A Visit to Maputo provokes thoughts of "Africa"

Day One in Maputo: March 25

The small plane from Cape Town lands at Maputo airport just before noon.  I wait the moving staircase to drop from the plane as the door is opened.  As I descend one metal step at a time I realize just how excited I am feeling to be back.  

When I reach the bottom I stop.  Blue hazy sky high above, hot tarmac below. A hint of a breeze.  I take a deep, deep breath of the tropical, pungent, thick, humid Maputo air.  It’s familiarity eases out of the recesses of my memory with a wave of nostalgia that catches up with the present.

It is a smell like no other.  Not a scent, not an aroma, these words are too vague for the combination of trees and ripe fruit and wood fires and humanity and diesel that mingles into something pungent, something sweet, something rich.  One sensation.  Its elements no longer distinguishable. 

It is particular and peculiar to Africa.  West.  East. Almost south.  Not Cape Town. 

It’s in my head before I know I have thought it.  An involuntary response: “I am in Africa”. 

²

Later I go for my first walk along the streets of Maputo from my friend Julie’s house which is in the middle of “cement” city on a busy main road, Avenida 24 de Julho.  Julie is a doctor has made her home here since the mid-70’s where I invariable stay on my visits, the last one about four years ago.

It is just before dark (no dusk here, its light then its dark) and it’s still hot and humid.  Unusual heat wave for this time of the year, 35 degree (95 Fahrenheit).  The sounds of the street are vibrant, cars and motorbikes and music and people talking and laughing, all give into a general roar of Maputo city sounds.  It resonates with my memories of living here in the eighties and they flood back: times of hope, times of hardship, times of obsessive focus on the political minutiae of a particular day by cooperantes (those who came to work here because of political commitment) when we gather at weekend parties or get togethers, the grace and politeness of the Mozambicans who must have regarded the arrival of hundreds of foreign volunteers with some bemusement if not resentment.  I was a bit of an outsider because I came in and out to write about Mozambique, I didn't work here.  I used to listen to their involvment and envy their direct contribution to the building of a revolution.   

Apartment building on Avenida Patrice Lumumba where I stayed in in the early 1980's

I pull back to my present surroundings and the rush, rush of people to catch minibuses home, the pace of cars (many more than my last visit) which often slow to a standstill, to people walking briskly to get where they are going at the end of the day on Julius Nyerere and Eduardo Mondlane and 24 de Julho.  I walk the familiar street and smile at the earnestness of their names, which reflect an earlier time:  24 de Julho (one of the few names unchanged after independence) crosses with Salvador Allende; Mao Tse Tung with Kim Il Sung; Patrice Lumumba with Vladimir Lenine, Karl Marx with Eduardo Mondlane, the first president of Frelimo who was assassinated in 1969.

Traffic outside of Julie's house - with a heavy dose of polution

I find bits of Portuguese coming back as I walk (though my language skills are pathetic), my feet aware the uneven, rubble-ly, stony and sandy, patched concrete sidewalks with edges broken so they merge into the cracks and crevices of the roads, past the street vendors peddling their wares, fruit, electronic goods and nuts, shoes, cloth.  There are Mozambicans filling the street, young, old, sprinting to or waiting for the minibuses that will take them to their homes on the outskirts of the city, students in uniform from the nearby technical college that used to be the Josina Machel High School, lively youngsters, boys and girls, chatting and laughing and flirting as they walk by, street children, children in school uniform.  The women in capulanas, the cloth tight-wound around the waist in colorful patterns, some with babies wound onto their backs, women in jeans and tight fitting t-shirts, the women in skirts and blouses and impossible shoes for the nature of the sidewalks.

I find a physical ease between people, anvopen affection, a physicality of the connection.  I can count the number of non-Africans I pass, a white woman my age-ish, a white man my age-ish, a younger woman.  I am ready with a smile as I am for everyone I pass, but they don’t acknowledge.  I surmise that to smile would be a tacit recognition that we are different, and they are not different, they are part of Maputo.

A young seller of airtime for cell phones

I head for Avenida Frederick Engels. Here the tempo abruptly changes.  My pace slows to enjoy the quiet, the scenes of lovers, bodies close, faces smiling, dreamy eyed sitting on benches facing the sea.   I am light footed and light hearted as I stop and look beyond the low wall at the edge of the cliff over the vast sea and the faraway horizon.  It’s glorious.  Maputo has its own beauty because of vistas like these.

