Quite Possibly the Longest Bog. Ever. SOUTH AFRICA.

B7: 9 hours ahead of you all. Around the South Eastern edge of Africa en route to Mauritius –maybe.

 

As I type this on the very back of the boat, deck 7, someone is practicing bongos –no doubt something they picked up in a port…And there are probably 100 people laying out while the pool sloshes and crashes all over the place and floods the deck per every wave we hit –whereby some girl squeals and giggles. This is rockier waters than we’re used to, as rounding the horn of Africa typically has crazy waves. There are stewards pushing the water with giant squeegee looking things whilst singing. Today the local favorite seems to be that “Oooh baby I love your way”song.

 

DAY ONE: The first thing I saw once we docked in Cape Town was white people. Lots and lots of white people. We were docked at the V&A waterfront port (Jetty 2) and it was a very expensive, very touristy place. We walked around the mall (Amy, Caroline, and I) that was right there and enjoyed all the creature comforts we’d been missing from home. Things like air conditioning (while it may still be cold back home remember that we’d spent the last two weeks around Summer in Africa.) So anyways we’re in the mall, trying to find the craft market people told us was worth checking out, when we reach a place called the red shed market inside the mall. We wander around a little bit and I find the coolest, creepiest beaded doll ever and decide I must have it. We’re talking really very creepy. So creepy in fact, that when I brought it back to the room 4 days later to show Allie, she told me she never wanted to see it again. It was made by some women in a local township (townships are huge sprawling ghettos found in S. Africa and Namibia [and probably other places in Africa, but I haven’t been to those] where people live in ramshackle tiny houses made of scrap wood and metal. With 20% employment rates in these places community arts programs like the one that made my doll make all the difference in how they live.)

 

So I started chatting with the woman who sold me the doll –Elgin, from Turkey. She left her home 17 years ago because of the Kurdish violence and wanted to start somewhere new. She was completely bonkers too. When I was paying her I told her we’d been in South Africa only an hour or two and when I started paying her, quickly counting out the coins of Rand she goes, “How you know what money what?!”And I told her I’d picked it up quickly since Namibia uses some rand too, and she says, “This bitch! She’s so smart!”No joke. I was called a bitch within my first hour of arriving in Cape Town by a 40 something crazy Turkish lady standing next to a life-sized wire and bead sculpture of a warthog. My life is very strange lately.

 

She tells us to go eat a delightful restaurant upstairs called “the ocean basket”where they serve all the dishes in the pan they cooked them in. We all ordered fish an chips and a half a liter local draught beer (this is quickly becoming a meal-time tradition) and got a huge serving of two fresh pieces of fish lightly fried, a serving of fries, and a generous glass of Castle beer. Castle is good but more astringent than I like. If ever you’re in S. Africa I’d just stick with the local Namibian Windhoek –though I did meet some Americans who told be Stella was good too. Anyways though; it was an amazing meal and only 4 dollars for everything!

 

So then Caroline meets up with some other friends and Amy and I decide to try and find the craft market –we get there and I bought some baller earrings and a rattle for Aiden, bracelets for Erin and Grace, and a bracelet for Vi. We then took off to long street; one young interport lecturer named Dale who boarded in Morocco and was getting off in her home of Cape Town, told us long street was full of funky cafes and markets and it was a must see. Amy and I got a little lost going there though because neither of us really believes in maps and would much rather keep asking people so we can meet the locals anyways. One local was Peter, who was a taxi driver who loved to talk and talk and talk. I honestly don’t even know what it is we talked about, except that is took up like 30 minutes of my first day there and he was incredibly suave.

