of an Empire

I began writing this on 17 December 2024, and then the holidays, combined with jet lag, RSV, and perhaps Norovirus, overwhelmed me.

Throughout this article, I use the racial categories of Apartheid-era South Africa, Black, Coloured, White, and Indian, because these categories were engrained in South African society by the Apartheid era and still classify South Africans today.

I was in Cape Town for almost all of November 2023, having been evacuated from Antarctica for really intense GI unpleasantness, before I went back to finish out the Antarctic season, and it was not an enjoyable experience. I was thrown back on my own psychological resources in a strange city far from always safe for local men. Let alone women tourists, even in a tourist bubble as I was, which in itself did not make me happy. And then I endured constant low-grade nausea until 16 November, even after the worst of the misery was over and all tests were negative. Petting a cheetah and climbing Table Mountain, as a test to see if I was fit enough to return to Antarctica, amazing as they were, did not make up for it.

I Would Have Petted Him Until He Told me to Stop

This season, we arrived in Cape Town the evening of the 14 December, and all of us promptly headed to our rooms to indulge in vast quantities of hot water, soap, shampoo, lotion—and naps, because the endless wind and sun are not conducive to good sleep. Then we went Christmas shopping and enjoyed a parting dinner together.

One reason I dislike Cape Town and by extension, South Africa, is that they are the saddest places I have ever been, even Afghanistan when I was there in 2006, with its open, profound hatred of women, because there was a palpable feeling even amongst some of the men, better was possible. As for Israel, where I lived for 10 years, you can put your false Apartheid comparisons you know where: there is great sadness in Israel, and great frustration, amongst Jews, Arabs, and Christians alike, and it doesn’t begin to compare to South Africa.

The Cape of Good Hope is where the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans collide, and it is one of the ends of the world. If you are an islander, you naturally think in terms of oceans and seas. If you are also an empire bent upon dominating world trade, usually through co-optation and corruption of local elites, rather than outright conquest, you want to control that confluence.

South Africa was once a great jewel in the crown of the British Empire, second only to India. India was the continental heir to great empires in its own past, with ancient and powerful artistic, economic, and intellectual traditions destroyed by colonialism that yet were unarguable even then, except to the most willfully stupid racist. The others—knew what they were destroying. It was perhaps the worst thing the British did. The South African native peoples, far from being stupid or naive, nevertheless had a significantly less sophisticated material and intellectual culture, which more easily allowed the British to lie to themselves about the terrible damage they were doing to actual human beings.

Sometimes, of course, they were honest.

In Cape Town, I hire a driver if I’m not sharing an Uber with a friend, and I sit up front with him (it has always been a male so far) as a security precaution, and if the driver is willing, we have conversations. One Coloured driver told me about the cheap bottles of strong spirit specifically marketed to the blue collar Coloured population, about the tolerance of violent crime, a clear policy of poisoning a group of people in the hope they would take their frustrations out on themselves and those who share their lives, rather than organizing themselves to avenge their miseries on those responsible for their suffering.

For South Africa is a place where the shadows of racial slavery and Apartheid are extremely dark. Layered upon the traditional male appropriation of female sexual, reproductive, and productive labor—which can only, ever, be appropriated by violence—is the reality that the intelligence and energy of the overwhelming majority of men was not wanted. The darker your skin was, the less your intellect and energy was wanted, the more likely was your intrinsic human desire to create, collaborate, and contribute to be debased, degraded, even destroyed.

While there is no better safety valve for the utterly justified rage and hate this creates in men than the women in their lives. The current international rise in misogyny—for example, men complaining women and girls outperform and outnumber boys and men in education, especially higher education, when no one and nothing is preventing those males from doing just as well except their own internalized contempt for anything girls and women do, let alone do well—is a deliberate strategy to divert rage and hate for hurt and humiliation away from those responsible, against those not responsible.