Not of course the beauty of Cape Town with its ever present mountain, its craggy, rock face rising up to the heavens from every vantage point so that you can’t escape it.  Towering, protective, magnificent.  Maputo with its vistas of the sea and the River Maputo that you must walk to find, cannot compete.  But it has other things to offer. Among them a vibrant city, with the addition of many side walk café’s and open air café’s in newly renovated parks - many that give views of the expanse of water that are creating a new culture of Maputo.  
 

Park overlooking the bay.  One of the newly renovated spaces with cafe's

Lovely places for coffee/lunch and meeting people and to work

I feel happy and at one in a city that provides perhaps not the beauty, but something else. 

Africa?

Well not exactly.

When I wrote in an early blog from Pretoria: I head tomorrow for that “this-is-not-Africa” beautiful city of Cape Town note the quotations marks.  I was being facetious.  Of course Cape Town is Africa, African.  It is at the very tip of Africa, purportedly its peninsula the meeting of Atlantic and the Indian Oceans (purportedly because that point is actually Cape Aghulas which a close look at the map of South Africa will reveal) how can it not be Africa.  Just as Libya and Tunisia and Egypt are Africa, but at the northern end. 

I bristle when people say Cape Town is not Africa.  I was born in Africa.  I grew up in Africa.  I feel African in the broadest sense of the word, not the racial categorization sense of the word. My city is Cape Town.

Africa is far more diverse than Europe.  Do we say that Greece is not Europe, but Britain is?  That Portugal is not Europe but Switzerland is?  So let us put to rest the notion that for some reason or other Cape Town is not Africa.

Cape Town has its own feel, its own expression of the continent, that once experienced is with you forever.  However, it is a city that is still cleaved apart by race and class   By privilege and inability to access resources. Far far less than under apartheid.  Now in the center, people of all races and ethnicities mingle and pass each other with a naturalness that could not be imagined during apartheid times. It is definitely Africa. 

Walking down Cape Town’s main street, Adderly, which in my youth was almost solely white, colorless and pristine, where whites thought little about shopping in whites-only department stores (the few smaller stores who encouraged black customers did not go as far as allowing them to try on clothes) breaking their shopping sprees with tea in department store the restaurants.  One of my strongest childhood memories of walking down Adderly with my mother was stopping to listen to African boys, not yet teenagers,  buskering kwela music on penny whistles.  Fabulous.  That the scene and the music that still echo in my mind speaks to how uncommon it was.  Now Adderly is alive with street vendors, selling all manner of goods - fruit and electrical and other miscellaneous wares and sunglasses and crafts, lining the street with stalls that take up half the wide pavements so that people jostle each other, people representing every part of Cape Town life.  The informal sector found in varying ways in cities all over Africa . And in on every street in the center of Maputo.

An artisan in the newly constructed park for crafts with its pleasant cafes and greenery.  Before crafts were sold all over the city.  It is not clear if the craft sellers benefit from this new arrangement

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So why, given that I feel this way, do I think to myself as I walk through the centre of Maputo “I am in Africa”, when in Cape Town I think, “I am in Cape Town”. 

In Maputo I do not feel the stomach tautening, the discomfort that often grips me when entering a restaurant in Cape Town, observing once again that the clientele are all white or almost.  Here there are open air café’s and a life that does not obviously segregate.  (Segregation comes through economics and class - the bairros on the outskirts of the city where people live in increasingly dire poverty)

Mozambicans live their city. From filling the café’s for coffee during the day and beer in the evening, from mingling on the street to stop and chat, to the sellers of fruits and vegetables from a cloth spread on the pavement, from carts with large wheels, from stands rough-built for the purpose that people congregate around. 

In Maputo people are tactile, holding hands, engaging, kissing on both sides, both  hello and good bye (I have learnt to assume the greeting with whomever I am introduced to).  Where Cape Town is organized, the pavements smooth, an ever present orderliness, in Maputo it is totally other.  Chaos is probably a more appropriate word. Shabbines? I revel in it.

  There are many new buildings in the city, and many more being built.

I confess: There have been glib moments when I have said without any sense that Cape Town is not Africa. How is that possible that I could forsake my city so?  I mull it over and see that it is not about Cape Town but more about the Africa I have experienced since emigrating from Cape Town.

I retrace my own personal trajectory. From leaving apartheid South Africa in 1967 during a period of fierce repression for the US where I immersed myself anti-apartheid and pro-solidarity with the anti-Portuguese colonial struggle activity, to my travelling in 1973 with a back pack from Cairo to Dar es Salaam, to returning to Africa within a few month to march with PAIGC in the war zones of Guinea-Bissau, and again after independence in 1976, to visiting Mozambique throughout the 80’s and when not in Africa submerged in writing these experiences, until the high point: watching on TV the release of Nelson Mandela from prison in 1990.

