I am the perfect mark, red-faced and melting like a Tussauds waxwork in a blast furnace. I’m cornered in the seat of an unmarked taxi on the Angolan-Namibian border, and I’m a cauldron of exasperation, jangled nerves, and Caprivi sweat.

Gangsta Dude looks like the seasoned marksman, leaning in the driver’s window taking it all in: middle-aged woman, not from these parts, traveling solo, clearly in a bit of a bind.

My taxi has just rolled to a stop near a fuel station on the edge of the Caprivi in northern Namibia, joining a flock of marked and unmarked cabs, but I’m too caught up in my dilemma to pay attention. Godfrey, the driver, has dropped his window and he and Gangsta Dude chat in what I assume is Kavango. I carry on with my business, computer flashing expensively from my lap while I try to find enough phone signal to get anything I can find online that will show me how to get home — a car rental, an airport, a shuttle, anything.

‘Hello.’

My brain registers that the guy in the window has switched to well-greased English, and he's addressing me now.

He’s the owner of this taxi, he explains through a grill of perfect teeth, and Godfrey is his driver. There’s been a misunderstanding. The next 400 km of the trip are going to cost an additional 1,000 Namibian dollars — a third more than Godfrey and I had settled on earlier — and Gangsta Dude is going to take over from Godfrey at the wheel. Moreover, we’re going to be driving in another of his taxis.

He stabs a thumb at a VW parked behind him, no official taxi number on the door. I see the silhouette of someone already in the back seat, but can’t make out who it might be.

My instincts snap to attention. The smile is so chiseled sunlight could spark off an incisor. The bucket cap low over a face that is arrestingly handsome. But there’s a… what is it… a swagger to him.

He’s one outsized piece of bling away from being an extra in a gangsta rap video.

The rescue mission had been going well until now, all things considered. I’d woken that morning, two weeks into a writing assignment for a major international title, to find myself unexpectedly stranded: no team, no fixer, no wheels, nowhere to stay that night, and nearly a day’s drive from the nearest rental car.

It all started about two months earlier, deep enough into the lifting of plague-era quarantine that travel across borders within the continent was again possible. A budding photojournalist has picked up on a story of an activist in Namibia who claims he’s uncovered human rights abuses amongst the elderly in some tribal communities. People are being accused of witchery — that they’re bewitched, or are witches themselves — because of a misunderstanding of the symptoms of their aging and ailing brains.

How else does someone explain their parent’s changing brain state, other than to believe that something demonic is at play, if they don’t have basic medical knowledge?

Some of the witchcraft-accused have suffered dreadful abuse at the hands of families or communities, he says: beatings, being chained to posts, starved, run out of their villages, threats of murder. The activist has rescued some for their own safety, he claims, and has put them in a private care home for the elderly at his own cost.

The photographer is wide-eyed and earnest. This is her big break. An international title has agreed to take the story, and fund the research trip. Will I go along to do a thorough investigation and write up the text for the story?

The plan is to meet in Swakopmund, a fishing and tourism town on the Namibian coast, in August 2021. The photographer and her boyfriend-slash-location-scout have already buddied up with the activist on a previous trip, where he’d introduced them to his central characters. Now it’s just up to me to join the convoy of two vehicles for the three weeks on the road and tie the ribbon on it all.

Preacher Man

My travel companion for the proposed 3,000 km road trip turns out to be a preacher who has lost his pulpit, but for all the right reasons.

Preacher Man had spent much of his evangelising years in the asphyxiating cultural corset of the Dutch Reform Church, a denominational offshoot with its roots in South Africa and that still whiffs in places of apartheid-style nationalism and White supremacy. His notion of god is as out-there as his shoulder-length mane must have been when, years earlier, the congregation gave him the nickname ‘hobo’.

He wears this badge with glee.

