In Which I Indulge in an Extended Metaphor on Caving and Art

Today, while watching the Mountain go all rosy from the top of a downtown parking garage, a key lesson applicable to both art and caving made itself clear to me. That is, the way into a large subject (or cave) may be very small, and you may have to blunder around a lot before you find it. The same can also be said of documentary filmmaking, to which I will return in a moment.

This being a blog—a travel blog, no less—I believe I’m allowed to simply begin with, “This morning in Cape Town, I woke up and then I had breakfast.” Actually, my breakfast was both interesting and Capetonian, as it included scrambled eggs (not the interesting part) and atchar, a Cape Malay pickled relish. In true Jenny Estill fashion, that is, without really knowing what it was, I bought a jar from two gregarious Coloured women who have a spice stand outside the central train station. I also ate an unidentified dried fruit that one of them foisted on me with no explanation except that she also sold them preserved in syrup.

Breakfast aside, by Wednesday morning I had already had enough experiences to write several entries but felt totally uninspired to do so. On Sunday, for example, I woke up early and drove down the eastern side of the peninsula to meet up with a hiking group. Most of the assembled hikers were over 60, and while I aspire to be like them when I reach that age, I did not particularly want to hike at their pace. At the first rest stop, two younger guys made a (very polite) break for it, and I tagged along. That last statement is somewhat inaccurate. Unable to gauge their exact degree of gnarliness and not wanting to slow them down, I took off when I found myself in front and increased their normal pace by a third. But we had a splendid day; the weather was stunning and the trails in Table Mountain National Park are so well-marked you hardly need a map.




Overlooking False Bay, with rainbow.





A protea, national flower of South Africa and part of the fynbos family of plants, which are only found on the Cape Peninsula.

Looking over False Bay again. I kept expecting Puddleglum to appear from behind one of these rock formations.

Nonetheless, Barry had a GPS unit, which we used (unsuccessfully) to locate the entrance to a huge cave he’d visited on a previous hike. We got thoroughly dirty slithering around in a smaller cave but never found the one he was looking for.

I kept wondering why the entrance was so hard to find and finally realized that I had been picturing a gaping hole in the side of the mountain complete with petroglyphs and Neanderthals roasting springboks over a fire. I think I’d better get my Fairy Godfather to take me caving and correct these Hollywood misrepresentations. It didn’t matter that we never found the cave, as our real (and handily accomplished) goal was to enjoy tromping around on the mountain.

But for anyone looking to set down their experiences or ideas on paper (or onstage or on camera), the search for the gaping hole in the mountainside is frustrating and ultimately fruitless. It’s particularly deadly when writing about an entirely new and foreign country; where do I start if not with breakfast? I start with something small, something serendipitous, something that catches my fancy or stops me in my tracks. I can only write about the South Africa that’s under my feet or whetting my appetite or making my heart knock against my ribcage.

I took a wrong turn into the garage after dropping a friend off near the train station and could find no place to turn around until after I’d pressed the button for a parking ticket. Signs instructed casual parkers like me to proceed to the 5th floor, which I did, for lack of anything pressing to do at home. I never tire of seeing Cape Town from new and interesting angles, and as I was unlikely to see it from this one again, I thought I might as well eat my supper and enjoy it the view. My rooftop picnic, with the sun setting on the Mountain and the boisterous, colorful parade of people going to and from the station below, was both delightful and mildly ridiculous. It was also, I discovered as something inside me lifted and then clicked into place, my way in for this week.

It was a good lesson to have reinforced as I head into my second week of participating in/facilitating a documentary workshop that NATA is sponsoring. The workshop is run by a charity called the World Film Collective, which teaches young people in disadvantaged communities to make short films on camera phones and then publishes the films on their website (http://www.worldfilmcollective.com/). It’s a neat idea, especially given the ubiquity, mobility, and unobtrusiveness of the camera phone. One of the hardest parts of making a movie or documentary, however, is choosing the small story that will tell the big story and which you as the filmmaker can tell with honesty and insight and in the time allotted.

I’ve learned a lot about filmmaking this week and possibly even more about editing with the horror that is Windows Movie Maker—so much so that I’m actually teaching people how to use a computer program. I was shocked, however, at how much more fluent with the computer I am than the young South Africans I’m working with and immediately sorry for every time I’d grumbled during typing lessons or lab sessions. My computer literacy is a gift and a skill unavailable to the millions of people who don’t have access to the technology that shapes so much of modern life. That being said, as I can barely get my bottom-of-the-line South African cell phone to work, I don’t think I’ll switch my major just yet.

Alas; I shall have to save Rauzilena the Seal and jackass penguins for my next installment.

A Brief Photographic Interlude

On the Mountain at sunset. The outside of all of these flowers are still charred from a fire that blackened many of the lower slopes last summer.

