HFB retreat at Melkbasstrand

               Roosevelt students sadly missed a day or two of Isilimela time because of the sports day on Monday and then a strike or teacher march on Tuesday; they finally shadowed their buddies on Friday, which at Isilimela is a shortened schedule (which accounts, but only a little bit, for the additional noon to two lessons taking place on both Saturday and Sunday with the teacher, Lulalime Zondi, with whom I was working Friday, at the extra expense of taxi fare for the learners coming in from different townships). I encouraged students before school to view their experiences through two lenses: first, what does it take to teach classes of between 40-65 students with few paper resources or books; second, what does education look like in a culture with an oral tradition. Students gathered after school to reflect on what they saw.

               These are some of the things they reported back:

·        Students talking through the whole class;

·        Students absolutely quiet through the whole class;

·        A lesson a teacher would not provide because learners misbehaved the day before;

·        Students not moving through the dismissal bell, staying;

·        Teacher leaving 10 minutes into class and returning at the end;

·        Learners staying in the room doing homework when a teacher didn’t show up;

·        Teacher banging erasers to get attention;

·        A single calculator being shared and passed around in math class;

·        No posters on the wall;

·        A learner waving away the pain and screaming but returning his fingertips for the remaining punishment;

·        Teachers saying, Are you following?

·        No one leaving to go to the bathroom during the lesson.

               Now we are here at Melkbosstrand, on the weekend retreat with all the Hands for a Bridge teachers and students, making art, playing games, having conversations about race, and walking on the South Atlantic coast.

               This morning Polly told students that water is the first medicine, and water is our ancestor, that teachers are ancestors, and that when students make their art, they’re doing so through their ancestors: acknowledge and open your hearts, she told them, to teachings of your ancestors. Be grounded, your mind to the ground itself.

               Pum moved from there to the honesty and humility HFB students wear on their backs, calling on them to finish this sentence: “I am a product of segregation / apartheid / integration, so I became…” Her statement moves students past several historical layers and demands students so quickly interpret their history and consider its deeply personal effects. Then she asked, how comfortable are you talking about race with your own group of people? Pum let students sit with this before asking about discussions with a person of another race—because if the first is hard, then how much more so the next? Buddy groups made up of Bellville, Isilimela, and Roosevelt then discussed what made them comfortable and uncomfortable with such discussions, a brilliant way of allowing students to cross the bridge most proximate to feelings about race, while also allowing some hard truths to come out. Learners were given time to speak out to their classmates of different races and cultures—just listen, do not feel judged or guilty, but really hear.

               One student said she was totally comfortable because she was raised to accept every person as a human being. White Roosevelt students don’t often say such things in my presence. They acknowledge their discomfort and say they are afraid of offending, or getting something wrong, or speaking for someone else who has more right to say. Acknowledging this discomfort is a first step towards recognizing the racism that pervades so many institutions and interactions. Is the discomfort because you don’t know what offends? Interrogating such uneasiness is a way of being honest and seen in each other’s company; but if people simply pave over all that useful telling bumpiness by saying I believe everyone’s equal and accept everyone, there’s little room for authentic witness, connection, understanding, growth, or healing.

               But that is certainly just the start. When all was said, Pum asked how far they are willing to go. You are Hands for a Bridge, and I know you speak about equality and connect with each other, but if you believe in these things, how far are you willing to go?

               How much can you speak each other’s languages, how much have you tried? If you came to this group not speaking Xhosa, how much Xhosa have you learned? If you came not speaking Afrikaans, how much Afrikaans have you learned? And students from Roosevelt, how many words do you know from the tribal languages of your lands? How far are you willing to go?

               What will you do?
               Here are some moments from Isilimela's performances at the night's open mic.

District 6, Bo Kaap

               District 6 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 this highly desirable neighborhood between Table Mountain and the center of Cape Town 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.

               Before fully entering the museum, Polly gathered students and reminded them that they are guests on this land, to think, as they listened to the stories and took in the exhibits in the museum, to consider the reservation-based peoples and their histories and present conditions, and the violent incursions of colonialism around the world. And she told students to thank the ancestors for the knowledge they would bestow on this land.

               Our guide through the museum, Joe Schaffers, or we think maybe he was also Youssef (Joe) Sharief Rassool, moved from vivid relatable detail to global perspective, teaching and provoking us a great deal. Specific details included the kind of trust people had before they the community was shattered and removed 36 kilometers away to the Cape Flats: Every child’s mother was everyone’s mother. If you dropped a bag and went somewhere, it would be there when you returned. A tab at the grocer’s meant you were trusted to pay later and the grocer was trusted not to alter the tab, and such trust was a piece of neighborhood intimacy. I have a student from Somalia who this year explained what it was to move to Seattle, where doors are closed and his family is isolated from neighbors living just on the other side of a wall.

