Last week, I betook myself to a reading at the Book Lounge, where there was not only good poetry but complimentary wine and hors d’oeuvres. I would have it noted, however, that I christened the Book Lounge my favorite bookstore in the world—a not inconsiderable honor, given the time I’ve spent book shopping in foreign countries—before the miraculous appearance of free food and alcohol. I will be seriously displeased if I hear of anyone visiting Cape Town without hauling up the top of Buitenkant Street, sitting on what might be the most comfortable sofa in the world, and admiring one of the city’s best Mountain views with a cup of tea in one hand and a book in the other. Truly, the only thing this place lacks is a cat named for an obscure author.
At the reading, half-English, half-Sri Lankan poet Seni Seneviratne shared from her new collection Wild Cinnamon and Winter Skin and sang several Yorkshire folk songs. I left resolved to make readings a regular part of my life—especially if they feed you—and with one line of Seni’s knocking around in my head. The poem is set in her native Leeds, where an Italophile industrialist adorned his factory with copies of three famous towers from Florence, Verona and Tuscany respectively. Her grandfather, she writes, would take the long way home from his job at a mill to pass these foreign follies because he “craved the comfort of a wider view.”
That’s the line that stuck in my head—“he craved the comfort of a wider view”—perhaps because a view that has widened to include both CampsBay and Khayelitsha provides little comfort. Thanks to the Lonely Planet, of course, I knew before I came that one was a stunning seaside suburb and home to some of the priciest real estate in Africa and the other a desperately poor township on the outer edge of the CapeFlats. But now I know them as the homes of friends: where Richard edits his documentaries on Cape Town life for public television and where Mfundiso lives and studies to be an electrical engineer. Where Asandiswa was robbed and made to watch three men rape her best friend on their way to school last year.
A week after telling us that story, Asandiswa is climbing out of the back seat of my car and making her way home through the warren of shacks on the edge of Khayelitsha. With a stream of commentary on his beloved but beleaguered township interrupted by “lefts” and “rights” at crucial junctures, Simcelile has guided me to the entrance to the N2, where my path home is straight and can be taken at 100 kilometers per hour. Nonetheless, he places my purse under his seat and tells me to lock my doors as he gets out of the car.“Thank you, Jenn-eee!” Mfundiso hums, waving at me, still impeccably dressed after our wet and hectic day. I watch them disappear into the gathering Cape dusk and begin to sob as I drive away; there is nothing I can do to insure that they get home safely tomorrow.
Nor can I do much from across the ocean to help my students at New Africa achieve their dreams. They are so brave just to dream them in the face of the obstacles that appear again and again in improvisations; their stories of violence, drug use, poverty, sexual abuse and HIV are not gleaned from Law and Order re-runs. In a country that increasingly retreats behind locked doors and high-voltage electrical fences, they have chosen a profession that demands and depends on public conversations. May we all be as brave in our dreams and our endeavors.
They also prove that a wider view can provide comfort or, better yet, hope. My view last Sunday widened to include 2,000 beneficiaries and supporters of the Treatment Action Campaign, the leading HIV/AIDS advocacy group in South Africa. We met and marched through central Cape Town to demand more resources for and better management of HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis prevention and care.* Three American friends and I went, one of whom is writing her thesis on civil society organizations and AIDS in South Africa and who had personally folded all 2,000 bright red “HIV Positive” t-shirts sported by the marchers. We were a bright red river streaming down Kaizergracht, Darling, and onto Strand as the sun tinted TableMountain pink and then went down. And, based on this not inconsiderable sample, I am willing to conclude that all Black South Africans can not only sing but harmonize spontaneously. I will never forget the sound of our voices, of my wordless humming and their flowing, plummeting isiXhosa syllables filling the streets of the central business district.
