Cape Town Bus Depot Sign

Architects of Destiny

15^th March 2011

Another return to Jozi, this time from Cape Town, glorious Cape Town. I have been prejudiced about dear old Slaapstad, unable to reconcile the Great Divide of bling and excess with the shacks and single storey living.

But I landed gently, and settled into the arms of the mountain, the softness of the light and the sweetness of the air. My body took on a new hue from excercise and sunshine, and I felt full, strong in my muscles, as if I once more inhabited this form that is such a miracle.

During the week my passion for the work I have proposed to do in Jozi waned a bit. I’d arrived feeling burned out from traversing Joburg, the M1, N1, N12, running a workshop, and a lack of consistent support. My adrenals felt hammered, and I didn’t much want to socialise.

But socialise I did, with much fine wine and a day on the beach, which sorted me out, and I was in equilibrium once again.

Today, I read in the Mail and Guardian that Oliver Schmitz made a brilliant film that had a 10 minute standing ovation at Cannes. A few years ago whilst juggling work as a freelance editor and director for hire, he realised that he was “dividing his career path” by doing both, and decided to focus on editing. How very sensible and masculine of him. How very envious I am that he has such clarity.

What do I want to do? I want to set up a home, and in the evenings deface giant billboards, transforming them into powerful social messages. I want to hang beautiful art on my walls, and cover my furniture in brightly coloured fabric, and draw big charcoal pieces, paint large canvasses. I want to find a course of cutting edge study that merges radical town planning and economic transformation and upliftment,  and work with people to realise their dreams of good living. And I want to be with my husband, lovingly, with great friendship and exploration, and adopt some children and create a home. I want to create. And I want to partner with someone to create a home and a life to move and expand into. Its somewhat of a late realisation, this idea of teaming up with my beloved to create something together – it has always been me, just me, the architect of my own destiny. But I now know that my next step is with someone else whom I love and cherish.

                                                        Greenside newspaper advertisement

Cape Town

8^th March 2011

The mist from Table Mountain is right down in the city this morning, moving through the streets as if searching for something, investigating the lower ground. It’s a morning that should be spent in bed with a delicious book, occasional glances outside to confirm the necessity of a cocooned retreat.

What an astonishing place this is. I had forgotten, seeped in personal judgements about the great and glaring socio-economic divide, the ease with which the paler population lives in phenomenal material abundance here. What has always been jarring on arrival is the highway passage to the city, which is flanked by township and squatter camps that  wrench one into the present day moment, a slap in the face to remind you where you are and of one of the pricetags for this city’s narrowly planned evolution.

But now, thanks to RDP (Reconstruction and Development) housing, the wicked scar of shacklands has been reduced to a contained eyesore. Now there are houses, rows of boxes with nary a meter between them and not a tree in sight, but houses, hallelujah. There is evidence of progress, redress, and of course, like an extra limb that remembered to grow, emerging from those houses are corrugated iron add-ons, lean to's, extra rooms to house extra people, of which there are many. Ever since I was at university 20 years ago, the figure of 10 000 people per month has been bandied about – 10 000 people migrate to Cape Town a month – someone said it to me yesterday again. I’m not sure how they count this migration.

I made it through the highway passage, my senses intact, relieved to arrive at my friends’ house in Tamboerskloof, a lovely old home with a stoep (porch) looking bang onto Table Mountain, the whole chunk of rock right there in all of its glory, embracing the city. My friends are film-makers and social activists, so its always inspiring to be around them. There is interesting conversation and vigorous perspective, as well as great food and wine.

So I put my social equity scanner on stand-by, and let myself simply be and enjoy where I am. I lived in Cape Town for 6 years in my early twenties, so, like Johannesburg, there is memory projected onto many buildings and streets, but thankfully, I am a fully fledged adult now and have shed some of the scales of the less pleasant and destructive behaviours we so gleefully engaged in. A walk on the mountain is just that, my sense of smell alive after years of not smoking, the fynbos giving up such sweet, delectable scents, whilst above us the cloud pouring off Table Mountain moves into dragon shapes, helicopter and shark shapes, according to my friend’s six year old son.

Sunday was my birthday, what a beautiful day we had. I had happy birthday sung to me in English and Afrikaans by my three adult friends and the four children. We blew out candles and gorged ourselves on cake, swam, laughed and enjoyed the bright blue skies, Southern Hemisphere style. 

