Epilogue: The Next Search

I’m home now. Back in a place where the big things are more or less stable and the attention is on the details. Living with my parents, I am cradled in comfort and security. There was no initial rejection; it was a completely natural reversion. I had created a world in my mind – one of peace, abundance, and comfort – as something to look forward to upon my return. And now I am living as if I am in that world. I bought a sandwich for $8.39 without flinching. I gently manoeuvred the car back to the right side of the road when my Dad pointed out that I was driving on the left without assessing the could-haves. I left my wallet out in public places fully expecting it to be there on my return. So far I haven’t been disappointed.

But I am expecting, as the weeks go by, for this fog to lift. I will start to feel strong emotions again, rather than a gentle baseline buzz. I will note aspects of my life here that feel emptier, despite all of the abundance, because I have lived in a place that in many ways was more nurturing.

My last week in Cape Town gave me a good sense of closure. The CD release for Khoi Khonnexion’s Kalahari Waits was very well-attended. Many people said very nice things, including the group, who has seen this as a defining moment in their ten-year history. We sold dozens of copies, and since then more have been sold to South Africans and people all over the United States and in Europe. Several press pieces have come out about it, all of which have been positive. Soon, for U.S. customers, the CD will be available on independent music site CD Baby. If you are interested in a copy, however, the best way is to speak to me about it.

After the release I had a farewell party and jam session at Tagore’s in Observatory, where I had played the out-of-tune piano several times a week for loose change over the summer. On Tuesday, Glen, Jethro and another friend took me to the airport. There we ran into the outgoing national Minister of Arts and Culture. He already knew Glen and Jethro, and we had a few minutes to kill before our planes took off. He wanted to buy a copy of the CD, but we didn’t have one with us. Then he showed us a new songbook he had helped put together for schools. He proudly pointed out which songs he had written, and performed them for us right there in the check-in line. A touching note to leave on.

As a musician, I often think about the process of assimilating experience and moving forward. Somehow, by some psycho-physio natural selection, my fingers go from fumbling a melody one hour to nailing it the next. From weak chord voicings one year to more harmonically rich ones the next. I think it’s a big part of what keeps me going – my ability to see that I am, slowly but surely, moving through some sort of terrain.

It is the moments when I doubt this progress when I feel the most fear and uncertainty about myself as an artist. Preachers use the same rhetoric and logic today to attack homosexuality as their predecessors used to defend slavery not long ago. Hundreds of civilizations in history have collapsed due to overpopulation and environmental degradation, but the same mistakes are being repeated. Does that mean it is possible for me to lose all the lessons I have learned while in Cape Town?

I am working under the hopeful assumption that my experiences have become part of my tapestry – lessons learned on an unconscious level will stay with me as long as they stay true. But I think it would help to condense into a list some of the lessons I can extract now in immediate retrospection:

1. My biggest barrier to understanding people is my own notions about them.

2. I can’t not be an artist. When I came to Cape Town, I had decided that I could succeed more as an academic. I soon learned that this was irrelevant. My core impulse is to create, and if I ignore that, I will not be happy.

3. For everything that I’m good at, there are a million people who are better. So stop dwelling on it.

4. There are as many ways to listen to music as there are styles of music. I can shamelessly practice as many as I want.

5. People in developing nations are caught in a complex love-hate relationship with America. Meanwhile, Americans don’t know they exist.

6. Poverty doesn’t have to be about feeling sorry for yourself.

7. Money can destroy relationships.

8. Relationships can destroy money.

9. Artists are the guardians and destroyers of myths.

10. Comfort is placatory.

11. A lot of people are struggling with what modernity requires them to believe. Many First Nation people struggle with the antagonism between the wisdom of their traditions and what modernity requires them to believe.

I think these lessons I am learning are part of being a global citizen. There is a growing body of people who are educated, financially stable, and mobile. These people live in a global village, and so have added power and added responsibility. I grew up in the place where I am now, the small town of Huntington, West Virginia, where many residents have lived for generations and generations. I knew that the opportunities I was looking for didn’t exist here, but at times growing up it was hard to imagine not being tied to this place. Now I am joining the ranks of other global citizens, and learning what that means. At the same time, by taking myself farther from my familiar context, I am learning what it means to be a West Virginian.

At Michigan I first learned to be proud to be a West Virginian, because I saw West Virginia’s uniqueness and I had to dispel others’ ignorance about it. In Cape Town, most people didn’t know it was a separate state from Virginia, but they also didn’t know the stereotypes that aren’t worth knowing. So it was tabula rasa for me, and I had to make a first impression. Natural beauty, strong culture, isolation, and economic woes were usually my talking points. And I would usually end up talking about dependence on coal and explaining mountaintop removal, which was always met with incredulity. When I was flying in to Charleston, I sat next to a businessman from California who was coming here for vacation. It felt good to be a local again.

Like the Zen cycle of awakening, I am now back at the exact spot where I started, but with my eyes a little more open. There is so much to explore about this place and my relationship with it. Now that I no longer find myself in Africa, it’s time to find myself where I am.

Thanks to all of you for reading over the past year. I have appreciated your feedback and support. I welcome you now to help me re-narrate this year by sharing your own reactions to my experiences and the lessons I have learned. With our complementing and conflicting perceptions, we can start to get a glimpse of something true…

Ch. 14: The New World

Classes are out for the term, and yesterday I had my one and only exam – a piano practical. For the previous few days I had put all my energy into preparing for it, and so when it was over I felt like celebrating. My official business with the University of Cape Town is now complete, except for nagging the administrative offices to put Jazz Ensemble on my transcript (I registered of it at the beginning of the term but they never got around to entering it into the system). This exam marked the beginning of a two week period of tying up loose ends before my departure on 9 June. This is the part where I start thinking about the practicalities of getting and being home. Kind of exciting.

It was with this on my mind that I went into a performance of Dvořák’s 9th Symphony (“Symphony of the New World”) by the university’s Symphony Orchestra last night. I sat there with a South African friend, a few meters from the cello section, letting Dvořák’s melodies wash over me. This symphony was based on the Czech composer’s visit to “The New World” in the late 19th century, and the themes are modelled on American folk styles – especially African American spirituals and Native American music. Hearing this in Cape Town, it occurred to me that this symphony, and its title, probably evokes a sense of exoticism for those who have not visited America. Perhaps it functioned more this way before America’s pop music took over international airwaves, but I’m sure even in that audience last night there were some people with the thought in the back of their mind, “So, this is what America sounds like.” I’m guessing this because I found traces of that thought in my mind.

I’ve been out of touch with my homeland now for eleven months, and I’m wondering what it will be like when I get back. Will I suddenly remember, in a rush of disappointment, all the things I was happy to leave behind in July? The hyper-consumerism, the technology cult, the de-emphasis on personal communication, the pursuit of the meaningless? More likely, this will come bit-by-bit, but my first sensation will be one of return to comfort.

I’m also wondering how this experience will look as it is disappearing over the horizon of my past. What will I miss about being here? The diversity of people and experiences? The musical gatherings? The individuals I have come to know? The bond I have with the friends that I have made here is becoming more tangible as it is about to be broken. I wonder if I’ll ever see them again.

I think, experience-wise, what will stick out most in my mind will be my time with Khoi Khonnexion working on our recording project. We’ve finished all the recording, mixing, mastering, and album design, and we’re now in kind of a limbo stage. We still haven’t exactly come up with all of the money to pay the manufacturing company, but we’ve already given them the master and the CD design, and we’re confident that by the 5th of June, when we receive our 1,000 copies, we’ll have raised enough or be able to invest enough to pay them. It’s exciting to think that in just a few days we’ll have the finished product in our hands. It has been a creatively challenging and fulfilling project. Both the form and the content are new territory for me – indigenous consciousness in Southern Africa, expressed with sounds that, for the most part, lack what I have come to learn to be the basic elements of music. It has involved a lot of experimentation, and the result is something quite fresh and, I think, compelling. I have learned so much about possibilities in the arts, and the people I have met through the project will serve as models for me as I try to carve out my path as an artist.

