Monthly Archives: June 2011

Walking into the mist

KZN
Today was a difficult morning. It was cold and I was tired and getting out of bed was a strain. By the time I was ready to go (late, of course – or at least later than usual), the sun was up, bathing the waking valley in golden-red light.

I walk to work. The reasons relate mostly to the lack of available vehicular transportation. It’s less of a hardship than it sounds. It’s good exercise. And I don’t mean “good” in the sense that everyone should have to do exercise every day. It feels good. My walk starts with a steep hill, which gets a little easier every day; then a long stretch of relatively level ground and finally a little stretch that is more open and gentle, where I can relax into the morning. With music, or some mornings without, greeting other morning walkers along the way, it’s a great space to think and process and just be.

Today, I started walking in sunshine. The day had dawned; it was beautiful and clear, except for some wispy mist curling around the foot of the distant hills. Thick dew, maybe even frost, made the morning sparkle as I set off. As I headed out on the flat stretch of my walk, I noticed that the valleys around me were filling up with thicker mist.

Around the corner and mist began to close in. Another corner and I was walking in a world blanketed in white. Eerie silence enveloped everything. Water droplets gathered on my hair and my clothes. I stopped to put the bright orange rain-cover over my day-pack – hoping the cars driving past would see me more easily.

This road is normally busy in the mornings. Today it seemed empty. Occasionally, the headlights of a car would burst through the mist a little way off. In seconds the vehicle had rushed past and was gone. I walked on. Alone in the chilly mist that shut out everything, everyone else.

At work, everything is quite. The thick drifts of mist seem to get heavier all the time. As I sit at my desk, window open to the fresh air, drifts of mist curl around the window-frame, come creeping, stealing into my office. The shapes of bushes in the garden outside are dark silhouettes against the white. The grass is wet with a fine layer of droplets. Nothing moves but the mist. The morning’s sunlight on dew is a distant memory. The mist seems to go on forever.

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