Out in Greenpoint with Micha and the Germans!

March 16, 2007: Kaapstad!

Chimurenga: Shona for “Struggle”

When I set out for South Africa, I made myself one promise-- to take advantage of all the opportunities available to me. And why not make a few opportunities available to me if they didn’t exactly present themselves?

A seed was planted when a fellow student introduced me to a magazine that focused on certain areas that I was interested in academically. Chimurenga (www.chimurenga.co.za) is a publication of art, culture and politics from and about Africa and its Diasporas. Consciously Pan-African, the range of material is expansive, the voice is definitively radical and each issue captures a critical and controversial theme.

I emailed them my resume and a cover letter explaining my interest. Soon after I received an email back from the editor, Ntone, and we set up a time to meet the next week.

I put on my most respectable outfit (conservative black skirt, button down shirt and heels—tres Banana Republic) and hopped a minibus (nearly broken-down vans crammed with passengers and pumping house music that serve as unofficial public transportation for the whole metropolitan area) into the center of “Kaapstad!” (Afrikaans for Cape Town and what the locals yell out the minibuses to lure passengers aboard)

Finding my way to Long Street—a wide, one-way street lined with cafes, bookstores and bohemian hang-outs—I wandered to the Pan-African Market, which is a three floor building filled with traders selling various arts and artifacts. Chimurenga shares the top floor with a few of these traders and an art gallery. The whole building is overripe with color and by the time I’ve reached the office, my face is also red from the afternoon heat.

I knock on one door, hear,“come in” and am greeted by five painters at their canvases in a cramped studio. Visibly surprised, I apologize and ask for Chimurenga. They all laugh and tell me to go next door but to come back afterwards. I laugh and say maybe I will.

So one door down, I’m greeted by Ntone, the editor, and Rucera, the administrator. Ntone and I hit it off immediately— our conversation spans from publishing to Foucault to New York to feminist theory to French. I’m in absolute awe of this man-- a political activist from Cameroon who began this magazine two years ago completely on his own.

Now each Thursday I travel to the office (where the traders are beginning to recognize me bit by bit and I no longer wear respectable skirts but instead throw on a t-shirt and jeans), and get lost in words. The day stretches out and I enter the myriad that is becoming the upcoming issue, tentatively titled “Conversations With Poets Who Refuse to Speak”:

“An issue on silence and its uses - so much has been said about speech: speaking up, speaking for oneself, not being allowed to speak, speaking for the other who'd rather speak for self, but very little is said about the virtue of silence. So much said about making oneself visible, but little said about mining the rich depths of absence. This issue is about silence, disappearing oneself as act. Though it's often one of abdication, could it be defiance, resistance even? - a challenging idea, in a culture where struggle about seeking exposure, giving voice, making visible and all that stuff...”

Here now, in the office, I type away to the foreign sounds of the city street below me-- completely unlike that of Manhattan where there is order to the noise in some way or at least NYC is a chaos I'm acquainted with. Ntone usually tumbles in around 3 pm, at times I sit here alone, which I relish. To have a private space where I can get inside the work or my own thoughts is a blessing.

But I don’t feel disconnected-- there is always some percussion rising from the street below, a bell or horn or the clicking of tongues. The afternoon sun bounces off the windows of the building across the street from us and lands on the left side of my face, splitting my reflection in two on my computer screen. The walls burst from the heat and the shade of orange they are painted—unhesitatingly gesturing its contents. To paint every one of your walls a bright, robust orange is to say , to shout, "This place is no accident, this place is on purpose, this place has a distinct voice and character and does not ask for approval".

But there is room here, it is not overcrowded with righteousness or ideology or intellectualism-- the high ceilings and the sparse furniture give that feeling. And the windows are always wide open, the small fan always blowing the soft hot air across me. There are no bars on the windows here—another blessing of sorts. Of course, we are three stories up.

The walls are punctuated by newspaper articles, next to blown-up pictures from the magazine, next to political rally posters, next to promotional posters for Reggae shows. Some in English, some in French, I try to decipher their messages, which in either language can be equally opaque: "Quelques questions sure la representation du corps 'africain' sure les scenes occidentales". My French starts and stops..."Some questions on the representation of the "African" body in Western scenes"?
And I'm exhausted by the translation-- of it all. To translate this world into a world I understand. To translate the street into a street I can navigate. To translate the expressions of each person into a smile or a sneer. These are the things that I am undone by.

This place—no, it is in particular my path to Chimu: the heat off the skin of the passengers from the cramped minibus, the tangled maze of the bus station, the earthy smells from the street markets, the bustle of city sidewalks, the lazy business of the traders in our building waiting for customers, the heartbreaking paintings at the top of the stairs—it is beautiful/ugly in the way that I know NYC can be as well. That element comforts me in its familiarity.

March 11, 2007, Newlands House

Truth in Translation
The director of my academic program at UCT arranged for the students to see Truth in Translation, a play about the Truth and Reconciliation Council (TRC) as told through the perspectives of the translators.

