Capetown 1998

Part 2

Submitted by Margaret Holub

Monday AM I am invited by the rabbi to a meeting I'll say more about in a second. But to get there I end up going to school with Helen and attending the first half hour or so of her class. The kids are seven, I think. They have the same teacher for seven years, so this must be their second year with Helen. They are milling around, getting dropped off by moms etc. At exactly 8 AM one of the students rings a little bell, and all the kids go back out of the classroom and line up. Helen stands at the door and greets each child by name, shaking each one's hand, occasionally giving a little hug. Once inside, they sit at simple old-fashioned wooden double desks. There's not much in the classroom, a few pictures on the wall and a little altar with a candle and some shells and such up front. Helen calls role by singing each child's name to a simple tune, and the child answers by chanting "Yes Mrs. Tilanus" in the same tune. They sing a few songs, I am introduced and say a few sentences, and then each child comes up in turn and recites a verse. Each declaims a different verse -- Helen later tells me that the teacher either finds or writes a verse which speaks to the personailty of the particular child, issues for him or her to work on and such, and then the child typically works with that verse all year. At this point I have to leave.

I find this classtime very touching. I don't know which of it is Waldorf pedagogy, which South Africa and which Helen. But the simplicity, the spiritual sense and some kind of old- fashionedness all appeal to me. Most of the children are white, but there is a black boy named Tutu. And another child comes in late. He is a black albino from one of the townships and evidently a very troubled child. Helen tells me a little about his various difficult circumstances, but she feels like she can't really teach him, and she's trying to get him moved to a more psychologically intensive school.

I walk over to Temple Israel Wynberg and meet Rabbi David Hoffman, about my age, from Van Nuys CA. He's a very wired guy! He's been in Capetown nine years and is at present the only Reform rabbi (except for the 88-year old emeritus, Rabbi David Sherman, who still appears to have some clout behind the scenes.) He's taking me to sit in on a meeting of the Interreligious Coalition on Crime and Violence in the Cape. The meeting is held at Bishop's Court, currently residence of Episcopal Archbishop Ndougane, succesor to Bishop Tutu.

Bishop's Court is a piece of heaven as a setting -- palatial and airy, full of flowers and gardens. We meet around a table with white linen cloths in a room full of oil paintings of past Archbishops. Bishop Ndougane is there -- a handsome, robust man in a bright purple clerical shirt with a gold chain leading to what I later see is a huge gold cross tucked in his pocket. Also present is Archbishop Hunter of the Catholic diocese and a few other Catholic priests, two imams, a representative of the Bahai fellowship, a Jewish Federation leader and a few other folks. The meeting is quite formal. I'm sussing out the context as we go.

In the news since I've been there are gang riots in Manenberg, a township virtually brought to a standstill by the battle between the Hard Livings gang and the Lucky Guys (I think that's what they're called.) The night before three Hard Livings members had been killed. Complicating the picture is the intervention of PADANG, "People Against Drugs and Gangs," a heavy-handed Muslim militia-type group which marches en masse into gang-troubled areas and causes all kinds of disturbances of their own. The Interfaith Coalition is just getting started, and it sounds like they've got a ways to go yet, not much of an agenda or anything. They have a meeting planned with "the government," but it's not quite clear who, what, where, when or why. There is some talk about a subgroup willing on short notice to go into the townships to comfort bereaved parents etc. Some sound willing to go, others hedge. Ndougane sounds smart and awake.

A word on crime. I can't remember the exact moments or words, but talk about crime was pervasive everywhere we went. We were warned not to walk, not to take taxis or trains. The front section of the paper every day was full of brutal killings, rapes etc. I didn't try to catalogue it all, but there was a sense of fear everywhere. Helen and Eddie warned us not to leave my purse visible in our bedroom, to hide our passports and plane tix even in the house. When Jared, age 18, took the train home from school, Helen drove the few blocks to the station to pick him up rather than having him walk. I don't think they were more protective or fearful than anyone else we met. It was strange just arriving and realizing we had no reasonable way to locomote on our own. Mickey and I walked into Observatory, the little university neighborhood a few blocks from the Tilanus' home, on Sunday afternoon, and it did seem seedy and rife with nervous-making aimless men. I couldn't tell what was my own unfamiliarity and apprehensiveness and what was good urban wariness. Later we walked into "Obz" many times without incident, but always during the business day.

One night we walked with the whole family through a path around the back of Valkenburg to a nearby restaurant. On the way back I was aware of a car parked by the side of the road, and a few minutes later Eddie confronted a man who was peering through the metal fence into a hotel's grounds. Eddie asked his business and sent him away. It was all kind of edgy. This is jumping ahead in my travelogue, but just a day or two before we left, on a Saturday afternoon, we finally all went to The Waterfront, a huge shopping mall/tourist development in the heart of the city, very glitzy. We were ambling among shops when we heard a loud crack, and about fifteen seconds later a second one. People started moving quickly in the direction of the sound. We weren't sure what the sounds were. Ten minutes we were walking to our car, and Mickey said, "They couldn't have been gunshots. We haven't heard any police or ambulances or anything." At that very second, like a cue, we heard the first siren, and several police cars and ambulances rushed into the parking lot. Next day's headlines were about the shootout at the Waterfront, formerly thought to be the one safe place for tourists in the city. Lots of handwringing about "what now???"

