It was my first time at a Khoi Khonnexion performance, and my head and eyes were drooping. This is the group that I am producing an album with over the course of my year here, and I had been anxious to hear them since I found out I would be working with them. Now it was five minutes into the performance and all I wanted to do was sleep. When the beat picked up, though, I found enough strength to play the drum that was in front of me. As we played, Jethro delivered his poetry in an animated voice, shouting against the colonizers that forced their lifestyle on the people of Africa. On the other side of the campfire, the faces of a small group of white South African tourists were lit by flickering light.
This was our second night in Ratelgat (pronounced “rottle-hot”) – a large tract of land given back to the Khoi people after being taken at the barrel of a gun. On it is a living replica of a traditional Khoi village. Around thirty domed thatch huts sleep two each, and a larger hut has a raised platform for a fire and a hole in the roof for smoke. We had come on Friday and were staying until Sunday evening when the band had a performance back in Cape Town. Our host was Jakobus, who came here a few months ago from Vanrhynsdorp, hired by the management to share his music and stories from his Khoi heritage with tourists. He is a small man with a tight face and a stain on his teeth that fits comfortably around a cigarette. His eyes beg you to listen to his hoarse tenor voice, though he speaks little English. “I try very friendly. But some people say, Jakobus, I like you not. You talk too much. Yes, my friend.”
His nephew Jan is a smiling kid about my age, whom Jakobus brought here to help him recover from his addiction to mandrax – a locally popular recreational drug. Jan speaks as much English as I speak Afrikaans – about two or three broken phrases. Yet frequently he would look at me and start speaking Afrikaans, expecting me to understand, which I found strange until I realized I was doing the same to him.
My exhaustion as I played with the group was due to a very short sleep the night before. The drive had been five hours, though Glen had predicted three. The N7 took us through semi-arid plains and past jutting, rocky peaks. When we arrived it was dark, and Jakobus and Jan met us at the gate on a tractor, which they push-started to lead us to the village. The festivities began with a fire, smokes, and stories. Later on, the music started. Jakobus sings and plays guitar in a style called riel. The songs are all his originals, sung in Afrikaans and fingerpicked on the guitar. We joined him on drums and indigenous bows. Sleep came late, and in the morning we were up early.
On Saturday the plan had been to take Jakobus into Vanrhynsdorp before the bank closed, and then come back to Ratelgat to record in a cave. But in the morning three hours proved inadequate time to mobilize, at a pace determined by casual conversation and cups of coffee. The bank was closed by the time we got to town, so we went to his mother’s house to drop off the money. At eighty, she lives in a small concrete block house in a grid with maybe fifty others exactly like it. The ground was pure dust, interrupted only by foundations and feet. Jakobus introduced me to his family as an Englishman from America. I quickly exhausted my canned Afrikaans phrases, and was left to look at faces as speech rattled around me. I snapped a photo of Jakobus with his mother, and he told her proudly that I would take her face to America.
Back at Ratelgat, I anxiously waited to depart for the cave. But it was lunchtime, and it would remain lunchtime for several hours, until the sun was too low in the sky to go to a cave. For dinner, the guys baked bread – burying flour-covered dough directly in the hot ashes. I suggested that we go off and record away from the noise of the generator, with the backdrop of night sounds. They thought that was a great idea, after a cup of coffee. When cups were drained half an hour later, we were invited to play for some tourists. So here I was by someone else’s fire, exhausted and frustrated from having accomplished nothing in a whole day, and beating on an animal skin. When the performance ended, it was decided that we would call it a night.
A nice long rest helped me prepare for whatever level of productiveness might lie ahead. More or less without my nagging, we did finally start off on the trail, carrying mic stands, recording equipment, and an assortment of instruments. The cave was actually little more that a rock overhang, so the light was good but the acoustics were not as dramatic as I had hoped. On the wall were faint stick figures, painted by San centuries ago. The recording went fine, though I later discovered I had lost a good portion of it.
After a few hours for lunch and many good-byes, we were back on the road. We left at 3:30, which would get us home just in time to start the performance, if we used Glen’s prediction of a three hour drive. Just as on the way here, however, his prediction proved to be two hours short, and we reached the theatre at the time the show was scheduled to end. Embarrassed for the band, I mourned the loss of another recording opportunity and funds to send us to Botswana. But no one else seemed to mind much, including the theatre owner, who said, “Man, you can only do what you can do.”
Though my instinct for structure may have been denied consistently throughout the weekend, I got a lot out of the experience. Most notably, I was immersed in the stories and culture of the present-day Khoisan. Glen, Garth, and Jethro made it a point to educate me about the history of the place and the people; Jakobus’s stories gave me glimpses into the mythology of the Khoisan collective consciousness; and my visit to Vanrhynsdorp was an experience of how most Khoisan and others classified as Coloured live – in material poverty. The structures of the apartheid government made material wealth inaccessible to non-whites. “Material want is bad enough,” wrote ANC martyr Steve Biko, “but coupled with spiritual poverty, it kills.” The Khoisan are not dead, and this weekend I saw some of the spiritual wealth – the music – that has kept them alive. And for the Khoi Khonnexion, alive is not enough. Their plan is to awaken the country to the Khoisan in each of us, both genetically and culturally, and anchor southern Africa in a tradition that has been developing since the birth of humankind.
