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| Maria arrives in Cape Town |
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| and immediately takes the plunge |
At the District Six Museum, our tour guide (and fabulous jazz singer) Joe told us how the building itself used to be a church designated for the black community under apartheid. The whole museum is dedicated to one of the areas of the city where people were forced out of their homes and neighborhoods. The government gave them an insulting fraction of what their homes were worth just for justification, forced them out of the area, demolished all of the homes and old, beautiful, historic buildings, and then built up "upgraded" living conditions and called them "skyrises" that the government turned around and sold them to white people only at incredibly inflated prices. Non-whites weren't allowed in the area. Joe lived in District Six from his birth in 1939 to when they forcefully displaced everyone in 1967, so he was speaking not just from research, but from his own personal experience and life. He told us about the Group Areas Act, the Immorality Act and the Mixed Marriages Act, and all of the negative effects of moving people out of their homes. Parents still had to commute and were never home, always tired, and never got to sleep, which created domestic problems. In the meantime the kids were at home alone unsupervised all day, and clicks turn into gangs, which brings about violence and drug.
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| Vernon Rose & Joe Schaffers at the District 6 Museum |
Joe told us about a male white former paramedic who visited the museum. This man told a story about how he tended to black victims who needed medical care. He provided care, got them to a hospital, and saved their lives, but then was persecuted by the law because black people could only be taken care of by black or coloured-only service vehicles and white people could only be taken care of by white-only service vehicles. He said that after being incarcerated for saving someone's life he knew he needed to leave South Africa. He moved to Canada and then came back to Cape Town after 40 years and came to the District Six Museum. There were also displays of signs used to segregate people and designate everything for people according to race, but as you'll see in some of my pictures, he pointed out how the words "person" or "persons" were only used when referring to whites, which was subliminal degradation and brainwashing, telling everyone, black, white, or coloured, that only white people were real people. Then we got to walk around and look at newspaper articles and stuff, and there was a room with a bunch of tiles with poems written by people who used to live in District Six and some quotes from famous authors like Bessie Head.
Joe said that he wishes he could take 20 people from all over the world, of all different colors, and put them in an empty field, and have them all prick their fingers and see that they all bleed red. He said he wants to show people that we are all one race and one species, and that greed and selfishness and taking more than we need is a uniquely human disease. It was a sad but touching place.
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| Real signs from the time of apartheid displayed in the District Six Museum. Note the intentional word choices http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.1524848116189.2035317.1084200239&type=1 |
Then we went to the "parade" in downtown Cape Town in the inner city area. It is basically lines and lines of vendors and beggars and a train station and a minibus taxi station. I don't have any pictures of this place (except for the old British building still called "city hall" which was near where we parked) because we had to hide away any jewelry or wallets or fancy sunglasses that would make us look like we are wealthy in any way. We stopped briefly at a line of food vendors to get bottles of water, and the vendor I chose did not take kindly to me. She was a young, black girl, probably not significantly older than me. It seemed kind of hard to get her attention even though I was the only one near her booth; she seemed really bored and tired, and when she finally (perhaps accidentally) made eye contact with me, our conversation went like this:
Me: "Hello, can I buy a bottle of water?"
Vendor: "What?"
Me: "Can I buy a bottle of water?"
Vendor: (calmly, quietly, unfazed, bored) "No"
Me: "What?"
Vendor: "No"
Me: "Just no?"
Vendor: *blank stare*
Me: "Ok" ..... *awkward pause.... moved on to the vendor right next to that where my classmates were all waiting in line.
Then an older woman with only a few teeth and battered clothes came up to us with a can asking for money, and it was a little freaky but mostly heartwrenching that we were instructed to ignore people asking us for money. We were told that it would be nice to give them a little bit of money, but that most people, even the elderly and children, often work in groups and have plans to take everything when you are distracted or take out your wallet or tell them the time on your cell phone to try to gauge how much money you have. It was so difficult to not pay any attention not only because I was so taken aback because I've never experienced something like that before, but I also felt terrible because maybe if I was so much worse off then I'd probably be trying to sustain myself by taking advantage of wealthy clueless tourists too. Every time we had to ignore someone it broke my heart. I've never been so sad and so uncomfortable (and even a little scared) all at the same time.
Going to the Parade right after the District Six museum was pretty surreal for me. I was thinking about how I could see the effects of oppression right in front of me. I interacted directly with people who were forced to live a sad and dangerous life because of what apartheid did to them and their ancestors and their people. It was helpful to do these activities on the same day because we were forced to make the connection between government mandated oppression and the way things are today. I also saw that sentiments from apartheid are still so deeply rooted in people's views and strife, and in a context where race is talked about instead of shrugged off. As Americans, we are always taught to keep quiet about race, or ignore it, or pretend we don't notice it. It was shocking at first to hear anyone talk so directly about race in any context. Communicating with each other and celebrating our differences, rather than pretending we don't notice them, is the only way to move forward.
I'm learning a lot here and it's only been one week.
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| Maria looking beyond the surface |
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