February 15, 2018
District Six was a lively, working class area
with a rich cultural life and generations of neighbors building community and
home since 1867. After the 1950s Group Areas Act, which allowed the government
to declare and restrict a neighborhood to a single race, 99 years after this
district was created, South African government declared District Six for white
people and began extensive demolition as the residents stood witness to
purposeful theft and violent disregard for home, a calculated obliteration of a
community that had been fully integrated for a century. A Hands off District
Six campaign successfully put the taint on the project, and the whites for whom
the area was intended conscientiously stayed away. And now the area, aside from
some recent homes for police and army personnel and a technical college,
remains a vast empty yellow wound between Table Mountain and Cape Town, a
memorial to the racial theft and violence of apartheid life.
Yesterday we went to the District Six Museum,
where we met Noor. Having Noor, a former resident and founder and passionate
mainstay of the museum, describe to us his experiences, his memories, his
pictures and his analysis, was deeply moving. It’s one thing to look at the
artifacts and placards, quite another to see eyes light up and moisten, to hear
the terror and conflict of a father whose child was desperate to pee and begged
to use the White bathroom and who had to tell her no, to hear of one who
watched his childhood home razed to the ground and community broken, to hear of
beatings witnessed for sitting on a wrong bench. Noor is also dynamic and
funny: students pulled close to hear every word.
As I
toured the museum, I was puzzled by two sectionals devoted to what looked like
a typical ugly apartment block that had gone down with the rest: there was so
much pride in them, in their advanced design, in the sports that occurred in
the courtyard below. I wonder what it is about the apartment compound they’re so
proud of, I said to Quinn. It might be because it was their community. It was
their community they were proud of, Quinn said. This was not the only time I’ve
learned by her insight: it’s not a building but love that makes a home.
Nevertheless,
when buildings are razed and communities are broken up and relocated to
racially designated areas, home, like love, is struck straight through with
long trauma.
During
all that time, we were counting down to Jacob Zuma’s final hours as president
of South Africa.
We
joined Isilimela at Greenpoint Stadium--the field beside the enormous O sports
complex visible from satellites in space--for their athletics day, a track
meet. We came four hours late and left a couple hours early. But the energy of
cheering with friends--as competitors, many barefoot, ran and jumped under the
shadow of Table Mountain--was invigorating. We also saw, horrifically, one girl
after another collapsing on the track, and a few totally blacked out and had to
be carried away in a limp heap of limbs. It is because they don’t practice, a
teacher behind me said. They run harder than their bodies are ready to sustain.
But surely running barefoot on a hot track under the African summer sun in a
drought doesn’t help.
That
night, many students went to sleep while their mamas and their families stayed
up to celebrate as Zuma, at midnight, ceded power, after years of
self-enrichment and corruption. The mamas were very happy this morning.
We
visited the Slave Lodge, where Polly had directed us to heed the call of
ancestors imparting their wisdom and experiences to us. We learned of the trade
of East Africans and South Asians through Cape Town and who was shackled by
whom and why. I was especially moved by an HIV/AIDS exhibit I hadn’t seen last
year working to break a stigma that not only isolates and shames but provides
cover for the disease to spread further. People’s quotes and photographs showed
some pain but also so much resilience, love and joy, reflecting well a quote
painted on the wall of the building built on the site of a slave lodge in a
country that formerly and for years systematized separation and hate: The quote
on the wall says, “Joy in spite of everything.”
And
this was the reflection students reported on the beach when they spent some
time in their journals: They have come to a deeper appreciation of their own
advantages and privileges, as when Elaine thought about running track with
dedicated shoes and spikes while here most run barefoot, their toes taped; or
when Lila described their mama getting frenzied because Dani had been running
her bath for too long, but the tub had only three cold inches of water; and as
Isabel pointed out, in an opposite experience, when their mama wanted Rebecca
and her to use as much water as they wanted, we are all hosted so well and
treated with such special deference and welcome that we can’t even glimpse what
it’s really like for people here. Nevertheless, we sense it, as when Lydia
conversed with a woman on the beach who was shocked when she heard Lydia was staying
in Langa: Isn’t it dangerous? Shouldn’t you need guard dogs? And whites in that
township are so rare kids swarm Lydia to touch the rarified hair of a race they
never personally encounter. In spite of such challenges and continuing racism,
what our students were especially struck by was an enormity of heart, love and
joy. Louis said he’d studied how Blacks were relocated to townships and now
sees litter everywhere and shacks made from sheets of metal. But he sees so
clearly the love, the songs and language that unites them so. As Sophia said,
nothing compares with a culture that wants to sing and dance with you.
Joy in
spite of everything.
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