Enjoy.
Sunday, May 23rd, 2010
And I couldn’t have asked for a better semester. The things I have had the privilege to experience, the people I’ve met, it’s been pretty damn good. With three days left I can’t help but reflect on how weird it will be to be home. I don’t want to pretend that Cape Town is “Africa” in all of it’s romanticized and wild glory – that would be way too… colonial. But that doesn’t take away from the things I’ve encountered that I just wouldn’t have seen if I chose a place like the UK (not to say it wouldn’t have been incredible). But my point is this: Cape Town, no matter how polished or Western the city, holds on to much of it’s history in interesting ways.
When I landed at the CPT airport in January, I was picked up by a family friend (she runs Shine Shine, check it out!) who drove me over to my house for the semester. I had been flying for 48 hours, been through JHB (Johannesburg) airport customs three different times, and was wide-eyed as could possibly be. On my drive from the airport (about 20 or 30 minutes from the city), I passed the N2 Gateway, a stretch of shacks that are impossible to not notice on the drive. Homeless people crossed four-lane highways at a snail’s pace. I had, of course, known, that it existed but it was different seeing it in the flesh. Not outraging so much as it was incredibly sad. I know now that I had driven through a couple of the many townships that surround Cape Town, a relic of the apartheid government that forcibly removed blacks and coloreds from their homes in the city. Ever see District 9? Based on Cape Town’s District 6′s forced removals.
A month or two later I was mugged around noon in my own neighborhood. A neighborhood that is incredibly residential on the scale of things. It wasn’t violent, and they left me with my license and my ATM cards, but definitely upsetting – after all, this was my neighborhood. I had been getting comfortable, and it was a healthy reminder to stay aware of my surroundings. Muggings can happen everywhere, but crime is a “reality” in this city. There is barbed-wire around most houses, and ADT security has a larger presence then the police. I leave in three days and I was just mugged this past Friday. But even though I’ve been mugged, even though this crime is seemingly “everywhere,” it certainly hasn’t colored my impression of Cape Town. On my flight down from London, an Afrikaans girl warned me about the crime. It was awful, she told me, I had to be safe. There are certain things you can’t do in Cape Town (walking home past sunset isn’t usually advised, certainly not for Americans), but it doesn’t something I will remember in a negative light.
Minibus taxis. Oh, how I love minibus taxis. Everything I ever read about Cape Town warned me against them – they were scary, wild, dangerous, and certainly not fit for tourists. Pish posh. Granted, there are no seatbelts, they are rickity, the drivers can be maniacs, and an unsurprisingly high portion of traffic accidents can involve minibusses, but man I love those things. 5R ($.80 USD) will get you almost anywhere in the city and there is nothing like a crowded minibus! You and 14 people in a tiny van, the driver honking every other second (literally – they have special triggers attached to the horn to make this easier), and the guardjie hanging out the window whistling and yelling the destination. The music is blasting (kwaito, reggae, or Ke$ha), and people are talking in languages you could never hope to understand. Want to know about what people really think about politics? Hop in a minibus and listen. Ride all day! They might be speaking Zulu or Xhosa, but you’ll hear their tone and recognize words. Mandela, Zuma, Malema, Xenophobia. That’s a big one. You may have heard about the nationalist violence that sprung up in 2008. Definitely a sensitive subject, and you’ll know it if an expat from another African nation decides to air his opinions on the matter. When you reach your destination, give a holler and try and find a way to get out without hitting more than a few people by accident. “Thank you, driver.” He’ll tell you “Thanks bru!” I don’t know if it’s because I’m white, but I always get the ‘bru’ (like ‘bro’) from them. I kind of like it.
Maybe I’ll continue this at some point, but for now I think this is enough. Cape Town: like everywhere else, but not like everywhere else. I have an exam in the morning, and as cathartic as this has been, I should probably get back to studying. Oh, and that sunset doesn’t have to do with this post, it’s just a nice sunset that I see from my house almost every other day.
Wednesday, May 5th, 2010
There are so many stories from Cape Town that I’ve never written down. I’m not quite sure as to why, maybe Twitter is really getting all of my scoops. Hopefully I can start to remedy that over the next month or so. I want to share stories from my travels to Lesotho, my DJing on Long Street, and my mugging just a few blocks from my house. There are more stories that will emerge in time, observations too. Some of them may not hit me for months to come.
