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.