Juluka

A Sense of Place

~ susanhayden ~ 30 Comments

Wherever I go and whatever I do, this sense of place and belonging. Not everybody, I notice, is as connected to their land of origin. My husband is a nomad, putting down shallow roots wherever he lays his Cape Union Mart hat. I believe he could live anywhere; he’d make a decision and thrive. My roots are more discriminating; they curl up their ends in protest, unwilling to embrace strange, new soil. I lived abroad like a spectre; not really being there, moving slowly as if in a dreamworld, vaguely surprised that people could see me.

Now we live in Green Point close to the stadium where everything, lately, happens. This makes traffic a mare from time to time, like a few weeks ago, the weekend of the Cape Town Marathon coinciding with a rugby event. I woke up to the 7am sounds of a commentator welcoming the day and the athletes. I brewed a cup of strong Swedish coffee and opened the windows wide to see our strip of slate-blue sea. From my bedroom window you could travel, in a straight stripe, to the wild and windswept shores of Robben Island. On clear days I watch its waves crashing.

Then, the opening strands of Juluka’s Impi – of course. Our Zulu warrior song for the warrior scatterlings flying over Table Mountain National Park, tracing the footsteps of everyone’s early ancestors, pounding the tarmac of our city streets, fighting inner demons, fighting themselves to keep running, keep running, you can do it. Our metaphor for life down here: keep running, warrior, you can do it.

Impi! wo ‘nans’ impi iyeza

Obani bengathinta amabhubesi?

(Warrior! the army is coming!

Who here can touch the lions?)

And, I’m home. Johnny Clegg is singing to me from beyond the grave, alive as he’s ever been, flying up over the mountaintops, giving the runners courage, reminding us of our fighter spirit, telling us we belong.

Nothing things become things. Maybe because I was uprooted for so long. A 4pm walk in Green Point park through the alleyway of trees that takes you straight down to the lighthouse (the oldest in South Africa) and the sea. Pale spring sunshine and a slight nip in the air. Winter exiting but not quite out of the building. Three Xhosa nannies with their push-chairs and small charges. They walk slowly, ambling along. Unlike me they meander; now stopping for no apparent reason. Now talking loudly, a hand on a generous hip. I wish I could understand what they were saying but we white people are limited when it comes to language. My friend, Nolo, speaks five languages fluently without thinking anything of it. 

Having grown up during the darkest days of apartheid it always amazes me to see the ease with which South African people mix. There’s a warmth and a friendliness and a willingness to connect, to reach out, to bridge divides. I see it around me all day long. The offer of help, to carry a bag, to give a lift, to donate to a child. Say, Molo, Sisi before you ask for your chicken strips at Spar and you get the biggest smile. Order the samp and beans and you’ve got a friend for life. 

At the heart of us humans lies the most fundamental need of all our of needs and that is for connection to other humans. In the cool, northern parts of Europe this connection has become lost. People are too self-sufficient; the need for one another is obsolete and it has resulted in a deep loneliness. You see it on their faces, especially during the winter months. Sweden is the nation with the highest amount of people living alone, a massive 47% of its 10.4 million population. 

At the end of the working day they let themselves into their (mostly) rented apartments. Nobody is waiting to greet them. No delicious smells emanate from their small kitchens. They stand in the hallway’s semi-darkness and hang their coat on a hook. They walk through the rooms, alone, turning on lights. They warm up their dinner-for-one and eat in front of TV. Advertisements paid for by the state remind Swedish people to say hello to their neighbours. A hundred meters up from our apartment in Malmö is an area of road where people cross to access a small town square and a walking street. The crossing is unusually wide. After wondering about it for years I asked a local why it had been designed that way. To encourage people to interact with each other, was his reply. 

Back in Green Point, going anywhere by car on event days is unthinkable so I decide, if I can’t beat them I’ll join them. The main road is packed with spectators. The first runners, the serious athletes, came in hours ago. These ones are tired, they’ve been running for five hours and the pain and exhaustion is evident on their faces. Many don’t look like athletes and you wonder at the determination, the inner fire that makes them do this, makes them persevere. The training sessions after work, already tired from a long day of traffic and complaints. Getting out of bed early on weekends to meet their friends, to run. I see a husband practically carrying his wife over the last 100 meters. I see a white lady and a black lady somewhere in their sixties, holding hands tightly, willing one other towards the finish line.

A woman on the sidelines is clapping and singing for these amateur runners. Initially I think she’s marathon staff but after a while I realise she’s just a spectator, spurring the competitors on. She sings, here we go, ruh-nuhs, here we go! Only two hundred meters to go! You’ve got such a beautiful weather in Cape Town today, thank the almighty for this beautiful weather! She reads the logos on their vests and calls them by name, fist-bumping those who still have the energy to look up, to lift their arms: Go, SAPS! Thank you SAPS for fighting the creemeenals! Go, Rondebosch Running Club! You can do it, Durbanveeeel!

Tired runners and their families walk the short distance back to their cars. Tonight they’ll make a braai. The aunties and uncles are coming; maybe a neighbour or two. They’ll bring tupperware for barakat so nothing goes to waste. Back to their houses in Mitchell’s Plain. Bloukrantz wood, klippies and coke and a barking dog. Auntie Salwaah has made her famous ‘Rille Gebak’ (spiced doughnuts). There was a special on lamb chops at Food Lover’s. They’ve been marinading all afternoon in shishamyana spice and love. Money is tight; there are no extras. But it’s lekker. It’s oraait. 