 

When we were leaving he goes, “Wait, ladies…I don’t have your names!”So we introduced ourselves and he says, “Why is it that Americans always seem to have the most beautiful names? And Amy! Amy is an incredibly powerful name to South Africa.”He told us the story of Amy Beihl, the American Fulbright scholar who helped to write South Africa’s new constitution at just 26. That she loved everyone, black and white, and that when she was brutally murdered while trying to pick up some black friends from a dangerous political rally in a nearby township, everyone was shocked. Four men were convicted in the stoning and stabbing of Amy out of the 300 who were rallied in the township that night –the men were a part of the pan-African movement whose goal was to have all of Africa in the hands of Black Africans and to run all white people out of the continent. Amy’s murder was, in a sense, premeditated in that the men were under orders to murder any white people who came to the township that night.

 

Amy’s story was incredibly moving, and depressing, but much more so when I did a service visit to her foundation in Cape Town two days later.

 

But anyways, back to that day, we said goodbye to Peter and started heading off towards what we thought was Long sty. We passed a big pretentious looking, all white with multiple security locks and gates at the entrance, private art gallery and when we just so happened to pause in front of the doors, they buzzed us in! We were looking pretty haggard I imagine, since there hasn’t been a laundry day in over two weeks and we’d been up since 6am for our diplomatic debriefing and breakfast. For whatever reason though, the gallery saw us fit to wander around and admire the incredibly cool paintings and prints we could never afford –the most striking of which was by a South African woman who did a series of what she called “African Mandala”prints. I don’t know if you can look them up back home but they were really cool. She’d taken clippings and digital art of politicians and flowers native to S. Africa and multiplied them into big symmetrical patterns like Buddhist mandalas (I hope I’ve spelt that right.)

 

After that we needed to get back to the ship because Amy had an FDP scheduled and I was exhausted. Being incredibly sick is just not conducive to exploring a big city. So I came back to the ship, grabbed some cheese and bread and rhombus tee and sketched for a little bit before falling asleep early. So the first day in Cape town was good and relaxing.

 

DAY TWO: Caroline, Cassie, Monica, and Rachel and I all got up and visited a township on the other side of table mountain called Iziko Lo Lwazi in Hout Bay. Our driver was a cool young Xhosa from Cape Town named Michael who was friends with a guy named Charlie that the girls had met their first day in S. Africa. I thought the whole thing sounded just a little bit sketch considering just how many people told us Cape Town was dangerous, and the townships in general.

 

Just to go off on that a little more –the first time I started to get nervous about Cape Town was when our diplomat was warning us of S. Africa’s critical safety rating by the US government –the highest rating a country can get. They  also dropped the bomb that people ALWAYS get robbed in Cape Town, often at gun or knifepoint, and that last voyage a girl had been raped there. Considering the HIV rate in S. Africa is just as bad as Namibia (roughly 1/5 people) if you do get raped you need to get to a hospital asap so that they can administer retroviral stuff that is 97% effective if you take it in the first four hours. Obviously every girl in the Union was near tears at this point, and very confused as to why this was only being brought us now…They also said whole buses of legitimate tours to relatively safe townships had been held up at gunpoint and robbed one by one. I wasn’t incredibly keen on taking an independent township tour with only 5 girls through a friend of a taxi driver.

 

I’d underestimated both Charlie and Michael though because I never felt anything but safe. When we first got to the township Michael got out and walked half of it with us. We stopped by the township church (made out of old steel shipping containers, cool, huh?) and met a community of women trying to financially empower themselves through traditional crafts life basketweaving, as well as new media like photography. An Irish photographer came there 5 years ago and taught a few women how to take photographs of the township they lived in, and then how to print them on silkscreened canvases. I met the woman who took a couple of the photographs and bought three little bocks of them.

 

We toured their community center where they’d built a sewing school to make local church robes, a computer lab they’d set up for children, They made a soup kitchen where if you had the money you could pay a small fee for a community dinner, or if you didn’t you could eat anyways. There was a house built atop the church where they’d made a safe haven for abused men/women/children, and a tutoring center for adults who wanted to improve their English. Noma, our guide who lived in the township, told us that the majority of people living in townships weren’t from South Africa, but poorer regions of Africa looking for a marginally better life. She said that the only reason the townships were divided was because they all spoke different languages –the Zimbabweans threw block parties and the West African French speakers would show up but they wouldn’t have much to say to each other, which is why English was to important to learn. It meant not only getting a job in South Africa, but also a means to understanding your next door neighbor.