               What is tragic about District 6 is the dehumanization and theft that occurred there, but also the willful destruction of what was clearly a paragon of diverse religions, cultures and backgrounds, living together in open accord. Joe catalogued the numbers of religions in a breathtaking list off the top of his head, and said there existed total acceptance of every one by everyone. But then they were removed, and not as a community—as individual families: sent to new place without stores or clinics or community centers or playfields or neighborhoods. The architecture was destroyed, yes, but the culture of the city and the intimacy of the neighborhoods too was entirely annihilated. And as more and more people were added to the population, Joe said, it was inevitable that, like increasingly crowded rats, they turned on each other, grew territorial, and gangs, theft, garbage in the townships is no surprise.

               Ubuntu, Joe said--community, togetherness, connection, kindness or person to person--it's a lot of rubbish. The concept held out to inspire the tourists is not lived in South Africa. No one is born a racist, but for two generations and more, people have been taught that segregation is right and natural, and this has become embedded deeply in the way people view others and themselves. So Joe holds it as his mission to change the mindset. He fully embraces each one, teach one, and to show people, through District 6, what is still possible and what has been broken and how deeply, and perhaps we will witness and teach ourselves those whom we meet, with total acceptance, brotherhood, Ubuntu.

               In the afternoon, after the ferry to Robben Island was cancelled for the afternoon due to turbulent waters, we went to Bo Kaap, a neighborhood that, like District 6, had a colored population made up of the Indonesian Malay families who once supplied labor to the building of Cape Town. Unlike District 6, it was not razed. There were so many mosques--and like the churches, synagogues left alone in District 6--they were respected and feared because of their international reach that Bo Kaap was left alone. Its houses are each painted in vibrant colors, which is why it's the cover of Lonely Planet South Africa year after year. There is a story of drunken merchants who used the colors to find their home, unlikely because of Islamic prohibitions on alcohol; our guide said the colors were instead a defiant expression of individualism in response to Apartheid. And it has become a vivid representation of the rainbow nation.

                We arrived in the neighborhood just in time for the call to prayer. Our students are being called in so many ways.

Student performances, Isilimela

          Students knew we were going to Table Mountain yesterday, so when we teachers arrived with the vans, students were already outside their homes waiting, at 7:30. I can tell you it's not been like that other days. But they were right to be excited: the sky was cloudless and no tablecloth draped the mountain; students could reach two separate coastlines and a whole geography of living--township versus city versus suburb, all against the high contrast of crag and blue. From the gondola on the way down, students sang "In the Fog, a song by Aisling Doyle, HFB 2017. The song ends, "And I love you... I love you guys!" The love was returned.

          Back at Isilimela, the learners were supposed to have watched a 20 minute video about Amy Biehl and forgiveness, and because most did not have this prepared nor had they communicated trouble with the video until today, Mimi called her students the best best best best best worst students in the world and demanded they set a better example. The result, though, was poignant: students lay down on the stage, crowded like sunbursts around phones RHS head to Isilimela head, focused together on a central but intimate point about race, anger, and forgiveness.
          Today, students performed three shows for Isilimela. They had been stressed about this event because the many snow days stole their every opportunity to plan, orchestrate and rehearse their performance (though not stressed enough, for many of them, to memorize their autobiographical "Where I am from" poems, though they did finally learn them in time for today). Tessa did a bang-up job organizing the structure and sequence of the show, and then led again as the MC and examplar of energy, which might account for her looking passed out shortly after the third and final performance.
          They sang "Music of Healing" and "Lean on Me," but also "Country Roads," which worried me from the start because students were so kitschy and goofy-loud when they first sang for us teachers--when the song calls for an unironic nostalgia--but perhaps today it was their best song: sweet, longing, and joyful.

           Elias, Morgan, Reese, and Tessa did a skit about Seattle--polite and frustrated at intersections, ready for coffee on any corner. Grace, Maddie, and Whitney demonstrated what class is like at Roosevelt: "I dismiss you--not the bell." Alea, Dani, Mel, and Natalia how difficult it is to wrangle a family dinner together, and how nice when it happens. Ray, Mel, and Stella presented the delights and misery of hiking in the Pacific Northwest, with some excellent physical comedy and full group participation as rain (that, somehow, was actually wet, especially for Ray). And Sarah, Coen and Zanzi led a full audience participation clapping cheer that Isilimela laughed themselves through.
          Q. & A. generated the following questions from their audience: What are your ages? What are differences between Isilimela and Roosevelt, between South Africa and the USA? Do students have cars? How are you punished? What has President Trump done to improve America? What South African dishes do you like most? Why are you here? Why does the president want to build a wall? What's the economy like in the United States? Do students smoke weed

Langa Walking Tour

             Langa packs in 150,000 people in a mostly single-story seven square kilometers. Today, they got to know the township more intimately, on a tour that takes us through the stark results of deliberate apartheid planning in a visit through steel- roofed lean-tos and rows of government apartment blocks, but we were also led through markets and life, brought into shacks where babies were cared for and where traditional rituals and ceremonies were described. There is a disquieting agenda in the tour--see us--but also the vitality of daily life and traditions passed on--see this.

