Random Thoughts on Home

The following blog reflects thoughts that are at this stage random about home and nostalgia and South Africa.  Rather than wait to do a “considered”  piece, which I will need to do for the book as that is permanent (and which will be helped by your comments - so will yet appear in this space), I am jotting down thoughts and reflections I have had over the two months I have been here.  These have come – and gone – while walking on the beach, talking to friends, meeting people, staring at the mountain (It’s become a joke with John who is continually telling me to “Look at the mountain!” because I said that to him at every vantage point when he arrived, and there are so many, it just never stops.  As I write I am looking over Fish Hoek beach, the mountains to the left, right and centre, the sky is blue, blue in the early morning light.  Ialready feel sad that I have just over two weeks more of this trip.

So let me indulge in a stream of consciousness about my thoughts on “home”:

CONCEPT of HOME

I can’t say I have yet come to terms with the concept of home and how I relate to it. But perhaps I am getting there. The longer I am here, the more comfortable I feel and the more settled.  This doesn’t mean I plan to relocate here. There are many considerations now that I have been away for so many years and made my life, my “home”, elsewhere.  But one thing is ever more clear. This city and country has once again cornered me.  It is beautiful, rich in people and cultures; it is complex and complicated (a word I usually don’t like using) and it twists me into many contortions of emotion – love, anger, despair, respect, wonder, angst.  Sounds like any love relationship, né?!

I have had the opportunity to meet amazing variety of South Africans.  Living here could be one of the most rewarding experiences imaginable on many different levels.

POVERTY

Yes, the poverty in this country is, well, overwhelming.  It is always commented on.  By visitors, returnees, people who live here.  What gets me is the level of disparity in terms of wealth.  This links to the levels of violence that is not talked about as much as I would have imagined, although perhaps this is because I am in Cape Town. (I referred to this in earlier blogs). 

Bus station for mini-bus taxis.  Fare to Cape Town is R12, roundtrip $3.5 dollars

I know it is hard for those who have lived outside of South Africa and Africa to be so upset by the poverty, the in-your-face, impossible-to-ignore poverty that is disturbing reason enough not to feel comfortable living here.  What is particularly disturbing is that access to resources are the domain of a very few and certainly by no means the prerogative of only the whites.

Privately built house in Khayelitsha

In Khayelitsha the mountains are in the far distance; there are not trees

It is impossible to read the newspapers daily and not be offended by the stories of corruption and misuse of authority and position to accumulate personal wealth on the part of many of South Africa’s leaders in different sectors. 

In relation to poverty, some figures tell the story: An official unemployment rate of 26% which among the 19 to 24 age group is estimated to be 53%; a poverty rate estimated at approximately 50%.  Ironically South Africa ranks as an upper-middle income country based on average income, some of the nation’s social indicators are comparable to those of the poorest countries of the world.  Having spent the good part of yesterday in Khayelitsha, all I can say is damned right.

Khayelitsha

Seller of hand creams at the Khayeltisha bus station

However the country I have lived in for the past decades is also a cleaved society.  Filmmaker and rabble rouser Michael Moore has recenlty pointed out that 400 Americans have more wealth than half of all Americans combined.  As my American friend, Peter Kjeseth, who has lived in South Africa for the  past ten years, noted with passion and anger in his voice this morning, the gap in wealth in the US is totally abysmal and getting worse. He feels no less passionate about this state of affairs as he does about South African poverty and the disparities. 

Tamboerskloof, suburb below the mountain where trees are in abundance

Another friend, South African living in the US, pointed out (quoting a Reuters article) in response to my email about minimum wages and the generally substandard  pay that is common in South Africa wrote: “President Obama has advocated, against shrieks and screams, increasing the federal wage floor to over $8 per hour in 2011. Over 35 million working Americans only get paid minimum wage. “So the point I am making” she continues, “is not that poverty wages are O.K. but that they exist, on a huge scale here in the U.S., still the world's biggest, and among the richest economies.  S.A. will have a hard time building its economy, given the deep scars of apartheid , to a comparable level of wealth and productivity- but the U.S. has gotten there and  yet gets away with  miserable minimum wages, huge, huge wealth/poverty gaps and tax cuts for the rich.  Why aren't the people marching in days of rage?”  

