On Oversized Rats, Losing My Keys, and Saying Goodbye

One of the lovely things about keeping a blog this summer was the way it helped me digest my adventure in manageable portions. When a particular detail or story lodged itself in my brain and refused to leave—or when my parents were agitating for pictures—I could sit down and deal thoroughly with some aspect of what I was seeing, hearing and feeling. I wish I’d bid the city farewell (in writing) when I had it in front of me; I could have sat at Lola’s on Long Street and watched the foot traffic pass until something fascinating or ironic or quintessentially Capetonian presented itself as a perfect motif for my final entry.

From the sunny Seattle coffee shop where I’m sitting now, thinking about Cape Town is like dipping a toe into a swift-moving stream of images, each as significant and symbolic as the next. The best I can do right now is scoop up a few bucketsfull of my time in South Africa.

***

A public parking lot in Kalk Bay, where I am but my car keys are not. I must have dropped them while hiking and caving with Barry and Cliff earlier that day. As I search my backpack one more time for the missing keys, the septuagenarian members of the Trails Club of South Africa with whom we had begun the hike that morning return to the car park with cheery greetings and later, concern for my predicament. Tony tries unsuccessfully to pick the locks on my little Atos, and I end up calling the car rental agency with a shamefaced plea for help.

The spare key is on its way, and I lean against the hood of my car talking to Geoffrey. Geoffrey is at least seventy and resplendent in cut-off denim shorts held up by a rope belt, a tattered windbreaker from the 1980s and brightly colored gaiters over his leather hiking boots. He is tan and extravagantly wrinkled, with rough hands and a classic English-South African accent. When I tell him that I am working at a theatre school, he tells me about one of his boarders, a Zulu girl who is studying African dance at the University of Cape Town.

“It’s all very new to me,” he says excitedly, “because we grew up under the system, of course.” I would meet far younger South Africans with far less enthusiasm for repairing the damage “the system” had inflicted on their country.

***

I am browsing the bookshelves in a deliciously cluttered antique store. At random, I pick up a treatise on South African society written by a white South African in the 1960s. The faded inscription reads, “Hope this explains some of the challenges we’re facing here. Love, Mum and Dad.”

***

Babs takes me to a Couch Surfers’ gathering at a local bar, where every conversation begins with, “So how long have you been surfing couches?” and “Sister” Mary James performs an impromptu drag show. After the last strains of “Like a Virgin” have died away, Babs, Simon and I totter down the near-vertical Victorian staircase and set off across the Company Gardens toward Long Street. Babs tells us to watch out for the oversized rats that haunt the gardens at night and insists that we stop at a brick amphitheatre outside of the South African natural history museum. We stand on a plaque in the middle of the amphitheatre, from which our voices echo in the empty gardens. It’s a secret, she insists, and only works at night.

The bar where Simon is supposed to meet his friends is packed with European tourists and American exchange students drinking themselves into stupors and flopping around to Oasis. I abandon my glass of wine and flee to the sidewalk tables, which are less crowded if no less noisy. Babs—a black belt in karate—teaches me how to throw a punch as we watch middle-aged tourists engage the services of young Black and Coloured prostitutes. She fends off beggars with curt rejoinders in Afrikaans and recalls how Long Street used to be the sole province of drug dealers and petty criminals. Suddenly, the street is full of shouting in many languages; a black man and a white tourist are scuffling and hurling drunken insults at each other. The knot of bodies around the fight parts to admit two public safety officers and then closes again and blocks my view, but I can hear the sound of fists on flesh. It’s not something I’ve heard in real life, I realize, and it is infinitely more sickening without sound effects.

***

Rex and I are careening through the Imfolozi part of Hluhluwe-Imfolozi on our way to our camp for the night. It is the Fourth of July, and we are blasting Rex’s country music mix as loudly as the Fiesta’s sound system will allow in celebration of our nation’s birth. We are no longer looking for rhinos and giraffes when we take a sharp corner and nearly collide with an elephant. Rex reverses hurriedly as the elephant, which is blocking the entire road, turns its ponderous head towards us. Its eyes glow very yellow in the Fiesta’s headlights. It continues to shovel roadside grass into its mouth and chew it with large, circular motions. David Lee Murphy continues to sing. We are at an impasse.

