A week on the Cape

South Africa and the globe

Globalism is the state of all things smelling the same. The scent of a mall, full of commodity gadgets and the same clothing made with the same hands of southeastern Asia and central America as any other mall in the world, is the same in the outskirts of center city Cape Town as it is in my hometown. Often South Africa feels more like Canada. This shouldn’t be alarming since both were (and Canada still is) members of the Commonwealth, which allowed South Africa to be privy to the economic engines that fueled neo-liberal capitalist theory following World War II. Often, South Africa feels more like Italy—dirty in a way, ad hoc in another way, and the same protocol at the espresso bars of Cape Town. Walking around city center (known as the City Bowl, due to the surrounding mountains, including the famous Table Mountain) is an odd mix of Rome, Istanbul, and maybe some place like Guadalajara. I’ve only been to the first two, which is the source of my impressions, the point being that to some extent you feel the grit, the luxury, the darkness, the poverty, and the self-conscious social history of Cape Town all at once, as opposed to American cities where these sensations are often distinctly dispossessed of each other.

We live in St. James, a village in the greater municipality of Cape Town, and spend a great deal of town about a half mile down the road in Kalk Bay, a similar village with a commercial center and a nice collection of restaurants, shops, and watering holes. It is winter here, and many establishments and homes burn wood, sometimes in pyres along the sidewalk (as in the case of the all-you-can-eat-prawn-place), and the air, right along the ocean, smells of the briny sea across the street and the clear winter air through which currents of wood smoke blow. Sunset is early, for obvious reasons, and this can be surprising since I’m used to the lingering light of dusk still at 10:30 back in Michigan. It accounts for a superficial fatigue right around seven in the evening when it is completely black, much as it occurs in winter back home. As a result, we spend time in the studio talking, listening to music, or going to a new restaurant.

Food here at the restaurants is delicious and cheap, so going out to eat is a good activity and allows for meaningful social time. Many restaurants have fireplaces and lingering around is the expected practice. Even after three hours at a restaurant last night our server was surprised when asked for the bill. Thus the joke that in South Africa one partakes in the discussion course, the water course, the bread and oil course, the starter course, the main course, then coffee, then the tab course, the paying course, and the waiting for change course. In St. James and Kalk Bay nearly everyone is white and speak with British accents. But we were interested to learn that Kalk Bay was an area during Apartheid where blacks, coloureds, and whites lived together, and where the rigors of Apartheid were not so explicitly apparent. Whites in South Africa are either Afrikaners or British and speak Afrikaans or English; black Africans in the Western Cape consist of Xhosa and Zulu peoples including many from the Eastern Cape that come to the townships of Cape Town for work; coloureds are of mixed race, descended from blacks or whites and slaves brought from the east during imperial times.

Nearly all in Cape Town speak English, including the Xhosa people who prefer it over Afrikaans for obvious reasons. June 16 was a national holiday commemorating the student protests of June 16, 1976 in which over 170 students were killed during a demonstration against the obligatory teaching of Afrikaans. This event was central to the emergence of the Africa National Congress which would eventually overthrow Afrikaner rule and open up free democratic elections, ending Apartheid allowing for the transformation of the nation previously ostracized by the world’s powers. The ANC is contentious in politics today due to extensive corruption and the perception among the majority that they are not tending to the people; a liberal movement persuaded by the fruits of globalism. We are still learning much about South African politics and at a good time to boot what with elections in 2009 and the arrival of the World Cup in 2010, for which many policy programs mark as some sort of glorious apotheosis of the new South Africa. Obviously, most of the country won’t experience significant change as a result of that magic number and it all feels, I gather by talking to residents in Khayelitsha, like an inverse Y2K deal.

