Category Archives: Ideas

Being South African

Ideas, Travel

Dis ‘n bitterbessie dagbreek, dis ‘n uitroep komma-punt
Mabalel is huistoe, want sy mis haar eie kind
Ek wens ek kon jou teken met ‘n koukie of ‘n kwas
Ek wens ek kon onthou hoekom ek so bewerig was
Ek wens ek kon jou oopskryf, met my balpunt pen behaag
Ek wens ons kon saam wakker word in ‘n youth hostel in Praag

Liefde uit die Oudedoos, Koos Kombuis

Ek lewe
Gemaak om na liefde te strewe
Op vlerke van vriendskap to swewe
Sonder vra, sonder sorge
Dag vir dag dreun ritme om my heen
Voel die ure vol, en tog alleen
Maar jou blik verslaan my vrese
Son, saffier, lag in jou wese
Bring geluk wat lank verlore was

Ek lewe, Karen Zoid

South Africa is a beautiful country. A kaleidescope of different beauties.

Like frost on the veld on a winter morning, icy-white on the dry, pale grass, in a valley surrounded by sweeping mountains dotted with trees and blood-red aloes.

In Autumn, the winelands of the Western Cape are spashed with colour: the yellow and orange and brown of the Autumn vines, darker evergreens on the slopes, the blues and browns of dams thirsting for the rainy season, empty blue skies and changing-colour oaks.

The moon rising over the Cape Town city bowl, the mountain rising from a haze of pinks and purples and blues, from where we sit on a gently swaying boat in the bay, the chilly breeze off the atlantic, the spray salty, the bubbly sweet

So many beauties. Grahamstown sunsets and cold beer. Highveld storms. The empty freedom of the Karoo. Evenings in De Akker and Springbok. The soaring Drakensberg. Mangroves in KZN. Long stretches of untouched Wild Coast beach.

Last week, the ANC presidential candidate said that Afrikaaners are the only whites who are truly South African. At the time, I didn’t pay too much attention; just another outlandish comment from someone who will say anything to please the audience to whom he is speaking. Today, reflecting on the NPA decision, I found myself retreating into music that I realised how angry his comment made me.

My comfort-music, the music that makes me feel whole again, is Koos Kombuis (with the fading echoes of ‘n SoutPaddy), Chris Chameleon, Klopjag, Karen Zoid, etc., etc. It’s ironic: the only subject I have ever failed was Afrikaans (in Std 2). My soul is Afrikaans. Die ‘taal van my hart’ is Afrikaans. But I’m not Afrikaans. I’m an English-speaking white South African.

I am angry, offended, impotently raging at the idea that anyone, anyone, questions my identity as a South African. When white South Africans go overseas they are often asked how they can be white and still come from Africa. We put up with it and laugh it off because they’re foreigners. It stops being funny when it happens at home. People joke and laugh about it but so many of us who were born here and who lived through the the transition and were part of the emergence of this new democracy remain fiercely attached to this country. No matter where we go, and many of my generation, many of my friends, are scattered across the globe, we remain fiercely, devotedly South African. And none of us is comfortably with anyone questioning that identity. I suppose heightened by the recent happenings just across the border in Zim with the strong suggestion that white Zimbabweans are not welcome.

It is not okay to me – and to many others I know – for anyone to question or throw doubt on my identity as a South African. I don’t care whose parents’ parents’ parents’ came from somewhere else (and everyone’s did), this is home –

There is a saying in Zulu: ‘If you were in my flesh, I could tear you out, But you are in my blood, which cannot be divided.’ Recessional for Grace, Margeurite Poland

I am an African. I am a South African. Wherever I happen to wander, on the earth and intellectually, I carry with me the red soil of the karoo, the soaring Drakensberg, the snow on the mountains around Worcester, the winelands in Autumn, Table Mountain from the bay at sunset, bright red aloes in winter-white grass and a million other moments that are my anchor. My identity is complex and multiple and complicated and no-one, particularly not someone who purports to be a leader of all South Africans, has a right to question the South African-ness of it. I’m not much of a fan of fighting but I would fight for this.