Cape Town has its unique geography and terrain. What I got used and what became far more familiar as Cape town receded into memory were to the open spaces, the endless veld, the boabab trees, the sounds of the veld, animals and birds calling, frogs, the hues of brown and gold and green over flat distances, the smells of fires and smoke, of undergrowth, of plants and bushes and trees and earth; the sounds of life in villages I stayed in, the different energies of the various cities, of the small towns, of the rural areas.  I have been incredibly fortunate that my writing took me places where I connected with much of the diversity of Africa.

So when I arrive in Maputo those many years of connection to Africa resonate in a way that arriving in Cape Town does not.  My connection with Maputo is immediate. In contrast, my time in Cape Town has been one of unhurried relearning and reconnection, of falling in love once again.  

Whether I can call it home is another question for another time. 

Postscript

Maputo:  Day 10 April 3

A week later, and I am still in love with Maputo. 



The end of the Acacia tree blooms. When in full bloom they set the city alight in orange

But reality seeps in:

·    The preponderance of South African companies, from mining companies, to supermarkets,department stores,  to high end and low end chain stores, to housing compounds... without, as far as I can gather, guarantees for worker conditions

·    The corruption – from the President and his amassing of wealth down to petty officials at the bureaucracy of bureaucracy

·    The falling apart of the health system and provision of care, which at the time of independence was a fundamental goal of the new government

·    To the falling apart of the education system, which at the time of independence...ditto

·    The tight control of the Frelimo, the party, with little possibility of dissidence, challenge or real democracy

·    Etc.

Despite a sense of disillusionment, I will miss Maputo, and my friend there, and feel the visit was too short.  I leave with determination to return for a longer time.

²

Meanwhile,tomorrow I return to Cape Town . 

I feel as if I am going back home.  

4 April, 2011

  Trees in abundance in Maputo beautify the city.

Alas, so are street kids, here fast asleep on the sidewalk

And here, clowning around

The Acacia trees line the avenues in abundance: knarled and imposing trunks, fern like leaves

"Apartheid is over but the struggle is not"

                                 Khayelitsha               

Katie sits next to me as I follow Peter’s car out of Cape Town to Khayelitsha.  This is the largest African township that visitors travelling from the airport to Cape Town can’t avoid seeing jammed up against the highway, a dense mass of shacks that border the road through on the Cape Flats

Katie

Katie tells me she has two children, seventeen years apart.  “I didn’t want more than one child when I would be unable to live with them and when I didn’t have my own place”.  The son, the eldest, lives near her in Khayelitsha, has his contracting business and renovates houses in white Cape Town as she calls it.  He does well.  Her daughter has a good job and is a boxing champion. Katie has grandchildren and great grandchildren. 

She grins when she tells me how her husband left her many years ago a few days before her birthday.  She found the timing particularly hurtful.  I ask her if he is close to his children. Yes, she answers, he is.  She chuckles again. He used to send her birthday presents  “But all that did was remind me that he had left me”.   But this is the past.  She is independent now.

Her activism took off in the 1980’s.  She  fought apartheid at its core – the pass laws .  And then it was over.  She believed that all the horrors were now behind. 

Katie outside her house in Khayelitsha

Two years ago she moved into a new brick house replacing the shack that she built on the small plot allocated to her.  In proud place in a new cabinet is a display of her bead work.  Her talents have been recognized and she is always busy.  Last year she took her intricate colorful necklaces to the Sante Fe International Folk Art Market.  Her beading work table is in the cluttered second small bedroom of her house.  Next to the table is a low black board on a easel with a child’s drawing in chalk by one of her grandchildren.  This keeps her great grandchildren and her grandchildren busy so she can get on with her work when she’s caring for them.  She continues to work as a domestic worker two days a week.  But on her own terms.  She is in charge of her life now.

Some of Katie's jewelry

And so why does Katie who has made so many strides in her life still feel the need to continue to fight for change; why still part of an ongoing struggle?

²

We reach Khayelitsha and  stop in front of a small community center.  In a room that was once a show house and is now used as a meeting room, I sit with seven women and two men on worn plastic chairs in a circle  The house hasn’t fared well.  The plaster board ceiling bows at the edges, the built-in kitchen furniture is split in places, the paint was probably once green, the floor is uneven.  Despite the clear hot sunny day outside, little light enters.