That uniquely South African smell of braai drifts across the city’s neighbourhoods, over the vibercrete walls, satellite dishes, guava trees, Toyota Cressidas. Epson Salt for aching muscles. Wyn vir die pyn. Kaptein, Span die Seile is playing somewhere. The other night, on the way back from the jol, my 17-year-old daughter and her friends asked the Uber driver to make a stop at McDonalds. They ended up having a picnic with him outside on the lawn. He wanted a Big Mac Meal. This stuff, the very marrow of South African life day-to-day, this doesn’t make it onto the news, but this is where we really live. Here, with our people.

A Moment

~ susanhayden ~ 34 Comments

The first time I saw him he was standing on Jammie steps with his back to me, broad against the sunlight. He was dressed like Jim Morrisson in a white pirate shirt and a series of leather necklaces. He laughed, and shook out his hair – lustrous long, brown curls that fell well past his angular shoulders. He was rangy in the way only 22-year-old men can be, and it took me some time before I realised he was something of a legend on that campus. He hung out with a posse of impossibly beautiful black girls. Rich, skinny girls with flawless skin and expensive sneakers and straight, white teeth. I’d watch him with them – the easy way they touched him like he wasn’t Jesus, just some guy studying anthropology.

I found out his name was Ben, and that he was foreign and a member of the Mountain Club. And someone told me where he lived and after a while I got a vague sense of his routines so that I knew, more or less, when he’d come sauntering by in his faded jeans and 6 foot 2-ness. And then he’d be gone again, somewhere else, and I was not cool at all nor pretty enough to compensate for my lack of street cred and there was no reason in the world why a guy like him would ever even think of a girl like me. And I didn’t question the order of the world for a second. Even though it seemed like that same order was about to change in a big way. Because, all around us, things were starting to give. In the words of Chinua Achebe, the centre could no longer hold; things were beginning to fall apart.

Sitting in my psychology class one morning beside an Indian girl who wore a different pair of Levis every day (you couldn’t buy them in South Africa due to sanctions against us so you had to go to London or send a friend) and behind a black guy in his thirties who worked the night shift as a petrol attendant and came straight to class in the morning, still wearing his uniform, suddenly we heard a noise and loud voices coming closer. My lecturer stopped lecturing and listened, looking worried. Then, without saying a word, went over to the door of the lecture hall, closed it and locked it.

We all sat very still. The noise increased – it was chanting, and things were being broken. It was the early nineties and the country, so long in apartheid’s stranglehold, was starting to break itself free. A crowd of people appeared. They held pangas and they danced. They smashed windows and kicked in doors. They set parked cars alight. We watched them out the window. Nobody spoke. The riot passed, and the noise died down. Still we waited. Silence. The door was unlocked, and we packed up our notebooks and left the building, the affected boredom we normally took such joy in practicing replaced by a sense of fearful anticipation. We walked past the rows of police vehicles, glancing nervously at the smouldering fires. A policeman waved us along, muttering under his breath.

Everything was happening, yet nothing was happening. We sat up late at night writing overdue papers and lived on popcorn and toast. I struggled to pass Stats. I flew through my English exams. I lugged The Riverside Chaucer up and down steep hills, found out I was a feminist and used the word ‘existential’ as often as I could. It was Cape Town, it was summer and there were parties to go to. And then, one night, there he was. It was a social at the Baxter, and we arrived late after most people had already left. The guy I was with knew him, and before I could even gather myself, he was introducing us and Ben was shaking my hand and smiling and saying hello.

And then, as if on cue, the opening bars of one of my all-time favourite songs, Juluka’s December African Rain started playing. And even then it was an old song, but there is some kind of magic in that music – the drums and the deep voices that sound like they come from inside the earth, itself, and how this Jewish boy from Joburg loved Zulus so much he became one, and back in those days, that was quite a thing. And by doing that, making that stand, he freed us more than we understood at the time. It was almost like everything we had not been allowed to love about Africa was being given back to us. Through his music we became impis; we were warriors; we were children of the land, united against a system so barbaric it made us sick to our stomachs. We were the new generation, and freedom was on its way.

I smiled at him and he smiled at me and we started dancing, me, my friends, the beautiful black girls and him. And then the party was over, so we left to go somewhere else. He got in the front seat of the car and I sat in the back, behind him, my mind reeling at his proximity to me, that he was really right here in the flesh, so impossibly close. And then, as we sped through the dark city streets, young people looking to have fun, the impossible happened. I felt his hand reach behind the seat and look for mine, find it, and enclose it in his long, brown fingers.

And I was so young and naive and taken aback by this gesture, what did I do? I giggled and pulled my hand away. I pulled my hand away. And then I sat in the darkness of the car feeling the heat creep up into my face; thinking, you idiot! You idiot! What did you do that for? And I prayed to the god of stupid young girls that he would just give me second chance. Just reach for my hand again. This time, I promise I won’t pull away. Because I have been in love with you for three years and never, in my wildest dreams, did I imagine you’d even give me the time of day. And I didn’t mean it, I didn’t! I was just taken by surprise. And as we drove on and the seconds ticked by, he sat very still, looking ahead of him – nobody else in the car even aware of this monumental thing that had just failed to happen. And with every streetlight we passed I knew with increasing certainly that I had missed my moment.

We never spoke again after that night. He’d give me a vague hello when we passed each other in the halls, and then I saw him less and less as he moved to another compass. His flat used to be on Rondebosch Main Road, just as you came off the freeway, its big windows facing the flyover. I drive past it once in a while when I’m going that way and I still think of him and that one night and how he’ll never know.

http://youtu.be/td8xC9lvHYQ