Now mid-60s, he looks nothing like the hippie-pastor from the days when he started campaigning for the protection of the elderly in traditional rural communities a decade or so earlier. Gone is the ponytail at the nape of his neck. Now, his hair seems platinum blonde rather than grey, and styled into a crisp undercut with foppish forelock. Calf-hugging jeans, precision-ironed shirts, hints of cologne: he’s more city hipster, than exiled clergyman.

It’s a good thing that the two of us are travelling together. We have plenty of time to fill, and as we while away the hours his story flows into all the nooks and crannies of our conversation. Outside the sealed cab of his hatchback, coastal desert dunes give way to brittle savannah as we head up and inland towards the Okavango. Once we get there, we’ll head east along the famous Caprivi strip, a memorial to a bizarre moment of Colonial-era map-making that has jabbed an angular finger of Namibia into the fleshy continental belly where Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Botswana meet at the Kazungula border post on the Zambezi River.

Then we’ll do an about-turn, and head back the way we came. We’ll meet a lot of witching along the way, I’m told.

I’m cross-legged in the passenger seat for most of the trip. Preacher Man insists on being at the wheel.

Our conversations starts out in no particular direction, but we soon find common compass points.

If I still believed in god, he and I would likely have worshiped a similar one.

We agree that god — in his case, the Judeo-Christian one — is fashioned in the image of the people who created him. The petulant man-god of the Bible is nothing more than a rough self-portrait of the patriarchal desert-wandering culture that painted a deity from the only reference material on hand: the image of themselves. This god, therefore, is male, with the same foibles as the people in whose image he is created.

If god exists, we seem to agree, they would be more expansive than the simple binary of gender. They are sexless. This kind of god, we agree, does not cast out homosexuals.

Preacher Man’s idea of god, though, was not one that his congregants wanted at their Sunday sermons, which got him fired from one — or was it two? — congregations. ‘Retrenched’ to be precise, but in his words this was the church’s work-around for his dismissal.

I don’t recall the details of the firing and re-hiring — what does a roving, flock-less pastor do, in between gigs? — but his final departure from the church came in his 50s. A grandchild had come out as gay. If the church rejected someone like this, he’d turn his back on the church. With that, he walked.

Since then he’s thrown himself into a few side-hustles, as any good entrepreneur should: inheritance money; flipping properties; a private care home for the aged.

It is here that Preacher Man has found his new cause. In his travels, he says he’s uncovered evidence of the elderly being abused because the typical symptoms of aging brains are misunderstood through the lens of superstition. He has lined up some prize cases of people whose stories will show how their failing brains have been read as the mark of sorcery. How else explain children’s names fading mysteriously from someone’s mental archive? Someone wandering off into the bush where they’d been gathering firewood for a lifetime, but can’t find their way back home? The departures into fantasy. Aggressive rants. The radio waves of communication filling with static or tuning into silence. Lapses in hygiene. Volcanic language from someone who wouldn’t ordinarily cuss.

Because of this, he says, they have been ostracised, driven from their homes, beaten, locked up, starved.

He now spends his twilight years as a roving apostle, traveling from town to town with a new sermon: old people aren’t to be feared, they are to be loved, and our African culture of ‘ubuntu’ — ‘I am, because we are’ — is the wellspring from which our better nature can flow. Turn away from the dark magic, and embrace our elders.

Some of the locals on his regular routes call him the ‘witch hunter’ because when he arrives in a village, he’ll ask the locals to ‘take him to the witches’. This is a sure-fire way to find anyone in the ’hood who is dementing, he says with a grin.

The story is compelling. There’s enough published research out there to give his claims some purchase: around the world, when communities don’t have a medical explanation for the confounding symptoms of certain brain or psychiatric quirks, they might explain these through a lens of superstition. Christians might see a person’s psychotic babbling as a sign of demon possession; in African spirituality, an epileptic fit might be seen as witchery.

