The directions are as follows, scrawled into a page of my notebook:
Travelling on the M1 South, take Boysens Rd off-ramp and keep travelling away from Gold Reef City. Once on Boysens turn left at the second set of traffic lights, into Mentz st. At the next set of lights turn left onto Ophir Booysens Rd that becomes Soweto Highway. Continue along this road to Soweto through Orlando East into Orlando West. Turn left into Carr street.
The Mzimhlophe Ark is next to a block-house grocery store, with badly handpainted signs on the wall for various products. It is low-rise land, packed dirt and one-storey houses trailed through the dust, cracked stones showing their teeth where the rain has worn grooves into the earth. On the edge of the Soweto highway, an old man in holed clothes is stooping down to pick up a piece of rusted scrap metal, perhaps car undercarriage, to add to the collection hanging from his arm.
The Ark itself is housed in an old bottleshop, the brick cash counter still preserved in the bottom half of the front room walls, now built onto with thin partitions that don’t quite reach the ceiling. Within that one building is a reception area (a couch, some armchairs, a low coffee-table, a framed copy of the South African constitution, thumbtacked children’s paintings, an exuberant bunch of plastic flowers, and a set of frayed papier mache chairs), a kitchen (an iron frame that three industrial-sized pots can rest on, a gas canister, a table), the preparation area (along one side handmade cubbyholes with handmade notes identifying the contents: “spices”, “flour”, “meal”, along another a narrow countertop where tall stacks of bread are being buttered), the manager’s office (three beaten-up chairs, a desk, a phone, a friendly mess of papers stacked on the desk, floor, and all flat surfaces), a toilet (locked), a storage shed (gleaming silver racks of donated bicycles leaning companionably against one another, silver helmets dangling from their bars, and in the corner, a jumble of second-hand, sadder, smaller bikes, with stunted parts missing), a room for meals (rows of plastic tables festooned with upended plastic chairs, empty save for two women with an ironing board and a neat pile of lime-green t-shirts, matching lime-green baseball caps heaped to one side), and a classroom of sorts (ceiling-high stacks of the same plastic chairs, rows of crayoned drawings, three boys at a dontated computer, painstakingly drawing in an old version of Microsoft Paint).
We meet the manager, a beaming man introduced to us as Martin, whom the other staff refer to as baba, or father. We sit in the well-worn front room, making introductions, exclaiming over the cloth mural hung at one end, and listening to what goes on in this little place. I am there as a representive of NOAH, to hear about their activities, their needs. They tell us about the hundred odd children who arrive every day for breakfast and lunch from the big tin pots, about the homework supervision classes and the reading groups, about the victories of their lime-green bicycle team, which practise every Saturday on the streets around this area, raising the dust.
The two women who were buttering bread come in, bearing a tray of teacups and buns. I hesitate, thinking of the rows of empty tables where the children eat, the half-bare kitchen, the second-hand, frayed edges of everything, thinking of what this offering costs. It seems too much to accept.
But, I realise, to refuse would be worse. So we cradle the cups of hot chocolate on our knees and listen, and laugh, and do what we can to be deserving of this hospitality.
Friday, June 06, 2008
Tuesday, June 03, 2008
Fashion Dilemmas Representative Of My Life
You know that your life has taken an interesting turn when you find yourself debating what outfit could possibly be suitable for a 7am breakfast at the Johannesburg Country Club, an establishment which prints copies of its dress code on menus, visitor cards and brass wall-plaques, a dress code that specifies, among its many requirements, which geographical areas of the club one might or might not be permitted to wear moccasins, and what length of pants will suffice after sunset, and also for a 10am meeting at a children’s centre in far West Soweto which at present is requesting funding to patch their leaking ceiling.
This is my Thursday morning. I'm not exactly sure how I came to be here, but it is an interesting place to be.
This is my Thursday morning. I'm not exactly sure how I came to be here, but it is an interesting place to be.
Saturday, May 24, 2008
Tinder for the Flames
On a rush-lined backroad from the northern outskirts of the city, a man is carrying his tightly top-knotted daughter on his shoulders, and a few steps behind him a slim woman is balancing a bright orange pack of Pampers on her head. I turn and watch them from the rear window as we pass by, another scrap of material for the patchwork blanket this city weaves.
At the Oriental Plaza, its faux minarets and archways a bleached terracotta in the bright sun, we duck into a lingerie store for a moment, giggling. A shop assistant clad in a black head-to-toe burka encourages us towards scraps of candy-striped silk underwear, her only visible skin the bridge of her nose and the edges of her eyes, which crinkle in an unexpectedly friendly way.
This is the collision of Joburg life, the coming together of all possible peoples and traditions. In a way, it is no wonder that sometimes the sparks catch alight.
In the lingering orange glow of a Saturday afternoon, at an old farmhouse whic is playing host to a birthday party, two blonde girls crouch over paper bags filled with sand, lighting candles within. The wavering line of candlelight grows as they make their way along the lawn verge, barefoot in the grass, print dresses flaring in the soft breeze. At the pool, their father holds the older one by the waist as she leans out over the water, placing pinpricks of light into the floating candles with the utmost of care. If I strain, I can catch the beat of music from the shebeen across the road that never sleeps, the smudge of charcoal on the horizon where, in the valley of Diepsloot beyond, the shacks are burning.
Later, we throw rose petals, the children gathering great velvet armfuls from the floor to fling at the birthday girl, while the police helicopters circle in the darkened sky. I wonder if from the sky our candles look like the other fires.
The images we see on the television, all of that week, and the next. I hear of them too from people in other parts of the world, who watch the same images and wonder how I am, and who ask what is happening.
I don’t have an answer. Those things happen on the other side of electric fences, on the far side of the valley. There is nothing in the taste of a latte, or the babble of shopping centre crowds, to let me know that anything at all is happening. I take out a map, and estimate the size of my life here: about eight square kilometres of suburbia.
All I can offer are fragments of explanation, dry firewood.
At a nearby school, we walk the perimeter with the principle, measuring out the prospects of establishing a food garden. He points to the cracked paving, the tiling coming away over the years, and we discuss the government budget for education. It’s hot and he shifts in his cheap suit, counting up the cost of all the things his students need and don’t have. The conversation strays, and he offers his two cents on the riots, the burnings, the killings.
“It’s the ANC in the area,” he says. “During the years of exile, they had bases in Zimbabwe and elsewhere, so now they owe these people. Whole areas of government housing were given to Nigerians, others to Zimbabweans… and there are South Africans living in shacks.”
It’s a rumour, or a truth, that I hear circulated elsewhere, one of many. Those who have nothing turning on those who are threatening to take what little they might hope for. A nation who still has difficulty feeding or housing most of its people, struggling under the influx of thousands more.
“I hire a Zimbabwean in my garden,” a Rotarian tells me. “I know he’s illegal, but I’d rather he works than steals. And they work harder than most South Africans.”
At a feeding scheme out in the Itsoseng squatter camp, a child pulls another in an empty husk of a broken vacuum cleaner, an eight-year-old minding his younger sister with the care of a parent. I hear of the complicated system of real estate, where bare patches of earth to sleep on come at a price, and those that begin in the shacks moving on to houses, and renting out the shacks to newcomers, and so on, a landowner system that links every chaotic, shifting layer of society.
But these are just fragments. It’s all I can offer. Two inches on the map, but far, far further than I can go.
I continue, unaffected, buying balsamic vinegar and ignoring the newspaper headlines. After all, who would I know that is in danger? The people dying are dying because no-one here knows or cares about them: they are on the outside of even the fringes of South African life.
I need to put a face on those outsiders. In the Mail & Guardian, there is an article from a Zimbabwean living in Harare. In the middle of the night, he is woken by knocking on his door – a cousin who had left a long time ago to earn a living in South Africa, now returning to Zimbabwe in the midst of the election violence and food crisis. They burned my shack, my passport, everything, the cousin weeps.
*******
Almost as abruptly as it flared, the violence has subsided. There are as many theories as to why it ended as there are as to why it began. I hope there will be many somebodys in the coming weeks who are able to tell the stories of those affected, to give voice to the voiceless.
And in the meantime, the city continues to amass its pile of firewood, and somehow, somehow, doesn’t burn to the ground.
At the Oriental Plaza, its faux minarets and archways a bleached terracotta in the bright sun, we duck into a lingerie store for a moment, giggling. A shop assistant clad in a black head-to-toe burka encourages us towards scraps of candy-striped silk underwear, her only visible skin the bridge of her nose and the edges of her eyes, which crinkle in an unexpectedly friendly way.
This is the collision of Joburg life, the coming together of all possible peoples and traditions. In a way, it is no wonder that sometimes the sparks catch alight.
In the lingering orange glow of a Saturday afternoon, at an old farmhouse whic is playing host to a birthday party, two blonde girls crouch over paper bags filled with sand, lighting candles within. The wavering line of candlelight grows as they make their way along the lawn verge, barefoot in the grass, print dresses flaring in the soft breeze. At the pool, their father holds the older one by the waist as she leans out over the water, placing pinpricks of light into the floating candles with the utmost of care. If I strain, I can catch the beat of music from the shebeen across the road that never sleeps, the smudge of charcoal on the horizon where, in the valley of Diepsloot beyond, the shacks are burning.
Later, we throw rose petals, the children gathering great velvet armfuls from the floor to fling at the birthday girl, while the police helicopters circle in the darkened sky. I wonder if from the sky our candles look like the other fires.
The images we see on the television, all of that week, and the next. I hear of them too from people in other parts of the world, who watch the same images and wonder how I am, and who ask what is happening.
I don’t have an answer. Those things happen on the other side of electric fences, on the far side of the valley. There is nothing in the taste of a latte, or the babble of shopping centre crowds, to let me know that anything at all is happening. I take out a map, and estimate the size of my life here: about eight square kilometres of suburbia.
All I can offer are fragments of explanation, dry firewood.
At a nearby school, we walk the perimeter with the principle, measuring out the prospects of establishing a food garden. He points to the cracked paving, the tiling coming away over the years, and we discuss the government budget for education. It’s hot and he shifts in his cheap suit, counting up the cost of all the things his students need and don’t have. The conversation strays, and he offers his two cents on the riots, the burnings, the killings.
“It’s the ANC in the area,” he says. “During the years of exile, they had bases in Zimbabwe and elsewhere, so now they owe these people. Whole areas of government housing were given to Nigerians, others to Zimbabweans… and there are South Africans living in shacks.”
It’s a rumour, or a truth, that I hear circulated elsewhere, one of many. Those who have nothing turning on those who are threatening to take what little they might hope for. A nation who still has difficulty feeding or housing most of its people, struggling under the influx of thousands more.
“I hire a Zimbabwean in my garden,” a Rotarian tells me. “I know he’s illegal, but I’d rather he works than steals. And they work harder than most South Africans.”
At a feeding scheme out in the Itsoseng squatter camp, a child pulls another in an empty husk of a broken vacuum cleaner, an eight-year-old minding his younger sister with the care of a parent. I hear of the complicated system of real estate, where bare patches of earth to sleep on come at a price, and those that begin in the shacks moving on to houses, and renting out the shacks to newcomers, and so on, a landowner system that links every chaotic, shifting layer of society.
But these are just fragments. It’s all I can offer. Two inches on the map, but far, far further than I can go.
I continue, unaffected, buying balsamic vinegar and ignoring the newspaper headlines. After all, who would I know that is in danger? The people dying are dying because no-one here knows or cares about them: they are on the outside of even the fringes of South African life.
I need to put a face on those outsiders. In the Mail & Guardian, there is an article from a Zimbabwean living in Harare. In the middle of the night, he is woken by knocking on his door – a cousin who had left a long time ago to earn a living in South Africa, now returning to Zimbabwe in the midst of the election violence and food crisis. They burned my shack, my passport, everything, the cousin weeps.
*******
Almost as abruptly as it flared, the violence has subsided. There are as many theories as to why it ended as there are as to why it began. I hope there will be many somebodys in the coming weeks who are able to tell the stories of those affected, to give voice to the voiceless.
And in the meantime, the city continues to amass its pile of firewood, and somehow, somehow, doesn’t burn to the ground.
Tuesday, May 06, 2008
Saturday, April 05, 2008
The world out there
Denmark creeps out of the still ocean surface in otherwordly pieces: a long thin arc of a bridge, like a surgical instrument slicing the water, joining one miniscule island of land to another. It is too delicate to exist, a daisychain dream in the middle of the North Sea.
Then suddenly we are over a snowscene, houses capped with white, fields combed with snow, lying heavy on the furrows like neat pinstripe suits. And the fairytale darkness of the forests pass below us, unwhitened, brooding in charcoal and deep evergreen. The stray pieces of frozen water on the roads and in the fields throw flashes of the blinding morning sunlight back up at us, sharp and crisp as the new day.
On the bus from the airport, I collect first impressions: large-lettered signs on suburban streets, like toytown holiday complexes; English advertisements and hoarding signs and shop displays; and elderly people, everywhere, pushing wheeled frames and riding electric scooters.
I walk for miles that morning, pulling my wheeled suitcase through the streets of København, marking out memory maps with my feet that follow the lines of the glass-mounted map in the Tourist Office. I walk for hours, watching and listening, sounding out the unfamiliar vowels of signs stuck into breadrolls and pastries and pizza slices. I peer in the windows of the below-pavement Turkish take-aways and Armenian grocery stores, jump to avoid the bicycles ting-tinging down the streets. A tall youth with a mobile phone and an American accent walks by:
"... look you know how I feel about you. If I was going to settle down with anyone it would be you..."
There is graffiti scrawled across every blank wall, a confusion of names and statements and movie quotes. When I cross the road at a red light, cars beep an admonishment. In the glare of the sunshine the night's snow is melting, raining from the roofs and sliding from car bonnets.
At night, I catch glimpses of the life that goes on inside the facades I pass. A lit-up internet café, with rows and rows of young men playing Half-Life in absolute silence. On one street corner, the orderly calm of a bingo hall, and three ten-year-old girls standing outside the window on tiptoes, peering in at the action.
****************
The snow falls thicker out in the countryside of Jylland, one of the many Danish peninsulas. We lay tracks in the morning on the way to breakfast, freshly set in white against the dark brambles and leafless trees. We shake snowflakes from our coats and hair when we get indoors, and stamp the crust from our boots. In the evening when someone takes a beer to the meeting, it is put outside on the windowledge to chill.
On the second night I see the icicles hanging from the chalet eaves. We jump up to snap them off, fighting duels with their brittle lengths. I have never held an icicle before and it feels curiously smooth, and slippery as the heat of our hands melts the surface. We throw them against the building to watch them shatter, breath smoking in the air.
When I walk back to my room at the end of the night, the snow is falling again, erasing all the footprints of the day.
****************
"What did you know about Denmark before you came here?"
I make a wry face. Nothing, is the honest answer. I take out the map of Europe now and I can fill in some of the gaps - the wheatfields with the turning windfarms, the neat road verges, the chocolate spread on breakfast rolls. I have my memory maps of the city, my bus timetables and the echoes of the language I don't understand. It is still not very much, almost nothing.
"How European do you feel?"
There are nearly one hundred of us here, from various parts of Europe, and some other parts of the world - India, Colombia, Morrocco Tanzania, Uganda, the US - brought together to plan youth exchanges. I am one of only two who speak English as a first language, but together we carry out opinion polls, run fair trade evenings, dress up, perform stand-up, teach each other the Macarena, make human pyramids. We have semi-drunken conversations in the school bar about the Lisbon Treaty, about what it means to be from a place, to be white or black, to be European.
I think of all the places in Europe I had been up until a few months ago, count them on one hand. France, Portugal, Britain. So pitifully little. I had seen more of Africa than I had of Europe.
I do, I had answered. I do feel European.
But what do I know of Europe?
******************
My journal pages for March 23rd to 24th are littered with phrases in Hungarian, Albanian, Telugu and Azeri. They were my traveling companions back to the city, a random collection of skin tones, religions, passports, and levels of exhaustion. We talked about elections, tourism, jobs we had, places we had yet to go.
I had been feeling weary, a returned traveler who wasn't sure what she had seen. Now I remember what still waits out there, and back here.
And I am excited. Because it doesn't end here.
Then suddenly we are over a snowscene, houses capped with white, fields combed with snow, lying heavy on the furrows like neat pinstripe suits. And the fairytale darkness of the forests pass below us, unwhitened, brooding in charcoal and deep evergreen. The stray pieces of frozen water on the roads and in the fields throw flashes of the blinding morning sunlight back up at us, sharp and crisp as the new day.
On the bus from the airport, I collect first impressions: large-lettered signs on suburban streets, like toytown holiday complexes; English advertisements and hoarding signs and shop displays; and elderly people, everywhere, pushing wheeled frames and riding electric scooters.
I walk for miles that morning, pulling my wheeled suitcase through the streets of København, marking out memory maps with my feet that follow the lines of the glass-mounted map in the Tourist Office. I walk for hours, watching and listening, sounding out the unfamiliar vowels of signs stuck into breadrolls and pastries and pizza slices. I peer in the windows of the below-pavement Turkish take-aways and Armenian grocery stores, jump to avoid the bicycles ting-tinging down the streets. A tall youth with a mobile phone and an American accent walks by:
"... look you know how I feel about you. If I was going to settle down with anyone it would be you..."
There is graffiti scrawled across every blank wall, a confusion of names and statements and movie quotes. When I cross the road at a red light, cars beep an admonishment. In the glare of the sunshine the night's snow is melting, raining from the roofs and sliding from car bonnets.
At night, I catch glimpses of the life that goes on inside the facades I pass. A lit-up internet café, with rows and rows of young men playing Half-Life in absolute silence. On one street corner, the orderly calm of a bingo hall, and three ten-year-old girls standing outside the window on tiptoes, peering in at the action.
****************
The snow falls thicker out in the countryside of Jylland, one of the many Danish peninsulas. We lay tracks in the morning on the way to breakfast, freshly set in white against the dark brambles and leafless trees. We shake snowflakes from our coats and hair when we get indoors, and stamp the crust from our boots. In the evening when someone takes a beer to the meeting, it is put outside on the windowledge to chill.
On the second night I see the icicles hanging from the chalet eaves. We jump up to snap them off, fighting duels with their brittle lengths. I have never held an icicle before and it feels curiously smooth, and slippery as the heat of our hands melts the surface. We throw them against the building to watch them shatter, breath smoking in the air.
When I walk back to my room at the end of the night, the snow is falling again, erasing all the footprints of the day.
****************
"What did you know about Denmark before you came here?"
I make a wry face. Nothing, is the honest answer. I take out the map of Europe now and I can fill in some of the gaps - the wheatfields with the turning windfarms, the neat road verges, the chocolate spread on breakfast rolls. I have my memory maps of the city, my bus timetables and the echoes of the language I don't understand. It is still not very much, almost nothing.
"How European do you feel?"
There are nearly one hundred of us here, from various parts of Europe, and some other parts of the world - India, Colombia, Morrocco Tanzania, Uganda, the US - brought together to plan youth exchanges. I am one of only two who speak English as a first language, but together we carry out opinion polls, run fair trade evenings, dress up, perform stand-up, teach each other the Macarena, make human pyramids. We have semi-drunken conversations in the school bar about the Lisbon Treaty, about what it means to be from a place, to be white or black, to be European.
I think of all the places in Europe I had been up until a few months ago, count them on one hand. France, Portugal, Britain. So pitifully little. I had seen more of Africa than I had of Europe.
I do, I had answered. I do feel European.
But what do I know of Europe?
******************
My journal pages for March 23rd to 24th are littered with phrases in Hungarian, Albanian, Telugu and Azeri. They were my traveling companions back to the city, a random collection of skin tones, religions, passports, and levels of exhaustion. We talked about elections, tourism, jobs we had, places we had yet to go.
I had been feeling weary, a returned traveler who wasn't sure what she had seen. Now I remember what still waits out there, and back here.
And I am excited. Because it doesn't end here.
Saturday, March 15, 2008
Going Back
At first, I am afraid I won't feel the same way anymore. It has been too long, and too much has changed since then. I am afraid I will make comparisons, and find something wanting. It is possible to fall out of love, after all.
I am not even sure I would be welcome, and I hesitate over the decision to go. And to be sure, the signals are bad to begin with - our buses don't connect at Eyre Square, and the dour-faced man in the notice-strewn office plays deaf while we wring our hands with worry. Even when a becapped driver comes jovially to our aid, and commissions an empty bus to run us out to our hostel beyond Maam Cross, I cannot shake the bad feeling. And it seems I am right.
On the door of our hostel is a notice penned in felt-tip: Check-in at 5pm. We look at our watches, aghast, then back down the empty roads, stretching for miles in either direction. It is two o'clock and a light rain has started, as we stand locked outside with our belongings.
"Well," I say. "Welcome to the West of Ireland."
My visitor and fellow traveler, Sabrina, takes a step back and looks around her.
"It's beautiful," she breathes.
"Yes," I sigh. "It is."
And it is a place I have loved dearly, for many years. But I wasn't sure how it would look anymore, or whether I would still feel I belonged. I have spent too long being away, and too much time recently being critical of the place I am from.
We throw our bags into a nearby tree, and armed with some chocolate begin walking. Sabrina wants to learn a song in Irish so I try to teach her Óró sé do bheatha 'bhaile to much amusement, and we yell along happily at the cloudy sky and the occasional curious sheep.
Over the crest of the hill we find a small sheep caught in a ditch, long brambles tangled in its coat. We try ineffectually to free it but the briars are stuck too deep. It is struggling, panicked, as the cars zoom by, so I run into the only house nearby and asked the dishevelled 13-year-old who answers the door for a knife.
"A wha'?"
"A knife! There's a sheep stuck."
"Bu' we doan have anny sheap."
"Oh for... look, do you've a scissors even?"
Eventually I return to the sheep with a blue-handled child-safe paper-scissors, and the 13-year-old in tow. Sabrina holds its horns while I cut at the wool knotted around the briars, and then the boy grabs hold of its back end and hoists the thing bodily out of the ditch and onto the road, where it promptly scrambles to its feet and dashes away, giving us all the Crazy Eye that sheep reserve for humans, stray bramble bits swinging from its coat. For the next three miles it keeps running ahead of us in spurts as we walk on down the road, crazy eyeing us between desperate snatches of grass.
"Stupid sheep," Sabrina mutters, then tentatively tries out one of her newly acquired Irishisms. "Feks ayke?"
I start to giggle uncontrollably. The sheep watches us warily as we both stagger about bent over with laughter.
"Welcome to the West," I say again, and we link arms on the rainy road to nowhere, or possibly Recess, where a hot drink and a turf fire awaits us.
Later, we hitch a lift back with a young trainee teacher from Oughterard, and make pasta in the hostel kitchen, which we eat while drying our socks in front of the fire, drinking tumblers of cheap red wine; and the next day we walk to Clifden, munching on a loaf of Polish bread and some cheese, to catch the end of the St. Patrick's Day parade there, which seems to consist of a tractor, two lorries and eleven kids dressed as bees; and after that we get chatting to some local pensioners, and wrangle a bus back through the lake region to Galway city, where we get talking to the Irish band at Tigh Neachtain and meet strangers who know people we know... and somewhere along the line I realise that there is something in the shape of the hills and the colour of the rock out here and the way the light breaks through the clouds that will never cease to open my heart.
And I needn't have worried, because I won't ever stop loving this land.
No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow. ~Lin Yutang
I am not even sure I would be welcome, and I hesitate over the decision to go. And to be sure, the signals are bad to begin with - our buses don't connect at Eyre Square, and the dour-faced man in the notice-strewn office plays deaf while we wring our hands with worry. Even when a becapped driver comes jovially to our aid, and commissions an empty bus to run us out to our hostel beyond Maam Cross, I cannot shake the bad feeling. And it seems I am right.
On the door of our hostel is a notice penned in felt-tip: Check-in at 5pm. We look at our watches, aghast, then back down the empty roads, stretching for miles in either direction. It is two o'clock and a light rain has started, as we stand locked outside with our belongings.
"Well," I say. "Welcome to the West of Ireland."
My visitor and fellow traveler, Sabrina, takes a step back and looks around her.
"It's beautiful," she breathes.
"Yes," I sigh. "It is."
And it is a place I have loved dearly, for many years. But I wasn't sure how it would look anymore, or whether I would still feel I belonged. I have spent too long being away, and too much time recently being critical of the place I am from.
We throw our bags into a nearby tree, and armed with some chocolate begin walking. Sabrina wants to learn a song in Irish so I try to teach her Óró sé do bheatha 'bhaile to much amusement, and we yell along happily at the cloudy sky and the occasional curious sheep.
Over the crest of the hill we find a small sheep caught in a ditch, long brambles tangled in its coat. We try ineffectually to free it but the briars are stuck too deep. It is struggling, panicked, as the cars zoom by, so I run into the only house nearby and asked the dishevelled 13-year-old who answers the door for a knife.
"A wha'?"
"A knife! There's a sheep stuck."
"Bu' we doan have anny sheap."
"Oh for... look, do you've a scissors even?"
Eventually I return to the sheep with a blue-handled child-safe paper-scissors, and the 13-year-old in tow. Sabrina holds its horns while I cut at the wool knotted around the briars, and then the boy grabs hold of its back end and hoists the thing bodily out of the ditch and onto the road, where it promptly scrambles to its feet and dashes away, giving us all the Crazy Eye that sheep reserve for humans, stray bramble bits swinging from its coat. For the next three miles it keeps running ahead of us in spurts as we walk on down the road, crazy eyeing us between desperate snatches of grass.
"Stupid sheep," Sabrina mutters, then tentatively tries out one of her newly acquired Irishisms. "Feks ayke?"
I start to giggle uncontrollably. The sheep watches us warily as we both stagger about bent over with laughter.
"Welcome to the West," I say again, and we link arms on the rainy road to nowhere, or possibly Recess, where a hot drink and a turf fire awaits us.
Later, we hitch a lift back with a young trainee teacher from Oughterard, and make pasta in the hostel kitchen, which we eat while drying our socks in front of the fire, drinking tumblers of cheap red wine; and the next day we walk to Clifden, munching on a loaf of Polish bread and some cheese, to catch the end of the St. Patrick's Day parade there, which seems to consist of a tractor, two lorries and eleven kids dressed as bees; and after that we get chatting to some local pensioners, and wrangle a bus back through the lake region to Galway city, where we get talking to the Irish band at Tigh Neachtain and meet strangers who know people we know... and somewhere along the line I realise that there is something in the shape of the hills and the colour of the rock out here and the way the light breaks through the clouds that will never cease to open my heart.
And I needn't have worried, because I won't ever stop loving this land.
No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow. ~Lin Yutang
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Lines on the map
In Strasbourg, it is the man walking his two poodles at night; in Münzen, it is two girls on the train, and the man selling hot roasted chesnuts from a cart; in Köln, it is a woman chaining up her bicycle beside the city walls; in Prien, it is the two pensioners smoking fag-ends in the snow by the station; in Dambache-la-ville it is the woman carrying laundry, who owns the gîte which should be closed on a Sunday.
We plan nothing, we have read nothing. Between us we speak a woefully small amount of the languages of the countries we pass through; we have no maps, no transport booked, and very little money. We decide to go on this trip on a whim, as a result of an excitable conversation several days beforehand. When I arrive in Münzen airport, I have already forgotten which country we were planning to go to next. I have a vague idea it might be Luxembourg. Perhaps.
But along the way we meet an assortment of unlikely guardian angels, who give us directions and decipher timetables and walk us to our accommodation and open their businesses for us on holidays. They sketch maps and write out words and suggest destinations and get us to the right platforms and give us advice.
And, accidentally, unintentionally, it somehow all works out. (As it always does)
******************
In a little guesthouse in Dambache-la-ville, I spot a Rotary sign on the wall and the owners and I begin a long and wonderful conversation. The man tells me of his family, how when his grandfather was born the area was German territory, and then transferred to the French, before being recaptured by the Germans who forced him to join the army, which was later liberated by the French, who then refused him a French passport because of the year of his birth certificate.
This area, he tells me, it is special. We have been passed back and forward, we are neither one nor the other.
*****
In a bar in Münzen, over several gluweins und leibkuchen, one of the group we are talking to explains to me that he is Bavarian. It is this region in Germany we are in now, he tells me, it is very old and we keep our own traditions. I am German, but I am Bavarian first.
*****
In Mondorf-aux-bains, a small border town in Luxembourg, I take a walk through the stairwayed streets, reading the wrought-iron signs, and fingering the gold-embossed organ in the empty little church. I walk over a bridge spanning a stream to visit a tobacconist on the other side, and on my way back I notice the flags on the bridge: one French, one Luxembourgish.
I stop. Turn around. Look closer. A small street sign on one side of the bridge reads "FRANCE". On the other side an identical sign reads "LUXEMBOURG". Slowly, I take four steps forward, then four steps backwards.
Luxembourg. France. Luxembourg.
I look at the ground, expecting to see a line drawn there, like they are on the maps. I always imagined there would be one, a yellow border drawn through this road, across the bend of the stream, cutting houses in half, dividing one half of a forest from the other.
But there is nothing. Just the flags shifting lazily in the breeze.
*****
On the tram in Strasbourg, two women in woollen bobble hats begin chattering away to us in a cobbled mixture of Deutsche and français, not in the least bit put off my my lack of knowledge of the former, or my traveling companion's lack of either. I ask about their use of language, about where they are from.
Ici! En Alsace! They tell me.
Vous êtes français? I ask. Are you French?
Non! They shake their heads emphatically. We are Alsacienne! That we are in France... they shrug, inscribe something in the air in front of them. Alors, it is just a mark on the map.
And I remember how we stood in the train station at Luxembourg, beneath the great wall mural of the rail network that stretched its limbs into four or five different countries.
Where to? we asked ourselves.
This way, I said. Let's go this way.
I traced a finger in the air, over the lines on the map that only exist in our minds, the invisible threads that bind us and divide us and that dissolve under our touch.
We plan nothing, we have read nothing. Between us we speak a woefully small amount of the languages of the countries we pass through; we have no maps, no transport booked, and very little money. We decide to go on this trip on a whim, as a result of an excitable conversation several days beforehand. When I arrive in Münzen airport, I have already forgotten which country we were planning to go to next. I have a vague idea it might be Luxembourg. Perhaps.
But along the way we meet an assortment of unlikely guardian angels, who give us directions and decipher timetables and walk us to our accommodation and open their businesses for us on holidays. They sketch maps and write out words and suggest destinations and get us to the right platforms and give us advice.
And, accidentally, unintentionally, it somehow all works out. (As it always does)
******************
In a little guesthouse in Dambache-la-ville, I spot a Rotary sign on the wall and the owners and I begin a long and wonderful conversation. The man tells me of his family, how when his grandfather was born the area was German territory, and then transferred to the French, before being recaptured by the Germans who forced him to join the army, which was later liberated by the French, who then refused him a French passport because of the year of his birth certificate.
This area, he tells me, it is special. We have been passed back and forward, we are neither one nor the other.
*****
In a bar in Münzen, over several gluweins und leibkuchen, one of the group we are talking to explains to me that he is Bavarian. It is this region in Germany we are in now, he tells me, it is very old and we keep our own traditions. I am German, but I am Bavarian first.
*****
In Mondorf-aux-bains, a small border town in Luxembourg, I take a walk through the stairwayed streets, reading the wrought-iron signs, and fingering the gold-embossed organ in the empty little church. I walk over a bridge spanning a stream to visit a tobacconist on the other side, and on my way back I notice the flags on the bridge: one French, one Luxembourgish.
I stop. Turn around. Look closer. A small street sign on one side of the bridge reads "FRANCE". On the other side an identical sign reads "LUXEMBOURG". Slowly, I take four steps forward, then four steps backwards.
Luxembourg. France. Luxembourg.
I look at the ground, expecting to see a line drawn there, like they are on the maps. I always imagined there would be one, a yellow border drawn through this road, across the bend of the stream, cutting houses in half, dividing one half of a forest from the other.
But there is nothing. Just the flags shifting lazily in the breeze.
*****
On the tram in Strasbourg, two women in woollen bobble hats begin chattering away to us in a cobbled mixture of Deutsche and français, not in the least bit put off my my lack of knowledge of the former, or my traveling companion's lack of either. I ask about their use of language, about where they are from.
Ici! En Alsace! They tell me.
Vous êtes français? I ask. Are you French?
Non! They shake their heads emphatically. We are Alsacienne! That we are in France... they shrug, inscribe something in the air in front of them. Alors, it is just a mark on the map.
And I remember how we stood in the train station at Luxembourg, beneath the great wall mural of the rail network that stretched its limbs into four or five different countries.
Where to? we asked ourselves.
This way, I said. Let's go this way.
I traced a finger in the air, over the lines on the map that only exist in our minds, the invisible threads that bind us and divide us and that dissolve under our touch.
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Aftermath
I'm late, I'm always late. Trotting along the pavement at night with the clip of my boots ringing out, a little breathless, checking the time again. Some things never change.
I feel a sudden nudge in my side, as though someone had grabbed at me. I turn - alarmed - and find the street behind me empty, empty but for me and the sudden painful racing of my heart. I look down and realise it was the handle of my laptop case nudging me, nothing more.
Nothing more, I tell myself. And start walking again, trying to calm the jangling inside.
A few minutes on, I feel it again, and again my body reacts before my brain catches up, adrenaline slamming through me even as I scan the empty street.
The third time it happens, I burst into abrupt tears. Standing alone on the darkened pavement, repeating to myself, I am safe, I am safe, I am safe.
I feel a sudden nudge in my side, as though someone had grabbed at me. I turn - alarmed - and find the street behind me empty, empty but for me and the sudden painful racing of my heart. I look down and realise it was the handle of my laptop case nudging me, nothing more.
Nothing more, I tell myself. And start walking again, trying to calm the jangling inside.
A few minutes on, I feel it again, and again my body reacts before my brain catches up, adrenaline slamming through me even as I scan the empty street.
The third time it happens, I burst into abrupt tears. Standing alone on the darkened pavement, repeating to myself, I am safe, I am safe, I am safe.
Saturday, January 12, 2008
Blessing
There is the familiar rumble of the engines, and my stomach turns over deliciously, in my mouth the sharp taste of that pre-flight thrill when for a moment you don't quite believe - and then the miracle happens, as always, and we part company with earthly things.
And that will be my last view of South Africa, the vastness of the city receding into pinprick lines and patterns of light, high above the darkened land. There is an unexpected lurch, somewhere in my chest, and I remember:
savannah grass under never-ending blue sky
the red of the earth
and of the aloe spikes
pepper blossoms falling out of my clothes
the warm breath of desert air
a murmur of voices counting together
dusty cracked kerbstones in the bleached clarity of light
the deep reverberations of lightning storms that shock every nerve ending
and the weight of raindrops falling
A turbulent kaleidoscope of colour, a land that is larger than life. And life itself, in all its forms and contradictions, in brute force and pain. The Ireland I remember seems faded and unreal by comparison.
"Were you here on holiday?" The young man in the seat next to me asks.
"No... not really." I stare out the black window. "I was... visiting... for a while."
"Looking forward to going back?"
I hesitate. And I realise that this is how it will always feel, somewhere between here and there, the joy of arriving and the pain of leaving. Always with your heart in two places.
**************
It is three weeks after I arrive home. I am out for dinner with some young Dublin professionals, successful people with good positions, a steady income, a place in the city centre. We order imported beer, talk of the new Michelin-starred restaurants, of billable hours, of the US presidential nominations. The lights are low, the service prompt.
And I am somewhere else.
I'm not sure it's somewhere I want to be. It's a place shaped like a child's smile, that smells of sweat and jasmine, and tastes of all the things you didn't do. It is a place full of unanswered and unanswerable questions, where the decision to buy a cup of coffee is enough to break you. It is a private place that I cannot share.
I'm supposed to be home now. But where is home?
Someone said to me recently, we who have travelled and given a piece of ourselves to another place, we are the blessed, or the cursed. We have fewer ties to bind us, and that is our joy and our pain.
We don't belong anywhere. Or maybe, we belong to many places.
"Too many fragments of the spirit have I scattered in these streets, and too many are the children of my longing that walk naked among these hills, and I cannot withdraw from them without a burden and an ache." - Kahlil Gibran
And that will be my last view of South Africa, the vastness of the city receding into pinprick lines and patterns of light, high above the darkened land. There is an unexpected lurch, somewhere in my chest, and I remember:
savannah grass under never-ending blue sky
the red of the earth
and of the aloe spikes
pepper blossoms falling out of my clothes
the warm breath of desert air
a murmur of voices counting together
dusty cracked kerbstones in the bleached clarity of light
the deep reverberations of lightning storms that shock every nerve ending
and the weight of raindrops falling
A turbulent kaleidoscope of colour, a land that is larger than life. And life itself, in all its forms and contradictions, in brute force and pain. The Ireland I remember seems faded and unreal by comparison.
"Were you here on holiday?" The young man in the seat next to me asks.
"No... not really." I stare out the black window. "I was... visiting... for a while."
"Looking forward to going back?"
I hesitate. And I realise that this is how it will always feel, somewhere between here and there, the joy of arriving and the pain of leaving. Always with your heart in two places.
**************
It is three weeks after I arrive home. I am out for dinner with some young Dublin professionals, successful people with good positions, a steady income, a place in the city centre. We order imported beer, talk of the new Michelin-starred restaurants, of billable hours, of the US presidential nominations. The lights are low, the service prompt.
And I am somewhere else.
I'm not sure it's somewhere I want to be. It's a place shaped like a child's smile, that smells of sweat and jasmine, and tastes of all the things you didn't do. It is a place full of unanswered and unanswerable questions, where the decision to buy a cup of coffee is enough to break you. It is a private place that I cannot share.
I'm supposed to be home now. But where is home?
Someone said to me recently, we who have travelled and given a piece of ourselves to another place, we are the blessed, or the cursed. We have fewer ties to bind us, and that is our joy and our pain.
We don't belong anywhere. Or maybe, we belong to many places.
"Too many fragments of the spirit have I scattered in these streets, and too many are the children of my longing that walk naked among these hills, and I cannot withdraw from them without a burden and an ache." - Kahlil Gibran
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Missing Out
The heat in Durban has a wet edge to it, stifling and tropical. We walk slowly down the main street, our police escort clearing the traffic in front, dragging banners and chanting, but even at that slow pace our t-shirts cling to us uncomfortably.
I watch the shopfronts we pass, Indian bazaars and hawkers wholesale stores. It's a Saturday and the world is out on the streets, haggling and yelling and making busy plans. The people we pass stare, street-sellers and harried grocery-shoppers wondering what to make of our ragged group brandishing AIDS emblems. The AIDS hike has reached its final destination.
Further downtown there are tall palms lining our way, and the crumbled buildings give way to vast colonial structures. We stop in the square outside the town hall where more people are gathered, and mill around waiting for the speeches and music to start.
Beside me, a late-middle-aged couple are gazing around, taking stock. "We haven't been in the city centre in five years," they explain to me. It's a familiar story, one I have heard again and again from white families I know living in Cape Town or Joburg or even Mthatha. It's gotten too dangerous, they say.
I look across at the bustling, laughing crowds at the outdoor market, the groups gathered in cool spots on the lawns, the people sauntering about in the green light filtering through the great palms above. At the foot of the town hall steps, a toddler is dancing enthusiastically to the guitarist as her Canadian mother and father look on adoringly. I feel sorry for all the people who are missing out on this morning.
I watch the shopfronts we pass, Indian bazaars and hawkers wholesale stores. It's a Saturday and the world is out on the streets, haggling and yelling and making busy plans. The people we pass stare, street-sellers and harried grocery-shoppers wondering what to make of our ragged group brandishing AIDS emblems. The AIDS hike has reached its final destination.
Further downtown there are tall palms lining our way, and the crumbled buildings give way to vast colonial structures. We stop in the square outside the town hall where more people are gathered, and mill around waiting for the speeches and music to start.
Beside me, a late-middle-aged couple are gazing around, taking stock. "We haven't been in the city centre in five years," they explain to me. It's a familiar story, one I have heard again and again from white families I know living in Cape Town or Joburg or even Mthatha. It's gotten too dangerous, they say.
I look across at the bustling, laughing crowds at the outdoor market, the groups gathered in cool spots on the lawns, the people sauntering about in the green light filtering through the great palms above. At the foot of the town hall steps, a toddler is dancing enthusiastically to the guitarist as her Canadian mother and father look on adoringly. I feel sorry for all the people who are missing out on this morning.
Friday, December 14, 2007
Something to lose
My phone rings in my pocket, insistent. It is Roger.
"Are you there yet?"
I shift the straps on my backpack, twist my hair away from my neck in an effort to cool down.
"No, I'm a few minutes away still. I'll call you when I get in to the office, okay?" I try to keep the bemused tone out of my voice.
It is my first day going in to the Noah headquarters from Roger's house, the kindly Rotarian who has taken me in for the duration for my stay in Joburg. He lives a few kilometers from the office, so I walk in, through the dusty intersections that have to pedestrian lights, ignoring the beeps from taxis soliciting business. I am not the only one walking, the streets lined with tired flatfooted women and men trudging to taxi pick-up points, to begin their day as domestic staff or office cleaners.
Roger rings again on my way home, anxious. He is waiting just inside the security gates when I get back, his adorable but ferocious-looking Rotweiler, Kerri, waiting beside him.
"Please let me drive you in instead," he begs, as I withstand a slobbery assult from Kerri.
And although walking is my one small slice of freedom in this city, my escape from the fences and guards and alarms, I relent, because I can see it is distressing him. So my last few weeks in this country are spent in Mercedes, in spacious houses, at dinner parties, lounging beside swimming pools and learning to lock gates. I live the stereotypical white lifestyle that we imagine when we think of South Africa. I am surrounded by white, well-fed faces.
********************
"They were nervous, and it almost killed me. The phone rang in the middle of it, you see, and the guy holding the gun panicked."
Roger takes a sip of whiskey from a tumbler, pats Kerri on the head.
"I was lucky. If you stay calm, and have enough in the safe to hand over, you can be lucky. There was a neighbour of mine who resisted, he was shot dead on his lawn."
It is easy to be dismissive of the high-security life, to judge, to accuse people of paranoia. But the evidence is not just anecdotal - the near miss Roger had during his house robbery two years ago, the car-jacking that happened to Jane's daughter two weeks ago, the bullet that Lynn displays which narrowly missed her and lodged itself in the sideboard - the statistics are also clear. South Africa has almost the highest rate of murder and violent crime in the world.
Again and again I wonder, what would I do if I lived in this city? What would I do if I had children?
*******************
"It's getting worse. The corruption, the incompetance, the crime. I don't know what's going to happen in future."
Ita tugs at her pearl necklace, glances around her immaculately decorated living room. Outside, the sprinklers flick-flick-flick over the neatly trimmed lawns. There is a soft lapping from the azure swimming pool.
"What if it all goes? What if we lose it all?"
I can see the fear in her eyes. She came from a small village in Scotland, from nothing. They were hungry as children. She is afraid of returning to that. Far better to be barricaded in.
I remember the family we stayed with in Zimbabwe, how I scoffed privately with Lydia at the mother's complaints of stress. Surrounding by starving people, she in her grand house holding a china tea-cup seemed laughable.
But what about us, about me? I find myself wondering how any of us would react if we lost even the annual holiday, the dinners out occasionally, the new set of winter clothes. Why is it so different, just because they live beside people in poverty? Why is that their problem and not ours also?
What is it that Ita has done that we haven't? We are all just as afraid when we have something to lose.
"Are you there yet?"
I shift the straps on my backpack, twist my hair away from my neck in an effort to cool down.
"No, I'm a few minutes away still. I'll call you when I get in to the office, okay?" I try to keep the bemused tone out of my voice.
It is my first day going in to the Noah headquarters from Roger's house, the kindly Rotarian who has taken me in for the duration for my stay in Joburg. He lives a few kilometers from the office, so I walk in, through the dusty intersections that have to pedestrian lights, ignoring the beeps from taxis soliciting business. I am not the only one walking, the streets lined with tired flatfooted women and men trudging to taxi pick-up points, to begin their day as domestic staff or office cleaners.
Roger rings again on my way home, anxious. He is waiting just inside the security gates when I get back, his adorable but ferocious-looking Rotweiler, Kerri, waiting beside him.
"Please let me drive you in instead," he begs, as I withstand a slobbery assult from Kerri.
And although walking is my one small slice of freedom in this city, my escape from the fences and guards and alarms, I relent, because I can see it is distressing him. So my last few weeks in this country are spent in Mercedes, in spacious houses, at dinner parties, lounging beside swimming pools and learning to lock gates. I live the stereotypical white lifestyle that we imagine when we think of South Africa. I am surrounded by white, well-fed faces.
********************
"They were nervous, and it almost killed me. The phone rang in the middle of it, you see, and the guy holding the gun panicked."
Roger takes a sip of whiskey from a tumbler, pats Kerri on the head.
"I was lucky. If you stay calm, and have enough in the safe to hand over, you can be lucky. There was a neighbour of mine who resisted, he was shot dead on his lawn."
It is easy to be dismissive of the high-security life, to judge, to accuse people of paranoia. But the evidence is not just anecdotal - the near miss Roger had during his house robbery two years ago, the car-jacking that happened to Jane's daughter two weeks ago, the bullet that Lynn displays which narrowly missed her and lodged itself in the sideboard - the statistics are also clear. South Africa has almost the highest rate of murder and violent crime in the world.
Again and again I wonder, what would I do if I lived in this city? What would I do if I had children?
*******************
"It's getting worse. The corruption, the incompetance, the crime. I don't know what's going to happen in future."
Ita tugs at her pearl necklace, glances around her immaculately decorated living room. Outside, the sprinklers flick-flick-flick over the neatly trimmed lawns. There is a soft lapping from the azure swimming pool.
"What if it all goes? What if we lose it all?"
I can see the fear in her eyes. She came from a small village in Scotland, from nothing. They were hungry as children. She is afraid of returning to that. Far better to be barricaded in.
I remember the family we stayed with in Zimbabwe, how I scoffed privately with Lydia at the mother's complaints of stress. Surrounding by starving people, she in her grand house holding a china tea-cup seemed laughable.
But what about us, about me? I find myself wondering how any of us would react if we lost even the annual holiday, the dinners out occasionally, the new set of winter clothes. Why is it so different, just because they live beside people in poverty? Why is that their problem and not ours also?
What is it that Ita has done that we haven't? We are all just as afraid when we have something to lose.
Friday, December 07, 2007
This Beautiful Life
Pat claps her hands at us.
"Come on - out on the balcony, now. They've come in from Swaneville ark."
