Townships: The Past is Not Past

               On our last day in Cape Town, we traveled to the memorial of Amy Biehl, the young white Fulbright student who in 1993 was killed by an angry mob as she was dropping off friends in Gugulethu the day before she was headed back to California. The violence occurred in the turbulent moment when apartheid was just ending.
              As we were gathered and reviewing what we knew from our research and the book we read, Mother to Mother by Sindiwe Magona, two men were watching us from an idling car. I went over to talk to them. Would it be okay if we took a picture with your group, they asked when I approached. I said, Probably—but first you have to tell why you want this, and I want you to be honest about it.
              In the four years since they had moved from the Eastern Cape, in all that time, they had never seen white people in Gugulethu before. They wanted a picture to mark the occasion, but perhaps the picture was a pretext to talk with us and find out what we were up to.
              We took the picture and launched an exchange of welcome and gratitude and questions.
              Amy Biehl was killed more than three decades ago. Apartheid ended more than three decades ago. But these men taught us so clearly the past is not past.

               The night before, the mamas held a braai for their guests and the Isilimela and Roosevelt teachers. Our students gathered all the adults in the yard and sang for us—“Lean on Me,” “Stimela,” and “Yahkalipi koko”; they were leaping and jumping in excitement while the Isilimela teachers were shouting at each other in surprise and joy, look at what the Americans are doing, our music, in IsiXhosa, singing with the students, all of us joined together.

Guilt as Pathway to Humbling

              We spent our first day at Hoërskool Bellville today. So many elements converged in our students to ramp up nerves and preconceptions. This includes how tightly and how quickly they bonded with Isilimela students and Langa mamas and a culture of song and dance and sharing, openness not replicated as unreservedly elsewhere. It also includes a progressive Seattleite’s suspicion of privilege while extending our curiosity and trust to the marginalized—commendable when so much voice and power is going the other way. Students also had a whole week to grow close with Langa, coming to these comfortable beds and warm showers with both an emptiness and sharp guilt.
              During the testing period this morning, we gathered to check in, and there were so many fears. During the retreat, HFB friends from Bellville pumped them full of negative expectation. Then some families made off-hand comments about township life that disturbed their guests. Some of our students missed the warmth and swapping of stories with their Langa mamas and found conversation with host families in Bellville superficial in comparison. And there was that guilt around the welcome comforts surrounding them.
              After school, Bellville HFB student Anzél explained that people didn’t bring up race because they wanted everyone to be comfortable and didn’t want anyone to be offended. She also said teaching about apartheid was very limited here: it’s taught by grade nine (after which, no history is taught at all in Bellville while it’s elective in Isilimela), but what happened after apartheid is not taught at all—nothing about what it took to get past apartheid and what it now takes for the nation to heal. But, Anzél says—and I would love our students to hear this—if someone has a real curiosity, then we know it’s okay to talk.
              When students compare communities in binary ways, I want them to consider what a privilege it is to travel to a place where as outsiders we can see history and all of its legacies so nakedly. It’s hard to do when you’re in it. And if you’re living in a place of vast income inequality, what kind of blinders and fear must one wear if you have so much and others have so little. In Seattle, this is also the case, yet you’re not likely to see it clearly: how often do you think and really feel with the full of your soul the way you do here about what it is to live on appropriated land, about the untended poverty, mental illness, addiction, sexual abuse, and other compounding violences in Seattle’s unhoused and walk between those who have and those who don’t until you feel so wrenchingly the wrongness and strangeness of so much culture aloof to it?
              The stinging guilt many of our students feel about enjoying their Bellville comforts is a good sign: it’s a pathway to humbling—to becoming more considerate and grateful, to being mindful, to actively organize to improve our world and the plants and animals that inhabit it. But honest seeing and big-hearted feeling is the tool, not the guilt that is that first stop on the way. You have to get on the other side of that guilt—to honesty and humility, the catalysts through which the world can be both heard and transformed.

Poverty Tour or Progress Tour

               I have now taken Langa’s cultural center Guga S'Thebe’s neighborhood tour four times. It always leaves a mark. It is always uncomfortable. It always incites guilt, sorrow, and anger.

              We began at the Dompas museum, housed in an old courthouse used to process neighborhood violations. In the nineteenth century, Langa was a place to house migrant labor; but later, after the Group Relocations Act, Langa was designated a township for Blacks only, and people were brought to the courthouse and jailed if they failed to have the Dompas, which you couldn’t get if you weren’t registered with a company in Langa, and you couldn’t be registered with a company in Langa if you were a woman. If you were from another township, you would need a special pass to come into Langa. Otherwise, jail.
              Our guide wanted us to see the continued hardship following the many violences done to Black South Africans after a colonial project which continually dispossessed the native peoples, and then, with a government spread thin, which gave them far too many opportunities to stay and wait in limbo. The guide in the back of our tour had both given us historical context for Langa but also whispered that our forward guide was giving us the poverty tour rather than the progress tour we should have had instead.
              We reflected in Guga S'Thebe, a beautifully built campus for the arts—ceramics, music, painting, and more—with studios for creating and teaching artists learning to make a living turning discarded plastics and wax cartons into saleable art.
              Our student Gabby said going from the childcare centers in one of the blocks and having the best fifteen minutes of her life with the children to then walking out and seeing where those children lived was not something she had words for.
              I told students I know they came out of that neighborhood tour with many feelings, the weight of what they saw, their voyeuristic implication in what might have felt like viewing exhibits in a zoo. But they have reasons for inviting you into their homes and showing you how they live, I said. They want you to witness and speak what you saw. That doesn’t make it easier.
              But I want you to think of all the things that are true—Gabby’s joy and hard witness, the progress tour we might as easily have taken, this place of vitality and art all around us. This is true also.     You need to look with honest eyes, not polite eyes—don’t be so polite you don’t notice the trash everywhere, but ask why. Notice honestly; and deeply ask why. Yes, have all the feelings. But then, open your hearts; observe with honest eyes; ask why; and use it to see to next possible steps; and where and when you can, organize, stand each other up, and act.

