Lost in South Africa

South Africa is a confusing, bewildering place. After spending nearly a week there, I hardly know what to think of it.
After the country’s recent history, it’s hard not to get caught up in the rhetoric of revival. I had my Global Music class watch some of Paul Simon’s Graceland concert, held in Harare, Zimbabwe in 1987—because, of course, it could not have been held in South Africa, the evil apartheid regime. Watching that video, it seems impossible that political freedom could ever come for millions of black people—certainly not without the tumultuous violence of revolution. Yet we know what happened. Three years later, in 1990, Nelson Mandela was freed. In 1994, he was elected president. Now his face is everywhere as the elder statesman of South Africa, and his name graces stately pavilions.
Yet, at the same time, little has changed. As a few locals confirmed, apartheid has been abolished, and black people can go anywhere—anywhere, that is, that they can afford. Which is to say that the townships still exist. Nancy visited one on her Operation Hunger trip, and saw worse urban poverty than she had ever seen before. It was so sad, she said, that it was embarrassing to take photographs of the decayed housing and the permanently starved children. Meanwhile, white privilege also exists. We spent one afternoon at Kirstenbosch Gardens, located just on the other side of Table Mountain. It’s a beautiful botanical preserve, built out of the landholdings of Cecil Rhodes (one of the paths was the ride to his house). Black people can go, but few do. It was one of the loveliest spots I’ve ever seen—breathtaking vistas, open fields backed by jutting mountains. The meal we had the restaurant there was wonderful, and fairly cheap. We had to wonder: just what allowed this kind of beauty to exist here? Was it gold, or diamonds? Was it European “genius”? How to compare this Eden with the dystopic reality of the Cape Town townships, one of which (Mannenberg) was not much more than about five miles away?
I don’t know what to make of it. The music scene is fascinating, especially the intersection of African music with jazz. Before coming here, I basically knew Abdullah Ibrahim (or Dollar Brand), the pianist/composer who was lifted from obscurity by Duke Ellington in the 1960s. On the way here, I found out more about the jazz scene—how it developed and flourished in the 1950s, only to be dismantled once the new apartheid government saw the dangers of cultural overlap and ordered Sophiatown, the mixed-race city near Johannesburg, demolished. Soweto was built on its ruins.
For SAS, I was the trip leader for the “jazz safari,” run by Coffee Beans, a local tour group. Our guide, Jacques Jacobsz, took us to the house of one of the elder figures on the scene, saxophonist Robbie Jansen. It wasn’t easy to find: s it turned out, Jansen had moved into a new house only last week. We actually ran into Jansen himself, who was returning from a gig and pointed us down the street. Jansen is about 70+ years old, and suffered a serious stroke about four years ago—so serious that he was at one point left for dead. He now carries with him a portable respirator, which gives him enough air to speak and breath—and still play alto saxophone with as much passion and intensity as one could desire. We gathered in his living room, drank his beer and ate his snacks (cheese, chips, broccoli), and listened to him play duets with a shy-looking fellow on keyboard. At some point the conversation moved to Abdullah Ibrahim. Jansen has played with him (he appears on the famous Mannenberg album), and after Nancy and I told him that we had married to Ibrahim’s music, he played “The Wedding” for us. We held hands until it was finished. A sweet, private moment.
We then went to the house of a younger musician. Hilton Schilder comes from a rich family of musicians: his family history includes Dutch gypsies as well as Khosas. He’s the kind of gifted person who can elicit sound from virtually any sound source available. Most of the time he’s a pianist. Yet he greeted us with the sound of a musical bow. You couldn’t expect to hear such delicate sounds on a recording, but it enchanted the small group of people gathered in his home. He also played guitar, including a virtuoso display of “tapping” of a kind I’d never seen before. Students of mine who heard him the next day said he also played violin. From what I’ve heard on recordings, his musical language fits easily into post-bop playing, but his curiosity pulls him into things like the musical bow that are unusual and clearly African.