We drag ourselves way from computer screens and phones and financial reports, and reluctantly follow her out. The sky is a leaden white glare today, making us blink as we shuffle about on the tiles, arms crossed, yawning.
A girl of about fifteen starts to sing then, in a clear, clear voice. We stop shuffling and listen. I can't understand the words but I know she is singing of things both far away and deep within us.
And without warning the other twenty-eight voices join in, and all the hairs on my body stand on end, as out on our little corner of an office block a children's choir sing for nothing and everything, their voices an unexplained miracle to all in the buildings around us and pavements below us. And it is a moment that can never be really shared with you, but I have no choice, no choice but to try.
"Come on - out on the balcony, now. They've come in from Swaneville ark."
We drag ourselves way from computer screens and phones and financial reports, and reluctantly follow her out. The sky is a leaden white glare today, making us blink as we shuffle about on the tiles, arms crossed, yawning.
A girl of about fifteen starts to sing then, in a clear, clear voice. We stop shuffling and listen. I can't understand the words but I know she is singing of things both far away and deep within us.
And without warning the other twenty-eight voices join in, and all the hairs on my body stand on end, as out on our little corner of an office block a children's choir sing for nothing and everything, their voices an unexplained miracle to all in the buildings around us and pavements below us. And it is a moment that can never be really shared with you, but I have no choice, no choice but to try.
Monday, December 03, 2007
Izinyawo zam (my feet)
When we arrive at 8am, there are already thirty children out on the lawns of Daveyton Ark, patiently awaiting their turn to have their faces painted. Tables are being erected as the cars begin to arrive, matching t-shirts are pulled on hurriedly and someone taps a drum experimentally. Under the tent awning, volunteers are setting out small plastic schoolchairs in red, blue, green and yellow, the colours of the handmade South African flags that some of the children hold tightly to their chests.
It is the launch day of the AIDS Hike my friend Des is organising, an arguably insane adventure which will see seven students walk between them the road from Johannesburg to Durban, a distance of some 800km. Along the way they will stay with Rotarians and visit different Rotary projects and Noah sites, to share stories, raise money, promote awareness of what is being done to counter the pandemic, and wear out several pairs of shoes.
As the carnival atmosphere gets well underway, I find a spare set of paints and begin to copy out the national flag onto the cheeks of the children. As the speeches begin, the singing and dancing and praying, I paint and paint and paint, until the drum majorettes in their immaculate white uniforms begin to beat out a tune and everyone assembles at the gates, ready to see off the hikers on their walk.
Why walking? people ask Des - interviewers, colleagues, Rotarians.
Because there are so many people in South Africa who have no choice but to walk. So many children who walk two hours to school and back each day. So many women who walk hours to fetch water each day. So many people who walk hours to work each day.
You can read up on their adventures here. Go well, my friends.
It is the launch day of the AIDS Hike my friend Des is organising, an arguably insane adventure which will see seven students walk between them the road from Johannesburg to Durban, a distance of some 800km. Along the way they will stay with Rotarians and visit different Rotary projects and Noah sites, to share stories, raise money, promote awareness of what is being done to counter the pandemic, and wear out several pairs of shoes.
As the carnival atmosphere gets well underway, I find a spare set of paints and begin to copy out the national flag onto the cheeks of the children. As the speeches begin, the singing and dancing and praying, I paint and paint and paint, until the drum majorettes in their immaculate white uniforms begin to beat out a tune and everyone assembles at the gates, ready to see off the hikers on their walk.
Why walking? people ask Des - interviewers, colleagues, Rotarians.
Because there are so many people in South Africa who have no choice but to walk. So many children who walk two hours to school and back each day. So many women who walk hours to fetch water each day. So many people who walk hours to work each day.
So we walk. 17kms that first day, and 14km the next. In the December heat, pushing ourselves to our maximum stride, on the hard shoulder of the highway, the whump of trucks passing jangling your nerves, the beep of drivers signalling encouragement.
You see more, at this slower pace. The people in the fields, the scatter of houses, the birds, the snakes. We walk out into Mpumalanga, into small towns where Rotarians meet us and cook for us and talk about the projects they run, the little steps that are being taken in the face of this enormous problem.
"Most people look at what AIDS is doing to us, and lose heart. It's too big. We're too small." Anthony, a Rotarian from Witbank, pauses, turning the meat over on the braai. "But every step forward is a step forward. It's the only way."
At the end of day 2, I part from the dusty, sweaty group and return to Johannesburg. In a couple of weeks I will rejoin them for the end of the hike, when they reach Durban.
You can read up on their adventures here. Go well, my friends.
Friday, November 30, 2007
Welcome to our Joburg
I should have known it would be different. Both better and worse, but never, never what quite you expect.
************
The Moletsane Ark in Soweto is one of the Noah sites, a place that provides educational, psychological and nutritional support for children affected by AIDS. Each "Ark" in Noah comes from the community and is run by the community. The ark can be a spare office in a school, or a shipping container, a tent on a patch of dirt: anywhere that people can find and make useable.
Many of these children it provides for are the oldest left in their household as a result of AIDS, and are looking after younger siblings. The staff and volunteers at the Ark work to give the children meals, help with homework, counselling, advice, clothing, and provide a place to play and be children.
Moses shows us around the Ark - the tiny cramped office filled with papers and boxes and three people making calls; the bare hall with holes in the wooden floor where they provide meals and after-school activities; the neat rows of plants in their little vegetable garden that supplement the meals.
Out there in the sun, he bends and puts his hands deep into the glossy leaves. Strawberries; so unexpectedly bright. He cradles a handful of them, and brings them over to the tap to wash before offering them to us; the fruits of his garden.
"Only if you have some too," Des says.
So we stand, the four of us, around the pump on that bright day, sharing equally what the earth has brought forth from this dusty corner of Soweto. And Moses says to me:
Welcome to Joburg.
****************
"Hey!"
"I just wanted a taste-"
"No! No more!"
"....ok....."
(surreptitious munching)
"I SAID no more!"
It's 5pm at a former ambassador's house on Thanksgiving, and the kitchen is in comfortable chaos. Des is slapping me away from the fried onions, Keegan and Beth are taking advantage of the diversion to steal some more crackers, while Lisa, another Ambassadorial Scholar, simultaneously manages the turkey, green beans, potatoes and stuffing with the perfect unperspiring co-ordination that only a girl from the South can quite pull off.
I wander along the booklined passageway, fingering the little ornaments from Turkey and other postings the ambassador and his wife have been assigned to. She tells me how they transported it all across Africa, the carved chairs and thick rugs.
Later, over the pumpkin pie dessert, we go around the table and say what we are thankful for. For the people I have met, I say. For being here.
************
"Here we go. Think of it as an experience."
We leap from the bus and dodge our way across the downtown street, past a man setting out a crate with sandwich bags of peanuts, and into a peeling doorway. After the security check, waved on by the skew-capped guard, Des leads me through a warren of partitions and up a narrow staircase. One floor landing gives out only onto a blackened burnt-out room that lets a chill wind into the building: we continue up to the next floor.
Here, there are more people than chairs in the corridors and waiting rooms, but this is clearly the sort of place where there are always more people than chairs. We thread our way through the shuffling queues, the people fanning themselves with free newspapers.
In Room 302 we find a bench, and settle in to wait for as long as it takes. I amuse myself by picking out the little oddities: the faded paisley wallpaper on the back of a cupboard that serves as a partition for the counter; the two rough-cut plastic stars hanging from the ceiling on tatters of string, alongside other empty pieces of string; the patch of tinsel on the wall, there from last year; the yellowed rectangular patches from old sellotape that marked where signs used to hang.
I read one of the signs that still survives:
Requirements for registration of traditional marriage:
- husband and ID book: one witness
- wife and ID book: one witness
- signed and dated lebola agreement
This is one of the processing offices of South African Home Affairs: passports, work licences, marriage licences, and possibly other things besides. We wait and wait, are reshuffled, told to join another queue, told to wait again, stand up, sit down, share an ipod, yawn, wait some more.
Three hours later, passport stamped, we stand downstairs again at the security check. Des is chewing her lip, looking out at the tumble-down buildings and hustle of people arguing, selling, waiting, on the crowded street outside. I can see her running calculations in her head: we have our laptops in our backpacks, our phones, we don't know our way and this is downtown Joburg.
"I don't know how long the bus will be..."
Someone hails her in Portuguese - an Angolan she met in the same queue a few weeks back, who just happened to come in today too to collect his passport. He offers us a lift to wherever we're going.
"Are you sure?"
"Of course." He shrugs easily.
And so it all works out, as if planned. The way it so often seems to.
************
Another day, another Ark, this time far outside of the city. In the front yard a ring of children are chanting out a clapping game: "Who's - that - police - man - come to - get the - letter- for - YOU!" Volunteers are swilling out the lunch pots, stacking plastic plates and wiping down oilcloth table-covers. A pair of what appear to be Chinese missionaries sit attentively by, accosting me gently with too-eager smiles:
"Hafyoo-found-jeesuschris-ar-safeyor?"
I look at Des, she looks back at me. We try not to laugh at the glorious unpredictability of life, at all the pieces that just don't fit, and yet are.
At the end of our brief visit the manager of the Ark gives us a great hug goodbye.
"Oh, I forgot to bring some of the badges from our project," she says. Then she turns to two of her staff and says something in Sesotho.
All three of them unpin the badges on their own chests and in turn, pins them to our own. I put my fingers to the beads wordlessly.
I think about how I felt about coming here.
And I think:
Welcome to our Joburg.
Yes indeed.
************
The Moletsane Ark in Soweto is one of the Noah sites, a place that provides educational, psychological and nutritional support for children affected by AIDS. Each "Ark" in Noah comes from the community and is run by the community. The ark can be a spare office in a school, or a shipping container, a tent on a patch of dirt: anywhere that people can find and make useable.
Many of these children it provides for are the oldest left in their household as a result of AIDS, and are looking after younger siblings. The staff and volunteers at the Ark work to give the children meals, help with homework, counselling, advice, clothing, and provide a place to play and be children.
Moses shows us around the Ark - the tiny cramped office filled with papers and boxes and three people making calls; the bare hall with holes in the wooden floor where they provide meals and after-school activities; the neat rows of plants in their little vegetable garden that supplement the meals.
Out there in the sun, he bends and puts his hands deep into the glossy leaves. Strawberries; so unexpectedly bright. He cradles a handful of them, and brings them over to the tap to wash before offering them to us; the fruits of his garden.
"Only if you have some too," Des says.
So we stand, the four of us, around the pump on that bright day, sharing equally what the earth has brought forth from this dusty corner of Soweto. And Moses says to me:
Welcome to Joburg.
****************
"Hey!"
"I just wanted a taste-"
"No! No more!"
"....ok....."
(surreptitious munching)
"I SAID no more!"
It's 5pm at a former ambassador's house on Thanksgiving, and the kitchen is in comfortable chaos. Des is slapping me away from the fried onions, Keegan and Beth are taking advantage of the diversion to steal some more crackers, while Lisa, another Ambassadorial Scholar, simultaneously manages the turkey, green beans, potatoes and stuffing with the perfect unperspiring co-ordination that only a girl from the South can quite pull off.
I wander along the booklined passageway, fingering the little ornaments from Turkey and other postings the ambassador and his wife have been assigned to. She tells me how they transported it all across Africa, the carved chairs and thick rugs.
Later, over the pumpkin pie dessert, we go around the table and say what we are thankful for. For the people I have met, I say. For being here.
************
"Here we go. Think of it as an experience."
We leap from the bus and dodge our way across the downtown street, past a man setting out a crate with sandwich bags of peanuts, and into a peeling doorway. After the security check, waved on by the skew-capped guard, Des leads me through a warren of partitions and up a narrow staircase. One floor landing gives out only onto a blackened burnt-out room that lets a chill wind into the building: we continue up to the next floor.
Here, there are more people than chairs in the corridors and waiting rooms, but this is clearly the sort of place where there are always more people than chairs. We thread our way through the shuffling queues, the people fanning themselves with free newspapers.
In Room 302 we find a bench, and settle in to wait for as long as it takes. I amuse myself by picking out the little oddities: the faded paisley wallpaper on the back of a cupboard that serves as a partition for the counter; the two rough-cut plastic stars hanging from the ceiling on tatters of string, alongside other empty pieces of string; the patch of tinsel on the wall, there from last year; the yellowed rectangular patches from old sellotape that marked where signs used to hang.
I read one of the signs that still survives:
Requirements for registration of traditional marriage:
- husband and ID book: one witness
- wife and ID book: one witness
- signed and dated lebola agreement
This is one of the processing offices of South African Home Affairs: passports, work licences, marriage licences, and possibly other things besides. We wait and wait, are reshuffled, told to join another queue, told to wait again, stand up, sit down, share an ipod, yawn, wait some more.
Three hours later, passport stamped, we stand downstairs again at the security check. Des is chewing her lip, looking out at the tumble-down buildings and hustle of people arguing, selling, waiting, on the crowded street outside. I can see her running calculations in her head: we have our laptops in our backpacks, our phones, we don't know our way and this is downtown Joburg.
"I don't know how long the bus will be..."
Someone hails her in Portuguese - an Angolan she met in the same queue a few weeks back, who just happened to come in today too to collect his passport. He offers us a lift to wherever we're going.
"Are you sure?"
"Of course." He shrugs easily.
And so it all works out, as if planned. The way it so often seems to.
************
Another day, another Ark, this time far outside of the city. In the front yard a ring of children are chanting out a clapping game: "Who's - that - police - man - come to - get the - letter- for - YOU!" Volunteers are swilling out the lunch pots, stacking plastic plates and wiping down oilcloth table-covers. A pair of what appear to be Chinese missionaries sit attentively by, accosting me gently with too-eager smiles:
"Hafyoo-found-jeesuschris-ar-safeyor?"
I look at Des, she looks back at me. We try not to laugh at the glorious unpredictability of life, at all the pieces that just don't fit, and yet are.
At the end of our brief visit the manager of the Ark gives us a great hug goodbye.
"Oh, I forgot to bring some of the badges from our project," she says. Then she turns to two of her staff and says something in Sesotho.
All three of them unpin the badges on their own chests and in turn, pins them to our own. I put my fingers to the beads wordlessly.
I think about how I felt about coming here.
And I think:
Welcome to our Joburg.
Yes indeed.
Monday, November 19, 2007
City of Highways and High walls
[Some months back:]
Someone claps their hands over my eyes and I jump. Des, my friend from New Mexico, has snuck up behind me in Arrivals and she's laughing now, delighted. She hoists one of my bags over her shoulder and we wait at the airport kerbside for Hans, her Rotary host counsellor, to drive up.
"That one," she points at an enormous gold Jeep, the sort of car people can’t help but stare at, that I can help but stare at. "I know," she catches my look and giggles.
We are soon out on the big freeways that ring the city, the skyline of Johannesburg flashing in the sun.
At every intersection, there are people selling things: tin dustpans; racks of white plastic coathangers; sun umbrellas pitched into the grass at crazy angles; regimented rows of neon-coloured dusters flying their colours into the breeze. All along the highways, there are posters on the streetlamp poles, advertising shows and security firms and hair products and Jesus. It takes me a few days to figure this out, the ongoing outdoor roadside show. Then I realise: its because no-one goes out, except in a car. You don’t see people, or houses, in most of Joburg, just roads and cars and high fences.
That night after we return from a restaurant, the electricity has gone. We sit in the jeep outside the electric gate, locked out of our home in the dark. I look at the razor-topped fences and shiver.
****************
One afternoon we drive into the central business district, the old heart of the city. From a distance it is vertical, shiny, a Manhattan skyline. Up close, it is broken-windowed, diseased; tower blocks that look as though they are rotting from the inside out.
It escapes me, an adequate description of newness decaying. How do I explain? Motel-fronts crumbled, but still lived in; black rot creeping up in the cracking white paint. Things falling down and being taped back up.
Recall a movie set, a city-centre abandoned after the plague.
Except it’s swarming with people, the first people I have seen on foot apart from the intersection entrepreneurs. The cheap clothing outlets and canned goods stores tucked under the overhangs of once-prosperous office blocks are closing for the day, and everyone is heading home. Kwela-kwela taxis flood the streets, whole traffic jams of taxis, our jeep towering above them, attracting strange looks.
"People say it’s dead here," Hans my host says. "I wonder do they never see this? Look!"
I see, I do. But these are bargain stores, refuse-ridden streets. There is life alright, but only of a certain sort. Most people never set foot in the centre any more, they filter through the suburban malls instead, circling the city warily. They are afraid of it, afraid to meet with their fellow men, afraid of open spaces.
Millions of people live here, but they don’t live together, and that emptiness at the centre of things chills me. This city has no heart.
**************
I’ve lost my bearings, but I know we’re heading out of the city.
The suburbs thin out and dusty plots take their place, the emptiness punctuated here and there by screaming billboards. I recognise the uniform blandness of tight-packed housing that signals the government housing schemes. Then they give way to a tumble of tin huts and patchwork houses leaning up against one another drunkenly: the squatter camps.
On a cleared patch of nothing in front of a shipping container a tussle of children are playing ball and laughing.
"Des! Des!" They yell, clambering into the jeep, tugging at t-shirts and chattering. In the beating heat we play chasing games and clapping games, give piggy-back rides, watch as the boys dance in their gumboots. One three-year-old girl sits in a broken vaccuum cleaner and I pull her about, both of us screaming in delight.
There are other things, other stories. The kids who are weaker this week than last week, their count getting too high. The four-year-old, four, just four, who was raped. But these aren't my stories to tell. For today everyone just plays, and it is enough.
**************
"You could come, for a little while." Des looks at me. "Only if you want."
I do want. It terrifies me, this city. And so it fascinates me. I decide to spend some time there after my course finishes, to help out at an NGO and learn about the city, about another part of South Africa.
And all too soon, it is finishing, my time in Grahamstown, and the next chapter is beginning.
In two days I leave for Joburg. Wish me luck.
Someone claps their hands over my eyes and I jump. Des, my friend from New Mexico, has snuck up behind me in Arrivals and she's laughing now, delighted. She hoists one of my bags over her shoulder and we wait at the airport kerbside for Hans, her Rotary host counsellor, to drive up.
"That one," she points at an enormous gold Jeep, the sort of car people can’t help but stare at, that I can help but stare at. "I know," she catches my look and giggles.
We are soon out on the big freeways that ring the city, the skyline of Johannesburg flashing in the sun.
At every intersection, there are people selling things: tin dustpans; racks of white plastic coathangers; sun umbrellas pitched into the grass at crazy angles; regimented rows of neon-coloured dusters flying their colours into the breeze. All along the highways, there are posters on the streetlamp poles, advertising shows and security firms and hair products and Jesus. It takes me a few days to figure this out, the ongoing outdoor roadside show. Then I realise: its because no-one goes out, except in a car. You don’t see people, or houses, in most of Joburg, just roads and cars and high fences.
That night after we return from a restaurant, the electricity has gone. We sit in the jeep outside the electric gate, locked out of our home in the dark. I look at the razor-topped fences and shiver.
****************
One afternoon we drive into the central business district, the old heart of the city. From a distance it is vertical, shiny, a Manhattan skyline. Up close, it is broken-windowed, diseased; tower blocks that look as though they are rotting from the inside out.
It escapes me, an adequate description of newness decaying. How do I explain? Motel-fronts crumbled, but still lived in; black rot creeping up in the cracking white paint. Things falling down and being taped back up.
Recall a movie set, a city-centre abandoned after the plague.
Except it’s swarming with people, the first people I have seen on foot apart from the intersection entrepreneurs. The cheap clothing outlets and canned goods stores tucked under the overhangs of once-prosperous office blocks are closing for the day, and everyone is heading home. Kwela-kwela taxis flood the streets, whole traffic jams of taxis, our jeep towering above them, attracting strange looks.
"People say it’s dead here," Hans my host says. "I wonder do they never see this? Look!"
I see, I do. But these are bargain stores, refuse-ridden streets. There is life alright, but only of a certain sort. Most people never set foot in the centre any more, they filter through the suburban malls instead, circling the city warily. They are afraid of it, afraid to meet with their fellow men, afraid of open spaces.
Millions of people live here, but they don’t live together, and that emptiness at the centre of things chills me. This city has no heart.
**************
I’ve lost my bearings, but I know we’re heading out of the city.
The suburbs thin out and dusty plots take their place, the emptiness punctuated here and there by screaming billboards. I recognise the uniform blandness of tight-packed housing that signals the government housing schemes. Then they give way to a tumble of tin huts and patchwork houses leaning up against one another drunkenly: the squatter camps.
On a cleared patch of nothing in front of a shipping container a tussle of children are playing ball and laughing.
"Des! Des!" They yell, clambering into the jeep, tugging at t-shirts and chattering. In the beating heat we play chasing games and clapping games, give piggy-back rides, watch as the boys dance in their gumboots. One three-year-old girl sits in a broken vaccuum cleaner and I pull her about, both of us screaming in delight.
There are other things, other stories. The kids who are weaker this week than last week, their count getting too high. The four-year-old, four, just four, who was raped. But these aren't my stories to tell. For today everyone just plays, and it is enough.
**************
"You could come, for a little while." Des looks at me. "Only if you want."
I do want. It terrifies me, this city. And so it fascinates me. I decide to spend some time there after my course finishes, to help out at an NGO and learn about the city, about another part of South Africa.
And all too soon, it is finishing, my time in Grahamstown, and the next chapter is beginning.
In two days I leave for Joburg. Wish me luck.
Saturday, November 10, 2007
Untold
Fun fact for today:
The estimate for the amount of Africans transported to new lands as slaves, and those that died along the way, and those that were killed in the battles over slaves on their own soil, stands at 40 million.
The population of the African contintinent in the 18th and 19th century was estimated at 100 million.
Every day here I uncover more and more that I did not know, and that I can't help but feel I should have known. I remember the creeping sense of shame I had when I was assigned several countries to research soon after arriving, and realised that a place called Djibouti did indeed exist.
And as I had more conversations over coffee, or with members of the Defence Forces, or on an upturned crate somewhere on the way to somewhere else, there were so many stories that had I had never be told. The day in class I learned about the Congo under Belgian rule -
"Does anyone know what they did?"
"They cut them all over with whips and left them to die very slowly."
"Yes that was one way. Or taking off the hands. To keep the people in fear. They killed about half the population, ten million people."
- that day I wanted to go home and put my head in my hands and hide. Ten million people and I had never heard. A holocaust. Who writes the histories of our world? I want to go back and reread all my secondary school books, to find out where these deaths fit in.
Several weeks ago I went to the Apartheid Museum. That I thought I knew, at least, but it was still a shock. The room of shadows cast by hanging nooses, one for every person hanged under the apartheid laws. The little book of Basic Bantu, teaching young whites the only phrases they would ever need - set the table, bring the mop, close the door. The shelves the miners lived on, ten-square foot bare concrete shelves, their only home for most of the year.
After I returned I went to lunch with Brij, and our conversation turned to what I had seen.
"You knew about the mining system, right?" I ask. "The foundation of apartheid? I mean, there were many things involved, but they found gold, not very good gold, it needed a lot of labour to be productive. So they moved most of the population, banished them, all the black people, out to little patches of land, not very good land. And the land couldn't support them, so the men had to leave to bring in money to support their families, from the mines. It was a great system, locked everyone in."
She looks confused, listening, as I continue.
"No-one told me," she says eventually. "I went to school next door in Zim and I never knew."
We sit under the pepper-blossom tree and look at our hands in silence.
"Why did no-one tell me?" she asks.
The estimate for the amount of Africans transported to new lands as slaves, and those that died along the way, and those that were killed in the battles over slaves on their own soil, stands at 40 million.
The population of the African contintinent in the 18th and 19th century was estimated at 100 million.
Every day here I uncover more and more that I did not know, and that I can't help but feel I should have known. I remember the creeping sense of shame I had when I was assigned several countries to research soon after arriving, and realised that a place called Djibouti did indeed exist.
And as I had more conversations over coffee, or with members of the Defence Forces, or on an upturned crate somewhere on the way to somewhere else, there were so many stories that had I had never be told. The day in class I learned about the Congo under Belgian rule -
"Does anyone know what they did?"
"They cut them all over with whips and left them to die very slowly."
"Yes that was one way. Or taking off the hands. To keep the people in fear. They killed about half the population, ten million people."
- that day I wanted to go home and put my head in my hands and hide. Ten million people and I had never heard. A holocaust. Who writes the histories of our world? I want to go back and reread all my secondary school books, to find out where these deaths fit in.
Several weeks ago I went to the Apartheid Museum. That I thought I knew, at least, but it was still a shock. The room of shadows cast by hanging nooses, one for every person hanged under the apartheid laws. The little book of Basic Bantu, teaching young whites the only phrases they would ever need - set the table, bring the mop, close the door. The shelves the miners lived on, ten-square foot bare concrete shelves, their only home for most of the year.
After I returned I went to lunch with Brij, and our conversation turned to what I had seen.
"You knew about the mining system, right?" I ask. "The foundation of apartheid? I mean, there were many things involved, but they found gold, not very good gold, it needed a lot of labour to be productive. So they moved most of the population, banished them, all the black people, out to little patches of land, not very good land. And the land couldn't support them, so the men had to leave to bring in money to support their families, from the mines. It was a great system, locked everyone in."
She looks confused, listening, as I continue.
"No-one told me," she says eventually. "I went to school next door in Zim and I never knew."
We sit under the pepper-blossom tree and look at our hands in silence.
"Why did no-one tell me?" she asks.
Thursday, November 01, 2007
Self-Censorship
"Riona?"
I look up, amid the sudden kerfuffle of chairlegs scraping and bags being zipped up. I wonder if it's about my last homework assignment, or the book I left behind one day in class.
"I read your journal," she says, as she nods and returns the goodbyes of the students filing out. She catches my expression, misinterprets it. "You are a writer, ney?"
Something cold finds its way into my insides.
"It is you? You wrote about my classes?"
It's begun to happen all to frequently lately, these sorts of encounters. Luckily, they have so far been people I love and adore.
But still, the first thing I do when I leave her class is sit down at a computer bank and read through everything I have written. Trying to remember what I said about her. Trying to imagine how what the other things I wrote might sound to a South African.
And I realise that I begin to edit myself, when I write now. I only ever tried to write what I saw, from my perspective, but there are all manner of half-truths and half-insults that emerge in the telling. I hope, in the course of this blog, that I have been fair on South Africa and the people I met. They have been more than good to me.
I look up, amid the sudden kerfuffle of chairlegs scraping and bags being zipped up. I wonder if it's about my last homework assignment, or the book I left behind one day in class.
"I read your journal," she says, as she nods and returns the goodbyes of the students filing out. She catches my expression, misinterprets it. "You are a writer, ney?"
Something cold finds its way into my insides.
"It is you? You wrote about my classes?"
It's begun to happen all to frequently lately, these sorts of encounters. Luckily, they have so far been people I love and adore.
But still, the first thing I do when I leave her class is sit down at a computer bank and read through everything I have written. Trying to remember what I said about her. Trying to imagine how what the other things I wrote might sound to a South African.
And I realise that I begin to edit myself, when I write now. I only ever tried to write what I saw, from my perspective, but there are all manner of half-truths and half-insults that emerge in the telling. I hope, in the course of this blog, that I have been fair on South Africa and the people I met. They have been more than good to me.
Monday, October 15, 2007
Hiatus
Writing is on hold at the moment, dues to deadlines, the Lion King, mother visiting, research, exhaustion, exams, travelling, wine picnics and general daily life!
For those of you still requiring a Saf'African fix, I recommend this lady.
For those of you still requiring a Saf'African fix, I recommend this lady.
Monday, October 08, 2007
The Years In Our Bones
He’s wearing worn baggy jeans, a tool belt looped loosely through them, and a shirt that’s only half tucked in. He looks like a mechanic, or a carpenter, and he’s both of those things in a sense. He’s nervous when he talks to us, fidgeting, his sentences trailing off or knotting themselves up, but then he picks up an instrument and from his rough square hands music
just
flows
Like breathing.
His name is Christian. He is one of the people behind African Musical Instruments, a factory that produces traditional instruments for use in schools and community groups.
"These instruments," he tells us, a group of Rhodes students sitting crosslegged on the floor, "they are the values we teach. They make them real. Watch."
He asks for some volunteers, hands them each a stick and shows them a very basic tune on the Marimba: tap-tap, tap, tap.
"Simple? Okay, now all together."
And suddenly the room is alive with interweaving notes, thick and fast, like conversation, like racing heartbeats, joyful and complex and interdependent and much, much more than the parts the make up the whole.
****************
I hear it one day as I am passing the Grade 7 classroom, on my way to the office. I step inside for a moment, find a seat beside Siphokazi. Easily thirty students are already packed into the small space, standing, sitting or leaning against the walls.
In the dusty space cleared of desks and chairs in the centre of the room, two Marimbas are standing. Four students are playing them, over and under each other's melodies, and there is a tight tension between them, a thread that seems to run through the middle of everyone there.
And then the stamping starts, and the banging on tables, the rhythms that I have noticed are always just below the surface in this school. In perfect, effortless harmony the room moves as one, and one boy steps out into the waiting space and begins to dance.
What is a dance?
It is pride and power and hope. It is sound made flesh. It is being part of the whole.
****************
"This is Riona."
"Hello," I say, shaking the man's hand. "I think I know you. Christian, right?"
"Are you Irish?" A boy in the corner with a fiddle asks.
A few of them look up expectantly.
"Yes," I tell the Grahamstown Irish band, ranged across Christian's sofa and chairs, unpacking their instruments.
I sit on the edge of the fireplace and talk about my time in L'Derry and Irish language policy and dancing on O'Carolyn's grave as around me the fiddles and accordians and guitars and flutes and bodhráns are tuned or tapped, snatches of melodies and scales escaping, amid much laughter and shuffling of sheet music. Someone passes me "Ó ró sé do bheatha 'Bhaile" and asks me how to pronounce the words, carefully pencilling the phonetics underneath.
I have time to think about how strange it is to be sitting here listening to this, to sounds of a faraway place that for reasons I can't explain make me so deeply sad and so deeply happy at once, when, in the way that it always does, the stray bits and tunes come suddenly together as one and the song is born and builds and builds as the second fiddle joins in and then the spoons and the tin whistle, leaping up and away and running free and wild, and in a little room on the southern edge of Africa I feel the years and myths and memories of all those I thought had nothing to do with me buried in my bones, part of who I am.
just
flows
Like breathing.
His name is Christian. He is one of the people behind African Musical Instruments, a factory that produces traditional instruments for use in schools and community groups.
"These instruments," he tells us, a group of Rhodes students sitting crosslegged on the floor, "they are the values we teach. They make them real. Watch."
He asks for some volunteers, hands them each a stick and shows them a very basic tune on the Marimba: tap-tap, tap, tap.
"Simple? Okay, now all together."
And suddenly the room is alive with interweaving notes, thick and fast, like conversation, like racing heartbeats, joyful and complex and interdependent and much, much more than the parts the make up the whole.
****************
I hear it one day as I am passing the Grade 7 classroom, on my way to the office. I step inside for a moment, find a seat beside Siphokazi. Easily thirty students are already packed into the small space, standing, sitting or leaning against the walls.
In the dusty space cleared of desks and chairs in the centre of the room, two Marimbas are standing. Four students are playing them, over and under each other's melodies, and there is a tight tension between them, a thread that seems to run through the middle of everyone there.
And then the stamping starts, and the banging on tables, the rhythms that I have noticed are always just below the surface in this school. In perfect, effortless harmony the room moves as one, and one boy steps out into the waiting space and begins to dance.
What is a dance?
It is pride and power and hope. It is sound made flesh. It is being part of the whole.
****************
"This is Riona."
"Hello," I say, shaking the man's hand. "I think I know you. Christian, right?"
"Are you Irish?" A boy in the corner with a fiddle asks.
A few of them look up expectantly.
"Yes," I tell the Grahamstown Irish band, ranged across Christian's sofa and chairs, unpacking their instruments.
I sit on the edge of the fireplace and talk about my time in L'Derry and Irish language policy and dancing on O'Carolyn's grave as around me the fiddles and accordians and guitars and flutes and bodhráns are tuned or tapped, snatches of melodies and scales escaping, amid much laughter and shuffling of sheet music. Someone passes me "Ó ró sé do bheatha 'Bhaile" and asks me how to pronounce the words, carefully pencilling the phonetics underneath.
I have time to think about how strange it is to be sitting here listening to this, to sounds of a faraway place that for reasons I can't explain make me so deeply sad and so deeply happy at once, when, in the way that it always does, the stray bits and tunes come suddenly together as one and the song is born and builds and builds as the second fiddle joins in and then the spoons and the tin whistle, leaping up and away and running free and wild, and in a little room on the southern edge of Africa I feel the years and myths and memories of all those I thought had nothing to do with me buried in my bones, part of who I am.
Monday, September 24, 2007
Embrace these childish things
"I think," I say to Christopher as I lean in the driver's window, "I think I'll just stay here. I'll meet you all back up at the main road."
"Can I come with you?" Ben asks, already half out of the car.
"Sure."
We watch as the car continues on its careful way down the dirt track that is more rock than road. Then we turn and begin walking back up the path, name-tagged, Ben in his suit, me in my skirt, barefoot because I can't walk in my heels on the clay earth.
"Sorry, I just needed to get out. Reminded me of family vacations. And Christopher had been drinking..."
"I know." He sighs. "By the time they get there and come back they'll have cooled off."
Around us the vast orangerock mountains of Lesotho lay in the evening light. The only sounds are the faint irregular chime of goats bells and the soft breath of the wind. I can feel the powder-fine sandy earth between my toes, slightly warm and comforting.
After a while I say, "The colours remind me of Botswana."
"Charlotte and I were going to go to Botswana next month..." He trails off, gazing out into the middle distance.
A sheep bleats somewhere far off, as we walk a little further.
"Strange, isn't it," I say slowly. "How all the plans have to change now."
"Yes." He runs a hand through his hair. "Yes. Have to tear up October and November. Start over."
There is silence for a while.
We pass two little five-year-old girls on the side of the road, beside an old man wearing a Sotho blanket, raise our hands in greeting. We smile at each other as we hear the two girls follow us up the hill, whispering shyly to one another.
Ahead, the sky is turning a deep shocking bruise of purple and red, as the sun lowers and the light fades. We can hear drums now, a beat that seems to come from the land itself, and that gets into the blood, deep, deep down.
And then, from behind us, stilling our breath, two little five-year-old voices begin to sing an unknown song in unknown words, wavering and disjointed, but high and sweet and unselfconscious and at that moment the most beautiful thing in this delicate world. It sounds like a lullaby in the calm silence, singing the day to sleep.
We don't say a word, walking lightly, for fear the moment will break.
Up on the hill there is a fire, with a crowd gathered around it. Women are on their knees swaying and clapping and there is a smell of meat and a happy cacophany in the air. Ben beckons to the two little girls and we stand a little way off watching the sun set.
They start to drift over, the other children, as children always do. I don't speak SeSotho so we make faces at each other, stick out tongues and make nonsense sounds and chase each other across the dusty hilltop and compete at handstands and toss a punctured ball around and point at cows and chickens and find names for them and shake hands and exchange our own names and giggle and snort and for a little while we can forget ourselves completely to the wide African sky and the beat of the drum and the press of little fingers.
And when we are back in the car, an hour or more later, with dust in our hair and tiny dusty handprints imprinted on the car doors, driving on into the night, Ben meets my eyes in the rearview mirror and says:
That was one of the most genuinely happy moments of my year.
And as we sit in a strangely peaceful silence, I recall the air of that unknown lullaby among the soft accompaniment of bells and wind. And I thank the world for bringing me moments like these.
"Can I come with you?" Ben asks, already half out of the car.
"Sure."
We watch as the car continues on its careful way down the dirt track that is more rock than road. Then we turn and begin walking back up the path, name-tagged, Ben in his suit, me in my skirt, barefoot because I can't walk in my heels on the clay earth.
"Sorry, I just needed to get out. Reminded me of family vacations. And Christopher had been drinking..."
"I know." He sighs. "By the time they get there and come back they'll have cooled off."
Around us the vast orangerock mountains of Lesotho lay in the evening light. The only sounds are the faint irregular chime of goats bells and the soft breath of the wind. I can feel the powder-fine sandy earth between my toes, slightly warm and comforting.
After a while I say, "The colours remind me of Botswana."
"Charlotte and I were going to go to Botswana next month..." He trails off, gazing out into the middle distance.
A sheep bleats somewhere far off, as we walk a little further.
"Strange, isn't it," I say slowly. "How all the plans have to change now."
"Yes." He runs a hand through his hair. "Yes. Have to tear up October and November. Start over."
There is silence for a while.
We pass two little five-year-old girls on the side of the road, beside an old man wearing a Sotho blanket, raise our hands in greeting. We smile at each other as we hear the two girls follow us up the hill, whispering shyly to one another.
Ahead, the sky is turning a deep shocking bruise of purple and red, as the sun lowers and the light fades. We can hear drums now, a beat that seems to come from the land itself, and that gets into the blood, deep, deep down.
And then, from behind us, stilling our breath, two little five-year-old voices begin to sing an unknown song in unknown words, wavering and disjointed, but high and sweet and unselfconscious and at that moment the most beautiful thing in this delicate world. It sounds like a lullaby in the calm silence, singing the day to sleep.
We don't say a word, walking lightly, for fear the moment will break.
Up on the hill there is a fire, with a crowd gathered around it. Women are on their knees swaying and clapping and there is a smell of meat and a happy cacophany in the air. Ben beckons to the two little girls and we stand a little way off watching the sun set.
They start to drift over, the other children, as children always do. I don't speak SeSotho so we make faces at each other, stick out tongues and make nonsense sounds and chase each other across the dusty hilltop and compete at handstands and toss a punctured ball around and point at cows and chickens and find names for them and shake hands and exchange our own names and giggle and snort and for a little while we can forget ourselves completely to the wide African sky and the beat of the drum and the press of little fingers.
And when we are back in the car, an hour or more later, with dust in our hair and tiny dusty handprints imprinted on the car doors, driving on into the night, Ben meets my eyes in the rearview mirror and says:
That was one of the most genuinely happy moments of my year.
And as we sit in a strangely peaceful silence, I recall the air of that unknown lullaby among the soft accompaniment of bells and wind. And I thank the world for bringing me moments like these.
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Berg Winds
There must have been rains, recently. For although the earth is dust now, bone white and bone dry, there is evidence preserved within it: spindly three-toed bird tracks, a string of jackal prints. And hoof-marks, of blessbuck and springbok and red-hart wildebeast, like sectioned strawberries, like cloven flint spearheads, like arrows on a crumpled map, pointing this way and that. I like the crunch of them underfoot.
We walk on, past white thornbush and feather-edged cacti, not quite desert, not quite bush.
And then, just ahead, evidence made flesh: they stand, white-socked, curious on the path, horns pricking the empty sky. Then one shies, and suddenly they are all in flight, like the trickle of sand when it turns almost liquid, a golden stream flowing across the path, fleeing us.
One of my felow hikers pauses.
"Feel that?"
I stop too. There is a warm wind picking up across the Burntkraal hills.
"That's called a 'Berg wind. Comes down from the mountains. Hot."
I breathe it in, smell the land it's come from.
"It means change is on the way."
We don't say anything for a moment, feeling it play across our bare skin.
Then we walk on.
We walk on, past white thornbush and feather-edged cacti, not quite desert, not quite bush.
And then, just ahead, evidence made flesh: they stand, white-socked, curious on the path, horns pricking the empty sky. Then one shies, and suddenly they are all in flight, like the trickle of sand when it turns almost liquid, a golden stream flowing across the path, fleeing us.
One of my felow hikers pauses.
"Feel that?"
I stop too. There is a warm wind picking up across the Burntkraal hills.
"That's called a 'Berg wind. Comes down from the mountains. Hot."
I breathe it in, smell the land it's come from.
"It means change is on the way."
We don't say anything for a moment, feeling it play across our bare skin.
Then we walk on.
Saturday, September 01, 2007
Tornado chasing
First one fleck, then another, a raindrop that falls too slowly. Waiting for a splash that never comes. Puzzling: the knowledge won't come at first, and then I realise it is ash, flakes of ash blown in on the hot wind to alight on the car windshield, the wingmirror, the bonnet.
Below, the hilltop is burnt black by the bush fire, dead and lost in the centre but insatiable at the edges still. We had breathed out hard when we saw it first up close, the dead hill - that exhalation that comes automatically, like a genuflection - and kept going, needing to see more, to face the thin edge of destruction and watch its progress.
One lonely firetruck sits on the hard shoulder ahead of us. On the unburnt side of the road I see small black patches where the fire must have jumped the 5-metre width of tarmac; on the other side the smoke rises, ominously thicker down in the valley beyond the line of sight. On our way back we see a flicker of flame licking at an electricity pole, and as we pass we can see, suddenly, that the other side has been eaten away by the fire as though rotten, and it is strangely, inexplicably disconcerting, like turning over an animal you presumed sleeping and finding the underside gone to the worms.
We find a spot on the far side of the valley to watch from, the crackle of bushes catching fire carrying across to us. Other people collect nearby, from cars and classrooms, forming in a ragged line, watching one branch of the fire make its way along the river bank towards campus.
We stand, transfixed, for some time, long enough for dusk to fall, before we begin to realise that we should do something - the danger so clear as to seem unavoidable, inevitable. It takes long minutes to shake off the utter powerlessness the slow march of the flames casts over us, settling into our skin, making sleepers' heavy limbs of our arms and legs.
At the campus office, I have to repeat myself over the din of the television.
"It's really quite close."
The man behind the counter looks blank, doesn't get up.
"Hasn't anyone told you yet?"
Then there's a tipping point, and suddenly all is action, motion. Three men pack into the car with us, fire extinguishes are blasted experimentally, a hollow threatening hiss, radios squawk locations and serial numbers.
And later, when we have done our civic duty, and retreated back to our vantage point on the hill to wait for the campus men to reach the fire, we watch as one lone figure, barely visible in the gathering dark, beats away at the flames with a green branch, over and over and over, until I am sure he must stop with exhaustion, but he does not; over and over, like an automaton, battling the advancing edge, and I find myself hoping it won't be stopped, find myself vaguely disappointed when I hear the fire extinguishers and watch as the clumps of red go out, here, there, and let the night bring down the dark.
Below, the hilltop is burnt black by the bush fire, dead and lost in the centre but insatiable at the edges still. We had breathed out hard when we saw it first up close, the dead hill - that exhalation that comes automatically, like a genuflection - and kept going, needing to see more, to face the thin edge of destruction and watch its progress.
One lonely firetruck sits on the hard shoulder ahead of us. On the unburnt side of the road I see small black patches where the fire must have jumped the 5-metre width of tarmac; on the other side the smoke rises, ominously thicker down in the valley beyond the line of sight. On our way back we see a flicker of flame licking at an electricity pole, and as we pass we can see, suddenly, that the other side has been eaten away by the fire as though rotten, and it is strangely, inexplicably disconcerting, like turning over an animal you presumed sleeping and finding the underside gone to the worms.
We find a spot on the far side of the valley to watch from, the crackle of bushes catching fire carrying across to us. Other people collect nearby, from cars and classrooms, forming in a ragged line, watching one branch of the fire make its way along the river bank towards campus.
We stand, transfixed, for some time, long enough for dusk to fall, before we begin to realise that we should do something - the danger so clear as to seem unavoidable, inevitable. It takes long minutes to shake off the utter powerlessness the slow march of the flames casts over us, settling into our skin, making sleepers' heavy limbs of our arms and legs.
At the campus office, I have to repeat myself over the din of the television.
"It's really quite close."
The man behind the counter looks blank, doesn't get up.
"Hasn't anyone told you yet?"
Then there's a tipping point, and suddenly all is action, motion. Three men pack into the car with us, fire extinguishes are blasted experimentally, a hollow threatening hiss, radios squawk locations and serial numbers.
And later, when we have done our civic duty, and retreated back to our vantage point on the hill to wait for the campus men to reach the fire, we watch as one lone figure, barely visible in the gathering dark, beats away at the flames with a green branch, over and over and over, until I am sure he must stop with exhaustion, but he does not; over and over, like an automaton, battling the advancing edge, and I find myself hoping it won't be stopped, find myself vaguely disappointed when I hear the fire extinguishers and watch as the clumps of red go out, here, there, and let the night bring down the dark.
Friday, July 20, 2007
Travelogue 10: Nowhere, Botswana
F-town, the locals call it, so we do too. Flat, empty, featureless, dust and neon signs and sameness. Midwest US without the glamour. But for all that it fills us up.
I feel freer here, I say to Lydia.
That's just what I was thinking, she says.
There aren't any dividing lines here, between the sections of town. No no-go areas, no razor-wire fences, no sectioning off. Lawyers offices and plush hotels are sandwiched between "Lucky 7" oddments stores and dingy hotplate cafés, and everywhere are the vendors hawking beans, lentils in old tin cans, strings of onions and tomatoes tied up with string, aprons and German-print skirts, sweets sold loosely, goat bells, racks of music cassettes, mobile phone accessories, call cards, cheap beads, spinach.
Fancy cars weave in and out of the 'bus station', an enormous carpark with kombis and old converted coaches, the same and yet so different from the Mthatha taxi rank, that closed-off place for only some of the population, that dangerous place we are warned against - here everyone is piling boxes and blankets onto buses and packing provisions and calling out greetings.
Makaw, we learn the word for whitey. We are the only white people in town, young, female, unaccompanied. Cars hoot, people lean out of shops, fall into step beside us, stare at us, stand by our table at dinner and introduce themselves. Everywhere we go we are watched.
And there is something else about it. There is nothing servile about the Batswana, even when they are sweeping our floors or taking our orders. We are treated with scorn, interest, frankness, amusement, sometime hostility. But always, always, as equals.
------------
Morning at the semi-permanent walled stalls behind our lodge, watching as phones and video recorders are repaired in the sunshine, wondering at the cooking smells coming from stalls with no signs or electricity but carefully stacked plastic bowls and tomatoes, perhaps, or spinach, as in the dark of the doorways beyond the day's lunches are being prepared on paraffin stoves.
Everything is strange, so we stop and point at things, taste African chewing gum and take a seat at an outdoor café to eat grill-roasted bread, the sugar and milk served in cups with no handles, the roof made of flattened cardboard boxes once used to pack electronics.
The women laugh at us, at our questions, at the fact of us being there. At the vegetable stalls on the street it is the same, giggles and great explosive laughter following us as we pick out avocados and lemons. I remember how people reacted to us in our bunny outfits and it feels somewhat similar. Free amusement, something people will go home and relate to their loved ones, little stories that make up a good day.