Slave Lodge and Sites of Remembrance

 

              The Slave Lodge is a sturdy building raised by the Dutch East India Company in 1660 that housed slaves especially during the British occupation. The active and proud voice accompanying the exhibits throughout was striking. I don’t remember what was written. But this is what I remembered about what was felt: In this space, there is no excuse for ignorance or forgetting. In this space, we honor the pain, the trauma, the complex stories. In this space, we share the voices preserved from grandparent to grandchild and on down because no one wrote them into the historical record, and because stories bring to life the abstracted and the silenced.
              Everywhere alongside horrific stories was a towering dignity—in pictures and in the words of descendants proud of their names however awful their provenance, proud, because their families wore them and passed them on, turned them to love, and strong, because their surnames remind them why they might still be struggling now, still waking up at three in the morning for a job. Knowing the past taught them and teaches us how to organize and resist and build for the future. The trauma and brutality was there in that museum, but with no trace of defeat or despair.
              A couple months ago I read How the Word is Passed, by Clint Smith, a powerful, wise book about how history is actively remembered or forgotten. He discussed places like the Slave Lodge through the Door of No Return on Gorée Island in Senegal and the importance of such “sites of remembrance”: here we can gather history around us, in stone, plaster, lintels, and the very air and ground beneath our feet, and we can invoke a past with both horror and reverence: it was here, it was here, I can’t imagine, and I can’t imagine because I am finally imagining.
              We can read a book and scan a Wikipedia article, or we can go and make ourselves ache to really understand something in the very moment we have started to understand.
              We returned to Isilimela to drum together in quaking, electric unison, every face a light.

First night, first school day in Langa

   

              By now, in our second day at Isilimela Comprehensive School, during the lunch period, you would find our students in a loud hive of energy in Ms. Mimi’s art room, eating with Isilimela Hands for a Bridge and the many others who congregate regularly in that space midday—talking, eating, shouting, standing, and then, a group of Isilimela learners teaching Roosevelt students or the other way round a dance, a shake, an elaborate set of moves.
              Roosevelt students met up in the small park by Mama Viola’s to play soccer and fall in love with the curious, unflappable children who came to them there. One student said it was the best time of her life in that little park. Perhaps all gatherings in that park were deliriously joyous.
              Before they would go home yesterday, students were already feeling the highs of their start here: today, moods were still high though experiencing the jagged demands of their jetlagged bodies in the South African heat. And students getting their hair touched was a shared, curious experience.
              They performed in the hall before Isilimela classes, drawing repeated cheers. The Q&A afterwards was a window to life and schooling here in Langa and as well as what our students chose to represent in answers. The first assembly was followed by a series of historical questions about America in various eras. Someone wondered if we trusted our president. How is our infrastructure in America. How many languages do you speak. Tell us about religion where you’re from. What sports do you play. Two questions evoked audible gasps and a tumult of reaction from the audience: a) do you wear school uniforms, and b) what time is it in Seattle right now.
              Someone wanted to know whether or not it was safe in America. One of our students said Seattle is mostly safe as long as one knows to avoid certain areas. Some Bellville homestay families in the past have expressed a shocked curiosity about our students staying in Langa. Were such shock to be expressed again, I’m sure our students will think back to the delirious joy of a neighborhood park.

Arriving in Langa township, Cape Town

  

              I returned to Cape Town, South Africa, with the Hands for a Bridge program for the first time since 2019. We received a welcome so warm our very world view began to tip.
              We arrived in Langa with our bags and gathered in Mama Dozi‘s cozy living room around two couches and platters of fruit and our sixteen students enclosed body to body in a safety and warmth of neighborhood matriarchs. The next morning, we arrived in the Isilimela Comprehensive School’s parking lot to a parade of Hands for a Bridge learners singing and holding a banner of welcome, Ms. Mimi bringing us together in a circle for more song and step, all of us together in a circle, her hand-mic encouraging volume and forming the spotlight. And then Monday assembly was moved to Tuesday, just for us, speakers filling the capacious hall with song as early-arriving learners welcomed American guests to a morning dance party until the hall was full with standing bodies, stepping, clapping, singing, harmony with the teacher on stage with her mic and full voice as she led us in prayer and song, words sometimes in English, sometimes in IsiXhosa, and all of it, such a tidal wash for us visitors: the joy, the song, so many collectively happy to sing and step together in school.
              Already we see a different way of being and being together in learning community. We see what community can be.
              All around us was a buzz of nervous excitement and shy looks and whispers, so when we could join in music and movement, we could say thank you; we could say, There is nowhere on Earth we would rather be.
              The Isilimela principal welcomed us in the assembly with the promise that they would strive to make us want to stay. They succeeded.