 

The township was very cool, but also very strange. I’d seen third-world living conditions before. Shantytowns exist all over the world, and it wasn’t even so much the vastness of them –Khayelitsha alone has over a million people living in it, but rather the paradox of Khayelitsha existing only a few miles from wealthy playboy paradises like Camps Bay and the Waterfront. This weirdness is all over the place in South Africa, and even in the tourists who come here. One girl I know from the ship visited two townships here and then went to the mall and bought Burberry sunglasses. We talked about it yesterday in my biomedical ethics class and Professor Harmon called it a cyst. There’re like these dense little pockets of extreme affluence, where people can completely ignore how most South Africans live. And they’re all over the place.

 

After the township we all wandered back to long street and ate dinner at a place called Mamma Africa’s. We didn’t have a reservation so we had to sit at the bar, but it was no big deal at all because it curved (it was carved and painted like a giant snake!) and we could all see each other. Plus we had the coolest bartender ever, who was very sweet and kept giving us springboks. Springboks are little shots of the local version of kaluah mixed with mint liqueur. Delicious, and the smoothest shot I’ve ever had. I also tried kudu there, a kind of antelope thing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Kudu) that made one of the best steaks of my life. Deeeelicious.

 

We had a fun few hours on Long street, bought some postcards and a tee shirt, had a couple drinks and then went out for hookah down the street. I didn’t smoke because I wasn’t feeling well, but I was enjoying their wine menu –which included the delectable “Nitida”: featuring the “mouthwatering characteristics of asparagus and tinned peas.”There was a not-so-great bellydancer who was dressed like a middle-Eastern Amy Winehouse (ew) so we decided to get out of there asap since the place was so shitty –there was only one flavor: mixed fruit, and they wouldn’t give us new coals.

 

So that was pretty much it for the second night. I wanted to get back fairly early since I had a service visit FDP to the Amy Beihl foundation the next morning starting at 9.

 

DAY THREE: My third day in south Africa was probably my weirdest. I’d known the story of Amy Beihl’s murder but what I knew of it virtually stopped at her death. I didn’t realize that her parents famously started this foundation, or that when Archbishop Desmond Tutu started a reparations committee giving those who felt they were wrongly imprisoned at the end of apartheid, that two of Amy’s murders requested that their cases be reopened. They had testified to stabbing and stoning her. They admitted their guilt. Yet when Desmond TuTu agreed to let them go, having served only four years of a seventeen year sentence, Amy’s parents agreed to their freedom. They said it’s what Amy would have wanted, that her murders were a product of political brainwashing and broken families from impoverished townships, that they didn’t actually kill her. And here’s where the story gets truly bizarre. Two of these men started working for the Amy Biehl foundation –they keep in close contact with Linda Biehl and even call her “mother.”Those two men were at the Amy Biehl foundation when I visited, and one of them helped give my tour of what the foundation does for the townships.

 

Easy L. testified to repeatedly stabbing Amy. Easy L. put his hand on my shoulder when I was getting out of the bus. Easy L. said that he was told “one settler, one bullet.”That the pan-African movement would fix Africa’s ills and that ALL white people were the enemy.

 

While I think it’s a fairly admirable thing Easy now if the sports programs director for the Amy Biehl foundation, I think he got off incredibly easy. He told us he now has a six year old daughter. I realize that the Christian ethics built into the American psyche lead us to have a very different view of death than other cultures. I get that. I realize that in certain parts of the world, death is seen as an incredibly natural process, and that it may not be the incredibly sacred, invaluable gift that I consider it. In my opinion, when you snuff out a life you’ve spat in the face of God. If you killed someone you’ve killed that person but you’ve also killed their children, their grandkids, every destiny and hope they’ve cultivated themselves for. When you repeatedly stab Amy Beihl, the Fulbright scholar who at twenty-six dedicated her life for the betterment of people across the world –for whom she helped write a constitution, when you stop short a life so heartbreakingly full of promise you had better remember her every day of the rest of your life. You had better live to make your own life an example to others, but you also ought to live and accomplish enough for two people: yourself and the person you killed.