------------
"No, no, you can't just walk on."
The man in the rasta hat on Gabarone's main street spreads his arms wide, stepping over his wares to shepherd us back.
"That's not how things are done here."
How things are done, apparently, is that after chatting to perfect strangers for a couple of minutes, you grab a friend of yours, abandon your stall and go in search of a place for them to stay that night, and once that is done, invite them to a patch of dirt behind a house to sit on stacked concrete blocks, offer them some home-rolled dagga, and argue with them about Greek dialets and Northern Irish history and the role of the IMF in Zimbabwe's current mess as a collection of friends start to drift over with their lunch, lawyers, election workers, musicians, in suits and in battered jeans, before exchanging numbers and email addresses with plans to meet again, somewhere else in the world.
----------
What did you do in Botswana, people ask. Kayaking? Bungee jumping? Lion spotting?
Um, we look at each other and shrug.
We just, sort of.... met people.
Nowhere in particular.
The best place to be.
I feel freer here, I say to Lydia.
That's just what I was thinking, she says.
There aren't any dividing lines here, between the sections of town. No no-go areas, no razor-wire fences, no sectioning off. Lawyers offices and plush hotels are sandwiched between "Lucky 7" oddments stores and dingy hotplate cafés, and everywhere are the vendors hawking beans, lentils in old tin cans, strings of onions and tomatoes tied up with string, aprons and German-print skirts, sweets sold loosely, goat bells, racks of music cassettes, mobile phone accessories, call cards, cheap beads, spinach.
Fancy cars weave in and out of the 'bus station', an enormous carpark with kombis and old converted coaches, the same and yet so different from the Mthatha taxi rank, that closed-off place for only some of the population, that dangerous place we are warned against - here everyone is piling boxes and blankets onto buses and packing provisions and calling out greetings.
Makaw, we learn the word for whitey. We are the only white people in town, young, female, unaccompanied. Cars hoot, people lean out of shops, fall into step beside us, stare at us, stand by our table at dinner and introduce themselves. Everywhere we go we are watched.
And there is something else about it. There is nothing servile about the Batswana, even when they are sweeping our floors or taking our orders. We are treated with scorn, interest, frankness, amusement, sometime hostility. But always, always, as equals.
------------
Morning at the semi-permanent walled stalls behind our lodge, watching as phones and video recorders are repaired in the sunshine, wondering at the cooking smells coming from stalls with no signs or electricity but carefully stacked plastic bowls and tomatoes, perhaps, or spinach, as in the dark of the doorways beyond the day's lunches are being prepared on paraffin stoves.
Everything is strange, so we stop and point at things, taste African chewing gum and take a seat at an outdoor café to eat grill-roasted bread, the sugar and milk served in cups with no handles, the roof made of flattened cardboard boxes once used to pack electronics.
The women laugh at us, at our questions, at the fact of us being there. At the vegetable stalls on the street it is the same, giggles and great explosive laughter following us as we pick out avocados and lemons. I remember how people reacted to us in our bunny outfits and it feels somewhat similar. Free amusement, something people will go home and relate to their loved ones, little stories that make up a good day.
------------
"No, no, you can't just walk on."
The man in the rasta hat on Gabarone's main street spreads his arms wide, stepping over his wares to shepherd us back.
"That's not how things are done here."
How things are done, apparently, is that after chatting to perfect strangers for a couple of minutes, you grab a friend of yours, abandon your stall and go in search of a place for them to stay that night, and once that is done, invite them to a patch of dirt behind a house to sit on stacked concrete blocks, offer them some home-rolled dagga, and argue with them about Greek dialets and Northern Irish history and the role of the IMF in Zimbabwe's current mess as a collection of friends start to drift over with their lunch, lawyers, election workers, musicians, in suits and in battered jeans, before exchanging numbers and email addresses with plans to meet again, somewhere else in the world.
----------
What did you do in Botswana, people ask. Kayaking? Bungee jumping? Lion spotting?
Um, we look at each other and shrug.
We just, sort of.... met people.
Nowhere in particular.
The best place to be.
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Travelogue 9: Down and out in Zim and Bots
"Welcome to Victoria Falls," woman on the shuttle from the airport says, in a navy skirt-suit and a tired smile. "You will want to do some activities while you are here?"
We take the proffered brochures, slippery under our fingers as we trace the list of prices next to bungee jumps, river-rafting, sky-diving, sunset cruises. An embarrased laugh escapes us.
"I'm sorry, we can't afford these."
Her smile falters, but she persists: "I'm sure we can negotiate something."
We shake our heads, sadly, bemusedly. We're in the tourist capital of sub-Saharan Africa, and between the three of us we have $100 US in our pockets.
To tell the truth, it wasn't meant to be like this. Not the best of planners at the best of times, we wholeheartedly embraced the impossiblity of planning for this trip. Zimbabwe laughs in the face of plans.
But there were several things we should have made sure to have. Money being one.
So we tramp the dusty roads of Vic Falls, tummies grumbling, pockets stuffed with food pilfered from the backpackers we stay in. The supermaket has tomatoes that week so we buy a few and make tomato sandwiches without butter, treasure our lone orange until we are dying of thirst somewhere on a dirt track in search of a Boabab tree, consoling ourselves with the thought of the impressive survivor-in-Africa stories we would tell on our return.
"If we return," I say faintly.
We have all our money - several hundred rand and some Zim dollars have been dug out from forgotten pockets and bras - spread out on the table before us. The ATMs are useless because of the official exchange rate. The man opposite is explaining the options facing us, which are few.
And that is when we decide to take the train.
They tell us not to - our friends, the owner of the backpackers, fellow travellers - so we don't tell them until the tickets are bought. We sit at the station on our bags, in the tired smell of sweat and long days, marvelling at our intrepidness, working hard at looking nochalant.
But we can't get the warnings out of our heads, so the first thing we lock for are the locks - push, click, pop the catch. Sitting in our tiny six cubic metre cabin with its fixtures stamped "Birmingham", hands on our bags. Listening to the noises outside. Hungry. Again.
It's only later, with the door propped open and Lydia brushing out my hair, after she has descended into the depths of economy class to buy some buns on the flourishing informal market (the restaurant car interestingly selling only cane and bourbon liquor), that I begin to realise I feel safer here than inside the locked houses.
Is that why we are told it is so dangerous? So we don't have to see? The chickens being loaded and unloaded, goats bells tinking, the dirt and the smells, the blank faces.
We don't have blankets so I stay awake all through the night journey, cold, exhausted, truly hungry now. My clothes smell of ingrained sweat, there are cockroaches in the corners. When the sun begins to rise I wake Lydia and we watch dazedly as the colours change. The train is going slowly, too slowly, and we worry about missing our connecting train, the next one not being for days. We wonder what to do about money. I count and recount what we have. Not enough.
Lydia whispers to me: it will all work out, it always does.
At Bulawayo, ushered along by a kindly Kenyan woman, we jump off the train and run across the tracks onto the one bound for Francistown in Botswana. We don't have enough money for the tickets and we sit, heart in mouth as the inspector comes along. Our Kenyan angel pays for us, waving off our thanks.
Please let us get to Botswana, please, we beg the heavens. Please let us get to where there is money. We talk of what we will buy when we arrive (champagne, caviar, expensive hairdos, butter), where we will go (massage parlours, restaurants, clean toilets).
Everything will be alright, we tell each other, once we get to Botswana. Oh magical place!
So then.
It's sunset and we're sitting at reception in a cheap holiday inn.
We haven't eaten since the buns the evening before.
It's a public holiday that day and next, so nothing is open.
We have no money on us.
The stony-faced receptionist is listening to our story of how our bank cards are being rejected by all the ATMs in town.
And I don't know what happened next because I closed my eyes to make it all go away, but let me never ever doubt the Australian again. Because somehow she made it ok.
It all worked out. It always does.
Thanks Aussie.
We take the proffered brochures, slippery under our fingers as we trace the list of prices next to bungee jumps, river-rafting, sky-diving, sunset cruises. An embarrased laugh escapes us.
"I'm sorry, we can't afford these."
Her smile falters, but she persists: "I'm sure we can negotiate something."
We shake our heads, sadly, bemusedly. We're in the tourist capital of sub-Saharan Africa, and between the three of us we have $100 US in our pockets.
To tell the truth, it wasn't meant to be like this. Not the best of planners at the best of times, we wholeheartedly embraced the impossiblity of planning for this trip. Zimbabwe laughs in the face of plans.
But there were several things we should have made sure to have. Money being one.
So we tramp the dusty roads of Vic Falls, tummies grumbling, pockets stuffed with food pilfered from the backpackers we stay in. The supermaket has tomatoes that week so we buy a few and make tomato sandwiches without butter, treasure our lone orange until we are dying of thirst somewhere on a dirt track in search of a Boabab tree, consoling ourselves with the thought of the impressive survivor-in-Africa stories we would tell on our return.
"If we return," I say faintly.
We have all our money - several hundred rand and some Zim dollars have been dug out from forgotten pockets and bras - spread out on the table before us. The ATMs are useless because of the official exchange rate. The man opposite is explaining the options facing us, which are few.
And that is when we decide to take the train.
They tell us not to - our friends, the owner of the backpackers, fellow travellers - so we don't tell them until the tickets are bought. We sit at the station on our bags, in the tired smell of sweat and long days, marvelling at our intrepidness, working hard at looking nochalant.
But we can't get the warnings out of our heads, so the first thing we lock for are the locks - push, click, pop the catch. Sitting in our tiny six cubic metre cabin with its fixtures stamped "Birmingham", hands on our bags. Listening to the noises outside. Hungry. Again.
It's only later, with the door propped open and Lydia brushing out my hair, after she has descended into the depths of economy class to buy some buns on the flourishing informal market (the restaurant car interestingly selling only cane and bourbon liquor), that I begin to realise I feel safer here than inside the locked houses.
Is that why we are told it is so dangerous? So we don't have to see? The chickens being loaded and unloaded, goats bells tinking, the dirt and the smells, the blank faces.
We don't have blankets so I stay awake all through the night journey, cold, exhausted, truly hungry now. My clothes smell of ingrained sweat, there are cockroaches in the corners. When the sun begins to rise I wake Lydia and we watch dazedly as the colours change. The train is going slowly, too slowly, and we worry about missing our connecting train, the next one not being for days. We wonder what to do about money. I count and recount what we have. Not enough.
Lydia whispers to me: it will all work out, it always does.
At Bulawayo, ushered along by a kindly Kenyan woman, we jump off the train and run across the tracks onto the one bound for Francistown in Botswana. We don't have enough money for the tickets and we sit, heart in mouth as the inspector comes along. Our Kenyan angel pays for us, waving off our thanks.
Please let us get to Botswana, please, we beg the heavens. Please let us get to where there is money. We talk of what we will buy when we arrive (champagne, caviar, expensive hairdos, butter), where we will go (massage parlours, restaurants, clean toilets).
Everything will be alright, we tell each other, once we get to Botswana. Oh magical place!
So then.
It's sunset and we're sitting at reception in a cheap holiday inn.
We haven't eaten since the buns the evening before.
It's a public holiday that day and next, so nothing is open.
We have no money on us.
The stony-faced receptionist is listening to our story of how our bank cards are being rejected by all the ATMs in town.
And I don't know what happened next because I closed my eyes to make it all go away, but let me never ever doubt the Australian again. Because somehow she made it ok.
It all worked out. It always does.
Thanks Aussie.
Sunday, July 15, 2007
Travelogue 8: Falling from the Edge
It had a name, from the time that things were first named. Mosi-oa-Tunya, the people called it. The smoke that thunders.
And it does; you can feel it beneath your feet.
***************
It is with you in your dreams, though it comes as the sea, or raging fire. Elements, fire and water; it is both.
In the cool gloom of your rented room, you hear it when the sun goes down and the other noises fade, leaving only its steady background roar in the their place. And you realise it has been there all along, through the impossibly bright day and the chatter of transient rabid baboon families, through the greetings and supplications of the people that line the streets here - hello, hello, good price for you - through the babble of accents from around the world and the shouts of taxi drivers soliciting business, through the raucous birdcalls and tinny shop music, the great Falls, constant, unchanging, as it always has been.
***************
On the path at the Falls, a man and his wife. Khaki shorts, cameras, both. He calls out a greeting: hello.
Then asks: get any good photographs?
Hunched forwards, fingers itching at the shutter release, striding forth.
I think of the men at the hunter's bar back in the town, weather-beaten faces and long-distance stares over their pints of bitter. And of the men who took the same bus with us into town after the charter flight, taciturn, inscrutable after a week on the hunt. They come from thousands of miles away to pay to stalk animals.
To capture. To shoot. To claim their piece of Africa.
"Yes," I say. Wanting to get away.
***************
But I didn't. It isn't possible. You can't capture the edge of the world.
In that pre-light - up and walking before dawn to be the first to arrive, down streets with no lights, only the faint blue-grey tinge in the sky to stumble along by, picnic basket under arm, guided by the roar, louder now, louder - that is truly what it is, the edge of everything.
Shrouded in plumes of spray that dance in teasing spirals, soaking hair and clothes and picnic basket, before suddenly clearing to reveal a great chasm, longer than the eye can make out, a crack right into the centre of the earth.
Seducing, that roar.
We inch forward, beyond the signs with their exclamation marks, toes curling in our shoes as if to grip the spray-slick rock.
A little more. Just a little more.
"I could imagine," Lydia says from somewhere far off, "just walking right over."
She balances near the edge. Sways. My fingers want to reach out and take hold of her damp hood.
Because I know exactly what she means.
And it does; you can feel it beneath your feet.
***************
It is with you in your dreams, though it comes as the sea, or raging fire. Elements, fire and water; it is both.
In the cool gloom of your rented room, you hear it when the sun goes down and the other noises fade, leaving only its steady background roar in the their place. And you realise it has been there all along, through the impossibly bright day and the chatter of transient rabid baboon families, through the greetings and supplications of the people that line the streets here - hello, hello, good price for you - through the babble of accents from around the world and the shouts of taxi drivers soliciting business, through the raucous birdcalls and tinny shop music, the great Falls, constant, unchanging, as it always has been.
***************
On the path at the Falls, a man and his wife. Khaki shorts, cameras, both. He calls out a greeting: hello.
Then asks: get any good photographs?
Hunched forwards, fingers itching at the shutter release, striding forth.
I think of the men at the hunter's bar back in the town, weather-beaten faces and long-distance stares over their pints of bitter. And of the men who took the same bus with us into town after the charter flight, taciturn, inscrutable after a week on the hunt. They come from thousands of miles away to pay to stalk animals.
To capture. To shoot. To claim their piece of Africa.
"Yes," I say. Wanting to get away.
***************
But I didn't. It isn't possible. You can't capture the edge of the world.
In that pre-light - up and walking before dawn to be the first to arrive, down streets with no lights, only the faint blue-grey tinge in the sky to stumble along by, picnic basket under arm, guided by the roar, louder now, louder - that is truly what it is, the edge of everything.
Shrouded in plumes of spray that dance in teasing spirals, soaking hair and clothes and picnic basket, before suddenly clearing to reveal a great chasm, longer than the eye can make out, a crack right into the centre of the earth.
Seducing, that roar.
We inch forward, beyond the signs with their exclamation marks, toes curling in our shoes as if to grip the spray-slick rock.
A little more. Just a little more.
"I could imagine," Lydia says from somewhere far off, "just walking right over."
She balances near the edge. Sways. My fingers want to reach out and take hold of her damp hood.
Because I know exactly what she means.
Friday, July 13, 2007
Travelogue 7: Impossibilities
I sit on our bags, diary on my lap, surreptitiously recording the details of the Charles Prince airstrip in the morning slantways light:
- A cluster of close-mouthed guards, leaning on the counter
- A quartet of hunting-jacketed men and their bottle-blond wives
- Framed photographs (two) of his Excellency Robert Mugabe President of Zimbabwe
- A gun tent, just visible at the far end of the landing strip
- A faded exchange control poster with the limitations figure of $17,000 Zim dollars crossed out, $140,000 written above, also crossed out, $300,000 written in biro above again
Outside, a tiny plane jogs to a halt. B's dad waves from the cockpit.
A lesson I learn: the smaller the plane, the longer that moment when it seems certain the thing will never become airborne.
And then, teeth-clenching seconds passing, the tattered strip falls away, and we rise up. And... I don't know, everything fails me after that. Words. Thoughts. Breath.
Impossible, impossible.
Human life - houses, roads, vegetable gardens - like tiny etchings. Less than an hour after dawn the light is sideways, and the world a plasticine model on a workman's bench. Just eaxctly so - I struggle to believe in it: the wisp-like communications towers, the round huts and rectangular houses, the frail fake shadows the trees cast.
So still. Except for a person - so small, so unspeakably perfect in making their way down a delicate road, casting their tiny pinlength shadow. Or a truck of miniscule articlated parts pulling two trailers alongside a general store. Or the men throwing clay bricks from the neat pencil-drawn furrows baking in the sun.
Impossible.
Colours and textures that strip the mind bare, until only that lone word is left rattling about. Great circles of green crops grooved with brush-stroke lines like an old LP, square rows of crops in different checkerboard hues of dust-red and orange, a curve of jewelled blue lake embroidered with circular beads of islets.
And secret things too - angular outlines, like housing foundations, in rows, and in the next field the same structures but fainter, crumbled, and in the next field the same again, though overgrown, like archaeological remains.
Is it an illusion, from here, that there is a pattern to life?
- A cluster of close-mouthed guards, leaning on the counter
- A quartet of hunting-jacketed men and their bottle-blond wives
- Framed photographs (two) of his Excellency Robert Mugabe President of Zimbabwe
- A gun tent, just visible at the far end of the landing strip
- A faded exchange control poster with the limitations figure of $17,000 Zim dollars crossed out, $140,000 written above, also crossed out, $300,000 written in biro above again
Outside, a tiny plane jogs to a halt. B's dad waves from the cockpit.
A lesson I learn: the smaller the plane, the longer that moment when it seems certain the thing will never become airborne.
And then, teeth-clenching seconds passing, the tattered strip falls away, and we rise up. And... I don't know, everything fails me after that. Words. Thoughts. Breath.
Impossible, impossible.
Human life - houses, roads, vegetable gardens - like tiny etchings. Less than an hour after dawn the light is sideways, and the world a plasticine model on a workman's bench. Just eaxctly so - I struggle to believe in it: the wisp-like communications towers, the round huts and rectangular houses, the frail fake shadows the trees cast.
So still. Except for a person - so small, so unspeakably perfect in making their way down a delicate road, casting their tiny pinlength shadow. Or a truck of miniscule articlated parts pulling two trailers alongside a general store. Or the men throwing clay bricks from the neat pencil-drawn furrows baking in the sun.
Impossible.
Colours and textures that strip the mind bare, until only that lone word is left rattling about. Great circles of green crops grooved with brush-stroke lines like an old LP, square rows of crops in different checkerboard hues of dust-red and orange, a curve of jewelled blue lake embroidered with circular beads of islets.
And secret things too - angular outlines, like housing foundations, in rows, and in the next field the same structures but fainter, crumbled, and in the next field the same again, though overgrown, like archaeological remains.
Is it an illusion, from here, that there is a pattern to life?
The glitter of a bird - white, a bird! Low enough we fly to see its flickering path over the woods, a speck of mica blown in the breeze.
I watch our shadow chase us over the land, and wonder about the impossible.
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Travelogue 6: See no evil
Our friend B sits across the immaculately white-clothed table from us, splashed in droplets of sunlight that filter through the creeper-vine canopy above. A girl in an equally immaculate white apron places tall glasses of homemade lemonade at our elbows, mint sprigs mingling sedately with the clear-edged ice-cubes. There is a polite hum of post-shopping conversation from the tables around us, from people who, like us, have nowhere better to be on a Thursday lunchtime.
So this, I think to myself, is Zimbabwe. I didn't expect this.
*************
In the queue at the Johannesburg bus station, waiting to board our 15-hour bus to Harare, I tried not to stare at people's bags. Great square blue-tartan carrier-bags, the ubiquitous sort seen on buses the world over, presumably all manufactured at one large factory in Taiwan, that everyone in our queue had. Except us. Inside the bags I could see gallon-jugs of cooking oil, tightly stacked loaves of bread, cartons of longlife milk.
We had our things too, from a scrap of ruled paper. We asked our hosts in Harare if they would like us to bring anything, and they dictated a short list:
2 kg brown sugar
2 litres oil
2 kg plain flour
1 packet Roiboos tea
1 bottle red wine
1 tin baking powder
We stuff the purchases into our suitcases, stuff US dollars down our bras (the man at the Bureau de Change at Joburg airport had laughed at Lydia when she asked for Zimbabwean dollars: are you mad?). We tap our breasts now to hear the crisp notes crackle.
We giggle. We're nervous.
*************
The first thing I know of Zim is an irregular rattling sound from just outside the bus door as we pull up at customs. As we file off in search of paperwork to complete I see that it is coming from a woman heaped in blankets, holding a tin, shaking it. Around us are the humpback shadows of cars with loads strapped to their rooves, and queues of buses, and streams of people shuffling just like us in the dark before dawn.
Back on the bus, the driver announces there will be no customs search of our baggage. Thanks to this good fellow, he says of a man in an ill-fitting uniform, give what you can to him. And we pass change into his cold fingers, cold from standing in the night dark, the powerful scent of sweat trailing after him, and as he makes his way among us the dawn light rises outside.
This is my first sight of Zim: blond-white scrub and earth, and a pale shell-pink dawn breaking along a horizon as far as the eye can see.
And a picnic bench, by the side of the road, out here in this great expanse of beautiful nothing. Who stops there now?
*************
The bus trundles on. Savannah grass, brick rondavels. Scrubland, townland. A white hotel with the suggestion of white-shirted waiters moving about within, at the gate boys in faded red uniforms beside faded red cooler boxes that read: the best ice-cream in town, selling cooldrinks in aggressive orange and red and blue.
A string of handpainted signs set into the eaves of a long, low wooden building: Dept of Agriculture; Inspections Unit; Immigration Office.
The boy with a fistful of Zim dollars: 10,000, 100,000 notes, who one of our new bus-friends negotiates with on our behalf for an exchange, keeping a watchful eye out for the man with the truncheon who patrols the filling station. This is our Bureau de Change.
*************
On the drive to B's gracious house, there are men on every street who raise an arm in salute; private guards. When we wander out to the back porch, barefooted, on that first afternoon, I dip my toes in the swimming pool, leaves circling in its depths. At the breakfast table there is imported French jam, yoghurt from the Zimbabwean National Dairy Co-op, no butter.
Tacked to the fridge is a shopping list, with several items crossed off. It's a rolling list, B explains. Every day we take it to the shops and see if that day there is milk, or garlic, or oranges.
Hung on the hallway wall is a cross-stitch panel. B's mother stitched it, in petrol queues. They would wake early, take a book or a needle, and settle in for the day, calling a family member when they needed to be relieved for toilet breaks. She points to a section of the panel: from there to there, that's the first month of 2006.
B plans out an itinerary for us: the local wildlife sanctuary, the lovely little coffee shop, the crafts fair.
Can we go to the supermarket? we ask.
Why? she looks at us.
Just... to see, we suppose.
The meat counters are empty. The bread has run out, and the milk, and the butter. The government has forcibly halved prices so people can't afford to sell. Or at least, not in the shops; in the parking lots we are approached with tomatoes, eggs, toilet rolls.
One evening as B is hand-rolling pasta for dinner, her father arrives back and heaves an entire skinned lamb, bleeding through the muslin covering, onto the spotless marble counter-top. Another government decree means there is no meat for sale, so a friend traded something for something, and now one of the cleavers is sharpened on a block and we all help to bag and label the cuts of meat.
*************
We have a vegetable garden, B's mother tells us, just in case.
She looks around to check that "the maid" isn't in the room.
Part of it always goes missing, she says. The staff take it. Only Christians have guilt; for them there is no shame unless you get caught.
People like us. We smile politely.
Leave the breakfast things, we are told. They will be cleaned up.
I go out to sit on the dry-grass back lawn and watch smoke rise from the huts of the staff who live there, the staff I never see, behind a screen of bushes. I hear a child laughing.
*************
There were always the conversations, at university. Someone would make a comment about how bad things were getting in Zim, and there would be a careful lack of response.
What problems? the person might say.
An awkward pause might follow; a change of topic.
What inflation. What food shortages.
Whose Zimbabwe were they talking about?
Most black Zimbabweans who can afford to be attending Rhodes have gotten practised at not seeing. The white ones see, but it's not really their reality either. The petrol shortages and unfinished shopping lists, yes, but also the organic food store with imported pesto and chocolate, the soft-carpeted lounge, the sunspangled coffee shop.
Whose Zimbabwe?
Beyond the shady suburb limits, we catch a glimpse of bare-chested men laying bricks, of dusty hoes. Of fields sprouting crops of weeds. Another piece to lay down, try to make the pieces fit.
Whose Zimbabwe did we see?
So this, I think to myself, is Zimbabwe. I didn't expect this.
*************
In the queue at the Johannesburg bus station, waiting to board our 15-hour bus to Harare, I tried not to stare at people's bags. Great square blue-tartan carrier-bags, the ubiquitous sort seen on buses the world over, presumably all manufactured at one large factory in Taiwan, that everyone in our queue had. Except us. Inside the bags I could see gallon-jugs of cooking oil, tightly stacked loaves of bread, cartons of longlife milk.
We had our things too, from a scrap of ruled paper. We asked our hosts in Harare if they would like us to bring anything, and they dictated a short list:
2 kg brown sugar
2 litres oil
2 kg plain flour
1 packet Roiboos tea
1 bottle red wine
1 tin baking powder
We stuff the purchases into our suitcases, stuff US dollars down our bras (the man at the Bureau de Change at Joburg airport had laughed at Lydia when she asked for Zimbabwean dollars: are you mad?). We tap our breasts now to hear the crisp notes crackle.
We giggle. We're nervous.
*************
The first thing I know of Zim is an irregular rattling sound from just outside the bus door as we pull up at customs. As we file off in search of paperwork to complete I see that it is coming from a woman heaped in blankets, holding a tin, shaking it. Around us are the humpback shadows of cars with loads strapped to their rooves, and queues of buses, and streams of people shuffling just like us in the dark before dawn.
Back on the bus, the driver announces there will be no customs search of our baggage. Thanks to this good fellow, he says of a man in an ill-fitting uniform, give what you can to him. And we pass change into his cold fingers, cold from standing in the night dark, the powerful scent of sweat trailing after him, and as he makes his way among us the dawn light rises outside.
This is my first sight of Zim: blond-white scrub and earth, and a pale shell-pink dawn breaking along a horizon as far as the eye can see.
And a picnic bench, by the side of the road, out here in this great expanse of beautiful nothing. Who stops there now?
*************
The bus trundles on. Savannah grass, brick rondavels. Scrubland, townland. A white hotel with the suggestion of white-shirted waiters moving about within, at the gate boys in faded red uniforms beside faded red cooler boxes that read: the best ice-cream in town, selling cooldrinks in aggressive orange and red and blue.
A string of handpainted signs set into the eaves of a long, low wooden building: Dept of Agriculture; Inspections Unit; Immigration Office.
The boy with a fistful of Zim dollars: 10,000, 100,000 notes, who one of our new bus-friends negotiates with on our behalf for an exchange, keeping a watchful eye out for the man with the truncheon who patrols the filling station. This is our Bureau de Change.
*************
On the drive to B's gracious house, there are men on every street who raise an arm in salute; private guards. When we wander out to the back porch, barefooted, on that first afternoon, I dip my toes in the swimming pool, leaves circling in its depths. At the breakfast table there is imported French jam, yoghurt from the Zimbabwean National Dairy Co-op, no butter.
Tacked to the fridge is a shopping list, with several items crossed off. It's a rolling list, B explains. Every day we take it to the shops and see if that day there is milk, or garlic, or oranges.
Hung on the hallway wall is a cross-stitch panel. B's mother stitched it, in petrol queues. They would wake early, take a book or a needle, and settle in for the day, calling a family member when they needed to be relieved for toilet breaks. She points to a section of the panel: from there to there, that's the first month of 2006.
B plans out an itinerary for us: the local wildlife sanctuary, the lovely little coffee shop, the crafts fair.
Can we go to the supermarket? we ask.
Why? she looks at us.
Just... to see, we suppose.
The meat counters are empty. The bread has run out, and the milk, and the butter. The government has forcibly halved prices so people can't afford to sell. Or at least, not in the shops; in the parking lots we are approached with tomatoes, eggs, toilet rolls.
One evening as B is hand-rolling pasta for dinner, her father arrives back and heaves an entire skinned lamb, bleeding through the muslin covering, onto the spotless marble counter-top. Another government decree means there is no meat for sale, so a friend traded something for something, and now one of the cleavers is sharpened on a block and we all help to bag and label the cuts of meat.
*************
We have a vegetable garden, B's mother tells us, just in case.
She looks around to check that "the maid" isn't in the room.
Part of it always goes missing, she says. The staff take it. Only Christians have guilt; for them there is no shame unless you get caught.
People like us. We smile politely.
Leave the breakfast things, we are told. They will be cleaned up.
I go out to sit on the dry-grass back lawn and watch smoke rise from the huts of the staff who live there, the staff I never see, behind a screen of bushes. I hear a child laughing.
*************
There were always the conversations, at university. Someone would make a comment about how bad things were getting in Zim, and there would be a careful lack of response.
What problems? the person might say.
An awkward pause might follow; a change of topic.
What inflation. What food shortages.
Whose Zimbabwe were they talking about?
Most black Zimbabweans who can afford to be attending Rhodes have gotten practised at not seeing. The white ones see, but it's not really their reality either. The petrol shortages and unfinished shopping lists, yes, but also the organic food store with imported pesto and chocolate, the soft-carpeted lounge, the sunspangled coffee shop.
Whose Zimbabwe?
Beyond the shady suburb limits, we catch a glimpse of bare-chested men laying bricks, of dusty hoes. Of fields sprouting crops of weeds. Another piece to lay down, try to make the pieces fit.
Whose Zimbabwe did we see?
Friday, July 06, 2007
Travelogue 5: The faithful servant
"This is Bertha."
Matt makes the introductions the night we arrive at his house in Cape Town and unfold ourselves from Lara's car, tired, crumpled and hoarse from several hours of show tunes performed with considerably more energy than talent.
It wouldn't be polite to say, but the years have taken their toll on Bertha. We learn that she has been with the family for three generations, has taken care of children and grandchildren and their miscellaneous friends and hangers-on, and she looks it. In the mornings she takes a while to get going, and she makes slow progress on her trips with us into town, large and ponderous and sometimes, if I'm allowed to mention it, not so very clean. People stare a little as she passes in the street.
But Bertha is eternally useful, always ready to take us to Kaapstad Bay to watch the sun go down, or drop us out to Green Point for an appointment, or ferry us to UCT to take in the view over the city, or carry our shopping bags back from the grocery stores. When we stumble out of our impromtu beds on the living room floor hours later than planned, and decide we urgently need to buy polkadot shoes or malaria tablets or bus tickets, she is there for us, always, uncomplaining.
She doesn't chide us when we come back with mud streaked down our arms from clambering across a "short cut" up the side of Table Mountain, and get it all over her. She waits patiently while we buy dripping ice-creams to eat instead of dinner, or shuffle about in the sand writing messages with our feet for passing planes to read, or run barefoot into the petrol station for late-night supplies, or skip stones for an hour on a flat-pebbled beach, one-two-three-four-five, tearing concentric holes in the roseate reflected sunset.
She smells somewhat of puppy, but then everyone in Matt's household does, including us. And when she leaves us at the airport, to catch our flight onwards to Joburg, I give her a sneaky pat on her slightly rusted broad blue bonnet.
Thanks girl.
Matt makes the introductions the night we arrive at his house in Cape Town and unfold ourselves from Lara's car, tired, crumpled and hoarse from several hours of show tunes performed with considerably more energy than talent.
It wouldn't be polite to say, but the years have taken their toll on Bertha. We learn that she has been with the family for three generations, has taken care of children and grandchildren and their miscellaneous friends and hangers-on, and she looks it. In the mornings she takes a while to get going, and she makes slow progress on her trips with us into town, large and ponderous and sometimes, if I'm allowed to mention it, not so very clean. People stare a little as she passes in the street.
But Bertha is eternally useful, always ready to take us to Kaapstad Bay to watch the sun go down, or drop us out to Green Point for an appointment, or ferry us to UCT to take in the view over the city, or carry our shopping bags back from the grocery stores. When we stumble out of our impromtu beds on the living room floor hours later than planned, and decide we urgently need to buy polkadot shoes or malaria tablets or bus tickets, she is there for us, always, uncomplaining.
She doesn't chide us when we come back with mud streaked down our arms from clambering across a "short cut" up the side of Table Mountain, and get it all over her. She waits patiently while we buy dripping ice-creams to eat instead of dinner, or shuffle about in the sand writing messages with our feet for passing planes to read, or run barefoot into the petrol station for late-night supplies, or skip stones for an hour on a flat-pebbled beach, one-two-three-four-five, tearing concentric holes in the roseate reflected sunset.
She smells somewhat of puppy, but then everyone in Matt's household does, including us. And when she leaves us at the airport, to catch our flight onwards to Joburg, I give her a sneaky pat on her slightly rusted broad blue bonnet.
Thanks girl.
Wednesday, July 04, 2007
Travelogue 4: Up and away
We have the video still, and it tells the story better than words ever could:
Two pairs of sockless feet waving out a car window, toes wiggling in the sunshine, as the mountains of the Karoo rush by, as life rushes by.
- I know how the backseat of that car tastes, of damp seat-sponge and shoe-dust and fresh-baked bread. The tomatoes rolling on the back shelf, a feathery head on my shoulder as we roll too, like kittens, soft-limbed and lazy and tangled. The bags at our feet, under our elbows, on our laps - like the barely-there mornings when we used to pile everything into our car for the long drive to France, cushioned in on all sides by belongings, pressing our faces to the window to say goodbye to the cat (who always knew and sat ramrod stiff with her back to us, refusing to forgive).
- I know what came before, hours and hours before, before there was a road to wave toes at. The yawning dawn reunion at the top of High Street, eyes gummed half shut, trailing hastily packed suitcases. We put our faces to the window too then, to say goodbye to Grahamstown, our Grahamstown, still asleep in the mist and the quiet that lays itself down before the day awakes.
We stopped an hour out of town at a farm stall, to inhale the morning smells of baking and vetkoeks griddling and coffee percolating and plan our route in the air - a vaguely gestured finger the seven hundred kilometres from there to Cape Town. In the parking lot there were two men, cradling pigeons in their hands. They passed them over to us, powdered downy things that struggled as we held them to our chests, then swung them out, up and out into the air, where - snap - wings unfurled and flight! Oh! The outrageous sense of joy of watching them take to the sky and wheel, smaller and smaller into the sharp speck of the sun.
- I know what came next too, after the video stops. Put your arms out, Matt said. And we did, seven arms out into the white sun, into the soft-strong slipstream that sucks at your fingertips, both wonderful and awful.
Up, he said, and down.
Up, and down.
A flock of finger feathers, beating slowly, then faster, until one little green car out to conquer the world must surely lift up, up, up and away.
Two pairs of sockless feet waving out a car window, toes wiggling in the sunshine, as the mountains of the Karoo rush by, as life rushes by.
- I know how the backseat of that car tastes, of damp seat-sponge and shoe-dust and fresh-baked bread. The tomatoes rolling on the back shelf, a feathery head on my shoulder as we roll too, like kittens, soft-limbed and lazy and tangled. The bags at our feet, under our elbows, on our laps - like the barely-there mornings when we used to pile everything into our car for the long drive to France, cushioned in on all sides by belongings, pressing our faces to the window to say goodbye to the cat (who always knew and sat ramrod stiff with her back to us, refusing to forgive).
- I know what came before, hours and hours before, before there was a road to wave toes at. The yawning dawn reunion at the top of High Street, eyes gummed half shut, trailing hastily packed suitcases. We put our faces to the window too then, to say goodbye to Grahamstown, our Grahamstown, still asleep in the mist and the quiet that lays itself down before the day awakes.
We stopped an hour out of town at a farm stall, to inhale the morning smells of baking and vetkoeks griddling and coffee percolating and plan our route in the air - a vaguely gestured finger the seven hundred kilometres from there to Cape Town. In the parking lot there were two men, cradling pigeons in their hands. They passed them over to us, powdered downy things that struggled as we held them to our chests, then swung them out, up and out into the air, where - snap - wings unfurled and flight! Oh! The outrageous sense of joy of watching them take to the sky and wheel, smaller and smaller into the sharp speck of the sun.
- I know what came next too, after the video stops. Put your arms out, Matt said. And we did, seven arms out into the white sun, into the soft-strong slipstream that sucks at your fingertips, both wonderful and awful.
Up, he said, and down.
Up, and down.
A flock of finger feathers, beating slowly, then faster, until one little green car out to conquer the world must surely lift up, up, up and away.
Tuesday, July 03, 2007
Travelogue 3: Getting it
It's not the most glamourous of places, it must be said. The pavements are cracked, some might notice. The awnings are dusty, the facades of the old hotels and churches are missing their whitewash. The Christmas lights stay up, well into July, blackened unlit twists of metal that hang sheepishly from the streetlamps.
Most of the time, it just looks tired. Grahamstown, one of the national papers explains, spends six months gearing up for the National Arts Festival and six months recovering.
But for that one week a year, everything changes. Grahamstown gets its glad rags on.
It's the signs we notice first, which have sprouted in our absence, unnamed places and schools and scout halls doubling as theatre venues, and posters, posters, everywhere - walls, windows, even taped to the pavement. Posters and hawkers, thousands of street-sellers, promising you shoes or sheets or metal figurines or painted quilts or every-colour lollipops or beaded earrings or woven baskets or leather wallets for nothing, for half nothing, for less than nothing.
And the people have arrived, that we notice too. People strolling about and gathering in little groups to bend over programmes, filling the coffee shops out onto the street and spreading advertisements and reviews over the outdoor benches, circling and marking and making lists. And with the people has come an energy, a bright buzz in the air, blown in from all corners of the country.
Our little pack of Festonians swells its ranks over the first few days, with new and hideously talented friends who we drink outrageous amounts of coffee with and make outrageous plans with and, accidentally, escape on an outrageously perfect road trip with. We wander the streets of our new town, practising monkee walks and eating at restaurants that appear from nowhere and swapping numbers and Greek sweets with people at the next table and sprawling, twirling grass blades, on the university lawns as we wait for the next exciting thing to happen upon us, as it invariably does.
We see ballets and jamming sessions and art exhibitions and youth theatre and who-dunnits and one-man-shows and somewhere in the middle of it all, I realise I am sitting watching an incredible, incorrect, tongue-in-cheek political satire about South Africa, and I get it.
I get at least a little bit of this noisy, heartbreaking, hopeful, tumultuous, contradictory place.
Most of the time, it just looks tired. Grahamstown, one of the national papers explains, spends six months gearing up for the National Arts Festival and six months recovering.
But for that one week a year, everything changes. Grahamstown gets its glad rags on.
It's the signs we notice first, which have sprouted in our absence, unnamed places and schools and scout halls doubling as theatre venues, and posters, posters, everywhere - walls, windows, even taped to the pavement. Posters and hawkers, thousands of street-sellers, promising you shoes or sheets or metal figurines or painted quilts or every-colour lollipops or beaded earrings or woven baskets or leather wallets for nothing, for half nothing, for less than nothing.
And the people have arrived, that we notice too. People strolling about and gathering in little groups to bend over programmes, filling the coffee shops out onto the street and spreading advertisements and reviews over the outdoor benches, circling and marking and making lists. And with the people has come an energy, a bright buzz in the air, blown in from all corners of the country.
Our little pack of Festonians swells its ranks over the first few days, with new and hideously talented friends who we drink outrageous amounts of coffee with and make outrageous plans with and, accidentally, escape on an outrageously perfect road trip with. We wander the streets of our new town, practising monkee walks and eating at restaurants that appear from nowhere and swapping numbers and Greek sweets with people at the next table and sprawling, twirling grass blades, on the university lawns as we wait for the next exciting thing to happen upon us, as it invariably does.
We see ballets and jamming sessions and art exhibitions and youth theatre and who-dunnits and one-man-shows and somewhere in the middle of it all, I realise I am sitting watching an incredible, incorrect, tongue-in-cheek political satire about South Africa, and I get it.
I get at least a little bit of this noisy, heartbreaking, hopeful, tumultuous, contradictory place.
Sunday, July 01, 2007
Travelogue 2: Transkei Window
"Do you have a boyfriend?" she asks.
They are all watching for the answer. Thirteen of us in a van designed for six or seven, cheerfully forced into several hours of blunt intimacy.
"Yes," I say.
"Just the one?" she asks.
"Yes," I say to general laughter. She smiles her sweet smile, over her sleeping child's head, gently, openly curious.
"And he has only the one?" she asks, holding up one finger.
"Yes! One! Me!" I point one emphatic finger in response.
More laughter. Outside the van window the sand-yellow plains skim by.
"My husband," she says after a pause, "has three girlfriends. In Johannesburg, where the mines are."
"Oh." I say.
Then, stupidly: "Uyavuya?"
Or, you are happy? This is ok?
She shakes her head.
"No," she says. "No."
Saturday, June 30, 2007
Travelogue 1: Hopeless Romantics
Imagine a journey.
Begin in the soothing hum of a long-distance coach, via the sharp-cornered edges of a guesthouse bed and the foil bite of a welcome mint. The next morning wake to a different story, a different world. Adjust to the chaos of downtown Mthatha, a hive of hurrying figures and lounging groups and wares spread out on folding tables, fingers pointing: this way, that way. Broken Xhosa, broken English, big smiles.
Get lost in the taxi quarter, jagged lines of vans parked wherever they come to a stop, girls weaving through with plastic boxes of fish cakes and bananas and red-skinned sausages balanced on their heads. Strike a price with your driver, find a seat and settle down to wait. Wait, as the day warms up, for more fellow travellers to arrive, for more space to be found for belongings. Move over, squeeze up, squeeze your eyes shut as the tyres lose contact with the road on the bends.
Change at Xhora. Fold into a smaller van, wave away the earring-sellers and fruit-vendors, the salesmen who try on sunglasses and grin at you. Grin back, still shaking no. Ten minutes, an hour, waiting. Scramble for your phone as it rings in the depths of your backpack, unexpectedly. Produce the magic word "iboyfriend" when the boys strutting nearby push one of their number over to solicit your number. Strike up a conversation with the woman cradling her child, make notes in her creased copybook of your names, your limited vocabulary.
Hold your breath to allow yet more people to squeeze in next to you. And then more. And pots and pans, and fruit baskets, and stacks of dishes. Make introductions over and over, with local primary school teachers and farm workers and those coming home from jobs in other parts of the country. Swap adddresses, swap new English words for new Xhosa words, use the only Setswana you know, translate for the French friend beside you, throw in some Irish and learn baby songs in Afrikaans. Smile a lot. Hold your breath and squeeze a few more in.
Be glad of the press of bodies as the road disintegrates into ruts and stones, and finally tussocked fields. Pose as the women manning a fruit stall somewhere before Nkanya come over to peer into the back of your van, because they have never seen white people in a local khombi taxi before. Watch as the baby is passed over to doze on someone else's lap, watch as she falls asleep amid the clatter.
Unfold creaking limbs at the rivers edge, greet the curious children on donkeys, pet the donkeys, make it clear that, no, you don't have sweets. Haggle with one offshoot of the group about getting across the river, hold firm at three Rand and step on empty milk crates to clamber into the waiting boat. Watch the water coming in the holes at the bottom.
Haul your bags off the other side and up the scrub hills. Wave at the people hoeing in the fields, who shade their eyes against the sun and wave back. Break out the remains of a bag of crisps and a bunch of bananas to share with the boys struggling under one of your bags as you stop, sweating on the side of the last rise.
Catch the breath you didn't know you still had as the hills split into a river mouth, that then opens onto the sea, and then onto a view of heaven.
Sink into the grass and gaze at the seaspray catching the light. At the white sands and the white wave-crests.
Welcome to Bulungula.
It is exactly as beautiful as they told you it would be.
(And it brings out anger too, unexpectedly. Anger at the dividing line running through the drinking houses, men on benches and women on straw mats, at women's work: to serve the mother-in-law, to remain faithful, to bear children, to fetch water and cook. But what is the men's work? you ask. They are all in the mines, is the reply. The mines, somehow you had forgotten the mines still existed in this new South Africa. All gone to the mines, to breathe dust and break bones and return years later when the children are all grown, to cough heavily if the cough hasn't already taken you.)
After you dress and write some journal notes and have meandered out to get breakfast, long after you have lost interest in the romantic figure she cuts, the woman is still there, walking over the hills in the cold morning air, slowly, slowly, slowly.
Begin in the soothing hum of a long-distance coach, via the sharp-cornered edges of a guesthouse bed and the foil bite of a welcome mint. The next morning wake to a different story, a different world. Adjust to the chaos of downtown Mthatha, a hive of hurrying figures and lounging groups and wares spread out on folding tables, fingers pointing: this way, that way. Broken Xhosa, broken English, big smiles.
Get lost in the taxi quarter, jagged lines of vans parked wherever they come to a stop, girls weaving through with plastic boxes of fish cakes and bananas and red-skinned sausages balanced on their heads. Strike a price with your driver, find a seat and settle down to wait. Wait, as the day warms up, for more fellow travellers to arrive, for more space to be found for belongings. Move over, squeeze up, squeeze your eyes shut as the tyres lose contact with the road on the bends.
Change at Xhora. Fold into a smaller van, wave away the earring-sellers and fruit-vendors, the salesmen who try on sunglasses and grin at you. Grin back, still shaking no. Ten minutes, an hour, waiting. Scramble for your phone as it rings in the depths of your backpack, unexpectedly. Produce the magic word "iboyfriend" when the boys strutting nearby push one of their number over to solicit your number. Strike up a conversation with the woman cradling her child, make notes in her creased copybook of your names, your limited vocabulary.
Hold your breath to allow yet more people to squeeze in next to you. And then more. And pots and pans, and fruit baskets, and stacks of dishes. Make introductions over and over, with local primary school teachers and farm workers and those coming home from jobs in other parts of the country. Swap adddresses, swap new English words for new Xhosa words, use the only Setswana you know, translate for the French friend beside you, throw in some Irish and learn baby songs in Afrikaans. Smile a lot. Hold your breath and squeeze a few more in.