            We started at Guga S’thebe, an arts, education, community resource and skills center since 1998, richly supplied with art and light and workers who clean and guide and sell art. Guga S’thebe, we learned, means “old platter,” and our guide explained that the old platter is both tradition and also Apartheid, and that we keep and rise from what is old. This is a stunning, vibrant place with mosaic murals and various forms of art everywhere, including the shape and reach of the buildings themselves. In one room, people are working with molds to make ceramic pottery which they fire and paint; in another, a group of musicians is amped up and playing in a large hall designed from recycled containers and other materials; in another room, a person is making mosaic images from shards of tile and glass; in another, paintings, art from sand, carved wood, wire. Still another room provided Wi-Fi to community working quietly on computers. The whole place is a testament to the vitality and resilience of a community whose hardships were plainly visible in dirt and glass and corrugated tin.

            Right next to Guga S’thebe is the old courthouse used to process Dompas 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. Pumi, our guide, explained the whole colonial structure surrounding the courthouse, as well as the company hostels we would later see on our tour, as well as the role of women in the civil unrest of the sixties that delivered Langa to its residents.

  

          Students afterwards reflected on the jarring proximity of very different living situations in Langa—the cell-like houses for migrants, government block houses for the lucky, older ones for the slightly less but still fortunate, and shacks in shantytowns, projects, for those our tour guide said were “just getting started,” and privately bought houses, the Beverly Hills of Langa, including the small cottages where the mamas live. They realized how much they take for granted, and want to learn from the joy and openness of people making rich lives with so little.

               They also felt very uncomfortable during the tour. Alea said the experience made her entirely rethink what it meant to be a tourist. Others, too, explained how uncomfortable they were with turning people’s poverty into spectacle, throwing some rand on the way out. But Kate anticipated the discomfort this year, and our guide therefore explained before we set why people were going to welcome the learners into their homes: it’s a way of making a little money, but also a way of being seen by the outside world.

Church Day

               Our first night in South Africa, and Stella finally got some sleep. 

               We went to church in the morning, a Catholic ceremony that included swinging incense into the hot air. Some of the service was in English, and the music was all-absorbing and rich; lyrics were projected on the wall on either side of the sanctuary so that we too could sing, though the words were in Xhosa, and one section was reserved for women who beat the time on percussive pillows.

               A nine year old told Dani she looked like Taylor Swift.

               After church, Siyabonga led us first to the memorial to Amy Biehl, the young white Fulbright student who was killed by an angry mob in 1993 (Footnote 1), an event featured in a book HFB used to read, Mother to Mother; there he asked Roosevelt to sing our national anthem, which felt unusually personal and mournful in context. We moved from there to a memorial dedicated to the Gugulethu Seven, young black activists killed by the police in 1986 (Footnote 2). After explaining for both sets a moment of forgiveness that occurred, and the way this was further reinforced through the national healing that came of truth and reconciliation work, Siya then grieved the vandalism and decay that have occurred for both monuments: important history is either not being taught or it's not being appreciated. Physical tributes to national wounds and healing are also not being maintained. 

               If we don't understand the traumas we're surrounded by, we're sooner to resent and disparage neighbors, both from stresses we don't understand and behavior we misinterpret as selfish; and if we don't understand the victories and heroes that emerged to tell truths and step in to heal such traumas, we're slower to energize around common values and goals. I've thought about this, because when my family lived in Hungary for a year, in 2010-2011, schools were beginning to weaken instruction in foreign language and in history, and this has only gotten worse as Hungary marches further towards autocracy: we need our conflicts and victories to be witnessed, to be memorialized, to be taught and felt, because this is how we invigorate and improve upon what is best in ourselves, and how we recognize and repudiate sickness.

               I hope that our students recognize the wisdom being offered them by their elders and ancestors, at home and far from home, who tell them again and again what it means to appreciate what we have and who we love, and that everyone is some way a sister and a brother.

               Maybe they felt this back at Isilimela, where students and teachers hosted guests from Bellville and Seattle and also community members, serving a feast of chicken, stewed lamb, noodle salads, spinach and sweet potatoes, and my favorite, chakalaka. I met a friend of Mimi's, Sylvia Mdunyelwa, who talked to me about the message she tries to share when she's brought into schools, a message of hope and respect that mirrored Siyabonga's earlier in the day: she has plenty of opportunity, as she is an active jazz singer with a illustrious past. Sylvia went to a website and found a picture of her with Nelson Mandela. If you look up Sylvia, jazz, and South Africa, you might find it too.

Footnote 1: http://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/anti-apartheid-activist-and-fulbright-scholar-amy-biehl-beaten-and-stabbed-death-cape-to

Footnote 2: http://sabctrc.saha.org.za/reports/volume2/chapter3/subsection43.htm