Ch. 3: Mountain Milk

The city of Cape Town is cradled by mountains and nurtured by the ocean. In the hazy distance sits the Twelve Apostles range. Table Mountain is right in the city, and her steeper neighbor, Devil’s Peak, waits on the other side of the sliding glass doors from our house’s common space. The Atlantic Ocean, on the far side of town, brings cooling winds in the summer.

Where I live is just blocks from the base of the mountains. If you were to walk down the east face of Table Mountain you would first reach the campus of the University of Cape Town. You would follow the stream of students past the rugby fields, through the muraled tunnel, and down to Woolsack Drive. You would cross over the road on a footbridge, pass through a gate into a parking lot where there are giant daffodil-like trees with trunks for stalks, pass the soccer fields, turn down a residential street, and then another in a few feet, marked “CUL DE SAC” on the pavement. The last gate on the left is ours, with a wooden fence guarded by thorny vines. You would ring the doorbell and I would let you in to a small yard with a table and two chairs. We would enter the house, greeted by a large map of southern Africa. We would pass through the living room with 194 books (the landlady did a thorough inventory), and through the dining area with a circular table, on which you will find this week’s paper and an empty wine bottle. The kitchen is quite large, with a semi-functional stove, microwave, fridge, and the indispensible electric kettle. Out the back door is a courtyard with an avocado tree and a clothesline (we have a washing machine, but no drier). Another structure holds three rooms, the last of which, on the right, is mine. In my room is another electric kettle, and I will make you a cup of Rooibos tea, because you just walked down Table Mountain.

Over its lifespan, Table Mountain has been gawked at by many eyes. In 1652 when the Dutch landed here in Cape Town, they saw the mountain through European eyes. To them it was a table; find a picture and your eyes will agree. But for thousands of years it had been something else. The San people have lived here for literally all of human history, and the Khoikhoi moved in before the Europeans did. The San were hunter-gatherers and the Khoikhoi were pastoralists, but the fluidity between them led to the encompassing term Khoisan. Then there are the colonial terms - Bushmen for San, and Hottentot for Khoikhoi – both derogatory, both commonplace.

I am here on the Telluride Association Reese Miller Exchange Scholarship. This scholarship is open to all University of Michigan students, and covers tuition, room and board, airfare, health insurance, and a stipend for a year of study at UCT. In return, I must complete a service project while I am here. For my service project (I will henceforth drop the term “service”), I am working with a group of musicians called Khoi Khonnexion, which works for and from the tradition of the Khoisan people. I will be recording an album for them, and we will sell it to benefit the San people in the Kalahari desert in Botswana.

I met with the group last Sunday: Glen, a scholar and organizer, Garth, a renowned visual artist, and Jethro, who lives in a township and is known as “the ghetto poet.” They told me about South Africa. In colonial and post-colonial times, the Bantu people such as the Zulu and Xhosa have always been the majority of the South African population. So the Khoi and the San today are minorities among the indigenous people – Glen calls them vulnerable indigenous people. It is their culture that is the most in danger, so to affirm and raise awareness of this culture, the Khoi Khonnexion makes music.

The San of the Kalahari are an illustration of the vulnerability that Garth speaks of. For tens of thousands of years, the San have been living in the Kalahari desert, which stretches outward from Botswana into Namibia and South Africa. Unlike Western peoples, the San in the Kalahari take part in a balanced ecosystem, requiring only the desert, its flora and fauna, and millennia of wisdom. The government of Botswana set aside the Kalahari Game Reserve for the San and the ecosystem of which it is a part, until diamonds were discovered in it. Then relocations forced them into ghettos where they lived in poverty. Finally in 2006 the supreme court overruled this decision, and they were allowed to return. However, they have no means by which to return, and the ones who do return face further persecution.

Weekdays this semester, with the mountain always in my periphery, I will trace backwards the steps you took to reach my house. At my meeting with the Khoi Khonnexion, Jethro told me how the mountain is viewed in his San heritage. Table mountain is not a table, but a woman giving birth, to me. To you, he said. Every morning I must greet the mountain mother, Khorikama, and she will take care of me.

I have been greeting her, and she has been taking care of me. Often she will be shrouded by mist. Other times neighboring clouds will bread and butter around her, inviting the mountain to be part of the sky. On her slopes are stone pines and, allegedly, zebras. She has watched as I have cautiously joined her other children in the valley, as I have gone from a helpless infant to a member of the family. I know she will not always offer bodily or emotional protection, but she will see to it that I will not leave the valley until I have grown, and learned a thing or two from my brothers and sisters.