I was gifted with a bottle of Suikerbossie Premier Grand Cru, subtitled, Ek wil jou he (I want you). Such a gentle way to celebrate a birthday, unassuming and full of family, small children, in whose presence I rarely am.

 

 Above: Devil's Peak from Bo-Kaap

Back of Table Mountain from Bakoven Beach

District 9

26^th Feb, 2011

I spent the day in Ivory and Ebony Park yesterday, presenting the first Enterprise Powerhouse information session. W was the first to arrive early, and we had a great conversation about him and his business. His father left early on in his childhood and didn’t send him to school, and that is his big boulder on his shoulder, that he didn’t get an education and so can’t do his dream job, boilermaker. Boilermaker? Dream job? OK, if you say so. The guy has fabulous energy and is an entrepreneur. I asked a few questions around what he had gained by not going to school, the inquiry needed to go deeper but we made our way there. The Theory of Equilibration is such a great tool to reposition one's thinking.

Ivory Park is lovely, from a certain perspective. Its got  a great vibe, its like being in a rural area. Slow, rounded time with people everywhere. Being with J, much greeting and many introductions, we spent a really lovely afternoon putting up posters for the information session and letting people know about the project.

The day was marred by a massive traffic jam, so that it took me 3 hours to get home. At one point I got my laptop out of the boot and checked my email, and came across discussion on Facebook about a Spoek music video, that is quite dark and primal. The discussion started around how the gaze in the video was disturbing, and then it emerged that it was made by the same folks who made District 9, or “the loathsome” District 9, as the writer named it. I read on, as I enjoyed the film and thought it well made. And this is what was written on the discussion:

I don't think there is any subversion here looking at the credits of who made the video the usual suspects

The Gaze is coming from same place that produced our representations in the loathsome District 9. Its from a particular location in white South African's gaze and psyche and received perception which goes unperceived by them,uninformed, uninterrogated, unreconstructed and underlying the unrelinquised, innate and deeply comforting supremacy that cushions their existence in sunny SA, even the ones with "political " backgrounds or suss. Am still astounded how I have always been met with blank stares and "who is that?" when referencing Hall or Gilroy when talking representation issues. Happily, I have long abandoned educating the Other's Other. And so I stay sane.

I was very shocked that I hadn’t made a deeper inquiry into District 9, that I am in fact one of those white folks who hasn’t reflected past my current perception, and allowed the voo-doo-isation of black people to exist, so swept up was I in the horrific xenophobic attacks and the condemnation of South Africans’ actions against foreigners resident in SA. When it has all been too frightening and this group is herded into a mass of “the Other”, and when our unspoken feelings of exclusion and vulnerability seep up from our unconscious mind, it is this kind of thinking, this voodoo-isation, that creates the separation, like a mist that creeps in, a veil that wafts between black and white. I see this, the interpersonal dead-wall.

I am very disturbed that I so easily enjoyed District 9, a sci fi thriller about a space ship full of aliens that is stuck over Joburg, and when freed by the army, are kept in a fenced off area where Nigerians control the monopoly of cat food to which the aliens are addicted. The film represents aliens (illegal African immigrants) as such, and stereotypical Nigerians as vicious, slobbering predators, South Africans as negligent, careless observers, with a violent public service.  

This debate is what makes South Africa an incredibly important place for me to be in. Nowhere else would my thought be thus stretched. I have not encountered this level of debate around race in Australia, perhaps because I don’t move in the right circles. I don't see any evidence of a public debate on race there. This is also the discourse that runs in private conversations, black conversations, and which I would love to see go public. But then, I wasn’t here when District 9 was released, so I don’t know what was publically debated.

I am grateful to have my peers lay it on the table this vividly, so that I am moved forward by their experience and into more critical reflection of my interactions in this world.

Such dangerous stuff to write about, if I made it public I do believe I’d be making myself available for some rabid criticism. What comes from myself is what I fear coming from others – that I didn’t have these critical thoughts myself, that I am terminally white (no argument there), that I am dense, not insightful enough. Perhaps its all true, as I have been living my experience elsewhere. And this is how I learn about race and dynamics, to be here, and to see through the various filters we experience each other through, that the fear has created.

I find on Facebook some fairly vicious, if intelligent, comments about white people. I guess that’s because so many of us live here only focussed on our own wellbeing, protecting ourselves against whatever perceived threat. There are still maids and gardeners and people who raise other peoples’ children. Fat cats, beggars on streets, people walking, trudging, missioning everywhere.