One of these people is local visual and musical artist Brendon Bussy. He went to school for visual art, and then started making money doing interesting projects that came his way, and even more interesting projects that reflect his own voice as an artist, but aren’t as financially rewarding. Right now he has what he describes as a “pizza delivery job” managing the production of a boxed set of South African documentaries, which will be manufactured in the thousands. In his spare time he finds ways of incorporating local indigenous musical styles into his mandolin playing, makes field recordings, and beta-tests electronic music software. He lent me a pair of speakers for the project, and showed me how to mix a piano so it sounds like shattering glass.

And there’s Isa Suarez, a French composer who spends much of her time in Cape Town. Her latest project is working with choirs of school kids, developing songs about their views about the world, and performing them on minibus taxis as they travel throughout the city.

Manfred Zille is a German-born artist who came to Cape Town during the apartheid struggle. His work was banned when he painted portraits of government officials and invited the public to add their commentary, graffiti-style, to the canvasses. These canvasses are now owned by the South African National Gallery.

The biggest inspiration to me has been Garth Erasmus – visual artist and member of Khoi Khonnexion. He too got his start during the time when the revolutionary task was to make the nation “ungovernable” by the apartheid system, so that it would collapse on itself. He stencilled tributes to recent victims of the regime’s violent tactics on the walls of the city. After apartheid ended, he began the quest for healing in his work, focusing specifically on his Khoisan heritage. He began research into indigenous history, and found his way to indigenous instruments. He began to create them as sculptures, and soon was taken in by their sounds. He also has taught himself the saxophone, and has the largest record collection of free jazz that I have ever seen – libraries included. From Garth I have learned about personal authenticity in artistic work, putting process over product, and integrating artistic vision with personal mindset. Garth is one of the most compassionate, understanding people I have known, and he seems to cultivate this in his artistic work.

So when I go back to the New World, I will have to keep my memories of these artists and their work alive. In America I found I had a crisis of cultural identity, but I have learned that there is a lot to explore in my own background, and I hope to use the models of these artists to go about it. No longer a fish trying to define water, I will go home having seen what my culture is not, which will bring to light what it is.

Ch. 13: Shooting Yourself in My Foot

Last Friday I did my first load of laundry since I’ve been here. My German housemate pointed out to me that I had been putting powder detergent in the liquid compartment of the washing machine. For nine months. “Yah, you see the little pump. He cannot pump powder.” Somehow it always gets diffused enough to convince me that it had served its purpose.

But, come to think of it, my clothes have always seemed clean anyway. And, assuming that I haven’t been rolling in harmful contaminants, seeming is all that matters. So how necessary is detergent, really, after a rinse and a spin and a few hours hanging in the sun?

In modern civilization, we use resources and much more than we need to, because we rarely get a glimpse of how unnecessary they are. And rich nations have largely been able to preserve this hegemony by remaining blind to the consequences these unnecessary uses of resources have on the global ecosystem. I read somewhere that Great Britain has kept its emission promises under the Kyoto protocol only by outsourcing manufacturing, and therefore emissions, to India. While corporations are greenwashing consumers in North America and Europe into thinking that they can be “eco-friendly” by buying unnecessary products with woodsy color schemes, the much less “enlightened” African continent is inflicting a tiny fraction of the impact on the Earth’s resources. Yet it is suffering the consequences. Nations with agricultural economies which are unstable anyway after generations of imperial leeching are more prone to suffering from erratic climactic patterns. Not to mention the even more fragile dependence on subsistence farming, as I saw in Malawi, where the rains-to-meals ratio is locked quite tightly. The first-world nations have cushioned themselves from these issues by their power to import despite rising food prices.

South Africa’s economy benefits from soil that is fertile in a different way – it contains some of the richest deposits of gold and diamonds in the world. Coupled with its history of apartheid, which allowed a portion of the population to consume resources and produce waste at a rate comparable to first-world nations, this puts it in the unique position of being both a perpetrator and a victim of resource-based environmental problems. One might think that this would produce an attitude of “we are shooting ourselves in the foot.” But this is prevented by South Africa’s limits of national cohesion. The apartheid legacy of contrast has remained, and so the perpetrators can still distance themselves from the victims. Alas! it is only a microcosm of global-scale dysfunction.

South Africa faces many environmental disasters, from polluted rivers and destruction of wetland ecosystems, to waste and energy. For a modern city, Cape Town’s attitude toward recycling is anachronistic. When looking at apartments, I asked landlords about recycling facilities, and received blank stares in response. My current landlord collects newspapers, glass, and tins, but says that “South Africa has a surplus of plastics.” South Africans haven’t fully grasped the idea of separating waste. And taxes for industrial dumping are so low that manufacturers have little incentive to reduce.

One issue that I feel right at home with is dependence on coal. My home state of West Virginia is a top producer and consumer of coal in the nation. South Africa, too, burns coal for most of its electricity. To my knowledge, the violent practice of mountaintop removal, which has been damaging water sources, ecosystems, and communities in West Virginia for many years, hasn’t found its way into the tactical handbooks of South African mine companies, but the other dirty attributes of coal are equally problematic here. 73% of carbon emissions in South Africa come from the burning of fossil fuels (primarily coal) for energy production. Jacob Zuma, the President-in-waiting who still needs to go through the motions of campaigning, recently said, “we want to escalate our national efforts towards the realisation,” (my “rhetoric” LED is now lit up), “of a greater contribution of renewable energy sources, including solar and wind power, as part of an ambitious renewable energy target.” Make it happen, JZ. Make it happen.

But the backbone of any real environmental change is not governments or corporations, but the people: constituents, consumers, those who make tiny decisions which, taken en masse, have huge consequences. A couple of weeks ago the World Wildlife Fund hosted a global Earth Hour. It asked all citizens of the world to turn off their lights for one hour, as a demonstration of solidarity against global warming. I was surprised that in Cape Town, despite its outdated tendencies, this was publicized on billboards and placards. In a minibus taxi one day I heard Desmond Tutu’s voice over the radio, urging my participation. It doesn’t take much of an excuse for South Africans to party, so this event was celebrated across the city. The Cape Town Philharmonic played at the waterfront. I had to miss out on a friend’s braai (barbeque) to play a candlelit gig at a local bar.

As an artist, I am concerned not only with material repercussions of environmental attitudes, but also the psychosocial concerns of a people living with not only the immediate effects and a guilty conscience, but the knowledge that it’s getting worse and it’s nearly unstoppable. This Wednesday I am presenting a performance at the College of Music which is conceived as a reaction to these building pressures, and a mythological response to them. Featuring masks, dancers, props, a storyteller, and music that is edgier than the tastes of most of the audience members, it will attempt to serve as a moment of catharsis. It’s something we all need to experience in order to be emotionally able to face the reality of the situation, and then roll up our sleeves and get to work.

Ch. 12: A Glint of Light in Woodstock

“Avoid conspicuous clothing.” Advice from page three of my passport. My passport, which has no clue where I am, except that I’m not in the United States. I wonder if South African passports say the same thing, or if it’s only America that would have such a superiority complex. You want to go out there? asks Uncle Sam, turning his pointer finger to the dark beyond. The wind picks up and thunder grumbles from somewhere over the Atlantic. I won’t stop you, he says, finger trembling. But please, avoid conspicuous clothing.