Be glad of the press of bodies as the road disintegrates into ruts and stones, and finally tussocked fields. Pose as the women manning a fruit stall somewhere before Nkanya come over to peer into the back of your van, because they have never seen white people in a local khombi taxi before. Watch as the baby is passed over to doze on someone else's lap, watch as she falls asleep amid the clatter.
Unfold creaking limbs at the rivers edge, greet the curious children on donkeys, pet the donkeys, make it clear that, no, you don't have sweets. Haggle with one offshoot of the group about getting across the river, hold firm at three Rand and step on empty milk crates to clamber into the waiting boat. Watch the water coming in the holes at the bottom.
Haul your bags off the other side and up the scrub hills. Wave at the people hoeing in the fields, who shade their eyes against the sun and wave back. Break out the remains of a bag of crisps and a bunch of bananas to share with the boys struggling under one of your bags as you stop, sweating on the side of the last rise.
Catch the breath you didn't know you still had as the hills split into a river mouth, that then opens onto the sea, and then onto a view of heaven.
Sink into the grass and gaze at the seaspray catching the light. At the white sands and the white wave-crests.
Welcome to Bulungula.
It is exactly as beautiful as they told you it would be.
***************
But remember, remember.
Yes, it is easy to forget. When you are laying down the first set of footprints that morning along the clean edge of the surf, or scratching out Irish words on a scrap of paper for the mostly-toothless Mxolisi in the light of guttering candles, or passing around a great plastic bucket of umqombothi in the woodsmoke of a tiny shebeen, or sharing stories in the back of a criminally overcrowded van pressed up against a Rastafarian's hat, forgetting is as easy as your laughter.
But as you lean out one misty morning over the bottom half of the half-door hut, watching the tiny figure of a woman with something white and indistinct balanced on her head make her way along a far hill under the picturesque pointed silhouettes of scattered rondavel huts, remember that this is a holiday for you. You are roughing it here for a few days - among the goats and straggling wheat plots and candle-stubs - to better appreciate the life you usually live.
(It reminds you, unexpectedly, of Ireland. The wild, bitter winds and the frozen earth that had to be dug by hand, the layers and layers of mismatched blankets and musty clothing worn like swaddling, the mud walls and slit glassless windows packed with skins to keep out the draft, the oppressive bareness of the one-roomed life, tin cans and maize strung out to dry and a heap of bedding in one corner, the days of work and drink and work with the same sad limbs and faces, an Ireland you have never really known but carry images of with you, an Ireland that is beautiful only to those that don't have to live in it with cracked palms and failing eyes.)
(It reminds you, unexpectedly, of Ireland. The wild, bitter winds and the frozen earth that had to be dug by hand, the layers and layers of mismatched blankets and musty clothing worn like swaddling, the mud walls and slit glassless windows packed with skins to keep out the draft, the oppressive bareness of the one-roomed life, tin cans and maize strung out to dry and a heap of bedding in one corner, the days of work and drink and work with the same sad limbs and faces, an Ireland you have never really known but carry images of with you, an Ireland that is beautiful only to those that don't have to live in it with cracked palms and failing eyes.)
(And it brings out anger too, unexpectedly. Anger at the dividing line running through the drinking houses, men on benches and women on straw mats, at women's work: to serve the mother-in-law, to remain faithful, to bear children, to fetch water and cook. But what is the men's work? you ask. They are all in the mines, is the reply. The mines, somehow you had forgotten the mines still existed in this new South Africa. All gone to the mines, to breathe dust and break bones and return years later when the children are all grown, to cough heavily if the cough hasn't already taken you.)
So
(you tell yourself)
remember.
After you dress and write some journal notes and have meandered out to get breakfast, long after you have lost interest in the romantic figure she cuts, the woman is still there, walking over the hills in the cold morning air, slowly, slowly, slowly.
Saturday, June 23, 2007
Stealing Time
Above is the route we took over the two weeks - by bus, cars, trains and planes, with varying degrees of success and financial solvency. Travelogues to follow...
Friday, June 22, 2007
Thursday, June 14, 2007
City of Saints
Winston plonks himself down on the chair opposite me with a sigh, and places an old salvaged tobacco tin on the table between us.
"What's this?" He indicates the pieces of paper fanned across the table with his chin, and begins rolling a cigarette.
"Study." I make a wry face. In truth, I'm spending more time browsing the shelves of second-hand books than making notes. Reddits is that sort of place - part cafe, part bookstore, part home, where you come to be rather than do anything in particular. I like that you walk through the kitchen to get to the outdoor seating, that you are greeted with a laconic "the usual?" when you come in the door, that the waiters come and sit with you during the slow times and scribble on your work.
The waiter in question I know already, after a memorable night involving a feather boa, several Tabasco shots, a bar with a shaggy dog standing in the middle of it (which I distinctly remember being unsurprised about, it being that type of bar), and a wall full of handwritten song lyrics to the songs playing on the sound system.
The scribble in question today reads "hot Anglican priest", with an arrow pointing to the room's other occupant, an older gentleman minding his own business on a table by the French doors.
I raise an eyebrow. Winston tips his head back to laugh silently, revealing beautifully-cut cheekbones, and taps the cigarette on the tabletop twice. I wonder, not for the first time, what it's like to be him in Grahamstown.
I remember being at college before exams one year, watching Disney film highlights in someone's digs and listening to my classmates talk about coming out to their parents. I remember a show that was put on with some local drag queens and how I felt when a friend told me the posters around campus had been defaced. I remember how another friend of mine wouldn't come to The George to meet some fellow students from my class, shifting uncomfortably at the thought of it and not quite admitting why.
I knew, peripherally at least, that Ireland is not an easy place to be gay. But South Africa is something different again.
Lecturers explaining that love couldn't exist between same-sex couples. Mild-spoken friends speaking words of hate. Classmates I respected saying things that numbed me to silence. On more than one occasion crawling under the covers to get away from the slow-burning rage and pain in my stomach. Knowing that hiding away wasn't the answer.
They call Grahamstown the City of Saints, with over fifty churches of different faiths and denominations. Never have I heard so much about god, or God, never have I had so many conversations about which path to walk, or waiting for marriage, or the splendour of the Lord.
Some of it is beautiful - watching people question their lives and discover themselves and radiate love and devotion. But some of it is unexpectedly ugly.
"More coffee?" Winston gets up as new customers arrive. I nod, drain my cup and lose an hour happily among the books and the sound of windchimes from the garden.
Some time later, he is back with a grin.
"What?" I ask.
"Nothing."
"What??!"
He pauses, then presents his slim hipster-clad behind for my inspection.
"Reach into the back pocket."
I do, and find a slip of paper. When I open it I see a phone number and a man's name.
"Who-?"
Winston nods his head at the now-vacated table by the window.
"No!" I say, grinning too.
And this strikes me as something to be very pleased about.
"What's this?" He indicates the pieces of paper fanned across the table with his chin, and begins rolling a cigarette.
"Study." I make a wry face. In truth, I'm spending more time browsing the shelves of second-hand books than making notes. Reddits is that sort of place - part cafe, part bookstore, part home, where you come to be rather than do anything in particular. I like that you walk through the kitchen to get to the outdoor seating, that you are greeted with a laconic "the usual?" when you come in the door, that the waiters come and sit with you during the slow times and scribble on your work.
The waiter in question I know already, after a memorable night involving a feather boa, several Tabasco shots, a bar with a shaggy dog standing in the middle of it (which I distinctly remember being unsurprised about, it being that type of bar), and a wall full of handwritten song lyrics to the songs playing on the sound system.
The scribble in question today reads "hot Anglican priest", with an arrow pointing to the room's other occupant, an older gentleman minding his own business on a table by the French doors.
I raise an eyebrow. Winston tips his head back to laugh silently, revealing beautifully-cut cheekbones, and taps the cigarette on the tabletop twice. I wonder, not for the first time, what it's like to be him in Grahamstown.
I remember being at college before exams one year, watching Disney film highlights in someone's digs and listening to my classmates talk about coming out to their parents. I remember a show that was put on with some local drag queens and how I felt when a friend told me the posters around campus had been defaced. I remember how another friend of mine wouldn't come to The George to meet some fellow students from my class, shifting uncomfortably at the thought of it and not quite admitting why.
I knew, peripherally at least, that Ireland is not an easy place to be gay. But South Africa is something different again.
Lecturers explaining that love couldn't exist between same-sex couples. Mild-spoken friends speaking words of hate. Classmates I respected saying things that numbed me to silence. On more than one occasion crawling under the covers to get away from the slow-burning rage and pain in my stomach. Knowing that hiding away wasn't the answer.
They call Grahamstown the City of Saints, with over fifty churches of different faiths and denominations. Never have I heard so much about god, or God, never have I had so many conversations about which path to walk, or waiting for marriage, or the splendour of the Lord.
Some of it is beautiful - watching people question their lives and discover themselves and radiate love and devotion. But some of it is unexpectedly ugly.
"More coffee?" Winston gets up as new customers arrive. I nod, drain my cup and lose an hour happily among the books and the sound of windchimes from the garden.
Some time later, he is back with a grin.
"What?" I ask.
"Nothing."
"What??!"
He pauses, then presents his slim hipster-clad behind for my inspection.
"Reach into the back pocket."
I do, and find a slip of paper. When I open it I see a phone number and a man's name.
"Who-?"
Winston nods his head at the now-vacated table by the window.
"No!" I say, grinning too.
And this strikes me as something to be very pleased about.
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Viva Solidarity!
I hadn't planned to be there. On the way between other things - dropping off a library book, going to a cafe for lunch - I take the most direct path and find myself at the edges of a crowd of people. I had heard the drums earlier, the chanting, and wondered what it was. I see some friends on the sloped lawn waving at me, so I thread through the people and pull up a piece of grass.
There are a large group of boys assembled in front of the university steps. They are listening as another boy speaks into a plastic megaphone, and breaking out now and again into spontaneous cheers. Around them, girls sit on the sunny lawns and listen too.
It's a rally organised by the university to speak out against rape. A rally for men only.
I remember heated arguments on sun-dappled benches about this, the rightness of men being placed at the centre of this year's Rape Awareness Week. In a nation where there is so much silence, where women are silenced, we argued about male voices being given a hearing. I wondered how I would feel about it when it happened, but I didn't expect to feel this.
The boys standing tall, shoulder to shoulder, punching the airs with their fists. The sense of joy and power that did not seem out of place with the subject matter being shouted from the megaphone. The cheers of Viva! scattered into the speeches and echoed by the crowd, Viva! The boys running up from the crowd one after the other to read poems or say a few words, and the banging of a drum, bom bom bom VIVA! The back-and-forth calling that built a conversation between the unplanned speakers at the impromptu podium and the masses standing below:
"Fire BURN rape fire BURN!"
"FIRE BURN!"
"Away, away, away!"
"AWAY! AWAY!"
"Viva speaking out, Viva!"
"VIVA!"
"Viva standing together, Viva!"
"VIVA! VIVA! VIVA!"
The drumbeat and your heartbeat rising up into the cloudless sky.
May strength live, may hope live, may solidarity live.
Long may it live.
Viva.
There are a large group of boys assembled in front of the university steps. They are listening as another boy speaks into a plastic megaphone, and breaking out now and again into spontaneous cheers. Around them, girls sit on the sunny lawns and listen too.
It's a rally organised by the university to speak out against rape. A rally for men only.
I remember heated arguments on sun-dappled benches about this, the rightness of men being placed at the centre of this year's Rape Awareness Week. In a nation where there is so much silence, where women are silenced, we argued about male voices being given a hearing. I wondered how I would feel about it when it happened, but I didn't expect to feel this.
The boys standing tall, shoulder to shoulder, punching the airs with their fists. The sense of joy and power that did not seem out of place with the subject matter being shouted from the megaphone. The cheers of Viva! scattered into the speeches and echoed by the crowd, Viva! The boys running up from the crowd one after the other to read poems or say a few words, and the banging of a drum, bom bom bom VIVA! The back-and-forth calling that built a conversation between the unplanned speakers at the impromptu podium and the masses standing below:
"Fire BURN rape fire BURN!"
"FIRE BURN!"
"Away, away, away!"
"AWAY! AWAY!"
"Viva speaking out, Viva!"
"VIVA!"
"Viva standing together, Viva!"
"VIVA! VIVA! VIVA!"
The drumbeat and your heartbeat rising up into the cloudless sky.
May strength live, may hope live, may solidarity live.
Long may it live.
Viva.
Confesson Of A Mere Witness
"I really admire what you're doing."
From time to time I hear these words from someone back home, and they startle me.
Me? I think, confused.
And then I realise, and guilt replaces the confusion. I have tried to be honest in what I write, but I see that I am still being misleading. I have tried to write about those things that fascinate or baffle or worry me, and in doing so I have only shown you part of the picture.
So please, if you will allow it, let us pull back the curtain a little.
I write so much about Amasango, but I spend only a handful of hours there a week (the students there just so happen to be some of the best people I know in this country, not to mention the best material). This week, I didn't go at all. Why? Because I was hungover, and told myself I should be studying. When in reality I trimmed my hair with a nailscissors, and showered, and wrote a few emails, and went out to a cafe to eat cake, with only the familiar dialogue in my head - cake? what about everyone who doesn't have cake?! what about all the things that money could buy??! - to intrude upon my afternoon.
The scholarship funding banked with me this year is more than many lecturers earn. I am among the country's richest percentile, with more money than most of the population will ever see. I live in a bubble that lets me forget that most days.
I am here to study, at a good university, which in a town where thousands of people struggle to feed themselves discards an obscene amount of food daily because its students don't finish their meals.
I am one of those students.
I estimate I spend a small country's income on coffee, not to mention regular lunches and dinners out because I don't like the dining hall, or the dining hall food. I buy biscuits I don't need that cost four times the hourly wage of the person who rings them up for me.
I go away every second weekend or so, to adventure and eat and explore. I socialise with young people who stay at five-star hotels when they travel, older people who have swimming pools in their landscaped backgardens, people who run banks and universities and listed companies. I buy a man some milk and congratulate myself, and then spend ten times that money on something I don't particularly want.
A few more corners of the picture, perhaps?
Last night: Brenda, standing on the bench beside me, holding a lighter to the vicious alcohol I have in my mouth, while Christopher photographs us in the act. Other friends passing around miniature cigars, or inviting me back to their champagne-stocked fridge.
Tonight: Stepping out of a leather-upholstered white mercedes, after a dinner in a beautiful house, talking over spirits in cut-glass tumblers about vacationing and learning languages and arthouse films. Telling Ben with concern that he should see the Rhodes counselling centre about a shooting he witnessed last month, forgetting the two boys at Amasango who saw their mother stab their sister to death a few days ago.
And, worst of all: I am at the shelter, in the home of some Amasango students, and for a few hours I talk and laugh and act as though I am their friend. But when they walk me home, when they ask to come and see me, I make excuses. Because I think (but don't say) that they don't belong in my life. And I escape, to go and sit and have more coffee.
Do you admire me still?
I don't.
A boy I hardly knew told me something before I left Ireland, and his words are often what sustain me here. He said I would see tremendous need, and that I would be haunted by it. Some people, he said, are stopped in their tracks by it. At the first place they come to, they roll up their sleeves and set to work. And that is good, but we also need people who move on, who watch and think and go on to tell others what they have seen.
He said, just witnessing is an important act.
He said, you go. And witness. And come back to tell us the tale.
I'm trying. I hope it's enough.
From time to time I hear these words from someone back home, and they startle me.
Me? I think, confused.
And then I realise, and guilt replaces the confusion. I have tried to be honest in what I write, but I see that I am still being misleading. I have tried to write about those things that fascinate or baffle or worry me, and in doing so I have only shown you part of the picture.
So please, if you will allow it, let us pull back the curtain a little.
I write so much about Amasango, but I spend only a handful of hours there a week (the students there just so happen to be some of the best people I know in this country, not to mention the best material). This week, I didn't go at all. Why? Because I was hungover, and told myself I should be studying. When in reality I trimmed my hair with a nailscissors, and showered, and wrote a few emails, and went out to a cafe to eat cake, with only the familiar dialogue in my head - cake? what about everyone who doesn't have cake?! what about all the things that money could buy??! - to intrude upon my afternoon.
The scholarship funding banked with me this year is more than many lecturers earn. I am among the country's richest percentile, with more money than most of the population will ever see. I live in a bubble that lets me forget that most days.
I am here to study, at a good university, which in a town where thousands of people struggle to feed themselves discards an obscene amount of food daily because its students don't finish their meals.
I am one of those students.
I estimate I spend a small country's income on coffee, not to mention regular lunches and dinners out because I don't like the dining hall, or the dining hall food. I buy biscuits I don't need that cost four times the hourly wage of the person who rings them up for me.
I go away every second weekend or so, to adventure and eat and explore. I socialise with young people who stay at five-star hotels when they travel, older people who have swimming pools in their landscaped backgardens, people who run banks and universities and listed companies. I buy a man some milk and congratulate myself, and then spend ten times that money on something I don't particularly want.
A few more corners of the picture, perhaps?
Last night: Brenda, standing on the bench beside me, holding a lighter to the vicious alcohol I have in my mouth, while Christopher photographs us in the act. Other friends passing around miniature cigars, or inviting me back to their champagne-stocked fridge.
Tonight: Stepping out of a leather-upholstered white mercedes, after a dinner in a beautiful house, talking over spirits in cut-glass tumblers about vacationing and learning languages and arthouse films. Telling Ben with concern that he should see the Rhodes counselling centre about a shooting he witnessed last month, forgetting the two boys at Amasango who saw their mother stab their sister to death a few days ago.
And, worst of all: I am at the shelter, in the home of some Amasango students, and for a few hours I talk and laugh and act as though I am their friend. But when they walk me home, when they ask to come and see me, I make excuses. Because I think (but don't say) that they don't belong in my life. And I escape, to go and sit and have more coffee.
Do you admire me still?
I don't.
A boy I hardly knew told me something before I left Ireland, and his words are often what sustain me here. He said I would see tremendous need, and that I would be haunted by it. Some people, he said, are stopped in their tracks by it. At the first place they come to, they roll up their sleeves and set to work. And that is good, but we also need people who move on, who watch and think and go on to tell others what they have seen.
He said, just witnessing is an important act.
He said, you go. And witness. And come back to tell us the tale.
I'm trying. I hope it's enough.
Sunday, June 10, 2007
Gumbooti
The sun sets differently here. Not the slow leaching of colour from the day that happens at home, faces and limbs fading to pale shadows of themselves, but a strange intensification of the light. Just before darkness falls everything turns a fierce orange. Like warm childhood memories, or winter firelight.
In this story-light, the confusion of punctured footballs and karate demonstrations and Greek dancing in the shelter yard suddenly coalesces into tight, tight movement. Five boys in gumboots twisting in apparently aimless directions, slapping irregularly at the sides of their boots, become in a blink a line of perfectly co-ordinated dancers, stomping and slapping and calling in time.
Gena sisi...
Gena bhuti...
In this story-light, the confusion of punctured footballs and karate demonstrations and Greek dancing in the shelter yard suddenly coalesces into tight, tight movement. Five boys in gumboots twisting in apparently aimless directions, slapping irregularly at the sides of their boots, become in a blink a line of perfectly co-ordinated dancers, stomping and slapping and calling in time.
Gena sisi...
Gena bhuti...
I catch some of the words, but the rest is lost to me. I can only watch from the outside at something I won't ever truly understand, and be glad for this moment, here, in this place.
Tuesday, June 05, 2007
Chatter
The oars make a delicious sound as they slice into the water, silken and intimate, like something running across your skin. Swallowed splash, droplets skittering, hollow knock from oar on boat: they are the only sounds that travel across the wide Fish River, swiftly devoured by the hungry forest edge.
Not the only sounds, no. Staccato call of a long-necked bird with flashing black wings, tin whistling of unseen smaller birds high in the foilage, ribbed drawn-out croaking from further in. Twigs snapping, leaves rustling: the breeze or something else?
And not forest; jungle. Thick, lush barrier of trees and vegetation I can't name, claiming the slopes all around us. Tangle of greenery that tumbles cacophonously downhill to spill out at the waters edge, palm trees pushed out from the bank in a fight for sunlight until they keel right over into the water, half-submerged, playing dead, broad palm fronds drifting in the current.
We drift too, in and out of the green shadows.
Past a mildewed jetty with two upturned canoes, the shell of an old hut just visible beyond, and the barely-begun skeleton of another, an abandoned wheelbarrow upturned too. We watch as we pass, searching for clues. Then the current takes us on and the jungle eats its secrets.
Talking, not talking. Dipping oars and blinking in a spangle of sunlight broken into a million pieces by the slow-shifting water.
Este said, when we arrived: this is a special place. I can share it though because you will appreciate it.
And we do. Out here the chatter of thoughts that threaten to nibble our insides away are quietened.
When you stop for a coffee somewhere, the hideous luxury of it. When you dress in the morning, the clothes others don't have. The conversations you leave unchallenged, the pleadings you ignore, all the things you don't need and won't give away. The guilt, the guilt, the guilt.
So then:
peace.
Wavelets licking the side of the canoe. Moving shimmers painting themselves on tree trunks. Wise monkey-faces cocked in our direction. Crimson blaze of wings opening.
And, later, the dunes, great white sheer faces of sand that rise suddenly at the end of the road, as though the land had met here and driven them up like mountain ranges. We race up their sinking planes, skip along the ridges being made and remade by the tail of the wind, a plume of sand eternally evaporating up into the sky. The din of the offshore wind, insultating us from each other, the antlered shadow of a kudu leaving cloven footprints along the line where the jungle meets white sand.
Look, says Dion.
He scoops out a chunk of sand at the base, and we watch, mesmerised, as the dune eats itself upwards, the wound turning to liquid at the edges and melting clear off in streams of running sand.
That's what that day felt like. Melting clean away.
Not the only sounds, no. Staccato call of a long-necked bird with flashing black wings, tin whistling of unseen smaller birds high in the foilage, ribbed drawn-out croaking from further in. Twigs snapping, leaves rustling: the breeze or something else?
And not forest; jungle. Thick, lush barrier of trees and vegetation I can't name, claiming the slopes all around us. Tangle of greenery that tumbles cacophonously downhill to spill out at the waters edge, palm trees pushed out from the bank in a fight for sunlight until they keel right over into the water, half-submerged, playing dead, broad palm fronds drifting in the current.
We drift too, in and out of the green shadows.
Past a mildewed jetty with two upturned canoes, the shell of an old hut just visible beyond, and the barely-begun skeleton of another, an abandoned wheelbarrow upturned too. We watch as we pass, searching for clues. Then the current takes us on and the jungle eats its secrets.
Talking, not talking. Dipping oars and blinking in a spangle of sunlight broken into a million pieces by the slow-shifting water.
Este said, when we arrived: this is a special place. I can share it though because you will appreciate it.
And we do. Out here the chatter of thoughts that threaten to nibble our insides away are quietened.
When you stop for a coffee somewhere, the hideous luxury of it. When you dress in the morning, the clothes others don't have. The conversations you leave unchallenged, the pleadings you ignore, all the things you don't need and won't give away. The guilt, the guilt, the guilt.
So then:
peace.
Wavelets licking the side of the canoe. Moving shimmers painting themselves on tree trunks. Wise monkey-faces cocked in our direction. Crimson blaze of wings opening.
And, later, the dunes, great white sheer faces of sand that rise suddenly at the end of the road, as though the land had met here and driven them up like mountain ranges. We race up their sinking planes, skip along the ridges being made and remade by the tail of the wind, a plume of sand eternally evaporating up into the sky. The din of the offshore wind, insultating us from each other, the antlered shadow of a kudu leaving cloven footprints along the line where the jungle meets white sand.
Look, says Dion.
He scoops out a chunk of sand at the base, and we watch, mesmerised, as the dune eats itself upwards, the wound turning to liquid at the edges and melting clear off in streams of running sand.
That's what that day felt like. Melting clean away.
Saturday, June 02, 2007
Ubuntu
On the tiled floor by the hatstand there are two Dutch girls, busily cracking eggs into a large plastic bowl and discussing lesson plans.
If you step over them, past a heap of discarded belongings and through the kitchen door, you might see something of the disarray of pots and pans beyond, stacked on countertops alongside half-empty wineglasses, unpotted seedlings, notebooks and greased baking trays. A neatly groomed girl, not yet out of her buttoned winter coat, is shimmying by another girl bent over at the sink, appealing loudly with rosemary- and oil-covered hands for a cheese grater. A woman is stirring an enormous steaming pot of something with one hand, adding crushed garlic to a pan with the other, while carrying on a conversation with a boy rummaging in a cupboard beside her.
Among half-open packets of butter, several bowls of pretzels, plastic bags of diced sweet potato and scraps of shredded cucumber, two more girls are chopping at a wooden board, pushing each other out of the way and sniffing tearily and spilling onion skins all over the floor, amid peals of laughter. Someone mentions phonetics and a collective shout is raised; someone else appeals for the music to be turned up. A torch is found and one of the girls is dispatched to find lemongrass in the darkened garden.
Beyond, in the living room, two girls are animatedly sharing knitting patterns over flaky slices of baguette, while in the far corner two others are listing the words they use on flash cards, and a boy stretched out on one of the couches is setting up his laptop to play a video made a few days ago. A roll of name tags is being passed around; the doorbell rings again and there is a shout of "got it!".
When the last tray is safely in the oven and every seat in the living room is occupied, the first meeting of the Amasango volunteers is called to order. There is an agenda, of sorts, happily disrupted by more arrivals and the eventual appearance of dinner. There is a lot of laughter, and dropped crumbs, and wild gesticulation. There is talk of games, and sums, and pictures and wool, of disruptive students and language barriers and the best books to read aloud. Plates are filled and emptied and refilled, new ideas are sparked, problems are shared over second and third helpings of chocolate cake.
"How did you find...?"
"What do you do when...?"
Towards the end one of the girls find me out. A small girl, birdlike and thin, with a voice I strain to hear. Like so many of the people in the room, she has been coming every week to the school to teach, barely aware of the other volunteers and the similar struggles they had. Earlier in the evening, Jane had told the whole group that this quiet girl had turned out to be an amazing teacher, while she blushed crimson.
We stand in the mess of broken eggshells and chocolate sauce, and she says now: I'm so glad this happened. I had been feeling so alone, and demotivated, until tonight.
Ever since I have arrived, and before that even, I have been trying to understand this African concept of ubuntu. It is tossed around with alarming frequency, used to sell alcoholic drinks or as a slogan for themed vacations, scattered throughout political speeches and government papers, invoked by traditional leaders casting about for legitimacy, by universities looking for progressive prospectus material, by journalists seeking some local colour. But for all the cheap intentions and definitions in the world, I realise finally that it is something you just know when you see it.
Giving of yourself to others; coming together to share in each other; being part of a community of people; learning from others; receiving affirmation from those you respect.
Being a person through other people.
Being there that night.
If you step over them, past a heap of discarded belongings and through the kitchen door, you might see something of the disarray of pots and pans beyond, stacked on countertops alongside half-empty wineglasses, unpotted seedlings, notebooks and greased baking trays. A neatly groomed girl, not yet out of her buttoned winter coat, is shimmying by another girl bent over at the sink, appealing loudly with rosemary- and oil-covered hands for a cheese grater. A woman is stirring an enormous steaming pot of something with one hand, adding crushed garlic to a pan with the other, while carrying on a conversation with a boy rummaging in a cupboard beside her.
Among half-open packets of butter, several bowls of pretzels, plastic bags of diced sweet potato and scraps of shredded cucumber, two more girls are chopping at a wooden board, pushing each other out of the way and sniffing tearily and spilling onion skins all over the floor, amid peals of laughter. Someone mentions phonetics and a collective shout is raised; someone else appeals for the music to be turned up. A torch is found and one of the girls is dispatched to find lemongrass in the darkened garden.
Beyond, in the living room, two girls are animatedly sharing knitting patterns over flaky slices of baguette, while in the far corner two others are listing the words they use on flash cards, and a boy stretched out on one of the couches is setting up his laptop to play a video made a few days ago. A roll of name tags is being passed around; the doorbell rings again and there is a shout of "got it!".
When the last tray is safely in the oven and every seat in the living room is occupied, the first meeting of the Amasango volunteers is called to order. There is an agenda, of sorts, happily disrupted by more arrivals and the eventual appearance of dinner. There is a lot of laughter, and dropped crumbs, and wild gesticulation. There is talk of games, and sums, and pictures and wool, of disruptive students and language barriers and the best books to read aloud. Plates are filled and emptied and refilled, new ideas are sparked, problems are shared over second and third helpings of chocolate cake.
"How did you find...?"
"What do you do when...?"
Towards the end one of the girls find me out. A small girl, birdlike and thin, with a voice I strain to hear. Like so many of the people in the room, she has been coming every week to the school to teach, barely aware of the other volunteers and the similar struggles they had. Earlier in the evening, Jane had told the whole group that this quiet girl had turned out to be an amazing teacher, while she blushed crimson.
We stand in the mess of broken eggshells and chocolate sauce, and she says now: I'm so glad this happened. I had been feeling so alone, and demotivated, until tonight.
Ever since I have arrived, and before that even, I have been trying to understand this African concept of ubuntu. It is tossed around with alarming frequency, used to sell alcoholic drinks or as a slogan for themed vacations, scattered throughout political speeches and government papers, invoked by traditional leaders casting about for legitimacy, by universities looking for progressive prospectus material, by journalists seeking some local colour. But for all the cheap intentions and definitions in the world, I realise finally that it is something you just know when you see it.
Giving of yourself to others; coming together to share in each other; being part of a community of people; learning from others; receiving affirmation from those you respect.
Being a person through other people.
Being there that night.
Sunday, May 27, 2007
Sweet and Sour
It takes like manna, that first sip.
"Oh," I say. "Oh my."
Gill, who is watching me over her own cup, smiles happily.
"Why does it taste so good?" I ask.
I didn’t think I was a city kid, although I was born there. I knew where my milk and meat came from, and I visited farms. But I never knew that we weren’t drinking fresh milk.
Gill’s farm, Wiley’s, produces bottles of full cream milk, milk that has not been pasteurised or skimmed. It’s like nothing I have ever had before.
She came from Ireland, via some other places, before settling here and marrying a farmer. It’s not an easy life, no holidays from the milking or the seemingly-endless intricacies of the dairy trade, where bottles are refilled with competitor's milk the moment your back is turned. But it's her life. And she seems to love it.
Another bottle is pushed in front of me. It's amasi, sour milk, thick and curdled and hugely popular in South Africa, mostly among the black population.
I pour out a little, trying not to wince at the gloop-glurg of it against the cup, and stick a finger in to taste.
"I think," I say carefully, placing the cup back down and sucking reflectively at my teeth, "I think that may be an acquired taste."
Gill grins again.
***************
I suppose we stick out, chattering away in strange accents and getting excited about everyday things like mango chutney and miniature pineapples. For whatever reason, we tend to attract a lot of well-meaning conversation from passersby, several times a day.
"Oh," I say. "Oh my."
Gill, who is watching me over her own cup, smiles happily.
"Why does it taste so good?" I ask.
I didn’t think I was a city kid, although I was born there. I knew where my milk and meat came from, and I visited farms. But I never knew that we weren’t drinking fresh milk.
Gill’s farm, Wiley’s, produces bottles of full cream milk, milk that has not been pasteurised or skimmed. It’s like nothing I have ever had before.
She came from Ireland, via some other places, before settling here and marrying a farmer. It’s not an easy life, no holidays from the milking or the seemingly-endless intricacies of the dairy trade, where bottles are refilled with competitor's milk the moment your back is turned. But it's her life. And she seems to love it.
Another bottle is pushed in front of me. It's amasi, sour milk, thick and curdled and hugely popular in South Africa, mostly among the black population.
I pour out a little, trying not to wince at the gloop-glurg of it against the cup, and stick a finger in to taste.
"I think," I say carefully, placing the cup back down and sucking reflectively at my teeth, "I think that may be an acquired taste."
Gill grins again.
***************
I suppose we stick out, chattering away in strange accents and getting excited about everyday things like mango chutney and miniature pineapples. For whatever reason, we tend to attract a lot of well-meaning conversation from passersby, several times a day.
So, in the canned goods aisle last week, a woman interrupts my nostalgic waxings about Wiley's milk, which is not stocked in any of the small-town chain supermarkets we regularly visit. She tells us where we can find some.
We buy a glass bottle with a screw-top lid, eschewing the trendier patterns for one tastefully portraying cows dancing. Frolicking, even.
We bring our bottle to the counter at the wholesale fruit and vegetable store, and a man fills it with milk from a great stainless steel container.
And this makes us much happier than it should.
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Shelter
I can hear shrieks in the corridor outside, as if someone were meeting a particularly unpleasant end. Possibly involving sharp knives. I'm debating whether or not it deserves investigation, and therefore my abandonment of the warm spot under my duvet, when I start to make out a few words.
"...COLD.... OWWW.... stupid GRAHAMSTOWN!"
When I do shuffle out in my socks, the shrieking and wailing is still working its way towards some manner of climax, and there are several girls hopping up and down, rubbing their arms inside four layers of summer clothing, scowling and generally looking rather pathetic. For the first, but not the last, time that day I get pierced with a furious stare as I attempt to sidle past:
"Is it like this in Ireland?"
As if somehow I may have brought the weather with me. Or as if the idea that somewhere people exist who don't mind this weather was just too much insult to injury.
I shrug, pull my coat around me and stamp off in my boots. My ears hurt from the cold but I enjoy it, enjoy watching my breath smoke in front of me. The underwater shimmer of summer has retreated and now everything has a clarity to it, sharp and bright and more real than before. When it gets dark the air smells like it does before Christmas, and the shop lights glitter. I am happy, more than happy - secretly delighted and trying not to let it show.
On maybe the third day of the cold snap, I'm having another yet another conversation about the weather, one of those auto-pilot exchanges of small talk that I barely pay attention to. And then the other person says:
Yes, forty people died on Monday in the Eastern Cape.
And I ask, although I already know, the thought just hasn't quite slotted into place yet: of what?
Of the cold.
And I think, suddenly, of all the little corrugated-tin houses on the edge of the township, of the places where the electricity doesn't reach but the wind does, of the holed t-shirts and bare feet and thin limbs. And the day is all too sharp then.
"...COLD.... OWWW.... stupid GRAHAMSTOWN!"
When I do shuffle out in my socks, the shrieking and wailing is still working its way towards some manner of climax, and there are several girls hopping up and down, rubbing their arms inside four layers of summer clothing, scowling and generally looking rather pathetic. For the first, but not the last, time that day I get pierced with a furious stare as I attempt to sidle past:
"Is it like this in Ireland?"
As if somehow I may have brought the weather with me. Or as if the idea that somewhere people exist who don't mind this weather was just too much insult to injury.
I shrug, pull my coat around me and stamp off in my boots. My ears hurt from the cold but I enjoy it, enjoy watching my breath smoke in front of me. The underwater shimmer of summer has retreated and now everything has a clarity to it, sharp and bright and more real than before. When it gets dark the air smells like it does before Christmas, and the shop lights glitter. I am happy, more than happy - secretly delighted and trying not to let it show.
On maybe the third day of the cold snap, I'm having another yet another conversation about the weather, one of those auto-pilot exchanges of small talk that I barely pay attention to. And then the other person says:
Yes, forty people died on Monday in the Eastern Cape.
And I ask, although I already know, the thought just hasn't quite slotted into place yet: of what?
Of the cold.
And I think, suddenly, of all the little corrugated-tin houses on the edge of the township, of the places where the electricity doesn't reach but the wind does, of the holed t-shirts and bare feet and thin limbs. And the day is all too sharp then.
Monday, May 21, 2007
tiny miracles
Jane says: I am living in a miracle.
It should be too early on a Sunday morning for miracles, that slightly bleached-out time on an empty stomach, before the smell of freshly percolating coffee gets inside the day. The wind is chasing stray leaves in under the door, skittering like mice across the tiles. I am dreaming of butter melting on golden slices of toast.
We have been talking about many things, about big and small challenges, and battles to wage. But somehow, talking about these things with Jane, you find yourself building strategies rather than bemoaning defeat. There are white horses and pennants and other days to fight, and there is such a thing as the army of good.
She takes students up to get tested, she tells us. Whenever there is a need, or a reason to be concerned. She's been doing it for fourteen years.
She's never had a student test positive. She beams as she tells us this.
A miracle, she says.
In the tree today there were tiny birds, so small I stopped and involuntarily put my hand up, as if to measure them. They can land on the layer of algae on the pond surface outside my window without creating a ripple, as though walking on water. When they perch on a thin curved stalk of the pampas grass that sprouts from the bank, it justs dips a little lower into the pond.
They are too small to exist; perfectly, impossibly tiny.
When I see them I believe in miracles. I believe in people like Jane.
It should be too early on a Sunday morning for miracles, that slightly bleached-out time on an empty stomach, before the smell of freshly percolating coffee gets inside the day. The wind is chasing stray leaves in under the door, skittering like mice across the tiles. I am dreaming of butter melting on golden slices of toast.
We have been talking about many things, about big and small challenges, and battles to wage. But somehow, talking about these things with Jane, you find yourself building strategies rather than bemoaning defeat. There are white horses and pennants and other days to fight, and there is such a thing as the army of good.
She takes students up to get tested, she tells us. Whenever there is a need, or a reason to be concerned. She's been doing it for fourteen years.
She's never had a student test positive. She beams as she tells us this.
A miracle, she says.
In the tree today there were tiny birds, so small I stopped and involuntarily put my hand up, as if to measure them. They can land on the layer of algae on the pond surface outside my window without creating a ripple, as though walking on water. When they perch on a thin curved stalk of the pampas grass that sprouts from the bank, it justs dips a little lower into the pond.
They are too small to exist; perfectly, impossibly tiny.
When I see them I believe in miracles. I believe in people like Jane.
Saturday, May 19, 2007
You learn something new
Joanne greets us with a smile and two glasses of iced cider. Which, for those of you who may not have realised, is the best possible way to be met on a sunny Sunday afternoon after a medium-length walk in the dusty heat.
Lydia has brought along tomatoes and mushrooms and fresh coriander for the pasta, and begins to unload them onto a wooden chopping board, gorging herself on drawerfuls of kitchen implements and reverently stroking the flat-bottomed frying pans.
Cooking! she squeals. In a kitchen!
Because while having your meals cooked for you every day might at first seem like a luxury, the dining hall quickly pales as an experience. Imagine a hundred or so raucous students slamming down trays and scraping chair-legs, slapping one another on the back and spilling runny substances over the tabletops, and - worst of all - applauding derisively at the sickening crashes that indicate a hapless staff member has just dropped a tray.
Then imagine you are a vegetarian. Soy sausages, fake mince, dinner ladies who peer at you strangely.
So explains Lydia in her current state.
We leave her to near-orgasmic culinary bliss, and take a stroll out into the cheerfully overgrown garden; frazzled strings of passion-fruit vines, rows of flourish-edged spinach, dogs leaping in and out of the sprinklers to catch a wizened lime thrown as a ball.
Joanne beckons me with a finger over to a tree in the corner. At first I cannot see what she is pointing at, something full and heavy hanging in among the leaves. Then I see: an avocado.
I never knew they grew in trees. And its a small thing, so very small. But they all add up.
Lydia has brought along tomatoes and mushrooms and fresh coriander for the pasta, and begins to unload them onto a wooden chopping board, gorging herself on drawerfuls of kitchen implements and reverently stroking the flat-bottomed frying pans.
Cooking! she squeals. In a kitchen!
Because while having your meals cooked for you every day might at first seem like a luxury, the dining hall quickly pales as an experience. Imagine a hundred or so raucous students slamming down trays and scraping chair-legs, slapping one another on the back and spilling runny substances over the tabletops, and - worst of all - applauding derisively at the sickening crashes that indicate a hapless staff member has just dropped a tray.
Then imagine you are a vegetarian. Soy sausages, fake mince, dinner ladies who peer at you strangely.
So explains Lydia in her current state.
We leave her to near-orgasmic culinary bliss, and take a stroll out into the cheerfully overgrown garden; frazzled strings of passion-fruit vines, rows of flourish-edged spinach, dogs leaping in and out of the sprinklers to catch a wizened lime thrown as a ball.
Joanne beckons me with a finger over to a tree in the corner. At first I cannot see what she is pointing at, something full and heavy hanging in among the leaves. Then I see: an avocado.
I never knew they grew in trees. And its a small thing, so very small. But they all add up.
Friday, May 18, 2007
"...such protection and care as is necessary...."
[Above quote from here]
There is a boy who doesn’t let go when he holds my hand. When he comes back to me with his worksheet and I reward the correct answer with a squeeze of his shoulder, he catches my hand. And he doesn’t let go.
He is seven, or eight, or maybe a small nine. He has a runny nose and a permanently hurt expression. I have to watch carefully when I call him over. Too often on his way one of the other boys will trip him, or smack the back of his head, or hold his worksheet high up and crumple it as he watches.
There are so many things that can happen between there and here.
So when he pulls a chair up beside me and takes my hand, I let him. It's what I can do.
There is a boy who doesn’t let go when he holds my hand. When he comes back to me with his worksheet and I reward the correct answer with a squeeze of his shoulder, he catches my hand. And he doesn’t let go.
He is seven, or eight, or maybe a small nine. He has a runny nose and a permanently hurt expression. I have to watch carefully when I call him over. Too often on his way one of the other boys will trip him, or smack the back of his head, or hold his worksheet high up and crumple it as he watches.
There are so many things that can happen between there and here.
So when he pulls a chair up beside me and takes my hand, I let him. It's what I can do.
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Joy is ...
... two young boys on a borrowed bicyle barrelling down the hill towards us, one across the bar and the other holding him tight, both bellowing with excitement at the sky, sunshine, passing trees, and at us as we jump onto the grass verge out of their way.
And it is also how we applauded them as they flew by, celebrating with the contagiousness of their abandoned joy.
And how one of them looked back in astonishment at us when we did, still yelling, for several long seconds, leaving the bicyle and its cargo without a navigator.
And how even after they gave the bike a sharp turn at the bottom of the hill to tumble out harmlessly onto a soft grassy landing, both boys scrambled to their feet to look curiously back up the hill at us, two girls much too old to understand the secret exhilaration of that first dangerous flight.
And it is also how we applauded them as they flew by, celebrating with the contagiousness of their abandoned joy.
And how one of them looked back in astonishment at us when we did, still yelling, for several long seconds, leaving the bicyle and its cargo without a navigator.
And how even after they gave the bike a sharp turn at the bottom of the hill to tumble out harmlessly onto a soft grassy landing, both boys scrambled to their feet to look curiously back up the hill at us, two girls much too old to understand the secret exhilaration of that first dangerous flight.
Sunday, May 13, 2007
Mama Lydia and Mama Riona
This week, I received my first-ever (joint) Mother's Day card, from Xolisani:
Saturday, May 12, 2007
Today
I don’t know, I’m still not sure, but I think this is how it might have been:
In the courtyard of our residence they are laying out white sheets across the brick, twisting them into ropes to be strung along the upper heights, shaking them out over trestle tables brought in for the occasion. They are blowing up balloons in silver and gold, and tying them with curls of golden streamers. In the hallways there is a scent of fruit shampoo and just-washed skin, eddying about in warm, soapy currents. There are gatherings behind hurriedly-closed doors, as beads and things that catch the light are exchanged and admired, and straps are adjusted and cloth is smoothed, so that it hangs - just so.
We sit along two hard-back benches, waiting. We have been waiting for a while, but I couldn't say how long that might have been. There is a tired, stale smell, and something more immediate, like ripe body odour, that I have stopped noticing. I can see a smear of dried blood on the wall opposite. Eric is sitting between Lydia and Samkelo, bare-chested, his feet turned inwards in ill-fitting black shoes. His socks are too short and the back of his thirteen-year-old heels are chafed hopeless grey. Lydia has a hand on his shoulder, stroking the bare skin, although Eric doesn't seem aware of her, or us.
Eric isn't even his real name. I can't remember that. Most of the kids have a simpler, Anglophone name they give us, because we don't remember. I can't remember.
She can only stroke him there because of the blood. We know why, but it still jars. To not be able to hold someone fully, or look at the wound, or take the blooded shirt from him and keep it there to stop the bleeding so that he doesn't have to. We have no gloves here. There are some at the school, because that's where it's supposed to happen, not on the lawns under the shady trees of the campus.
When we had arrived, we had asked one person after another where to go. No signs, no clues, just crumpled hospital beds and scuffed skirting boards. It took several minutes to locate the right room, where we were told to queue up to get a chart. But he's been stabbed, I said. He needs a chart, we were told, so we sat in the near-empty reception and watched someone fill out a form with interminable slowness, before being absently waved to another queue in another room.
It's my first time, Samkelo says as we wait. Today was the first time I saw someone cut.
Me too, says Lydia.
The man ahead of us in the queue has a bandage over one eye that is seeping red through the gauze. He stares at Eric, inviting a story, but Eric remains unseeing, gazing straight ahead.
We wait. And wait.
We watch as the man with the gauze is unwrapped, and rewrapped.
When they take Eric into the theatre room they tell us to wait outside. We sit and watch as he huddles with his bare chest while his blood pressure is taken, then is moved back out to the bench, his arm still open and red, and finally moved back inside to be jabbed, and stitched and bandaged. In the corridor we sing songs to let him know we're there, old gospel and blues and Christmas hymns, the only ones we can think of, and all alone on the chair Eric waits and folds his blood-stained shirt, carefully, so carefully, so that only the clean part shows.
And when, much later,
after the police have arrived and taken some phone numbers,
after the ride back to the shelter and the explanations to the staff there,
after we gather all the boys in one of the bedrooms and ask them to talk, about what happened, about what they saw and felt,
after we have hugged some of them goodbye more than once and trudged back up to the town,
after finally crying the angry and desperate tears that had waited until then and screaming out loud to clear their taste from our mouths, screams for the blood on the walls of a hospital in a country with a HIV epidemic, for the knife that was confiscated only yesterday and returned on the same day to be used today, for the guards at Rhodes who began to wash the blood off the pathways rather than call for an ambulance, for a boy who came home to the only home he has and had no-one to take him into their arms and tell him it was going to be alright, for scuffed heels and the way he shook, and how as we left he was slumped in a corner with nobody nobody nobody
after locking ourselves in our rooms and drowning out the noise of the party in the courtyard beyond,
after washing our hands to make sure there were no traces of blood,
after the white sheets they laid down have all been trampled and marked,
that's what I remember.
A boy sitting all alone in a strange place, folding and refolding his shirt, trying to cover the stains.