Another way to gain a wider view is to climb a mountain, or at least go for a run on top of one. Thanks to Cape Town’s spectacular topography, I have done both frequently during my stay here. Wednesday’s run, my first since jamming a toe a few weeks ago, was a glorious jaunt from the Lion’s Head parking lot to Signal Hill, from which they fire a cannon every day at noon so that Capetonians can’t take too long a lunch break. Signal Hill is also called Lion’s Rump, so I guess I ran along its spine.
Lion's Head and Rump from the Cable Car.
In typical Cape Town fashion, it was sunny on the CapeFlats, pouring in Woodstock, misty in CampsBay and windy everywhere. I never tire of watching the play of light and cloud on a stormy day, a pleasure that is perhaps closed to those reared in sunnier climates. The view from the Spine, as I have decided to call it, takes in the tankers in Table Bay, the Flats, the City Bowl, Robben Island, Green Point and the new World Cup stadium, and a sliver of the Twelve Apostles as they disappear down the Atlantic Coast. It is truly a wider view, and as I rounded a corner on my way back, a brilliant shard of rainbow shot heavenward from the shoddy streets of Salt River and disappeared into the Table Cloth streaming across the Mountain.
Efforts to reintroduce the White Rhino at Hluhluwe-Imfolozi--ten points if you figure out how to pronounce that--have been so successful that this game actually got boring. My friend Rex and I figured we'd better play it while we had the chance, though, as rhino sightings are rare at Davidson.
We hadn't been in the park but fifteen minutes or so when Rex spotted this elephant. We turned the car around in case we had to make a break for it; it seems elephants take more umbrage to being gawked at than other animals in the park and have a tendency to rush cars. Rex was pretty sure that we could outrun it, but better safe than gored by an elephant.
The view from our camp.
Giraffes are very strange animals.
Hippos at Lake St. Lucia. They are rather boring during the day but apparently roam the streets of the nearby town at night, terrorizing residents and drinking from swimming pools. No joke about the terrorizing part--hippos kill more people than any other animal in Africa.
Sitting atop my dresser are a shot glass and a rug made from plastic bags and scraps of wool. They, as well as a lingering cough, are mementos of what will surely remain one of the most extraordinary Tuesdays of my life. It began in a gas station parking lot, where Mfundiso and I chatted in my (locked) car and waited for our group to assemble. It was shaping up to be an aggressively wet day, which did nothing to make less bleak the tiny houses and rutted roads of Gugulethu. When the rest of the group had packed their soggy selves into the back of the Atos, we set off to meet the young gay man who was to be the subject of our film.
A few wrong turns later, we found ourselves perched on chairs in a bare living room while its owner went to fetch Shane. Shortly thereafter, our subject sashayed in wearing embroidered cowboy boots, skin-tight pinstripe jeans, a furry white scarf and expertly applied lip stick and rouge. He lit a cigarette, popped a hip, and started telling us about his life.
Not for the last time that day, I chided myself for not having a camera rolling—Shane’s flamboyant entrance and impromptu monologue seemed a heaven-sent opening for our film. Indeed, they may have been calculated as such; no one had told Shane that we were planning to film him the next day. No one contradicted him when he said we were shooting that day either, so with no preliminary research and a plan that changed every fifteen minutes, I shot my first documentary. Our shoot consisted of us (me) driving Shane to visit various family members and interviewing them about their lives and relationships with him. It also took place mostly in isiXhosa and Afrikaans, and in a context so far removed from my own that I found myself shutting up and taking orders without question. This in itself was a unique experience; I don’t lightly relinquish my stake in a creative process nor my share of responsibility for its product. I quickly realized, however, that I could best serve this process as observer, WFC bankroller, and chauffeur.
A word about driving in the townships: don’t. Streets bear names infrequently, stop signs are rare to nonexistent, and the potholes were deep enough to pose a serious threat to my little Hyundai. And while I admire the entrepreneurship and Nascar-esque skills of the unlicensed “cockroach” taxi drivers of Gugulethu, I do not want to share the road with them. Without exaggeration, I am both stunned and grateful that my friends, my car and I survived that day unscathed.
