All posts by Claire

About Claire

Wandering (and wondering) development professional and aspiring aid worker. Contact me on anticipationofwonder[at]gmail[dot]com

Morning

KZN,
Some mornings are a gift. Today, as I opened the curtains, above the hill across the valley from me the sun rose, a giant luminous, golden-red ball against the cloudy sky. Fine drifts of cloud across the face of the deep-pink-red ball just emphasized the intensity of the colour. I rushed inside to get a camera but of course my camera isn’t good enough to capture this exceptional site. Instead I stood and watched it as it rose slowly and disappeared into the denser clouds.
Far above, the edges of clouds still carried a tint of rose-pink, the last remnants of sunrise. The birds sang and far-away laughing voices drifted on the quiet morning air. The day began.

Some mornings are a gift. Today as I opened the curtains, above the hill across the valley, the sun rose, a giant luminous, golden-red ball against the cloudy sky. Fine drifts of cloud across the face of the deep-pink-red orb just emphasized the intensity of the colour. I rushed inside to get a camera but of course my camera couldn’t capture this. Instead I stood and watched it as it rose slowly and disappeared into the denser clouds.

Far above, the edges of clouds still carried a tint of rose-pink, the last remnants of sunrise. The birds sang and far-away laughing voices drifted on the quiet morning air. The day began.

A developing multi-culturalism for South Africa – Rhythms of the Eastern Cape

Arts, Ideas, South Africa, ,

Something special is happening in the Eastern Cape. Or at least, something special is happening at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown later this month/early next month: the beginnings of the disaggregation of the catch-all categories, that have plagued and defined South Africa’s history, into self-selected, fluid, fascinating groupings.

For years (decades? generations?) South African people have been categorized – assigned to different groups by outsiders. Whether it was the British Government in the 1800s or the Apartheid government last century, and probably long before that. Groups were considered static, inflexible and uniform. Of course, the largest of these unbending group categories was race. South Africa, under Apartheid – and still today because of employment equity – had 4 race groups: Black, White, Coloured and Indian, further designated ‘white’ and ‘non-white’. All people were assigned to one or other of the race groups (whether or not they fitted) and their future would hence-forth be determined based on that race. The classification was so important that even ID numbers indicated a person’s race.

In the new South Africa, things have relaxed a bit and there has finally been a recognition that race is not a real indicator of the group to which a person belongs. But a society used to classification does not move easily to a flexible multi-culturalism. For many, the 11 official languages present a neat set of categories to replace race in the country. But the 11 drastically oversimplify the complex multi-cultural society that is South Africa. The idea that there are 11 distinct and internally homogenous groups in the country is laughable. These 11 groupings, while based on language are seen by many as a mirror of 11 (or at least 9) black ‘nations’. But this is a completely inaccurate picture of the country. These supposed ‘nations’, these static, homogeneous classes of people do not exist. People don’t fall neatly into 11 distinct ‘nations’.

The country is far more complex than that and is home to many more cultures.  Some of these cultural groupings are being explored/exploring their own existence through their distinctive music and dance at this year’s National Arts Festival. Through a series of lunchtime concerts – Rhythms of the Eastern Cape – the music and dance of five groups of Eastern Cape people will be presented: AmaMphondo, AbeSuthu, AmaKhoisan, AmaBhaca and AbaThembu. These groupings are not categories sustained by the imposition of an external labels; they are created and recreated on an ongoing basis by people who self-identify as part of the groups. They have distinct cultures in the sense of culture as a way of being and expressing identity. Their histories are necessarily complex, incorporating many influences, from the groups their ancestors met and interacted with on their long journey, over millennia, from the heart of Africa to their Southern home – a history often predating the recorded or recognised existence of the specific group – to the people they met on arrival in the Eastern Cape and the settlers with whom they shared their land and later a country. All these interactions influence the development of each distinct music and dance style.

True multi-culturalism is not simply attempting to assign each person to a pre-defined group in order to make it possible for these people who have different (static, unchanging) ‘cultures’ to work together. It requires a mental shift from externally imposed categories to the recognition that cultures are eternally adapted, adopted, created and recreated by the people who self-identify with those cultures, who view that culture/those cultures as an intrinsic part of their identity as ‘self’. It requires that each person be treated as a unique individual because generic categories imposed on others are never enough to explain or understand the cultural identities of individuals – crude stereotyping as illogical as assuming that all women or all people from the continent of Asia will think and act the same.

Multi-culturalism is the pioneering work of the groups performing at the National Arts Festival, not as activists, but in celebration of their cultures. Through sharing, exploring and enjoying their own ways of being, they will begin to reject the crude categories that were once imposed by others and implicitly celebrate the kind of multi-cultural society that will (and should) be.

Rhythms of the Eastern Cape will be at ILAM at the following times:

Friday 1 July 13:00 AmaMphondo
Sunday 3 July 13:00 AbeSuthu
Tuesday 5 July 13:00 AmaKhoisan
Thursday 7 July 13:00 AmaBhaca
Saturday 9 July 13:00 AbaThembu

Duration: 1 hour                  Tickets: free

Joy, Work and Home

Ideas, ,

I am reading Le Guin again. The Dispossessed – my favourite of her books. In the strange limbo of relocating to a new city, it seems appropriate. It feels like home. That strange, slippery concept of home, always just beyond my grasping fingers.

In Le Guin’s fictional anarchist world, the language has only one word for work and play. They are the same word, the same thing. Today felt like that for the first time in years. It feels good to come home to the work that I love. After Korea, after so many months of doing work that was not mine. That work was work. It was counting the hours and getting through the days. It was living for the weekends when I could put on my red boots and pack my little backpack and see new places and discover new things. Or spend hours in coffee shops and bars and discover friends and acquaintances. Not that there was anything wrong with the discovering and the travel and the friends. But the work hours felt wasted. Work has always been central to who I am, to how I enter the world. I lost that for a while.

Today I felt like I had found it again. Today I sat for hours, hardly noticing time, and the words and the numbers danced and played and became the thing I wanted them to be. But not just any words and numbers. Words and numbers about the things that I know and love. Things I think about just before I sleep and when I wake up in the middle of the night. The things that engage me, like food security and development and poverty and aid. Words and numbers that are ideas made tangible. The visible parts, the bits that are useful and relevant on the page right now, but that are part of a bigger picture, of a slowly twisting whirlwind of ideas about security and poverty and development and hope.

There is a joy in doing real, hard, relevant work. Thinking work. Work that is bigger than who I am, that is part of a larger moment, part of a giant, swirling atmosphere of ideas. It feels like being connected to that ethereal whirl of ideas. Like spending a day of hard, intense work dancing in and out of that mist of thoughts to catch in your net, just the right concepts and phrases and arguments for now.

This work, the work I love, is not just a part of who I am; it is my home. This whirling unreal reality is where I live. It is where I thrive, where I find the energy to keep going, to keep doing. It is where I meet the people who excite and inspire me. It shouldn’t be called ‘work’. It should have the same name as play. It challenges and energizes and stimulates me as much as the rush and the swirl of debate.

Perhaps tomorrow I’ll feel differently. Perhaps one flurry of thoughts is only the illusion of a whirlwind. Perhaps ‘home’ is as ephemeral as that exquisite moment when all the words dance into place with a gentle sigh of peace. But that is a beautiful place. Home is an idea. It is a difficult, fleeting idea for those who have chosen against the settled comfort of suburbia. Perhaps the compensation is the thrill of an intellectual-emotional home just a wish away from the work that, if you are lucky, you do each day.