Katie, Sindiswa, Dorothy, Cynthia, Angelina, Six, Evelyn, Jack and Ethel are members of a group dating back to the early 1980’s, who came to be known as the “Nyanga Squatters”.

The group of Nyanga Squatters who told me their story

It’s a moving story of courage and determination in the face of apartheid.  It’s a story of how a group struggled against apartheid on the personal level, won some victories for the wider community, and longed for the day when apartheid would end;  for when the conditions of their lives would improve and they could begin to leave behind them the poverty and oppression and the humiliation they had known for generations.

They are still waiting.

“The TRC could be used to wipe away tears of some people”,  one of the women in the group interjects, referring to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The TRC was formed soon after the new government came to power as a means to address the serious human rights violations – the murders, the killings.  But not the day to day crimes against the people who lived the brutal realities of apartheid. 

They were all eager to talk – their words translated by Sindiswa from Xhosa to English - about the apartheid period as a time of acute suffering. 

“The TRC did nothing for those who lived and suffered so long under apartheid.  We had nothing to wipe our tears with”

“No one came to say sorry”, said Peter who stayed for the beginning of the session. “No one.”

But don’t get me wrong.  While their feelings of abandonment by national and local government was real, this was not a room full of people recalling only their suffering.  They were telling me their history with pride, and often with humor, even as they expressed disappointment in how things have turned out.    They are in no way defeated.

Dorothy

Their story goes like this:

They were among the hundreds of women who headed for Cape Town from the Transkei and the Ciskei (Xhosa-speaking ‘homelands’) in the early 1980's.  How could any woman survive in that dry land with all its physical and political problems, with no way to feed their family, old and young?  How could they survive being split from husbands and partners who as "units of labor" lived as “single” in Cape Town and earned so little that the remittances with a pittance? 

There was only one thing to do. They packed their few belongings and set off with their children.  Illegal or not, they had to eat. They knew, as Africans entering a so-called “Coloured Preferential Area”, they had only 72 hours to seek work before being declared illegal.  Totally impossible. They didn’t care.  They were determined to stay. 

They did not hide in fear. Feeling that safety was in numbers, they went to the administration and made their demands.   They were told that on such-and-such a day they should meet at such-and-such a place and they would get the decision about their case from the authorities.

At the appointed time they headed for the meeting place.  They got their answer: the police were armed and waiting.  They were rounded up, put on buses and driven 1170 kilometers (730 miles)  to Umtata, the capital of the Transkei.  Gone!  Too bad that they had not brought their children with them.  Too bad they could not get their belongings.  Just too bloody bad.   The authorities were not interested.  Their only interest was that these agitators did not set a bad example and get away with it.

For three months they pleaded to be allowed to return to get their children who had been taken in by neighbors.  Some were only a few months old.  Others were a few years.  The authorities finally agreed and they were told that buses would be provided – but just to get your children.  OK, baas.  They filled more than 20 buses.  They arrived back in Nyanga.

“Then”, said Sindiswa who was translating, waving her right hand in a snake-like move, “It was duck and dive, hide and seek!”

Phffft!  They collected their kids and disappeared into the dense morass of corrugated iron- wood scraps- plastic sheeting shacks and narrow pathways occupied by the thousands of Africans living both legally and illegally in the Cape Town area.

Some took sanctuary in one or two churches in the community.  They were safe for a few months while they tried more negotiations from their safe havens.  They got nowhere. When this no longer worked, a group of 57 decided it was time to involve a “white” church. On March 10, 1982 they headed  for St. George’s Cathedral in the center of Cape Town on a Sunday, acting as if all they wanted to do that day was pray.  They informed the Dean that they were not planning to leave. Their plight was greeted with a sympathetic ear.  A squatter camp was set up in the grounds of the Cathedral and after a while began to fast in protest.

The media began to cover the story and it was captured in the international press as well. 

The authorities caved.  They squatters got a three month temporary permit.  At the end of the three months they got an 18 month permit.  The pressure from the world and from inside the country against those dompasses was getting to be too much.  Then they got an 18 month permit.  Soon after the pass system was  abolished. National resistance and international pressure was too much.  Confronted with the need for settlements the government established Khayelitsha, forcing the squatters and hundred like them to leave Nyanga.  Minimal services were provided as the population climbed to over 400,000. Their activism focused on the right to decent housing. 

Then President F.W. De Klerk announced in early February  1990 that Nelson Mandela would be released on February 11^th.; that the ANC and other banned organizations would be unbanned.  After a transition period elections were held at the end of April 1994 and apartheid was finally dead (if not totally buried). Then on May 10, Nelson Mandela was inaugurated and the new South Africa was born.

