I met Trouser first. It took three days before I learned that his name was Trouser, but I saw him from the hotel window, sitting out in front of the little restaurant across the street, wagging his tail at the passersby, attracting quite a bit of attention since he was just so big!

On our second night of going to the restaurant (which in a strange twist of American-kitsch irony, was called the Apache Spur), we finally stopped and said hello to Trouser up close. A skinny young Xhosa man came up behind him, wearing the uniform of a security guard.

"Great dog," said kai-Imakhu Ryan, petting Trouser's head. "That's not a dog," replied the young man. "That's a lion!"

So we were introduced to the Spur's personal security guard, Shepherd, and Shepherd's dog-lion. Every day they said hello. Every night they said goodnight. In the middle of the night I woke up and saw them, sitting in front of the stairs leading up to the Spur, sharing barbecued ribs in a bucket, or talking to the owner or one of the hired help from the Spur, passing the hours, guarding the door.

By the time we asked Shepherd if we could take a picture of himself and his dog, we'd been in South Africa long enough to know about its dual nature: it was a place where people could be fantastically wealthy and beyond poor, sometimes at the same time....a place where sixteen-bedroom summer homes were only a few miles from glorified cardboard boxes with no water or electricity. A place which didn't seem to know what it was going to do with itself, now that it had the freedom to do so. A place which will haunt my dreams for the rest of my life.

Shepherd posed, Trouser even made a valiant effort, and we started walking back across the street to the hotel. "Wait!" Shepherd called...so we stood in the middle of the street, stopping traffic, as he came across to talk to us with the trusty dog-lion watching his back. He asked, quietly, if it would be possible for us to send him a copy of the picture once we'd returned to the States. "I don't have any pictures of Trouser," he explained. I reached into my wallet for a piece of paper and a pen, handing it to him with the indication that he write down where we could send it, to his home address, and he pushed the paper away with a strange look.

It took five minutes to understand: Shepherd lived on the street in front of the Spur, so the only way to get a photograph to him would be to send it to the owner, who'd bring it down for him. "My mother lives in Khayelitsha," Shepherd admitted, saying the name of one of the most destitute of Cape Town's black townships. "My mother lives in Khayelitsha. I stay here."

In the U.S., you often hear people complaining about the "homeless problem," about how it would all be so much better if the bums would just go get a job. What if the bums had a job, but still had no home? Shepherd was very well employed, from what we understood talking to the owner of the restaurant, who hired many township people because they needed the money so much more. Additionally, the restaurant saw to it that Shepherd and Trouser had somewhere to sleep and food to eat. Yet in the U.S. mindset, Shepherd would still be a bum, a drifter, the sort of person you look through when you're walking down the street, because obviously he was too damn lazy if he didn't have a place to live...job or no job.

(Click for full size image 47k.)

I didn't sleep that night. I sat in the window, watching a man and his dog share a late-night dinner.

We found a one-hour photo the next day and had the picture developed. That evening we presented the photograph to Shepherd. He praised the picture, looking down to show it to Trouser, commenting on how good the uniform looked, then tried to hand it back. When we indicated it was for him to keep, he hugged us both with tears in his eyes. "I'm going to put this in a frame and give it to my mother," he said. "And I'm going to show it to my boss." For the rest of the trip we spent each evening talking with Shepherd, about Cape Town, about his life, about our lives. On our last day he stopped us in the street again.

"I will pray to God to give me the power to come to the States and follow you," he said to me, putting his palms up before me in a form of supplication and honor which coincidentally is the same for both the Xhosa and the Kemetic. "Perhaps one day I will even be a priest like you," he said to kai-Imakhu Ryan. Trouser watched from the doorway, holding a small ball painted to look like the Earth in his shaggy paws.