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.

The Story of Two Marches

March 30 1960:  30,000 Africans march on Cape Town, eight miles from the African townships.  They head for Parliament but detour to the Police headquarters at Caledonian Square when they hear that the army has surrounded it.  It is a call to end the pass laws.

September  13, 1989:  30,000 South Africans of all races march on Cape Town, from St. George’s Cathedral to the Cape Town Parade.  It is called a Peace March. It is a call to end the violence The first contributed to my leaving South Africa.  The second contributed to my ability to return.

The 1960 march takes place nine days after the notorious Sharpeville massacre.  It’s leader is arrested. It results in the declaration of a State of Emergency that very afternoon, and the brutal clamping down of political activists for years and decades to come.  The 1989 march, twenty-nine and a half years later, is lead by Archbishop Tutu. Five months later, almost to the day, apartheid unravels. Nelson Mandela is released and the ANC and PAC were unbanned. The dismantling of the apartheid state began.  Four years later, in April 1994, Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as the first President to represent all the people of South Africa.

I walk into the newly opened exhibition space in the crypt of St. George’s Cathedral.

I stop before towering photos capturing the 1989 march.  The role that the religious leaders, Christian and Muslim, provided gravitas to the event and are in the forefront. Being Jewish, I note the absence of Rabbis.  The Chief Rabbi of Cape Town was initially against the march, I am told, but supported the actions later. It was sparked by the killing of 23 people in various Cape Town townships in the aftermath of the second tri-cameral parliament elections on Election Day, six Days earlier.  

Enough!

Photo by Eric Miller (www.eric.co.za) who kindly agreed that I place it in this blog. *

I am moved, emotions wrenching, tears well up as I see a dense mass of thousands upon thousands of Capetonians, black, white, men, women, young, old, in business suits with ties, in shirt sleeves and t-shirts, serious faces, smiling faces, somber faces, glowing faces.  Faces of a people who know they are winning.

I recently found black and white grainy photos of the first march.  They are equally powerful.  African men, and some women, packed tight as they walk silently into the centre of the city.  I reflect that, looking back, way back, what happened that day lead to my leaving. It is why I am not  a face in the  crowd in the photos in St. George’s Cathedral crypt.

The march came nine days after the March 21^st Sharpeville massacre which captured headlines throughout the world. The protest was part of a wide campaign against the pass laws. These laws forced all Africans living in urban areas to carry pass books in the land of their birth to prove that they had permission to be there. These laws defined every movement and aspect of their lives.  Relegating them to no more than units of labor, they provided a Draconian means of controlling and directing a cheap – very cheap - labor force.  The pass laws were one of the main pillars of apartheid and the fuel for a vibrant South African economy.  In 1952, four years after the apartheid government came to power, the laws were extended to include all male Africans over the age of 18 regardless of whether they lived in the towns or the rural areas; four years later African women were lassoed into the law. 

Enough!

The call went out:  Leave your passes at home, present yourself to your local police station and be arrested.  Township after African township throughout South Africa responded to this call.  In Sharpeville, the cheerful, calm and friendly protestors sent jitters down the spines of the skittish police, young and inexperienced. They fired wildly into the crowd.  Most of the victims were shot in the back while trying to flee, including ten children, some on the backs of their mothers.  The killings caused reverberations around the world, bringing with it unprecedented shock and horror at the extent of the brutality of the apartheid regime, which up until then the world had largely managed to tolerate and ignore. 

The protests were local within the confines of the proscribed African areas that the police could contain.

Not so Cape Town.

The specter of 30,000 Africans walking deliberately and silently out of the townships of Nyanga, Langa and Gugulethu scared the bejeebies out of the white government.

As well as for many of the soldiers deployed to provide control. 

Michael Mittag, a friend from university and beyond, stood outside his office on one of the streets leading into the city center.  “There was a buzz, an eerie buzz, that reverberated through the buildings.  It sounded almost electronic”.  He was impressed. In awe.  But not the terrified soldier no more than 18 years old standing near him, who gave visible evidence to his fear by the spreading wet spot in the front of his pants.

At the head, dressed like a school boy in shorts and sockless shoes – the only clothes he possessed - was Philip Kgosana, looking even younger than his scant twenty-three years.  He had hoped for a turnout of about 5,000. Kgosana, having acquired the necessary white sponsorship was among the few African students permitted to attend the University of Cape Town.  The only way he could support himself was to live in the all male sub-standard barracks built for grossly underpaid ‘migrants’ (foreigners in their own country) as ‘temporary’ (they were in fact permanent) housing far away from their wives and families in the rural areas who were not permitted to live with them. Steeped in their lives, their histories, sufferings and living conditions, Kgosana dropped out of university and began working as a political activist full time. 

Kgosana fearful that the police would begin to fire and cause life-threatening havoc and among the marchers tightly packed in the narrow streets of Cape Town, agreed to ask the marchers to return home.  But only after he was promised an interview with the Minister of Justice so that he could place the demands of the marchers before him.  On Kgosana’s his request which travelled back through a murmuring wave from the front of the protest to the back, they turned around as one and walked back to their townships, led now by police vans.

At four o’clock Kgosana arrived for the meeting.  He was arrested. Nine months later he was released on bail. He skipped the country and went into exile.  (He is now back home)

I was in my last year of high school, and our school, like most probably most, went into virtual lock down.  It was considered a dangerous situation.