Flats overlooking Clifton beach with the reflection of the setting sun

 Clifton beach

Clifton beach at sunset

There are significant ways that South Africa looks after its poor that puts the US to shame.  Take the story of Grace, who’s  name matches her personality.  I got to know her when I stayed at a friend’s house where she works as a domestic worker.  Last September Grace had a double bi-pass surgery at Groote Schuur hospital, no longer the  segregated hospital of apartheid years, whose standard of medical care was spotlighted when Christiaan Barnaard performed the first heart transplant in 1967. The cost?  Completely free.  That’s not all. Grace was able to build her own house using a subsidy from the government, supplemented by aid from the Irish government.  In addition, she received receive monthly social grants that are provided to all families with children under the age of 18 who qualify according to an income based means test.  When Grace reaches the age of 60 she will qualify for a state old age pension that is not tied to any form of contribution while working.

 RACISM

Ongoing racism is often raised as a reason for not living here, I understand how strong the response is for those who see it.  Sally wrote in her piece I published on this blog a vivid description of a racist incident that made her acknowledge once again that she couldn’t live here.  Because of our past, because of growing up under apartheid, the reaction to racist incidents is like a punch in the belly. A really hard punch.

For me, though, having lived these many years in the United State, it’s a no go argument.  There racism is rampant, a constant undercurrent of life and politics, of the economy and society in general.  A black President has not meant that racism is over, although some seemed to want to argue this.  It has meant all too often that a backlash has been severe.   And since 9/11 Americans of the Muslim faith have experienced levels of racism and xenophobia that is unprecedented.  I remember a comment by a close South African when she lived in New York for three years in the late 80’s studying at Columbia University, that she had never, ever in South Africa experienced the racism she encountered in the US, both as a white South African and as a general part of living in American society.  Regard for white South Africans might have changed the day that Mandela became President, but the general level of racism remains.

I have been impressed over the past two months at the few racist incidents I have encountered and when I have they tend to be very mild.  What I do observe is the systemic racism. Although I no longer feel my stomach clenching into a knot of discomfort to the point of pain when I enter a Cape Town restaurant and am confronted by the usually all white clientele, I haven’t stopped noticing. I have spent a lot of time in the past few days with a Somali friend and her 6-year-old daughter, Hibo, and we can only laugh as we note, once again, that they are consistently the only black customers.

Certainly there have been the open though not necessarily hostile stares, as I walked along Fish Hoek beach with Hibo.  But these were less frequent than the smiles, the calls of “How beautiful!” and  “I love your hair” (that day her long hair stood out in a magnificent mass of curls) and then “And yours too!”, from someone with the same grey curls as mine.  People would stop to chat and to encourage Hibo to pet their dogs.  When we were in restaurants or at Kirstenbosch (Botanical Gardens) the usual children seeking out children to play with took place and she was off to participate in their games, apparently fully accepted.

In my daily interactions with people on the street and with people I meet for my writing and for pleasure I am accepted with generosity and affection, regardless of race or class.  And so after a while, I have found that this is what I anticipate.  Color is not something I am noticing on a personal level.  When I walk into white, white restaurants or shops I do notice.  This was very different in Johannesburg.  There is a much bigger black middle class in Gauteng (Johannesburg and Pretoria).  The suburbs are not as segregated.  Race meets class.

Back in the US I will once again encounter a pervasiveness of race.

COULD I LIVE HERE?

Quick answer: Yes. 

This doesn’t mean I am going to return. There are too many other considerations at this stage of my life. The point is that I know I could live here and part of me would love to.  Not to, feels a bit like a abandonment by the privileged of an ongoing struggle for change in this country which I have found at the community and civil society level to be inspiring. 

Every now and then a thought nags at me that goes something like this: To have skills that one can bring to the vast need here, and not do so feels like an easy way out;  to not be part of it, feels a bit like desertion.  I do remind myself that poverty is systemic and exists everywhere.  But for me, with my past of having grown up here, it would and it could make some sense to return, even at this late stage.  That I don’t contemplate it except to spend some months here each year is personal.  It has little to do with South Africa per se.

I think about what one South African friend wrote in her annual  letter to friends on return to Johannesburg after seven years of working in New York.  After commenting that people who didn’t know her well and some who did expressed delight and amazement that she would return home at a time when the country was once again in a cycle of middle class emigration, she wrote: “Of course I’m amazed anyone would think we’d stay away – rather this mess, our mess, one we understand, than the messes elsewhere – and yet another year of Obama’s own party not supporting him on health care, two wars unending, and a number of colleges suffering a shooting rampage, reminds one of how the grass may seem greener but every country has its madnesses.”

My problem is that BOTH the United States where I have lived for over 40 years and South Africa talk to me of their madnesses. I relate to two messes.  So which one do I choose?  It is a rhetorical question, as I have chosen to remain in the US.