 

The creepiest thing about it was that he didn’t seem to even show much remorse at all, and even weirder, it seemed as though everyone on the bus was quick to forget exactly what he did. One girl sitting in front of my on the bus said: “You know, it’s so awesome that out of such brutality, God could do so much good.”Like God changed Easy’s heart to this saint of a man –that teaching a few kids from just a small section of the world’s ghettos how to play field hockey counteracted his actions. I was horrified to see SAS students hugging Easy and laughing at his jokes. When we passed the cross marker where Amy was dragged from her car, beaten with stones, and then stabbed and left to bleed out beside a gas station outside a township, Easy stayed in the front seat of the airconditioned charter bus and took questions. I found the whole thing disgusting.

 

I hope no one thinks though, that I disagree with the Amy Biehl Foundation itself. I think it’s one of the most admirable things I’ve ever heard to let go of so much pain and make it your life’s mission to continue with the kind of work your daughter would have supported, despite her death. I think the Beihl Foundation (and most of it’s workers) do a really noble thing by trying to give kids with literally nothing, a means to express themselves through art and music. I’d like to think that maybe that’s enough to save some kids, but I can’t imagine that fingerpainting is going to erase years of hatred towards a perceived enemy.

 

 I later talked to the tour leader, professor Dee Bird about everything from that day. Dee is a white South African who’s been living in the states for a few years now –when she asked me how I felt about that day everything just flooded out. I found myself getting angry, I told her about how horrified I was by Easy, by his political rhetoric that he still talked about –how he called himself a freedom fighter then and a freedom fighter now. That it felt as though he felt a little sorry for having killed someone in so public a way, that the ideals that motivated Amy’s death were still obviously there. Dee said she felt the same way –that she thought it strange too how quickly the other kids on the boat were to accept his work with the foundation as suitable penance for the crime he committed. She said that she was glad she wasn’t the only one, and that as a white south African it would be expected of her to have those opinions.

 

South Africa has real and true living heroes. The kind I think America lost a long time ago. People like Desmond Tu Tu and Nelson Mandela are credits to the world –to face such hardship and adversity and then find a way to not only make yourself better, but to uplift an entire Nation from mess with little resources, is a truly amazing thing. South Africa has so much hope, and when we learned about how Mandela refused to retaliate against those who’d done so much wrong against him I was so amazed by the wisdom and patience and supreme faith he must have to believe that things will work out as they should and that he was a better man than those who did wrong by him and black South Africa.

 

And yet, he may be an example to South Africa, but he is by no means the average man. The racism I saw in South Africa was worse here than I’ve ever seen in any country, on both sides. Worse than Appalachian Virginia, worse than castes in India, worse than how Spaniards view Africans. Even Elgin, the Turkish woman who came here after apartheid had ended whispered to us to be wary of “the blacks...”That they would kill you for the necklace you wore; that they “are hungry.”Neither side trusts one another –whites feel maligned by a government trying to give opportunity to generations of blacks for whom the previous government spend 2 dollars worth on education compared to the 30 dollars white children received. White South Africans are emigrating at an alarming rate because they can’t find jobs and the crime is so bad. Black South Africans are still segregated. They lash out with horrible violence against the whites who they feel continue to represent a system and way of life that doesn’t care about them at all. And I’d have to agree; those cysts exist to make rich, white, south Africa comfortable. It’s hard to see those townships through the tinted shades of one’s designer sunglasses.