Preacher Man has plotted a course through villages and towns along the route, where we will meet the people whose lives he is saving from the savagery of superstition. He doesn’t have any beef with witchcraft, per se, but his mission is to take on the harmful practices that might come from it.

He is almost irresistible. His sermon is as sincere and fervent as his manner is affable, and his good humour crosses the gulf between cultures.

A few reporters have picked up on his work in recent years, which is how the aspirant editorial photographer stumbles upon him.

The long haul

One week into the research trip, something isn’t adding up. Or maybe it is, but not in the way I expected.

We start with a visit to a sandblasted farmhouse on the edge of the Namib Desert, which has been repurposed into what looks like an under-serviced, over-priced care facility for the elderly. Here, I’ve spoken with the staff, and sat quietly watching the residents go about their days, the photographer’s shutter release thlick-thlick-thlicking in the background. Most of the residents are locked inside their own worlds, some happily so, some not; with many it’s impossible to know.

Preacher Man then takes us to meet a traditional-healer-slash-witchdoctor an hour to two’s drive away, who practices under the tin awning of a one-room wood and mud house near a place that has a name on the map but is no village to speak of. This guy says his treatments cure any manner of vexes: wilted erections, the curse of another witchdoctor, a flagging business, the broken heart or smarting ego of a jilted lover, high blood pressure, you name it. These cures come with an eye-watering fee, even by middle-class measures, according to a hand-written price list in a well-thumbed note book. How a subsistence farmer in the back end of nowhere will find this kind of cash is something I can’t get to the bottom of. There must be a lot of haggling and barter to keep this economy going.

We meet a retired minister in a town north of Windhoek and see how he dotes over a wife who still has love, but not much language.

We spend a morning with a wizened fellow in a natty suit made by a local tailor, the next stop down the road, who practices his version of traditional medicine from a room in working class neighbourhood in a dusty town between here and nowhere. The place is packed with baskets and carrier bags of dried herbs and other natural remedies. His consulting fees are just as impressive as his colleague’s out in the bush, but he seems less foreboding and he doesn’t try to hustle us for money.

We meet a few student nurses who we’re told are doing volunteer community outreach for Preacher Man, by educating the country folk about late-life brain disease.

As we trundle from town to town, the wheels eating up the kays, the hours of rambling conversation seem directionless at first, but slowly I get some bearings. Preacher Man gives glimpses of the map that guides him through his particular version of the world. The contour lines of his thinking start to rise up out of the flat surface of the page. He shows where the valleys of his mind are, how they allow the rivers of his ideas to flow and collect into natural pools. I see where the erosion lines have carved into the canyon floor of his understanding of the world, how these emerging contours carve feedback loops that cut the riverbeds intractably deeper, keeping him faithfully tracking the course of a single story that is bigger than him, but still very much his own.

Like any journey into uncharted territory, it is wondrous, intriguing, bewildering, exasperating, exhilarating. It is muddy with uncertainty, and fearsome at times. In hindsight, it was a beautiful encounter with another’s internal landscape.

But it is also clear where the root of the rot is.

The Christians got quite a fright when they arrived in the New and Old Worlds, and found the ‘savage natives’ worshiping foreign gods. Before long, the newly dominating culture had demonised African spirituality so effectively that there was a troll under every bridge, a witch cavorting with the devil, and Father Christmases nicking biscuits from beneath the Xmas tree. Or wait, which one was that again?

Either way, Preacher Man’s interpretation of things was dipped into that old tradition. Customs that are as day-to-day to an African traditionalist as reciting the Hail Mary is to a Catholic, or a Buddhist thumbing prayer beads, or someone meditating on the image of a candle flame to quiet their racing mind, became the things of devils and spells.

Preacher Man is acting with the best intentions, but he can’t see beyond the veil of his own myth-making. Sure, the literature does capture examples of people’s mental health symptoms being read as the work of dark forces — but this is as much true in traditional African communities, as it is in White evangelicals in the US.