In the courtyard of our residence they are laying out white sheets across the brick, twisting them into ropes to be strung along the upper heights, shaking them out over trestle tables brought in for the occasion. They are blowing up balloons in silver and gold, and tying them with curls of golden streamers. In the hallways there is a scent of fruit shampoo and just-washed skin, eddying about in warm, soapy currents. There are gatherings behind hurriedly-closed doors, as beads and things that catch the light are exchanged and admired, and straps are adjusted and cloth is smoothed, so that it hangs - just so.
We sit along two hard-back benches, waiting. We have been waiting for a while, but I couldn't say how long that might have been. There is a tired, stale smell, and something more immediate, like ripe body odour, that I have stopped noticing. I can see a smear of dried blood on the wall opposite. Eric is sitting between Lydia and Samkelo, bare-chested, his feet turned inwards in ill-fitting black shoes. His socks are too short and the back of his thirteen-year-old heels are chafed hopeless grey. Lydia has a hand on his shoulder, stroking the bare skin, although Eric doesn't seem aware of her, or us.
Eric isn't even his real name. I can't remember that. Most of the kids have a simpler, Anglophone name they give us, because we don't remember. I can't remember.
She can only stroke him there because of the blood. We know why, but it still jars. To not be able to hold someone fully, or look at the wound, or take the blooded shirt from him and keep it there to stop the bleeding so that he doesn't have to. We have no gloves here. There are some at the school, because that's where it's supposed to happen, not on the lawns under the shady trees of the campus.
When we had arrived, we had asked one person after another where to go. No signs, no clues, just crumpled hospital beds and scuffed skirting boards. It took several minutes to locate the right room, where we were told to queue up to get a chart. But he's been stabbed, I said. He needs a chart, we were told, so we sat in the near-empty reception and watched someone fill out a form with interminable slowness, before being absently waved to another queue in another room.
It's my first time, Samkelo says as we wait. Today was the first time I saw someone cut.
Me too, says Lydia.
The man ahead of us in the queue has a bandage over one eye that is seeping red through the gauze. He stares at Eric, inviting a story, but Eric remains unseeing, gazing straight ahead.
We wait. And wait.
We watch as the man with the gauze is unwrapped, and rewrapped.
When they take Eric into the theatre room they tell us to wait outside. We sit and watch as he huddles with his bare chest while his blood pressure is taken, then is moved back out to the bench, his arm still open and red, and finally moved back inside to be jabbed, and stitched and bandaged. In the corridor we sing songs to let him know we're there, old gospel and blues and Christmas hymns, the only ones we can think of, and all alone on the chair Eric waits and folds his blood-stained shirt, carefully, so carefully, so that only the clean part shows.
And when, much later,
after the police have arrived and taken some phone numbers,
after the ride back to the shelter and the explanations to the staff there,
after we gather all the boys in one of the bedrooms and ask them to talk, about what happened, about what they saw and felt,
after we have hugged some of them goodbye more than once and trudged back up to the town,
after finally crying the angry and desperate tears that had waited until then and screaming out loud to clear their taste from our mouths, screams for the blood on the walls of a hospital in a country with a HIV epidemic, for the knife that was confiscated only yesterday and returned on the same day to be used today, for the guards at Rhodes who began to wash the blood off the pathways rather than call for an ambulance, for a boy who came home to the only home he has and had no-one to take him into their arms and tell him it was going to be alright, for scuffed heels and the way he shook, and how as we left he was slumped in a corner with nobody nobody nobody
after locking ourselves in our rooms and drowning out the noise of the party in the courtyard beyond,
after washing our hands to make sure there were no traces of blood,
after the white sheets they laid down have all been trampled and marked,
that's what I remember.
A boy sitting all alone in a strange place, folding and refolding his shirt, trying to cover the stains.
Friday, May 11, 2007
The Unbreakable Thread
A hot water bottle. That's what knitting conjured for me before South Africa. A seemingly-endless hot water bottle in the shape of an armless thick-set snowman. One of those singularly ugly things you eventually bring home from school, which is halfheartedly used once or twice before being relegated to the washbasket, then to the back of the airing press, and then finally, with no fanfare and considerable quiet relief on the part of all those involved in its brief and pointless existence, to the bin.
Knitting was unfashionable.
Knitting was disempowering.
Knitting was for old women.
The door opens again, and two boys tumble in, propelled by the force of their pent-up hesitation outside, both pushing each other in a flail of arms and legs.
They scuff around the room in a familiar pattern - first one will go to the table and grab whatever we have brought in, while the other will make unspecified, undirected noise, until myself or Lydia begin to explain the rules of the room to them in a schoolteacherish voice. One or both will then shout at the ceiling in Xhosa, refusing to make eye contact, while twisting out of our grasp as we make an attempt to steer them out by one arm. Maybe a old tennis ball or a broom handle will make an appearance at this point, and be flung around wildly, just short of striking us, but connecting solidly with a fellow student, or a piece of furniture. The one whose idea it was will then lose interest and make a loud and destructive exit, probably snatching away something from one of the other students before slamming the Grade 7 door closed behind them.
The room takes in a deep, quiet breath. The little dust-storms settle. Someone picks up the chair that has been knocked over.
The boy left behind makes the usual sheepish face they all offer when the regular drama has played itself out, and finds a place to sit. He meekly accepts the oversize needles I hand him, and with clumsy fingers together we loop the wool, and push it through, and pull it over, and count: one stitch. Then two, then three.
And I realise he is shaking with concentration. When he turns to beam at me as we reach four stitches I can see tiny beads of sweat along his hairline. Across the room on another plastic chair Xolisani is crouched over the points of his needles, squinting for want of his lost glasses (last seen somewhere in the long grass by the train tracks). Near him, Vuyelwa is winding the dark pink wool she picked out around one needle, as Lydia coaxes her along in a low voice. Siyabulisa has his mouth scrunched up in concentration, hissing as he drops a stitch and holds out his work for Brij to put to rights.
It is the quietest twenty minutes I have ever had at Amasango.
When the security guard comes to lock up, we finish up the lines being worked on - knotted, uneven, dropped, but created nonetheless, something that would not have existed otherwise. We pack the needles away into plastic carrier bags full of odd balls of wool, wool donated by girls in our residence, friends overseas, parents passing through. I pick up my bag, and my scarf (my unspeakably beautiful scarf that Lydia knitted me over many weeks, while walking to the shops with the ball of wool tucked into her handbag, or sitting amongst discarded research papers in the small hours, my scarf that I left behind in class one day and couldn't sleep that night for guilt and grief over, and woke before the cleaners arrived in the morning to race across campus and nearly cry with relief to find still lying forgotten under the desks, my scarf that has finally taught me what my mother couldn't, to respect my belongings and keep them safe), and nod as the boy says, his eyes on the half-finished row that I pack away:
Next week.
Then they are away, jostling through the doorway, released screeches exploding into the waiting sunlight. Something falls over noisily. Someone yells.
Next week.
Knitting was unfashionable.
Knitting was disempowering.
Knitting was for old women.
The door opens again, and two boys tumble in, propelled by the force of their pent-up hesitation outside, both pushing each other in a flail of arms and legs.
They scuff around the room in a familiar pattern - first one will go to the table and grab whatever we have brought in, while the other will make unspecified, undirected noise, until myself or Lydia begin to explain the rules of the room to them in a schoolteacherish voice. One or both will then shout at the ceiling in Xhosa, refusing to make eye contact, while twisting out of our grasp as we make an attempt to steer them out by one arm. Maybe a old tennis ball or a broom handle will make an appearance at this point, and be flung around wildly, just short of striking us, but connecting solidly with a fellow student, or a piece of furniture. The one whose idea it was will then lose interest and make a loud and destructive exit, probably snatching away something from one of the other students before slamming the Grade 7 door closed behind them.
The room takes in a deep, quiet breath. The little dust-storms settle. Someone picks up the chair that has been knocked over.
The boy left behind makes the usual sheepish face they all offer when the regular drama has played itself out, and finds a place to sit. He meekly accepts the oversize needles I hand him, and with clumsy fingers together we loop the wool, and push it through, and pull it over, and count: one stitch. Then two, then three.
And I realise he is shaking with concentration. When he turns to beam at me as we reach four stitches I can see tiny beads of sweat along his hairline. Across the room on another plastic chair Xolisani is crouched over the points of his needles, squinting for want of his lost glasses (last seen somewhere in the long grass by the train tracks). Near him, Vuyelwa is winding the dark pink wool she picked out around one needle, as Lydia coaxes her along in a low voice. Siyabulisa has his mouth scrunched up in concentration, hissing as he drops a stitch and holds out his work for Brij to put to rights.
It is the quietest twenty minutes I have ever had at Amasango.
When the security guard comes to lock up, we finish up the lines being worked on - knotted, uneven, dropped, but created nonetheless, something that would not have existed otherwise. We pack the needles away into plastic carrier bags full of odd balls of wool, wool donated by girls in our residence, friends overseas, parents passing through. I pick up my bag, and my scarf (my unspeakably beautiful scarf that Lydia knitted me over many weeks, while walking to the shops with the ball of wool tucked into her handbag, or sitting amongst discarded research papers in the small hours, my scarf that I left behind in class one day and couldn't sleep that night for guilt and grief over, and woke before the cleaners arrived in the morning to race across campus and nearly cry with relief to find still lying forgotten under the desks, my scarf that has finally taught me what my mother couldn't, to respect my belongings and keep them safe), and nod as the boy says, his eyes on the half-finished row that I pack away:
Next week.
Then they are away, jostling through the doorway, released screeches exploding into the waiting sunlight. Something falls over noisily. Someone yells.
Next week.
Thursday, May 10, 2007
Jumping
My writer's block has not been this:
The mark scribbled on the paper, or the shock I felt, although these things stopped me short.
The words that I said when I sat in front of his oak desk, with his family photos and diplomas on the wall behind him, although these things were wrong and goading and shameful now to recall.
The words that he said when I gave him a reason to, his voice raised in indignation and rage, although some of them stuck in my side, and remain there still.
The fact that I cried at the time I most wanted not to, in front of the person I most wanted not to, although it felt humiliating at the time.
The way he said, when I did, that I should get a hold of myself, although that was hard to forgive but not any more than I should have expected, nor any less than he owed me.
The moment I realised that there was no-one around to be hugged by, and walked dazedly around the sunny, bustling campus, furious and empty and drained and doubting my reasons for being in this country, although that was a lonely moment.
The times since I have avoided a building I used to love, in case I should meet him, although that makes me I feel more disappointed in myself than I can say.
It was this:
Just how quickly, how unforgiveably quickly the thought came to my mind. How not four hours after I received the paper back, before I ever met with him, I put it into words. How I was so willing, and so eager, to make myself the victim to explain a mark that will never change anything in my life.
How I thought it was because I was white.
How I sometimes still wonder.
How I despise myself for it.
The mark scribbled on the paper, or the shock I felt, although these things stopped me short.
The words that I said when I sat in front of his oak desk, with his family photos and diplomas on the wall behind him, although these things were wrong and goading and shameful now to recall.
The words that he said when I gave him a reason to, his voice raised in indignation and rage, although some of them stuck in my side, and remain there still.
The fact that I cried at the time I most wanted not to, in front of the person I most wanted not to, although it felt humiliating at the time.
The way he said, when I did, that I should get a hold of myself, although that was hard to forgive but not any more than I should have expected, nor any less than he owed me.
The moment I realised that there was no-one around to be hugged by, and walked dazedly around the sunny, bustling campus, furious and empty and drained and doubting my reasons for being in this country, although that was a lonely moment.
The times since I have avoided a building I used to love, in case I should meet him, although that makes me I feel more disappointed in myself than I can say.
It was this:
Just how quickly, how unforgiveably quickly the thought came to my mind. How not four hours after I received the paper back, before I ever met with him, I put it into words. How I was so willing, and so eager, to make myself the victim to explain a mark that will never change anything in my life.
How I thought it was because I was white.
How I sometimes still wonder.
How I despise myself for it.
Friday, May 04, 2007
The highest form of praise
The heat hasn't quite gone out of the day yet, but the café is taking last orders. We have commandeered an outdoor table, under a sun-umbrella, sipping coffees and tipping our faces towards the remains of the sun.
On the seat next to me, Xolisani is singing along in a thin and broken voice - the kid can dance like nobody's business, but he can’t sing – to various hiphop songs that reach us tinnily from the earphones of the ipod Jason has lent him. He has come along with Jason after school, and perches on the edge of the bench, as if he might be asked to leave at any moment. His crooning forms an amusing backdrop to our sunsoaked banter, Jason occasionally laying a cautioning hand on his arm when the volume of his enthusiasm threatens to interfere with other diners' conversations.
We stop for a moment when we hear Time To Say Goodbye come on over the speakers.
Xolisani is quiet for a few long seconds, listening to the violins rising to a crescendo, and then, in the same high wavery voice, blissfully unaware of the figure he cuts in his jaunty woollen hat and scuffed shoes, he begins to sing along to the operatic strains of Bocelli.
On the seat next to me, Xolisani is singing along in a thin and broken voice - the kid can dance like nobody's business, but he can’t sing – to various hiphop songs that reach us tinnily from the earphones of the ipod Jason has lent him. He has come along with Jason after school, and perches on the edge of the bench, as if he might be asked to leave at any moment. His crooning forms an amusing backdrop to our sunsoaked banter, Jason occasionally laying a cautioning hand on his arm when the volume of his enthusiasm threatens to interfere with other diners' conversations.
We stop for a moment when we hear Time To Say Goodbye come on over the speakers.
Xolisani is quiet for a few long seconds, listening to the violins rising to a crescendo, and then, in the same high wavery voice, blissfully unaware of the figure he cuts in his jaunty woollen hat and scuffed shoes, he begins to sing along to the operatic strains of Bocelli.
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
Snapshots
“Would you look at that.”
Christopher raises his eyebrows behind mirrored shades. It’s another sunny morning, just before noon, and there is a little boy of three peeing against a tree on High Street.
“They just do that here, don’t they…” He continues. I swear he wrinkles his nose.
I think of the boys peeing at Amasango, and then look around.
“Well, are there any public toilets?” I ask.
He gives me a quizzical look.
“I mean,” I begin, thinking out loud. “Imagine you live in one of the far extensions of the township. It’s maybe, what? Over an hour’s walk? And you don’t have a car. So what are you supposed to do?”
That stumps us both.
Christopher is black, and that’s supposed to mean something here. It does mean something. He has an unwritten passport to places I don’t, he is presumed to have an understanding that I won’t, or can’t. He is a brother to people he has never met, a part of some great extended family that crosses borders and bridges the Atlantic Ocean.
But he is so very far away from that boy. Further even than me.
I remember another conversation. One night in Cape Town, I lay in my hostel bed and listened to Christopher’s voice come through the mattress above, in those curiously intimate moments of shared travel.
“Since I’ve been here,” he said sleepily, “I feel like I’ve come home.”
From the bed across the room, Mamphela snorted loudly. “Oh my word, I hate it when people say that.”
“I’m sorry, but I do. I do.”
“Just because you’re black?”
“Yes, I guess, Africa is a black continent…”
“What? Is Ireland a white country so?” I interject.
“Yes. Yes it is-”
“That’s nonsense. So if you’re black, and born in Ireland, and become an Irish citizen… you’ll never be Irish? And neither will your children? Just because of your skin?”
The three of us argued it back and forth for a while, a bit drunk, a bit overwrought. I remember I cried, silently, in the dark. You’re racist, I remember Mamphela shouting at Christopher.
Another conversation:
Ben and I are sitting at a white-clothed table, the remains of a Rotary meeting going on behind us.
“I was talking there to Esté,” he says. “And she told me, her ancestors came to South Africa nearly three hundred years ago.”
He pauses.
“That’s before mine even left for the States. And how come… I get to be an American, right? No-one questions that. Why is it so difficult to think of her as an African?”
And another:
Amasango student: Ngubani igama lakho?
Faro: I’m sorry, I only speak English.
Amasango student: No Xhosa?
Faro: I’m American. Only English.
Amasango student: But you’re black!
And one last one:
It was my very first day here. Esté leans across a restuarant table, earnestly trying to explain to me in her Afrikaans-English.
"I was always against apartheid. I was different to most people, and I always challenged it. It made no sense to me."
She tips a glass of wine between her painted fingernails.
"But Riona, the saddest thing is... nobody escaped it. Not even me. We all still see in apartheid."
Just like those old photographs, in black and white.
Christopher raises his eyebrows behind mirrored shades. It’s another sunny morning, just before noon, and there is a little boy of three peeing against a tree on High Street.
“They just do that here, don’t they…” He continues. I swear he wrinkles his nose.
I think of the boys peeing at Amasango, and then look around.
“Well, are there any public toilets?” I ask.
He gives me a quizzical look.
“I mean,” I begin, thinking out loud. “Imagine you live in one of the far extensions of the township. It’s maybe, what? Over an hour’s walk? And you don’t have a car. So what are you supposed to do?”
That stumps us both.
Christopher is black, and that’s supposed to mean something here. It does mean something. He has an unwritten passport to places I don’t, he is presumed to have an understanding that I won’t, or can’t. He is a brother to people he has never met, a part of some great extended family that crosses borders and bridges the Atlantic Ocean.
But he is so very far away from that boy. Further even than me.
I remember another conversation. One night in Cape Town, I lay in my hostel bed and listened to Christopher’s voice come through the mattress above, in those curiously intimate moments of shared travel.
“Since I’ve been here,” he said sleepily, “I feel like I’ve come home.”
From the bed across the room, Mamphela snorted loudly. “Oh my word, I hate it when people say that.”
“I’m sorry, but I do. I do.”
“Just because you’re black?”
“Yes, I guess, Africa is a black continent…”
“What? Is Ireland a white country so?” I interject.
“Yes. Yes it is-”
“That’s nonsense. So if you’re black, and born in Ireland, and become an Irish citizen… you’ll never be Irish? And neither will your children? Just because of your skin?”
The three of us argued it back and forth for a while, a bit drunk, a bit overwrought. I remember I cried, silently, in the dark. You’re racist, I remember Mamphela shouting at Christopher.
Another conversation:
Ben and I are sitting at a white-clothed table, the remains of a Rotary meeting going on behind us.
“I was talking there to Esté,” he says. “And she told me, her ancestors came to South Africa nearly three hundred years ago.”
He pauses.
“That’s before mine even left for the States. And how come… I get to be an American, right? No-one questions that. Why is it so difficult to think of her as an African?”
And another:
Amasango student: Ngubani igama lakho?
Faro: I’m sorry, I only speak English.
Amasango student: No Xhosa?
Faro: I’m American. Only English.
Amasango student: But you’re black!
And one last one:
It was my very first day here. Esté leans across a restuarant table, earnestly trying to explain to me in her Afrikaans-English.
"I was always against apartheid. I was different to most people, and I always challenged it. It made no sense to me."
She tips a glass of wine between her painted fingernails.
"But Riona, the saddest thing is... nobody escaped it. Not even me. We all still see in apartheid."
Just like those old photographs, in black and white.
Monday, April 30, 2007
The wrong side of the tracks
"I think I'll walk next week," I tell Kate, the fellow volunteer who drives me to Amasango, in a purposely offhand voice.
"What is this, International Stroll In Front Of Me Day?" She gesticulates wildly at the people crossing the road in front of her car, slams on the brakes, and then turns to me and takes a deep breath. "WHAT!"
I flinch, though I've been steeling myself for just this.
"I've thought about it-"
"You can't."
"It's only a few hundred meters-"
"In the most-mugged part of town!"
"I won't take anything with me-"
"It'll be too late for them to realise that AFTER they're smashed a bottle over your head."
She sits back triumphantly, conversation closed.
"Well." I say. Because what else is there to say?
Here, there's really only one thing you need to say to explain Kate: she's from Jo'burg.
There are many, many people like her here, and they lead a certain sort of life as a result. It's a life of electric gates and invisible lines, a life where walking to your local shops in broad daylight is still never safe. And anyone who doesn't believe in the necessity of this fear is, sadly, misguided. Particularly naive and pale students from overseas who just don't understand South Africa.
Yes, there is crime in Jo'burg, and probably more so than in the rest of the country, I don't dispute that. Yes, there is more violent crime in South Africa than there is in most of Europe, I don't dispute that either. Yes, there is need to be careful. I have spent weeks locking my laptop into my cupboard every time I left the room, carefully emptying out cards and money from my wallet before venturing off campus, hugging my bag in front of me at all times on the street, terrified to let it out of my sight. I have been frightened to be here at times, and I have made decisions not to do certain things or go to certain places as a result.
But the fear is not always real, or right.
I have been in this town for a few months, and I know full well that things are stolen, and that people can be attacked. But I also know that I don't want to live like Kate. In a locked box.
There is a railway line that runs through Grahamstown. Out of the thousands who pass through Rhodes, a handful will ever cross that line. In this town there is, literally, a wrong side of the tracks. And most of the people of this town live on it.
I have been crossing back and forth over those tracks, and walking to Amasango, for weeks now. I have never felt threatened or in danger. I have stopped emptying my pockets before I go, stopped worrying about bringing along a bag, stopped keeping my back to the wall and my eye on every shadow.
Sometimes, like just the other day, I will be overly incautious. I didn't notice the man walking beside me until I felt a tug at my bag, my open bag with my wallet on display. I saw in time and nothing was stolen, but it was a shock still, a warning about how careless I can be.
But even if I hadn't seen, it was just a wallet. Like the wallet I had taken in Dublin just before I left for here.
And naive and pale foreigner that I am, I am okay with perhaps having something stolen. Kate may never understand me, but I am okay with taking certain small risks. I am okay with it, because I think of the boys from the township highschool, and Auntie Lorna, and the men planting trees, and Lungawa who runs the extension six primary school, and the woman who smiled when we gave her Easter egg and told us she would save it for her grandchild, and all the people from the wrong side of tracks, all the people I would never have met if I had been too worried about a wallet.
"What is this, International Stroll In Front Of Me Day?" She gesticulates wildly at the people crossing the road in front of her car, slams on the brakes, and then turns to me and takes a deep breath. "WHAT!"
I flinch, though I've been steeling myself for just this.
"I've thought about it-"
"You can't."
"It's only a few hundred meters-"
"In the most-mugged part of town!"
"I won't take anything with me-"
"It'll be too late for them to realise that AFTER they're smashed a bottle over your head."
She sits back triumphantly, conversation closed.
"Well." I say. Because what else is there to say?
Here, there's really only one thing you need to say to explain Kate: she's from Jo'burg.
There are many, many people like her here, and they lead a certain sort of life as a result. It's a life of electric gates and invisible lines, a life where walking to your local shops in broad daylight is still never safe. And anyone who doesn't believe in the necessity of this fear is, sadly, misguided. Particularly naive and pale students from overseas who just don't understand South Africa.
Yes, there is crime in Jo'burg, and probably more so than in the rest of the country, I don't dispute that. Yes, there is more violent crime in South Africa than there is in most of Europe, I don't dispute that either. Yes, there is need to be careful. I have spent weeks locking my laptop into my cupboard every time I left the room, carefully emptying out cards and money from my wallet before venturing off campus, hugging my bag in front of me at all times on the street, terrified to let it out of my sight. I have been frightened to be here at times, and I have made decisions not to do certain things or go to certain places as a result.
But the fear is not always real, or right.
I have been in this town for a few months, and I know full well that things are stolen, and that people can be attacked. But I also know that I don't want to live like Kate. In a locked box.
There is a railway line that runs through Grahamstown. Out of the thousands who pass through Rhodes, a handful will ever cross that line. In this town there is, literally, a wrong side of the tracks. And most of the people of this town live on it.
I have been crossing back and forth over those tracks, and walking to Amasango, for weeks now. I have never felt threatened or in danger. I have stopped emptying my pockets before I go, stopped worrying about bringing along a bag, stopped keeping my back to the wall and my eye on every shadow.
Sometimes, like just the other day, I will be overly incautious. I didn't notice the man walking beside me until I felt a tug at my bag, my open bag with my wallet on display. I saw in time and nothing was stolen, but it was a shock still, a warning about how careless I can be.
But even if I hadn't seen, it was just a wallet. Like the wallet I had taken in Dublin just before I left for here.
And naive and pale foreigner that I am, I am okay with perhaps having something stolen. Kate may never understand me, but I am okay with taking certain small risks. I am okay with it, because I think of the boys from the township highschool, and Auntie Lorna, and the men planting trees, and Lungawa who runs the extension six primary school, and the woman who smiled when we gave her Easter egg and told us she would save it for her grandchild, and all the people from the wrong side of tracks, all the people I would never have met if I had been too worried about a wallet.
Sunday, April 29, 2007
Change in the Air
It was when Lydia and Sarah appeared at my door, wet hair stuck to their foreheads and forlorn looks on their faces, a trail of wet footprints in their wake, that I realised summer really was over.
There had been rainy days before. Even in the height of summer, I have been caught in downpours that feel uncannily like a bathful of water has been upturned on your head. The weather here is capricious, to say the least. "If you don't like the weather, wait five minutes" is the town slogan, a mantra repeatedly daily as people emerge from lectures to shiver in tank tops that seemed appropriate just before the lecture began, or sweat uncomfortably as they walk home in the jeans that were just right when they set out to the shops.
So autumn ambushed us, in the guise of a temporary shower. That decided to stay.
The heaters are on, jumpers have been rooted out from the bottom of cupboards and woollen socks have appeared in the supermarket. Forgotten are the mosquito bites and the perpetual sheen of sweat and a sudden nostalgia descends for the halcyon days, when frangipani flowers littered the pathways, and you went barefoot to the library and to class, or cut fresh mango out on the balcony, or sat out on the grass under the shade of a tree between lectures.
There are wonderful, wonderful things about the everyday freedoms of summer, and now, imprisoned in their rooms, people wear faces of protest against their confinement.
But then picture this:
A handmade woollen scarf, a carefully-worked story of long journeys and tea-soaked evenings and restless moments between meals and stolen hours out on a white-painted bench, finally wound around a neck to guard against the cold.
A drift of umber and ochre and scarlet leaves, shifting dreamily across the lawns and down the clocktower steps, and two buttoned-up girls bending over to sift through them, scooping them up and letting them fall in delight, and the crunch of them underfoot.
A room with candles burning and the heater glowing warmly, and bundles of rugs and coats heaped around, and hands gratefully cupping steaming mugs of tea, scented with mint and fruit and honey and just a hint of cut grass.
There's a change in the air and I like it.
There had been rainy days before. Even in the height of summer, I have been caught in downpours that feel uncannily like a bathful of water has been upturned on your head. The weather here is capricious, to say the least. "If you don't like the weather, wait five minutes" is the town slogan, a mantra repeatedly daily as people emerge from lectures to shiver in tank tops that seemed appropriate just before the lecture began, or sweat uncomfortably as they walk home in the jeans that were just right when they set out to the shops.
So autumn ambushed us, in the guise of a temporary shower. That decided to stay.
The heaters are on, jumpers have been rooted out from the bottom of cupboards and woollen socks have appeared in the supermarket. Forgotten are the mosquito bites and the perpetual sheen of sweat and a sudden nostalgia descends for the halcyon days, when frangipani flowers littered the pathways, and you went barefoot to the library and to class, or cut fresh mango out on the balcony, or sat out on the grass under the shade of a tree between lectures.
There are wonderful, wonderful things about the everyday freedoms of summer, and now, imprisoned in their rooms, people wear faces of protest against their confinement.
But then picture this:
A handmade woollen scarf, a carefully-worked story of long journeys and tea-soaked evenings and restless moments between meals and stolen hours out on a white-painted bench, finally wound around a neck to guard against the cold.
A drift of umber and ochre and scarlet leaves, shifting dreamily across the lawns and down the clocktower steps, and two buttoned-up girls bending over to sift through them, scooping them up and letting them fall in delight, and the crunch of them underfoot.
A room with candles burning and the heater glowing warmly, and bundles of rugs and coats heaped around, and hands gratefully cupping steaming mugs of tea, scented with mint and fruit and honey and just a hint of cut grass.
There's a change in the air and I like it.
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Pass/Fail
I have one foot inside the classroom door – always propped open, for students to wander in and out and sample some of the other classes that might take their fancy – when something hits me about the middle, just below my rib cage. I’m used to being struck at Amasango, by the older boys who think it funny to slap you from behind and feign a sneering innocence as you spin around to identify the guilty party, a taunting cruelty no different from the many boys down through the ages who take a stick to a caged animal, and so my first reaction is to throw my hands up in an attempt to shield myself.
Slowly, cautiously, I look down and see a first-grader attached to my waist, hugging me with a ferocity that is painful. Not physically painful; it hurts me somewhere I can't quite place. It's the sharp hurt you feel when you realise that there may be no-one in this child's life who ever hugs them.
How do you walk into a place like Amasango and not feel repeatedly broken?
I need to explain that there are thrilling moments of pure joy in that school. Being welcomed back with that hug marked a change in behaviour towards Lydia and I that we could only make sense of later on over countless cups of tea: we had passed an important test. We had gone away for the vacation, and we had come back. Sometimes the best of intentions can cause terrible damage, and many, many students in the past have begun coming to Amasango only to simply stop turning up. It's not easy to undersrtand how that must feel, to be abandoned over and over.
But we had come back.
And so everything changed, and the wariness we had been treated to for weeks evaporated. The sticks are put away.
The faces at the window disappear, and the older boys who had sidled around our drama classes for many weeks come inside, to take up name badges and roar like lions and dance on one foot and play dead.
The first-grade teacher, who has barely made eye-contact with me since I began coming to the school, abruptly starts to teach me the parts of the body in isiXhosa, grinning benevolently at my faltering attempts.
Outside the cathedral one evening, two of the boys get chatting to us and we all find ourselves enacting interviews and planning a radio programme and demonstrating our drama games in the deserted town square, giggling fit to burst.
Just yesterday: a boy waves his worksheet at me, shouting "More Maths! More Maths!" The youngest in the class, Ukululeku, patiently counts out the bottle-caps I've gotten my hands on to use as counters, much better than the scraps of paper we had been improvising with before. And to my right the following exchange takes place:
Teacher: You aren't in this class.
Siphelo: I know.
Teacher: What are you doing here?
Siphelo (in the exasperated manner of one pointing out the obvious): I want to learn.
(gives look that says - Now can I get on with it?)
And there is dancing and yodelling and laughing and miming, and all manner of wonderful things that sound dangerously close to being cast in an Oxfam ad, or perhaps a heartwarming sequel to Sister Act, and it is real and happy and exhilarating and some of the best times I have had.
But.
But the broken part never really heals. Because even as you are congratulating yourself, it begins to dawn on you.
You will leave, soon. You will be just like all the others.
And that's why it hurts the way it does.
Slowly, cautiously, I look down and see a first-grader attached to my waist, hugging me with a ferocity that is painful. Not physically painful; it hurts me somewhere I can't quite place. It's the sharp hurt you feel when you realise that there may be no-one in this child's life who ever hugs them.
How do you walk into a place like Amasango and not feel repeatedly broken?
I need to explain that there are thrilling moments of pure joy in that school. Being welcomed back with that hug marked a change in behaviour towards Lydia and I that we could only make sense of later on over countless cups of tea: we had passed an important test. We had gone away for the vacation, and we had come back. Sometimes the best of intentions can cause terrible damage, and many, many students in the past have begun coming to Amasango only to simply stop turning up. It's not easy to undersrtand how that must feel, to be abandoned over and over.
But we had come back.
And so everything changed, and the wariness we had been treated to for weeks evaporated. The sticks are put away.
The faces at the window disappear, and the older boys who had sidled around our drama classes for many weeks come inside, to take up name badges and roar like lions and dance on one foot and play dead.
The first-grade teacher, who has barely made eye-contact with me since I began coming to the school, abruptly starts to teach me the parts of the body in isiXhosa, grinning benevolently at my faltering attempts.
Outside the cathedral one evening, two of the boys get chatting to us and we all find ourselves enacting interviews and planning a radio programme and demonstrating our drama games in the deserted town square, giggling fit to burst.
Just yesterday: a boy waves his worksheet at me, shouting "More Maths! More Maths!" The youngest in the class, Ukululeku, patiently counts out the bottle-caps I've gotten my hands on to use as counters, much better than the scraps of paper we had been improvising with before. And to my right the following exchange takes place:
Teacher: You aren't in this class.
Siphelo: I know.
Teacher: What are you doing here?
Siphelo (in the exasperated manner of one pointing out the obvious): I want to learn.
(gives look that says - Now can I get on with it?)
And there is dancing and yodelling and laughing and miming, and all manner of wonderful things that sound dangerously close to being cast in an Oxfam ad, or perhaps a heartwarming sequel to Sister Act, and it is real and happy and exhilarating and some of the best times I have had.
But.
But the broken part never really heals. Because even as you are congratulating yourself, it begins to dawn on you.
You will leave, soon. You will be just like all the others.
And that's why it hurts the way it does.
Thursday, April 19, 2007
Vigil
At the entrance to the cathedral they hand us white candles, slotted through a piece of white folded paper as a candle-holder. We carry them like injured birds, cradling them close as we follow each other up the aisles, past pews full of people. I pause and bend to ask a girl for her light, our heads bowed over the wicks as they come together, spreading the light, which in turn I pass on, which is also passed on, and so on it goes.
It is seven o’clock on Zimbabwean Independence Day and the cathedral is full, pinpricks of light wavering in the night gloom. When the speakers take their turn at the postern it is the light they talk about.
“Cast light into the darkened places.”
“As a symbol of our hope.”
The speeches are short, and long. They are read out in wavering voices, and with determination and control. The speakers are young, and old; powerful, and gentle; Jewish and Christian and neither.
My friend is the last to go up. I remember how a few weeks ago we sat on someone's bed and she talked about how she would like to hold a vigil on Independence Day, to both celebrate her country and protest at what is occurring in it. She thought it might be a small affair, a handful of friends.
She looks out at the hundreds seated before her, many of whom did not come on a whim like me, but who thought long and hard about the risks involved, and who came in spite of them. All she says is, please excuse my voice, and then she sings the first few words in Shona of the Zimbabwean national anthem. Not everyone knows it, but from here and there clear voices join in and rise up, up to the vaulted ceiling far above. The girl beside me has the sweetest voice I have known.
As the last strains die away someone from the back begins the South African anthem, Nkosi sikelel' iAfrika, and I realize it is the first time I have heard it.
I don’t know the languages but I don’t need to. There among people who stand and sing as one in pride and hope and unity I feel something beyond what words can explain and unexpected tears come to my eyes. I don’t want it to end but it does.
People begin to rise, to file out into the aisles. One by one they dip their heads to snuff out their candles, here and there the light disappears, put out in silence, one by one until it is dark again.
[the original Nkosi sikelel' iAfrika, a part of which is used in the national anthem]
It is seven o’clock on Zimbabwean Independence Day and the cathedral is full, pinpricks of light wavering in the night gloom. When the speakers take their turn at the postern it is the light they talk about.
“Cast light into the darkened places.”
“As a symbol of our hope.”
The speeches are short, and long. They are read out in wavering voices, and with determination and control. The speakers are young, and old; powerful, and gentle; Jewish and Christian and neither.
My friend is the last to go up. I remember how a few weeks ago we sat on someone's bed and she talked about how she would like to hold a vigil on Independence Day, to both celebrate her country and protest at what is occurring in it. She thought it might be a small affair, a handful of friends.
She looks out at the hundreds seated before her, many of whom did not come on a whim like me, but who thought long and hard about the risks involved, and who came in spite of them. All she says is, please excuse my voice, and then she sings the first few words in Shona of the Zimbabwean national anthem. Not everyone knows it, but from here and there clear voices join in and rise up, up to the vaulted ceiling far above. The girl beside me has the sweetest voice I have known.
As the last strains die away someone from the back begins the South African anthem, Nkosi sikelel' iAfrika, and I realize it is the first time I have heard it.
I don’t know the languages but I don’t need to. There among people who stand and sing as one in pride and hope and unity I feel something beyond what words can explain and unexpected tears come to my eyes. I don’t want it to end but it does.
People begin to rise, to file out into the aisles. One by one they dip their heads to snuff out their candles, here and there the light disappears, put out in silence, one by one until it is dark again.
[the original Nkosi sikelel' iAfrika, a part of which is used in the national anthem]
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Heaven's Things
This time last week:
I'm watching socks, white with a black edging. The going is steep since the waterfall, so my eyes are on the path and George's legs as he negotiates the way in front of me. It's Lydia's sigh, from somewhere behind me, that makes me stop for a moment and look up.
"Oh." I say.
It's early afternoon in the Drakensburg mountain range, high above the land in the thin air. The light is washing over the undulating hills in soft sweeps, picking out a slope of land, or the tops of trees. The far peaks of the mountains across the valleys below are dissolving into a cloud bank which spills over the edge; one cloud detaches itself and sails across the valley floor just above the ground. I wonder why it looks so strange, and then I realise; we are so high up that even the valleys are at cloud height.
Over the rise of the crest above us, baboons are lumbering over the rocks, long snouts sniffing the air. There is a barking sound as one of them warns the others of our approach. George barks back.
George is Pauline's father, a game ranger of many years. He used to take care of this section of the mountains, so he knows the paths well, and points out eagles and wildflowers with the end of his umbrella.
We are heading for a rock art site at Game Pass, on a shelf at the very summit of the nearest mountain. It was painted by the San people, who don't exist any more. They were driven into the mountains by settlers and other African natives, and killed off slowly.
After an hour of hiking, we make it, sweaty and a little out of breath. We break out chocolate and apples, and study the panels of hunters and eland in delicate strokes across the sheer rock face. They came up here and painted it in blood, to capture the power of the animals and trap it in the stone.
And we look back out at the path we have taken and the clouds and the mountains. Eagles are wheeling in above, and we are lightheaded from the adrenaline of climbing, and dizzy with the open space up here in the rocky heights. I remember a passage in a book I had read that morning, at a crane sanctuary in the mountain foothills. The book was a record of the stories a San tribe recounted to a writer many years ago, and the lines run around in my head:
therefore
we are stars
we must walk the sky
for we are heaven’s things
I'm watching socks, white with a black edging. The going is steep since the waterfall, so my eyes are on the path and George's legs as he negotiates the way in front of me. It's Lydia's sigh, from somewhere behind me, that makes me stop for a moment and look up.
"Oh." I say.
It's early afternoon in the Drakensburg mountain range, high above the land in the thin air. The light is washing over the undulating hills in soft sweeps, picking out a slope of land, or the tops of trees. The far peaks of the mountains across the valleys below are dissolving into a cloud bank which spills over the edge; one cloud detaches itself and sails across the valley floor just above the ground. I wonder why it looks so strange, and then I realise; we are so high up that even the valleys are at cloud height.
Over the rise of the crest above us, baboons are lumbering over the rocks, long snouts sniffing the air. There is a barking sound as one of them warns the others of our approach. George barks back.
George is Pauline's father, a game ranger of many years. He used to take care of this section of the mountains, so he knows the paths well, and points out eagles and wildflowers with the end of his umbrella.
We are heading for a rock art site at Game Pass, on a shelf at the very summit of the nearest mountain. It was painted by the San people, who don't exist any more. They were driven into the mountains by settlers and other African natives, and killed off slowly.
After an hour of hiking, we make it, sweaty and a little out of breath. We break out chocolate and apples, and study the panels of hunters and eland in delicate strokes across the sheer rock face. They came up here and painted it in blood, to capture the power of the animals and trap it in the stone.
And we look back out at the path we have taken and the clouds and the mountains. Eagles are wheeling in above, and we are lightheaded from the adrenaline of climbing, and dizzy with the open space up here in the rocky heights. I remember a passage in a book I had read that morning, at a crane sanctuary in the mountain foothills. The book was a record of the stories a San tribe recounted to a writer many years ago, and the lines run around in my head:
therefore
we are stars
we must walk the sky
for we are heaven’s things
Zebras Crossing
Pop music in English and Zulu is pumping from the stereo, as we race down the winding roads that lead out from Petermaritzburg into inner KwaZulu-Natal. Pauline, barefoot and golden-limbed in the driver's seat next to me, is shimmying her shoulders to the beat, oversize sunglasses reflecting the flat landscape dotted with acacia trees that stretches out as far as the eye can see.
Lydia and Julie, a French girl we live with, half-dozing in the back seat, rouse themselves as she swings the car into a sharp turn-off, and through a pair of gates with iron wilderbeast worked into them.
"Are we in a reserve?" I ask, confused.
"Ja," Pauline says, negotiating another bend in the road, which is now just a rough track. "I live here, didn't I tell you?"
"Hey, is that...?"
"Zebra!" Lydia squeals from the backseat.
"Pests," Pauline snorts. "They're always on the road."
For one week of our vacation, we have turned ourselves over the family Zaloumis - our fellow res-mate Pauline, her parents, two dogs, two horses, and a cockadil named Sparky - who have lived on various reserves for the last thirty years or so.
It is a week of adventure that comes in many flavours and varieties. From swinging through the forest a hundred feet above the ground, to crashing a Scottish highland festival, to hiking in the Drakensburg, to horseriding out among white rhino, there is hardly a spare moment.
At Spioenkop reserve, we invite the park rangers over for dinner one night. A semi-circle of dining chairs are arranged out on the thorn-strewn grass behind our chalet, not a lawn but a rough clearing before the bush begins, and by the dying light of the braai embers a trio of khaki-shorted men, legs muscled from years walking the reserves, sit and swap war stories of the times they were chased up the nearest tree. Passing a hand across a white-stubbled chin, their eyes permanently fixed on the horizon, the last of the old game rangers mourn the changing times in the new South Africa.
We are warned not to wander out into the bush at night, but the draw is too strong for me to resist. It's darker than could be imagined out there, and we lie on our backs and wonder aloud at the sheer spread of stars above, the night sky thick with them, tracing half-remembered constellations with a finger and finding our place in the universe by their light, very small and awed in this vast vast land.
Julie had said something to me that first morning as we drove in, and I think about it again underneath the glittering sky. She put a hand just below her breast and said, in beautifully accented English, "You know zis feeling, zis feeling like it's warm here. Like when you are in love."
She pointed out the window at the landscape.
"I have zat, with here."
And we had both gazed out at the rolling plains, and the dark bruises of the mountain peaks rearing at the edge of the world, and I thought about language, and how the truest of emotions will shine through regardless.
I start to undertand then, that even when you leave, Africa always takes a piece of you to keep.
Lydia and Julie, a French girl we live with, half-dozing in the back seat, rouse themselves as she swings the car into a sharp turn-off, and through a pair of gates with iron wilderbeast worked into them.
"Are we in a reserve?" I ask, confused.
"Ja," Pauline says, negotiating another bend in the road, which is now just a rough track. "I live here, didn't I tell you?"
"Hey, is that...?"
"Zebra!" Lydia squeals from the backseat.
"Pests," Pauline snorts. "They're always on the road."
For one week of our vacation, we have turned ourselves over the family Zaloumis - our fellow res-mate Pauline, her parents, two dogs, two horses, and a cockadil named Sparky - who have lived on various reserves for the last thirty years or so.
It is a week of adventure that comes in many flavours and varieties. From swinging through the forest a hundred feet above the ground, to crashing a Scottish highland festival, to hiking in the Drakensburg, to horseriding out among white rhino, there is hardly a spare moment.
At Spioenkop reserve, we invite the park rangers over for dinner one night. A semi-circle of dining chairs are arranged out on the thorn-strewn grass behind our chalet, not a lawn but a rough clearing before the bush begins, and by the dying light of the braai embers a trio of khaki-shorted men, legs muscled from years walking the reserves, sit and swap war stories of the times they were chased up the nearest tree. Passing a hand across a white-stubbled chin, their eyes permanently fixed on the horizon, the last of the old game rangers mourn the changing times in the new South Africa.
We are warned not to wander out into the bush at night, but the draw is too strong for me to resist. It's darker than could be imagined out there, and we lie on our backs and wonder aloud at the sheer spread of stars above, the night sky thick with them, tracing half-remembered constellations with a finger and finding our place in the universe by their light, very small and awed in this vast vast land.
Julie had said something to me that first morning as we drove in, and I think about it again underneath the glittering sky. She put a hand just below her breast and said, in beautifully accented English, "You know zis feeling, zis feeling like it's warm here. Like when you are in love."
She pointed out the window at the landscape.
"I have zat, with here."
And we had both gazed out at the rolling plains, and the dark bruises of the mountain peaks rearing at the edge of the world, and I thought about language, and how the truest of emotions will shine through regardless.
I start to undertand then, that even when you leave, Africa always takes a piece of you to keep.
Monday, April 16, 2007
Interlude
For two weeks in April, Rhodes unceremoniously turfs us out on the street. Disgruntled, your earthly possessions in boxes and suitcases around you, you pick yourself up, kick a few rocks in disgust, dust yourself off, and take to the road.
Tales will follow of tussels with wild animals and thunderstorms, of dizzying heights and forest walks, of sweaty hikes and lazy days by the pool, of zebra bums and horse farts.
For now I will only say that it is good to be home.
And that it is strange to realise that this is home.
And that there is nothing better than a scruffy nine-year-old slamming into you for a hug to welcome you home.
Tales will follow of tussels with wild animals and thunderstorms, of dizzying heights and forest walks, of sweaty hikes and lazy days by the pool, of zebra bums and horse farts.
For now I will only say that it is good to be home.
And that it is strange to realise that this is home.
And that there is nothing better than a scruffy nine-year-old slamming into you for a hug to welcome you home.
An invitation
I received an interesting piece of paper a few weeks ago. It reads:
Dear Honoured Guest,
It is with great pride that the King of AbaThembu,
His Majesty Zwelibanzi Buyelekhaya Dalindyebo
invites you to the installation of
Zwelivelile Mandlesizwe Dalibhunga Mandela
as the head of Mvezo Traditional Council.
I read it twice and still didn't understand.
"Is this you?" I ask Mandela.
He nods.
"So... you're important then, hey?" I ask.
"No, no," he grins.
But, yes, he is.
**************
There is a boy in red, running alongside the car, between the rush-roofed mud huts painted green and yellow, dust-dry grass beneath his bare feet. It's a postcard, that image. I've never been to this place, somewhere out in the wild centre of the Eastern Cape, but I know it already.
The road seems to go on into forever, a track of dirt and loose stone looping out across the hills and valleys. I look back and see a cloud of dust in our wake, settling on the bony flanks of donkeys picking their way across the scrub and dogs laid out panting in the heat. We know we are getting close when we start to overtake local people walking along the road in twos and threes.
There are tents with folding chairs, and girls dancing to the beat of a drum. Some of the them are bare-breasted, hung with ropes of beads that criss-cross their chests and ring their ankles as they stamp and turn and sing. I try not to stare too much as we wait for events to begin.