Lucky for me, I prefer earth tones. But I do have an orange backpack.

On Saturday I decided that it was about time to inject some fresh energy into my music collection. I planned to head downtown to the fabled Musica superstore at the Waterfront. Despite my best efforts, I wouldn’t make it to the Waterfront. That is, until today, when I found myself sitting in a bank hoping I would not be defeated by bureaucracy, and that I would be able to afford my groceries after all.

Just before I left for the music store, I got a call from Cizzi, a Swedish student who was my housemate briefly in Observatory. She wanted to know if I would join her at an organic food market at the Old Biscuit Mill, a touristy establishment in Woodstock. I wasn’t sure where it was exactly, but she said it was just a walk down Lower Main from where we used to live. It was on my way to the Waterfront, and I needed food anyway. So I hopped on a taxi, which in Cape Town means a minibus that goes back and forth along a certain route, at times stuffing in more passengers than there is enough oxygen to support. But this one was pretty empty, so I was at leisure to talk with the man who collects the money. “Do you know where the Old Biscuit Mill is?” I asked. He showed no sign of recognition, and in Afrikaans he consulted with the driver who showed no sign of recognition. They arrived at a conclusion. He promised to drop me off close by. As we continued along Main Road past anything within walking distance of my old house, I began to get antsy. But he insisted he would take me there. As the taxi was slowing down, the coloured woman next to me turned to me. “Do you want to get robbed? You’re a white guy, and only coloured people live here.” Neither of these points was news to me, so I chose to continue, but to listen to the driver’s advice: “keep your belongings close.” It wasn’t hard – I was wearing an orange backpack, which couldn’t have been closer to my back. He said the Old Biscuit Mill was right there, and pointed a short way down a side street.

I took this short street and rounded the corner. There, with boarded windows and chipped paint, was The Biscuit Factory. I wondered how far I was from my actual destination. I called Cizzi. “What street are you on?”

“Can’t find the name.”

“Do you see train tracks?” I did. She didn’t.

I knew I was at least still in Woodstock, so I followed this street back in the direction I had come. It was parallel to Main Road, and busy enough that I wasn’t too concerned in broad daylight. I ran into a couple who actually knew the place. They told me I was about 3 km away. The midday sun had already brought a shine to my forehead. Forget it, I said, I’ll just go back to Main Road, catch another taxi, and find that music store. I took out my phone and sent a text message to Cizzi informing her of my plans. On Table Mountain, tourists with binoculars would have seen a tiny explosion of light coming from Woodstock as the sun glinted off of my phone’s display. “That one’s on borrowed time,” they would have said to each other. That is, if they had read the warnings in their passports.

Putting the phone back in my pocket, I started down another side street toward Main Road. I heard anxious shouts from a group of people sitting in front of a shop. They were waving frantically at me, don’t go down there. A shirtless man with a crystal hanging from a cord around his neck approached me.

“Where are you from?” He asked. I told him.

“So you’ve heard of the Bronx. You’re in the Bronx right now. Come sit by my sister’s shop for a few minutes. I’ll go fetch a shirt and I’ll take you to Main Road.”

I appreciated his looking out for me, but I had no reason to believe he wasn’t one of the ones he was warning me about. I was just a few blocks from the side street I had taken to get here, which was less residential and more open. I thanked him and told him I would just go back the way I came.

A few steps in that direction, I heard the same question from another man. “Where are you from?” He was a big guy, with two diamondlike earrings. Still walking, I told him where I was from. Next thing I knew, he plunged his hand into my pocket and pulled out my cell phone. In his other hand appeared a big, jagged knife. He pulled my orange backpack off my back without much difficulty. He retreated, and another man walked toward me with eyes that said, you don’t want any trouble, do you? I didn’t but, remembering my beloved sound recorder in my bag, I shouted after my assailant, “There’s stuff in there you don’t want, man.” Then I turned and kept walking, as the other man was drawing closer. Again, I heard a chorus of voices drawing my attention. This time it was a group of people at a filling station. What did they want? And would this guy intercept me if I tried to go to them? Then I saw that they were gesturing at my orange backpack, which was now in the hands of the shirtless man. So I crossed the street and went to this little shop, where I was given back my bag. “Check to see if anything’s missing,” said the shirtless man.

“Just my wallet,” I said, eyeing the sound recorder with relief. He and his brother had approached the guy, but when they saw his knife, they had backed off. He had dropped my bag, and taken only my wallet. Was he afraid of the stuff he didn’t want? I can only guess. I was given a crate to sit on, and I listened as the locals cursed the drug addicts for tarnishing the image of Woodstock and of Cape Town. The shirtless man’s brother escorted me to the police station, where I ran into a filmmaker I had met at a party. He had told me he was doing a documentary on crime in Cape Town. Was he here for research? I asked him. No, his car had been broken into.

After riding around Woodstock in a police cruiser looking for the perpetrator, I wound up back at the station. After waiting awhile, an officer dropped three cards on the table: two debit cards and my Eagle Scout ID, which also has raised lettering but is less useful at an ATM. For some reason they were all bent in the middle. So, where was the diamond-eared man? They had let him go. Something about the card companies and subpoenas. I gave my statement, and listed everything that had been in my wallet. My driver’s licence, I remembered, was not among them. I had used it to get my UCT ID the day before, and apparently had left it at the desk in the Leslie Social Sciences building. On Monday I went back for it. They still had it, and I told them my story. “Should have left your wallet here,” quipped the man behind the desk.

As with any misfortune which can be written about in this tone so soon after its occurrence, there are elements of fortune within it. Thanks to my absent-mindedness, I don’t have to go back to the DMV in June. Thanks to raised lettering, I still have my Eagle Scout ID. Thanks to the residents of the community, who publicly antagonized a violent man who probably knows where they live, I got my bag back and made it safely to the police station. And thanks to my parents dropping everything to help me, I did receive the money wire I was waiting for in the bank today.

While the implication is absurd that everywhere outside the U.S. is more dangerous than everywhere inside the U.S., it’s true that Americans tend to stick out here, and we tend to be targets. Preventing and preparing for crime is part of the everyday thought routines of people living in urban South Africa. While we’ve all learned that prevention is priceless, we also know that fear is futile. As soon as I get my cards working, I’ll jump in a taxi again. And this time I’ll come back with CDs.

Ch. 11: The Lord Gave and the Lord Hath Taken Away

I have found myself in Africa for six months now. I am halfway through my stay here, and incidentally, halfway through my university education. No better time to find a new Africa.

I had the good fortune of spending Christmas with familiar faces. Mary Walsh and her husband Roy Heaton knew my father from his nomadic soul-searching days. Now their daughter, Mary Beth, was halfway through her term in the Peace Corps in Malawi. For Christmas, Mary Beth met them in Cape Town, where several of their old friends live. Luckily for me, this meant Christmas with families. Mary Beth was happy to see a more developed city, but, as it turns out, she had to pay for it dearly.

Before she left Malawi, Mary Beth had been bitten by one of the fiercest creatures in tropical Africa – a mosquito. But now Mary Beth was in Cape Town – a malaria-free area – and she hadn’t brought her medicine with her. So when she woke up Christmas morning with obvious signs of the disease, she had no choice but to seek medical attention. So it was a miserable holiday season for her, and she ended up in Pretoria, where the South African Peace Corps doctor took care of her. After a short spell in Pretoria, she returned to Malawi.