He is a spiritual Don Quixote and his mind has spun an outlandish hallucination of goblins and trolls, and conjured up victims of what he sees as innocent but misguided trickery. In his fervour, he is looking for evidence of sorcery, and his observer bias is finding it everywhere.

1+1+1=0

The tally of evidence doesn’t match up with the numbers in the photographer’s original story pitch, as told to her by Preacher Man.

Case one: let’s call him Tony. Tony’s brown irises are blossoming into blue coronas with age. His advancing years and lack of English mean it’s hard to verify the story as told by his adult children and Preacher Man. They tell us that the 73-year-old has been accused of witchcraft, stripped of his cattle as a way for villagers to get reparation for the damage his hexing has caused them, and they’ve beaten him up.

The story is hard to verify. It seems there’s some communal jealousy towards him, a successful farmer, and maybe there are some other seedlings of grudges that’ve bloomed into ill-will.

By the yardstick of journalistic fact-finding, there’s nothing to show a link between dementia behaviour, and Tony’s neighbourhood conflict.

Next: Fran. According to Preacher Man, Fran is in her late 40s. She’s living with dementia, and was accused of witchcraft by fellow villagers eight years earlier. They beat her so badly that she was left for dead.

He can’t take me to meet Fran in person, but her 23-year-old son, a student nurse, is ready to speak with me.

The first red flag is someone presenting with dementia symptoms at 40, which is extremely young, even for the earliest onset of the kind of degenerative brain disease that falls under the umbrella term of ‘dementia’.

The story Fran’s son tells, though, is also entirely different to Preacher Man’s version.

Just like with Tony, there seems to have been some kind of jealousy or rivalry that led to Fran’s attack, but no dementia. I press the son, rephrasing the same question in different ways to be absolutely clear about what I believe he’s telling me: was Fran showing symptoms of dementia or any other mental illness when the attack happened?

No, he answers decisively each time, she wasn’t.

She may have had malaise and memory problems after the attack — she took a bad beating to the head — but that and the depression passed soon after. She’s fine now, he says.

Case two, spiked.

Case three: Dina. Dina is raison d'etre for Preacher Man’s outreach. She’s the capstone holding his activism story together. He tells me he found her about a decade earlier during a visit to a Himba village in the Caprivi, where she was chained to a post outside the family home. Her dementia, he said, led to her being accused of witchcraft. To keep the family safe from her hexing, she’d been chained to this post for 20 years. Her brother is the main instigator of her imprisonment, afraid as he was of her dark powers.

The story is titillating. In a dramatic rescue caught on video, Preacher Man frees her from her chains. He has her washed and dressed and later tries to integrate her back into the community. But this fails, and he must take her to safety at the same private care facility where Tony now lives.

When I meet Dina in the care home, she is well taken care of. She chuckles happily to herself, habitually lifting a pinch of snuff to a nostril, the tobacco powder disappearing into a delighted snort. But she’s inhabiting her own internal reality. There’s no way to communicate with her.

Another red flag: Preacher Man’s version of her story has her presenting with dementia symptoms for three decades. Dementia is a degenerative and incurable brain disease with a much shorter time horizon than this. The life expectancy for someone with the most common form, Alzheimers, is about 12 years at best, but usually less. The life expectancy of other forms of dementia, such as vascular dementia, is usually even shorter.

Dina has clearly been ill for a long time — three decades at least — but likely with a psychiatric condition, not dementia.

Her abuse is appalling, but the story is not what Preacher Man has claimed it to be. Her chaining up may also have had nothing to do with witchcraft.

There are many examples in the literature from around the world, in different cultural and economic contexts, where people with difficult and disruptive psychiatric symptoms are restrained in various ways, and abused horribly. This is either to make it easier for their carers to manage them, or to protect the individuals from harm, such as burning themselves on a stove, wandering off into the traffic, or getting lost in the veld. There are cases of people being chained or tied up in ill-equipped psychiatric hospitals, or locked in rooms. Some dementia activists even frame the most advanced psychiatric medications as a form of chemical restraint.