Khayelitsha is the Africa that we all expect. Children push low-slung crates on a crude sort of long bed wagon with wheels around the streets and I have only witnessed children with these things. There is a bus service that brings folks from the township into the city center and other parts of Cape Town. They are tall buses and long, with large non-reflective windows and dirty brown and yellow exteriors. In the fields between informal and formal settlements or housing developments there is trash strewn among the grasses and shrubs; trails crisscross these areas that people scavenge through them looking for things that may be useful. In the afternoon light they are emblazoned on the sky over the plain in which the township rests, an expanse of treelessness and sand that used to be the seabed. The government has implemented the construction of roads and along them some utilities such as street lights. They line the highways of the plain and end in the haze of the mountains along the horizon. Schools and community centers are under construction, as well as new houses, but waiting lists are long for houses which are small and ineffective as long-term dwellings.

Children who do go to school (over 80%) remain without skills and resources upon finishing. On the pavement zigzags spell out intersections and along the roads everyone seems to be carrying plastic bags. Strip malls and even big-box retail are popping up in the townships and people patron them despite a healthy skepticism of debt. Like many poor areas in America, even impoverished homes here have televisions or sound systems and it is common practice for people to play loud music from their front rooms during the day. Walking down the streets I hear Beyonce, Paris Hilton, and techno. The techno, some Berliner-shprockets high modernity nonsense, really makes things feel dystopian. 20-foot long containers double as shops—for barbers, pay phone booths, or fruit stands and they can be found at intersections within the neighborhood as well as along major roads. The train station in Khayelitsha is busted and makes use of ramps which during rush hour are packed and swarming with people. In the car we pass a funeral, another time on a walk we pass a meeting of residents who have gathered to discipline a boy in the community accused of robbery. Justice is bottom-up in the township, particularly in light of the fact that police are far away, and don’t attend to the informal squatter settlements. The colors of Khayelitsha are radiant, and the people here are in tight community. The greatest irony of poverty is that it often brings out the best of human cooperation. The residents take pride in what they can, just like anybody else in this world, and despite rising crime and drug problems, the residents of Khayelitsha are finding themselves empowered to reign in their community in a way that is really unprecedented, even in America. People are friendly and welcoming, and the children fascinated by visitors.

There is always the worry for xeno-exoticism, or the notion visitors have of the victimhood, innocence, purity, or righteousness of struggling communities or exotic peoples. Naturally, this can’t be avoided, and that’s alright to an extent. Curiosity and empathy are essential in all inter-human relations, particularly in cross-cultural exchanges where the aim is to share resources and glean learning from communities with different assets. Moreover, all peoples on this earth are xeno-exoticized to some extent. White Americans do it to Jennifer Anniston, Ivy League students, the Mafia, hicks, and Celtic culture. The difference in guiding productive and meaningful curiosity and empathy lies within a community’s expressed intentions, motivations, and the methodologies of interaction. At the end of the day, the dignity expressed between two people of different origin, livelihood, class, race, gender, or whatever else you want to distinguish, is about mutual experience, respect, love, and affirmation of personhood. Also at the end of the day, this isn’t really all that hard to accomplish. So, when I write fondly of the children of Khayelitsha who exude a vibrancy that I have witnessed only here, I do so because it’s true, not out of pride of having been in the center.

The drive to and from the township takes us along the dunes and the shore of False Bay. To the north and south are steep sandstone mountains that rim the plains. The dunes are lush with growth, the water is a deep blue on a sunny day, and the mountains are slightly obscured by haze depending on the magnitude of the well-known winds of the Cape that emerge from the confluence of the cold Atlantic currents and the warm Indian Ocean currents. All and all, the Cape is epic in its geography and represents the greatest aspirations and the deepest troubles of a country consciously dealing with identity and justice in a free market world. The former is, perhaps, and surprisingly, the result of the extraordinarily late arrival of official equal justice to a Commonwealth nation. In light of the flourishing of rights activism that was possible and supported in the mid-nineties, and the leadership of Nelson Mandela, South Africa is, or has the potential to be, one of the first major post-global nations. It can, under critical scrutiny and the affirmation of its assets, even those of unsavory histories, become a sustainable nation without the delusions of free market globalism.