Moments of wonder

Ideas

het satteliet tv jou bron van avontuur geword?
en is jou playstation nou die somtotaal van jou genot?

het jy gehoor wat het geword van jan tuisbly?
hy het geglo dat hy alles tuis kon kry
en onbewus van wat daar is
wat buite sy voordeur skuil het hy
uitgemis op

acapulco, amsterdam, londen en berlyn
phoenix arizona waar die son ook lekker skyn
brussels, delhi, moskou, machu picchu in peru
san francisco, shangai en ja, selfs ook timbuktu.

Chris Chameleon, Reis

I love this song. The sentiment is something that makes complete sense to me and I know lots of the people feel the same. Travel is a crucial part of being. Not just travel. It’s about having experiences. It struck me last night (which watching a fantastic Chris Chameleon show) that the feeling of wonder that accompanies being in far off places and doing things I wouldn’t normally do (like spending 5 hours travelling in a dodgy taxi that leaked all the way), is the same sense of wonder that accompanies the experience of good live theatre. One of the reasons that Grahamstown festival is such a joy is that it is an increadibly intensive period of wonder. A week filled with hours of suspention of disbelief and believing in magic.

Some people think I am odd because I get so excited about things which seem ordinary to others. I experience such an increadible sense of wonder at some things that others find simple. Sometimes they are as basic as a perfect day or the increadible beauty of a karoo landscape stretching to forever. Other times they are things like shows or art exhibitions or books or lectures that stretch me and make me more than I was before. I recently read (for the first time) On Liberty. The feeling of wonder was the same.

I suppose the realisation is that I want all of my life to be filled with those moments. I may never have stability and the stable satisfaction of the blossoming of relationships and months and years of hard work into something gently beautiful. Perhaps it is sufficient compensation that my years will be filled with moments of extreme, of increadible wonder and joy. Joy will, of course, not fill every moment and my life will continue to have many lows, and lows as hard and deep as the moments of wonder are high. But they are infinitely bearable in exchange for the joy.

When I am old, I shall sit and write and think and remember these moments. Many will have tangible records – photographs, scrapbooks, writing, old newspapers and stories I have kept and the music and writing and pictures of those with whom I have shared those moments. Perhaps it is melancholy and defeatist to think of growing old alone but I like to be realistic. If that is what awaits me, I am so glad I will have these memories to hold on to, these journeys, mental and physical. And I’m so glad that I have learnt to hold on – in the face of all entreaties to be a grown up and not be so excitable –  to this precious capacity to expereince moments of increadible wonder.

Palau

Ideas

One trip across the border and the travel-bug has bitten! I suppose the desire to know different people and different places has always been there – a desire I’ve explored through books and stories – and finally taking this Mozambique trip has made acting on that desire and travelling to far-off places seem more of an option.

It occurs to me that this epiphany probably shouldn’t coincide with getting National Geographic. There was a show this evening about the fossilised remains of small people found in two caves on opposite sides of the main island of the micronesian nation of Palau. It’s fascinating. I am intrigued. A national of little people who lived between 3000 and 1500 BP and then vanished from the earth. People who came from across the seas to these coral islands. People who are smaller than other humans of the time but who seem to be human. The researchers think they may have been ordinary-sized humans who rapidly evolved to be smaller (except for their teeth, which apparently take longer) and then were wiped out by something… no-one is quite sure what.

I suppose the academic reaction is that I want to study the situation. And possibly find some way to study some of the disciplines that would let me study the situation. Even without the formal access to the information, I’m sure I’ll read up on it and keep my eye out for papers like this one. I’m particularly interested in the idea of elastic and/or multi-directional human evolution. I’m fairly sure, in general, that the idea of evolution, when taken as the idea of movement along a fixed line in a fixed, particular direction, has been over-generously applied, particularly in it’s application to social or societal development. This is my big objection to stage theories of human social development. It’s fascinating to think that there might be physical evolutionary evidence of a group of people who evolved in the opposite direction (in this case smaller instead of larger) to other human groups.

Whether or not it’s true, whatever else I find out about these ‘little people’ of Palau, I now have at least one place on my list of ‘places to visit before I die’. I guess once the travel bug bites there really is no turning back.

See you in the Republic of Palau…