 

After that I was exhausted. I got back around 6 and that night a bunch of us went out to eat with a friend of Caroline’s from back home. He’s from Fairfax city too, so it was really weird; small world, huh? They were nice but we were all tired and not all that interested in going out club/bar hopping, so we headed in early. We also didn’t do all that much because we knew we’d have a big day ahead of us the next morning since the girls had arranged for an all-day tour of the highlights of Cape Town with Charlie, their original driver who they assured me was totally legit and very cool. I had a couple of doubts, mostly because we’d had such HORRIBLE experiences with cab drivers in Namibia and I was wary of them, but I knew Charlie was a good friend of Michael’s and Michael really pulled through that day at the township and made it such an awesome experience.

 

DAY FOUR: At 7 the next day we all work up and went outside to meet up with Charlie. He was the sweetest man I think I’ve ever met in my whole life. He gave us an amazing rate (don’t worry, we tipped like a rockafeller) and was just incredibly nice. We kept saying he was like our dads he was just so nice and attentive. At one point during breakfast in Simonstown he told us he was sorry to leave us for a moment while we drank our hot chocolate, but that he’d be back in just a minute, that he had something he had to get across the street. Once we’d finished our hot chocolate he’d returned with a bunch of cough drops and sinus stuff from the pharmacy across the street since Monica and I couldn’t stop coughing. Early on in the day I asked Charlie if he’d heard of Bojo Mojo, an African dance group we’d listened to back to back in Michael’s car –he said he hadn’t but before we could say anything more he’d called Michael and urgently demanded they meet up and let him borrow the c.d. so we could listen to it some more.

 

Like I said, sweetest man alive. So we went to Simonstown first, had a cup of delicious hot chocolate all around, saw the statue of Just Nuissance, a famous dog of Simonstown who would go and collect the sailors who’d gotten too drunk at the pubs to get home by themselves. We saw the penguins all around and got really close. Charlie got a little too close to one of them and it leaned over and started hissing at him, then he goes “Oooh, this one seems a bit aggressive!”Charlie is charming like that.

 

On the way to the cape of good hope our car was rushed by baboons. They were everywhere on a little road along the side of a mountain and they just weren’t all that interested in the multitude of cars, vans, and bikers all waiting for them. Charlie got out a tazer and whenever they got too close to the car he’d let it go off –just the sound of it scared them away, which made me wonder how many times they’d been tazed before. One of the smaller baboons was even missing a hand. How sad.

 

Once at the Cape of Good hope we just wandered around –it’s the most south western part of Africa and it’s where the Indian and the Atlantic oceans meet. It was pretty cool but really touristy.

 

Then we went to an ostrich farm on the way to the winelands (Oma you must go here in Cape town, I really think you’d love it. Just driving up there is GORGEOUS and the wine is spectacular and very cheap.) Where I chased a couple baby ostriches before heading out to another vineyard where we pet cheetahs! We had a really tasty lunch and pretended to be incredibly fancy though I’m sure we stood out like the loud, constantly laughing, chewing with our mouths open, fidgeting, Americans we are. Lunch was all kinds of South African specialties like bobotie (a minced meat dish with potatoes and cheese; we’ve had it both spicy and sweet) cheesy cauliflower, yellow rice with raisons, and malva cake with custard.

 

The vineyards were absolutely gorgeous, they were just spectacular. I don’t even like wine, but the place smelt wonderful and there were gardens and fountains and sculptures in each vineyard we went to. As lovely as all this was though, it was just another of those incredibly rich, predominantly white, cysts Prof. Harmon spoke about. On the way to one of these vineyards there was just a line of girls walking up and down the highway –in a country where aids is truly an epidemic, turning tricks has got to be a near death-sentence. And yet, just a mile or two away there were old white people, Europeans on holiday with money burning holes in their pockets, delicately sipping exclusive wines in all-white outfits.