Meanwhile, I had met these friends of their family, the Horrockses, who lived most of the year in Malawi. Along with Amy, a friend from the Telluride Association who is on a Fulbright in Malawi, I was up to four contacts in the country. I had standing invitations from all of them, and I decided to take them up. So on the ninth of January I flew to Lilongwe, the capital city.

Malawi is a small, skinny country that borders Mozambique, Zambia, and Tanzania. On the eastern side of the country is a large lake – Lake Malawi. According to the U.S. State Department’s website, 90% of Malawi’s residents practice subsistence farming. It also has a very high population density. This means that if you are standing somewhere in Malawi, there’s a good chance you’re in somebody’s maize field. The country was only invaded by the British in the late 19th century. It never saw a large influx of European expatriates, so the British didn’t bother to Westernize it. Now independent since 1964, it still has rudimentary industry and infrastructure.

I spent a couple of days with Amy in Lilongwe. We took a walk through the streets of Old Town – the main trading district. Many of the scenes seemed anachronistic – old Singer sewing machines, hand-painted shop signs, scaffolding made from flimsy sticks.

This last image may be a good symbol for the Malawian professional music scene. One evening I got to play with some local jazz artists. The keyboardist with the group hadn’t had any formal musical education, and he asked me if I had a CD that I could give him that would teach him to play jazz. Later in the week I hitched down to Blantyre, the other main city in Malawi. There I met more musicians who bemoaned the situation – everyone who was good enough to leave the country, did. Visiting an international school, I was invited to teach two music class periods. It was a total of three students, and it was the only instruction they had had, and probably would ever have, in improvised music.

Early in the week I received an email from Mary Beth’s mother in Rhode Island. The Peace Corps office in Washington had decided to terminate Mary Beth’s service in the Peace Corps, in order to penalize her for not taking her medicine, and to make an example out of her for future volunteers. Everyone who had known Mary Beth and her work fought the decision, including the Peace Corps director in Malawi. But in the end, the appeal went back to the initial decision makers, and the decision stood. So, as it turns out, I would be with Mary Beth when she was saying goodbye to everyone she had known for the past year.

I reached her village and found the school where she had been working as a physical science teacher. Her house was filled with students; she was passing out photos to remember her by. Her house is made of concrete, with a tin roof. She has three bedrooms and two common rooms, with only a few wooden chairs, a table, and camp chairs for furniture. There is a small fenced in area outside where dishes are washed, and a shelter for cooking on the other side. The shelter has no chimney, and as I stood by to learn how to cook nsima, the local staple dish, a sort of corn porridge, I found my eyes continually assaulted by the smoke of the fire. The Malawians seemed immune. Behind that shelter there is a vegetable garden, and on the other side of that is the chim, another shelter with a hole in the floor and a BYO toilet paper policy.

We walked with Melita to her village, across a few kilometers of tobacco fields. We went from house to house so Mary Beth could say goodbye to her students’ parents. While Mary Beth chatted in Chichewa, I used only what I knew - by far the most useful phrases in the language: mulibanje (how are you?), ndili bwino (I’m fine), and izikomo (thank you). It’s no coincidence that these are all polite words. Chewa culture places great value on politeness and respect, as well as a virtue that I enjoyed the most as a visitor: hospitality. In Blantyre a man whom I had shared a hitch with went at least an hour out of his way to help me find the place I was looking for, even insisting on paying my minibus fare. In Lilongwe another man took about an hour to give me a tour of City Centre. And here in the village, everyone we visited invited us in for nsima. But Mary Beth had too many goodbyes to say.

The next morning I went with her to her school, where she addressed the students in assembly, giving them instructions on how to write letters to America. The staff and students were in despair – she had spent a year preparing her students to take the physical science portion of the national exam. But it required two years of preparation, and now that she was leaving halfway through, and there was no other teacher for physical science, all the students knew they were going to fail it. In my interactions with the students I got the strong sense that most of them had a strong desire to succeed, and many obstacles in their way. Mary Beth’s departure was one more obstacle.

All the children of the village came to watch the Peace Corps being loaded with all her belongings. She said her last goodbyes and the van pulled away. She is still fighting to be reinstated, and has collected many letters of support from her students, which she will send to Washington. Today I heard from her father that she was home safe, but still having difficulty coming to terms with the events of the last couple of weeks.

Pictures from Malawi at http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/natepmay.

Ch. 10: Peace

My clothes are probably dry by now. I hung them on the line a few minutes ago, taking breaks in between socks to recover from the brutal 9:30 am sun. At the beach yesterday the water was warm enough to swim comfortably. But I was wearing jeans, so I walked, and I have the rosy cheeks today to prove it. It’s Christmas season in Cape Town.

It’s still not quite registering aesthetically. I went to a “carols by candlelight” service with around 2,000 people at Kirstenbosch Gardens, and yesterday I caught my housemate singing along with his recordings of children’s choirs doing German Christmas songs. But I haven’t found the will yet to digitally dust off my Nat King Cole or Vince Gauraldi Christmas albums. Where’s the snow? asks my senses. And where’s the family?

Most of my exchange student friends, including all of my housemates, have gone home. I have moved to Observatory, an artsy and studenty neighborhood down Main Road from my old place. Now I live in a lovely house with two Germans and a Norwegian. My room has a fireplace, but I’m not finding that useful these days. I’ve been most grateful for my warm housemates, and the television which picks up Al-Jazeera, on which I watched my president dodge footwear.

When my housemates at my other place were packing their bags a few weeks ago, it was then that I felt the pangs of homesickness. Then Joseph rang the doorbell. I thought he was the painter. I had the sliding glass door open and I was sitting just inside reading Carl Jung, some time in the afternoon. The painter had been here the previous day, and I hadn’t gotten a good look at him, so when another guy showed up in work-looking clothes I let him in the gate. He walked into the yard just as he would if he were the painter, but then he said his name was Joseph and asked if I had any work that I needed done on the house. He spoke softly and slowly, without any emotion on his face. He didn’t have a sob story. I didn’t have work for him, but he was already in the yard, so I didn’t want to send him away. He said he was trying to pay for his hostel which was 25 rand per night (about $2.50 US). I invited him to sit down and offered him some food. He accepted and I brought out some Muesli and milk. He said this was the first he had eaten that day. I asked him where he was from, and he said Nairobi, Kenya. He had boarded a ship in order to go overseas, but had ended up in Cape Town. He was met with xenophobic violence, and one of his friends was stabbed to death on a train. He spent some time at a refugee camp but found that equally dangerous. Now he was looking for odd jobs and paying his hostel day-by-day. He wanted to go home, but he couldn’t afford to. He was twenty six. He asked about me, where I was from, what I was studying in school. I’m from America, where we also have poor people. Joseph wasn’t a Vietnam Veteran, he didn’t have schizophrenia, and he didn’t seem to be drunk or on drugs. This was not someone who had been abandoned by the system. This was someone who was part of the system – a system where millions and millions of reasonable, hard-working, honest people, people who don’t take dangerous risks, people who don’t blow their money on drugs, have access to an unmanageably small amount of resources. In fact, the system depends on these people to use meager resources so that the richer ones can maintain their lifestyles.

Many of these poor people are immigrants like Joseph. Immigrants are people who have taken initiative to improve their condition, people who had hope for a better life, and left their homes to achieve it. Many people in Africa escape the poverty, corruption, and political, religious, and tribal violence of their home countries and come to South Africa. They settle in townships and find jobs. Then, as the trend has been recently, the local people rape them, burn their houses, kill their family members, and drive them out. They go to government refugee camps, like Blue Waters in Cape Town. But the government doesn’t want them. The government wants them to go home, which they can’t afford to do, or to settle back in the townships, where they will most likely be killed. So the government has left the camps. It has stopped providing food and sanitation services. Local relief organizations are stepping in to the best of their ability.