Oh the rejoicing in the townships! In the rural areas.  In the towns and the cities. Throughout South Africa.  More TV images.  The scenes of joy.  I watched with tears.

Apartheid was over, and the Nyanga Squatters were as happy as anyone.  They would get back their dignity and self worth. South Africa was now owned by the majority. There would be housing and schools and freedom of movement and health facilities and jobs and no-one arresting them for crimes that were only crimes in apartheid South Africa, nowhere else.   

Fast forward seventeen years.

They are still waiting for basic services.

What are the biggest issues? I ask, already having a sense from the way the conversation was going. Now their voices are serious.

Lack of decent housing. Lack of Jobs. Violence among the youth. Education.  And overriding poverty.

The son and daughter of one of the Nyanga Squatters outside their house

Katie in front of the plot where their new house is being built next to the shack

Many of the group of “Nyanga Squatters” from the Cathedral hunger strike continue to wait for livable housing.  Some find that after years, many years, their names are not on the waiting list, although they registered.  Others find that allocations have been made, but no action was taken to inform them. Three of those sitting with me are still living in shacks.  The rest had been allotted small brick houses.  The houses were free.  But much work was needed to make them livable. “Matchboxes”, they call them. 

Angelina's house.

There is an exposed electrical wire at the back of the house that the authorities admit is dangerous

but they haven’t come to fix it. Angelina grows corn in the sandy front garden.

What exacerbates all these conditions is the impossibly high jobless rate.  At the end of 2009, 53.4 percent of all young black Africans between the ages of 15 and 24 unemployed -- three times the unemployment rate (14.5 percent) of young white South Africans.  Even those with education can’t find jobs. “You have no experience”, their children are told. But how can they get experience, they ask rhetorically, if they can’t get jobs?

We have been talking for over three hours.  I see their earnestness of, their faces, a mix of hope and sadness, of feeling failed by the government, but refusing to give in.  These are not defeated faces, not by a long shot.  South Africa is theirs and they made it theirs through their struggle.  That spirit does not die.

But their message has been clear and explicit:  Apartheid is over but the struggle is not. 

²

I explain to the group that I am moved by their stories, that I respect their struggle, but I can offer nothing concrete.  I feel humbled.  I am from outside.  I am white.  I visit. I leave.  I stay in the white city.     

“Ja, no” they said in the typical yes-no way that South Africans begin their responses, “it doesn’t matter.  We are not expecting anything.  If you tell our story, that is enough.”

And then they invite me back.  The visit was too short, they tell me.  Please come again, meet with our leaders and hear the full story.

I had come to South Africa with an open mind, not sure what I would find to add to my book.  I know as I say goodbye that this is one of the stories I will include.  My book is developing a mind of its own.

²

Cynthia with one of the children from the crèche at the community center.

They get food from the Provincial Administration, but not salaries.

They care givers volunteer. They work full time.

 Cynthia's co-worker, also a volunteer

Guest Blog: "Cape Town is Where I was Made"

I met Sally Spilhaus when I was at university.  We were 19.  I was intimidated by her, she was so beautiful, so confident, so competent, so worldly.  Or so I thought.  I was timid and lacking in confidence. And I thought this would not change.  She often reminds me how I would doze off - often under the table or once under a grand piano - at dinner parties.  I felt I had nothing to offer, so went to sleep.  I did grow out of that.  And she admitted to not feeling quite as together as I assumed her to be.  Those were tricky times for young women, and we both drawn like a magnetic force into the emerging women's movement in our respective adopted countries soon after we arrived.  No looking back...

Sally (left) and Stephanie soon after arriving in North America

We both emigrated to North America in 1967, each of us with silent heavy hearts, she to Montreal, me to New York. Our friendship has been strong ever since our Cape Town days, sharing various trials and tribulations, triumphs and happy times in the years that have followed.   

Sally (right) and me at a restaurant in Kalk Bay in February

Sally was in Cape Town when I first arrived, and so we had time to talk about our responses to "home".  The following are her thoughts, in part in response to the previous guest blog by Dan O'Meara:

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February 23, 2011

It is 6 a.m. and I am sitting up in my bed in the Hermanus B&B I will occupy for the last four days of my holidays, typing on my laptop.  The place is situated right on the cliff path in Westcliff, and from my bed I can hear the rumble of the waves against the rocks and the tentative, creamy early morning calls of a Cape robin just outside my window. These sounds are two of the clearest – and dearest  -  aural memories of my childhood. There is only one cliché that does justice to the way I feel when I hear them:  my heart swells with love. It does not matter that Hermanus is now a dreary tourist trap full of crappy “curios” and clothing stores through which women shuffle like robots, searching for the perfect garment to turn mutton into lamb.  Step onto the cliff path and the Hermanus of my childhood is still there, and I love it as much as I did then.  The rocks and aromatic bushes and flowers and waves and birds that I knew in great detail when young are still there and they are a vital part of what I can only describe as my home.