What I love about being in Ivory Park is the humanity, just being there in a place of Africa, how ordinary it all is. I like the rounded edges, the softness in the air, the friendliness of the people. And I wish for other white south Africans that they could experience this too. I know they did with the rugby in Soweto. I don't mean that I'm having a quaint experience. There is tremendous hardship in Ivory Ebony Park, but what I see is a lot of white South Africa missing out on the positive qualities of black culture, because they exclude themselves from participating in it. 

Bismillah.

Fountainhead

19^th Feb, 2011

I have long been feeling that I am living in a fog. In my younger years it was a narcotic fog, herbal, filthy chemical, whatever could create the fog. Recently, in somewhat more sober years, the fog has seeped out since witnessing the damage I do to myself working therapeutically with people, holding them in their trauma, walking, sometimes stumbling out of the horror, the crippling pain and the decimated self worth. All those workshops, the sledgehammer to my body and my delicate energetic system, I am done with it. Done with it. I put a further 6 months into iDecided, which is a website where people working with trauma can swap sessions, debriefing and supervision, but that lay down flat on the African earth in December last year, and has refused to rise. I realised I had to flog it, to chase people up and down badly designed corridors, be stood up for meetings, pursue communications with no response from the very people I was trying to help. Sometimes, the message comes loud and clear.

I have just closed the yellowed, worn pages of a badly printed book, the cover long fallen off, depicting a platinum blonde who one would expect to see perched on a red Ferrari, or in a Bond film. The designer of this cover had clearly never read the book, the most extraordinary fiction ever written, with the most important message I have ever read. The Fountainhead – Howard Rourke’s opus. It has cut through my fumbling attempts to live this life given to me, and what I discover is that the very thing I am offering to others, Activating Genius, is the very thing I have been longing for, all my life. What a mess of a life it has been, surrounded by humans who believed they knew how to develop an individual. Occasionally ham fisted family, beautiful intentions but blind to individuality, sworn enemies of anything inner, firmly committed to pruning, clipping, moulding, beating the impetus out of the little animals in their care. Constipated contracted school, clueless, posturing, hopeless in any capacity to nourish something more delicate than fictionalised history and formulaic mathematics. Religion, friends, work, you know the drill, the waiting passageway of humans busy with other humans, determined to shape humanity so that their very own genius never gets a spot of airtime.

What was it I wanted to do? I wanted to sing, to write, to create music. I just hope its not too late to make contact with that of me, like it was for Peter Keating, when he finally painted, it was gone.

I also understand my devotion and admiration to P now – he was fiercely, uncompromisingly individualistic, but I also suspect the violence of his creation was to scare people into submission. Compared to him, J is a  mere man in a suit. A second-hander. In his brother’s shadow, brilliant, I do believe it was a fight all his life to stand out. Genius, but I wonder what his real genius is?

And what mine will be? How about I approach The Enterprise Powerhouse not as an altruistic project, but a piece of work that is to serve my genius, my individuality, my unique configuration. Yes, this will be good. All the altruism didn’t feel right, it was the fog, and I think that’s part of this hunger for a partner, a man, that disowned part of me created a hunger for it in someone else. I served J, disconnecting from myself around him, in his space. Perhaps he picked it up and was repulsed by it, perhaps that was the key that set me free from him, it would have been so horrible to be with him, had he said yes to me in January.

The song I discovered this week, the tablecloth that holds the map of the singer's desire, tells him, “You’re the wrong turn, a big fat no, the fifth drink before a long drive home …. You’re the bars to my cage, you’re all I think about every day … every time you walk by, I am drawn to you. Desire, such a wicked little high, when the one you want, is blind to you ….”

His blindness, or clarity will set me free. It is a feeling I have that we would be great together, but he will destroy me. As will altruism destroy me.

My intention that I put out to the universe: An investor will come on board, and want me to start The Enterprise Powerhouse as soon as possible, latest September 2011, and will generously renumerate me to do so, with 12 extraordinary, motivated, committed geniuses enrolled to the course.

Thank God for Ayn Rand, thank God for The Fountainhead. What I wrote down this morning from the hallowed book:

The creator is not concerned with disease, but with life.

And ….

There is no substitute for personal dignity. There is no standard of personal dignity except independence.

How different might my life have been if I’d have realised this in my twenties? But it is how it is, and it is not too late.  I will make music, and I will write, and I will be successful with The Enterprise Powerhouse, in shAllah. I have licence to be myself, to abide by my own barometer of “yes” or “no”, and even though other people are hovering around the project, the shall be great wide open spaces for lateral stretches of creativity to breathe in four dimensions and expand into something brilliant, breathing genius. 

