Down Under

The Great Barrier Reef
[[File:Great Barrier Reef 015 (5390533959).jpg|Great Barrier Reef 015 (5390533959)]]

As I prepare for an upcoming trip Down Under, I have been reflecting on how much (or little) I know about Australia. Like Bill Bryson, I can’t seem to remember the name of the Prime Minister. I have never had a strong desire to visit, since in my mind it seems like half of South Africa must be living there, surrounded by shark-infested waters, there's the abominable treatment of the aborigines and it's not the easiest country to get to from here. 

Much of my knowledge seems to come from local television in the mid-70s…like programmes on the marvels of The Great Barrier Reef, and does anyone remember The Rolf Harris Show? That popped up from my subconscious when I woke up this morning. I could clearly recall the woolly bespectacled man with his wobble board, didgeridoo and accordion, introducing us to Waltzing Mathilda and Tie Me Kangaroo Down. And, of course, there was Crocodile Dundee.

According to a friend who has moved here from Adelaide, most of the cities are on the coast and except for Sydney, are “like Port Elizabeth with a little more going on”. As often happens, once you turn your focus onto a place, you start to gather all sorts of information, like it takes five and a half hours to fly from Sydney to Perth, there are multiple time zones and, according to another friend who heard me complain about the heat a while ago, if it’s 30 degrees she thinks it’s a cool day. That’s the other thing, I realise I have friends in at least four cities. At the end of the day, that’s really why I am going – to connect with people. 

Since, thanks to globalisation, I have more than a few items of clothing with Australian labels in my cupboard and even my hair products carry the .com.au logo, coupled with the Nicole Kidmans and Hugh Jackmans, I suspect that I may have absorbed more than a little of the culture. I am travelling to the largest island and the only continent to occupy an island, with an open mind. Will keep you informed, mate. 

P.S. Just in case I lose my sense of humour, I have packed a copy of Bill Bryson's Down Under. 

District Six - We will Remember

Family and Friends Woodstock/District Six circa 1940s
My grandmother holding my mother on the right

Thursday 11 February 2016 marks the 50th anniversary of the declaration of District Six as an area for Whites only. District Six is now unrecognisable from what it was before its destruction but I have fond memories of the area where my grandparents lived and my father was born.

My father in his rugby-playing days circa 1950

One hundred years ago there was a vibrant community there of Indians, coloureds, Portuguese, Greeks and Jews. Freed slaves, merchants, immigrants, artisans and labourers all worked and lived peacefully side by side. They were an eclectic mix of cultures, religions and ethnicities in a melting pot typical of a port city like Cape Town … apparently a threat to the apartheid government. It would take about 15 years to move the 60 000 people out, to the Cape Flats, to areas like Manenberg, Hanover Park and Mitchell’s Plain.

My life revolved around Hanover Street, the main artery which ran all the way up from the city centre, into Walmer Estate where I grew up.  My grandfather’s tailor shop, later to be taken over by my uncle, was a hive of activity there; the doctor who delivered me in my grandparents’ home, had his surgery there where we would queue for hours to be seen, and Majiet’s barbershop was filled with people not necessarily having their hair cut, but playing dominoes and catching up on the news. A trip into town would inevitably involve a stop for roti and curry from the Crescent Café. My father says that you could buy anything in Hanover Street except petrol.

Central to the area was the spirit of kanala – a Malay word for “if you please”. Before it became District Six , the area was called Kanaladorp, a mixture of Malay and Dutch, referring to the way people assisted each other, or did favours for each other – a version of Ubuntu.

Malay choir
photo courtesy Ismail Lagardien

Tied up with my memories is the music which was played in the streets by minstrels, Malay choirs and Christmas bands, and the food with names like bredie, bobotie, denningvleis, frikkadels and oumens onder die kombers. One dish that, for me, represents the Cape with Malay, Dutch and Christian influences blended together with fragrant spices was pickled fish. I remember my maternal grandmother making it in the last week of Lent, to eat on Good Friday. She would make it well in advance to give the spices a chance to penetrate the fish, and also to free up her Friday when she would spend many hours in church. The best fish to use was geelbek, kabeljou or yellow tail which would have been bought either from the fish market on the corner of Hanover and Clifton Street, opposite the Star bioscope, or from the fish cart which did the rounds in the neighbourhood. The hawker would sound his horn to alert housewives that he had arrived with the catch of the day and they would come out to the street to haggle.