BACK TO THE QUESTION OF ‘HOME’

Where is that illusive thing called home?  Because of this blog and my current writing I am thinking about this a lot more than I ever have. 

On Monday night I attended a Seder with some friends.  It was a lovely evening.  The discussion about freedom and the meaning of Passover allowed for thoughtful reflections.  I sat amongst good people, friends I have known since I was eight and since the first month of moving to New York who have now made their home in Cape Town with their American husbands.  So why did I feel sad, emotional even?   I was feeling as “home”-sick!  I was missing the annual Seder that my family has been part of for the past twenty or so years in Montclair.  And I felt almost teary.

Our Seder is an annual event, where we cook up a storm, invite friends, Jews and non-Jews and read from the pointedly secular Haggadah that one of the group prepared based on progressive Haggadahs that have emerged over the past decades.  I called after I got back to where we are staying, and was welcomed by shrieks of delight over the phone. Stephanie!!!  I could hear the buzz of people in the background as they waited for Kendra, my daughter, to get there from the city after work so they could begin.  How many are there this year, I asked?  About 22, 23.  Oh, I said, that’s small!  Last year we had 31 squeezed around Claudia’s table.  So I said, next year in.... Montclair. Home?

I continue to have difficulty in satisfactorily or at least not succinctly answering the question posed by the title of my blog.  Home is where the heart is, goes the adage.  My heart, I am finding is in many places. 

In the United States my heart is with a wide group of very good friends, some South Africans, some Americans, a few hailing from other nations.  In London it is with close family members who either immigrated from South Africa around the time I did, or, as in the case of my niece and my great-niece, were been born. There as well as some true Brits besides my nieces, including my God daughter – at least until she recently  (happily or me, though perhaps not for her Mom) moved to New York. 

In South Africa where I have friends who when we meet after often years of separation simply pick up on conversations we had before and expand.  My heart is with these, my communities in different parts of the world.  Home is not a static place for me.  It is where I happen I feel at home.  Most particularly it is where I feel passion and compassion.  Where I engage in debate, where I get affected by the politics and the news.  In my case it takes place in both South Africa and the environs of New York if not the United States as a whole.

Perhaps I must simply echo Socrates, "I am not an Athenian (Capetonian), or a Greek (sSouth African), but a citizen of the world." Or the Tamil poet, Kaniyan Poongundran who wrote, "To us all towns are one, all men our kin". Thomas Paine, "My country is the world, all men are my brethren and my religion is to do good." (I will forgive them their use of “men”)

Have I come home or back?  I still don’t really know. I have come back to Cape Town. But home?  I proudly tell people wherever and whenever the question arises, that I was born here but I live in the United States.  Sometimes I will add “It’s good to be home”.  I then may expand:  “Growing up in South Africa means that the country continues to have a hold on me. South Africa will never let you go”. They all nod.

I was flagged down at 11:30 one night on the Main Road in Newlands on my way back from dinner with friends by two policeman, one black one white.  The white came up to me and explained it was a spot check.  He asked for my license.  Ah, New Jersey! he said.  I told him I was born here.  He smiled as he said with great emphasis in a strong Afrikaans accent, “Ag, but South Africa is best!  The very, very best!”

(He then cautioned me that they were concerned that I was driving alone at that time of night.  It is dangerous he assured me.  Up until that moment I was feeling particularly good about life, and independent.  I drove the rest of the way to Tamboerskloof aware of every car behind me.  But by the next day I felt unencumbered by fear once more, just aware of the sensible precautions to take as one does in both South Africa and New York, although in South Africa these precautions are far more stringent.)

CAN YOU LONG FOR A PLACE AND NOT CALL IT HOME?

I will miss South Africa when I leave. I will miss Cape Town which, before I came, I didn’t expect to feel as attached to as I now do.  I will also long to return and get to know other parts of South Africa as I got to know Matumi.  I miss the different terrain, the different sense of other parts of South Africa that resonate more closely with the other parts of Africa I got to know over the past decades. (See earlier blogs on Matumi and Maputo)

I am already scheming my next visit back or home.  I hope, intend, plan to come back for longer periods.  Meanwhile well over two thirds of my time here has slipped by, leaving me sad at the thought of leave but very relaxed.  I don’t stop reacting, but I find myself more reflective, seeing the whole, and not only the parts.  I see failures and I see successes.  And perhaps this is just the nature of the world, which doesn’t mean we should shrug and move on. 

One thing I can’t do is shrug off South Africa.

April 20, 2011

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

_____________________________________________

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