Security

14^th Feb, 2011

I’m not quite sure how to feel, about to sleep inshAllah in this Bryanston house, perched on the first floor, the ground floor secure, the stairwell terribly secure with inch wide solid metal bars hacked shut by a heavy padlock.

Up here, in the king size bed of foam, perched on the wall is a small dvd player, on its own little custom made stand, wired into the alarm system, flashing scenes from the four cameras which cover the entrance gate, the front door, the back yard and the parking area. What a nightmare it must be to have insomnia, and to lie here watching the grim grainy black and white images switch so clumsily to each other.

A moth flies before the lens, hogging the limelight, shamelessly.

Whilst I was cooking my spinach earlier, I looked down and noticed my armour. On my upper chest lay my tawiz, protection from Shaykh Nazim, the prayer inscribed within the sewn leather triangle. Further down, around navel height, dangled the panic button, hung from an unattractive, cheap silver chain. And at my ankles, lay the lovely Ms S, pit bull terrier, more sweetheart than any pit pull I have imagined. Probably the dog with the finest manners in Johannesburg, aside from her rancorous farting.

So I am not sure what to feel up here in this bedroom. With all the security I wonder if I should suspect some horror has already occurred here? I do not know this area, have only heard of too many robberies, too many hideous home invasions (they don’t call them home invasions here – I’m not sure those orgies of torture and pillage have their own title as yet). The spectre of events I have heard or read about hover in my mind, this being a wealthy area. I have no desire to live here, in the north, where apparently beauty only resides within homes, the pavements merely a supporting role to the high electric fences.

This screen on the wall sends its tired message into this room, and I wonder what my mind will think of tonight. I wonder what I will dream in this new room, this house where I have had so much emotional discomfort in the last month. InshAllah, I will sleep deeply, and the dreams that come my way will continue to inform me, to teach me and remind me. InshAllah. To choose not to plug into the house’s personal fear matrix will free my sleep tonight, so, I push down the little screen with its grainy images, the dull light leaves the room, g’nite. ….

            

North of the Zambezi

North of the Zambezi – 10^th Feb 2011

This morning at 8am I stepped onto my yoga mat, preparing for the day I prostrated to the north-west, “Haq”, I bow to the truth. Trucks rumbling in the background, the sound of the building supervisor’s voice became louder and louder as the concrete mixer rotated. He started yelling and I was reminded, I’m north of the Zambezi, as my friend B put it, north of the line that separates Jo’burg and Rosebank to the south, to everything in the north. I am WAY north of the Zambezi, here in Irene, surrounded by Centurion, rapidly becoming one of my least favourite places on the planet.

When I heard the supervisor scream, “Come on man, you fucking useless, hurry up,” my rage surged. Off the mat I marched to the building site in my yoga gear, passing A, the old Zulu man in his overall who works in this complex full time, who was standing watching the performance from a distance. “Eish, hy vloek die manne, ne?” (“he’s cursing the men hey?”)

“Eish,”  he replied.

I tried to get the supervisor’s attention to let him know that we could hear him and could he tone it down. He ignored me, so I got a bit of paper and a pen and pointedly stood taking down the company details, ready to burn his sorry ass. At which point he came over and asked what the problem was. By this time I was furious, and let him have it, which I don’t often do.

“Its unacceptable that you are talking to these men like this and telling them they’re fucking useless. We can hear you loud and clear …” I went on, basically in a fury telling him they deserved dignity and we didn’t want to hear his abuse. He apologised, and when I stormed off, I realised that what I’d wanted to say was that this kind of behaviour is why some black people hate white people so much. Remember Eugene Terreblanche? What is with these kind of South Africans that they can’t see the correlation between violent crime and command language, control behaviour, treating people like dumb animals? What does this fellow think the consequences of his vitriol will be?

God, this place is heavy. This far north of the Zambezi does my head in. Its ugly, lacks progressive thought, makes me want to flee south, to the arms of Jozi where less of this goes on.

Mind you, when I was furniture shopping near Northcliff, I think the area was called Albertskroon, with my friend last week. The blonde Afrikaans lady who served us, ciggie in one hand coffee in the other, not an ounce of fat on her tiny body, declared her dominion by leading us to the workshop at the back of the shop and yelling at the top of her voice, “Hey … WARASSA! Shut up, julle raas,” (“you’re making a noise”) to a group of black men crafting tables, chairs, cabinets. Ugly, unnecessary, she was quietly embarrassed when she realised we didn’t occupy the same side of the Great Divide as she did.

