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.