And so, everywhere around you, if you know how to see, is the detritus of the British empire. I have not been to Robben Island, because I have been to Mauthausen and Dachau and I think that’s plenty—Tuol Sleng is not on my list either—but this past December we were lodged in the Waterfront Breakwater Hotel, which shares quarters with the University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business in the former Industrial Breakwater Prison.

The original prison was constructed in 1859 to house convicts of all races used to construct the breakwater for the construction of the harbor of which the Victoria and Albert Waterfront is part. White convicts were initially required to sleep between Black convicts: the thought was that language barriers would keep them from conspiring. While I have not examined historical records, I imagine the plan didn’t work as well as hoped, given that Breakwater was the first prison to racially segregate convicts and in 1902 moved Whites to the Industrial Breakwater Prison, with its castellated turrets and interior courtyard. Walking through the halls of the now-university is pleasant enough, but you don’t need signage to realize this building could only have been a prison. The construction is extremely strong, and the doorways remove any doubt.

I wonder what the students think, walking through them: the Bantu Education Act of 1953 established the legal foundation of many aspects of Apartheid, especially in education. The Bantu Education Act deliberately made equal access to quality education for Blacks and Coloureds a legal impossibility, turning South Africa’s educational system into a means of maiming and crippling the intellects of Black and Coloured children so that they were fit for little more than manual labor, and unskilled manual labor at that.

Yet not all of this detritus is ugly.

I have two favorite places in Cape Town.

One is Quagga Books and Art in Kalk Bay. You do not know what you will find there. Wherever I go, I buy books for the Pritzker Military Museum and Library, where I am the writer in residence. Last year, I went to three bookstores, Quagga being the last because it is so far out from downtown Cape Town. There I found a copy of Two Years of the Japan-China Undeclared War: And the Attitude of the Powers by Edward Bing-Shuey Lee, then sometime editor of The (Peking) Leader and the editor of The Chinese Republic. Published in Shanghai in 1933 for an elite policy audience of colonial administrators, and Foreign Service and military officers, there were dozens of photographs hand-pasted in. Holy Cows! So I checked. Three copies of the book in World Cat, none of which were ours, 2 copies publicly for sale, and the price was very good. Done. Wrapped in the wool shawl I call my Antarctica sheet, with a book of lithographs from what was then called the Great War, and packed in my unlocked, checked luggage. I suffered agonies on the flight home, worrying that some underpaid, overworked baggage handlers would steal my polar clothing and equipment to sell. But those old books? Throw them in the rubbish, no one wants them.

Of course, everything made it home safely.

This year, I returned to Quagga and walked out with a haul somewhat greater because I wasn’t spending $1700 on a single title. All books were related to the colonization of South Africa and the wars of conquest that followed.

But what else is in Quagga? Lavishly hand-illustrated botanical books. An ancient and huge giraffe skull I craved, for the same atavistic reasons the owner loved it and refused to sell it, while getting it out of the country would be terribly difficult and then what? Affix it to my front door to greet visitors? A hippo tusk, split lengthwise by some tremendous force, likewise. And something which has not ceased to haunt me since I first saw it last year. A block of marble, the imprints of a foot and a knee carved into it, worn by time and the elements so it looks soft as wax, from who knows where, who knows when. The skull of a tiny mammal. Postcards from all over the world—what have we lost to email? On every shelf, small shells, the gifts of the ocean across the street. A tiny terra cotta vessel perhaps 3,000 years old, which was for sale, and now sits in my bookcase, itself from colonial Burma / Myanmar.

And Jean, the manager, a stocky blonde woman, no longer young, with her square, handsome face and clear eyes like the blue ice of Antarctica, radiating intellect and fine character in every sentence.

The other is Private Collections, which specializes in architectural antiques from India, run by a Coloured gentleman. Last year, I walked out of there with an old traveling chest, a combination of toiletry kit, jewel box—military and diplomatic orders are a type of jewelry considered suitable for men—and travel desk. I brought it home in my rolling duffle bag, every compartment packed with items of clothing, then the chest itself wrapped in my polar sleeping bag, and just about everything else I could pad it with.

