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.