But this may be too mundane a story than one involving curses and cauldrons.

Preacher Man is the only source of information in Dina’s case, and things just aren't holding up anymore.

This is the death knell of the entire story. When I present this to the team, the photographer’s face is ashen. Preacher Man looks surprisingly buoyant.

I suggest we re-angle the story to use other evidence we’ve found and which the literature backs up: a story that examines how modern life and urbanisation are breaking up traditional family networks in rural southern Africa, and what this means for elderly care when the state can’t step into the gap. Some of our interviews show how families are coping in this context. We’ll need to rejig the rest of our trip but we have plenty of wiggle room if we're agile and change the next few days' schedule.

The photographer nods.

The following morning we begin wending our way back along the Caprivi, but things are getting tense. The more Preacher Man and I talk on the road, the more gaps appear in his own story. The organisation under whose banner he claims to do community outreach and education — which has sounded like a non-profit in the healthcare sector — looks more like a one-man-band whose achievements are largely self-reported and possibly overblown. There’s no NGO registration; no governance structure or board accountability; no audited books from what I can tell.

His claims as a health care expert to the elderly are also looking thin: no medical training; no formal qualifications or expertise in degenerative brain diseases other than what he’s picked up from tinkering on the internet.

The more I probe, the chillier things become.

The photographer is infuriated that I'm grilling Preacher Man. She is new to photojournalism and doesn’t know her way around the journalistic protocols of fact checking: you have to double- and triple-check everything, even the things your friendly sources tell you. Preacher Man’s agenda is baked into every aspect of the research trip: every case study, every source, every interview, every village stop. Every bit of background information he’s fed us is shaped by his need for us to see the same hobgoblins he does.

The photographer doesn't want to see that she’s bought his story, hook, line, and sinker. There's going to be a moment of reckoning with her editor.

Preacher Man, who lost his pulpit when he left the Dutch Reform Church and thought his small-town sermon was going to go global, now realises this isn’t going to happen.

Un-becoming

The breaking point arrives with the pace and temperature — the dignity, even — of a glacier. It is slow, it is deathly cold, and it has momentum that is geological in its finality.

It comes when we have one week left to go on the trip, and we’re sitting under a tree speaking to a headman — a traditional leader — in a community near the border town of Divundu. We’re on Namibian soil. A few kays away, across the Okavango, is Angola. Preacher Man has lined up this interview in one more effort to convince me just how deeply woven superstition is into the culture.

It’s late in the day. An inflamed sun turns a psychedelic pink-orange as it bulges in an atmosphere thick with dust.

Preacher Man and I are both tired and skittish, and this line of inquiry is dead in the water, but I try to make sense of what the headman is saying. Our conversation is a discombobulating tangle that has more to do with the basics of grammar than the blunt-force heat of the day that has scrambled our brains and possibly cooled our empathy.

The headman soldiers on in his third-language English; I, sadly, have no knowledge of his mother tongue. We talk about his culture, his world view, what local attitudes are towards aging and mental conditions, and where superstition fits into all of this. I probe tentatively to see if he knows of any cases in his constituency of the elderly being abused as a result of this misunderstanding of age-related mental dysfunction? Nope, none.

Back in the car, as we drive towards the cooling remains of a melting sun, I ask Preacher Man to explain more of the contradictions that have surfaced from today’s interviews.

This is when the glacier grinds inexorably over whatever might have been left of our good will between us.

He hisses: about my biases; about how I’ve been undermining him from the start; how I’m refusing to see what is right in front of me; how I don’t understand the culture here.

We both seem to be accusing the other of the same transgression: that the other is clouded by our need to see things through our own skewed optics, and we don’t want to see what’s truly going on. How do either of us know what is true in all of this messiness, when each of us has such different methods of inquiry, different ways to test what is true, different understanding of chains of evidence, and different expectations of the outcome?