My friend Alika volunteered with one of these organizations, and was tasked with buying the groceries, and given no further instructions. When she arrived she learned that half the camp is Muslim – Somalian refugees – and couldn’t eat the non-halal meat that she had bought. She also learned that the relief organizations take time off for the holidays.

Where is home for these refugees? Is it Somalia, where they are in the crossfire between Islamic militants and government forces? Is it the South African townships that they were driven away from by locals? Is it the refugee camps which the governments are starving them out of?

Joseph showed up again a couple of weeks later. He had come back to the hostel and found his things out on the street. He hadn’t paid in three days. He said he remembered his brother across town (me) and had come to see if I could help him. I fed him again, gave him some clothes, and a little more money. He asked me if I understood the language of the music I was listening to – it was local jazz, probably in Xhosa – I said no and asked him if he did. He didn’t. We are both far from home.

But I have a home to return to. And while I’m here, I have a place to live. This can all be a bit overwhelming. When I think of home, I think of a place where everyone is home. When I come home in July I know that it will be beautiful and I will be thankful. Then as weeks go by, it will be mundane again.

I am sure that some of you are also away from home for the holidays. For some of you, home may seem mundane. When mundanity is taken away, it is mundanity that we desire the most. I am thankful that I can be here, away from home and the mundane. I hope that the memory of this experience can keep my future mundanity from becoming complacency. Because peace leaves no room for apathy.

I hope you all find peace this holiday season. As always, I’d love to hear from you.

Ch. 9: Hair and Healing

On the day the exchange rate peaked, Josh and I were giddy with our newfound spending power. We were planning to go to the Abdullah Ibrahim concert anyway, but we decided to pay for the best seats, and invite two of Josh’s friends. Abdullah Ibrahim is arguably South Africa’s most famous jazz musician. Living in America for a time, he played with the greatest jazzmen and earned an international reputation. He wrote and recorded a song, “Mannenburg” which became an unofficial anthem for the struggle against apartheid. Yes, this Mannenburg is the same place where I worked with Shawco (although an extra “n” was inserted for some unknown reason). He’s from Cape Town, and on the first of November he gave a concert here, this time at the Artscape Opera House – a far cry from the segregated clubs where he earned his reputation.

Abdullah played in a trio with two American guys, leading them through a continuous stream of tunes and tune-fragments. After the show, Josh’s friends went home and left us with two tickets to the “after party” which one of them had received from her dad. The “tickets” were lanyards with tags that said “VIP.” We followed the other similarly-important people we saw into a room, where we played our part by helping ourselves to a free glass of wine each. We soon discovered that the “after-party” was a press conference. In walks Abdullah with a handful of journalists. He sits at a table with his trio and some record execs. “Hello,” he says. Then he moves on to the questions portion.

Only one journalist seems to have anything on his mind. He asks some questions about the new solo album that he is releasing, and about Abdullah’s music in general. “A reporter once asked me, ‘What is improvisation?’” Abdullah begins. “I said, ‘Let me take you into the township at midnight. When you see a gang coming around the corner, it’s time to improvise.” I chuckle to myself, swirling my glass of wine. Township improvisation, I’ve been there.

Jethro from the Khoi Khonnexion is tall and skinny, with dreadlocked hair and two front teeth missing. He moves in jerks and speaks in bursts. He is a vegetarian and lover of cannabis. He calls himself “the ghetto poet.” He comes from Kalkfontein, a township north of the city with Afrikaans- and Xhosa-speaking residents. He invited me to his place to experience township life, and I accepted.

The tour started at the home of Jethro’s “B-minor” and the children she had with him. It was one room with some divisions – a kitchen, a living room, and a curtain hiding what must have been a bedroom. We left after an argument erupted in Afrikaans. Walking through the township, Jethro was venting to me. She had cut off their children’s dreadlocks. Uprooted them. Ashamed of her progeny’s indigenous identity, she had sheared off its expression. Too lazy to nurture them, she had relegated their care to a cold, buzzing, metal blade.

We wound around houses, stepping over streams of wastewater. Homes were small, so many were in the streets and in their yards, washing clothes, nursing babies, eating, smoking, laughing. We entered a house, walking in on a woman who was affixing her wig. Everyone wants the hair they don’t have, she said. She acknowledged that black people try to imitate white people’s hair, but she guessed that if I had a sister, she was probably not content with her hair either. I do, and she’s not.

“Hold on,” says Abdullah, “there’s another question.” The cameramen stop breaking down their tripods, packing up their boom mikes. It’s me – I have put down my wine glass and walked boldly to the front. “How is your music connected with the indigenous people of Southern Africa?” He spoke earlier about pitching his idea for an M7 school to the San in the Kalahari. The M7, focusing on music, menu, martial arts, meditation, medicine, movement, and mastery, is not doing so well in its Cape Town incarnation. People here are not excited about it, but the Kalahari San, he said, welcomed the holistic approach. “I am indigenous,” is his response to me. He starts pounding on the table and singing in the voice of a shaman.

Jethro walked me to his place, built out of corrugated metal and sticks. He lives in one room about six feet by ten feet, with a bed, a bookshelf, a radio, and a chest for his food, upon which stood a pot of coffee. The radio runs on a car battery; there is no electricity in any of these homes. His sculptures and paintings stand in monument to his self-identity – an indigenous man in a world out of touch. He was still upset about the hair, and only after about eleven neighborhood kids came by, calling him “uncle Jethro” and expecting his leadership as a soccer coach, did he cheer up. I went with them to their game. Jethro shouted instructions through the whole game, but was not disappointed with the end result, a 3-1 loss. Neither was the team. They paraded home through the streets, chanting their team name, “Love and Peace,” with a spirit of victory.

It was getting dark, and I was hoping that my improvisation could be limited to my ignoring of the shouts of “Boer” (Afrikaner) as I passed by the locals, and my escape from a confrontation with a drunk man, who took me weakly by the arm and tried to lead me away. Jethro was walking with me to catch a taxi. On the street corner we saw a woman limping, with a large sore on her ankle, and leading a child. Jethro spoke to her, then told me to wait there. He ran off toward a field, and I was left to respond to all the strange looks with eyes of nonchalance. I could see him in the distance, and he seemed to be gathering plants. A couple of minutes passed, and I was finding it harder to look like I belonged on that corner. Finally, Jethro returned. The woman was a Khoisan, he said, but she was never given traditional knowledge of medicine. The remedies she needed were growing practically in her back yard.

“Doctors don’t know anything about healing,” says Abdullah. Modern medicine is about separateness – first dividing body, mind, and spirit, then taking the body in isolation, and then specializing in a particular organ or system. Healing is breaking down the separations. In a country where separation was the rule of the land, healing is now badly needed. This is the imperative that drives Jethro’s poetry and his actions.

He navigated the minibus taxis with me, and walked me to my door. By then it was totally dark. I asked him how he would get home, as the taxis were already thinning out. He said he would manage; I later found out that he walked – a four-hour excursion. Safety does not concern him much. As soon as he opens his lips and shows his missing teeth, he said, everyone knows he is not worth robbing.

Ch. 8 1/2: Change That Can't Be Elected

If you had found me asleep on the floor of a practice room in the basement of the South African College of Music today, you might have felt pity for me. Indeed, I was exhausted. I had spent the night in a vigil. I had kept watch until I was certain that things were safe, until I could see Table Mountain in the sun’s light, and until another light had also risen in the corner of the sky. But once I saw that light, I was in no need of pity.