The evening of the march my father, Joe’s step through the back yard was uncommonly quick and light, lacking any of his usual end-of-day draggy tiredness.  He was positively glowing.  No sooner had the news of the march spread to him in his law office in Athlone, a Coloured area of Cape Town, he was in his car driving to a vantage point to view the extraordinary phenomenon.  He was awe struck by the huge, silent, orderly march of thousands upon thousands of determined Africans, who with immense dignity walked towards the center of Cape Town with their one message. It was a demonstration of power and of determination that he had never before witnessed or believed possible and he was exhilarated. 

“This is the beginning of the end!” he announced at the dinner table to my mother, my sister and I and perhaps our African domestic worker listening from the kitchen. “The government cannot deny what has just happened.  The passes have to go.”  He truly believed that this was a major turning point, from which there would be no going back. What he saw when he surveyed the dense protest, was a determined mass of African workers taking up the struggle, flexing their collective muscle, and showing the oppressive ruling class that they were ready to take on the revolution. His Trotskyist viewpoint was being justified.  The workers had risen. There could be no turning back. Or so, on that day, he fervently believed.

He underestimated the might of the apartheid machine. 

A State of Emergency was declared that afternoon. Within days the Unlawful Organizations Act was passed, the ANC and PAC were declared illegal.  The Terrorism Act was passed, which allowed for indefinite detention without trial.  The Communism Act were more stringently enforced. A severe clamp down followed of all who might be considered a danger to the state.  Thousands were arrested.  Thousands fled into exile. 

Thousands fled into exile. 

For the next eight or nine years, South Africa experienced a hiatus in open political activity.  Caught in the revolution’s doldrums as a result of terrible and mounting repression, looking on as bannings and detention without trial and trials for “crimes” that were simply demands for human rights were metered out with determination by an state bent on crushing any resistance, however slight, I decided to leave. 

This was not an easy decision, and the discussion, and debates and differences with friends who decided they must stay often went on into the night.  But with heavy heart I made it along with others who were privileged to be able to leave voluntarily into self-exile at our own pace.  I simply could not live under apartheid, benefit from its privileges because of the happenstance that I was born into the “white” racial category, and while finding no obvious – for me at the time - meaningful way to contribute to change. 

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After leaving the exhibition I was invited to have lunch with the Cathedral’s  Sub-Dean Fr. Terry Lester, Lynette Maart and Josette Cole.  

Fr.  Lester, Maart and Cole are social justice activists of the 1980s generation who are passionate about educating next generations about what happened under apartheid in general and the role the St. George’s Cathedral played in pursuing non-violent means of struggle in particular.

Fr. Terry Lester and Lynette Maart are part of the leadership team of the St. George’s Cathedral Crypt Memory and Witness Centre.  The Centre aims to excavate the social history of the Cathedral, particularly its role in the struggle against apartheid to use as a lens to current social justice issues.  Josette Cole, a member of the Mandlovu Trust, is researching the struggles of squatter communities in and around Cape Town between 1977 and 1985.  Plans for the next exhibition are well underway. Under the theme ‘Bearing Witness’ it will focus on the 23-day fast in March/ April 1982 of 57 Nyanga Bush squatters at St. George’s Cathedral to protest the dire lack of rights for Africans to live - as families - and work in Cape Town/Western Cape.

Our conversation is as inspiring as it is sober.  They do so with zeal and purpose.  I listen to their plans and can only be impressed.

But as I listen I reflect that Brecht’s words about the “difficulties of the plains” are all too real.

They talk about how Cape Town was being transformed into a city for foreigners, for tourists to enjoy.

They talk about Cape Town being gradually transformed into a city for foreigners, for tourists to enjoy.

They talk about resources being poured into making the centre of Cape Town safe and beautiful, a magnet for the privileged.

They talk about lack of access to resources for those who continue to live in poverty on the Cape Flats in areas apartheid relegated to coloured and African people.

They talk about how those continuing to live in these inhospitable outskirts of the city are most likely to remain, given Cape Town’s exorbitantly high property rates.

They talk about iron shacks, and crowded tiny brick houses, and lack of water and lack of electricity; of inferior education.

They talk with concern about what they see as a the lack of political will to forge change, so that for too many what they had marched for, what people by their thousands had died for is still in the realm of dreams.

²

I listen and I find I am listening as an outsider.

I know, and knew, that the South Africa I would return to, would be a complicated and often distressing place.

I am listening to a story that is not directly mine. Not yet. Without living here, without being engaged is specific aspects of working for change, can I, I wonder,  I regard South Africa as home?

But ‘home’, I know is a fluid and often mercurial concept.  It can be attached to more than one place and space.  But this is for a future blog.

Meanwhile, I am moved by the history of struggle in South Africa, inspired by the tenacity of those who lived through it and won.  I am moved in a way that is only possible because I was born here.  And because growing up in Cape Town and South Africa defined who I would then become.  I was raised and socialized here so that what I now see and recognize became as intrinsic to me as any part of my genetic makeup. 

And I cannot give it up or give up on it.

But as I said, this is for a future blog, as I continue to mull over the meaning for me of the triumvirate of words: exile, nostalgia, home.

²

* Eric Miller is one of the most widely published and experienced photojournalists working in South Africa who documented the anti-apartheid struggle and continues to document the process of transformation in South Africa.  http://www.eric.co.za/

Cape Town

March 2, 2011