Este calls them popporazzi, the men and women sprawling idly over their equipment, who sweat and scowl in the heat, snapping the dancing girls and stalking the seated guests with blank-eyed lens, bored, until they erupt in sudden frantic packs, trailing leads and booms, on the scent of an arriving dignitary. When the helicopter buzzes by overhead there is an unprecedented scramble for positions and people stand up from their seats to see over the heads of the press, a whisper running through the assembled crowds.
And there he is. Madiba, they call him.
He sits directly across from us, a white-haired man with his hands neatly folded, as my classmate Mandela takes a seat on the platform and the ceremony to mark his installation in the chieftainship of Mbezo begins.
The sound system has broken some time that morning, out here in the wilderness with no back-up, so no-one can hear. We talk to the people sitting next to us, who supply a commentary on the speakers who take to the podium; first the king of the Zulus, then the king of Lesotho, then the king of Swaziland, and then there is a sudden hush and the white-haired man is making his unsteady way up the steps to address the crowd.
The press are swarming the platform, clicking and flashing. No flash, the attendants say, trying to keep order. Mandela is sitting with a lion's skin draped around his shoulders, next to his wife, listening to the speech as the wind whips across the plains into the open-air venue, but no matter how hard we strain our ears we can't hear, nor see clearly over the waving cameras and microphones.
And before I can think about it to much I have stood up and made my way to the front, expecting at any moment to hear, Excuse me Ma'am, or sisi, You can't do that, but I don't, no-one stops me, no-one at all, and then I am looking over the shoulder of a cameraman at the front of the stage and there is seven feet between me and... him.
Some of my classmates are in the audience and when they see me standing there they follow me up. Igopoleng, the ANC member who fled South Africa forty years ago, joins me, and we stand together, shoulder to shoulder, still unable to hear much, but transfixed, beaming, in that strange and surreal moment, and after a moment or two or maybe more Igopoleng puts his hand on my arm and says, Now I can die a happy man.
Madiba. The Father of the Nation. Mandela's grandfather. Nelson Mandela.
Dear Honoured Guest,
It is with great pride that the King of AbaThembu,
His Majesty Zwelibanzi Buyelekhaya Dalindyebo
invites you to the installation of
Zwelivelile Mandlesizwe Dalibhunga Mandela
as the head of Mvezo Traditional Council.
I read it twice and still didn't understand.
"Is this you?" I ask Mandela.
He nods.
"So... you're important then, hey?" I ask.
"No, no," he grins.
But, yes, he is.
**************
There is a boy in red, running alongside the car, between the rush-roofed mud huts painted green and yellow, dust-dry grass beneath his bare feet. It's a postcard, that image. I've never been to this place, somewhere out in the wild centre of the Eastern Cape, but I know it already.
The road seems to go on into forever, a track of dirt and loose stone looping out across the hills and valleys. I look back and see a cloud of dust in our wake, settling on the bony flanks of donkeys picking their way across the scrub and dogs laid out panting in the heat. We know we are getting close when we start to overtake local people walking along the road in twos and threes.
There are tents with folding chairs, and girls dancing to the beat of a drum. Some of the them are bare-breasted, hung with ropes of beads that criss-cross their chests and ring their ankles as they stamp and turn and sing. I try not to stare too much as we wait for events to begin.
Este calls them popporazzi, the men and women sprawling idly over their equipment, who sweat and scowl in the heat, snapping the dancing girls and stalking the seated guests with blank-eyed lens, bored, until they erupt in sudden frantic packs, trailing leads and booms, on the scent of an arriving dignitary. When the helicopter buzzes by overhead there is an unprecedented scramble for positions and people stand up from their seats to see over the heads of the press, a whisper running through the assembled crowds.
And there he is. Madiba, they call him.
He sits directly across from us, a white-haired man with his hands neatly folded, as my classmate Mandela takes a seat on the platform and the ceremony to mark his installation in the chieftainship of Mbezo begins.
The sound system has broken some time that morning, out here in the wilderness with no back-up, so no-one can hear. We talk to the people sitting next to us, who supply a commentary on the speakers who take to the podium; first the king of the Zulus, then the king of Lesotho, then the king of Swaziland, and then there is a sudden hush and the white-haired man is making his unsteady way up the steps to address the crowd.
The press are swarming the platform, clicking and flashing. No flash, the attendants say, trying to keep order. Mandela is sitting with a lion's skin draped around his shoulders, next to his wife, listening to the speech as the wind whips across the plains into the open-air venue, but no matter how hard we strain our ears we can't hear, nor see clearly over the waving cameras and microphones.
And before I can think about it to much I have stood up and made my way to the front, expecting at any moment to hear, Excuse me Ma'am, or sisi, You can't do that, but I don't, no-one stops me, no-one at all, and then I am looking over the shoulder of a cameraman at the front of the stage and there is seven feet between me and... him.
Some of my classmates are in the audience and when they see me standing there they follow me up. Igopoleng, the ANC member who fled South Africa forty years ago, joins me, and we stand together, shoulder to shoulder, still unable to hear much, but transfixed, beaming, in that strange and surreal moment, and after a moment or two or maybe more Igopoleng puts his hand on my arm and says, Now I can die a happy man.
Madiba. The Father of the Nation. Mandela's grandfather. Nelson Mandela.
Friday, March 30, 2007
Idle talk
There is a boy singing on a guitar, regaling us with a song he introduced as being about seeing his girlfriend kiss his best friend. Someone is accompanying him on African drums. Jelly shots are doing the rounds, and on several of the tables sit hubblies, long pipes snaking out of them, filling the air with tobacco in notes of toffee and strawberry and mint.
We are sitting under the benevolent reach of a great knarled pepper tree, nursing bottles of South African cider. To my left, three girls are discussing the wig one of them is wearing. To my right, Bridget is speaking with a boy called Fufu and a girl with a fluffy collar. I sip cider and let the evening wash over me, snippets of conversations snagging on the tree branches above.
"... for a costume party at the end of second year, we had a whole routine and eveything. I brought it with me just in case..."
"… and his mother picked him up as they were running into the bush and just kept running. He remembers seeing some of the others hiding when they were far enough in. He watched as one mother beat her child to death to keep him quiet, to keep him from giving them away….”
"... never even kissed you know, but this is the man for me I just know it, and yes it's only a weekend every few months but he is the most divine..."
*********
It's Zimbabwe they are talking about, where the mother and child were. Just another massacre that most of us never hear about.
There is a lot of talk about Zim here, especially since the march that took place on campus a few weeks ago. A lot of talk about how Zimbabweans spoke out against apartheid once, and how it is time for South Africans to return the favour.
But there is also not enough talk. Many Zimbabweans don't speak, or march, with good reason.
You hear soon enough about the people to attend Rhodes not to study but to report back. The spies who check up on what Zimbo expats are saying and doing. You are told of the boy who wrote an article once, and three days later he had a call from home to say they had received a visit about it. The girl who called home for permission to attend the march, and her parents asked her not to, because everyone knows what happens, everyone knows someone it has happened to.
At lunch in the Dean of Student's house, the lecturers and local businessmen talked about how it reminds them of the bad old days, when the SADF had a base on campus to monitor student activity. My politics building was the old police base, I am told, where they ran the cameras that photographed the anti-apartheid marches and demonstrations, to identify those that attended for later arrests. It worries them to think students are again being watched.
But how do we stop it now? they ask. We know it happens, but what can we do?
Sarah decided not to attend the march, not because she doesn't sympathise with Zimbabweans, but because she felt a march would acheive little or nothing.
It's just a lot of talk, she said.
But with Zimbabwe, perhaps being able to speak freely is an acheivement in itself. Perhaps just talking is an act of defiance.
We are sitting under the benevolent reach of a great knarled pepper tree, nursing bottles of South African cider. To my left, three girls are discussing the wig one of them is wearing. To my right, Bridget is speaking with a boy called Fufu and a girl with a fluffy collar. I sip cider and let the evening wash over me, snippets of conversations snagging on the tree branches above.
"... for a costume party at the end of second year, we had a whole routine and eveything. I brought it with me just in case..."
"… and his mother picked him up as they were running into the bush and just kept running. He remembers seeing some of the others hiding when they were far enough in. He watched as one mother beat her child to death to keep him quiet, to keep him from giving them away….”
"... never even kissed you know, but this is the man for me I just know it, and yes it's only a weekend every few months but he is the most divine..."
*********
It's Zimbabwe they are talking about, where the mother and child were. Just another massacre that most of us never hear about.
There is a lot of talk about Zim here, especially since the march that took place on campus a few weeks ago. A lot of talk about how Zimbabweans spoke out against apartheid once, and how it is time for South Africans to return the favour.
But there is also not enough talk. Many Zimbabweans don't speak, or march, with good reason.
You hear soon enough about the people to attend Rhodes not to study but to report back. The spies who check up on what Zimbo expats are saying and doing. You are told of the boy who wrote an article once, and three days later he had a call from home to say they had received a visit about it. The girl who called home for permission to attend the march, and her parents asked her not to, because everyone knows what happens, everyone knows someone it has happened to.
At lunch in the Dean of Student's house, the lecturers and local businessmen talked about how it reminds them of the bad old days, when the SADF had a base on campus to monitor student activity. My politics building was the old police base, I am told, where they ran the cameras that photographed the anti-apartheid marches and demonstrations, to identify those that attended for later arrests. It worries them to think students are again being watched.
But how do we stop it now? they ask. We know it happens, but what can we do?
Sarah decided not to attend the march, not because she doesn't sympathise with Zimbabweans, but because she felt a march would acheive little or nothing.
It's just a lot of talk, she said.
But with Zimbabwe, perhaps being able to speak freely is an acheivement in itself. Perhaps just talking is an act of defiance.
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Eggs and good tidings
I've discovered that Lydia has a blog!
It is really worth reading, especially this one, where I think she gives a better picture than anyone could about what Amasango is like.
This is her getting ready for our Easter Egg hunt today. We put on bunny ears and drew whiskers with eyeliner, and wordless, bunnylike, we hopped with a bagful of eggs all the way to Amasango. On our way we doled out a few to unsuspecting pedestrians, and it was incredible the difference a costume makes - the smiles we got!
As soon as we got back we already started listing off other possible holidays to capitalise on...
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Brought to you by the sound “Gr” and the number “8”
- some pre-schoolers
-two glasses
- two spoons
- two bowls
- a dice
Add water, and stir for fantastic results.
Scifest has hit Grahamstown, and I was advised it was something not to miss. I promptly signed up to help out at the pre-school section in the town hall, where all manner of activities are taking place. The theme this year is numbers and counting, so I get down on my knees and make drumroll noises on the table as the dice is rolled, and then we all shout out the dots with great glee: “ONE, TWO, THREE, FOOOUUURRR!”
Much excitement and mayhem ensues as liberal spoonfuls of water are spilled every which way, sometimes even making it into the target glasses. And we manage it all somehow without any shared language.
One three-year-old decides that any number below five just doesn't cut the mustard, and begins cheating with a spectacular disregard for both the rules and the concept of shame. I’m sure there’ll be a career for her in accounting some day.
I come back wet and happy, and with a newfound appreciation for all things numerical. Who knew counting could be so much fun.
******************
Amasango is in a chaotic state, as usual. Students wander in and out of the classrooms, tumbling over chairs to grab at each others shirts, jostling around the few students still diligently bent over torn-edged exercise books.
Boys run outside to pee on the long grass behind the building, but as I haven’t yet encountered a toilet on the premises I’ve concluded for the moment that this is actually respectable behavior. In the middle of it all Jane, back from a well-earned week’s holidays, continues to be a rock of calm.
“Soap,” she says, cheerful as always. “A couple of them were saying terrible things yesterday so I threatened to put a bar of soap in their mouths.”
She has an envelope on her desk, with photos in it. They are of one of the students, a girl of about sixteen. She was beaten up by an ex-boyfriend of hers, who had just been released on bail following a previous conviction for assaulting her. Jane took the photos as evidence for the next case against him.
We look in silence at the photos. Jane shrugs. Business as usual.
I take a seat on a foot-high red plastic chair with the ‘littlies’ or Grades 1 and 2, lumped together in the one classroom. They don’t seem to have any work to do, so we fold paper fortune tellers and they teach me clapping games. I find a workbook and ask them, with the help of pigin-Xhosa and the translating efforts of one of the boys and exaggerated hand-gestures, about some of the sums they’ve done. I borrow a butt of a pencil from Thembu and a crumpled sheet of exercise paper from someone else and try out a couple of examples: 13 + 14, 23 + 42.
I notice a ten-year-old, Sinovuyo, is moving his lips, counting it all out from the number chart on the wall. We sit together for a while and tear up bits of paper as counters, and I show him how to add up each column separately rather than adding it all together at once. One of the others, Mziwoxolo, gets interested, so I write out lists of sums and together we correct them.
After several smaller sums, I write this down on the paper:
430,565,231,629
+ 139,423,748,310
---------------------
Sinovuyo sucks air in through his teeth. Yoh, he says, the multilungual South African exclamation for anything shocking. I sound out the billions and millions and thousands and hundreds, and we shake our heads over the sheer size of all those numbers.
Then I hand him the pencil.
And he realizes he can do it.
And that, that, is when I realise why people become teachers.
Monday, March 26, 2007
A Good Day
I find them sitting under an old tree, on the ground with the clay and grass. School closed early today for the Amasango students, so we came to find some of them at the Eluxolweni shelter. Whatever it is we do when we come to the school, we understand that the most important thing is just to turn up every week. To not be another person who lets them down.
The sunlight filters through the tree branches, and the day has a slow, calm quality about it. Lydia leans over to coax a praying mantis off my arm. One of the boys is beating out a rhythm on a piece of tin he is sitting on, perhaps once a part of a toy cart.
When we listen closely, we can hear it's "Amazing grace."
And it's just good. Really good.
The sunlight filters through the tree branches, and the day has a slow, calm quality about it. Lydia leans over to coax a praying mantis off my arm. One of the boys is beating out a rhythm on a piece of tin he is sitting on, perhaps once a part of a toy cart.
When we listen closely, we can hear it's "Amazing grace."
And it's just good. Really good.
Suffer the little children
“Are you alright?” Nina gives me an alarmed look. It may be because I’m swaying a little.
My hair has been knotted into a mess of tangles, where clumsy fingers were pulled through it. My clothes are stained here and there with the bodily fluids of others. I can still feel the hands that grasped me, many hands, all over. I feel aching and violated.
But pleasantly so.
There are some people that you meet and they stop you in your tracks. Auntie Lorna is one of these. We met her outside of her creche in the township, a wonderfully large grandmother who began to talk up a storm. Everyone called her auntie, from the toddlers pulling at her skirts to the aged nuns she once worked with.
"I get nothing but heartache for running this place," she tells us, as we stand, enthralled, at the edge of her front garden. "A lot of the time, the parents run away without paying. Yoh! But I love children, don't I?" she addresses a wide-eyed girl who is half-hiding behind her, gazing out at us.
We're walking away when Lydia puts both our thoughts into words. We already have full schedules, but there is something so appealing about the idea of little children who don't spit or attempt to stab each other, and Auntie Lorna's all-encompassing embrace.
So that is how I end up at the creche one morning, sitting on an impossibly small chair while a roomful of two and three year olds stare openmouthed at me, their bowls of porridge forgotten. At first I am given a wide berth, but then one assertive little one comes up to investigate, and within minutes of being given the all-clear I am swarmed by a mass of tiny warm bodies, all clamouring to be hugged or held or picked up.
We go on a walk into town, me and Auntie Lorna and our gaggle of stumbling, squabbling, hand-holding, humming toddlers. We get to the railway bridge and I watch, fascinated, as they negotiate the steps, backwards, frontwards, on their knees. I pick out the most hesitant ones and hold out a hand, tiny shoes somehow making the big steps.
I get covered in drool, fought over, grabbed, tickled and kissed. I take turns hoisting them onto a hip as I make my way through the morning's routines, doling out juice and tissues for runny noses. I come back exhausted and messy.
But there are really few pleasures akin to a morning being mauled by toddlers.
My hair has been knotted into a mess of tangles, where clumsy fingers were pulled through it. My clothes are stained here and there with the bodily fluids of others. I can still feel the hands that grasped me, many hands, all over. I feel aching and violated.
But pleasantly so.
There are some people that you meet and they stop you in your tracks. Auntie Lorna is one of these. We met her outside of her creche in the township, a wonderfully large grandmother who began to talk up a storm. Everyone called her auntie, from the toddlers pulling at her skirts to the aged nuns she once worked with.
"I get nothing but heartache for running this place," she tells us, as we stand, enthralled, at the edge of her front garden. "A lot of the time, the parents run away without paying. Yoh! But I love children, don't I?" she addresses a wide-eyed girl who is half-hiding behind her, gazing out at us.
We're walking away when Lydia puts both our thoughts into words. We already have full schedules, but there is something so appealing about the idea of little children who don't spit or attempt to stab each other, and Auntie Lorna's all-encompassing embrace.
So that is how I end up at the creche one morning, sitting on an impossibly small chair while a roomful of two and three year olds stare openmouthed at me, their bowls of porridge forgotten. At first I am given a wide berth, but then one assertive little one comes up to investigate, and within minutes of being given the all-clear I am swarmed by a mass of tiny warm bodies, all clamouring to be hugged or held or picked up.
We go on a walk into town, me and Auntie Lorna and our gaggle of stumbling, squabbling, hand-holding, humming toddlers. We get to the railway bridge and I watch, fascinated, as they negotiate the steps, backwards, frontwards, on their knees. I pick out the most hesitant ones and hold out a hand, tiny shoes somehow making the big steps.
I get covered in drool, fought over, grabbed, tickled and kissed. I take turns hoisting them onto a hip as I make my way through the morning's routines, doling out juice and tissues for runny noses. I come back exhausted and messy.
But there are really few pleasures akin to a morning being mauled by toddlers.
Saturday, March 24, 2007
You know you’re not in Ireland when…
… walking down main street, you pass a scowling woman with a green parrot on her shoulder.
You look around for someone to confirm that, yes, it is indeed a parrot. A battered shell of a van packed with schoolchildren and spilling Afro-Carribean music out of its open windows is pulling a jerky U-turn in the middle of the street; a man is hawking a heap of used and many-holed shoes to passersby; a group of immaculately-uniformed girls with impossibly warm woolen jumpers drift by under the harsh glare of the midday African sun. No-one gives the parrot a second glance.
You look at the parrot. The parrot looks back at you.
You decide a nap seems like a very good idea.
You look around for someone to confirm that, yes, it is indeed a parrot. A battered shell of a van packed with schoolchildren and spilling Afro-Carribean music out of its open windows is pulling a jerky U-turn in the middle of the street; a man is hawking a heap of used and many-holed shoes to passersby; a group of immaculately-uniformed girls with impossibly warm woolen jumpers drift by under the harsh glare of the midday African sun. No-one gives the parrot a second glance.
You look at the parrot. The parrot looks back at you.
You decide a nap seems like a very good idea.
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
30. Small Beginnings
I wake at 6am when a door slams somewhere. It's bright already and the Haw-di-daws are haw-di-dawing their strange prehistoric cries outside my window, chasing away further sleep.
I stare at the ceiling for a while, then get dressed, deciding to take a walk before the first aerobics session of the morning. I had joined the gym last week but predictably had yet to make it to a session, so I christen this morning the morning of resolutions.
The campus is asleep as I jog along, red-roofed residences closed to the morning sun. Already busloads of people are arriving to work in the kitchens and residences, here at daybreak even on a public holiday. I think about the day ahead, about how I might slice a pineapple and spend the morning up on the balcony writing a few letters and flagrantly ignoring the assignments I have to do before the vacation. I say hello to the men and women on their way to work, passing them out as I head up the hill towards Settler's Monument where I'll have a place to sit and view Grahamstown before it wakes.
From the top of the hill I can see the figures of people making their way up through the long grass, and below them is the sprawl of town, wreathed in morning mist. I yawn widely, stretch, and start to pick my way back down the rock path.
There is an old woman, perhaps only sixty but with a work-tired body, making a slow progress uphill, a large plastic bag in one hand and a crate balanced on her head. She is sweating heavily in the morning heat.
I'm four steps past her when my brain kicks in. I dither, chiding myself for always being too late in thinking about helping, too shy to offer such a simple thing.
Before I can change my mind I turn back and ask if I can carry some of her things. There is no grace in the moment, but it happens. We walk up in silence, pausing for breath every once in a while, and then she thanks me.
You would think it would be easier the next time, but it's not. I still dither when on my way back down I see another woman struggling under another load, still fight to overcome that hesitation. She is gracious though, to make up for my awkwardness, and chatters in Xhosa about her knees.
She doesn't speak English, but the man walking just behind her does. He trips on one of the rocks that serve as steps, his bags spilling out. He tells us as he picks them up, slowly, painfully, that he had a stroke a few years ago and he shouldn't be doing this, but they asked him in for some extra work today so he came.
We go slower after that.
I say goodbye at the top of the hill. I feel suddenly lighter without the bags to carry, my arms aching a little as I swing them. I realise I've missed the gym session, but I've had my excercise for the day.
And I'm thinking, those men and women shouldn't have to walk with those loads up those hills. I can carry one or two things today, I could arrange a car for tomorrow, but what after that? Day in and day out, on those old legs, with old hearts and old knees.
And it's too much to think about. So I let myself realise that I did one good small thing, the one thing I could do.
And there are worse ways to begin Human Rights Day than that.
I stare at the ceiling for a while, then get dressed, deciding to take a walk before the first aerobics session of the morning. I had joined the gym last week but predictably had yet to make it to a session, so I christen this morning the morning of resolutions.
The campus is asleep as I jog along, red-roofed residences closed to the morning sun. Already busloads of people are arriving to work in the kitchens and residences, here at daybreak even on a public holiday. I think about the day ahead, about how I might slice a pineapple and spend the morning up on the balcony writing a few letters and flagrantly ignoring the assignments I have to do before the vacation. I say hello to the men and women on their way to work, passing them out as I head up the hill towards Settler's Monument where I'll have a place to sit and view Grahamstown before it wakes.
From the top of the hill I can see the figures of people making their way up through the long grass, and below them is the sprawl of town, wreathed in morning mist. I yawn widely, stretch, and start to pick my way back down the rock path.
There is an old woman, perhaps only sixty but with a work-tired body, making a slow progress uphill, a large plastic bag in one hand and a crate balanced on her head. She is sweating heavily in the morning heat.
I'm four steps past her when my brain kicks in. I dither, chiding myself for always being too late in thinking about helping, too shy to offer such a simple thing.
Before I can change my mind I turn back and ask if I can carry some of her things. There is no grace in the moment, but it happens. We walk up in silence, pausing for breath every once in a while, and then she thanks me.
You would think it would be easier the next time, but it's not. I still dither when on my way back down I see another woman struggling under another load, still fight to overcome that hesitation. She is gracious though, to make up for my awkwardness, and chatters in Xhosa about her knees.
She doesn't speak English, but the man walking just behind her does. He trips on one of the rocks that serve as steps, his bags spilling out. He tells us as he picks them up, slowly, painfully, that he had a stroke a few years ago and he shouldn't be doing this, but they asked him in for some extra work today so he came.
We go slower after that.
I say goodbye at the top of the hill. I feel suddenly lighter without the bags to carry, my arms aching a little as I swing them. I realise I've missed the gym session, but I've had my excercise for the day.
And I'm thinking, those men and women shouldn't have to walk with those loads up those hills. I can carry one or two things today, I could arrange a car for tomorrow, but what after that? Day in and day out, on those old legs, with old hearts and old knees.
And it's too much to think about. So I let myself realise that I did one good small thing, the one thing I could do.
And there are worse ways to begin Human Rights Day than that.
Sunday, March 18, 2007
29. The Irish abroad
"What's that?" Numi stops me and points at the sign that reads Dia Duit on the front door.
"It means 'hello.'"
"No, but what language is it?"
"Irish."
"What... Irish is another language?" Numi's forehead crinkles in concentration. "It's not just English... only in Ireland?"
She's not the only one. My linguistics professor for Xhosa seems to be under the same impression. And when I try to explain about a language that everyone learns but no-one speaks, it just gets more confusing.
But for the most part, it's surprisingly easy to be Irish in South Africa. St. Patrick's Day is an eagerly anticipated annual celebration amongst the Rhodents, and as the resident Irish Girl I play up to the part. I stick flags and balloons and Irish phrases up around our res, paint faces, give impromptu history lessons and put on an Irish dancing evening before the big day, thus finally putting two years in the Gaeltacht to good use. I even persuaded the token Brit Sarah to join in, in a joyously momentous reconciliation of our two traditions that had people crying in the aisles. I was a cultural ambassador Síle deValera would have been proud of.
But outside of Ireland, of course, Irish really means only one thing. Alcohol, and potato sackfuls of it.
Now, bear in mind that Rhodes students already know a thing or two about the old drinking. Two days before Paddy's day, Ben describes what the bar is like on a typical Thursday night: boys dancing on the tables, so drunk that they are knocking over glasses, broken glass all over the seats and floor. Most weekday nights, there are groups of students lying on the street in a drunken stupor, unable to walk home unaided. I know I'm supposed to be used to this, but I'm not.
As Paddy's Day wore on, I began to get a little apprehensive. After a morning tea-and-cake session at the senior citizens club - one of the many little adventures our house committee organise throughout the year - where I met a woman called Shirley who remembered cutting up little harps at convent school in honour of the saint himself, we pass by the Rat and Parrot, favoured destination of students, second only to their beds.
A boy with large cardboard shamrocks stuck to him is swaying outside, a pint of green beer in hand. Inside is a roaring mass of people and green decorations, and evidence of many already-spilled glasses of Guinness.
"Sise," I say to the girl beside me, "I may be the worst Irishwoman abroad ever, but I don't think I want to go out tonight."
The first years in my res are aghast when they come calling at my door later on, in search of costume material.
"I went out last night," I tell them as I draw shamrocks on their arms and find badges to pin to them. "We had pizza and champagne on the lawns. Tonight you go have fun for me."
I stayed in and finished my assignments, and had camomile tea delivered by a thoughtful housemate, like the old woman I am.
And I may have my citizenship revoked for saying this, but I'm not a bit sorry I missed it.
"It means 'hello.'"
"No, but what language is it?"
"Irish."
"What... Irish is another language?" Numi's forehead crinkles in concentration. "It's not just English... only in Ireland?"
She's not the only one. My linguistics professor for Xhosa seems to be under the same impression. And when I try to explain about a language that everyone learns but no-one speaks, it just gets more confusing.
But for the most part, it's surprisingly easy to be Irish in South Africa. St. Patrick's Day is an eagerly anticipated annual celebration amongst the Rhodents, and as the resident Irish Girl I play up to the part. I stick flags and balloons and Irish phrases up around our res, paint faces, give impromptu history lessons and put on an Irish dancing evening before the big day, thus finally putting two years in the Gaeltacht to good use. I even persuaded the token Brit Sarah to join in, in a joyously momentous reconciliation of our two traditions that had people crying in the aisles. I was a cultural ambassador Síle deValera would have been proud of.
But outside of Ireland, of course, Irish really means only one thing. Alcohol, and potato sackfuls of it.
Now, bear in mind that Rhodes students already know a thing or two about the old drinking. Two days before Paddy's day, Ben describes what the bar is like on a typical Thursday night: boys dancing on the tables, so drunk that they are knocking over glasses, broken glass all over the seats and floor. Most weekday nights, there are groups of students lying on the street in a drunken stupor, unable to walk home unaided. I know I'm supposed to be used to this, but I'm not.
As Paddy's Day wore on, I began to get a little apprehensive. After a morning tea-and-cake session at the senior citizens club - one of the many little adventures our house committee organise throughout the year - where I met a woman called Shirley who remembered cutting up little harps at convent school in honour of the saint himself, we pass by the Rat and Parrot, favoured destination of students, second only to their beds.
A boy with large cardboard shamrocks stuck to him is swaying outside, a pint of green beer in hand. Inside is a roaring mass of people and green decorations, and evidence of many already-spilled glasses of Guinness.
"Sise," I say to the girl beside me, "I may be the worst Irishwoman abroad ever, but I don't think I want to go out tonight."
The first years in my res are aghast when they come calling at my door later on, in search of costume material.
"I went out last night," I tell them as I draw shamrocks on their arms and find badges to pin to them. "We had pizza and champagne on the lawns. Tonight you go have fun for me."
I stayed in and finished my assignments, and had camomile tea delivered by a thoughtful housemate, like the old woman I am.
And I may have my citizenship revoked for saying this, but I'm not a bit sorry I missed it.
Friday, March 16, 2007
28. Breaking Bread
Mango spots me on the way back up High Street, and is by my elbow before I have seen him coming.
"You'll buy me dinner tomorrow night," he says.
I stop and take a few steps back.
"You can't tell me to buy you dinner," I frown.
"Yes," he says, nodding emphatically. "Otherwise I won't eat."
And yes of course he can, because otherwise he won't eat. But it's complicated, it's always complicated. Why Mango and not any of the other hungry boys? If it's one Saturday dinner, then will it start being every Saturday dinner? What happens when I leave during the vacations, or at the end of the year?
I come to Lydia with a suggestion, because somehow Mango is a joint issue with us, part of the larger problem of poverty that we're trying to solve in our heads. We will offer to take him to eat with us at the dining hall every Sunday, on the condition that we see him at Amasango school during the week.
When Annalene, one of the girls from Lydia's floor, hears she frowns a little.
"Are you sure it's the right thing to do?" she asks.
"No," I say. "But it's not one of the very wrong things." I tick our hard-won lessons off on my fingers. "One, it's not food during the week. If he goes to school he'll get three meals a day during the week. Giving food during the week takes away a crucial incentive to go to school. Two, it's not money. Money goes on glue, and drugs aren't allowed at school, so they get withdrawals and leave early."
It's taken a lot of learning to get even this far. A lot of mistakes.
Last week we took sweets to school. It seemed simple: they would never usually have them, and we had the money to buy them. But it was wrong from the moment I arrived.
What's in the bag, they wanted to know, clamouring around, poking at it, hands out. It changes everything; we stop being people, we are just the thing they want. They wheedle and beg and push each other out of the way, and it feels like all of the getting to know each other has been undone in a few minutes.
Even when we finally leave it isn't over. One of the kids who doesn't go to school spies the bag and follows us down the road, begging and pleading. Go to school, we tell him. We have an argument in the street, but I prefer the arguments to the begging - arguments are real. We learn to be tough, to stick to our position. No money, no food during the week, no concessions to anyone who is not at school.
Sometimes we end up back at square one. Mango doesn't show for his dinner date. Another boy we promised to get bread for has disappeared when we get back, and we spend twenty minutes looking for him with no luck. We question whether we give for our own conscience, or for their good. We tell ourselves it's not supposed to be easy. We wonder.
"I guess it's supposed to be hard," Lydia says wearily. "We're on a year-long accelerated programme to learn about all the things we didn't have to at home. Forget the course, this is the education."
And sometimes, when you're not looking, it is easy.
Yesterday a boy asked to finish my milk, and I say sure, because the question was sincere and direct and the milk is healthy, and we smile at each other and it's good, suddenly.
Today I had bought a loaf of banana bread, still hot from the oven, and a nine-year-old who introduces himself later as Zenethembu points at it, asking for some. We find a stoep out of the light drizzle and I break off a chunk for him and some for Lydia, and we sit and talk and munch away.
And it comes to me then that the part of it that seems right is not the giving, but the sharing. I remember the biblical encouragement to break bread with your fellow man, and that is what seems most apt at that moment, huddled together watching the rain and sharing what we have.
"You'll buy me dinner tomorrow night," he says.
I stop and take a few steps back.
"You can't tell me to buy you dinner," I frown.
"Yes," he says, nodding emphatically. "Otherwise I won't eat."
And yes of course he can, because otherwise he won't eat. But it's complicated, it's always complicated. Why Mango and not any of the other hungry boys? If it's one Saturday dinner, then will it start being every Saturday dinner? What happens when I leave during the vacations, or at the end of the year?
I come to Lydia with a suggestion, because somehow Mango is a joint issue with us, part of the larger problem of poverty that we're trying to solve in our heads. We will offer to take him to eat with us at the dining hall every Sunday, on the condition that we see him at Amasango school during the week.
When Annalene, one of the girls from Lydia's floor, hears she frowns a little.
"Are you sure it's the right thing to do?" she asks.
"No," I say. "But it's not one of the very wrong things." I tick our hard-won lessons off on my fingers. "One, it's not food during the week. If he goes to school he'll get three meals a day during the week. Giving food during the week takes away a crucial incentive to go to school. Two, it's not money. Money goes on glue, and drugs aren't allowed at school, so they get withdrawals and leave early."
It's taken a lot of learning to get even this far. A lot of mistakes.
Last week we took sweets to school. It seemed simple: they would never usually have them, and we had the money to buy them. But it was wrong from the moment I arrived.
What's in the bag, they wanted to know, clamouring around, poking at it, hands out. It changes everything; we stop being people, we are just the thing they want. They wheedle and beg and push each other out of the way, and it feels like all of the getting to know each other has been undone in a few minutes.
Even when we finally leave it isn't over. One of the kids who doesn't go to school spies the bag and follows us down the road, begging and pleading. Go to school, we tell him. We have an argument in the street, but I prefer the arguments to the begging - arguments are real. We learn to be tough, to stick to our position. No money, no food during the week, no concessions to anyone who is not at school.
Sometimes we end up back at square one. Mango doesn't show for his dinner date. Another boy we promised to get bread for has disappeared when we get back, and we spend twenty minutes looking for him with no luck. We question whether we give for our own conscience, or for their good. We tell ourselves it's not supposed to be easy. We wonder.
"I guess it's supposed to be hard," Lydia says wearily. "We're on a year-long accelerated programme to learn about all the things we didn't have to at home. Forget the course, this is the education."
And sometimes, when you're not looking, it is easy.
Yesterday a boy asked to finish my milk, and I say sure, because the question was sincere and direct and the milk is healthy, and we smile at each other and it's good, suddenly.
Today I had bought a loaf of banana bread, still hot from the oven, and a nine-year-old who introduces himself later as Zenethembu points at it, asking for some. We find a stoep out of the light drizzle and I break off a chunk for him and some for Lydia, and we sit and talk and munch away.
And it comes to me then that the part of it that seems right is not the giving, but the sharing. I remember the biblical encouragement to break bread with your fellow man, and that is what seems most apt at that moment, huddled together watching the rain and sharing what we have.
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
27. Between shifts
There are a group of women outside on the lawn by the dining hall, lying on their bellies under the shade of the trees in their white smocks and white hair-caps, twirling blades of grass in their fingers. The lunch shift is over, and the dinner shift still a comfortable distance away, and so for these few hours work has no hold over them, and their laughter keeps me company as I make my way across campus.
Sunday, March 11, 2007
26. The Opposite of Sex
We’ve had several drinks over the course of the evening, myself and the other Rotary scholars, which is why we agree so enthusiastically. As four highly competitive people with zero chance of winning the quiz, alcohol had been cheerfully embraced as a distraction from our abysmal performance, and now we needed something to remind us how young and fabulous we still were.
Braai, my res, Ben says. Let’s go.
It’s in full swing by the time we arrive, trestle tables laid out with cups and salad fixings and boxed wine, plastic garden chairs scattered out under the night sky, a huddle of young men staking out their territory at the grill. Someone has erected a canopy over one side of the lawn, and underneath it a group of students are dancing, presided over by a boy at a laptop and speakers who nods his head to the music.
But it’s not just dancing. Before Ben has finished making some quick introductions, I’m already being led by the hand to the impromptu dance floor. For a few beats I’m lost, but then I pick up the moves, stomping and twisting in unison with the crowd. Somewhere to the jazz side of line dancing, it's a group event, celebrating just being there together on a warm autumn night.
I had dressed up for the quiz, a rather formal fundraiser at a tennis club, and I had forgotten how much I would stand out at a casual barbeque. I get rid of the heels to dance barefoot on the grass, but I still attract some attention.
Since arriving at Rhodes, I had wholeheartedly embraced the scruffy student lifestyle. It's not that I stopped looking in the mirror, but make-up or co-ordinated clothing has been relegated to another time and place. There is too much to do and no-one to impress. So it's a bit of a shock to have men approach me on the dancefloor. It's not just the flirtation, it's that apart from my classmates and other Rotary scholars, I've become unused to speaking to men my age. Girls and boys do not mix casually at Rhodes.
When I decide to leave early, a very serious young man from Ethiopia insists on accompanying me out to the road. And I'm aware that I can't quite believe he is sincere about meeting up as friends, perhaps because I have seen so little of true friendship between the sexes here. At the dining hall, I see only girls sitting with girls and boys sitting with boys. I don't have mixed groups of friends. I don't have any South African male friends.
There's an atmosphere here I don't like, something that started with the Serenades and has continued on through the weeks since. And it has something to do with the boy who makes comments that can only be described as lecherous every time he sees Lydia, in a way that makes my skin crawl. And it has something to do with what happened last week.
There was a rape on campus, outside the sports club after a social evening, with people all around. It's the second one since the start of term five weeks ago. Rape happens quite regularly, I'm told, sometimes it's students, sometimes not. Four students raped a girl by the library steps last year.
An article is written about it; we are warned not to be so blazé about walking around alone at night. And I wonder about that boy who talks to Lydia that way, I wonder about a place where students feel they can get away with that on the library steps, and how I feel about living in this place where it seems safer to stay scruffy.
Braai, my res, Ben says. Let’s go.
It’s in full swing by the time we arrive, trestle tables laid out with cups and salad fixings and boxed wine, plastic garden chairs scattered out under the night sky, a huddle of young men staking out their territory at the grill. Someone has erected a canopy over one side of the lawn, and underneath it a group of students are dancing, presided over by a boy at a laptop and speakers who nods his head to the music.
But it’s not just dancing. Before Ben has finished making some quick introductions, I’m already being led by the hand to the impromptu dance floor. For a few beats I’m lost, but then I pick up the moves, stomping and twisting in unison with the crowd. Somewhere to the jazz side of line dancing, it's a group event, celebrating just being there together on a warm autumn night.
I had dressed up for the quiz, a rather formal fundraiser at a tennis club, and I had forgotten how much I would stand out at a casual barbeque. I get rid of the heels to dance barefoot on the grass, but I still attract some attention.
Since arriving at Rhodes, I had wholeheartedly embraced the scruffy student lifestyle. It's not that I stopped looking in the mirror, but make-up or co-ordinated clothing has been relegated to another time and place. There is too much to do and no-one to impress. So it's a bit of a shock to have men approach me on the dancefloor. It's not just the flirtation, it's that apart from my classmates and other Rotary scholars, I've become unused to speaking to men my age. Girls and boys do not mix casually at Rhodes.
When I decide to leave early, a very serious young man from Ethiopia insists on accompanying me out to the road. And I'm aware that I can't quite believe he is sincere about meeting up as friends, perhaps because I have seen so little of true friendship between the sexes here. At the dining hall, I see only girls sitting with girls and boys sitting with boys. I don't have mixed groups of friends. I don't have any South African male friends.
There's an atmosphere here I don't like, something that started with the Serenades and has continued on through the weeks since. And it has something to do with the boy who makes comments that can only be described as lecherous every time he sees Lydia, in a way that makes my skin crawl. And it has something to do with what happened last week.
There was a rape on campus, outside the sports club after a social evening, with people all around. It's the second one since the start of term five weeks ago. Rape happens quite regularly, I'm told, sometimes it's students, sometimes not. Four students raped a girl by the library steps last year.
An article is written about it; we are warned not to be so blazé about walking around alone at night. And I wonder about that boy who talks to Lydia that way, I wonder about a place where students feel they can get away with that on the library steps, and how I feel about living in this place where it seems safer to stay scruffy.
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
25. Meeting Mandela
He was an accidental acquaintance; I was lost amid the quiet superiority of the Law School, retracing meandering pathways past unmarked entrances, and he had a reassuring bulk about him. Mandela is tall, much taller than me, a gentle mountain of a man with eyes that smile. And, crucially, he knew where my lecture room was.
I don't blink when he tells me his name; every second rock in South Africa has been named after the patron saint of this troubled land. Following in Mandela's genial wake is a slow process, as fellow students exchange pleasantries with him every couple of yards and I am treated to round after round of introductions.
It turns out we are in the same class together. Apart from Mandela and myself, there are ten other students of varying ages and backgrounds. There is Daniel, a white-haired priest from Malawi, who arrived with his minder, a man who appeared and did most of the talking for him and who disappeared promptly the next day. There is Moses, an old ANC member from Soweto who fled to Botswana in his twenties and made a life there as a teacher, and who is now returning to rediscover a life here. There is Kulwahigo, a quiet boy from Tanzania who barely makes eye-contact but always has something interesting to say; Hacien from Algeria; Gaeton and Aymeric from France; Remie from Serria Leone; Nadia from Cameroon; and Mary and Kgoso from South Africa.
We fit around one large table, in the front room of the Politics Department. During lectures I watch through diamond-paned windows as the branches outside wave in the breeze, and we argue with the lecturer and talk over one another and listen as some of us share life stories that intersect with the histories we are studying.
Mandela is my favourite, the one who gives me a wink when he arrives late to the table. We talk about what we did at the weekend, and that's how I find out about his business, his farm, his trips to India. I tell him he has to take us out one day to see the farm, a field trip for the class.
I'm talking to someone else one day about him and they say: oh yes, that's Nelson Mandela's grandson.
I spend a few days trying out phrases in my head. I have it all figured out, exactly what to say to tell him that I know, and I don't see him any differently. To demonstrate how wonderfully unaffected I am by MEETING A RELATIVE OF MANDELA, HOLY COW - I mean, honestly, isn't that why we all came to South Africa?
The interior monologue goes on for a while, but there never seems to be a good time to bring it up. It's one morning at Law, when I'm using my elbow to shunt him aside so another friend can take a seat, that I realise I don't really need to say anything. It matters and it doesn't matter.
And I don't think he'd mind that it gives me something to tell the folks at home.
I don't blink when he tells me his name; every second rock in South Africa has been named after the patron saint of this troubled land. Following in Mandela's genial wake is a slow process, as fellow students exchange pleasantries with him every couple of yards and I am treated to round after round of introductions.
It turns out we are in the same class together. Apart from Mandela and myself, there are ten other students of varying ages and backgrounds. There is Daniel, a white-haired priest from Malawi, who arrived with his minder, a man who appeared and did most of the talking for him and who disappeared promptly the next day. There is Moses, an old ANC member from Soweto who fled to Botswana in his twenties and made a life there as a teacher, and who is now returning to rediscover a life here. There is Kulwahigo, a quiet boy from Tanzania who barely makes eye-contact but always has something interesting to say; Hacien from Algeria; Gaeton and Aymeric from France; Remie from Serria Leone; Nadia from Cameroon; and Mary and Kgoso from South Africa.
We fit around one large table, in the front room of the Politics Department. During lectures I watch through diamond-paned windows as the branches outside wave in the breeze, and we argue with the lecturer and talk over one another and listen as some of us share life stories that intersect with the histories we are studying.
Mandela is my favourite, the one who gives me a wink when he arrives late to the table. We talk about what we did at the weekend, and that's how I find out about his business, his farm, his trips to India. I tell him he has to take us out one day to see the farm, a field trip for the class.
I'm talking to someone else one day about him and they say: oh yes, that's Nelson Mandela's grandson.
I spend a few days trying out phrases in my head. I have it all figured out, exactly what to say to tell him that I know, and I don't see him any differently. To demonstrate how wonderfully unaffected I am by MEETING A RELATIVE OF MANDELA, HOLY COW - I mean, honestly, isn't that why we all came to South Africa?
The interior monologue goes on for a while, but there never seems to be a good time to bring it up. It's one morning at Law, when I'm using my elbow to shunt him aside so another friend can take a seat, that I realise I don't really need to say anything. It matters and it doesn't matter.
And I don't think he'd mind that it gives me something to tell the folks at home.
Monday, March 05, 2007
24. Poverty tourism
I have a beautiful camera. It is sleek, smart and sophisticated, with pinsharp focus and a colour depth that makes grown men cry. It could be operated by a below-average-intelligence one-handed partially blind monkey and still produce mouthwatering images. It has been passed around many sticky-fingered children, children who usually manage to break things just by looking at them, children who come with large red warning labels and who leave a litter of destruction in their wake. And it has always come back in one piece with a story to tell.
It is sitting in my wardrobe, where it has spent most of the last month. I have a beautiful camera, and I don’t feel like I can take it anywhere.
It’s not just that it is visibly, clearly expensive, the equivalent of a year’s wages or more here. It’s not just that it is large and intimidating, the closest thing to a paparazzi weapon that most people will have seen.
It’s that the photographs I most want to take, I feel I can’t. It would feel wrong. Because it is wrong.
There are all sorts of power relationships involved in the taking of images. And distance; there’s a way in which a photo can be a step backwards, or a glass wall going down. I don’t want to go to places and meet people as someone behind that glass wall.
I don’t want to be a poverty tourist.
The township is not an attraction, this country is not an attraction, it is a home. I am only a visitor here, and a visitor cannot take hospitality for granted. I won’t make a home and a people into a postcard. Or, at least, I'll try not to.
Let me draw you pictures with words instead: of the riot of stalls and materials along Bathurst Street; of the pineapple sellers dozing under tattered sun-umbrellas; of the long stretch of the old railway line that tired people walk down, belongings balanced on their heads; of little waving hands through a classroom window, mimicking my hand movements; of the bright glimpse of paisley armchairs and carefully draped laced tablecloths through an open door of a paint-peeling one-storey township house; of two dew drops on a black-skinned hand, smooth satin against roughened lichen of a milkwood branch, and the deep green of the bush beyond.
I may make trite observations, or come to wrong conclusions. I may be an unwelcome visitor at times, or intrude upon places I'm not wanted. I will struggle with seeing people, not poverty, and I won't get it right all of the time, or even most of the time.
But I will go out there and be in it. And for now the camera will stay in the wardrobe.
Thursday, March 01, 2007
23. Playing a part
A girl approaches us at the traffic lights, with a cardboard box of mealie maize under her arm. Her name is Joyce. She recognizes Lydia from earlier in the day, when she warned her about leaving her handbag open on the main street.
We exchange a few pleasantries, and it’s all very easy for a moment, until Joyce asks us for money for her school fees.
Countless times every day I am asked for money. Thin women lying on the side of the road in a bundle of ragged clothes, thin legs out in front of them. Hunted-looking boys of nine or ten, children who have lived on the streets for years. Old men clutching plastic bags who shuffle slowly through the bars with low, apologetic voices.