Weddings were communal affairs

Weddings and funerals were community affairs. When I was about six or seven I was a flower girl twice in the same year, once for my aunt, a Christian wedding and then for a Muslim neighbour, a dressmaker who sewed all the dresses for the wedding herself. The whole street turned out to see the bride when the wedding cars hooted to announce her arrival, and the neighbours followed behind to the reception in the Princess Street Hall. Funerals were another occasion when everyone would just turn up to pay their respects and support the family in any way they could. Christian men would borrow fezzes and take their turns carrying the bier of their Muslim neighbours. 

As the bulldozers moved in and the walls came tumbling around her, my paternal grandmother was banished to Mitchells Plain, far from the city centre where she had lived her whole life. She had been a fiercely independent woman, who had to earn a living after her husband died and left her to raise four children on her own. She made koeksisters and konfyt to sell door-to-door on Sunday mornings in District Six, and sewed and crocheted. She used public transport or walked wherever she had to go. What I remember most was her loss of independence. Suddenly she found herself in a foreign area without any infrastructure and no public transport to fetch her pension from the General Post Office in Cape Town. For the first time she had to ask for help.

My grandaunt and friend snapped by street
photographer while walking past the GPO

Central to my motivation for going back to university, was to equip myself with skills to tell the stories of growing up, not only my stories but the stories of those who cannot tell their own. We’re a deeply divided society, still trying to recover from a brutal past. We cannot sweep it under the carpet, sooner or later the bump will trip us up. When you strip away a people’s history you take away their pride. Telling these stories helps to restore dignity and help us to move forward. We need to know that someone sees our pain and understands.

Wall in District 6 Museum bearing names of former residents

I urge you to visit the District Six Museum. However painful the memories of apartheid may be, the exhibition there humanises the experiences while celebrating the rich diversity of people who once lived here. For me, it’s like settling into an old armchair and turning the pages of a well-worn family photo album. When I see the barber’s corner, the display case with the games we once played in the road, the photographs of the Peninsula Maternity Home where my sister was born or the wall-hanging with the name of the rugby club my father played for, I feel that our lives mattered. And when I walk up the stairs to the wall that bears the names of families who lived here, and I scroll down to find mine, I feel that our experiences have been validated and dignified. 

Memorial Plaque at the District Six Museum

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1d/District-Six-Memory-Plaque.jpg

Discovering Stories of Slavery

I finished reading Andre Brink’s Philida a while ago and it’s taken a long time to process the violence of the relationship between slave and master in the Cape during the 19^th century. I remember hearing that the slaves in South Africa never had it has bad as their counterparts in America.  Of course, I knew that this was propaganda along with other things we were told about the benign nature of our history. However reading the details of rape, whipping, impaling on top of the humiliation of being sold/auctioned, objectification, and the cruelty the slaves were subjected to, was nothing short of distressing.

Brink was inspired by the story of a relative who had owned the farm, Zandvliet, which is now Solms-Delta*.  Francois Brink had fathered four children with his father’s slave, Philida. He had promised that he would marry Philida but the farm is in trouble and his father orders him to marry a white woman from an important family in Cape Town. It wouldn’t do to have reminders of his former transgressions. So Philida is sold and separated from Ouma Nella, the only mother she has known.

The story unfolds in 1830s just before emancipation. Brink, the writer, skilfully juggles with religion, the tensions between the English and Dutch, and relationship between the landowners and the slaves. There were places in the book, though, where I wasn’t sure that a woman would say something quite in the voice that he uses.

There’s a poignant scene in the book which has stuck with me. Slaves were not allowed to wear shoes and one of the slaves on Philida’s new farm secretly makes a pair for each of them so that they can celebrate the emancipation with shoes. And celebrate they do, “…running up and down the street…singing and dancing and kicking up the dust...from now on everything will be different.” Of course they weren’t really free as they were forced to spend a further four years serving an “apprenticeship” on the farm.

Andre Brink was the first Afrikaans writer to have a book banned by the South African government during the apartheid era. He challenged the policies of the Nationalist Party through his writing in books such as A Dry White Season and A Chain of Voices. He died almost a year ago today, aged 79. Philida was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2012.

Philida reflects near the end of the book that “Ouma Nella’s stories… are all that remain now. Perhaps, when the end comes, they are all that can go on living.”

*When Mark Solms bought the farm in 2002, he set about uncovering its history, revealing not only the foundations of the first house built there, but also the remnants of a Stone Age site dating back about 5 000 years ago, and the story of Philida. A museum has been established to preserve the history of the farm as well as the musical heritage of the Cape. 