To give you some background, the TRC was a court-like body assembled after the end of apartheid. Anyone who felt they had been a victim of violence could come forward and be heard. On the flip side, perpetrators of violence could also give testimony and ask for forgiveness, as well as amnesty from prosecution. Though it was flawed in particular ways, I think it is a particularly generous gesture towards reconciliation that speaks to the progressive way in which South Africa is striving to become a unified country.

While a few of us were waiting in the foyer of UCT’s Baxter Theatre to enter the play, we noticed a bunch of TV cameras following a group of people. As we got closer to see what was being filmed, we realized that at the center of the lights and cameras was Reverend Desmond Tutu. Reverend Tutu is a South African activist who is reknowned worldwide for the work he has done in opposition of apartheid. In 1984 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and has recently put his efforts towards stopping the global AIDS epidemic. Another major claim to fame is that he is generally credited with coining “Rainbow Nation” as a metaphor for what post-apartheid South Africa might become under ANC leadership.

AND he also headed the TRC. To sit in the audience watching this play, all the while knowing this man—the embodiment of hope in South Africa—was just rows ahead of us, was amazing and exhausting. The genius of retelling the TRC story through the perspectives of the translators was that you heard a whole country’s pains through the translators—speaking in first person and trying so desperately to stay objective, to merely translate the victim’s or perpetrator’s words… which was essentially an impossibility, it was asking them to be inhuman.

After the play therewas a Q&A where Reverend Tutu spoke with the cast, as well as lead a prayer. It was indeed an unexpected and blessed evening.

March 4, 2007, Newlands House, 21:36

Today is my one month anniversary with Cape Town. I can’t say that the month has flown by. I’m so preoccupied by Time that I keep too close an eye on my watch, the week day versus the weekend, and the neat, discrete boxes of my calendar. In fact I would say that I’m obsessed with Time—harvesting as much from it as I can, studying it’s swing and it’s pull, waiting for it to catch up with my ambitions, dragging my weight against it’s interminable pull.

Each day so far has been filled in its own unique way and so each day is crystallized, separate and distinct from some concept I have of a linear, progressing life. So in many ways I’ve felt this month was bloated and ready to be put away. 24 hours is indeed a short and finite period, but here the hours are pregnant with unknowable upshot and significance.

Wednesday was my first day volunteering with SHAWCO. SHAWCO is South Africa’s largest student-run NGO that organizes to improve the quality of life for the individuals in the “developing” communities within the Cape Town metropolitan area. I put the trusted, ironic quotation marks around the word developing because this word is problematic—first, the skewed assumption is that there is under-developed and developed but also it negates the possibility that some societies are overdeveloped (and at what/who’s cost?). Secondly, I don’t know that it’s fair to characterize the neighborhood that I visited as “developing” in the positivist way we presume. It is developing but in what direction, I don’t think that any one can tell.

I had been encouraged to volunteer by many and indeed, wanted to witness the “Other Cape Town”, the Cape Town that won’t be televised during the next Olympics. But I wanted more than to witness what actually exists in this place which is for many South Africans a blank where they can place their fears, a dark void which they refuse to shine light on--keeping them from being responsible. But I couldn’t just visit, I couldn’t merely witness. That is one theme weaves fervently in and out of Jewish culture—to witness is to be responsible, to witness is to be culpable. The witness is no longer innocent.

So I joined SHAWCO. It was all very sugary and corporate in its marketing and appeal. There is a steering committee and coordinators, a mission statement, and a fundraising branch. Yep, here was a group of organized, clean-cut students who were engaging with these communities and trying to make an impact.

In reality it is a mess—although a good-hearted mess that does have potential and will one day be the smooth machine it so desperately wants to appear to be (for funding reasons as well as for general morale). My interview was a questionnaire of sentimentality, the orientation was like first day at summer camp, and the biggest joke of all is my assignment. I requested to be put in the arts program—hoping I would be assigned tiny kids I could play basic guitar with and do sing-alongs like I had seen my brother do many times at the summer camp we worked at together too many years ago. Why not introduce a few Beatles songs into the townships, if they hadn’t already heard them? Or maybe I would get some older kids and we could write something together. Or perhaps some coloring? I’m decent at staying inside the lines.

But no, I, Nathalie Le Du—white girl from New York—will be teaching African Drumming to… Africans.

Enjoy the laugh. I certainly did. I even brought it up to the coordinators but the fact that I had zero drumming experience didn’t seem to matter much. Then I became a bit indignant at the idea—how colonial, an American arriving into a poor African township to teach African music culture. How absolutely absurd.

But I started to get another picture of what the purpose of the arts program would be once I visited Khayelitsha.

There is a place roughly 25 minutes outside of Cape Town named Khayelitsha. To get there I ride a small coach bus with some other students down the N2 highway. The road curves lazily around, neatly dividing the city bowl and the beginning of the steep mountain. The highways here wrap languidly around the edge of the ridges, unlike US highways, which blast through rock and lay down flat ribbons of pavement. We pass under signs for the airport and planes flying low, arriving and departing. We pass signs for the waterfront and the promise of a lovely evening out on the town. We pass exits that lead you to soft green golf courses, so pure and innocent in their neatness, in their clean order. As you drive further away from the crests of the mountains, the land tires out and stretches interminably, like a flat line after the last heartbeat.

