Dropping into Cape Town has always been emotional for me, even the first time I ever went there with a bus load of strangers. We were confronted by a drug sniffing police dog at a rest stop in one of the mountain passes about an hour out of Cape Town. Where we come from we have never used dogs against people (unless the person jumped over your fence when we were sleeping at night) so it was quite a rude awakening to have an animal be a potential accuser. Where we come from, an animal has never accused a human being... it’s always the other way around. Welcome to Cape Town.
Be that as it may that MILF, Cape Town, had taken my nesting virginity soon after I got there, this was the city where I had first decided to break my nomadic tendencies; got my first creative job; worked for the first time in a service industry; experienced institutionalised racism where people where so unaware you’d think they considered it their privilege; fought the system in a long sustained war...and lost; almost met my wife; fell in love again and again... and again.
The good the bad and the fuckin’ ugly all visited me in Cape Town in equal amounts. I lived to tell the tale, not totally unscathed even though I smiled through most of it. Boy did I pay, if trading in all the notebooks documenting your life and next generation ideas count as payment. A huge blue trunk with my sister’s name is lurking around that city somewhere, in it there used to be books from my grandfather’s study, books from different parts of the world that had made the journey with me to the Motherless City, film negatives spanning my life until I was 12 or 13 years old... I could go on, however I’d rather not since I am trying to feel like it wasn’t too big a price to pay.
But you know I got some change back from the Cape Town... so I really shouldn’t feel too badly about the difference. What was the change...? That’s about 60 rolls of undeveloped film documenting my life from when I was barely legal to when I was old enough to know better. Who knows what has survived the decade long storage, it will be interesting to find out. That was the coins, as for the notes... I got to keep friendships that have survived the distance, the different paths our lives have taken... and now, new friendships as well. One in particular stands out, something began in cyber space and finally “consummated” in Cape Town with a physical meeting after a year or so.
One more fantastic bit of priceless is just the old Cape ways, they don’t seem to have left after all despite the flashy new buildings. The community spirit which just wells up and sprouts selflessness, or botho in the Tswana way not the oft dissected but never quite defined ubuntu. I spent time with Maria Podesta just doing “manly things” like setting up her trestle table and randomly filling her vintage clothes on her rack for the You Me & Everyone We Know night market. It turned out to be a good thing too since she hooked me up with a Babatunde trilby, something I had always wanted since I saw it on Tiisetso’s blog yonks ago. There it was that thing that kept me in the Cape for all those years, something I wondered why a gang of people wanted to exploit in the most negative way possible. That feeling that you could actually work for fresh air because it felt good doing it and the fulfilment couldn’t quite be paid for in cash... though a Babatunde did the job quite nicely thank you.
No comments:
Post a Comment