"Being American and All", Capetown, South Africa

Rabbi's Notes - February 2006

by Rabbi Margaret Holub

Greetings from Sunrise Mansions #5, our wild and wonderful apartment (excuse me, “flat”) at the top front of a building (sorry, “block”) hovering right over the Indian Ocean coast of Cape Town (where I shouldn’t even tell you we’re wearing shorts every day and nursing sunburns…) Our friends Eddie and Helen Tilanus own the block and saved this fabulous roost for us. They wrote the book on hachnasat orchim, the welcoming of guests, not only giving us the flat and furnishing it but even filling the fridge with days’ worth of groceries, driving and hiking us all over the place and patiently answering our millions of questions about everything we see and do. We are staying in Muizenberg, the “suburb” (which here means neighborhood outside the City Center) where the Tilanuses live. Sadly for us, it is a famous surfing beach with wide white sands and glorious warm-enough water. The town itself could be Santa Cruz – lots of surf shops and internet cafes, a little run-down but coming up. The biggest difference (another being the delightful Cape Dutch architecture everywhere we look) is that the mobs of surfers, families and sun worshippers frolicking on Muizenberg beach are totally racially mixed – black, white and “coloured,” (a classification which takes in Cape Malay Muslims, people of mixed race, Indians and others.) It’s a sight for sore Mendocino Coast eyes.

For those of you Megillah readers who don’t know the ins and outs of my daily life, I have just begun my three-month sabbatical. We’ve been in Cape Town five-plus days. I haven’t yet started the work I came to do – at least not officially. I will meet folks at the Desmond Tutu Peace Centre and the Tygerberg Hospital next Monday and Tuesday and will hopefully dig right in from there. I’ll fill you in on those adventures in the next installment of the Megillah. For now I find myself watching wide-eyed and especially listening wide-eared all around me wherever we go. Stories abound, and sometimes people don’t even know that they are telling them.

Today, for instance, we were traipsing around the mountainside that rises steeply upward from the ocean where we’re living. Trying to cut back down to the Main Road, we took a shortcut through a closed historical building. Only it wasn’t closed, as it happened.

A pleasant-faced black caretaker was sweeping the path, and Eddie apparently knows him. The caretaker invited us inside. It turned out to be a little courtroom, very sparse, which had been turned into a museum. In the main room we saw a box for testifying and another for swearing in witnesses. Things were neatly labeled, and there were even a few mannequins placed behind the registrar’s window and such. But, said Andy, the caretaker, the museum has been closed for the past four years, and he is employed mostly to guard it and keep it from being looted and destroyed. He keeps the place immaculate and, with no funding or even directive to do so, has created a lovely garden in back by digging up indigenous plants from the mountainside and cultivating them.

Andy is actually a policeman, and this is his posting. He is sad that the museum is closed. “The new government isn’t very comfortable with this piece of history,” he said a bit wryly. Inside, pictures of sour-faced white magistrates hung on the walls. A black robe was pinned to the wall behind a raised dais where the judge once sat and heard cases. With a pleasant smile Andy pointed out that there were two entrances to the courtroom. All old buildings, he said, would have two doors and two stairways, one for blacks and one for whites. This was a courtroom for blacks and coloreds. White arrestees were tried elsewhere.

He took us downstairs to a pair of windowless brick cells. Layers of names were scratched in the walls. Mickey asked if that graffiti was recent, and Andy said no, that some of those names were a hundred years old. It was a miserable, airless place, with buckets for toilets. Sometimes, Andy said, the cells were packed standing-room-only with prisoners. In one of the cells there was a display of handmade weapons, many with names I had read in books about apartheid, like pangas and zip guns. There were spears, clubs, whips. Andy confirmed that these had been used by blacks during the anti-apartheid riots in the eighties. In another downstairs room we saw a carefully-labeled “punishment bench” with a pillow on it and five four-foot-long canes. The pillow was labeled “for protection of the kidneys.” Andy said, “I myself was punished on this very bench.” As a fourteen-year-old growing up in one of the squatter camps, he liked to hike and camp with his friends on school holidays. One Saturday, he told us, he and his friends were hiking towards the Cape Point, and, instead of walking miles around whites-only Muizenberg Beach, they walked across the beach on their way south. A policeman grabbed him and one other boy, and they were thrown into that same dungeon we were standing in. They were kept until Monday, when they could be brought before the Magistrate. He and his friend were each sentenced to five lashes, which were administered immediately.

Mickey asked him, “When you think today about that policeman who beat you, how do you think of him?” And Andy kept smiling and said, “I have him to thank for who I am today. That day I decided that I would become a policeman myself and show them how it should be done.”

Just a few days earlier we had been chatting about experiments in which people are asked to wear glasses with two different colored lenses. I guess that eventually the brain reconciles the dissonance and things look normal again. This impromptu visit to the jail made me feel like I had different lenses on each eye. The museum was obviously put together during the years when apartheid was in place, and its white curators were completely unselfconscious about their dungeons and whipping benches. Apartheid fell, and the new government sees no charm in sites of the cruelties of the immediate past. Mickey and I in turn look with admiration at the gentle black man who had once experienced brutality in that prison, had been transformed in an unexpected way by the experience and now gardened and cared for it and wanted to show it to us.

But the lenses and their refractions go on and on here. The day we arrived, we walked with Eddie and Helen along a path by the various beaches. At one small cove a bunch of colored families were packing up their picnics at the end of the day, and there was a lot of trash. “I don’t want to be racist,” said Helen, “but when this was a whites-only beach it didn’t use to be so trashy.” I found this observation fascinating. “When you were young and growing up under apartheid,” I asked her, “did you think that things like whites-only beaches were perfectly natural, or were you aware that there was something problematic about the system you lived under?” “Oh definitely!” she exclaimed with passion, “when I was young I was filled with shame all the time… Kind of like you must feel now, being American and all.” I thought, and may have said aloud, that when Mickey and I visited eight years ago, she might not have thought to make that comment. And then she asked me how I felt growing up in a place where American Indians had been destroyed. I’ll leave you all to ponder how you might answer her.

We’ve hardly had a conversation here in which apartheid hasn’t been mentioned in some way or another. And I find myself fascinated with how people process these memories and bring them to bear on the present. It is not a simple matter at all, and it has ramifications for us all. I am so excited to be here, and I send my love from a fascinating and challenging place!

P.S. I'm at "our" internet cafe on Friday late-afternoon. We're on our way to the local orthodox shul for Kabbalat Shabbat. Not quite knowing the time, we stopped by on our way here, and we saw a couple of busy women setting a big table with a fancy dinner for many folks -- amazingly like our own Friday night tisches! I'll mail this and then join you all for Shabbat dinner -- with love, Margaret (and Mickey too)

© 2006 Rabbi Margaret Holub

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