Friday AM we went to the heart transplant museum at Groote Schuur Hospital, just a stone's throw from Valkensburg. Wouldn't mean much to anyone but me -- but I was obsessed with heart transplants when they first happened, and it was a great thrill to stand in the same operating theater where it all first happened.
Saw a heart-lung machine which Barnard had brought to
Capetown, basically some rubber tubing with two little pumps like you'd run
a fishtank with -- so primitive. Saw the actual hearts of the first few
donors and recipients in bottles. Saw letters from around the world,
including one from a nine-year old boy from Minnesota or someplace. Why
wasn't mine up??? Learned that Groote Schuur, like Valkensburg, is being
closed down limb by limb.
That evening I did my first services at Temple Israel, Wynberg. Temple Israel is the only Reform temple in Capetown, but it has two buildings a few miles apart. The older shul is in Green Point, a Gold Coast-like beachside strip of expensive condos. Just about three miles away is Wynberg, where, we were told, Jewish families move once they have children. Somehow that three-mile drive is a world away to Jewish Capetonians, and so the congregation simply acquired another building, and more or less the older folks go to Green Point and the families to Wynberg. At least that's what we were told; the demographics I experienced looked a little more mixed than that. The Wynberg shul was like a fifties Reform temple in the USA. The service itself was extremely formalized. I was given a script, lots of cues for the choir (up in a loft, invisible) and responsive readings. There was a potluck dinner following, much like one we'd have, except that places were set for each person, and apparently a few volunteers had put lots of time into arranging who would bring what, etc.
The most interesting thing was two conversations I had a few minutes apart -- the first with two older women, both complaining bitterly about the current state of things, crime, especially. One said she'd move to join her children in Australia in a heartbeat, except the rand is so weak that she couldn't afford even a single room there. A few minutes later we were getting a ride home from a beautiful woman with two teenagers, who went on about what a thrill it is to live in the new South Africa. She spoke about how compartmentalized whites had to be in the apartheid years. "Yes, there's crime now," she said, "but at least crime is not the law anymore." She is a professor of education who teaches teachers, does a lot of work in the townships, and is obviously as optimistic as the older women were pessimistic about the changes. This typified the conversations we had with local Jews -- many, maybe most pessimistic and discouraged, a few full of heart. Many have already left South Africa, most of the elders' children seem to have gone to Australia, England, the US, Canada. One man summed it up: "I'm sick of hearing all these people who said they wanted change so much before, and now that it's here, all they do is complain about every little thing!"
In the AM I led services again. It was Eddie's birthday, and in the afternoon I helped Helen cook up a feast. I guess potluck birthday parties aren't done there. In the evening about twenty folks came over for a very nice dinner party, kids playing pingpong in the next room etc. Mickey did a California thing and initiated a little circle for birthday wishes. People acted a little embarrassed but said lovely things. When they were done, Eddie responded by going back round the circle and saying something special about every person there. I was impressed. The friends were mostly people who had raised kids with Eddie and Helen, indistinguishable from the kinds of serious, intelligent, nervous parents you meet anywhere I've been.
Lazy day Sunday -- went up to the University of Capetown -- beautiful, ivy-covered, built on terraces up the side of Table Mountain. Eddie told me that there's some apprehension there these days because they've opened admission to so many blacks, with concern about drop in standards etc. By this time I am aware that every question Mickey and I ask is about race: do black people come here? How much money does that the security guard make? Where is he likely to live? Why are only whites in here? How can she afford to be here? I start to feel self-conscious. Just saying the words "black," "colored" and "white" over and over sounds crass in my ears. But race is obviously the issue everywhere. At the same time I note a kind of discomfort in Eddie and Helen with all these questions, or maybe I project. If they came to the USA and only wanted to talk about Watts and Harlem and affirmative action, how would I feel? At the same time, what is South Africa famous for? It's pretty, but no prettier (and not much different) than California. South Africa is famous for apartheid and its end. Everywhere I go I am morbidly aware of the color of everybody's skin.
In the afternoon we take a walking tour of a few blocks of downtown Capetown
and see, amidst the usual disgusting seventies office towers, a bunch of
austere old Cape Dutch houses, the upstart victorians, with their gaudy
wrought iron decorations, Edwardian wedding cakes, deco palaces. Driving
down the same streets to meet the walking group I hadn't noticed any of
these. So it was like those pictures where, if you focus your eyes a
certain way, you'll see a landscape. The historical buildings suddenly
crystallized in front of us, and we kept noticing them for the rest of our
stay. It was great.
Time to say a bit about what Capetown looks like. What makes it the beautiful city that everyone says it is are two factors: Table Mountain and segregation. Table Mountain folds all over town, so that the city is built into its crevices. There's nowhere you can go without a great view of the massif behind you. It's quite grand, has an absolutely flat top and dwarfs the city. Architecturally Capetown is no great shakes to my untrained eye, though those old-fashioned beauties are all over the place. It's not precious, like San Francisco. In fact, it's hard to make comparisons, but if anything, Capetown looks like Oakland -- a very pretty city nestled into hills with some lovely old buildings and a lot of ugly ones. The other beautifying factor to Capetown is apartheid, which physically separated the affluent and the poor areas of the city, so that there are many miles of beautiful "suburbs" (more like what we would call affluent urban neighborhoods) with lovely houses, trees, flowering shrubs, little shopping neighborhoods and such -- and the rest of the city a good distance away. Not so different at all from Los Angeles, a parallel I think of a million times. All the bougainvillea and hibiscus makes one think of LA right away, as does the fact that you could spend your whole life in Santa Monica or Beverly Hills and never see Watts, Compton or East LA, right?