Lest We Forget

Photo taken at District Six Museum 2015

I am reading William Pick’s The Slave has Overcome, and the humiliation of being a student in the medical faculty of the University of Cape Town during the 1980s, has coming sweeping back in waves over me. Professor Pick is the former head of the School of Public Health at Wits University and President of the Medical Research Council and holds a string of other awards and accolades including a fellowship from Harvard University. He tells his story as a descendant of the historically-repressed indigenous Khoisan people who overcame the barriers of apartheid to become an internationally recognised leader in the field of Public Health. 

Prof Pick studied medicine at UCT in the 1960s. It was painful to read of the discrimination he faced and to be reminded of the same issues which I experienced 20 years later – the difficulties of travelling from the Cape Flats to campus, the awkwardness of being able to sit next to whites in lecture theatres when we couldn’t sit next to them in restaurants, not being able to treat white patients, not being able to dissect a white cadaver…

In the hospital you were able to work out the race and sex of your patient without even seeing them – the folders were green for blacks and pink for whites, a number in the corner of the name labels classified patients according to race and sex with number 1 being equal to "white male", 2 for "white female", 3 for "coloured male" and so on until the classification at the bottom of the hierarchy was "black female". 

I remember having great difficulty as a third year student on my first psychiatry placement at Valkenberg Hospital in the coloured ward where a mix of neurotic and psychotic patients had been dumped together because of a lack of facilities. My supervisor sympathised with me but said her hands were tied because I couldn’t be placed in the white ward at Groote Schuur Hospital. 

In the last while I have been disturbed to hear opinions that this government is worse than the apartheid government. I, too, am angry at the slow rate of transformation, but sympathetic at the overwhelming burden of the apartheid legacy of gutter education, inferior health care and segregation at every level and I am insulted when I am told that apartheid wasn’t that bad, that it’s over now and we must move on. 

To say that apartheid was better than what we have today is to dismiss the suffering and humiliation of millions of people, the death and torture of thousands more and the brainwashing of generations of people who believed that they were inferior or superior and had a right to treat fellow human beings in a certain way because of the colour of their skins. To say that apartheid was better than what we have now is to minimise the suffering of all those forcibly removed from their homes, those denied entry to university. To say that apartheid was better than what we have today is to give the perpetrators permission to pat themselves on the back and smile smugly because they were justified in treating black people the way they did. 

I salute Prof Pick and the countless others who, like him, have overcome the legacy of apartheid to excel in spite of the barriers. 

Relate Bracelets - Making a Difference

There’s a rhythm to threading beads which I had to learn this morning – 4-1-1-1, 4-1-1-1, and so on. I sat down and started threading without making sure that my beads were in the right order and pretty soon I had made a mistake. Luckily, I was sitting in-between two experts, who quickly showed me the secret. 

The bracelets we were making are the basics of an inspired project for social upliftment, started by Lauren Gillis in 2010. The project offers township seniors dignity, companionship and an income to support themselves; offers disadvantaged youth an opportunity to earn a living, and, at the same time, helps new organisations grow their potential. What’s more, the bracelets which are produced help raise awareness of causes as varied as early childhood education, clean water, malaria and wildlife conservation. 

The finished product in aid of Masikhule

The concept is simple – the bracelet which can be completed in a matter of minutes, is the tool which provides purpose, income and awareness. To date, Relate has created earning opportunities for over 350 people, supported over 70 causes and sold almost 2 million bracelets. Young adults are employed to turn the strings of beads into a bracelet which bears a disc identifying the cause which will benefit. We had the opportunity to engage with them and hear their dreams of a future as a teacher, butler, musician and more.

Younger experts putting the bracelets together

But back to the threading room... to end off, the gogos and tatas (grannies and grandpas) showed us how they keep fit with a series of seated exercises to some lively music, before a feast of Nando’s chicken. The project is truly holistic!

Visit the website, www.relate.org.za, for more information or to purchase bracelets. 

Red Roses and Blue Wigs: A Tribute to Edward Mellerick

I keep replaying the last time I saw you. Were there any clues I missed? Were you in more pain than usual? Sad? Miserable? But, no, I think you were your usual flamboyant self as you drilled me for the details of my son’s dance date.

You made me angry sometimes. “Have I come here to be abused? Whose hair is this anyway?” I learnt to go with the flow, shed the objections with the hair dropping onto the floor. And then you’d pronounce, “You look beautiful. If only I was ten years younger…”

“Yes, Edward, and straight…”

“Oh, shut up and get your lipstick out the bag.” You’d raise your eyebrows in despair at me never having the magic wand you thought could fix any mood.