Cape Town is, in fact, an area populated primarily by “coloured” people—people of mixed ancestry, including Indian and Asian. Their music draws on an indigenous repertory dating back to the 1700s of Cape Town songs, or “ghomme music” (named after the drum that always accompanied the music). It relies on a simple harmonic repertory that remains at the heart of Cape Town jazz, to say nothing of other kinds of South African pop music. I’m still trying to understand it: it clearly indulges in European cadences (the I6/4-V-I progression), but is used in an African context as a kind of time-line pattern. The big accent comes on I6/4—a strong tonic chord, in a fat voicing (with the fourth on the bottom). But it is also a chord that is forced in movement—a dissonance that must resolve to V (and then to I). To use this progression intelligently requires balancing out these forces
Cape Town is a strong jazz city. The local club at the V&A Waterfront (Victoria and Alfred), the Green Dolphin, offers jazz every night (or “eight nights a week,” as a sign proclaims). Jazz at the Dolphin is American-style; but elsewhere, it blends into what Jansen called “folk music.” It is South African music with a jazz flavoring, with the saxophone the prominent instrument.
Our last day in South Africa involved a tour that forced us to look at apartheid. We were supposed to go to Robben Island, where Mandela and other ANC men were held for decades; but unfortunately, the ocean was too rough for the barge to travel out into the bay. But we did travel to District Six. This was a neighborhood, not too far from the center of the city, inhabited by Muslim and other Coloured people in a chaotic but lively pattern of settlement. In the 1960s, it was designated as a “white” area. People were told to leave. Some did. Others refused. The latter watched bulldozers destroy their homes, furnishings and all. All but a few landmarks (mostly churches) were cleared.
We had driven in this area the other night, coming back from a jazz benefit at Swingers, held to defray the medical expenses of saxophonist Winston Mankunku. The cab driver was the friend of a waitress at Swingers. To our surprise, it turned out that his father and Abdullah Ibrahim were close childhood friends—in fact, according to him, Abdullah was in town for a few days to provide acupuncture for his father. He drove us into District Six, stopping at a Moravian church that now sits by itself in the midst of empty fields. The only new thing that has been built in District Six is a college, originally intended for white students of engineering. The rest was blocked by court battles; and even after apartheid was dismantled, there are still legal issues about who the land actually belongs to.
Our tour stopped at the District Six museum. Clearly, this is an issue that cuts deep into the hearts of many people in Cape Town. Families that had lived there for decades, even centuries, were dislocated into townships on the other side of Table Mountain. The empty fields—gashes on the city’s landscape—are testimony to the ravages wreaked on South Africa as a whole. Nor has the post-apartheid era solved these problems. Our host, a light-colored woman, said that she and others like her had the right now to settle anywhere—anywhere, that is, that they can afford. And of course, few can now leave their township houses. So the city remains frozen where it is.
South Africa still has this flavor. One night, Nancy and I went out to a restaurant that offered a sampling of African cuisines. Nobody orders anything: instead, they bring by a continuous array of dishes from across the continent. It was entertaining, although offering less than promised. (We were told that we could eat as much as we wanted; but if you told them you liked one particular dish and wanted more, they looked at you as if you were a huge nuisance. Once they passed through their medley of dishes, that was it.) Everyone in the restaurant was European. All the staff was African. At one point, the waitresses and cooks came out and started singing, accompanied by a drum. It was pleasant, but it reeked of the old South Africa—our “happy natives,” and all that. And nothing contradicts it now: who, among the black South Africans, can afford to spend $20-25 a head on a meal like this? There are still stores on Long Street that offer beautiful African artifacts at exceptionally high prices. Again, the only people visiting them are Europeans.
And yet, and yet: it is a beautiful place. The view from the top of Table Mountain (we took the funicular) was spectacular. The Mediterranean climate is outstanding. Somehow, it is a land blessed by God. All the more tragic, then, that it must live with the ghosts of hundreds of years of oppression.