His voice is frostbitten.

‘I think you should hire a car at the next town, and make your own way home.’

A mosquito, trapped in the car with us, flounders against the windshield. The back of Preacher Man’s hand cracks against the glass with the report of a gunshot in the car’s air-conditioned interior.

‘Yes,’ I say, the mosquito suddenly gone, ‘that’s probably a good idea.’

We ride out the last few kays to the lodge in the kind of silence that can only be described as the throbbing relief that comes after a boil is lanced.

Now, finally, we understood each other.

The photographer is livid. I’ve been out to sabotage her story from the get-go, she says, and I’ve been inexcusably rude to the Preacher Man. She refuses to discuss this further.

The following morning, Preacher Man points his wagon in the direction of home and hightails it out of there, his hope of a global pulpit burning away like mist in the morning sun, . The photographer climbs into the boyfriend’s overlander, and they disappear in a belch of diesel fumes.

That’s the last I see or hear from her.

Gangsta Dude

No need to panic. I’ve got my bags, my notes and field recordings, and the blessing of my editor. Don’t fret, she says from across the time zones in Washington, this kind of thing happens from time to time.

‘If we have to kill the story, we’ll kill it. Get yourself home safely first.’

It turns out that getting home isn’t as simple as conjuring up a hire car with the incantations of a credit card. I’m a day’s drive from the nearest rental, and we’re not exactly in Uber-central.

The problem seems easy to fix. It means being at the mercy of the informal taxi economy, between here and rentable wheels, but the lodge receptionist has a friend who knows a friend, and she’s on it.

Mid-morning, a silver Toyota pulls up with Godfrey at the wheel. The car is respectably roadworthy, with only a few dings in its hide, a starburst across the wind shield, and a passenger door that won’t quite close. After he’s slung my dusty bags into the trunk, Godfrey has to walk around the car, fiddle with my door’s dicky latch, and ease it closed.

Once we’ve picked our way over the dirt road from the lodge on the banks of the Okavango River and found the tar artery that will slowly thread me back into the formal transport grid, we begin what seems to be a simple hop-skip-and-unplanned-jump between the towns that will eventually get me to an airport and, hopefully, an international flight home.

At about 120 km per hour, the car develops a nervous tick.

‘Could we drive a little slower, please?’

‘Sure,’ says Godfrey. ‘Is this ok?’

The needle hovers at 100.

‘Yes, that’s fine, thanks. I’m a bit of a nervous passenger.'

No worries, his body language seems to say.

With that, we settle into a comfortable cruising altitude for the next two hours. I flip open my laptop and begin making sense of the past two weeks. I have to explain to my Washington editor why the story’s a dud, the team imploded, the photographer gone AWOL, and the crew’s fixer has hightailed it back home without me.

There are some groovy tunes thrumming out the car’s speakers, though, and my foot can’t help but tap along.

It was a shitty way to start the day, but it looks as though things are going to be ok.

Until we pull up alongside the forecourt at that fuel station, and Gangsta Dude sidles into the frame.

Con job

Gangsta Dude’s scam is as subtle as an 18 wheeler barreling down the highway in a belching chimney of diesel fumes.

My eye-roll is carefully choreographed.

‘Another thousand Namibian dollars? You’ve got to be kidding. No way, I’m not paying that. And no, I’m not getting into that car with you.’

With Godfrey at the wheel until now, there’s been a paper-trail: the lodge I’d spent the previous night at, the receptionist, her friend the taxi driver, a vehicle registration plate. But when I step out of this car and into the other, with this guy at the wheel, I disappear off the map.

No fucking ways.

I launch a counter-offensive.

I instruct Godfrey to drop me off at a nearby lodge, just a few blocks across town. If I can’t get to the rental car company in the town 400 km away, I’ll stop here and figure something out.