Hermanus

I started writing something in response to your blog a good week ago, prompted by an incident I observed on the beach at Fish Hoek.  But then you sent me Dan’s piece, and after reading it I almost abandoned doing one myself, because I felt that he was expressing something very close to what I was feeling, which was that Cape Town was no longer my home. And then slowly, as I wandered around the peninsula with a Canadian friend in tow who was constantly gasping in amazement at everything she saw, I began to change my mind.  Her enthusiasm was clearly genuine, giving me enormous pleasure but also, I became aware, great pride. Surely you can only be proud of something that is yours, a part of you in some way that can never be lost.  What can be more “yours” than the place where you were born and spent your formative years?  So I picked up the challenge again.

Sally on Fish Hoek beach

I suspect that what Dan is expressing, at least in part, is a deep disappointment at the way things have turned out since 1994. It is a disappointment that I am sure most of us share, to a greater or lesser degree.  We may no longer feel  “at home” here, for a variety of reasons, but does this mean that some particular part of this country is not still our home, the cradle of our being, what made us what we are at the most fundamental level? 

No matter what has happened to Dan or any of us since, the game plan was mapped out here, for all of us expats. And we love it because it is so deeply in our bones, this country that is such a compelling and extraordinary set of contradictions.
 

Sally in South Africa in 1982 on a visit we made together

So yes, the taste of biltong or Marmite, the smell of resin under pine trees baking in the sun, the power and thunder of the waves at Hermanus when they crash against the rocks, the way a coloured vendor of fish or flowers cracks a joke while you try to make up your mind what to buy, and you both pause in your business to fall about laughing :   these things tug at memory and make our hearts beat like a lover’s.   I do not think that we are talking about “mere nostalgia”.  I think we are talking about love and the core of our being.

But – and of course it is a big but – it does not mean that we are all ready to “come back home”.  Every time I come here I fantasize briefly about living in the sun again, getting away from those long dark cold Canadian winters.  I even think I can learn to cope with the violence, the crowding and congestion, the pollution, the desecration of so much of the natural beauty of the peninsula. And then something happens to bring me back to reality again. 

Like the Fish Hoek incident last week.  I was walking on the beach with my Canadian friend at 7 a.m., a habit we had started upon our arrival. The usual elderly swimmers were there, and dog walkers strode along energetically while their dogs tore about in noisy ecstasy. There was a white woman walking in front of us, with two Jack Russells at her heels.   She was gradually gaining on a black man who was walking more slowly ahead of her. 

As she drew nearer, her dogs shot forward and danced around the black man’s legs, nipping at his ankles. He yelled at the woman, while trying to leap out of the dogs’ range. She began flapping her hands ineffectively;  it was not clear whether she was encouraging the dogs or trying to control them. 

At that moment a tall, gangly white man jogged past us.  As he drew abreast with the black man he said, with a broad smile and an even broader accent, “Clever doggies, clever doggies”. 

My blood was instantly on the boil, that old reaction of fury and shame, and before I could think I yelled “I suppose you think that is funny, you arsehole!” which was about as silly and ineffective as the dog owner’s flapping of hands.  Then the whole business just fizzled out, as quickly as it had started, and my friend and I, the woman and her racist dogs, and the black man put some distance between each other and continued walking as though nothing had happened.  The white man was way ahead of us.

It is still there, deeply entrenched, spreading poison everywhere.  Too many generations will have to go to school together, work together, fall in love with each other and have children together before it leaches out. And much damage will continue to be done before that happens.  I would go crazy if I lived here. 

When I am planning a visit, I don’t say I am going home, I say, I am going to South Africa, where I come from.  When people ask me where I’m from I say I am a South African but I have lived in Montreal for over forty years.  When people ask me when my holiday will end, I say, I am going home on Friday.  Montreal means where my life is, my children, my grandchildren, my friends, my man, my activities.  It is my home in that sense. 

But Cape Town is where I was made.  Nothing can change that.

ÓSally Spilhaus 2011

The Taste of a Peach....

