Friday, October 26, 2007

SABC: Mzantsi Fo Sho

Sooo I’m apparently terrible at regularly updating this… I apologize. I’m sure your lives have been totally busy too, though, so I hope you understand.

Also, re-reading that first ridiculously long entry, I was bored, and I lived through it all, so I’m going to TRY to make this shorter (but you know how long-winded I can be in writing).

Right now, we’re in Stellenbosch, which is about an hour inland from Cape Town (that’s east of CT, since Cape Town is on the western coast of South Africa, for those of you who have been pretending to visualize where I am, but really have no idea), but the family my friend Maddy and I are staying with actually lives in Somerset West, about 15-20 minutes south of Stellenbosch (so we’re about 5 minutes from False Bay [i.e. the ocean]). Our lectures this week are on Afrikaner identity, as Stellenbosch is a very white town, and they’ve almost all been really interesting, which is very refreshing after our recent string of really boring, repetitive lectures in Durban. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the number of my stereotypes that are being broken about Afrikaans-speaking South Africans simply by living with a family who usually speak to each other in Afrikaans, and through the information covered by our lecturers, who are able to simultaneously be critical of and sympathetic to the Afrikaans-speaking community.

As I just mentioned, we were recently in Durban, staying in backpackers and studying Indian identity. We had a community action workshop in an Indian township and visited a school there; saw a great one-man play about South Africans of Indian heritage; sat through numerous lectures on the history of Indians in South Africa and how different people identify themselves; took a literary walking tour of Grey Street (which had the potential to be really cool, if we had read any of the books that mentioned the sites we visited); met Univ. of KwaZulu/Natal students and talked about student activism with them; hung out on the beach; and explored the area around our backpackers. I also got to meet a long-lost relative, Jehanne, who is the half-sister of my mom’s mom (essentially my half-great-aunt). She took me on a driving tour of Durban, and it was really interesting to hear her perspective (as an English-speaking, older, white, native South African who learned Afrikaans in school and knows some Xhosa and Zulu) on apartheid and its legacy.

Before Durban, we had been in the Eastern Cape, first staying in Tshabo, a rural village outside of East London, and then staying in a backpackers on the beach (where a handful of us took a surfing lesson from a very stereotypical-looking blond surfer dude named Denver). In Tshabo, Maddy and I lived with a family consisting of a mama, tata, three girls (14, 19, and 22), and two babies (the sons of the two older sisters) in a one-room Rondevaal (round house). Our family was incredibly sweet, and everyone spoke varying levels of English, ranging from our mama, who only knew a few words, to our 14-year-old sisi, who was probably 50% fluent. This gave us a great chance to practice our Xhosa, which I loved, and Maddy struggled with. When we went to the backpackers after this, we had our final Xhosa oral test, and that was the last that we will learn of Xhosa. The first day we got to Stellenbosch, we had a 2-hour lesson on basic greetings and sayings in Afrikaans, but otherwise, we’re totally done with language for the rest of the program. I’m actually a little disappointed, as I really enjoyed learning Xhosa, but I’ve thought about teaching my current host family a few Xhosa phrases (they don’t even know how to say hello!), so that could be a fun way to keep using it.

I forgot to mention that we left Durban for a few days to drive three hours to Imfolozi and Hluhluwe game parks to go on a brief safari. We unfortunately drove through in our obnoxious white 8-passenger SIT vans where not all of the windows open, so we didn’t always have the best views, but we did get to see rhinos, giraffes, elephants, water buffalo, warthogs, wildebeests, and baboons, so it was worth the miserable 4:45 a.m. wake-up.

Later in the evening on the day of the safari, we went to a nearby hotel to watch South Africa win the rugby world cup against England. Since we were basically in the middle of nowhere, this was our only option of a location to watch the game, which was mildly unlucky as we were surrounded by British fans… thankfully, they weren’t overly rowdy, and South African pride definitely dominated the crowd anyway. It’s been interesting in Stellenbosch to talk to Afrikaans-speakers who relate the Afrikaner/British competition back to the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902, saying how great it feels to the Afrikaners to beat the British at anything and everything.

Going back even more in time, the weekend after we went to Simonstown, we participated in an amazing workshop led by the Direct Action Center for Peace and Memory (DACPM), whose leaders are former Umkhonto we Sizwe combatants (MK = the “militant” arm of the apartheid-era ANC [African National Congress—the party in power since 1994] which trained in guerilla warfare). It was absolutely incredible—we were taken on a journey to different sites of the struggle around Cape Town, starting in District 6 (an area right in the city center which was incredibly multicultural before the government forcibly removed its residents to the outskirts of the city and demolished the buildings) and moving to Langa (the first black township, where most of District 6’s black residents were “relocated” to), Guguletu (to see the memorials for the Guguletu 7 and Amy Biehl), and a couple other townships. The facilitation was really intense and powerful, and our group definitely bonded a lot that weekend (which we needed, as we were going through what our Academic Director labeled the “storming” phase of our time abroad).

Speaking of our group, everyone on my program is great—even the people who I might not be obsessed with (really only a few people) are essential to the group in terms of adding humor, general ridiculousness, and complaints to bond over. We’re from all over the US in terms of schools and where we grew up, but almost everyone is some sort of social science major, and for the most part, we all get along really well, or have at least found a close group of good friends. I’ve also been able to hang out with Paolo, an Oxy friend who’s studying at Univ. Cape Town this semester, a good amount, and it’s definitely been nice to have a non-SIT person with whom to debrief every once in a while.

I definitely think that’s long enough, but please let me know if you think I should elaborate on something in the future—everything is so amazing that I really have a hard time limiting what information I write about.

I hope everything is wonderful with all of you, and please shoot me an email or leave a comment, as I’d love to hear what you’re doing!

Love,
Jess