Okay, back on track... That same afternoon, right after the clergy meeting, Eddie, Mickey and I took off on a road trip. We headed east along the beginning of the "Garden Route." More spectacular beaches and vistas from the road, a kind of elegant Highway One -- big, red, rocky mountainsides and blue, blue water below. We made it the first night to De Hoop Nature Reserve, twenty kilometers or so down a dirt road, over a ridge, totally flat with a ridge of sparkling white dunes in the distance. I swear they looked like snowy peaks. We turned into the reserve and right there, beside the road, were about eight zebra! It took my breath away to see them in something like a natural setting. So beautiful, so elegant, so "natural!" The place was also full of bontebok, elk-like animals with beautiful broad noses and black and white stripes around their skulls.

Next morning we took a walk along the edge of a dry river, in which, Eddie told us, were all sorts of baboons, different kinds of elk and more. Across the other side of the riverbed we could see the ruins of a few lovely old gabled, thatch-roofed farm buildings. Turns out we were looking right into the weapons testing grounds, at which South Africa some years ago detonated an underground nuclear bomb. On our way out of De Hoop I got out and crept right up behind the zebras.

Driving on along about fifty miles of dirt road through poor, dry farmland we saw Cape Cranes (endangered) and many storks. We came to a "pont," a little ferry across a river which was pulled manually along a cable by two small, wiry guys. Turns out it's the last of its kind in the area. On through Knysna, a big Laguna Beach, and we decided to drop in on the "Knysna Elephant Park" owned by Ian Withers, a fellow that Eddie had met at an environmental conference some weeks earlier. We met his big, friendly-faced wife, Lisette, first, and she immediately invited us to stay in their guest cottage.

Down the hill were three elephants! They had been procured from Kruger Park, where the elephant population was due to be culled. They three "elees" had two trainers, a white man who didn't say much, and Geoffrey from Malawi, with whom we chatted a great deal. The elephants! They were domesticated to the extent that we could feed them out of our hands, touch and pet them, look at them to our heart's content. They are so beautiful, dramatic and elegant. It was strange and a bit sad, naturally, to see them in relative captivity, but it was such a thrill to be near them. African elephants have big ears "shaped like a map of Africa." These three were six, six and eight years old respectively, tusks just beginning to appear. They roam freely over the grounds during the days and are penned in at night, chained at the foot so they won't bother each other's food. These three were named Harry, Sally and Juma (or was it Duma?) -- a bit undignified for such creatures. Ian over beers told us the procedure for capturing them -- darting them from helicopters with tranquilizers, winching them into steel cages on the back of flatbed trucks, giving them an antidote that makes them stand up in their cages, then driving them, fighting and struggling, 21 hours to their new home. Left in Kruger Park they would have been killed, and their life looks pretty copacetic at Ian's considering.

Geoffrey -- comes from Malawi, speaks very good English, has a farm back home (8 hectares, fruits and veggies) and a wife who tends it there. No running water, plowed with animals, presumably so poor that he "wanted to see what South Africa was like." He goes home once a year to help with harvest. He's having a salary dispute with Ian, who is, we hear, planning to hire a German trainer anyhow, lessening Geoffrey's negotiating leverage, I'd imagine. Geoffrey is one of hundreds of thousands streaming into South Africa from even greater poverty elsewhere on the continent.

We drove on to Nature's Valley, another paradisaical beach where Eddie would like to buy farmland -- then up a fabulous wild mountain pass into the Little Karoo. The beach end of the pass was filled with timber farms, pine, planted in symmetrical rows -- the rest wild fynbos -- watsonia, heathers, great, folded, geologically wild mountainsides. On the other side a rolling desert, hot! We pulled into Oudtshoorn, the ostrich capital of the universe, late, hot and a little miserable. Mickey was curious about ostrich biltong, jerkey to us, so Eddie took us to the abattoir, a huge, modern concern that smelled nauseating. Inside hundreds of mostly colored customers were buying every kind of ostrich meat -- blue and yellow-streaked hearts, sausages, steaks that looked just like beef. I was getting sick to my stomach, wondering when I would finally give up and be vegetarian. We got the biltong, went to see the Kango Caves -- geologically magical but totally touristified with colored lights, stupid names for every formation etc. On our way out Mickey got to chatting with an Israeli woman, who said, "These caves are okay, but have you seen the ones outside Jerusalem? Much bigger, much better!" Totally typical Israeli! On through the Karoo, through beautiful old farmsteads, to a hotsprings for the night, a wine valley (the Robertson Valley -- not so well-known apparently as Stellenbosch and Paarl, but beautiful.) Tasted some wines, had a picnic in the sweltering heat, drove through some Mendocino-like little towns and headed back to Capetown

{End of Part 2}

(Capetown 1998 - Part 3)

Copyright Margaret Holub 1998

Last updated 03/12/98 (RGE)