But, thanks to divine intervention and my hitherto latent defensive driving skills, we not only survived our day with Shane but witnessed a series of encounters both unsettling and inspiring. My group members and I had approached this project armed with stories of the homophobic horrors of the Cape Flats and were surprised again and again to find Shane so totally unafraid to be himself. He sauntered down the grim, potholed streets of his childhood neighborhood as if on a Milan catwalk, blowing kisses and waving to people he knew. Everyone (including me) was “sweetheart,” “darling,” or “sweetie pie; life in Gugs was “amazing” and he was “having a great time.”
His ebullience is inspiring, as is the network of friends and family members who buck the homophobic culture of the Cape Flats to love and support their flamboyant, irrepressible son, stepson, cousin, nephew, etc. We visited the sister of his long-dead mother and filmed the two of them laughing and snuggling in her double bed while she chided him to keep his feet off the comforter and played her favorite soap in the background. We visited Shane’s stepmother, who maintains a relationship with him although his sexuality contradicts her reading of the Bible and she is no longer living with his father. It is Caroline’s rug that sits on my dresser—R15 well spent. It was also Caroline who made fake breasts for Shane out of water-filled condoms for a school costume contest—which he won—and half-wonders if she is to blame for his sexuality and life style. And, when a cloudburst made filming impossible in Terra’s tin roofed shack impossible, we hauled four cameras and seven strangers to Shane’s cousin’s house, who relocated her napping husband into the other room and let us film the interview in her lounge.
It was three o’clock by the time we sat down to film what was to be the emotional center of the documentary. Friend and fellow participant Thulani interviewed Shane and his father Joe together, addressing the first in English and the second in isiXhosa. They spoke of Shane’s childhood, of his emerging sexuality, of their relationship, and of the deaths of Shane’s mother and sister. Finally, with great sensitivity, Thulani steered the interview towards a story we hoped to have in the film but dreaded hearing.
About eight years ago, Shane was gang-raped in an abandoned house in Delft, the township where he grew up. He believes this is how he contracted HIV. Leaning against the kitchen doorway, I wept as quietly as I could. Shane and I wiped our teary eyes at the same time, and then he motioned for a cigarette. Simcelile lit one of his own and I placed it in Shane’s shaking fingers as Thulani asked Joe how his son’s diagnosis has affected him. Had I been able to understand isiXhosa, I would have wept even more to know that this was the first Joe had heard of the rape.
We had heard of it the previous day, when our group member Terra proposed Shane (her friend and roommate) as a subject for our film. According to Terra, Shane doesn’t get regular medical attention and has no idea how far the disease may have progressed. He smokes and drinks as much as he can afford to; the glass on my dresser is that which he used to down three gigantic Black Label beers and then left in my car. Neither behavior helps combat an immunosuppressive disease like AIDS, despite Shane’s insistence that he will not let it beat him like it did his mother, sister, and many friends.
Furthermore, some of his stories simply do not check out. He has no birth certificate and cannot apply for a passport, yet claimed to have traveled to Belgium with an old boyfriend. Such inconsistencies confirmed my feeling that Shane sometimes lives not so much in defiance of but in denial of the grim borders of his reality. Many friends to whom I told the story agreed; they concluded that Shane must have been lying about the rape. Perhaps it’s true, but I won’t add my disbelief to the load of challenges given a gay, HIV positive man to bear through the potholed streets of Gugulethu, little though it would weigh. It’s simply not for me to decide; my window into his life was far too brief for that. I am only sorry that neither my film editing skills nor my words can render that window as elegantly and as clearly as I would have them do. You'll just have to come to Cape Town.
Shane and Joe share a cigarette at lunch.
From left to right: Terra, Thulani, Simcelile, Asandiswa, and Mfundiso (all of which I can pronounce) editing at New Africa. My laptop is the one that looks like the back of a hippie's van.
Terra and Simcelile, in a computer lab somewhere deep in the bowels of UCT and a little silly after our marathon editing session.