En-route to Devil's Peak, where Babs, Dominique and I go walking most afternoons.


In a used bookstore on Long Street. The middle copy is in Afrikaans.



Table Mountain as the "tablecloth" lifted last Saturday morning.

On Fences

My room and person still smell pleasantly of the woodsmoke from my first brai (Afrikaans for barbeque), at which I finally tasted (and learned how to pronounce) boerewoers. Unlike most sausages, boerewoers are guaranteed to be at least 70% meat, and I, being rather a sausage aficionado, found them very tasty. Babett’s neighbor Darren and her friend (and his girlfriend—for which Babs takes credit) took me on a beautiful walk on the lower slopes of Table Mountain that ended at the grocery store, where we bought brai fuel and food. Traditional brais are very social events and involve lots of sitting around and lots of alcohol. They are also traditionally held in summer, when sitting around outside is generally more pleasant, but we managed quite well, as evidenced by Babs’ winter brai get up, complete with down jacket for cold and sunglasses for smoke.
Besides the exceptionally high quality sausage, our brai was much like an American barbecue—or cookout, depending on your orientation to the Mason-Dixon line—with one notable difference. We held ours in the tiny courtyard that we share with Darren, where the walls are so high I had to jump to see the bright, full moon and the tip of Devil’s Peak it illuminated. It seems that much of South African life takes place under lock(s) and key(s)—I have seven for the house alone.
After dinner, the four of us squished onto the couch on the stoep (stoop), letting our boerewoers digest and watching the cars go by on the N1. Although partially blocked by the beige blob that is the Good Hope Center—a 1970s horror made totally redundant by the recent construction of a glitzy convention center on the waterfront—Cape Town’s central station is also visible from our window. Provided one is lucky with traffic lights and is not hit by a left-turning Capetonian who is under no obligation to yield to pedestrians, it’s twenty five minutes from our door to the one operational ticket window. It can’t be more than a mile and a half, a fact I had gleaned from agonizingly detailed sessions with Googlemaps in my dorm room, and which I repeated to myself like a mantra as the black and yellow trains crept out of the station and fear wiggled its way through my bones.
When I was planning to study abroad in Cape Town last fall, I rebuffed concerns for my safety with a snarky, “Don’t worry, I’m not going to run in the townships by myself at night.” The truth is, I’m not supposed to leave the house on foot by myself at night. Nothing worse than catcalls has yet befallen me, and it’s entirely possible that nothing will. Indeed, the Jenny with whom you are probably familiar would have scorned the earnest entreaties of just about everyone I meet that I rent a car for my stay in Cape Town. But it was a considerably chastened Jenny who sat on the couch and listened to Babs, Darren and Dominique swap theft stories and caution me to trust my instincts and not think myself into dangerous situations.
My first four days in Cape Town were gripped by a sick, creeping fear such as I have never known. It (and jet lag) woke me up at three am so that I could worry my body temperature up at least five degrees and wonder what the hell I was doing here. What, exactly, was I so scared of? Of having R20 pulled out of my pocket while I wasn’t looking? Of being the only white person on a train car? Of the desperately poor? I think, really, it was the fences; I let them into my heart—which is not where they belong—and am still struggling to put them right.
For example, NATA is located in a predominately Coloured suburb that I thought perfectly respectable-looking when Babett drove me by last Friday. Then, the delightfully batty woman who served me a ginger beer on Saturday afternoon stared at me in disbelief when I told her I was working in Athlone and asked in her heavy Afrikaans accent, “Aren’t you scared?” I didn’t tell her I was planning to take the train. If she ever set foot in Athlone, though, she wouldn’t be half as scared. But then Mareth, the Academy director and patently neither racist, elitist, nor alarmist didn’t want me to walk the three blocks to the Athlone station by myself.
So, after my first day there, I walked with Naren the music teacher, a middle-aged Coloured man with an untidy mop of salt-and-pepper curls and the distracted air of a thoroughgoing intellectual (he’s a musicologist). He was also very hungry, and visited the bank and three different sandwich shops before finding one that was suitable on our way to the station.
One of those was the Athlone KFC. While Naren waited in line (before deciding that the service was too slow), I stood against the trash can, trying not to be in anyone’s way and feeling out of place and, yes, scared. Of what? Of the signs asking customers to buy the Palestine Times to support the cause? Of the fact that the other women in the room covered their heads? Or perhaps of the young Coloured man who caught my eyes for a millisecond as they dashed around the room at lightning speed—notice everything but be noticed by no one—and purposefully came over to the trash can I was blocking. He threw away a wrapper, then turned toward me. I smiled quickly before my dislocated brain whirred off to something else and I looked away.

“Such a fake smile,” he said.