Countless times I refuse. Or I just look away.
They tell us not to give – the university, the locals. There are too many in need, too many that can’t be helped by a few Rand. Better by far to give to an organization, they say.
Even food is discouraged. One night Lydia and Sarah had asked a pair of street boys to share a pizza with them in a local cafe. Mango, the talkative one, with sharp cheekbones and a winning way, explained while he ate. About the glue addictions the six year-olds have, and the things they do for money if they can’t get it begging. All this the girls had heard before; everyone knows the street children are overlooked, anything can and does happen to them. But as the boys wrapped the last slices up carefully in napkins to take back to their friends, they offered to buy more pizza.
“No,” Mango said, shaking his head. “Just these slices are fine. Any more and they’ll sell them, for glue.”
Joyce is talking now, about the expense of going to school, about how she doesn’t want to be on the streets but she can’t find the money to go to school. Lydia and I look at each other. I know exactly what she’s feeling; a squirming discomfort, a bottomless sort of helplessness, a sickening guilt. We want to be anywhere but there.
So does Joyce.
It's that you stop being a person. You become actors in a timeless theatre-piece with set scripts, the worn lines rolling off your tongue - please; I just need; I can't. No-one escapes from it.
After a while, Lydia finds a way through the conversation. She offers to go with Joyce to school, to pay her fees directly. They arrange to meet the next morning.
Joyce never shows.
******************
If money is too complicated a thing to give, time is surprisingly easy. Rhodes runs a community volunteer programme, so most of us signed up for one of the many projects operating in Grahamstown.
Are you sure you want this one? they asked me, giving me a once-over.
I nod, yes.
The Amasango school for street children is housed in an old railway station, on a patch of bare dirt ringed with wire fencing. Myself and a girl called Kate go together. It's only a hundred yards from the end of the High Street, but it's beyond the no-go line that exists in our heads, so we get a lift.
When we arrive a boy of eleven saunters up to the padlocked gate, a set of keys hanging from his finger. He looks at us and walks away. Eventually he comes back, unlocks the gate and walks off again without a backward glance.
There's a scuffle going on inside one of the classrooms. One of the students brought in earphones, and the headmistress, a formidable woman called Jane, is having some difficulty parting the boy from them.
"Step back," she says to us. One of the security guards that are always present at the school steps in to help, prising the boy away from Jane. A lone earphone goes rolling by my feet.
There is a short tour of the crowded classrooms, most of which are in slight disarray. It's hot and lunchtime is approaching. One teacher has her hands over her eyes, tiredly resigned for the day. The boy with the earphones follows us and repeatedly presses up against Jane, demanding something in isiXhosa. She calls for security each time, as he stands in doorways and blocks her way.
"Sorry about this," Jane says. "Today is.... perhaps a slightly above-average crazy day. One of the students was arrested yesterday for stabbing someone so they're all a little tense." She smiles cheerfully, and continues on to the next classroom.
Kate looks at me. "Having second thoughts?" she asks.
****************
Back at res, Lydia and I discuss Amasango, and Mango, and what sort of activities we want to run at the school.
"Oh, I saw Joyce," Lydia says. "She used to go to Amasango but she's at the secondary school now, she came back this afternoon to talk to Jane."
"Oh?" I raise my eyebrows.
"Yep. We're ok now, I helped her with her homework."
We both settle back against the wall together in silence.
That part wasn't in the script.
We exchange a few pleasantries, and it’s all very easy for a moment, until Joyce asks us for money for her school fees.
Countless times every day I am asked for money. Thin women lying on the side of the road in a bundle of ragged clothes, thin legs out in front of them. Hunted-looking boys of nine or ten, children who have lived on the streets for years. Old men clutching plastic bags who shuffle slowly through the bars with low, apologetic voices.
Countless times I refuse. Or I just look away.
They tell us not to give – the university, the locals. There are too many in need, too many that can’t be helped by a few Rand. Better by far to give to an organization, they say.
Even food is discouraged. One night Lydia and Sarah had asked a pair of street boys to share a pizza with them in a local cafe. Mango, the talkative one, with sharp cheekbones and a winning way, explained while he ate. About the glue addictions the six year-olds have, and the things they do for money if they can’t get it begging. All this the girls had heard before; everyone knows the street children are overlooked, anything can and does happen to them. But as the boys wrapped the last slices up carefully in napkins to take back to their friends, they offered to buy more pizza.
“No,” Mango said, shaking his head. “Just these slices are fine. Any more and they’ll sell them, for glue.”
Joyce is talking now, about the expense of going to school, about how she doesn’t want to be on the streets but she can’t find the money to go to school. Lydia and I look at each other. I know exactly what she’s feeling; a squirming discomfort, a bottomless sort of helplessness, a sickening guilt. We want to be anywhere but there.
So does Joyce.
It's that you stop being a person. You become actors in a timeless theatre-piece with set scripts, the worn lines rolling off your tongue - please; I just need; I can't. No-one escapes from it.
After a while, Lydia finds a way through the conversation. She offers to go with Joyce to school, to pay her fees directly. They arrange to meet the next morning.
Joyce never shows.
******************
If money is too complicated a thing to give, time is surprisingly easy. Rhodes runs a community volunteer programme, so most of us signed up for one of the many projects operating in Grahamstown.
Are you sure you want this one? they asked me, giving me a once-over.
I nod, yes.
The Amasango school for street children is housed in an old railway station, on a patch of bare dirt ringed with wire fencing. Myself and a girl called Kate go together. It's only a hundred yards from the end of the High Street, but it's beyond the no-go line that exists in our heads, so we get a lift.
When we arrive a boy of eleven saunters up to the padlocked gate, a set of keys hanging from his finger. He looks at us and walks away. Eventually he comes back, unlocks the gate and walks off again without a backward glance.
There's a scuffle going on inside one of the classrooms. One of the students brought in earphones, and the headmistress, a formidable woman called Jane, is having some difficulty parting the boy from them.
"Step back," she says to us. One of the security guards that are always present at the school steps in to help, prising the boy away from Jane. A lone earphone goes rolling by my feet.
There is a short tour of the crowded classrooms, most of which are in slight disarray. It's hot and lunchtime is approaching. One teacher has her hands over her eyes, tiredly resigned for the day. The boy with the earphones follows us and repeatedly presses up against Jane, demanding something in isiXhosa. She calls for security each time, as he stands in doorways and blocks her way.
"Sorry about this," Jane says. "Today is.... perhaps a slightly above-average crazy day. One of the students was arrested yesterday for stabbing someone so they're all a little tense." She smiles cheerfully, and continues on to the next classroom.
Kate looks at me. "Having second thoughts?" she asks.
****************
Back at res, Lydia and I discuss Amasango, and Mango, and what sort of activities we want to run at the school.
"Oh, I saw Joyce," Lydia says. "She used to go to Amasango but she's at the secondary school now, she came back this afternoon to talk to Jane."
"Oh?" I raise my eyebrows.
"Yep. We're ok now, I helped her with her homework."
We both settle back against the wall together in silence.
That part wasn't in the script.
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
22. Encountering nature, and human nature
Everyone is looking at my foot. I'm acutely aware of the stubby toes and the chipped nailpolish, and just how ridiculous the situation I have gotten myself into is.
"Yep," Elliot says, wiping some sweat off his brow. "Yessir. That's going to be tricky."
We all look up the mountain trail, then back down at my foot. Currently separated from the sandal its supposed to be wearing.
We're in Cape Town, at the base of Lion's Head mountain. It's the beginning of a weekend-long Orientation programme for all the (mostly American) students in South Africa on Rotary scholarships, and our first activity is a brisk climb before sunset. And I've just broken my sandals.
I sigh, kick off the sandals, then hike up my skirts.
"Don't worry," I say. "I'm Irish." Or something to that effect.
The Americans look horrified, but it's actually quite pleasant, feeling the sunwarmed orange dust between my toes as we take in the views of the sparking bay below. The bare rock of the last few feet is wonderful. It reminds me of clambering across the rocks in Skerries harbour, feeling for toeholds and relying on an inner balance, an understanding between you and the earth. I feel like I am truly on the mountain then.
"Crazy Irish," they shake their heads, when I try to explain.
Coming down is another matter. The stones that side are small and sharp, so my graceful goat-like canter becomes a stilted puttering. Ben, a fellow Rhodent from Mississippi, gives me a pained look. He's from the South, where they still open doors and pull out chairs, so a maiden in distress is an intolerable sight for him.
"Get on my back, I'll carry you," he pleads.
"No. Going. To. Make. It." I manage through gritted teeth. "Stubborn. Sorry."
Ben is clearly torn between two Southern dictates, one part of him insisting that what he's seeing requires manly gallant action, the other part reminding him that he can't give help where it's not wanted. He compromises by staying by my side the whole way down, wincing and offering light conversation to while away the time.
Brenda from Seattle, meanwhile, thumbs her nose at me and gallops on ahead. South, meet the North.
I don't think I had realised until then how very different Americans are from each other. I'm used to thinking of them in a block - loud voices, white teeth, large tips. This group of scholars kick dust all over that notion.
Desiree, from New Mexico, speaks English, German and Spanish and dances a better Irish jig than me. Lyndsee, from Chicago, does a mean line in swearwords and mirrored goth clothing. Lisa, from Georgia, confides in me as we swing our legs off the deck of the yacht club that as a Southern girl she's expected to be always smiling and polite. I'm not very good at it, she grins.
And Ally, from Jersey, is the most humble and sweet of people and refers to herself as a bit of a dork. She and I sit on the lawns of a farm in Stellenbosch, drinking pear juice and getting excited about youth work and drama activities. It turns out she and I work in the same field, thousands of miles apart-
"But young people are the same everwhere, hey," she says.
****************
After evenings sitting in the Kirstenbosch botantical gardens listening to live jazz, nights dancing on the sweaty, thumping balconies of Kloof street, and mornings rowing out at the marina, we bid a sad adieu to Cape Town and settle back into small-town campus life. And I find I'm glad to be home.
I'm out at the Amasango school, as they get ready for lunch. One of the scuffed classrooms gets cleared of tables, and all the chairs are moved in. A great tin pot of samp and beans is dished out, one plate at a time.
I'm standing by the doorway, swatting away flies and listening to the clatter and scraping of chairlegs in the oppressive heat. A boy in a holed shirt beside me is hopping up and down in agitation, anticipating his turn. He has a paper hat on his head, made from a ruled page of a notebook.
I point at it. "Did you make that?"
A cluster of boys start to explain how easy it is, and offer to show me. The hat gets passed into my hands.
In biro there are messages scrawled on it. Nosizwe loves Bulelani, one of them reads.
I think of all the times I've seen the same message on pencilcases and schoolbags and bathroom walls of all the schools I've ever been to.
I guess Ally was right.
"Yep," Elliot says, wiping some sweat off his brow. "Yessir. That's going to be tricky."
We all look up the mountain trail, then back down at my foot. Currently separated from the sandal its supposed to be wearing.
We're in Cape Town, at the base of Lion's Head mountain. It's the beginning of a weekend-long Orientation programme for all the (mostly American) students in South Africa on Rotary scholarships, and our first activity is a brisk climb before sunset. And I've just broken my sandals.
I sigh, kick off the sandals, then hike up my skirts.
"Don't worry," I say. "I'm Irish." Or something to that effect.
The Americans look horrified, but it's actually quite pleasant, feeling the sunwarmed orange dust between my toes as we take in the views of the sparking bay below. The bare rock of the last few feet is wonderful. It reminds me of clambering across the rocks in Skerries harbour, feeling for toeholds and relying on an inner balance, an understanding between you and the earth. I feel like I am truly on the mountain then.
"Crazy Irish," they shake their heads, when I try to explain.
Coming down is another matter. The stones that side are small and sharp, so my graceful goat-like canter becomes a stilted puttering. Ben, a fellow Rhodent from Mississippi, gives me a pained look. He's from the South, where they still open doors and pull out chairs, so a maiden in distress is an intolerable sight for him.
"Get on my back, I'll carry you," he pleads.
"No. Going. To. Make. It." I manage through gritted teeth. "Stubborn. Sorry."
Ben is clearly torn between two Southern dictates, one part of him insisting that what he's seeing requires manly gallant action, the other part reminding him that he can't give help where it's not wanted. He compromises by staying by my side the whole way down, wincing and offering light conversation to while away the time.
Brenda from Seattle, meanwhile, thumbs her nose at me and gallops on ahead. South, meet the North.
I don't think I had realised until then how very different Americans are from each other. I'm used to thinking of them in a block - loud voices, white teeth, large tips. This group of scholars kick dust all over that notion.
Desiree, from New Mexico, speaks English, German and Spanish and dances a better Irish jig than me. Lyndsee, from Chicago, does a mean line in swearwords and mirrored goth clothing. Lisa, from Georgia, confides in me as we swing our legs off the deck of the yacht club that as a Southern girl she's expected to be always smiling and polite. I'm not very good at it, she grins.
And Ally, from Jersey, is the most humble and sweet of people and refers to herself as a bit of a dork. She and I sit on the lawns of a farm in Stellenbosch, drinking pear juice and getting excited about youth work and drama activities. It turns out she and I work in the same field, thousands of miles apart-
"But young people are the same everwhere, hey," she says.
****************
After evenings sitting in the Kirstenbosch botantical gardens listening to live jazz, nights dancing on the sweaty, thumping balconies of Kloof street, and mornings rowing out at the marina, we bid a sad adieu to Cape Town and settle back into small-town campus life. And I find I'm glad to be home.
I'm out at the Amasango school, as they get ready for lunch. One of the scuffed classrooms gets cleared of tables, and all the chairs are moved in. A great tin pot of samp and beans is dished out, one plate at a time.
I'm standing by the doorway, swatting away flies and listening to the clatter and scraping of chairlegs in the oppressive heat. A boy in a holed shirt beside me is hopping up and down in agitation, anticipating his turn. He has a paper hat on his head, made from a ruled page of a notebook.
I point at it. "Did you make that?"
A cluster of boys start to explain how easy it is, and offer to show me. The hat gets passed into my hands.
In biro there are messages scrawled on it. Nosizwe loves Bulelani, one of them reads.
I think of all the times I've seen the same message on pencilcases and schoolbags and bathroom walls of all the schools I've ever been to.
I guess Ally was right.
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
21. Hand to Mouth
Today was not a good day.
I'm back in my room now, and that's about as far as I can get with it. But that's not good enough. So let's begin where everything must, back at the beginning.
Este picked us up in the morning, Ben and I. We take a road I have never been on, and a few hundred yards down it we pick up two men in faded t-shirts and jeans. They were waiting outside a corrugated tin trailer; a sign above the open end reads High-Class Hair, and inside there are two girls waiting on stools and the shadowy movements of a hairdresser attending a third. Across the road is a blockhouse shop with no windows, covered with a peeling mural for Cadbury's Dairymilk. It looks abandoned, but it's not.
The men direct us onwards, through streets lined with concrete one-storey houses. They are about twice the size of my bedroom.
The road becomes a potholed dirt track, but the houses continue, multiplying. Some are just patchwork contructions of tin in varying shades of rust, canted to one side. Some are made of dried mud and knarled sticks. Goats and skinny, high-bellied dogs are picking their way along the edges of the yards.
A series of images:
A pair of elderly women selling pineapples from a battered bus shelter.
Three boys playing checkers in the shade at the back of a house doubling as a petrol station, sitting on upturned plastic crates.
A line of clothes hung out along the wire fencing around a house, red-orange-yellow-green-blue, carefully rainbowed in order.
Dust. And scrub yards. And more goats.
This is Extension Six of the Grahamstown township. The unpaved streets are numbered, not named; easier for the planners. I'm trying, but I can't begin to describe what it is like.
We are there to visit a small plot of scruband that will be turned into a nursery for tree seedlings. Under the supervision of the two men with us, who both live in the township, the seedlings are to be sold locally. It sounded like a good project, but now that I am here, I wonder.
Trees. I look around. It seems an odd place to start.
But then where do you start?
On the way back, Este stops at the house of her gardener, Mr. Pilau. He hasn't come to work for the last few days, and she is worried. He has no phone, so she couldn't call.
While she unwinds his chickenwire gate, I sit in the car and watch as a woman in a torn blue shirt fills a basin with dirty water. There are other basins in front of her house, for washing clothes. She comes out of her garden and tips the water out onto the verge, a long brown sluice in the midday sun.
Este comes back out to the car. She has tears in her eyes.
Mr. Pilau is very sick. She thinks he has tuberculouses. She is sure he won't be back to garden for her again.
I knew it would happen one day, she says. He is very old.
We leave Mr. Pilau and his little house. I don't say much as we leave the dirt roads and goats behind, and out the window things slowly return to order. We stop outside Este's office, under the shade of an oak tree.
Students are milling around, calling out greetings. A miniskirted girl in front of us is blowing up a striped beach ball. I blink.
Are you okay? Este asks.
I'm sorry, I say. I'm just very tired.
She gives me a hug.
You just saw another world, yes? She says. It's hard, but it's good you saw it.
Yes.
Maybe it was a good day.
I'm back in my room now, and that's about as far as I can get with it. But that's not good enough. So let's begin where everything must, back at the beginning.
Este picked us up in the morning, Ben and I. We take a road I have never been on, and a few hundred yards down it we pick up two men in faded t-shirts and jeans. They were waiting outside a corrugated tin trailer; a sign above the open end reads High-Class Hair, and inside there are two girls waiting on stools and the shadowy movements of a hairdresser attending a third. Across the road is a blockhouse shop with no windows, covered with a peeling mural for Cadbury's Dairymilk. It looks abandoned, but it's not.
The men direct us onwards, through streets lined with concrete one-storey houses. They are about twice the size of my bedroom.
The road becomes a potholed dirt track, but the houses continue, multiplying. Some are just patchwork contructions of tin in varying shades of rust, canted to one side. Some are made of dried mud and knarled sticks. Goats and skinny, high-bellied dogs are picking their way along the edges of the yards.
A series of images:
A pair of elderly women selling pineapples from a battered bus shelter.
Three boys playing checkers in the shade at the back of a house doubling as a petrol station, sitting on upturned plastic crates.
A line of clothes hung out along the wire fencing around a house, red-orange-yellow-green-blue, carefully rainbowed in order.
Dust. And scrub yards. And more goats.
This is Extension Six of the Grahamstown township. The unpaved streets are numbered, not named; easier for the planners. I'm trying, but I can't begin to describe what it is like.
We are there to visit a small plot of scruband that will be turned into a nursery for tree seedlings. Under the supervision of the two men with us, who both live in the township, the seedlings are to be sold locally. It sounded like a good project, but now that I am here, I wonder.
Trees. I look around. It seems an odd place to start.
But then where do you start?
On the way back, Este stops at the house of her gardener, Mr. Pilau. He hasn't come to work for the last few days, and she is worried. He has no phone, so she couldn't call.
While she unwinds his chickenwire gate, I sit in the car and watch as a woman in a torn blue shirt fills a basin with dirty water. There are other basins in front of her house, for washing clothes. She comes out of her garden and tips the water out onto the verge, a long brown sluice in the midday sun.
Este comes back out to the car. She has tears in her eyes.
Mr. Pilau is very sick. She thinks he has tuberculouses. She is sure he won't be back to garden for her again.
I knew it would happen one day, she says. He is very old.
We leave Mr. Pilau and his little house. I don't say much as we leave the dirt roads and goats behind, and out the window things slowly return to order. We stop outside Este's office, under the shade of an oak tree.
Students are milling around, calling out greetings. A miniskirted girl in front of us is blowing up a striped beach ball. I blink.
Are you okay? Este asks.
I'm sorry, I say. I'm just very tired.
She gives me a hug.
You just saw another world, yes? She says. It's hard, but it's good you saw it.
Yes.
Maybe it was a good day.
Monday, February 19, 2007
20. Hand and Foot
Sarah calls them "the Sisis", from the respectful form for address which means sister in isiXhosa. They call us "sweetie."
I don't know what their names might be, because our conversations are limited to greetings. Sometimes it's easy to forget they are there. But whether or not I think about them, the Sisis are part of every day of my life at Rhodes.
They clean our corridors, wash our showers, disinfect our toilets, make our food, empty our bins. They are the silent army that keeps the university running, behind the scenes.
It makes me uncomfortable, to be served. I don't know how to behave around these broad, plain-smocked, headscarved women, who look so much like the charicature of a black servant. I don't know whether I imagine the deferential tone they use with us, we who don't have to think about them at all. It needles at me, this system that places me in a certain relationship with other people.
But like so much here, it's not as simple as it seems.
South Africa, like so much of the continent, is in desperate need of more employment. In the township here, there is a 75% unemployment rate. Your own labour is the easiest thing to sell, so the service sector is a corner-stone of South African life. People are paid to do the things other people don't want to.
So you don't do your own washing up, or ironing, or shoe-cleaning, or sewing, or shopping, or car-washing, or lawnmowing. A person does it for you.
People are cheap.
And as awful as that sounds, it is the reality here.
When I first saw the women and boys on the street who charge people for minding their cars, it struck me as something wrong. But the parking-meters were getting vandalised, so it became cheaper to have someone stand out in the sun all day with a pocketful of change.
So I know that the women who clean up after me have a job that they wouldn't otherwise have. I know it, and it still makes me uncomfortable.
I don't know what their names might be, because our conversations are limited to greetings. Sometimes it's easy to forget they are there. But whether or not I think about them, the Sisis are part of every day of my life at Rhodes.
They clean our corridors, wash our showers, disinfect our toilets, make our food, empty our bins. They are the silent army that keeps the university running, behind the scenes.
It makes me uncomfortable, to be served. I don't know how to behave around these broad, plain-smocked, headscarved women, who look so much like the charicature of a black servant. I don't know whether I imagine the deferential tone they use with us, we who don't have to think about them at all. It needles at me, this system that places me in a certain relationship with other people.
But like so much here, it's not as simple as it seems.
South Africa, like so much of the continent, is in desperate need of more employment. In the township here, there is a 75% unemployment rate. Your own labour is the easiest thing to sell, so the service sector is a corner-stone of South African life. People are paid to do the things other people don't want to.
So you don't do your own washing up, or ironing, or shoe-cleaning, or sewing, or shopping, or car-washing, or lawnmowing. A person does it for you.
People are cheap.
And as awful as that sounds, it is the reality here.
When I first saw the women and boys on the street who charge people for minding their cars, it struck me as something wrong. But the parking-meters were getting vandalised, so it became cheaper to have someone stand out in the sun all day with a pocketful of change.
So I know that the women who clean up after me have a job that they wouldn't otherwise have. I know it, and it still makes me uncomfortable.
Saturday, February 17, 2007
19. Joy Theatre
The man on the stage tells us things might get a little scary, so he wants us to try something.
He asks us to reach out and hold the hand of the person on either side of us. I find myself holding hands with a boy of about nine, who beams delightedly at his friends, and tells them I feel soft.
I look around and everyone is holding hands, and it strikes me as the loveliest thing I’ve seen in weeks.
There are easily three or four hundred schoolchildren in the theatre. We are here to watch an environmental parable titled Eco-Wolf and the Three Pigs, doing a run at the university theatre. Lydia and I are the only members of the audience over twelve years of age, the only white faces in a sea of perfectly uniformed giggling children.
From the moment we arrive something funny infects us. We had gone on a whim after seeing the poster, not sure what to expect, but we stomp and laugh and hoot our way through the play, waving our hands and jumping out of our seats. I find myself screaming “Eh-WAY!” at the top of my lungs when we’re asked questions in isiKhosa, outrageously excited that I understand.
They’re not like children at home, I say as we leave.
No, says Lydia, not like Aussie kids either.
We try to identify it, traces the edges of it. It was something in the way that everyone was waving and clapping even before the performance began, groups of twenty of or so children standing up and dancing together. Something in the way that nobody threw food or did any of the everyday cruel things that I remember from school trips. Something in the way that we were made to feel welcome.
I went to a pantomime in Dublin just before I left, with schoolchildren on a Rotary project. I remember one or two wonderful kids, who sang their hearts out in that same joyous way.
But the atmosphere was different, so very different. We will never see those children again, but we agreed that they had made the highlight of our week.
Thank you, wherever you all are.
He asks us to reach out and hold the hand of the person on either side of us. I find myself holding hands with a boy of about nine, who beams delightedly at his friends, and tells them I feel soft.
I look around and everyone is holding hands, and it strikes me as the loveliest thing I’ve seen in weeks.
There are easily three or four hundred schoolchildren in the theatre. We are here to watch an environmental parable titled Eco-Wolf and the Three Pigs, doing a run at the university theatre. Lydia and I are the only members of the audience over twelve years of age, the only white faces in a sea of perfectly uniformed giggling children.
From the moment we arrive something funny infects us. We had gone on a whim after seeing the poster, not sure what to expect, but we stomp and laugh and hoot our way through the play, waving our hands and jumping out of our seats. I find myself screaming “Eh-WAY!” at the top of my lungs when we’re asked questions in isiKhosa, outrageously excited that I understand.
They’re not like children at home, I say as we leave.
No, says Lydia, not like Aussie kids either.
We try to identify it, traces the edges of it. It was something in the way that everyone was waving and clapping even before the performance began, groups of twenty of or so children standing up and dancing together. Something in the way that nobody threw food or did any of the everyday cruel things that I remember from school trips. Something in the way that we were made to feel welcome.
I went to a pantomime in Dublin just before I left, with schoolchildren on a Rotary project. I remember one or two wonderful kids, who sang their hearts out in that same joyous way.
But the atmosphere was different, so very different. We will never see those children again, but we agreed that they had made the highlight of our week.
Thank you, wherever you all are.
Friday, February 16, 2007
18. Women talk
"I have a place," Lydia tells me. "It’s up on the top floor. There is a bench and it looks out over the hills. Let’s go make tea and watch the sun set."
We nearly miss it, used to the twilight of our respective homes. The sun makes an abrupt disappearance here, so you have to get the timing right.
We borrow Sarah’s room keys to use her kettle, and a couple of mugs without handles. Lydia has fresh milk and I have homemade rusks, and we set out our tea things on the balcony as the sky turns a dusky pink. The covered balcony has bars on it, floor to ceiling bars set just close enough to prevent even the smallest body from slipping through, and arranged in a delicate design. It doesn’t feel like a cage, but that’s what it is.
Lydia has brought her knitting, so we talk, and knit, and munch rusks loudly. Other people join us from time to time, as the night sets in and the campus lights go on.
Bridget takes a seat beside me with her knitting. I watch as she knits one, pearls one, needles clicking in the half dark.
We get to talking about men, as women often do.
And, somehow, we get to talking about Bridget’s rape. Which women don’t often do.
Why is it we don’t talk about it? Why do I feel uncomfortable writing about it, as though I’m betraying her?
Bridget has learned to talk about it, over the last few years, about how she wished she had prosecuted. But she chose to go back to his house, and in Zimbabwe, a place that puts men first, that makes you responsible for whatever happens. It was not until she came to Rhodes that she even realized it was rape. That because she had said no, it was not just sex.
Bridget talks about it because she knows rape happens, more often than anyone will admit. She wants to make sure that if it happens to someone near her, they’ll know they’re not alone.
I have never felt so aware of being a woman since arriving here. I wonder if a man can ever know what that fear feels like, the fear that is always just under your skin, the fear that makes you into someone other than the person you expected to be. The fear that makes you glad to be caged.
We nearly miss it, used to the twilight of our respective homes. The sun makes an abrupt disappearance here, so you have to get the timing right.
We borrow Sarah’s room keys to use her kettle, and a couple of mugs without handles. Lydia has fresh milk and I have homemade rusks, and we set out our tea things on the balcony as the sky turns a dusky pink. The covered balcony has bars on it, floor to ceiling bars set just close enough to prevent even the smallest body from slipping through, and arranged in a delicate design. It doesn’t feel like a cage, but that’s what it is.
Lydia has brought her knitting, so we talk, and knit, and munch rusks loudly. Other people join us from time to time, as the night sets in and the campus lights go on.
Bridget takes a seat beside me with her knitting. I watch as she knits one, pearls one, needles clicking in the half dark.
We get to talking about men, as women often do.
And, somehow, we get to talking about Bridget’s rape. Which women don’t often do.
Why is it we don’t talk about it? Why do I feel uncomfortable writing about it, as though I’m betraying her?
Bridget has learned to talk about it, over the last few years, about how she wished she had prosecuted. But she chose to go back to his house, and in Zimbabwe, a place that puts men first, that makes you responsible for whatever happens. It was not until she came to Rhodes that she even realized it was rape. That because she had said no, it was not just sex.
Bridget talks about it because she knows rape happens, more often than anyone will admit. She wants to make sure that if it happens to someone near her, they’ll know they’re not alone.
I have never felt so aware of being a woman since arriving here. I wonder if a man can ever know what that fear feels like, the fear that is always just under your skin, the fear that makes you into someone other than the person you expected to be. The fear that makes you glad to be caged.
17. Voices from the past
After four attempts to find a working photocopier, three flights of stairs carting five large bound volumes, two trips back to the ground floor to load money onto my card, and too many missing books to count, I've used up most of my already-limited reserves of patience. It's when I discover the journal article I need has been actually torn out of the correct volume that I decide it's time to call it a day.
It's not that I have a general aversion to libraries, but my lecturers require very comprehensive background reading, which can involve fifteen sources per week, per module. That's a lot of books to photocopy, and heft up and down multiple flights of stairs during a heatwave, along with your handbag, reading lists, water, stapler and course-outline, as nothing can be left behind if you expect it to be there when you get back.
This does not a happy woman make me.
But I'm unwilling to leave without making some progress with my research, so I pick a book at random and begin to skim it.
It's about the history of the liberation movement in South Africa, and what sort of racial make-up the movement had. In a land divided by law into black, white, Indian and Coloured, it is surprising how inclusive the popular organisations were.
I stop at a page titled "Call to the Congress of the People," a leaflet issued in 1955. I print it out, and take it back to my room. It's taped to the noticeboard in front of me now.
Sometimes the voices of the past can be heard so clearly, its a though they are standing just behind you, whispering in your ear. This is one of those times.
Take a moment. Read it aloud. Let the voice of the people be heard.
Call to the Congress of the People
We call the people of South Africa black and white — let us speak together of freedom!
We call the farmers of the reserves and trust lands. Let us speak of the wide land, and the narrow strips on which we toil. Let us speak of brothers without land, and of children without schooling. Let us speak of taxes and of cattle and of famine. Let us speak of Freedom!
We call the miners of coal, gold and diamonds. Let us speak of dark shifts and the cold compounds far from our families. Let us speak of heavy labour and long hours, and of men sent home to die. Let us speak of rich masters and poor wages. Let us speak of Freedom!
We call the workers of farms and forests. Let us speak of the rich foods we grow, and the laws that keep us poor. Let us speak of harsh treatment and of children and women forced to work. Let us speak of private prisons, and beatings and of passes. We call the workers of factories and shops. Let us speak of the good things we make, and the bad conditions of our work. Let us speak of the many passes and the few jobs. Let us speak of foremen and of transport and trade unions; of holidays and of houses. Let us speak of Freedom!
We call the teachers, students and the preachers. Let us speak of the light that comes with learning, and the ways we are kept in darkness. Let us speak of the great services we can render, and of the narrow ways that are open to us. Let us speak of laws, and governments, and rights. Let us speak of Freedom!
We call the housewives and mothers. Let us speak of the fine children that we bear, and of their stunted lives. Let us speak of the many illnesses and deaths, and of the few clinics and schools. Let us speak of high prices and of shanty towns. Let us speak of Freedom!
Let us speak together. All of us together — African and European, Indian and Coloured. Voter and voteless. Privileged and sightless. The happy and the homeless. All the people of South Africa; of the towns and the countryside.
Let us speak together of freedom. And of the happiness that can come to men and women if they live in a land that is free. Let us speak of freedom. And how to get it for ourselves, and for our children.
Let the voice of all the people be heard.
It's not that I have a general aversion to libraries, but my lecturers require very comprehensive background reading, which can involve fifteen sources per week, per module. That's a lot of books to photocopy, and heft up and down multiple flights of stairs during a heatwave, along with your handbag, reading lists, water, stapler and course-outline, as nothing can be left behind if you expect it to be there when you get back.
This does not a happy woman make me.
But I'm unwilling to leave without making some progress with my research, so I pick a book at random and begin to skim it.
It's about the history of the liberation movement in South Africa, and what sort of racial make-up the movement had. In a land divided by law into black, white, Indian and Coloured, it is surprising how inclusive the popular organisations were.
I stop at a page titled "Call to the Congress of the People," a leaflet issued in 1955. I print it out, and take it back to my room. It's taped to the noticeboard in front of me now.
Sometimes the voices of the past can be heard so clearly, its a though they are standing just behind you, whispering in your ear. This is one of those times.
Take a moment. Read it aloud. Let the voice of the people be heard.
Call to the Congress of the People
We call the people of South Africa black and white — let us speak together of freedom!
We call the farmers of the reserves and trust lands. Let us speak of the wide land, and the narrow strips on which we toil. Let us speak of brothers without land, and of children without schooling. Let us speak of taxes and of cattle and of famine. Let us speak of Freedom!
We call the miners of coal, gold and diamonds. Let us speak of dark shifts and the cold compounds far from our families. Let us speak of heavy labour and long hours, and of men sent home to die. Let us speak of rich masters and poor wages. Let us speak of Freedom!
We call the workers of farms and forests. Let us speak of the rich foods we grow, and the laws that keep us poor. Let us speak of harsh treatment and of children and women forced to work. Let us speak of private prisons, and beatings and of passes. We call the workers of factories and shops. Let us speak of the good things we make, and the bad conditions of our work. Let us speak of the many passes and the few jobs. Let us speak of foremen and of transport and trade unions; of holidays and of houses. Let us speak of Freedom!
We call the teachers, students and the preachers. Let us speak of the light that comes with learning, and the ways we are kept in darkness. Let us speak of the great services we can render, and of the narrow ways that are open to us. Let us speak of laws, and governments, and rights. Let us speak of Freedom!
We call the housewives and mothers. Let us speak of the fine children that we bear, and of their stunted lives. Let us speak of the many illnesses and deaths, and of the few clinics and schools. Let us speak of high prices and of shanty towns. Let us speak of Freedom!
Let us speak together. All of us together — African and European, Indian and Coloured. Voter and voteless. Privileged and sightless. The happy and the homeless. All the people of South Africa; of the towns and the countryside.
Let us speak together of freedom. And of the happiness that can come to men and women if they live in a land that is free. Let us speak of freedom. And how to get it for ourselves, and for our children.
Let the voice of all the people be heard.
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
16. Valentine's Day, a timeline
Eight am, and taped to my door is a sweet, with a note from the house committee wishing us a very happy Valentine’s Day. I eat the sweet, crumple up the note, and resolve to ignore today as best I can.
Ten am, and on my way to lectures there are single red roses everywhere; held by girls who have be given them, by boys about to give them, by sellers on the road willing to give them for a price.
Eleven am, and I'm having a furious argument with Lydia, the Aussie, about the principles of international law, over juice at the cafe with couples sitting all around us.
One pm, and I'm in a school on the outskirts of town, speaking to a group of students about a club they are setting up. On their desks are handmade roses fashioned from crepe paper. Their teacher is wearing a red shirt with hearts on his tie.
Four pm, and I get back to my house, to take in my washing. My arms are full when Henri stops me at the door, asking if I had picked up my flowers yet. A bouquet of red roses is sitting in reception, ridiculously large. The other girls are both curious and envious. I realise I like it that way.
Five pm, and we’re stepping out in heels and short skirts, sashaying into a dining hall transformed by candelabras, tablecloths and great red bows. No-one can explain to me why the university would do such a thing, or how free wine can be provided without causing a stampede - both things equally unthinkable in Ireland. We take a table overlooking the sunny lawn and pout for the cameras, drinking wine from tumblers and stealing carnations from the centre-piece.
Six pm, and I'm in in a telephone nook off the stairway, one hand to my ear as I try to hear his voice over the click-clack of heels and rowdy laughter. It's hard.
Nine pm, and our names are called out as we walk into the Rat and Parrot, a French girl hanging out of the veranda above and gesturing wildly to us. Half the French diaspora is assembled up there, chainsmoking as only the French do, in a way that makes you wish you smoked.
Ten pm, and we locate the American contingent, completing rounds of introductions and rounds of drinks. We toast in Irish, in French, in Greek, and the South African phrase of indeterminate origion: “Chin-chin!”
Eleven pm, and I’m out of my chair instructing a handful of Frenchmen on the idiosyncratic grammatical construction of “abso-fucking-lutely”, adding the emphasis in the correct places with my bottle of Hunter Gold. The French may have one hundred words for fucking, we decide, but the Irish have the most inventive way with it.
Just before midnight, and Lydia and I are double-kissing the assembled international society goodbye, swearing to bring physical affection to South Africa one kiss at a time.
Just after midnight, and I get what I really needed, a good solid hug from a man. Men just hug differently, we decide, even gay men.
Some time later, we’re sitting barefoot on Sarah’s bed, dipping rusks into our Roiboos tea and discussing the international criminal court and how no-one hugs enough in South Africa and just what peacekeeping is supposed to mean.
Two am, I'm tucked up in bed, looking at my roses. It seems astounding that someone thousands of miles away can leave a physical object here in my room. It's almost like having him here too.
But only almost.
Ten am, and on my way to lectures there are single red roses everywhere; held by girls who have be given them, by boys about to give them, by sellers on the road willing to give them for a price.
Eleven am, and I'm having a furious argument with Lydia, the Aussie, about the principles of international law, over juice at the cafe with couples sitting all around us.
One pm, and I'm in a school on the outskirts of town, speaking to a group of students about a club they are setting up. On their desks are handmade roses fashioned from crepe paper. Their teacher is wearing a red shirt with hearts on his tie.
Four pm, and I get back to my house, to take in my washing. My arms are full when Henri stops me at the door, asking if I had picked up my flowers yet. A bouquet of red roses is sitting in reception, ridiculously large. The other girls are both curious and envious. I realise I like it that way.
Five pm, and we’re stepping out in heels and short skirts, sashaying into a dining hall transformed by candelabras, tablecloths and great red bows. No-one can explain to me why the university would do such a thing, or how free wine can be provided without causing a stampede - both things equally unthinkable in Ireland. We take a table overlooking the sunny lawn and pout for the cameras, drinking wine from tumblers and stealing carnations from the centre-piece.
Six pm, and I'm in in a telephone nook off the stairway, one hand to my ear as I try to hear his voice over the click-clack of heels and rowdy laughter. It's hard.
Nine pm, and our names are called out as we walk into the Rat and Parrot, a French girl hanging out of the veranda above and gesturing wildly to us. Half the French diaspora is assembled up there, chainsmoking as only the French do, in a way that makes you wish you smoked.
Ten pm, and we locate the American contingent, completing rounds of introductions and rounds of drinks. We toast in Irish, in French, in Greek, and the South African phrase of indeterminate origion: “Chin-chin!”
Eleven pm, and I’m out of my chair instructing a handful of Frenchmen on the idiosyncratic grammatical construction of “abso-fucking-lutely”, adding the emphasis in the correct places with my bottle of Hunter Gold. The French may have one hundred words for fucking, we decide, but the Irish have the most inventive way with it.
Just before midnight, and Lydia and I are double-kissing the assembled international society goodbye, swearing to bring physical affection to South Africa one kiss at a time.
Just after midnight, and I get what I really needed, a good solid hug from a man. Men just hug differently, we decide, even gay men.
Some time later, we’re sitting barefoot on Sarah’s bed, dipping rusks into our Roiboos tea and discussing the international criminal court and how no-one hugs enough in South Africa and just what peacekeeping is supposed to mean.
Two am, I'm tucked up in bed, looking at my roses. It seems astounding that someone thousands of miles away can leave a physical object here in my room. It's almost like having him here too.
But only almost.
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
15. The other side of the door
There is some manner of ingenious queuing system in place, cleverly disguised from the unpractised eye. It appears to consist mainly of sporadically shuffling the waiting students, mothers, babies, pensioners and workers into new patterns to create an impression that something is happening, a strategy further concealed under a continuous stream of isiXhosa. Its unclear whether this is even the right queue, and the woman in charge is very good at avoiding eye contact. An hour into it, some of those with less faith get up and leave, but it’s hot and I have nowhere urgent to be so I stay put.
I need to open a bank account, something I foolishly expected would take about twenty minutes. I have a large amount of money that I would like to give them, but they don’t appear in the least bit interested.
Another overheated fellow queue-ee gives an exasperated sigh and heaves themselves to their feet. Ten minutes later, the student ahead of me is beckoned forward, only to be turned back at the last hurdle due to a missing piece of paper.
I am moved from the edge of a tabletop to a chair, so it appears some progress is being made.
I settle back and listen to the conversations around me. There are eleven official languages in South Africa - English, Afrikaans, isiXhosa, isiZulu, Ndebele, Venda, Seswati, Sesotho, Sepedi, Tsonga and Tswana - and without the aid of Google I would never be able to name them all, something I used to feel guilty about until I got chatting to South Africans. Mostly neither can they.
isiXhosa, though, I know. It’s the most widely-spoken language next to English and Afrikaans, and here in the Eastern Cape it’s the local language, so I’m becoming accustomed to the full, rounded sound of it, interspersed with a variety of tongue clicks I can't hope to replicate.
Sometimes it's a deep orchestral accompaniment to my time here, and I can switch off and hear the musical cadences, the steady beat.
Sometimes I just feel lost.
I almost didn't see the advert. The classes are tucked away at the top of several flights of stairs, in a room with no number. Several times a week, Bulelwa Nosilela calls out Xhosa words of greeting and gratitude, tapping the beat out on her hands, and we chant back, hesitant at first, then with more confidence, as we adventure into places previously locked from us. There are several others in the class like me, who don't need the credits but want to be there anyway.
English is the lingua franca here; daily tasks such as buying a phone, ordering a meal or opening a bank account - eventually - don't present a problem. But there's more to living than daily tasks. The street traders who don't look at you, the panhandlers who call out to you, the shop assistants who talk over you.
So we come to class and take notes and dutifully chant back, out of curiosity, out of feeling shut out, out of a desire to understand. We come to open the door.
I need to open a bank account, something I foolishly expected would take about twenty minutes. I have a large amount of money that I would like to give them, but they don’t appear in the least bit interested.
Another overheated fellow queue-ee gives an exasperated sigh and heaves themselves to their feet. Ten minutes later, the student ahead of me is beckoned forward, only to be turned back at the last hurdle due to a missing piece of paper.
I am moved from the edge of a tabletop to a chair, so it appears some progress is being made.
I settle back and listen to the conversations around me. There are eleven official languages in South Africa - English, Afrikaans, isiXhosa, isiZulu, Ndebele, Venda, Seswati, Sesotho, Sepedi, Tsonga and Tswana - and without the aid of Google I would never be able to name them all, something I used to feel guilty about until I got chatting to South Africans. Mostly neither can they.
isiXhosa, though, I know. It’s the most widely-spoken language next to English and Afrikaans, and here in the Eastern Cape it’s the local language, so I’m becoming accustomed to the full, rounded sound of it, interspersed with a variety of tongue clicks I can't hope to replicate.
Sometimes it's a deep orchestral accompaniment to my time here, and I can switch off and hear the musical cadences, the steady beat.
Sometimes I just feel lost.
I almost didn't see the advert. The classes are tucked away at the top of several flights of stairs, in a room with no number. Several times a week, Bulelwa Nosilela calls out Xhosa words of greeting and gratitude, tapping the beat out on her hands, and we chant back, hesitant at first, then with more confidence, as we adventure into places previously locked from us. There are several others in the class like me, who don't need the credits but want to be there anyway.
English is the lingua franca here; daily tasks such as buying a phone, ordering a meal or opening a bank account - eventually - don't present a problem. But there's more to living than daily tasks. The street traders who don't look at you, the panhandlers who call out to you, the shop assistants who talk over you.
So we come to class and take notes and dutifully chant back, out of curiosity, out of feeling shut out, out of a desire to understand. We come to open the door.
Monday, February 12, 2007
14. Too umlungu for my skirt
The two boys ahead of me in line turn around to look at me. One of them says hello. I return the greeting.
"I like your skirt," he says.
"Thanks," I smile. I had picked it up in a little shop under the campus archway, my first strike back against the South African sun. It's patterned white and blue, and wraps around me right down to the floor, neatly covering about half of my body's burnable area. I suspect I paid far too much for it, a white girl with no idea what the shop owners were snickering about, but I consider it an investment.
We get talking about some other things, me and the boys, and I forget about it.
Later, I say good afternoon to the security guards in their reflective yellow jackets on the corner of Artillary Street.
"I like your skirt," one of them says, grinning.
Hmmm, I think. I know it’s a damn pretty skirt, but there’s something else going on here.
I ask one of the Xhosa girls during our hike on the Assagaii trails, she of the electric blue frilly skirt. I figure if anyone can explain clothing to me it's her.
"Is there something funny about me wearing that skirt?"
"No," she says. "Well, it’s a Sotho skirt."
"Mendisa... am I too white for it?"
She thinks for a moment, then smiles at me. "No, I think it looks nice. When I saw you first, I thought you were an African."
I think about that one, and decide it's a compliment.
"I like your skirt," he says.
"Thanks," I smile. I had picked it up in a little shop under the campus archway, my first strike back against the South African sun. It's patterned white and blue, and wraps around me right down to the floor, neatly covering about half of my body's burnable area. I suspect I paid far too much for it, a white girl with no idea what the shop owners were snickering about, but I consider it an investment.
We get talking about some other things, me and the boys, and I forget about it.
Later, I say good afternoon to the security guards in their reflective yellow jackets on the corner of Artillary Street.
"I like your skirt," one of them says, grinning.
Hmmm, I think. I know it’s a damn pretty skirt, but there’s something else going on here.
I ask one of the Xhosa girls during our hike on the Assagaii trails, she of the electric blue frilly skirt. I figure if anyone can explain clothing to me it's her.
"Is there something funny about me wearing that skirt?"
"No," she says. "Well, it’s a Sotho skirt."
"Mendisa... am I too white for it?"
She thinks for a moment, then smiles at me. "No, I think it looks nice. When I saw you first, I thought you were an African."
I think about that one, and decide it's a compliment.
Sunday, February 11, 2007
13. Getting Aquainted
I call him Mister, because it seems only polite.
If we're going to be living in such close proximity, it's best that these nicieties are sorted out early on. I won't pretend I was thrilled to share a bathroom with him, but I was prepared to make the effort as long as certain boudaries were observed.