                                         Smells are surer than sounds or sights
                                         To make your heart-strings crack—

                                                      - Rudyard Kipling, Lichtenberg

I bite into a small, perfectly ripe, imperfectly rounded, soft, furry skinned, orange – really orange - peach.

It is a few days after arriving in Cape Town, settling in, which means organizing my new workspace in my cousin Gillian’s house close to the mountain above the city, beginning to contact friends, and generally getting ready for writing.  I am still in awe of the view of the glorious mountain in all its moods from every vantage point that her house and garden presents, when I casually pick up a peach from the fruit bowl on Gill’s kitchen table.  In the two-inch thick large flat-ish weathered bowl, four peaches rub up against other fruit: bananas, plums, avocadoes, mangoes, pineapples.

These other fruits are, it must be said, delicious.  However they are not that far from the league that can be found elsewhere and so they evoke and provoke little. 

Bananas I have eaten in America were perhaps not quite as dense in taste or texture, but if their flavor evokes anything it is probably America where the banana is the most popular fruit. 

Plums which drip as I eat them are sweeter and riper, for sure, but while they provoke some memories of a Cape Town childhood, they compete with plums I picked from a tree that grew in the garden of a house in the Catskills,  New York that I once shared with South African friends.    

Mangoes - well frankly, there is nothing to beat the fleshy, creamy, golden mangoes, large as babies’ heads,  that I have eaten in West Africa.  Now there’s a mango!

And the little undersized pineapple?  No contest with the enormous Abacaxi I encountered in northern Mozambique which women sold from high piles along the side of the road we drove on.  They were so heavy and ripe that even before I could cut through their thick, thorny skin to be cored and sliced,  juice had oozed and collected in a large puddle on the plate by virtue of their very weight. 

It not being Avo season the ones in the fruit bowl hail from Spain or Latin America and are no better, no worse than those I buy in Montclair and leave to ripen in a brown paper bag in a dark kitchen cupboard.  And not that much cheaper either.

As for the chunks of watermelon I tasted on a friend’s St. James’ veranda overlooking the vast sapphire sea?  Not up to the flavor, color or texture of the height of the season summer watermelons in the US. 

But then I pick up a peach, nestling innocently among the other fruit.  It is smaller and rounder than the New Jersey peaches that come into season for five or six weeks during the summer, and which I buy in small amounts at the local Saturday farmer’s market.  There is a window of what seems like a mere 60 minutes before peaches transform themselves from too hard to too soft to frot.  If you don’t eat them at precisely the right moment, they are destined to join the organic scraps heading for the compost heap.  If you manage to, they were, I thought, pretty delicious.

Or so I thought before I bit into my first Cape peach.

Like the swelling, cresting and crashing of a wave after a calm, shallow sea I am engulfed.

With this one sensual taste, I am home.

I can’t describe taste.  It is way beyond my literary powers. But although recognizable as a peach, it is essence of peach, just as perfume is essence of the flower it is extracted from; just as a dab of perfume amplifies and is absorbed by the weightlessness of air as it ripples outwards until it can fill a whole room when the wearer steps into it, so the taste enters my head and expands there, to flow over my mind and release dormant memories.  

I relish it bite by slow bite, until only the pit is left.  I help myself to a second. This time I cut it in half and then in quarters, and then eighths removing the pit which leaves behind a deep rose-red creviced imprint in the orange flesh.  I bite into each section savoring each one and chewing  thoughtfully.

I remember...

The feel of sun on skin, salt on skin,  leaving a white residue, wet sand clinging to feet and ankles and shins which when dry turns crusty and has to be vigorously toweled off.  The pinched painful sun burnt  shoulders, chests, backs and glowing cheeks.  The smell of calamine lotion slathered pink onto sensitive skin, unable to sleep under even a sheet.

Sundays at the beach. The packing of a picnic lunch into a wicker picnic suit case.  Roast chicken, boiled eggs, tomatoes, cut up carrots and cucumbers, salt wrapped in squares of grease proof paper  twisted at each end, bottles of water that will be too warm to drink, plates and alloy cutlery strapped criss-cross inside the lid of the case.  Then placed into the boot of the car with towels and an old table cloth and folding chairs.  The drive to Muizenberg.  No seat belts, my sister and I in the back seat, perhaps one of us with a friend in our black Citroen with the spare wheel held in place by metal casing the shape of the wheel, driving at 30 or 40 miles per hour.  It was a trek. 