Personality change is an interesting thing. When you’re the one changing, how do you know? Have I changed since I’ve been here? In what way? I can’t feel it, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t happening. Whenever I tell people where I am this semester, they always tell me how incredible an experience it is, how much it will change me, what an amazing new perspective I will come back with. These people are not wrong, but from here it’s hard to tell if they are right.
I have seen so much since I’ve been here – beautiful mountains, fast sports cars, and shanty towns as far as the eye can see. But where some people seem shocked, changed, spurred into action, it has confirmed what I have always known: the world can be a deeply unfair place, and the ugliness of the world (poverty, racism, crime, etc) is far from gone. Not to say that it hasn’t furthered my own desire to work for change, but it hasn’t shocked me in the way that it seems to for some.
I don’t know how to feel about that. On the one hand, I am often self-conscious about my lack of radicalization. People tell me how shocked they are, how much it’s “opened their eyes.” On the other hand, I think to myself, really? They weren’t aware that there were deeply-seated economic inequalities? That people live without running water or regular electricity? What kind of rock do they live under? And are they going to care once they get back to their nice cozy existence in the US?
I find myself thinking a little too much like Holden Caulfield these days, with all these implications of phonies. It’s not that I disparage their efforts and outrage, I just don’t think it will last. One of the things I respect about them is their willingness to get involved, but I worry that it is only short-term. Maybe that’s where the difference really lies – though my reaction isn’t outrage, so much as it’s grim acknowledgement, I want to spend my life working to affect positive change. I want to harness my skills and work with an NGO or policy group with healthy goals, not sit work for a corporation that is determined to make a profit at any cost.
Sometimes I worry that my stated career goals become an excuse not to get involved in the present. I fear that I will stay involved only through “work,” and my job now is to prevent that from happening.
Sunday, February 28th, 2010
Pop music is pop music. That’s what I’ve learned. It doesn’t matter where you are – the US, UK, Australia, France, Italy, or Germany. Take a look at the Top 10 on iTunes and dollars to donuts you’ve got some pretty similar lists. I mean really similar lists.
But South Africa is on a different continent, maybe we’ve got something different?
Nope. Most of the clubs here play straight Top 40 – Lady Gaga, Black Eyed Peas, Ke$ha, David Guetta, Kanye West. You name it, and I’ve heard it here.
A few weeks ago, when I visited a middle school in Oceanview (a township outside Cape Town), we heard that some kids had a hip-hop dance troupe and were going to be performing. And I was stoked to hear some local hip-hop. There was a DJ there, who played with them. What did I he play? Top 40 hip-hop. Some TI, the David Guetta remix of Black Eyed Peas “I Gotta Feeling,” and a few other songs that just weren’t very noteworthy. They were amazing – apparently they’re internationally ranked – but I couldn’t shake the idea that middle school students in a poor suburb are growing up and listening to our incredibly materialistic music.
I think it’s interesting that South Africa imports music from the US like it does – it’s such a different culture, but they want the same things we want in their music. I don’t know if that’s escapism, or consumerism, or what, but I do know that they like our music, and absorb our messages. For us Americans, our pop music sometimes just feels like stuff we happen to listen to because its on the radio. But by importing it, are South Africans tacitly saying “I support that message, I like the lifestyle they’re selling”? Maybe, it’s hard to tell. Maybe it’s the same reason white kids love gangster rap.
As my hipster-ish professor of African culture likes to say, Cape Town thinks of itself as “a city in the world.” It wants to be global and cosmopolitan, which often has the effect of really pushes aside a lot of issues and local culture.
That’s the other thing – there is SO MUCH GREAT LOCAL MUSIC. Either the really rough kwaito sound or the incredible deep and jacking house sound, they’re so lush and emotive. They have a sound that is definitely not like the music of the US. Now I just have to find some places to actually hear it.
All of this is to say that I don’t really know how much any of this matters – is music just music? Are we making a statement when we listen to particular kinds of music? Is there anything even wrong with that? With the internet making the world global and the easy access to mp3s, is this even a valid conversation anymore? And maybe I’m just being ethnocentric.
Music:
This is kind of a weird selection, but I’m going through old stuff on iTunes and I felt like sharing. It’s hardly new, this song got leaked to a blog in October of 2008. The quality is terrible, because it samples a video game commercial. Seriously.
But it’s so good – I love how playful this thing is. I don’t have a direct mp3 link – I’d upload it, but there’s no way I’m paying $1 just so that you don’t have to wait 15 seconds.
Camron – Oh No You Didn’t [4shared link]