Just like these other places have signs, there is a sign for Khayelitsha. With anywhere between 400,000 to one million residents (no one has been able to determine this figure with accuracy because of the rate at which people arrive), the name is Xhosa for “Our New Home”. The bus slows to make a right off the exit ramp and the seemingly unsoiled order of modernity’s highway and the city is behind us. From the height of the window of the coach bus you can see the tangled patchwork of single sheets of tin roofs reaching out to the horizon. Turning right, turning left, turning left again, we drive further inside this wretched disordered maze and get snapshots of moments lived each day here. Some men are picked up by a minivan, which acts as unofficial public transportation, speeding into the city, blasting pop music. Two girls rub their clothes on wash-bins at a fountain—the rough statistic is that there is one of these fountains for every 40 families to share. The water spilling over the sides of their bins darken the brown-yellow dirt underneath their feet into a paste. They look up at our bus, the passing spectacle, and with no facial expression return to their chore. Children linger near the informal food stand where lollies and chips are sold—some have shoes, some do not. Broken panes of glass are propped up in some shacks as windows. I strain to look inside the homes that have no doors just to see if they have floors. Girls in school uniforms walk in pairs along the side of the street, their book-bags swinging in unison.

Finally we pull into the driveway of a building with tall cement walls forming a perimeter. We’ve arrived at the SHAWCO center—which is mainly a recreational room that has 4 half-empty rows of free-standing metal shelves that serves as a community library. Joined to the library is an office, a kitchen area, another room and some public bathrooms. Just inside the perimeter, next to the driveway, there is a small fenced in playground—roughly 12 x 12 feet—with a wooden jungle gym. There are always, always little ones—maybe just 4 years old or so—climbing up and down this play set or sitting in the library looking through the story books with deteriorating spines.

Our bus pulls into the driveway—some children eye us curiously, some cautiously. The slightly older ones hang about in small gossiping groups. The little ones don’t notice us at all and continue to run and jump around in the playground. The SHAWCO veterans begin to call out their program names and I follow Sitembile, the coordinator for the day, to a loose group of kids.

Sitembile, is a UCT student who volunteers with SHAWCO and coordinates the arts program. She has a strong energy—she is positive but no-nonsense. I still hear the righteous irritation in her voice when she advised us in our orientation—“Whatever you do, do NOT pity these kids. They are kids, like any others—so treat them that way”.

She speaks to them in Xhosa, switching into English enough for me to know she is asking them if they’ve signed up for the arts program. They have and we begin to walk to a nearby building—there is a school next door that allows us to use their classrooms. Four girls and one boy, all in their school uniforms, glance at me and say something to Sitembile. My name is mixed in with the clicking of the Xhosa—it is a beautiful series of sound for me to hear. I smile at the kids and they giggle a bit.

The classroom is what you might expect—the yellow sandy dirt from outside having been trailed in by children’s feet make the floors dull looking and make a scratchy sound as the children’s patent leather shoes shuffle into the room. There are rows of old-fashioned light wooden desks that seat pairs of students. The chalk board has the previous lesson still written on it in English and children’s art projects line the walls. There is an old, faded poster of a food pyramid hanging in the rear of the room, the bottom edge waves lazily with the breeze.

We begin by playing a name game and at first I can’t even understand their names, much less pronounce or remember them. We play another ice-breaker game where we must pair off and learn about the other person, then return together as a group and tell the whole group about your partner.

I am paired off with Siziwe and Sintu. Siziwe is a cheeky girl who reminds me a lot of myself when I was younger. She is a bit chubby, self-confident and very smart. Her outgoing, comic nature makes her seem a bit wild. Sintu is a bit shyer but after a while becomes more outspoken. It is obvious that he will be very handsome when he grows up and tells me that he loves acting. When we re-join the group I also get to know a bit about Nosiphiwo, a skinny twig of a girl with big eyes, Yandiswa, taller than all the other girls by a foot, and Siphokazi, also a bit sassy with wild hair.

We play a few games like this, breaking off into groups and coming back together again. They are shy with their English, though I suspect they are better than they believe. Siziwe traps me into attempting to say a Xhosa word with a loud click. It is her favorite food—some sort of maize and salad—and I am supposed to report to the group that this is her favorite dish. I fumble through the first two syllables, then hesitate before I attempt the click, which falls awkward, heavy and flat—not at all like the way this sound bounces jubilantly out of the back of their mouths. We all laugh. It feels warm and intimate—we’ve already begun creating inside jokes… even if they are at the expense of my outsider-status.

What I am to these kids, I’ll never know—an oddity, a charity worker, an imposition. I continue to throw myself into, in front of these situations and they hit me in unexpected ways. Maybe it is a little irresponsible to see some things as an experiment—but I’d rather try at doing something than do nothing. I am a witness. I know I can be no hero in their lives. It is not for me to say they need saving or heroes. My hope is that if they need this, they will do it for themselves. We merely try to give them a space and a time, just a room and an hour each week, to fill with sound and laughter. This, I am pretty confident I can do.