Pictures from this weekend at http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/natepmay.
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Saturday, August 9, 2008
Ch. 5: Samp and Bean Curry
Slowly I’m learning not to associate Hindi and Nepali with food. But since I’ve been here I’ve heard those languages every evening in the kitchen, and it is always accompanied by the smell of cumin and sizzling onions. I can sometimes guess what they are saying – the burner’s too hot, don’t add milk to that, the tomatoes need to be chopped, a little too salty – and the language has developed a flavor of its own. But as I interact more with my housemates, and I hear them speak to each other in other contexts, I am unlearning this narrow association. Daksha and Anne are the Nepalis. Aadesh, Daksha’s boyfriend, is from India, and doesn’t speak Nepali, though he understands it. All three speak Hindi, which makes it the language of commerce in the kitchen. Anne also speaks her ethnic language, Nevari, and French because she went to a French school as a child. Daksha’s regional language is Parsi. Aadesh speaks a couple of other Indian languages and understands several others. Of course, all of them speak English fluently as well, although Aadesh occasionally says “hotel” when he means “restaurant,” and remains confused about the letter V.
I speak none of these languages. Not even French. But every night I join them in the kitchen. Along with their languages, all three were taught from a young age the art of cooking, and I have the great fortune to be their apprentice. Tonight is my big night -- Daksha is not feeling well and needs to study, so she suggested that I cook dal, or lentils. Here is the test of my cooking acumen – no written recipe, just the wisdom of these three masters, who at times disagree on the details. Now in performance mode, I set out washing the rice and the lentils, and chopping the onion and garlic. But by the time I am ready to put oil in the pan, all of the burners on the stove are in use. Our other housemates, all Americans, have decided to cook tonight as well. Joy, who also went to a French school as a child, is making stuffed peppers and cous cous with Natalie. Marc, who is minoring in Chinese, is boiling pasta for chicken alfredo. The only one not present is Josh, who has taught himself some Afrikaans, and somehow had a short conversation in Swedish when he met our neighbor from Stockholm. He might’ve gone out to eat. But everyone else has a burner, and I have to wait. I pass the time by chopping the garlic into smaller pieces.
Multilingualism is the norm in Cape Town, and not only among international students. The mother language of most whites is English or Afrikaans. For most Coloureds it is Afrikaans, and for most Africans it is Xhosa. Afrikaans is the evolution of the swab of Dutch that was put into the petri dish of the Cape Colony when it was settled in the 17th century. Since Afrikaners made up the National Party which created and maintained apartheid, it was seen by many blacks as the language of the oppressor. When Afrikaans was set as the language of the schools, children took to the streets in protest. In Cape Town, Xhosa (pronounced with kind of a slurping click) is the most prominent Bantu language. It is similar to Swati, Zulu, and Ndebele, which, along with English, Afrikaans, Sepedi, Sesotho, Setswana, Tshivenda, and Xitsonga, are also among the eleven official languages of South Africa. Many Africans speak more than one of these languages. And most people in Cape Town also speak English, with accents that betray their mother language.
The English here is a bit different. It shares its spelling with the motherland, and Marc was docked points on an exam for spelling “finalise” with a “z” and “labour” without a “u.” Then of course there are the vocabulary differences. “Just now” is some point in the near future. Corn is “mealie.” “Howzit?” is a common greeting. Musical note-values have completely different names – a 64th note is a “hemidemisemiquaver,” which presumably some South African musicians can say without laughing.
It is easy to tune out Xhosa and Afrikaans in everyday life, but I wish I knew more of them. I would love to take Xhosa at UCT, but it didn’t fit into my schedule. Instead, I must pick it up here and there. My first lesson was a few weeks ago when I was walking home from Shoprite. Three women were trying to push a car into a gated lot, and it wasn’t moving much. I offered my help, and we made slow and steady progress until we reached an incline. Now at a standstill, one of the women went to Main Road, and came back with a guy about my age. He silently joined the struggle, and when we remained stuck, he looked into the driver’s door and released the emergency brake. Still wordless as the rest of us laughed at ourselves, he helped us push it into place and then walked off. The three women had been far from silent, but their chatter had been in Xhosa. When they thanked me for my help, I asked them to teach me a few words. This is how I learned molo – hello, and kunjani? – how are you? The other place I have picked up some Xhosa is in church, where the hymns are projected in Xhosa with their English translations.