You lived vicariously through all of us, your loyal followers.

“How are the beautiful babies?” (never mind that they were adults now) and then, like a praise-singer, you’d recall their achievements and milestones from first haircut (which you insisted on giving even though you had no patience for cutting children’s hair), relating the story of my son, aged 9 or 10, being interviewed regarding playing chess, (“… and then the interviewer asked him so what was your shortest game? Five minutes. And against who? Pause for dramatic effect … with sheer delight at the answer – my dad!), my daughter’s matric dance (who is that bouncer she’s taking?), her graduation and her save-the-world sojourns to foreign places. My trips to Sweden were deliberately confused with Switzerland; my flippant answer to your question, what’s the Muslim version of a kugel? (a koeksister) got retold many times.

You’d embarrass me by running through a richly-embellished version of my life every time you introduced me to someone – “from virgin to mother of 6” – adding details about life on campus, meeting my husband and having kids, weaving in overseas trips and the accomplishments of various members of the family … you took as much pride in my return to studies after many years as if you really were the brother you told people you were.

“When those hands get too tired to work you should write,” I said. “We’ll get you onto that computer yet.” I’m writing this for you now. You would’ve loved a blog all to yourself, although you probably wouldn’t have been able to find it on the internet you viewed with such suspicion.

I’m going to remember you for the single rose that used to arrive on my birthday from “the other man”, slobbering me with kisses, your beautiful garden, the enormous displays of flowers that greeted us when we came to visit you, getting ready for functions and you booming at me – “colour? colour!” – and the collections for all your charities every Christmas in lieu of gifts and, most of all for the time you walked down the hallowed corridors of Vincent Pallotti hospital to cheer me up post-op, wearing your blue wig. Thank you for making me laugh.

Towards an Archive of Freedom

Siona O’Connell is on a mission to tell the stories of growing up in Cape Town and to that end has directed and produced a number of documentaries that have emerged out of her research as a faculty member at the University of Cape Town’s Michaelis School of Fine Art and the Centre for Curating the Archive. Siona and I grew up opposite each other on the edge of District Six and share a similar background. Her work is centred on issues of identity, memory and belonging in post-apartheid SA, which all resonate with me. In the past few years she has inspired and cajoled me into exploring similar issues.

I was fortunate to be at the premiere of her latest offerings which screened at the Baxter Theatre on Thursday evening. The first documentary, An Impossible Return, deals with the forced removals from the Cape Town suburb of Harfield during the apartheid-era.

Capetonians in general seem to be unaware of the extent of the forced removals, tending to focus on District Six, but removals occurred across most suburbs subsequently declared “for whites only”. These include Woodstock, Newlands, Kenilworth, Plumstead and Simonstown. Something that had never occurred to me before was that people had to chop up furniture to make it fit into the matchbox dwellings the government moved them into. 

What I remember most about my grandmother’s removal to Mitchell’s Plain in the 1970s, was her loss of independence. Suddenly, the fiercely-independent woman who had survived two husbands, was exiled to a suburb without any infrastructure and had to ask for help to fetch her pension from the Cape Town Post Office as she could no longer get there via public transport.

The second documentary, The Wynberg 7: An Intolerable Amnesia, is a deeply moving account of the lives of the group of teenagers who became known as the Wynberg 7, after being detained during a protest march on the same day as the Trojan horse massacre in Athlone. They were sentenced for public violence, a criminalisation of the public protest.

The documentary includes original footage from the march, court case and detention. It includes interviews with a lawyer, student activist and photographers plus the family of the 7. The trauma is fresh in the minds of the family, especially for the aged mother of one of the young men, who was subsequently diagnosed with schizophrenia. She is concerned about who will look after him when she dies.

I was shocked to hear that those who hadn’t testified at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission still have criminal records. Listening to their stories and the lack of acknowledgement 30 years later, I don’t blame them for wondering whether the sacrifices they made were worth it.

The admission to the screening of the documentaries was free and open to all. The theatre was packed with more than a few who were in the theatre for the first time in their lives. The emotion was palpable and the audience rose in a spontaneous standing ovation after Siona’s powerful speech.

                                

The title of the blog is borrowed from the title of the symposium hosted by the Centre for Curating the Archive I attended last week. 

For more, see
Centre for Curating the Archive 
Story of Wynberg 7