It was a week ago I was standing outside Manenberg Primary again, rushing my goodbyes as usual, then getting onto a bus full of Norwegian students. The reason for this was that the Vanderbilt team (who I’d been riding back with) had left over the weekend – our side of Manenberg threw an impromptu party the Friday before to mark the occasion, with much hugging and gift-giving and the requisite fanfare. Vince grilling pork sausages behind a row of classrooms, older kids I’d never seen biking up to ask if there were any leftovers, construction-paper diplomas for the sixth-graders. When I came back after the weekend it felt like the set of a stage production that’s just been struck: school about to resume, my boys kicking a ball around in the yard, back to usual.
Then I said goodbye. I was there to do a few more interviews and also to work on developing an idea which I’ve been hammering out with a few of the teachers. This is a program which partners Manenberg Primary with its counterpart middle school in Durham, NC, connecting students and teachers – many of the teachers here are in sore need of training and certification. I’ve been trying to pitch the idea to the people at Duke who work with local schools; they seem to think it’s promising. Could be I was just acting out an urge to see something tangible come out of the past eight weeks, to be remembered in Manenberg for something lasting. We want to be remembered, we Americans, we need those little reassurances that yes, your time here has been valuable in a more-than-monetary sense. We come to places like this for emotions and relationships beyond the scope of business transactions.
I realize that I’ve barely scratched the surface here, either talking about the point of my work in South Africa or in trying to understand the contradicting layers of Cape Town. Manenberg, after all, is a small township, only around 80,000 people, notable for the amount of bad press per capita during the time of the gang battles but relatively unknown to the wider dynamics and currents that move the city. It’s kind of well-off compared to the vast outlying townships, which are Xhosa-speaking and culturally worlds away. But hey, it’s as good a place to start as any.
Urban theorists like Mike Davis estimate that by the year 2050, the majority of the planet’s population will be living in urban slums like the ones on the Cape Flats, or on the hillsides of Rio de Janeiro. This is a totally believable statistic but it almost defies comprehension when you start contemplating it at the human level.
I think I began to grasp the implications of this prediction the following night, Thursday, when I went to Khayelitsha for dinner. A little explanation is probably needed here. A friend of mine, part of a group of students I’d met at the guesthouse, was living with a homestay family in K-ville for two weeks as part of her program. We met near the bus terminus and took a packed minibus taxi out to the fringes of the Cape Flats, where goats wandered untethered on the highway shoulder and smoke rose from oil drums. My friend’s homestay was in Harare, one of Khayelitsha’s more established neighborhoods, near a brightly-muraled community park. We sat down on a bench here as the sun went down, two white kids in scruffy attire, and the children gradually approached. They gathered around us and sat in my lap and wanted to arm-wrestle. They’d never seen me before and never would again. I got the feeling I was stepping into an intimate and closely-bound community that was welcoming me with open, well, arms. There were murals everywhere, wall-high Mandela faces and AIDS ribbons, exhortations against drugs and domestic abuse, simple expressions of neighborhood pride.
Everything in Khayelitsha is on full view: steal something from a neighbor and it is instantly tacked to your reputation on the street, nothing secret for long. There is no such thing as garbage here, or at least the line is less distinct. Things you’d throw away in the city get used here to patch up corrugated walls or collect rainwater. There’s a KFC somewhere in Khayelitsha, make no mistake, but there’s also the woman who boils goat heads on the path outside her house. The goat head lady was a few doors away from my friend’s homestay. Her host mom, a woman who peppered her English with “my angel,” “my babies,” “my baby angels,” etc., cheerfully invited me to stay for dinner, generous helpings of rice, potatoes, sweet cabbage, and mutton. They had a TV by the portable space heater, playing Dr. Phil at low volume. I stayed to help with the dishes a little and then the family walked with me to the minibus stop. This is one of the things they tell you to avoid at all costs in South Africa, take public transportation in a township at night, alone, but at this point I was still reeling from the force of the host mom’s goodwill and felt this sort of protective aura bubbling up around me. I got a few looks. The taxi stopped several times to pick up people headed downtown and once swerved to avoid something burning in the middle of the road.
The last guy I interviewed in Manenberg was a police officer, a city patrolman downtown who spends his off-duty hours watching out for the kids on his block, opening his house to them if it keeps them away from the drug dealers. Ten years ago he took his family out of Manenberg, moved into a middle-class neighborhood somewhere in the leafy suburbs of Cape Town. He lived there for eight years and then he moved back to Manenberg. I asked him why and he gestured around like it was self-evident. Which it was, in a way – the neighbors coming in to borrow cookware, kids popping in and out every few seconds from the street, things you notice because they don’t really happen in more affluent parts of town. The new neighborhood was too private, he told me, it was too secure and self-contained. Eight years and he still didn’t know the kids’ names next door. So he came back to Manenberg, drawn by the living force of this community at the margins.