Eventually, the elephant moves off into the bush and we keep driving through the starlit Zululand night.

***

It is the day of my students’ final performance. I march into my class overwhelmed by how much there is left to do and determined to use every minute as effectively as possible. I want to start rehearsing right away; some of the pieces are not even close to performance-ready, and we are performing in less than eight hours. Jean-Pierre raises his hand and says,

“But, Jenny? We have to clean the theatre first.”
“Fine.” I reply, and turn my attention to something else.

Forty-five minutes later, desperate to begin a run-through, I am chasing my actors all over the building as they bother Nozibele the housekeeper for a broom, and then a mop and bucket, cleaning fluid, and paper towels. I finally get them all into the (beautifully cleaned) theatre and ready to start rehearsing, when I notice that Jean-Pierre is stapling the curtains together.

Several of the windows in NATA’s 65-seat theatre are broken. There is no soundproofing, and performances are frequently interrupted by car horns from the M-18 and trains leaving or approaching Athlone Station. The theatre has five hanging lights, one of which came unplugged and plunged half the stage into darkness in the middle of the performance. Available set pieces include and are limited to plastic chairs, a few battered tables, a wooden window frame and a couple of benches. All of their costumes would have to be brought from home, music sung themselves, and sound effects made by hand or played on cell phones. And the stage itself is backed by a rickety wooden frame draped in scraps of cheap black fabric, which J.P. is meticulously repairing with nothing but a stapler, infinite patience, and an inspiring sense of stewardship for this space in which he works and creates.

***

I’m willing to concede that not everyone in South Africa can sing, but it certainly seems that everyone does sing. My days at NATA were filled with spontaneous song; students would harmonize with the music included in a classmate’s performance piece, and the audience even joined in with the a capella rendition of “Amazing Grace” that one group included in the final performance.

And so, while I darted in and out of the students’ classroom returning assignments on my last day, Stephanie and Leonita grabbed me by the hand and told me they had something for me. That “something” turned out to be a song, a pop ballad I didn’t know about saying goodbye and letting someone go. With their unparalleled ability to create compelling performances out of absolutely nothing—no music, no accompaniment, no trappings of any kind—they sang me off with designated solos and four part harmony.

With severe second thoughts about leaving my little life in Cape Town, I left NATA and drove to the Long Street Baths, the run-down municipal pool in the heart of the City Bowl where I had been lap swimming since breaking a toe in Mtunzini. Built in 1908, the baths are a Long Street institution and a remarkable space of cultural mixing in a city that remains very segregated. The pool complex also houses a Turkish bath and is closed to men on Tuesday afternoons.

I was usually there in the evenings, and my favorite pool employee said as much when I rocked up to swim at noon last Tuesday. He and I had developed a special rapport after he mistook me for a child and nearly refused me entry without a parent. After that, he greeted me cheerily whenever I paid my entry fee and almost always gave me a discount. While counting out my R11.90 fare on my last day, I told him that I was early because I had a plane to catch that afternoon. He asked me where I was going. I told him I was going home, back to America, and then he said,

“Tell you what. Stop that, put those coins in your other hand, put them back in your wallet, and enjoy.”

He was off shift when I left the pool; I never learned his name nor told him how much I’d enjoyed his cheerful greeting every time I went to swim. But it is his small generosity, rather than my rainy ride to the airport or rush to catch my flight to Dakar, that forms my enduring final shot of Cape Town.

For the moment, all that remains to be said is salakakuhle and baie dankie.

Better Yet, Hope

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 Camps Bay 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 Cape Flats. 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 Table Mountain 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 Cape Flats, pouring in Woodstock, misty in Camps Bay 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.

*You can read about TAC and the march at http://www.tac.org.za/community/node/2722.

Next one to spot a rhino wins!

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.

Unusual Souvenirs

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.

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.