Awful, dark country this is. Awful and dark when the men choose to stay in the employ of the Nazi, as we now refer to her, where these confounding relationships are perpetuated, where the filth of dominion, disdain, disregard and victimhood smears itself over our days. Oh I’m dark today, I apologise, but I feel terribly, terribly dark.

My friend pulled me up on the weekend, on what I said about the risk of the current socio-political discourse becoming a cliché. He identifies as black, occasionally taking  the righteous pedestal, and feels to correct me about this: he thought I was saying that the post-apartheid discourse was a cliché, and that I was, like a typical whitefella, disregarding the suffering of the blackfellas. This is not at all what I was saying; I am looking for tangents, byways, other avenues of the cultural discourse, to reveal some enlightening perspectives. I realise I have the freedom to do this, by virtue of my historical privilege, bolstered by the deeply entrenched sense of entitlement that hums within me. 

But from this morning’s horrible story, and from the daily scenes of black people being berated, commanded, ignored, corrected, badgered, diminished by white people, those backroom scenes, sometimes in public, but often I guess lonely, humiliating scenes, I recognise that there is a need for the solid post/anti-apartheid discourse  to hold firm, to remain rooted deep in the earth and not be shaken, even though some people switch off, some roll their eyes, glaze over, some simply observe.  That perhaps now, more than ever, is a time for vigilance, whilst we distil and implement the constitutional and legal process, perhaps it is timely to break out fresh language around human rights.

Unfortunately we are often ruled by the dictates of the markets, our virtual Hitler, with all the fear mongering and manipulating of the national psyche around job numbers. Hallowed job numbers. These numbers are part of the game, critical aspects to dividends and prospects, quarterly earnings and political sales pitches. Without brilliant leadership, which is absent, the one way we can move this society into empowerment is through individuals affecting local pockets and the ripple effect that will result. Economic policy is meaningless to the guy spreading the liquid concrete under the viper tongue of the supervisor and his black moustache; he will probably only get paid R50 or R100 for the days work anyway. My contribution is a program to develop entrepreneurs, inshAllah, as I don’t believe in relying on job creation or being an employee to guarantee the freedom of your soul or your pocket.

Get me out of here. Out of this headspace and into something softer. But this, snor city, (moustache city), this Pretoria,  is what I chose when I arranged to stay here for these days. I trust my soul, I trust these distastefully uncomfortable situations that ignite my ire. These days fuel my fire around injustice and abuse, and bring into close range the power that I gained from my cultural heritage that I can harness and use for good now. It is risky, stepping into the warzone of race and human dynamics, I may get annihilated, I may be humiliated. I may be responding to historical triggers that are unresolved in me. But what I do know is that I can’t stand by, I cannot simply observe people’s struggles. As much as I wish someone would help me, even rescue me, love me, respect me, care for me, protect me, so I must do for others when situations arise.

Usually I am more cautious, circumspect before entering the fray, but I am further fuelled by the ferocious energy of Gauteng, of this land that has been ravaged by mining concessions, and pays us back with toxic acid water. Bakes us with heat, submits to our manic highways and byways, only to drive us forward with the urgency of creation on the edge. I do not know any other city in the world that propels its citizens with such raw, voracious, insatiable energy.

What I do know is, here, north of the Zambezi, I miss the progress of Jozi, I miss the embrace of my old lover and can’t breathe much in the mist of the conservative population that manages this energy. This is an old feeling, an old distaste that carries with it all that appalling legacy, and when I see it re-enacted it brings a whole Mail & Guardian, Vrye Weekblad history and vigilance, and I want to be done with the contractions of the past, done with the need to diminish and control  each other, done with the division of labour that has not really changed, in for example, the building industry on show today.

Tell me – am I simply a naïve woman? Gone too long and too sensitive? What I am interested in is a life beyond fear of each other, and with every abusive encounter, how we set ourselves back to a fearful, bitter, back-biting society. Maybe I’m too much of an idealist, or I believe too much in alchemy, what can evolve from merging disparate elements. Maybe I spend too much time on my own, so that I can entertain ideals. Maybe I’m out of touch, but my curiosity is heartfelt, as is my frustration with the days that fail to produce the possibilities that I hold.