So we come to an arrangement that seems to suit us both. Mister Spider had the corner next to the door, and once he stayed there where I could see him, I was happy to let him remain as lodger.
Bugs are more heavywight here, and camp was a good place to get aquainted. And after the first shock, Mister Spider and I got on just fine, Gill having assured me that the large and hairy creature wasn't poisonous. It was also surprisingly easy to accommodate Mister Mouse, and the extended family of Mister Ant, without any fuss.
I know there are one or two members of my own extended family who might have difficulty believing this. They may even point to a range of specific incidents involving rather small harmless arachnoids in the past.
But this is Africa. Here at camp, this is how the new Riona reacts:
"By the way Este, we have a mouse in the kitchen."
"You think so?"
"No, I know so. I saw him. He trotted past me while I was reading on the couch."
On our morning hike through the bush, Gill leading the way with a stick she picked up in the Transkei, there were many other chances to greet various cuddly additions to the bug race.
"Er, Gill?" I ask, wiping long strands of spiderweb from my face. "You see that very large spider we're disturbing? Is it dangerous?"
"Not at all."
"Are you sure?"
"Absolutely."
"But doesn't bright yellow and green spots mean poisonous usually?"
"Well, you'll get a bite alright, but it won't kill you."
If we're going to be living in such close proximity, it's best that these nicieties are sorted out early on. I won't pretend I was thrilled to share a bathroom with him, but I was prepared to make the effort as long as certain boudaries were observed.
So we come to an arrangement that seems to suit us both. Mister Spider had the corner next to the door, and once he stayed there where I could see him, I was happy to let him remain as lodger.
Bugs are more heavywight here, and camp was a good place to get aquainted. And after the first shock, Mister Spider and I got on just fine, Gill having assured me that the large and hairy creature wasn't poisonous. It was also surprisingly easy to accommodate Mister Mouse, and the extended family of Mister Ant, without any fuss.
I know there are one or two members of my own extended family who might have difficulty believing this. They may even point to a range of specific incidents involving rather small harmless arachnoids in the past.
But this is Africa. Here at camp, this is how the new Riona reacts:
"By the way Este, we have a mouse in the kitchen."
"You think so?"
"No, I know so. I saw him. He trotted past me while I was reading on the couch."
On our morning hike through the bush, Gill leading the way with a stick she picked up in the Transkei, there were many other chances to greet various cuddly additions to the bug race.
"Er, Gill?" I ask, wiping long strands of spiderweb from my face. "You see that very large spider we're disturbing? Is it dangerous?"
"Not at all."
"Are you sure?"
"Absolutely."
"But doesn't bright yellow and green spots mean poisonous usually?"
"Well, you'll get a bite alright, but it won't kill you."
It's only then that I realise Gill, a septugenarian dairy farmer of many decades, may differ from me in her definition of dangerous.
When I return to the bathroom Mister Spider is not in his corner. I decide I can wait until we get home to pee.
Saturday, February 10, 2007
12. Camp Assagaii
I’m yelling something incoherent, dancing up and down in the sand, feinting left, then right. A girl in a frilly electric blue skirt crouches in position next to me. One of my team has sand all down the side of his face from an earlier scuffle. We're hot and dusty and oblivious to the crackle of the heavy sky above, or the wind that's getting up on the lower plains.
Undele punches the ball into the air and sand flies as it is tossed backwards and forwards across the net. I hated volleyball in school, but that was indoors, in tracksuit bottoms and tennis shoes that squeaked on the shiny floor.
This is dirty, and sweaty, and loud. And completely chaotic.
There is screaming in English and Xhosa, and hysterical laughter as people fall, the same in any language. Someone is keeping score but only very loosely, and there are repeated appeals to Mister Ref, who doesn't appear to exist. Even when the first drops of rain fall the game doesn't falter.
It's only the dinner bell that finally puts an end to it. By then the rain is falling hard and great forks of lightning have split the sky, the vastest sky I have ever seen. From the top of Assagaii camp you can see full circle, out over the mountains and pasture land broken by lines of gumtrees. A violet dark is setting in when I stumble inside to get my shower things.
Then the lights go out.
I wait a few moments, but nothing happens. So I put my things down and go out to the porch. And for some reason I go out into the rain.
Rain in Africa is bigger, heavier, like coins falling. It sounds incredible, bewitching.
I stand at the edge of the top lawn, letting it soak me, feeling a strange shiver run right through me.
******************
Inside, I find a spout of rainwater and rinse the sand and dust from my feet, cup my hands and splash it on my face. This is what the camp does to you, this is what the people do to you. That morning I had put on make-up, worried about the size of my hips. I can't say why none of that matters here, but it doesn't.
I'm the only white girl, the only non-Xhosa speaker. This weekend camp is part of Este's programme for a select group of students in their first year at Rhodes. It's for students who came from schools which wouldn't be called schools in Ireland, places that had no textbooks. And from those villages and townships somehow they sat the same exam as everyone else and passed.
The programme finds the brightest and least prepared students, and runs an extra foundation year for them so they can improve their English and maths, so they can adjust to university life, so their full potential can be tapped. They come to camp to begin that year.
A team of students are preparing dinner in the dark. The camp owner sends up some candles and we eat by candlelight - meat cooked on the braai or barbeque, sliced tomatoes, and Mqosho, which I can't properly explain but is made with beans.
After dinner, we gather in a circle and some past students of the programme talk about their experiences.
And I listen. And I think about my classrooms, about my parents who would have paid for tutors if I needed them, about the science laboratories and computers and how we all wanted to be anywhere but school.
Gill, another teacher on the programme, had told me that these students will be 100,000 Rand in debt by the time they finish their degrees, and that they will be expected to support their families too once they graduate. It's a great burden for an eighteen-year-old to bear.
But I don't hear any bitterness in the voices I'm hearing. I hear eagerness, and encouragement, and love.
I listen to the thunder rumble outside and am thankful that I am here, with these people, in this place.
Undele punches the ball into the air and sand flies as it is tossed backwards and forwards across the net. I hated volleyball in school, but that was indoors, in tracksuit bottoms and tennis shoes that squeaked on the shiny floor.
This is dirty, and sweaty, and loud. And completely chaotic.
There is screaming in English and Xhosa, and hysterical laughter as people fall, the same in any language. Someone is keeping score but only very loosely, and there are repeated appeals to Mister Ref, who doesn't appear to exist. Even when the first drops of rain fall the game doesn't falter.
It's only the dinner bell that finally puts an end to it. By then the rain is falling hard and great forks of lightning have split the sky, the vastest sky I have ever seen. From the top of Assagaii camp you can see full circle, out over the mountains and pasture land broken by lines of gumtrees. A violet dark is setting in when I stumble inside to get my shower things.
Then the lights go out.
I wait a few moments, but nothing happens. So I put my things down and go out to the porch. And for some reason I go out into the rain.
Rain in Africa is bigger, heavier, like coins falling. It sounds incredible, bewitching.
I stand at the edge of the top lawn, letting it soak me, feeling a strange shiver run right through me.
******************
Inside, I find a spout of rainwater and rinse the sand and dust from my feet, cup my hands and splash it on my face. This is what the camp does to you, this is what the people do to you. That morning I had put on make-up, worried about the size of my hips. I can't say why none of that matters here, but it doesn't.
I'm the only white girl, the only non-Xhosa speaker. This weekend camp is part of Este's programme for a select group of students in their first year at Rhodes. It's for students who came from schools which wouldn't be called schools in Ireland, places that had no textbooks. And from those villages and townships somehow they sat the same exam as everyone else and passed.
The programme finds the brightest and least prepared students, and runs an extra foundation year for them so they can improve their English and maths, so they can adjust to university life, so their full potential can be tapped. They come to camp to begin that year.
A team of students are preparing dinner in the dark. The camp owner sends up some candles and we eat by candlelight - meat cooked on the braai or barbeque, sliced tomatoes, and Mqosho, which I can't properly explain but is made with beans.
After dinner, we gather in a circle and some past students of the programme talk about their experiences.
And I listen. And I think about my classrooms, about my parents who would have paid for tutors if I needed them, about the science laboratories and computers and how we all wanted to be anywhere but school.
Gill, another teacher on the programme, had told me that these students will be 100,000 Rand in debt by the time they finish their degrees, and that they will be expected to support their families too once they graduate. It's a great burden for an eighteen-year-old to bear.
But I don't hear any bitterness in the voices I'm hearing. I hear eagerness, and encouragement, and love.
I listen to the thunder rumble outside and am thankful that I am here, with these people, in this place.
11. Welcome Message
The Dean of Students calls her name, and a young woman in a long skirt gets up from her seat. She has short, pixie hair and sharp collarbones. She’s nervous, and she says so.
“This is the first time I have talked about this in public,” she tells us, peering up at the rows of seating in the lecture hall. She pulls at her hands and looks down.
She has an Afrikaner accent, and an Afrikaner way of speaking; stop-starts and shortened words, translating into English, her second language. Most people at Rhodes don’t have English as a first language, but the Afrikaans speakers are less smooth, more stilted, than the Xhosa or Zulu.
“I was always a little wild, in college. I did a lot of things. Maybe not very safe things, but I was young. And. Yes. I grew up in a time it was safe. To play out on the street.” She glances over at the Dean.
She was out on a research trip, with another woman. They were followed, two women on their own, and taken out of the car by a group of men.
“They took the car,” she says. “But then they. Well. Yes, they assaulted us, yes? You think maybe you give them the car, and that’s it, but not always. They left us for dead. I was four months pregnant.”
Someone found them, took them by helicopter to a hospital. She says it took years to get over it, to feel safe again. She doesn’t say what happened to the baby.
There is silence in the lecture hall.
This is our Orientation Day, for postgrads. She is speaking between a talk about which residence to choose, and how to apply for funding.
“It’s difficult speaking to you,” she says, looking around. “Because I don’t want to scare you. I don’t want to take away from your college time. I don’t regret the way I lived my life. I don’t.”
She stops, takes a breath. “But these things do happen... this weekend a friend of mine was brutally… she was strangled, yes, brutally. For her jeep. She died. For her jeep.”
She starts to cry, head forward, thin shoulders hitching. The Dean comes forward and puts an arm around her, but she tries again.
“I don’t want to scare you.”
But these things happen, and not always to other people.
“This is the first time I have talked about this in public,” she tells us, peering up at the rows of seating in the lecture hall. She pulls at her hands and looks down.
She has an Afrikaner accent, and an Afrikaner way of speaking; stop-starts and shortened words, translating into English, her second language. Most people at Rhodes don’t have English as a first language, but the Afrikaans speakers are less smooth, more stilted, than the Xhosa or Zulu.
“I was always a little wild, in college. I did a lot of things. Maybe not very safe things, but I was young. And. Yes. I grew up in a time it was safe. To play out on the street.” She glances over at the Dean.
She was out on a research trip, with another woman. They were followed, two women on their own, and taken out of the car by a group of men.
“They took the car,” she says. “But then they. Well. Yes, they assaulted us, yes? You think maybe you give them the car, and that’s it, but not always. They left us for dead. I was four months pregnant.”
Someone found them, took them by helicopter to a hospital. She says it took years to get over it, to feel safe again. She doesn’t say what happened to the baby.
There is silence in the lecture hall.
This is our Orientation Day, for postgrads. She is speaking between a talk about which residence to choose, and how to apply for funding.
“It’s difficult speaking to you,” she says, looking around. “Because I don’t want to scare you. I don’t want to take away from your college time. I don’t regret the way I lived my life. I don’t.”
She stops, takes a breath. “But these things do happen... this weekend a friend of mine was brutally… she was strangled, yes, brutally. For her jeep. She died. For her jeep.”
She starts to cry, head forward, thin shoulders hitching. The Dean comes forward and puts an arm around her, but she tries again.
“I don’t want to scare you.”
But these things happen, and not always to other people.
10. This could almost be California
Let’s do something tonight, Jani says.
There’s a programme of events all this week, but it’s aimed at the first years. The older students on the res committee are restless and they want to show me around.
After dark we gather a couple of cars, someone runs to the shops for wine, and we pile in for the short drive to the top of the hill.
One of the girls had the foresight to bring wineglasses, so we find a space to sit on the grass and drink, out overlooking the town, carfuls of students arriving around us and unloading their drunken cargo to the beat of hiphop and house music. The air is full of flirtatious chatter broken by wild whoops of joy, and further along the bluff a few suspiciously darkened cars sit for those who desire a little more privacy. Longlegged girls perch on bonnets, guys in surfer shorts crack beer cans open with a hiss.
This could almost be California.
Spread out below are the light of the town, a much larger place than I imagined. Some of the girls help me trace out familiar landmarks – the campus archway, the cathedral, the main lawn, the local pizza place – before we reach the invisible line that divides our side of the town from the places we don’t go.
There is a tinkle of glass followed by a disappointed chorus of voices as somewhere a bottle slides off a car bonnet.
What are they? I ask. On the far slope of the valley the sprinkle of lights end, and there are what appear to be very large streetlights.
Floodlights, Sarah answers. That’s the townships. Most of the houses don’t have electricity so they put up those huge floodlights.
I squint, curious, but no-one else seems interested. A part of me is fascinated and appalled. But another part of me wonders if it’s so different from the Parisian ghettos, or the Bronx, or Ballymun.
Or Compton, California. Crowded, hurriedly built places people with money don’t dare go.
I drain my glass, listening to the revelry around me. Maybe I'll adjust, like everyone else seems to. Maybe the inequality becomes less jarring.
But that is too easy to say. I come from the most unequal country in the world.
Maybe we're just better at hiding it.
There’s a programme of events all this week, but it’s aimed at the first years. The older students on the res committee are restless and they want to show me around.
After dark we gather a couple of cars, someone runs to the shops for wine, and we pile in for the short drive to the top of the hill.
One of the girls had the foresight to bring wineglasses, so we find a space to sit on the grass and drink, out overlooking the town, carfuls of students arriving around us and unloading their drunken cargo to the beat of hiphop and house music. The air is full of flirtatious chatter broken by wild whoops of joy, and further along the bluff a few suspiciously darkened cars sit for those who desire a little more privacy. Longlegged girls perch on bonnets, guys in surfer shorts crack beer cans open with a hiss.
This could almost be California.
Spread out below are the light of the town, a much larger place than I imagined. Some of the girls help me trace out familiar landmarks – the campus archway, the cathedral, the main lawn, the local pizza place – before we reach the invisible line that divides our side of the town from the places we don’t go.
There is a tinkle of glass followed by a disappointed chorus of voices as somewhere a bottle slides off a car bonnet.
What are they? I ask. On the far slope of the valley the sprinkle of lights end, and there are what appear to be very large streetlights.
Floodlights, Sarah answers. That’s the townships. Most of the houses don’t have electricity so they put up those huge floodlights.
I squint, curious, but no-one else seems interested. A part of me is fascinated and appalled. But another part of me wonders if it’s so different from the Parisian ghettos, or the Bronx, or Ballymun.
Or Compton, California. Crowded, hurriedly built places people with money don’t dare go.
I drain my glass, listening to the revelry around me. Maybe I'll adjust, like everyone else seems to. Maybe the inequality becomes less jarring.
But that is too easy to say. I come from the most unequal country in the world.
Maybe we're just better at hiding it.
Friday, February 09, 2007
9. These hot days, is the mad blood stirring
They still talk about it.
“Four days,” they say, shaking their heads. “You have no idea.”
Last November, the water went. The Grahamstown reservoir ran dry after a pump gave out, and all across town there was nothing to shower with, drink, or flush toilets with. The Dean of Students drove up to Port Elizabeth to buy bottled drinking water for 9,000 students and staff. The girls in New House learned how to unblock the toilets by hand.
We listened as they described the smell, the dirt. Sarah had spent four months in a village in Kenya once and had to wash out of a bucket, but even that hadn't prepared her for one hundred increasingly irritable girls in close quarters during exam time.
We listened and nodded sympathetically. We tried, but we couldn't begin to imagine how a flushing toilet might be a luxury.
On Wednesday night when I arrived back from the farm, there was a notice posted to the front door:
What is hand-flushing, for you delicate souls out there?
It goes like this: fill a bucket with water from a stagnant tank, and pour it into the toilet to flush everything through.
It's so hot that I put my head in cold water just to go outside, change clothes twice or three times a day. By eleven I can't move without breaking out in sweat.
But here I sit, at my shiny laptop, with bottled water to hand, in the air-conditioned cool. And I have not had to hand-flush, as the shortage has yet to reach that stage. This is just an inconvenience for us, and a temporary one at that.
It's a different story in the township, or the squatter camps, places where running water is scare at the best of times. At least, this is what I assume. We're insulated here, in our shady wide-avenued campus, with trucks to bring bottled water a the snap of a finger; we don't have the first idea what it's really like to be without.
“Four days,” they say, shaking their heads. “You have no idea.”
Last November, the water went. The Grahamstown reservoir ran dry after a pump gave out, and all across town there was nothing to shower with, drink, or flush toilets with. The Dean of Students drove up to Port Elizabeth to buy bottled drinking water for 9,000 students and staff. The girls in New House learned how to unblock the toilets by hand.
We listened as they described the smell, the dirt. Sarah had spent four months in a village in Kenya once and had to wash out of a bucket, but even that hadn't prepared her for one hundred increasingly irritable girls in close quarters during exam time.
We listened and nodded sympathetically. We tried, but we couldn't begin to imagine how a flushing toilet might be a luxury.
On Wednesday night when I arrived back from the farm, there was a notice posted to the front door:
There is a problem with the delivery of water from Waainek to theSo far, it is not too critical. There is no hot water for showers, no water for waching machines, almost no water for flushing toilets. But we have drinking water, and cold showers, and old water for hand-flushing on standby.
reservoirs supplying town. The reservoirs are currently only 34% full, hence
areas of Grahamstown (e.g. the Post-Grad Village and parts of Grahamstown East)
have no water. The Municipality are working on the problem, but should the
reservoir levels drop further, more parts of town will be without water.
What is hand-flushing, for you delicate souls out there?
It goes like this: fill a bucket with water from a stagnant tank, and pour it into the toilet to flush everything through.
It's so hot that I put my head in cold water just to go outside, change clothes twice or three times a day. By eleven I can't move without breaking out in sweat.
But here I sit, at my shiny laptop, with bottled water to hand, in the air-conditioned cool. And I have not had to hand-flush, as the shortage has yet to reach that stage. This is just an inconvenience for us, and a temporary one at that.
It's a different story in the township, or the squatter camps, places where running water is scare at the best of times. At least, this is what I assume. We're insulated here, in our shady wide-avenued campus, with trucks to bring bottled water a the snap of a finger; we don't have the first idea what it's really like to be without.
8. The still, quiet centre.
A trail of calves have followed the jeep across the field. In their soft cow way they gaze at us, sidling closer until their noses are touching the jeep’s side. One of them begins to lick it experimentally.
Inside the jeep, nine-month-old Kimmy is performing a pantomime of delight, hands waving and a drooly excited sound bubbling out. Cows are clearly terribly exciting for a baby used to central London.
It’s my fourth day and Este has taken me safari-spotting cows for a few hours with her son’s new family. In a land of elephants and tigers, this may not seem the most exhilarating of adventures, and it’s not.
But Leonie and Ronald’s farm is worth the visit. With a panoramic view of the local mountain ranges, tall glasses of chilled pineapple juice from their pineapple fields, a litter of tiny blind terrier pups, and a rather tigerish pet cat who goes into ecstasies at human contact, it is a wonderfully domestic break from the exotic.
They have fences, of course. Large, electric, automated fences that I’ve only ever seen at the zoo. That takes a little getting used to.
Inside the jeep, nine-month-old Kimmy is performing a pantomime of delight, hands waving and a drooly excited sound bubbling out. Cows are clearly terribly exciting for a baby used to central London.
It’s my fourth day and Este has taken me safari-spotting cows for a few hours with her son’s new family. In a land of elephants and tigers, this may not seem the most exhilarating of adventures, and it’s not.
But Leonie and Ronald’s farm is worth the visit. With a panoramic view of the local mountain ranges, tall glasses of chilled pineapple juice from their pineapple fields, a litter of tiny blind terrier pups, and a rather tigerish pet cat who goes into ecstasies at human contact, it is a wonderfully domestic break from the exotic.
They have fences, of course. Large, electric, automated fences that I’ve only ever seen at the zoo. That takes a little getting used to.
But out in the middle of the fields you can't see the boundaries.
There is just sky.
And grass.
And quiet.
Wednesday, February 07, 2007
7. The sort of girl
Her eyes were red, but she was a shy girl anyway, the sort who spend their first week on the edge of tears, so I thought nothing of it. It was only after I had prattled on for a few minutes that she blurted out:
“My parents just left. So.”
I hug her, without really thinking about it.
“If we were in Ireland I’d make you tea." I tell her. "Tea solves everything.”
She grins in a wobbly way.
“Want to sit in the common room for a while over a cup?” I ask.
I’d met her yesterday. Carla, a white girl from a small town, an only child who’d never been away from home. She was the sort who seem too young for university, the sort who seem entirely without a layer of skin everyone else has. I’d sat with her and another girl, a gorgeous black shaved-headed first year, over dinner in our dining hall.
They were full of weighty opinions about the world, of the sort you only ever say at that age. The other girl had gone to boarding school, one with A-levels, and declared that therefore uni would of course be no problem. All the while looking to me for confirmation, for reassurance.
I felt too old right then.
But now I think, looking at Carla, maybe being older is a good thing. Maybe you can be a reassurance.
Another girl’s parents are just leaving, hesitating at the doorway, and again on the steps. Unsmiling, blocking all the rest of us out as if we are the problem. When they finally get in the car, the three of us make our way to the common room.
Carla has sugar in a Tupperware box, and her own mug and spoons. My mum packed them, she explained. She produces a box of biscuits; "To share with friends." She is the sort of girl who would worry about not having friends to share them with.
In the TV room next to the common room, another group of first years are watching television, laughing and singing together. Carla casts a look in their direction. She is the sort of girl who would never be able to go and join in, the sort of girl who would feel excluded. What she says is:
"They always have to make so much noise. They're always like that."
Something in her tone of voice doesn't sit right with me.
We talk about growing up, about families, about missing their annoying habits. We talk about security, about the locks we use on the cupboards even though there's a padlock on the door, the routine of packing things up every time you leave your bedroom, double-and triple-checking that everything is stowed away. We talk about the bedroom windows, how at first I thought they might be too flimsy, how I didn't realise there were metals bars underneath the pretty panes, like prison bars, so you never have a truly open window. We talk about the guards, and I say that the campus seems very secure.
She disagrees.
"I wouldn't trust them."
She tells us about living in a small farming town. When she was ten they were robbed. She says it was the security firm in the town that did it.
"So you see, you can't ever trust them."
A definite capitalisation is creeping in.
"Really?" I stay non-commital.
"Oh yes. In my secondary school, there was only me and another girl. We had to stick together all through. We were the only two-"
Here she puts a finger on her arm and rubs the skin.
"They are always so loud, like that-" a nod in the direction of the TV room.
She sees my not-quite-comprehension.
"You know, black people." She whispers these last two words.
Really, I say again.
I feel a little sick. And I need to do something to counteract her words, so I get up and go into the other group of girls, now singing and shimmying in harmony, who are, yes, all black, and I tell them their singing is wonderful. It is.
I come back to sit with Carla and the other girl. I have no idea what to say, so I try to say something about how living with new housemates is always tense, that they are just first years trying to find friends, and that they are not trying to exclude anyone.
But I'm at a loss, so I leave as soon as is polite, to lie on my bed and untangle the knots in my stomach. The sick feeling is still there, the feeling of having things turned upside down.
I had no idea she was that sort of girl.
“My parents just left. So.”
I hug her, without really thinking about it.
“If we were in Ireland I’d make you tea." I tell her. "Tea solves everything.”
She grins in a wobbly way.
“Want to sit in the common room for a while over a cup?” I ask.
I’d met her yesterday. Carla, a white girl from a small town, an only child who’d never been away from home. She was the sort who seem too young for university, the sort who seem entirely without a layer of skin everyone else has. I’d sat with her and another girl, a gorgeous black shaved-headed first year, over dinner in our dining hall.
They were full of weighty opinions about the world, of the sort you only ever say at that age. The other girl had gone to boarding school, one with A-levels, and declared that therefore uni would of course be no problem. All the while looking to me for confirmation, for reassurance.
I felt too old right then.
But now I think, looking at Carla, maybe being older is a good thing. Maybe you can be a reassurance.
Another girl’s parents are just leaving, hesitating at the doorway, and again on the steps. Unsmiling, blocking all the rest of us out as if we are the problem. When they finally get in the car, the three of us make our way to the common room.
Carla has sugar in a Tupperware box, and her own mug and spoons. My mum packed them, she explained. She produces a box of biscuits; "To share with friends." She is the sort of girl who would worry about not having friends to share them with.
In the TV room next to the common room, another group of first years are watching television, laughing and singing together. Carla casts a look in their direction. She is the sort of girl who would never be able to go and join in, the sort of girl who would feel excluded. What she says is:
"They always have to make so much noise. They're always like that."
Something in her tone of voice doesn't sit right with me.
We talk about growing up, about families, about missing their annoying habits. We talk about security, about the locks we use on the cupboards even though there's a padlock on the door, the routine of packing things up every time you leave your bedroom, double-and triple-checking that everything is stowed away. We talk about the bedroom windows, how at first I thought they might be too flimsy, how I didn't realise there were metals bars underneath the pretty panes, like prison bars, so you never have a truly open window. We talk about the guards, and I say that the campus seems very secure.
She disagrees.
"I wouldn't trust them."
She tells us about living in a small farming town. When she was ten they were robbed. She says it was the security firm in the town that did it.
"So you see, you can't ever trust them."
A definite capitalisation is creeping in.
"Really?" I stay non-commital.
"Oh yes. In my secondary school, there was only me and another girl. We had to stick together all through. We were the only two-"
Here she puts a finger on her arm and rubs the skin.
"They are always so loud, like that-" a nod in the direction of the TV room.
She sees my not-quite-comprehension.
"You know, black people." She whispers these last two words.
Really, I say again.
I feel a little sick. And I need to do something to counteract her words, so I get up and go into the other group of girls, now singing and shimmying in harmony, who are, yes, all black, and I tell them their singing is wonderful. It is.
I come back to sit with Carla and the other girl. I have no idea what to say, so I try to say something about how living with new housemates is always tense, that they are just first years trying to find friends, and that they are not trying to exclude anyone.
But I'm at a loss, so I leave as soon as is polite, to lie on my bed and untangle the knots in my stomach. The sick feeling is still there, the feeling of having things turned upside down.
I had no idea she was that sort of girl.
Tuesday, February 06, 2007
6. On being serenaded
At 5.45am the house intercom starts shouting at us. I wore earplugs to bed in preparation for this, but I’m woken up regardless.
The intercom squawks again, more insistent this time. I put a pillow over my head.
There’s a dim light outside when I draw the curtains. I pull on a pair of tracksuit bottoms because I slept without any pyjamas, then stumble to the bathroom to brush my teeth. Around me my corridor is emptying, girls in nightdress filing out into the courtyard.
It’s not cold, even at 6am, but the first years huddle together in sleepy, yawning solidarity. Up on one of the upper balconies a pair of birds are carrying out a very raucous conversation, but down here there is only a low mumble with a distinct undertone of grumble.
The first boy peeks his head around the corner of the courtyard. He has a guitar slung across his bare chest, and is wearing boxer shorts sprinkled liberally with pink hearts.
“Come on, don’t be shy!” Jani, our senior student, hollers.
A ragged line of boxer-shorted boys trail Pink Hearts into the courtyard centre. Among them are Spiderman, Basketball Man, and Impossibly Tight Y-Fronts Man. Some of them, improbably, are wearing black suit jackets open over their bare chests.
And then.
Then, they begin to sing. With matching hand movements. And winking, a lot of winking.
Why, you might ask. Dear lord why.
Because Rhodes has segregated housing, since arriving I have met nary a member of the opposite sex. This, apparently, is the novel Rhodent solution to intersex mingling. It’s called Serenading, and it’s one of the many fine Rhodes traditions that await me.
So the first full conversation I have with a boy in this country – concerning wireless cards and broadband usage, I must point out - is conducted with me trying hard not to look below his bare waist, and him pretending not to notice.
And you know, I think there’s something to it. Once you’ve seen a man in his underwear I guess awkward small-talk is never again a problem.
The intercom squawks again, more insistent this time. I put a pillow over my head.
There’s a dim light outside when I draw the curtains. I pull on a pair of tracksuit bottoms because I slept without any pyjamas, then stumble to the bathroom to brush my teeth. Around me my corridor is emptying, girls in nightdress filing out into the courtyard.
It’s not cold, even at 6am, but the first years huddle together in sleepy, yawning solidarity. Up on one of the upper balconies a pair of birds are carrying out a very raucous conversation, but down here there is only a low mumble with a distinct undertone of grumble.
The first boy peeks his head around the corner of the courtyard. He has a guitar slung across his bare chest, and is wearing boxer shorts sprinkled liberally with pink hearts.
“Come on, don’t be shy!” Jani, our senior student, hollers.
A ragged line of boxer-shorted boys trail Pink Hearts into the courtyard centre. Among them are Spiderman, Basketball Man, and Impossibly Tight Y-Fronts Man. Some of them, improbably, are wearing black suit jackets open over their bare chests.
And then.
Then, they begin to sing. With matching hand movements. And winking, a lot of winking.
Why, you might ask. Dear lord why.
Because Rhodes has segregated housing, since arriving I have met nary a member of the opposite sex. This, apparently, is the novel Rhodent solution to intersex mingling. It’s called Serenading, and it’s one of the many fine Rhodes traditions that await me.
So the first full conversation I have with a boy in this country – concerning wireless cards and broadband usage, I must point out - is conducted with me trying hard not to look below his bare waist, and him pretending not to notice.
And you know, I think there’s something to it. Once you’ve seen a man in his underwear I guess awkward small-talk is never again a problem.
Monday, February 05, 2007
5. Last Night
I did a stupid thing last night.
It is dark when I leave the computer labs, just cool enough for my vest top to be a little inadequate for the walk back across campus. The crickets throb all around like electric currents humming, and the still-warm air is full of scents I can’t identify, slip-slapping along the dust-brick avenue home. It’s so strange and wonderful that for a moment I have an intuition of exactly how much I will miss this place when I leave.
I say hello to the security guard on the corner, tuck my bag in under my arm. Up ahead three girls are turning down from one of the higher roads and they pause to look at me. One of them sings out:
“Are you al-riiight?”
I say yes out loud, follow up with a silent of course in my head. They say no more and walk on.
I’m not sure what just happened. I don’t look lost. But I definitely look something.
I turn off, up a steep avenue lined with large residences for students, and small houses of staff and wardens. I start to cut across the Oriel Hall lawn, but the lights stop just beyond the house and all I can see are bushes beyond.
I stop. Turn back.
I continue to the top of the avenue, but I don’t recognize these houses, these driveways, that wall. And that’s when the panic kicks in.
I’m not a panicky person, but I’m getting used to this feeling, the first hot bolt through your insides. I take a few deeps breaths. Now I realize why those girls stared at me.
A girl walking home, alone, past dark is just not done. Not even here, with guards on every corner.
I did a stupid thing. I’m not sure how stupid, because there is an edge of hysteria to the warnings sometimes, to the locks and bolts and emergency numbers.
But I won't do it again.
It is dark when I leave the computer labs, just cool enough for my vest top to be a little inadequate for the walk back across campus. The crickets throb all around like electric currents humming, and the still-warm air is full of scents I can’t identify, slip-slapping along the dust-brick avenue home. It’s so strange and wonderful that for a moment I have an intuition of exactly how much I will miss this place when I leave.
I say hello to the security guard on the corner, tuck my bag in under my arm. Up ahead three girls are turning down from one of the higher roads and they pause to look at me. One of them sings out:
“Are you al-riiight?”
I say yes out loud, follow up with a silent of course in my head. They say no more and walk on.
I’m not sure what just happened. I don’t look lost. But I definitely look something.
I turn off, up a steep avenue lined with large residences for students, and small houses of staff and wardens. I start to cut across the Oriel Hall lawn, but the lights stop just beyond the house and all I can see are bushes beyond.
I stop. Turn back.
I continue to the top of the avenue, but I don’t recognize these houses, these driveways, that wall. And that’s when the panic kicks in.
I’m not a panicky person, but I’m getting used to this feeling, the first hot bolt through your insides. I take a few deeps breaths. Now I realize why those girls stared at me.
A girl walking home, alone, past dark is just not done. Not even here, with guards on every corner.
I did a stupid thing. I’m not sure how stupid, because there is an edge of hysteria to the warnings sometimes, to the locks and bolts and emergency numbers.
But I won't do it again.
Sunday, February 04, 2007
4. di.ver.si.ty
"Who here has heard of a coconut?"
I'm confused by the question, but hardly anyone else is. There's a general shifting about, and several voices speak at once.
"It was an Oreo at my school," one girl says. She has short hair and likes to skateboard. "They'd whisper it sometimes as they went by, if I was hanging around with white kids."
"Black on the outside, white on the inside," someone else translates.
"What about teabag? Or wigger?"
A chorus of agreement. Same thing, only reversed, apparently.
We're sitting in the common room, all the first years and the res committee. I'm on the floor with most of them, taking part in a workshop on "Diversity."
It's Rhodes trying to educate the racism out of us, one girl had said earlier by way of explanation.
"Listen, let's not be too PC about it either," Henri says. "It doesn't mean you can't hang around mostly with people of your own colour."
She gestures with her hands. "You can be friends with whomever you like, and because of language or culture it will often turn out - well it looks segregated. But it's not, it's natural sometimes."
Earlier, while waiting for a walking tour of the university, I had noticed how the group of assembled first-years had broken up into two smaller groups. One of whites, one of blacks. I remember how I switched groups to try and balance it out. It's odd how colour-conscious you become.
Este had said to me on my first day, "Even those of us who were against apartheid can't help but think in terms of apartheid." I'm beginning to understand that.
The conversation moves on, and people start telling their own stories. Bridget, from Zim', recounts how people would accost her at home because she was white. "You killed my father!" one man yelled, pointing in her face. The killing had happened twenty years before Bridget was born.
Sarah joins in with her experience of being British in South Africa. It's all your fault, people tell her. What have I got to do with what happened a century ago? she asks. She doesn't believe that she should feel guilty.
Sitting on the floor, I think, honestly, about all the times I felt British people should feel guilty on account of their history, hoped they would. I hope I can talk to Sarah about that some day.
I almost didn't come to this workshop. In Ireland I work at a reconciliation centre, I give workshops on diversity myself.
The teacher being taught.
I never imagined how humbling this year would turn out to be.
I'm confused by the question, but hardly anyone else is. There's a general shifting about, and several voices speak at once.
"It was an Oreo at my school," one girl says. She has short hair and likes to skateboard. "They'd whisper it sometimes as they went by, if I was hanging around with white kids."
"Black on the outside, white on the inside," someone else translates.
"What about teabag? Or wigger?"
A chorus of agreement. Same thing, only reversed, apparently.
We're sitting in the common room, all the first years and the res committee. I'm on the floor with most of them, taking part in a workshop on "Diversity."
It's Rhodes trying to educate the racism out of us, one girl had said earlier by way of explanation.
"Listen, let's not be too PC about it either," Henri says. "It doesn't mean you can't hang around mostly with people of your own colour."
She gestures with her hands. "You can be friends with whomever you like, and because of language or culture it will often turn out - well it looks segregated. But it's not, it's natural sometimes."
Earlier, while waiting for a walking tour of the university, I had noticed how the group of assembled first-years had broken up into two smaller groups. One of whites, one of blacks. I remember how I switched groups to try and balance it out. It's odd how colour-conscious you become.
Este had said to me on my first day, "Even those of us who were against apartheid can't help but think in terms of apartheid." I'm beginning to understand that.
The conversation moves on, and people start telling their own stories. Bridget, from Zim', recounts how people would accost her at home because she was white. "You killed my father!" one man yelled, pointing in her face. The killing had happened twenty years before Bridget was born.
Sarah joins in with her experience of being British in South Africa. It's all your fault, people tell her. What have I got to do with what happened a century ago? she asks. She doesn't believe that she should feel guilty.
Sitting on the floor, I think, honestly, about all the times I felt British people should feel guilty on account of their history, hoped they would. I hope I can talk to Sarah about that some day.
I almost didn't come to this workshop. In Ireland I work at a reconciliation centre, I give workshops on diversity myself.
The teacher being taught.
I never imagined how humbling this year would turn out to be.
3. Coming Home
It was early on a Saturday morning that I arrived here, sweating so much in the jeans I had chosen to travel in, and which seemed so appropriate in the chill of Dublin airport, that I thought I might just lay down in the heat and die.
I hardly notice the campus at first, the sights and buildings Este is pointing out. I am thinking very hard about a cold shower, very hard indeed. That thought is the only thing between me and a sudden, untimely expiration in the African sunshine.
I am assigned to New House, in the Jan Smuts residence. As the town that Rhodes University is based in, Grahamstown, is both small and far away from any larger cities, the vast majority of the 6,000 strong campus live on the grounds.
This first day, I am exhausted, sweaty, laden down and incorrectly dressed, so I am disappointed by the small bare room I am given the keys to, by the list of rules taped to my desk, by the shared bathrooms and my silly white body. New House is for girls, mostly younger girls, and I sit on my bed and decide a mistake was made. In the morning I resolve to ask for a transfer.
The next morning I feel more human, and I start to appreciate the warmth of the res committee - the team of staff and students who run the residence. Every house has a res committee, and it's their job to bond the whole house of a hundred or more students, and make us a family of sorts. They drive me down into the town to pick up toiletries, sort out my computer access, bring me to dinner, and talk and talk and talk. They hail from Zimbabwe, Namibia, Zambia, Botswana, England, Australia, Mauritius, and every conceivable part of South Africa.
And the campus is nothing short of stunning. Great palm trees and old colonial architecture; leafy shaded walks and swimming pools; lawns peopled with beautiful students reclining in the sunshine. My department is in a latticed house three minutes down the road from me, my tall-ceilinged dining hall is just around the corner.
I go for a stroll into the town to buy some things I hadn't packed. I stand in Mr. Price Homeware and gaze around at the array of bedsheets and cutlery and cushions, transfixed. For now I just buy one or two things - a towel, a scented candle - and head back to New House.
The girls are outside in the shade of the entranceway, sharing cups of juice and opinions. I sit with them for a while, talk about Afrikaans culture and the Zimbabwean land reform, then go inside to my little room.
I move the furniture around, put the scented candle on the bedside locker. I can hear some unnamed birds calling outside, and the ebb and flow of conversation. Soon the evening cool will set in and the jazz band on the green will set up. And I realise that though I've been here for less than 24 hours, I wouldn't change it for the world.
I hardly notice the campus at first, the sights and buildings Este is pointing out. I am thinking very hard about a cold shower, very hard indeed. That thought is the only thing between me and a sudden, untimely expiration in the African sunshine.
I am assigned to New House, in the Jan Smuts residence. As the town that Rhodes University is based in, Grahamstown, is both small and far away from any larger cities, the vast majority of the 6,000 strong campus live on the grounds.
This first day, I am exhausted, sweaty, laden down and incorrectly dressed, so I am disappointed by the small bare room I am given the keys to, by the list of rules taped to my desk, by the shared bathrooms and my silly white body. New House is for girls, mostly younger girls, and I sit on my bed and decide a mistake was made. In the morning I resolve to ask for a transfer.
The next morning I feel more human, and I start to appreciate the warmth of the res committee - the team of staff and students who run the residence. Every house has a res committee, and it's their job to bond the whole house of a hundred or more students, and make us a family of sorts. They drive me down into the town to pick up toiletries, sort out my computer access, bring me to dinner, and talk and talk and talk. They hail from Zimbabwe, Namibia, Zambia, Botswana, England, Australia, Mauritius, and every conceivable part of South Africa.
And the campus is nothing short of stunning. Great palm trees and old colonial architecture; leafy shaded walks and swimming pools; lawns peopled with beautiful students reclining in the sunshine. My department is in a latticed house three minutes down the road from me, my tall-ceilinged dining hall is just around the corner.
I go for a stroll into the town to buy some things I hadn't packed. I stand in Mr. Price Homeware and gaze around at the array of bedsheets and cutlery and cushions, transfixed. For now I just buy one or two things - a towel, a scented candle - and head back to New House.
The girls are outside in the shade of the entranceway, sharing cups of juice and opinions. I sit with them for a while, talk about Afrikaans culture and the Zimbabwean land reform, then go inside to my little room.
I move the furniture around, put the scented candle on the bedside locker. I can hear some unnamed birds calling outside, and the ebb and flow of conversation. Soon the evening cool will set in and the jazz band on the green will set up. And I realise that though I've been here for less than 24 hours, I wouldn't change it for the world.
2. Fear and Loathing
He tells me his name is Pete. He hesitates before he says it, so I think it might be a simpler version of his name. Or maybe it's just that no-one usually asks.
Pete singled me out as soon as I left arrivals at Johannesburg. I have too many bags, and clearly no idea where to go. He was by my side in a moment, offering to take me to the right terminal for my transfer.
He puts his hands on my luggage cart, but I don't let go. It's ok, he tells me, he can push it for me. After a few hundred yards I stand back and let him push it.
He's wearing a t-shirt that says PORTER, he has an ID card for the airport. But I am outside in the Jo'burg sunshine, with too many belongings to keep an eye on, too much money in my purse, and terrified of the poor black people all around me.
I wasn't afraid until I arrived. But thirty minutes after landing I'm thinking like an Afrikaans farmer.
It's not about the colour of skin. It's about having so much, surrounded by people who have so little. I understand, in those few minutes, what I couldn't from months of reading about the history of this country. It was fear that drove apartheid, fear of having what so many others need.
Everything about me seems ostentatious, unnecessary, undeserving. Rich. And Pete knows it. He's very polite, but I think he loathes me a little all the same.
Pete, who is not much older than me but who looks drawn and pinched in a way I will never be. Pete, who has to work weekends at the airport, to pay for his course in mechanical fitting. Or so he tells me.
I loathe myself a little too. For already being so on guard. For already being so cynical.
***********
On the connecting flight to Port Elizabeth, I asked the Afrikaans man beside me if there were townships around the city.
"What do you mean, townships? You mean, where the black people live?"
I struggled, not really sure myself.
"No - more like shanty areas. You know?"
He doesn't give me much of an answer. I wonder how to read him. It seems defensive, a sort of weariness from always being on the defensive, always being attacked.
But I see them nonetheless. As the plane descends, skimming above the ground, there are suddenly crooked rows of corrugated tin huts crowded onto the bare dirt alongside the runway, rows and rows and rows. And it's there again, that same blank terror.
It's there too when my adopted mother, Este, asks me to lock all the doors as we leave the airport in her car. It's there in the clusters of barefoot black boys who stroll along the highway shoulder. It's there when I see that my new bedroom is on the ground floor, with a very flimsy-looking window. It's there in the panic-buttons along the university routes, in the squat woman who "minds" the cars on the main street for a fee, in the constant security presence around campus, in the reinforced locks on the doors and the warning posters all about.
My insides are eating me up. It's fear of black people, one part of me scolds. And a little bit of that is true - it seems different when the person on the street-corner asking for change is black. I am overwhelmed, intimidated by being white in a sea of black. Because there are no poor white people here, so it's alarming how fast you start to equate black with a potential threat.
It's a struggle to understand it, a struggle to be honest about it. I'm learning too much about myself. So far, I don't like what I'm finding.
Pete singled me out as soon as I left arrivals at Johannesburg. I have too many bags, and clearly no idea where to go. He was by my side in a moment, offering to take me to the right terminal for my transfer.
He puts his hands on my luggage cart, but I don't let go. It's ok, he tells me, he can push it for me. After a few hundred yards I stand back and let him push it.
He's wearing a t-shirt that says PORTER, he has an ID card for the airport. But I am outside in the Jo'burg sunshine, with too many belongings to keep an eye on, too much money in my purse, and terrified of the poor black people all around me.
I wasn't afraid until I arrived. But thirty minutes after landing I'm thinking like an Afrikaans farmer.
It's not about the colour of skin. It's about having so much, surrounded by people who have so little. I understand, in those few minutes, what I couldn't from months of reading about the history of this country. It was fear that drove apartheid, fear of having what so many others need.
Everything about me seems ostentatious, unnecessary, undeserving. Rich. And Pete knows it. He's very polite, but I think he loathes me a little all the same.
Pete, who is not much older than me but who looks drawn and pinched in a way I will never be. Pete, who has to work weekends at the airport, to pay for his course in mechanical fitting. Or so he tells me.
I loathe myself a little too. For already being so on guard. For already being so cynical.
***********
On the connecting flight to Port Elizabeth, I asked the Afrikaans man beside me if there were townships around the city.
"What do you mean, townships? You mean, where the black people live?"
I struggled, not really sure myself.
"No - more like shanty areas. You know?"
He doesn't give me much of an answer. I wonder how to read him. It seems defensive, a sort of weariness from always being on the defensive, always being attacked.
But I see them nonetheless. As the plane descends, skimming above the ground, there are suddenly crooked rows of corrugated tin huts crowded onto the bare dirt alongside the runway, rows and rows and rows. And it's there again, that same blank terror.
It's there too when my adopted mother, Este, asks me to lock all the doors as we leave the airport in her car. It's there in the clusters of barefoot black boys who stroll along the highway shoulder. It's there when I see that my new bedroom is on the ground floor, with a very flimsy-looking window. It's there in the panic-buttons along the university routes, in the squat woman who "minds" the cars on the main street for a fee, in the constant security presence around campus, in the reinforced locks on the doors and the warning posters all about.
My insides are eating me up. It's fear of black people, one part of me scolds. And a little bit of that is true - it seems different when the person on the street-corner asking for change is black. I am overwhelmed, intimidated by being white in a sea of black. Because there are no poor white people here, so it's alarming how fast you start to equate black with a potential threat.
It's a struggle to understand it, a struggle to be honest about it. I'm learning too much about myself. So far, I don't like what I'm finding.
Saturday, February 03, 2007
1. Arrival
A few last-minute panics, some hard goodbyes, three plane journeys and a car ride later, and I can set my multiplicitous bags down in my adopted country for the next year.
Hectic is not the word right now. It's hot, I have hundreds of people to meet, places to visit and a small village water supply to buy if I'm going to make it through this coming week.
Writing will begin soon...
Hectic is not the word right now. It's hot, I have hundreds of people to meet, places to visit and a small village water supply to buy if I'm going to make it through this coming week.
Writing will begin soon...
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