Finally, Marc dumps his alfredo onto a plate, and I can put down a frying pan and add my finely chopped garlic. I follow the process that I have seen – adding onion, then turmeric, then cumin, sautéing until the onion is limp and translucent, turning off the rice when the water is absorbed, mashing the lentils until they are the right consistency, and finally adding the onions to the lentils, with some tomato and a little butter (one of Aadesh’s “secret ingredients”). We sit down to eat, and I watch their faces closely for the verdict. Thankfully, I am given a nod of approval. To me, it doesn’t taste as good as when they made it, but I’ll improve. I will learn the theory, which can then be applied to many dishes. So far one of my favorites has been one we invented: samp and bean curry with green beans. Samp is large kernels made of corn meal and is a traditional South African staple. Somehow, it gracefully received the Indian/Nepali treatment given it by my housemates. In Cape Town, where languages and cultures are churned together on a regular basis, this was probably not the first experiment of its kind.
I speak none of these languages. Not even French. But every night I join them in the kitchen. Along with their languages, all three were taught from a young age the art of cooking, and I have the great fortune to be their apprentice. Tonight is my big night -- Daksha is not feeling well and needs to study, so she suggested that I cook dal, or lentils. Here is the test of my cooking acumen – no written recipe, just the wisdom of these three masters, who at times disagree on the details. Now in performance mode, I set out washing the rice and the lentils, and chopping the onion and garlic. But by the time I am ready to put oil in the pan, all of the burners on the stove are in use. Our other housemates, all Americans, have decided to cook tonight as well. Joy, who also went to a French school as a child, is making stuffed peppers and cous cous with Natalie. Marc, who is minoring in Chinese, is boiling pasta for chicken alfredo. The only one not present is Josh, who has taught himself some Afrikaans, and somehow had a short conversation in Swedish when he met our neighbor from Stockholm. He might’ve gone out to eat. But everyone else has a burner, and I have to wait. I pass the time by chopping the garlic into smaller pieces.
Multilingualism is the norm in Cape Town, and not only among international students. The mother language of most whites is English or Afrikaans. For most Coloureds it is Afrikaans, and for most Africans it is Xhosa. Afrikaans is the evolution of the swab of Dutch that was put into the petri dish of the Cape Colony when it was settled in the 17th century. Since Afrikaners made up the National Party which created and maintained apartheid, it was seen by many blacks as the language of the oppressor. When Afrikaans was set as the language of the schools, children took to the streets in protest. In Cape Town, Xhosa (pronounced with kind of a slurping click) is the most prominent Bantu language. It is similar to Swati, Zulu, and Ndebele, which, along with English, Afrikaans, Sepedi, Sesotho, Setswana, Tshivenda, and Xitsonga, are also among the eleven official languages of South Africa. Many Africans speak more than one of these languages. And most people in Cape Town also speak English, with accents that betray their mother language.
The English here is a bit different. It shares its spelling with the motherland, and Marc was docked points on an exam for spelling “finalise” with a “z” and “labour” without a “u.” Then of course there are the vocabulary differences. “Just now” is some point in the near future. Corn is “mealie.” “Howzit?” is a common greeting. Musical note-values have completely different names – a 64th note is a “hemidemisemiquaver,” which presumably some South African musicians can say without laughing.
It is easy to tune out Xhosa and Afrikaans in everyday life, but I wish I knew more of them. I would love to take Xhosa at UCT, but it didn’t fit into my schedule. Instead, I must pick it up here and there. My first lesson was a few weeks ago when I was walking home from Shoprite. Three women were trying to push a car into a gated lot, and it wasn’t moving much. I offered my help, and we made slow and steady progress until we reached an incline. Now at a standstill, one of the women went to Main Road, and came back with a guy about my age. He silently joined the struggle, and when we remained stuck, he looked into the driver’s door and released the emergency brake. Still wordless as the rest of us laughed at ourselves, he helped us push it into place and then walked off. The three women had been far from silent, but their chatter had been in Xhosa. When they thanked me for my help, I asked them to teach me a few words. This is how I learned molo – hello, and kunjani? – how are you? The other place I have picked up some Xhosa is in church, where the hymns are projected in Xhosa with their English translations.
Finally, Marc dumps his alfredo onto a plate, and I can put down a frying pan and add my finely chopped garlic. I follow the process that I have seen – adding onion, then turmeric, then cumin, sautéing until the onion is limp and translucent, turning off the rice when the water is absorbed, mashing the lentils until they are the right consistency, and finally adding the onions to the lentils, with some tomato and a little butter (one of Aadesh’s “secret ingredients”). We sit down to eat, and I watch their faces closely for the verdict. Thankfully, I am given a nod of approval. To me, it doesn’t taste as good as when they made it, but I’ll improve. I will learn the theory, which can then be applied to many dishes. So far one of my favorites has been one we invented: samp and bean curry with green beans. Samp is large kernels made of corn meal and is a traditional South African staple. Somehow, it gracefully received the Indian/Nepali treatment given it by my housemates. In Cape Town, where languages and cultures are churned together on a regular basis, this was probably not the first experiment of its kind.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