Help me, help me.....

It’s been a long week at sea.
We began with the Neptune Ceremony—a bit of silliness only loosely associated with our crossing the equator. The ceremony began on our first day at sea after Ghana, at 9 a.m. (more than fourteen hours before we actually entered the Southern Hemisphere). King Neptune, it was alleged, was furious that so many of us were still “polliwogs”—naïfs who had never been across the equator by sea and who had failed to pay tribute to his majesty. Neptune, of course, was Captain Jeremy Kingston, naked to the waist and ridiculously slathered in green. (I passed him in his resplendent semi-nakedness in the hall outside my room, where he looked suitably grim. I assume playing this role was part of his contract, an unfortunate consequence of his duties.) The ceremony itself was fairly simple, although time-consuming. Those who were to become “shellbacks” had to have a luminescent goo (green or shocking pink) poured over their heads, dunk themselves in the swimming pool, and then stand dripping in line to kiss a fish, held out by one of several “goddesses.” (Mine was held by anthropology professor Wenda Trevathan.) After this, you were knighted by “Dean Bob” (Chapel), whose role as royal chamberlain was marked by a silly straw hat. I put it off for a while—many of the faculty, clearly not playing the game, were standing to the side—but finally decided I’d better get it over with. The pool water by this time was a murky pastel sludge. I didn’t go on with the final phase: the seriously hardcore had their heads shaved. By my age, I reasoned, simply having hair was something not to be messed with. A small percentage of students (and a few adults—including one of the elderly Lifelong Learner women) went through with it, making certain portions of the lunchroom at times look like the Cancer Ward.

A few days later, the water turned wild. We had enjoyed remarkably calm weather up to this point, all across the Atlantic and around the bulge of West Africa; but somewhere south of the Congo our usual side-to-side rocking was irregularly joined with deep, unpredictable bulges. One day at lunch I was on the floor, talking to Celia, who was inconveniently telling me she needed her diaper changed. I looked up and saw my plate slide to the end of the table. It fell off, splattering my dessert and glass of iced tea. Gasps from nearby diners. As I got up to deal with the mess, a countering wave made my wife’s plate slide off the other side. It wasn’t always that bad, but it often was, and you never knew when it was coming. You could see the waves on the deck, but few people were out there—the weather had turned grey and windy. Inside, it was random and disorienting. And it stayed that way for several days.

I was impervious to all this. I had grown accustomed to the side-to-side rocking after the first day at sea, and took even this unpredictable movement in stride. That is, until Wednesday morning. The night before, we had been invited to “dinner with the captain.” About two dozen of us were dressed to the nines, drinking wine in the staffulty lounge before retiring to the Deck Five dining hall for our sumptuous meal. The food was good, and the wine kept coming. I joked with our Staff Captain, Mats Nelson, about his homeland (southern Sweden, which as we both knew was originally Denmark) and felt pretty pleasant staggering across the ship to my room, knowing that with the unstable ship, no one could identify me as drunk from my movements. But the next morning I became sick. I thought it was an aftermath of my inebriation. But in fact, I was sober then. I managed to empty my stomach (pretty thoroughly) over the morning and taught class at noon, much against my will. Perhaps that’s it, I thought. I made myself eat some toast and soup for supper and went to bed.

Over the next day I felt myself recovering, gradually increasing my appetite. But on Friday, I simply didn’t feel like eating. I wasn’t throwing up any more, but everything disgusted me. Once again I taught my Global Music class (this time, forcing myself into a decent presentation of the politics of South African music, relying on Paul Simon’s videotaped 1987 concert). I tried to eat lunch, but found that eating toast and soup just worsened my distaste. It was not just appetite: the whole ship turned foul before my eyes. I spent the afternoon watching “A Dry, White Season,” a well-acted but predictable melodrama about apartheid in South Africa, and by the time I was finished, I was looking at everybody as if they were villains in a drama. The ship’s clinic was closed all day: I had to wait until 4:30 to finally see a doctor. Her diagnosis was disappointing mild: yes, I’d had a virus, but I probably still felt lousy because my electrolytes were down. She prescribed some electrolyte pills ($1 each) and suggested I drink Gatorade. Damn. I thought I had something particularly vile. So I gradually resuscitated myself and felt my stomach slide into place.

Still, my mood has been foul. Part of it is my sentence of “dock time,” which I’m still serving in Cape Town. The weather is sunny and warm, the view of Table Mountain outside the ship is glorious—a huge, greenish monster off the port side—but I still have my three hours to serve. I know I’ll feel better once I get off the boat (when I’m finally in a place where I can call the M.V. Explorer a “boat” if I like), but until then, I’m stuck. I can hardly wait to get into South Africa to find out what it’s like to be on land south of the equator. I’ll report back as soon as I can.