The election was called at 6:00 am here. I was at Café Sofia’s on Main Road, with some fifty or sixty others – mostly, but not entirely, Americans. The screams were deafening, and their intensity was matched by the squeeze of hugs from strangers. Tears of joy were shed. Some were even hysterical.

Joy (the person) and I stepped out into the morning light and started for home. We found it difficult to contain ourselves, and announced the news to strangers on the street. I only had a couple of hours to sleep before I had to accompany a fellow student for a practical exam. On the way to the college I passed Christopher, the security guard. He asked me if things would really be different from now on.

For many of us, Africans and Americans alike, this election has played to our archetypal notion of the hero, who slays the dragon and earns dominion over the kingdom. This, combined with a vision of an America that is no longer a global parasite, inspires a new sense of patriotism in many Americans to whom that word has had negative connotations for at least eight years.

We elected our new leader because he promised change, but as he reminded us in his speech, we can’t just vote change into office. We must be the change. This spirit, this energy, this hysteria – let it not be an ephemeral flame, only to be put out when we are reminded of the cold complications of reality. Though we may now see the stars and stripes in a warmer light, patriotism will be no easier in practice.

The time could not be riper for us to examine what the practice of patriotism means. For me, especially since I have been here, patriotism means seeing my country in a global context. One of the most stark realities that we face when we look at this picture is that , in our use of resources and production of waste, we are enforcing the inequality which we ideologically condemn. Our citizens simply have more available to them, and have developed a culture where the unsustainable use of resources is a norm. Unsustainable means that the remaining global resources are suffering because of it, but our citizens also largely have the power to isolate themselves from the consequences. So the burden is left on the shoulders of the economically weaker nations. For these nations, this is what the American flag symbolizes.

Culture is not an easy thing to change. Change comes with the inspiration of an event of mythological significance, and charismatic leaders to sustain that inspiration. In other words, the logs are stacked and the kindling is lit. It is up to us to fan the flame.

Ch.8: Spectator Democracy

Today I went to the post office to mail my absentee ballot. I had almost forgotten that voting was work. I spent the whole morning researching the candidates for the state and municipal offices. These are positions that I know are important, like the state supreme court justices who serve for 12 years, and the mayor of my hometown. But I felt completely out of the loop when it came to choosing. I would say it’s because I’m overseas, but I remember the same feeling on the day of the primaries back home.

Nevertheless, I felt obligated to go through with it, to walk my envelope fifteen minutes down Main Road to the post office, and to pay R27.90 for an international stamp. After all, I was the one who put up posters all over campus appealing to Americans to get their absentee ballots.

I did not exactly make these signs out of a pure longing to increase participation in democracy. Demographics motivated me: American students abroad, in Africa, many of them studying international development… I could picture how most of their ballots would turn out, at least in the presidential election. But I do generally think it’s a good idea to vote, at least if you follow current events, which is also a good idea. My housemate, who doesn’t like to discuss politics so I’ll keep him nameless, has decided that he will not vote. I argued with him a bit, for the sake of understanding his perspective. He said there’s no way to really know the candidates before they’re in office, plus he’s tired of people saying that people died so that he could vote.

The signs were quite successful – most of the confetti strips are gone by now. I didn’t really expect such success, and I expected a little more commentary. I found a “LOSERS” scrawled on one, but other than that they were spared the anti-American sentiment which is a common theme in South Africans’ conversations. “JEALOUS,” I could write back. South Africa does not hold public presidential elections. During general elections, citizens vote for their party of choice, and the percentage of the vote won by each party determines the makeup of the National Assembly. The National Assembly then votes for the President, which is usually the leader of the party which is in the majority. But there’s a catch – there’s really only one party, the African National Congress (ANC), which led the revolution that culminated in Nelson Mandela’s rise to power in 1994. In the last election, the ANC received almost 70% of the vote, with the next party in line, the Democratic Alliance, coming in at 12%. We complain about a two-party system, but here they’ve got it worse.

In the last few weeks, however, a new solution has been presenting itself. Last month, President Thabo Mbeki was asked to step down, and he obliged. The head of the ANC, Jacob Zuma, had been tapping his fingers on his desk in anticipation of the end of Mbeki’s term midway through next year. But a corruption case threatened his eligibility as a candidate. This was dismissed by a controversial ruling, but not resolved in everyone’s mind. The ANC decided that Mbeki was too closely involved in the fight to disqualify Zuma, and pulled him from the presidential office. To appease the disquieted masses they didn’t put Zuma in directly, but chose an interim President, Kgalema Motlanthe, to finish out the term. Cabinet members and ministers resigned in solidarity with Mbeki and, under the direction of Mosiuoa “Terror” Lekota, disillusioned ANC members are now forming a break-away party to contest Zuma in the upcoming elections.

It didn’t help my argument with my housemate that former Anglican archbishop Desmond Tutu, a Nobel laureate and influential figure all over the world, has said that he will not vote unless the ANC heals its divisions. This argument confounds me as much as my housemate’s – is he not saying, “I refuse to vote unless I don’t have a choice”?

Amidst all of this drama, South Africans are also following another soap opera, the U.S. elections. But they know the drama is also not confined to the TV screen. At church on Sunday the minister prayed for America’s elections which, he said, will be momentous in determining the future of both the U.S. and South Africa. South Africans aren’t too divided about the candidate they support. And it’s not just because his father’s from Kenya, but that probably doesn’t hurt. The silk-screen-style stickers with his face, eyes turned upward, are a common road-sign and waste bin adornment, just as they are in the U.S.

It might actually be more democratic if South Africans did vote in the U.S. elections, along with Iraqis, Costa Ricans, and all others who float on the tides of U.S. foreign policy. And it extends beyond foreign policy, as seen in the global impact of the American financial crisis. The value of the South African rand is falling alongside the U.S. dollar but at a much higher rate, defying Galilean physics. In fact, the ZAR:USD rate is at a record high in recent history.

But, despite having strong opinions and vested interest, South Africans must stay on the sidelines in both the American elections and their own. They must leave the U.S. election to the Americans, who they see as ignorant and self-absorbed. I am hoping that the results of this election will help to heal this image.

Ch. 7: In the Sky

Mikail and I had our hands full. Paints, brushes, paper, and most bulkily, bags of potatoes. It was the last day before spring break, and the coordinator for our volunteer group was already on her way to Johannesburg, so she had asked us to fetch the materials from the SHAWCO office. SHAWCO is a student volunteer organization at UCT which buses university students into the townships to run various programs from tutoring to the arts for students of all grades. My program is an arts workshop, and we go into Manenburg, a coloured township, every Friday for three hours. Today we were going to be turning potatoes into stamps, dipping them in paint, and making pictures. A plan obviously devised by someone not wearing light-colored clothes.

Most of our group is American exchange students. Anxious to take advantage of the break from classes, many planned trips to Botswana, Namibia, Lesotho, or other places in South Africa. When Mikail and I got back to the SHAWCO van, we found that most of our group had left early for these trips, and we were down from about twelve to about five. Mikail and I were both leaving the next day: he to Swaziland to conduct AIDS research, and I to Kruger national park to see animals. Of the other students, one was a South African and therefore less anxious to see the continent, and one, Terrance, had made certain that his travel plans did not conflict with our SHAWCO activities. In the van we discussed our strategies for keeping the butter knives out of small hands while still giving students creative control over the shape of their potatoes. It was going to be tough to control around fifty energetic 3rd through 7th graders with so few of us.