The minutiae of what comes next are too complicated to get into but it involves a tangled set of negotiations between Godfrey and Gangsta Dude in Kavango, a few zig-zags through town, arriving back at the gas station, and me ultimately conceding that Gangsta Dude will drive me to the lodge after all.

According to my phone’s GPS, it’s a few minutes’ drive away, so it’s a low-risk compromise. No problem.

Gangsta Dude slides in behind the wheel, fires up the engine, and pulls away from the forecourt.

A blue line on the GPS map says to turn right and head into town. He indicates, and swings the wheel left.

Gangsta Dude takes the road that’s clearly heading out of town.

A curated British voice from the navigation app helps correct the error: make a u-turn and head back into town.

I repeat the navigator’s instructions, only less courteously.

‘We’re supposed to go that way,’ I say, thumb jabbing in the direction of the retreating town.

‘No, this way is better.’

Gangsta Dude’s voice is unreadable.

The car rattles up to high speed, its nervous tick returning; the town shrinks behind us.

‘In five hundred metres, turn right,’ says the navigator helpfully.

Gangsta Dude ignores the right-turn, and keeps heading straight.

The navigator comes to our aid once more: ‘In one kilometre, turn right.’

At the next chance to re-route back to the lodge, the driver again ignores her. Now, even the wispiest edges of the settlement are thinning.

‘Make a u-turn, and…’ the navigator insists.

‘We’re going the wrong way,’ I interrupt her. ‘The lodge is back that way, it’s in town.’

‘The lodge is this way,’ Gangsta Dude says, the speedometer needle hovering at the top of the car’s tolerance level.

The noise in my head is inversely proportionate to the quiet in the car.

This is it. This is where it happens. This is where the mark disappears off the map, her body gets dumped in the veld, and her luggage pilfered for whatever can be got for it in some backstreet market in a shit-hole town on a shit-hole border of a shit-hole country.

‘Stop the car! STOP THE CAR!’

Gangsta Dude checks his mirrors, checks his blind spots, indicates, and pulls over. Gravel crunches under the wheels as we leave the asphalt and come to a safe stop on the shoulder.

‘You will not believe the week I’ve just had!’ I froth and splutter. ‘I will not be scammed. I will not argue with you. Just… just follow the map. Follow the map!’

My finger stabs at the smudged screen in my hand.

‘Take me to this lodge!’

Gangsta Dude smiles.

‘Ok,’ he says, ‘ok. Let’s follow the map.’

He waits for a gap in the traffic, flicks the indicator light on again, makes a u-turn, and follows the map at a polite speed.

The navigator’s crisp English leads us back into town, and down a rabbit warren of dirt roads and back streets. I use my hand as an awning against the sun and make as if to wipe the sweat from my face, but really it’s to smear the tears away and blast my nose free of snot.

Gangsta Dude runs a steady commentary as we track the GPS lady’s clipped instructions. We wash up at a scruffy industrial collar of the town, next to a down-market shopping centre.

‘Ok,’ he says, pulling up the handbrake. ‘Here we are.’

There isn’t a lodge in sight.

I find the number of a tourist contact I’ve just been given, and make a call to find out why the lodge isn’t where it should be, here on the map, in front of our car.

That’s because it’s 20 km out of town, I’m told over the phone, exactly in the direction the driver had been taking me.

By now I can’t even summon the will to feel shame. But an I-told-you-so would have gone down well.

I apologise once, twice, thrice.

‘Ok,’ I say, ‘I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. Just take me to the lodge.’

Enlightenment

What follows is another cycle through a purgatory of unravelling nerves. The trip to the lodge is somewhat more complicated than either of us had expected. We take a few wrong turns that lead us along some sandy back roads that cut across an ancient floodplain between here and nowhere. We’ve shut GPS lady up, because she has nothing of value to add, and there’s barely a settlement in sight. This is 4x4 country, and we’re not in one.