The buying of watermelons. On Prince George’s Drive, my father pulls over in front of young men selling them at the side of the road.  He unfurls his long frame from the car and teases and jokes in his not too fluent Afrikaans, and is teased back.  Then he selects one of the large melons from the high dark green pyramid.  First he scrapes a spot on the rind.  If it marks easily he  rests the heavy melon on top of his head, and jerks his hands downwards.  If it cracks an inch or less it is deemed ripe enough to buy.  If not, it is returned to the pile and another selected.  “Try that one, Daddy!” I dance around and insist, delighted when “my” one is chosen.  Later, spread out on towels  on the beach, my father cuts it with a large bread knife brought along for the purpose and we hold the triangular slices by the rind, and devour the deep red, juicy flesh while trying to shield it from the wind’s determined effort to spoil the pleasure by insinuating fine white sand.

Tea at Kirstenbosch. Scones and apricot jam and thick cream. Milkshakes from synthetic flavoring and coloring. Pale green peppermint my definite favorite.  Large lawns to run on.  Stone steps to climb amongst Proteas and indigenous bushes up the sides of the mountain towering above us.  Lady Ann Barnard’s deep, clear bath shaped like a bird, in amongst different species of ferns and other shade plants, the sound of water trickling into and out of it.

The large sloping lawn outside the house I live in in Mowbray until I turn eight.  Rolling down the slopes, arms tucked under chests. Playing catch.  Making  tents with kitchen chairs upside down and blankets draped over for the roof.  Tea carried out to me and friends on a tray by our domestic to drink in cups with saucers in the coziness, cut off from the whole world. Bread and jam cut in triangles.  Sometimes Oros orange squash in plastic glasses tinkling with ice. 

Playing on these lawns on a sunny Saturday morning with coloured children my age and younger who have come with their father for legal advice from my father.  I fill two paper bags with toys on appreciating that they have none, and my six year old arms each grasping a bag I head back to the lawn from my bedroom. 

Stopped by my mother.  “What are you doing?”  “I want to give toys to my friends”.  “Absolutely not.  Take them back to your room”. Her voice is unsympathetic.  I do.  All of them.  My good deed thwarted.  Me crestfallen.

What other city boasts a mountain up to the heavens?  Always taking care, mother mountain, as if it could protect us from all things untoward. But it doesn't.

Suburbs nestled around it.  Streets running through the city right up to it.  Craggy and rocky, layers of rock, and its flat, flat top. Small cable car miraculously ascending.  Clinging to my mother‘s hand, sure it won’t make it. My father’s fear that we wouldn’t was real enough to keep him down below. Windy up there, walking along the paths and smiling at the cute dassies, who look something like prehistoric rabbits.  From the top we see the flat, sandy, Cape Flats, inhospitable terrain for those who work in Cape Town and are the source of my privilege.  But I am yet to understand this.

Later when older, climbing that mountain, up and up along windy paths, balancing on rocks, but never attempting the really tough, challenging climbs that Cape Town mountain climbers revel in.  One memorable time with a cousin leading the way.  Only understanding the importance of making sure one’s toe nails are cut when making the long descent,  toes jammed up against the front of my shoes, until I finally, painfully reached the bottom with bruised toes and blood seeping out of a big toe.

The peach talks to me of warmth, and sea, and long beaches, and lush flora, and easy living, and sturdy, comfortable houses, kept dustless and shining by domestic workers whose families lived back in the Transkei are looked after by sisters and mothers while they take care of me.

The contrasts dawn on me slowly.  My childhood interprets my surroundings through lenses that present it as normal.  As much as my parents rail against apartheid and my father bores his advocate friend with 18 hole lectures in Trotskyism during their Wednesday afternoon golf, for me what I see around me as a child, in keeping with South African with what other white children absorb, seems to present life as it is.  Not life as it should be.

Who picked the peaches of my childhood and adolescence?  Who packed those peaches so that they arrived in stores unbruised? Who could afford to buy them and place them in large bowls on tables in scrubbed and shiny kitchens, in such abundance that a child walking by could grab one without stopping and eat it as she (I) went about her life of privilege and ease.

With each slow dawning moment of understanding of what apartheid means to those who are roped and chained in by it, I feel a wave of shock.  It is increasingly emotional and increasingly painful so that anger seethes below my surface and bursts. 

Once in New York I will build on my anger and hatred of apartheid and get to know the finer details of how apartheid functions, and how it essentially exists to control a cheap labor force.  I will devour banned books. I will meet exiles and connect with the anti-apartheid and anti-colonial struggles.  I will begin to channel (but not lose) the emotional response into anti-apartheid and anti-imperialism activism in the United States. 

And in so doing I will lose the taste of the Cape peach.

And now after apartheid is no more and I am back in Cape Town I have found it again.