As usual, the kids had no trouble entertaining themselves, but it was our place to guide them through activities that “develop character, confidence, and self-expression,” as the SHAWCO material words it. One unique problem today was that the kids wanted to eat the potatoes – raw – more than paint with them. At the end of the activities we had a pile of works which were the pride of their creators, but would be forgotten about after playing outside for thirty minutes. When it came time to leave, we faced a gauntlet of hugs and piggy back rides. Terrance’s path contained the most such obstacles, and we waited in the van as he made his way through them, telling children that he not see them next week, but the week after.

He finally climbed in the van and we pulled out of the school. “They’re so CUTE!” he shouted as we waved goodbye. A black southerner, Terrance’s accent was unique among the American students, and even more so in South Africa. But this didn’t deter him from using his voice – to praise, to comment, to laugh -- always with enthusiasm. In the van he warned us that he was going to say something scandalous, and then bemoaned the low turnout in light of the view of Americans as interested in service only on a superficial level. This engaged us all in a discussion of the matter, which lasted until we let Terrance off on Main Road. “He’s a character and a half,” someone observed with a chuckle.
The next day I was to leave with three of my housemates – Anne, Aadesh, and Daksha – for our Kruger park safari. Kruger, in the northeast corner of the country, is the most famous of the national parks in South Africa, and is known as a haven for the kinds of animals that are always poking their heads out of Noah’s Ark on the walls of babies’ rooms – elephants, zebras, lions, giraffes, hippos, rhinos, crocodiles, buffalo, and many more. I got onboard late in the planning stages – I was mostly interested in an adventure with my friends, and glad for the chance to see the countryside. On the day we left the wind blew like I had never seen it here. The cab picked me up from a café on Main Road, where I had been drinking hot chocolate and watching the few people on the streets fighting to walk. On the way to the airport the rain started, and soon we could barely see out of the car windows.

The weather was pleasant in Johannesburg, and by the time we arrived at Kruger it was 100 degrees. In Cape Town, however, the weather worsened. The rain continued through the week and flooding began in earnest. The sea, too, was losing its calm.

So while Cape Town was flooding, we were with Noah’s animals. A Shangaan man who had been a tracker for 6 ½ years drove us around in a safari truck, and taught us about the animals’ behavior. We camped in luxury campsites, and our meals were prepared by chefs. One night I received a text message from Garth of the Khoi Khonnexion: an American student at UCT had been swept out to sea – was I okay?

The following Friday we were back in Manenburg. We had a better turnout of volunteers today, but our task was much more difficult. We were somber as we stood in a circle and held hands, and I taught the children “May the Circle Be Unbroken,” which they picked up quickly:

May the circle be unbroken,
By and by, Lord, by and by
There’s a better home a-waitin’
In the sky, Lord, in the sky

Poetry, one of the volunteers, went to the front of the room. “Can you point to the sky?” she asked. They did. “Do you remember Terrance?” They did. She quivered a little, “Terrance passed away last week, and now he’s in the sky.” She was one of his best friends, and had been with him when a freak wave came and swept him off of a rock. We passed out paper and pencils, and the children made cards for his mother. Many of the cards were addressed to Terrance himself: “We miss you Terrance,” and “I love you.” The children were shocked, but I believe their art was therapeutic – remembering him through pictures and words. And Terrance’s mother, over the ocean and in a hospital bed, will no doubt be comforted when she sees the impact her son made on these children. As for us, it has been hard not to notice the silence where his Alabama voice used to be.

Ch. 6: Ratelgat

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.

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.

Ch. 4: Xenophobia Methodist Church

I was hoping no one was watching my face – the only white one in the congregation of perhaps a hundred or more. If they had been, they might have seen tears forming in the corners of my eyes. It was the music that did it. When the service was to start, a woman’s voice poured from the front of the church. In response, the whole congregation sang back, improvising harmonies that filled up the sanctuary. Soon, they were on their way. Small cushions were dispersed, which were slapped in time, with complex cadences after each phrase. A djembe joined in, and then a tambourine added heavenly sibilance. It was freedom – the drum and the tambourine would periodically drop out on the player’s whim, parishioners danced in the pews, and everyone contributed their own embellishments to the music. This was my first service at Xenophobia Methodist Church.

That’s how my American friends and I sometimes refer to it, because on the front of the church hangs a large, colorful banner that simply reads,

Xenophobia
Rosebank Methodist Church

No one questions what it is referring to. This May, the word came to public consciousness after attacks on immigrants were carried out across the country. Workers from nearby countries come to South Africa for opportunities, and are seen by locals in the same light that many U.S. Americans see Mexicans workers. Zimbabwe especially has coughed up thousands of emigrants as it faces out-of-control inflation (a Zimbabwean friend showed me a “worthless” 10 million dollar note with an expiration date), and violence following the recent contested election. On May 12th, South Africans lashed out against these foreigners, and the violence spread quickly to other parts of the country, including Cape Town. At least 62 people died, and around 25,000 were made refugees. Churches like Rosebank Methodist did their best to protect, house, and feed them, but were overwhelmed by lack of resources. Other refugees were taken into homes of locals.

Alice, a chatty Zambian woman whom I met at a party, was one of these. A mob of people came to where she had been staying. “The brats,” she said, just as her phone rang. I didn’t get the rest of the story. Now she’s living in relative safety, but she can’t wait to go back to Zambia. Her other experiences in this country have not been redeeming. Once, she applied for a job and was sent for training to a place that was a day-long train ride away. She was made to work in the fields and given very little food. When she decided to quit, the company refused to pay for her transportation home. The police intervened and made them pay for a ticket for the next day. Facing resentment of her fellow workers, she slept in the train station that night. In Zambia, she says, even the Zimbabweans are welcomed.

It doesn’t even make sense, says Joseph, Alice’s host. The people who come here are good workers, and they are paying landlords good money. Local businesses benefit from their presence, whereas South Africans (who, according to another source, tend to be spoiled by hand-outs) contribute less.

It may have occurred to you that I am a foreigner here. This occurred to me, and to my parents, when I was planning my trip. But all of the people targeted have been living in poorer areas. American students are not of interest to the perpetrators, who want to drive out those who they see as taking the jobs they are qualified for. The closest I felt to fear of xenophobia was Tuesday at my first jazz ensemble rehearsal. After I approached the professors to ask about joining an ensemble, they decided to kick out a current student to open up a spot for me. They said his attendance was poor. Apparently they forgot to tell him that he was kicked out, because he showed up to our first rehearsal, and met the American student that was replacing him. I had been concerned about resentment when I heard what the professors decided to do -- American students are often seen as having an entitlement complex. But fortunately, this student was cool with it. “No beef,” he said, and the professor let him play drum set (not his best instrument) for the rehearsal.

Nor did I feel any resentment at church on Sunday. Yes, I felt self-conscious at times, listening silently as the rest of the church was caught up in Xhosa hymns. But I was made welcome. At the Pick n Pay afterward, two churchgoers recognized me and invited me to the Friday youth service. If I don’t go again on Friday, they’ll at least see me again on Sunday. Methodism isn’t necessarily up my spiritual alley, but music carries a theology of its own. Unity is among its tenets. I, a foreigner, felt right at home.

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.

Ch. 2: Living in Boxes

“Unfortunately, you will have to check one of the boxes in question eight.”

The “unfortunately” was the first concession that the invigilator had given to us as human beings. I was still uncomfortable checking one of those boxes, but I felt less polarized by this woman who would have been more comfortable teaching a an old-fashioned Catholic primary school. After all, we were all college students, some of us even graduate students. Most of us were from the U.S., but we were being forced into taking a long and poorly written English proficiency exam designed for South Africans. Before we could start the testing, we had to fill out a detailed survey of our secondary schools – which province were they in? did they have running water? And now in question eight we were asked to answer a question that had always been strictly optional, and we were faced with a ghost of a South Africa whose death we all welcomed.