 

We then went to a lion sactuary. There’s a big problem in South Africa of people and farms raising lions and other huge game and making a small profit from people petting them and visiting them in zoo-like places whereby they’ll sell the lions once they’re big enough to fake safaris just so people can shoot and stuff them. It’s kind of disgusting. Anyways, we went to a sanctuary where I can only imagine they steal them from these farms, as most of the time the plaques said they couldn’t disclose where the lions came from. They even had a really adorable white baby lion that I got a video of.

 

There was a little zoo type place outside of that with goats, pigs, ducks, and tortoises, that we played with a bit before heading off again back home.

 

We were exhausted once we got back to the waterfront so we popped into the pick and pay grocery store for some snacks for the 4 days between S. Africa and Mauritius and then the 4 more before then and India. Once we got back to the ship (I snuck on garlic bread, hahahaha) I went to the smoke deck to see what Amy was doing and if anything was happening that night for Brian’s birthday. They all went out to a fancy shmancy dinner (later I learnt said dinner included don perrignon and fresh oysters –wtf) while I went out for a few drinks with Caroline, we met up with my friend Michelle (a buddy of Allie’s) at the bar and we had a few shots while waiting for them to finish with dinner.

 

I had something called “Antifreeze”that tasted like a frozen, minty banana. Very strange. In South Africa I’ve found about half the time the shots are normal, and the other half they bring out two or three little one ounce shots. It’s kind of cute, and nowhere has alcohol been more expensive than in the US, so it’s always a good deal.

 

This blog is already entirely too long and I’m sure my drinking escapades are only amusing for so long so I’ll give you the highlights:

 

-12:00 We started out at Zula’s at midnight –a fun two story club on long street with a big, live, local band. Had lots of springboks with Allie, Allison, Ben, Brian, Grant, Lee, Amy, Scott, Sarah, Rachel, Michelle, and some other friends of friends. Met some cute French men. Had a shot of tequila with Michelle. Bought a mystery shot for Brian’s birthday –had a shot of something apple-ish with Michelle from a test tube. Met a cute Brit. Had a rum and coke. Had a beer and another shot of tequila with Michelle. Danced.

 

-1:30 Grant had arranged for a cab to pick us up from Zula’s to go to Camp’s Bay –the very exclusive, expensive, beach town, about 20 minutes away from Long St. Piled 10 people into a cab (how did this happen?) Bruises on my lap from when Michelle’s bony bottom made my legs go numb since there weren’t nearly enough seats. Made it to the club as they were closing. Stole Allison’s beer and everyone headed to a different bar called Dizzy’s down the street.

 

-2:10 Had three shots of tequila with Michelle and a beer. Decided we wanted to all hang out on the beach so Michelle and I bought some beers and smuggled them out in our shirts by holding our stomachs and pretending we were pregnant (why pregnant kids go to bars, I’ll never know.) Climbed some rocks. Drank beer and whisky Scott bought off the bartender. Built a bonfire. Ran into the ocean a couple times thinking it’d be the Indian and thus really warm. Instead we were still facing the Atlantic and it was painfully cold. Grant’s iphone was stolen by a homeless man named Willy who said he owned the beach. Ben fell off a rock and bruised his hip.

 

-6:30 Made it back to the ship, showered off my clothes.

 

-9:00 Got a call from Cassie, Monica, Rachael, and Caroline, asking if I still wanted to wander around cape town and try to find the weekend market beside the stadium where the 2010 soccer fifa championships were to be held. Washed my face and noticed I’d lost my nose ring sometime last night.

 

Bought a book, ate a wrap, listened to some terrible live music at the amphitheater, came back just before 5 thinking I’d made it with enough time before the 6pm on-board time when we were to leave Cape Town to go to Port Louis, Mauritius. When I woke up the next morning we still hadn’t left because we had more trouble refueling. Furious, I went to classes and studied for the global studies exam I took today. Now they say if weather permits, we should be arriving to Mauritius on-time. Considering how often SAS messes up times I think we’ll be lucky to arrive there at all. L

 

xoxo,

Jennifer