After years collecting volumes of
harrowing testimony, Desmond Tutu’s Truth and Reconciliation
Commission (TRC) reported it’s findings to the
world while we were in Cape Town. The TRC represented
a symbolic attempt by a new nation to come to terms
with the madness of the apartheid years. Searching for
"the truth" is always hazardous. This was
my third visit to South Africa in nine months. For me,
things have got more rather than less complex with each
visit. As I suspect it still will be for South Africans,
despite the TRC’s best endeavour, "the truth" of
the situation remains not just painful but elusive.
But I do come back from the Crossings
project with many strong images from a variety of encounters:
The epic scale of the township at
Khayelitsha. Hundreds of thousands of people inhabit
this part of the Cape Flats, living in sheds about the
same size as the one at the bottom of my garden. Standing
on the climbing frame in the yard of the Khayelitsha
Craft Market you see the shanty stretching far, far
away into the distance. But the expressions on the faces
of the people of Khayelitsha are not the stares of despair
newsreels so often capture as their representation of
black Africa; children laugh, rush up and demand you
take their photo, beaming joyfully at the inscrutable
lens. Amused adults look on, smile and wave.
Filing past Mandela’s cell
number 5 in B section of the Robben Island jail.
The guides on the Robben Island tour are all ex-political
prisoners. Impassively they tell of the atrocities
routinely
committed by the prison staff on captive veterans
of the struggle who transgressed a rule. Like being
buried
up to your neck in sand and left all day in the Cape
heat; when a jailer finally arrived and asked if
you
were thirsty a positive reply meant them urinating
in your mouth. That after 27 years of this Mandela
could
emerge not just sane but magnanimous is, to me, profoundly
incomprehensible.
Tatumkhulu Afrika reading his poem
Nothing’s Changed at the exact spot where he lived
before District Six was bulldozed. An old man unable
to forgive or to forget. Rightly raging. Thin voiced,
Tatumkhulu spoke of Montstrasse where he lived and where
one single palm tree is now the only marker of that
part of the bustling community where, he said, for the
first and only time in his life, he felt "at home".
But two years after he found his spiritual home, this
area on the edge of the city centre, a melting pot of
Cape cultures, was declared "White" under
the Group Areas Act and then systematically ripped down.
Ethnic cleansing of a city suburb. Aged sixteen, Marc,
whose parents had been thrown out of their District
Six home too, listened intently to the poet’s gentle
bitterness. Then quietly said "But some things
have changed Tatumkhulu. Isn’t it time to move
on?"
But the strongest impression was
of people facing an uncertain future with nobility
and fortitude. Strongest of all was the fierce pride
on
the face of each and every child and adult, black,
white or coloured, who, hand clenched to breast,
boomed out
the anthem of the rainbow nation, Nkosi Sikele iAfrica.
In the words of the woodcut print by John Muafangejo
which emblazoned the T-shirts we bought at the Khayelitsha
Craft Market, the main memory I come away with is
a
sense of a people imbued with "hope and optimism
in spite of the present difficulties."
November 1998