There are monumental vessels, a bookcase so vast it deserves a house built around it, filled with magazines such as Architectural Digest, for sale, but reference material until they find their homes. A tall Tang horse stands guard upon a table. There are armoires that were shipped across the oceans in the age of sail, and sometimes you catch the scent of the Low Countries and Northern Germany, rather than jolly old England, not so jolly at all, when we look back at it. A cluster of black-glazed jars for storing various chutneys and pickles and spices. An enormous storage jar for some kind of liquid—I always think of wine or olive oil, but the latter is not likely. Greek and Roman amphorae that did in fact hold olive oil and wine.

And the doors, oh, the doors! Because the shop is dominated by doors, which, like most of the antiques, come from India. Some have a plain, modest elegance that would grace what we used to call a middle class home. Some speak to fear: there is a barred outer door and a solid inner door. Others are tall, crowned by a half-moon of windows, elegant again, but austere and proud, not modest. And one, which pulls me to it on my visits, not wide, not tall, but massive, intricately carved with the iconography of Southern India, spread as far as Ankor Wat.

You wonder, who walked through those doors. What secrets did those homes and villas and shops know? Who shipped those armoires and tables, desks and chairs, from Europe at vast expense? What conversations were had? And whose lives were changed for those conversations, and how? What suits and dresses filled the armoires and chests? What happened to the spinsters and weavers as spinning and weaving were mechanized? Who made the laces? How were the fabrics dyed? When were the birds who trimmed hats rendered extinct? What jewels and state secrets or love letters did those traveling chests hold? Whose fortunes were made? Whose lives ended?

All empires end, of course, and rarely in ways as dramatic as the Thousand Year Reich being ground like grain in the 12th year of its existence. America, too, is an empire, if we have never truly admitted it to ourselves, and as far as empires go, and despite my huge issues with American foreign policy, a rather abnormally benign one. And now we are watching that empire dismantled, not carefully by people who have the good of Americans and the future of America as a genuine Constitutional democratic republic at heart, but by raping, looting, murdering vandals intent upon immiserating virtually all Americans, including the straight, white, Evangelical men who are their base.

They will strip the nation of all that is valuable, and sell it to the highest bidder. And as part of this, they are systematically damaging, in an attempt to destroy, those institutions meant to keep Americans safe, be it from foreign enemies, predatory domestic (or multinational) “businesses,” or those who wish to see Americans reduced to cheap day laborers drugged with cannabis, cheap liquor, and all the violent, degrading porn they can handle, to condition men to derive sexual pleasure from hurting women and girls and boys and other men. We can expect a national abortion ban, formally degrading a woman to worth less than the contents of her uterus she herself is creating from her own body, and national-level attempts to restrict contraception, pregnancy and childbirth being by far the most damaging and dangerous events human beings typically endure. Only service in elite military units comes close to the physical damage pregnancy and childbirth routinely inflict upon women, and given the paucity of men in those units, the incidence is far lower. Plus plenty of guns to keep down those of us who actually value our lives and the lives of our fellow Americans, although that may backfire. Indeed, the once and future President is an adjudicated rapist and convicted felon, an ancient, life-long failure of a businessman in the throes of dementia, who attempted a coup, and far from being punished for it, has been rewarded with a second term.

While I do not believe this man is the end of the American experiment, he will do deep damage, more than he has already done, and we have already lost a great many Americans due to his sadistic incompetence, and the sadism of those whose malice he channels, whether in the Covid pandemic that sent many of us mad, or the abortion bans or the insurance executives allowed to shorten our lives for profit or… And many more of us won’t survive his second term.

He will, however, attempt to destroy the American empire in a particularly reckless and dangerous manner, for nothing but ego and profit. And the pleasure he takes in destruction and pain.

I wonder what detritus we will leave behind.

Unless otherwise noted, all photos © Erin Solaro.