8. Race:
__ Black __ White __ Coloured __Indian __Other

To South Africans, this would be much less strange an encounter. And most would have no question which box to check. Before 1994, “other” was not an option. The entire population was registered as Black (Africans of Bantu descent), White – (those of European descent), Indian, or Coloured – a term that meant basically the same as “other,” most of whom were lighter-brown-skinned descendents of non-Bantu indigenous people or of slaves taken from Southeast Asia and Mozambique. Whites have always been the minority here, but were allocated an inordinate amount of the resources. Below them were the Indians and the Coloureds, and at the very bottom rung was the majority of the population – those labeled as Black.

This system of classification, called apartheid, was started in 1948 the National Party, which was composed of Afrikaners – white people of Dutch descent. Two years later, the Group Areas Act began the racial zoning of living areas. From there, it only escalated. But so did the resistance – the African National Congress gained momentum and developed as a highly organized political force. Finally, in 1994, after broiling between internal resistance and international pressure, the National Party government turned over the country to the ANC, under baton of Nelson Mandela.

Mandela became a worldwide icon for bringing the country from the oppressive state of apartheid to a new democracy which is constitutionally bound to embrace everyone – the Rainbow Nation. Yesterday was his 90th birthday, and it was celebrated worldwide. Here at home, the media is filled with praise. The headline placards hung up and down Main Road celebrate him, calling him by his popular nickname, Madiba. I picked up a copy of the national paper, The Mail and Guardian, when I went to the Pick n Pay today to buy my groceries, and found this letter from a 14-year-old from Soweto: “Madiba deserves an aeroplane. I am tired of seeing him on TV coming out of big Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs. I want to get him a small aeroplane he can use to go anywhere, even to Pick n Pay to buy his groceries.”

South Africa does have a lot to celebrate, but, as I was reminded by the English proficiency test, the legacy of apartheid is far from over. On Monday the university took the international students on a tour of the peninsula. We saw African penguins on Boulders beach, and baboons, ostriches, whales, and two oceans at the Cape of Good Hope. For lunch we pulled into a town called Oceanview, where the Coloureds had been settled after being forcibly removed from places like District Six in the heart of town where, in 1966, the homes of 60,000 Coloureds were bulldozed to make room for white settlement. Our huge coach buses pulled into the parking lot of a high school, and we went into the gymnasium where we were served lunch. Afterward, we were treated to a variety show put on by students – talented and passionate singers, dancers, and musicians. The principal then invited us back. The kids need encouragement, he said, when only student in three will graduate, and the others will face stifling unemployment and rampant opportunities for crime.

On Thursday we were shown that this was not, indeed, the worst of it. Shawco, a huge volunteer organization at UCT, took us into the township of Khayelitsha. Townships in South Africa are generally poor areas near cities where Blacks flocked to find work. Most homes are small and made of corrugated metal. Running water and electricity are rare. Education is drastically inferior to other areas. Khayelitsha is the third largest of these in the country, with up to one million residents. Again in coach buses, we drove past endless rows of shacks, patched together from thin sheets of variously colored metal. Again we pulled up to a school and disembarked – a swarm of mostly bleached faces and mostly straight hair, a spectacle for the children playing in the schoolyard, who gathered at the fences. Of course they had seen white people before, especially there in a place where Shawco runs many programs and regularly ships in college students. But mostly on TV, where the bleach runs through every valley. Hollywood Americans are the real ambassadors to the townships, imbedded everywhere a TV set and some electricity can be found. And the message they bring is a welcome one – in The Real World, resources are not an issue. Cars are big enough to house two families, and each home is a village.

Those who would check the White box do not live in the townships. 90% of Khayelitsha lives in the tiny box beside the word Black. It is another symbol of the power of this country’s past. Yesterday amidst celebration and praise, the world was quietly reminded of Madiba’s mortality. There is still a long battle to be fought.

Note: I have some pictures up: http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/natepmay.

Ch. 1: Find Me in Africa

I should have said I was going to Africa. Just to see what the responses would be. “Europe” would surely be different. Those who asked, “Where in Europe?” would expect a list of countries – not just one – that had been grouped together for their geographic proximity. How many would have asked, “Where in Africa?” And if they did, what would they expect from my response? Sure, some would be familiar, but I imagine for many my answer would simply be cross-checked with a list of alarm-bell countries like Sudan and Zimbabwe. For others it would put me in the green part instead of the brown part. I am predicting this because I always said I was going to South Africa. The responses – lions, spears, missionaries – how much did they depend on the South part?

I do not speak with disdain. A year ago I was one of them – only wise enough not to trust my pre-judgments. And I can’t blame it all on ignorance. “Nkosi Sikelel iAfrika” is the national anthem here – “God bless Africa.” What other country has an anthem that praises the continent and not the country? If there is another, I bet it is in Africa. There is something of a shared experience that didn’t end when Europeans sat around a table and drew lines on a map. There is a shared exploitation, a shared diaspora, shared poverty, and shared resistance. It is a point of pride that the lines the Europeans drew did not slice open a people.

Unity is not homogenous. That’s why I’m both in South Africa and in Africa. But there’s more – I’m in Cape Town. “It’s striking how un-African Cape Town looks and sounds,” says my travel guide. But I am looking to experience Africa the only way something big can be experienced – by seeing a small portion of it and understanding how it fits into the rest, without projecting it onto the whole. That’s not a preferred method of the tourism industry which fathered my guide. The truth is, my trip to the grocery store today was as authentic an African experience as any Kruger Park safari, but we all love canons, and if there’s going to be a canon, the Mowbray Shoprite is not going to be in it.

Through all of South Africa right now it is 3:23 am. At least at the time I am writing this in a notebook – I don’t yet have an adapter to plug in my computer. My first attempt to adjust my sleep schedule was foiled earlier by the timid tinkle of my alarm clock, which allowed me to sleep from morning until mid-afternoon. Any sleep in the two days leading up to that could have been called “nodding.” I flew from Charleston, WV, to Washington, then overnight to Frankfurt, Germany, then overnight to Cape Town. In two full days I ate three total meals. But I only ate again after sleeping, arranging my room, grocery shopping, dueling with a pay phone, and meeting my neighbors. I guess I hadn’t burned many calories adjusting my tray table.

In Frankfurt I met a family of four from California on their way to visit relatives in Iran. They were pleasantly open as we waited for our flights. The fifth-grade boy, Daniel, showed me some of his drawings and stories depicting his favorite superheroes – Egyptian gods. I introduced him and his brother to the art of drawing a portrait without looking at the page. Of course, I got a free portrait out of the deal, in which I appear to have been buried in a pyramid for thousands of years. I now have it hanging on my bulletin board next to my map of Cape Town.

On the way to Frankfurt I sat next to a woman from Hanover, Germany who managed a New Orleans jazz band in the States. When the flight attendant made an announcement, she remarked that her German was beautiful.
- “Can you tell where she is from?” I asked.
- “Yes. Hanover. That area.”

I’m sure most Capetonians would disagree with the statement in my travel book. To them Cape Town sounds exactly like Africa, just as, to my travel companion, Hanover sounds exactly like Germany. I’ll be writing to you periodically during my year here. My hope is that my isolated experience, put in perspective, will help you find this part of the world. For me, it will be a chance to reflect, and I accept the hopeless challenge of pouring my experience into the mold of the written word. Any time you want to hit the reply button to ask, comment, argue, or inform, it would bring me encouragement. Now I will leave off, because it is time I find Africa on the backs of my eyelids.