This is an old one ... May of 2005. I was living in London with a boyfriend called Antonio, who I was very much in love with at the time. As I was cleaning up my in-box, I stumbled upon this, and realized that it's not only my in-box I'm cleaning.
We had taken a trip to South Africa, and I wrote a little something about the trip, which changed my perspective on poverty. Here it is, rough around the edges and largely unedited ...
One of the big jokes of the trip was that The Westcliff in Johannesburg checked us in as Mr. and Mrs. Coursey, which my Mount Holyoke feminist self got a big rile out of. I asked my boyfriend Antonio if he would take my name, and he said yes. We enjoyed two days of reading The Corporation (think Michael Moore for big business) and Life of Pi. Just kidding about the name. He actually laughed!
Down to Cape Town, we checked into Mount Nelson Hotel, named after the British explorer Lord Nelson, which ironically shares the name of the country's liberator from the vestiges of racist, colonial rule, Nelson Mandela.
The market stalls are filled with Kenyans and Nigerians who sell hand-carved wooden tables for 8 British pounds, and understand the favorable value of their currency to the extent that they say, "We make it cheaper for you so you have to pay extra for the weight at the airport and it's still OK!" Thank God the three pound carved hippo we had to have didn't tip the scales. Haggling is easy & friendly compared to northern Africa, and they even tell you the best time to come and get a good price at the end of day!
CAPE OF GOOD HOPE!!!!!! Where the Indian Ocean meets the Atlantic, the world ends and begins again, Vasco de Gama called it Buona Speranza (good hope) because he was the first to circumnavigate the continent of Africa and seeing that he had reached the "bottom" was certainly an encouraging sign. Smooth seas become harsh and temperamental, as edges are rough by nature, and the edge of the warm, temperate Indian becomes a tiger upon meeting the Atlantic. Just on the other side in Mozambique, further up the eastern coast, that same Indian Ocean is soft and lazy, a practical bathtub. Proving that a play of opposites often swings the pendulum to just one side alone, once again there is no melting pot, no happy middle and in-between.
Interesting to see that everywhere on this planet the natives and settlers have had conflict, and to this very day in our modern cities of the Western world we have pockets of ethnic communities, ie people that haven't assimilated and become white, as there is no reverse movement to becoming dark or 'other'. Are we naturally different, and must we celebrate our differences by learning to live apart in harmony, to live separately and together in the same city? That could be alright, if that's the way things are (and that IS the way things are in most places), if the opportunities, facilities, education, water, roads, etc, were equal in both places. This is unfortunately not the case.
This brings me to the Townships. I wrote an SMS to a friend and my sister upon arriving in Cape Town that read: 'this is a moral injustice, living in shacks like this'. The sadness that confounded me would not be shared by the people of the Township. On the contrary. I have never seen such a true community, in every sense of the word. In 1966, a community of 60,000 working class people living in the center of Cape Town was forcibly moved outside the city, their houses bulldozed and demolished. This neighborhood, called District 6, to this day hasn¡¦t been properly re-built, and the people still live outside in townships, more or less shacks with little facilities/water. Each room sleeps three families. Each family gets one bed. Clothes are hung on the walls, and sheets are tacked up as curtains. Some sleep together on the bed, others on mats in front of the beds. They eat mostly tripe and chicken on barbeques and something called African salad, a soupy dish of corn mixed with sour milk.
In the houses without water, there is an area for sleeping and an area for kerosene cooking, equal to 2 closets put together; and unisex public toilets are lined up outside.
What surprised me is that these Africans seemed more happy and together, with tremendous community spirit, than the white South Africans we encountered in the city. If a mother calls her child to eat, and that child is playing with 20 other children, they all come to eat, everything is shared. Money, clothes, food, whatever they have. And food, for one, as we were there just before dinner time, is pouring out of their kitchens and on the street, and our guide pointed out that nobody goes hungry. With basic needs of life provided for, a people who have no separate word for cousin (they are called brother or sister instead) come together and live quite happily and in peace.
If a man coming from the country has a friend in the Township from his village, that man will share his bed, his food, his clothes, his money, and find that person work, and the man is not expected to pay anything back, because it is understood that there will come a time when he will be able to do that for someone else.
They took us to a traditional healer¡¦s workshop, with dried lizard skins and animal bones and eggs and earth-colored powders and tinctures in unlabeled cans and jars. The healer returned my eyes as we were leaving, and I hoped that he was not judging my Western ways, a stupid and perhaps instinctive urge for what being different can mean to someone else. We were taking a tour in his neighborhood, and he had perhaps not done one in East Hampton or New York to see how we live. It would certainly be less interesting from his perspective. One of the shaman's tools was a string of condoms, hung up on a clothesline in a candle-lit makeshift garage. All of his tools are meant to ward off evil spirits from the body and the house, and of course AIDS is in this category. Condoms are available free everywhere in the Townships.
THAT is all I have to say about Africa, as you can imagine on a safari we saw animals, but this doesn¡¦t need explaining. For all you non-vegetarians, I ate elephant biltong (dried meat), impala, springbok, crocodile, ostrich, and potato ice cream. I got really close to buffalo, and really far away from lions (not such a bad thing).
What I took away from this trip is that nothing material will bring true happiness, neither the lack of running water nor having to share a bed with your family. People can get used to anything, and while I am in no way condoning the disenfranchisement of 90% of South Africa's population, I can say that living in close spaces has created a massive, beautiful intimacy. Happiness is when you take care of everyone you love, and they take care of you, nobody goes hungry, and nobody is alone.
