At around 4:00 p.m. on Sunday the power went out here in the part of South Africa’s Kwa-Zulu Natal province that we live, one in a series of rolling blackouts by the republic’s main utility, which struggles to meet demand.
The weather outside was 75 degrees with a light breeze that carried a trace of smoke. My significant other and I heard a beep that signaled the shutdown, then the appliances kicked off.
The outage seemed like a good time to get out of the house. We resolved to bicycle around the village, a circuit that takes about an hour.
Others had similar thoughts. On our road, a neighbor walked her beagle. A couple from the cul-de-sac at the end were out with their two retrievers. Our ridgebacks, Tala and Juma, raced to them. The wife, who happens to be the vet who cares for our dogs, pushed their infant daughter in a stroller.
Later the sun set and the stars appeared. One burned a bright yellow.
That’s how it’s been here the past 10 days, when a combination of power cuts and spotty Internet conspired to connect me more closely with the days and nights.
Internet in the village comes from Telkom, a state-owned monopoly that serves most of the republic. Our house receives Internet via so-called ADSL, a pre-broadband era technology that, in theory, delivers Internet over copper telephone lines at speeds of around 5 gigabytes per second on a good day.
The ADSL here gives out at sundown sometimes. The house receives about one bar of cellphone service, which means you can’t use your phone as a hotspot.
Service delivery can be spotty in South Africa. Of course, we’re well off compared with most people. Nearly 65% of households in South Africa have no access to the Internet, according to the latest census.
Our spotty Internet connection feels like a throwback to the mid-1990s in the U.S., when the World Wide Web had just appeared and most of us dialed into the Internet via modems.
You connect when you can.
That leaves plenty to discover when you can’t connect. A week ago we biked along the beach in Durban, from the city front to the Blue Lagoon, where on Sundays Indian families, three and four generations strong, gather. We read a book of drawings by Jean-Michel Basquiat and watched a documentary about the artist in downtown Manhattan in the 1990s. We hooked up the speakers to the stereo that had been unconnected for years and listened to jazz. I began reading “The Fear,” a chronicle by the journalist Peter Godwin about Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe.
Most days the dogs and I walk together at a farm nearby. They wake me in the morning.
If I want to work with an Internet connection, I head to the village library, where I can pick up a cellphone signal from Vodacom that registers four or five bars.
The library, which occupies a low-slung building, has sections in English, Zulu and Afrikaans. It also displays the latest local newspapers and periodicals. One day recently, I read the Mercury, a daily from Durban, flipped through an issue of GQ’s South Africa edition, and lost myself in an collection of essays by Nadine Gordimer, the South African writer who died last year.
The place is pin quiet. Sometimes the librarians chat softly in Zulu.