The next few days we sightsee around Capetown -- climb Table Mountain (that is, Mickey and Eddie climb it. I struggle up the first hundred feet and decide to backtrack and take the cable car up!), go out to Groote Constantia, a gorgeous old colonial estate, go to a shopping mall (could be Santa Rosa.)
Wednesday I get together with Gill (pronounced "jill") Washkansky, the Jewish quilter that Deanna found for me on the internet (and married to the nephew of Louis Washkansky, the first heart transplant recipient, by the way...) We'd exchanged some e-mails before I left and talked on the phone just about daily. She feels like an old friend by the time I meet her. We sit in her living room for awhile with another quilter, also Jewish as it happens, named Nollene. Both are nominally orthodox, though Nollene is wearing jeans. Nollene speaks especially positively about all the changes going on in the country. Gill is also quite supportive -- in fact, she works part-time for an organization that does development work in the townships -- but she also speaks of what seems to her to be nearly pervasive corruption in the present government and among some of the black workers in her agency and others like it. "It's pretty discouraging," she says, "when you raise a bunch of money, and then when you go to use it, it's not there." But she's pretty generous about it. It's not right, she says, to take on new workers and not provide adequate training and supervision for them. Their lack of skill and preparedness leads to these kinds of breaches. We talk quilts, politics, families and kids, all that nice stuff. Nollene leaves and Gill and I go on a fabric-buying expedition.
I'm a little surprised to hear that Gill only knows of two sources for African fabrics, one of which I've already scoped out in Obz. Seems the quilters all buy American and British textiles. Oh well, I still buy up a storm at Dick Louie's, a funky old warehouse next to the Beaver Lounge downtown -- cheap batiks and lots of indigo "Africal fabric," a highly starched calico that indeed I have seen many black women wearing. On to Mnandi in Obz where they have the upscale stuff, gorgeous fabrics and prints and expensive to match. Many are apparently designed in South Africa and actually manufactured in Holland. They are as soft and lustrous as the stuff from Dick Louie is stiff and threadbare. I buy a few meters, all I can afford. That evening the Tilanuses take us for a sunset picnic to Llandudno beach, as perfect a paradise of a white sand beach as one could ask, Table Mountain looming right above, the water for once warm enough to wade (or surf) in. It's a highlight of a night for us all.
Thursday AM I have a date with Rabbi David Hoffman, the Reform guy I've already met a few times. He talks energetically -- I imagine he doesn't have the opportunity to talk shop with a curious but uninvolved colleague so often. I'm a little surprised by some of the stands he says he's taken since coming to Capetown to be the local rabbi. For example, he told me proudly of taking on Bishop Tutu in print for the bishop going to Yad Vashem and afterwards saying that the Jews should forgive the Nazis. It's an arguable premise, I suppose (though in my mind if anyone would be qualified to put forward such a controversial notion, I'd listen to Tutu...) Likewise his public call for a death penalty in SA. I took him on on this one, for sport as much as anything. Hoffman said several times that, were it not for his family, he would take risky and controversial stands -- but his wife and kids would fear for his life. The first time I heard him say this I have to admit, I was a bit skeptical. But later I was chatting with Eddie about environmental politics a bit, and I asked him casually whether people in SA do civil disobedience acts like tree sitting. People are afraid, he responded -- this is a dangerous place. They might be killed. I hear versions of this several times, that it has been in the past, at least, dangerous to take political stands, and people are afraid. Even now? Even now there are gangsters and others, and no one really knows how safe it is to "speak truth to power."
In the afternoon Raffa (she and her boyfriend Alister are tenants of the Tilanuses, living in a tiny converted garage -- Raffa is a graduate student, Alister a surveyer -- both cute young hippies, very friendly, in and out of the house all the time) takes me to Greenmarket Square to the big craft market there. There's actually a lot of the same Balinese and Guatemalan stuff there that you'd find at any import store here, also tzatskelehs from all over Africa, all also available at Pier One. I'm pretty fetched by the twisted wire soap dishes and candlesticks and such apparently made in the townships and buy a few little things. On to the Pan African Market, an indoor craft coop, where, along with the all-over-Africa stuff is a lot more art from the townships. Stuff is made from recycled everything. I buy a hat crocheted from plastic bags, a bowl collaged with product labels, a little wire doll necklace made from a piece of a coke can. I find this junk art very touching -- and, of course, I am mad to shop, as always!
That evening I go to Gill's quilt guild meeting and meet about eight other quilters. They look like the same women you'd meet at a quilt meeting here, proper, older etc. Very nice too. And it's not true about the African fabrics -- they've all brought work to show me, and at least half incorporate local fabrics in fabulous ways. One woman is doing a ten year project, an intricately embroidered peace quilt replacing the traditional American flower motifs with local flowers. Another woman has done a gorgeous, if fastidious, Baltimore Album quilt, also replacing the American images with local proteas, watsonias and such. Somehow I find this all very touching. A woman next to me is working on what she calls an "African American" quilt, one of the big, irregularly pieced ones with lots of African fabrics. She grew up on a farm in the Transkei (the most remote and "African" part of South Africa, I am often told), and her family left because of their objection to apartheid, to raise her in Zimbabwe. Regular folks with amazing stories, reflected in the quilts in subtle ways.
{End of Part 3}
Copyright Margaret Holub 1998
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Last updated 03/12/98 (RGE)