Such a short sentence, I think now, and of such importance. I was too tired, too disoriented, too worried about the train ride home, too far away from home and (say it) too scared to lower my panic-fences and look this man in the eye. Though I’m unlikely to revisit the Athlone KFC—a KFC is, after all, just a KFC—I owe this man an apology and a thank you.
The lines between sensible caution and paranoia are not easy to draw, and trying to do so brings me smack up against prejudices I didn’t know I had and against a lot of big questions about race, class, political structures, and human nature. You know—nothing big. Writing it out makes me realize, however, that this level of questioning and examination is exactly what travel is supposed to yield and, indeed, what was missing from my adventures in New Zealand and in Prague.
However, on Tuesday, I traded my Fear of the Train Station for my Fear of Driving on the Left Side of the Road. The freedom that my little blue Hyundai Atos provides has removed some of the worries that were pushing me into the panic zone and making real learning impossible. And those of you familiar with my prowess at distinguishing my left from my right will be happy to know that I have not yet suffered or inflicted any major injuries driving on the left side of the road.

A Rainy Beginning

The first thing I notice is the omnipresence of fences. Also the fact that (white) people don’t seem to walk in Cape Town. Granted, it is both the dead of winter and pouring. The question of the hour—one not easily solved—is how many of the fences are necessary precautions and how many are the products of white paranoia. On one expat forum, a recent Capetonian emigrant wrote that many white South Africans haven’t adjusted from the “total security” of a police state and the “total fear” that necessitated it. Things are a lot grayer now, he wrote, for all South Africans.
That goes for the weather, too, whose rain seems to have the endurance of Seattle’s and the power of North Carolina’s—I should feel right at home. It was gray and misty when Babbett and I left the house this morning to drive to Athlone and locate the school where I’ll be working, but it absolutely pounded on the corrugated metal roofs of the outlet store where we trawled racks of last season’s designer labels. My Seattleite lexicon of rain varieties will come in handy, at least, if nothing else that I know does.
They weren’t expecting me at NATA until Monday, and when I arrived, one woman with whom I’d been speaking was out sick and the other had apparently gone back to America. Babbett showed me pictures of upholstery fabric she’s collecting to show her father, who has not reupholstered his couch since 1960-something while we waited for someone (we weren’t sure who) to come and deal with me. Eventually, the workshop that NATA was conducting with Golden Arrow Coachlines employees stopped for a break, during which one of them spent a good ten minutes telling me about his daughter in Miami, and the director of NATA came to introduce himself and take me around a bit. Ian looks to be in his 50s or 60s, with a shock of white-blonde hair and a firm, friendly handshake. He took me over to NATA’s theatre, where a group of snappily dressed students was giving a presentation on Black theatre.
One student called the white police officers in an Apartheid-era photograph on his poster “Boers,” which is now a derogatory way to refer to white South Africans—equivalent to “kaffir” for black South Africans, according to Babbett. At this, my outspoken housemate piped up from the back of the classroom and said, “Who are the Boers?” We both heard Ian respond with a brusque “Please!” and thought, as Babbett said later, “that dude was telling me to shut the fuck up.” My heart dropped into the pit of my stomach and started hammering as I thought she had just offended my boss, colleague, and future students. She may have, but what he actually said was “police,” which he then explained to the students was the correct term for the white men in their photograph.
As we drove away, Babbett said she was proud of herself for not getting her hackles up when she heard the term “Boer”. “My response,” she said, “was like ‘If you can call me a Boer, can I call you a kaffir?” This sort of defensiveness seems unwarranted to me, and no way to reckon with a racially tense past and build a peaceful, multicultural society. I’m not arguing that using offensive terms for white people will accomplish that either, but for a group that still enjoys such entrenched privilege (as many white Americans do) to yelp about “reverse discrimination” without actively trying to level the playing field seems hollow and immature.
I read an editorial on the back page of a men’s magazine that claimed women were now objectifying men’s bodies (their abs in particular) as much as men and the media objectify women’s. The goal, of course, is not mutual objectification. But I didn’t find the argument nor the conclusion sound; male bodies are patently not objectified in the media as female bodies, and even if they are, that doesn’t mean women’s bodies have ceased to be made into objects (and often objects of violence) or that men are suddenly allowed to stop thinking about this objectification and its very negative consequences. My conclusion seems to be that everyone needs to lay down their weapons, be they photographs or words, in order to come to the table and move forward.
That was far longer than I intended it to be and I’m sweating at the thought of posting it for anyone’s consumption besides my own. But I put off too many important conversations until that nonexistent day when my opinions will be both exhaustively informed and completely foolproof, so here goes. I know it sounds a little grim so far, Mom, so know that my day also included a lesson in isiXhosa tongue clicks, a lot of laughing and astrologically-informed conversation with Babbett, a whirlwind tour of lively and colorful downtown, the daily noon gun from Signal Hill, and a delicious Cape Malay chicken biryani. And, thanks to you, a chocolate-covered Jo-Jo.