The lodge turns out to be a lot more pricey than I think I can justify, even in my predicament, but all the other places I call are fully booked. I’m trying to Google-search my way out of the problem but I’m chasing my tail. I seem to have instructed Gangsta Dude to drive in circles, and now the phone reception drops from three bars, to two bars, then one. Google goes quiet. Sunset is getting closer. It’s 24 hours since Preacher Man has pulled the plug on our trip, but this time I don’t have anywhere to stay for the night.

I’m shouting at my phone, its browser frozen and indifferent.

‘Stop. Just stop the car, please.’

Once again, Gangsta Dude stops the car. There’s no need to even pull off the road. This is hardly even a road anymore. I throw the passenger door wide and stomp off over the sandy flats where I dissolve into a frothing mess of snot and spit and tears and sweat.

I’m hunched under the thimble of shade cast by my sunhat, hands on my knees, and wail into an abyss of unapologetic self pity.

The moment passes as fiercely as a thunderstorm. Once it’s done, I stomp back to the car, throw myself back inside, and slam the door, which won’t shut. Gangsta Dude walks around the car, wiggles the dodgy latch, eases the door closed, strolls back around to his side, slides into the seat, puts his hands back on the wheel.

I can’t remember if he looks at me at this point, or if he keeps his eyes on the sandy track ahead of us. That detail doesn’t matter, because this is when the Buddha arrives.

Mr Dikuwa — a twenty-something entrepreneur with a taxi business that involves at least two cars, maybe three, and a handful of freelance drivers, who has patiently shrugged off my suggestions that he is a crook and a thug and a murderer-in-waiting — channels a bit of planetary wisdom that must be as ancient as humanity itself.

‘Sometimes when you are that angry you just have to cry,’ Mr Dikuwa says, with a compassion that extends beyond his youth and beyond the abuse he has suffered at my hands, because he understands that he has in his car a frightened woman who just wants a safe ride home.

‘If you don’t cry, you get sick. So… you can cry…’

With that, I suddenly don’t need to cry anymore.

Laundry list

The hubris of thinking we ‘Westerners’ are the higher-born mortal, and the better gatekeeper and curator of the Indigenous story.

I once heard someone reflecting on prejudice, and how we can excise it. It isn’t like a once-off heart surgery, where we have an awakening to our conditioned racism, which we fix with a single invasive procedure.

It’s more like maintaining good dental health, where we examine ourselves as a daily discipline, and continually brush or floss or gargle away the corrosive acids and bacteria that rot our teeth and befoul our breath.

It takes me five days to get home.

Five days, two flights, and several airport shuttles, which includes calling on Mr Dikuwa’s services again. By now, Mr Dikuwa and his plucky band of drivers are on speed-dial.

The second Dikuwa taxi ride involves his third driver taking me from lodge to airport, and it would have been a disappointment if it hadn’t involved another misadventure. We go off-piste through a low-income neighbourhood that is well off GPS lady’s preferred route. We stop to pick up a pregnant lass who's waiting for us on the corner of somewhere and somewhere, upon which the taxi gets mired in sand as fine as talcum. The lass is the driver’s girlfriend and seems not at all put out when she and I have to lean our shoulders into the car’s rump and heave it into motion again.

I use the travel time to hammer out a ten-page report for my editor, laying out how the story and the team came so horribly unstuck, and I pitch a new angle.

When I swing open the door to my apartment back in Cape Town, it is so cavernous that the sound of the filthy clothes tumbling into the laundry basket seem to ricochet off its walls. There are a pile of awaiting emails, including several from a new neighbour who demands to know who in our block of flats is responsible for buying cleaning detergent for the bins out the back, and why haven’t I acted sooner on his laundry-list of other issues relating to block management.

A sapling of goodwill wilts inside me. Deep in the soil of the psyche, a cotyledon of misanthropy breaks its seed casing, and grows towards the light.

Chapter 8…