Dispatch: Riding the Elevator

Some of us have jobs where friends and strangers always say, “Wow, that must be so interesting,” and “what an incredible job,” and just “How cool.” But then for the person, sometimes me, being told that, I just think, well, its work. We all can be consumed by our work. And often in going so deep, immersing ourselves in work, experiencing the stress, we can unwittingly put blinders on. When we’re dashing from meeting to meeting, lobbying for quality childcare and innovations in education, do we always picture those kids and families in our mind? [Just an example, I am sure my parents do.] As journalists seeking the next good story or researchers doing dissertations, once we get back to the newsroom or office to write, do we remember the faces of the people we just interviewed? Sometimes, of course. But it is impossible for that to be always.

I have been filming and watching and cutting footage for the last several months, immersed in whether or not a certain bite makes sense, whether someone will misinterpret someone’s perspective, cutting out the umm’s and aaah’s, picking the perfect shot of Peter brushing his teeth and Vuyani at the mic, and trying how I remain true to all the young people, to the events they discuss, and to myself. But yesterday, as I was going through some archival footage from last May of refugees gathered at police stations and refugee camps, I realized that I had forgotten about the victim. Yes, I have found and filmed Peter, a 17-year-old Rwandan boy, but there were thousands of other victims and casualties of this violence.

It hit me yesterday, watching footage of a woman sitting on blankets in a room at a police station, crowded with other women like her, feeding pap to her son. She was being interviewed and speaking French. I couldn’t understand everything, but what I did understand was: “Nous somme pas vene ici pour mourir, non…. Nous somme des personnes comme vous.” “We did not come here to die, no. We are people like you.” Today, I can still see her face. Her French makes me think she is from DRC. She spoke passionately, her son had wide eyes and remains of food surrounding his lips. While my film only includes one young refugee, this film is about this woman. It is about all the people crowded into this police station. It is about everyone who experienced the attacks, on whatever level.

The tough part of my job lately is to create balance. To balance the story of those who experienced the violence with the stories of the perpetrators, the bystanders and the teenagers who live at a distance, who do not live in the space where the attacks happened, but whose ideas and experiences, to me, are just as important. In speaking about her life, one of these young people, a 16 year old named Carey, said, “Its almost as if we live in this very comfortable bubble and anything that happens outside the bubble really doesn’t matter because we are the most important people in our lives and that’s, you know, how we see things. Which is ridiculous because these attacks happened right outside the bubble.” Pretty insightful for a 16 year old.

So what is my bubble? Do I move in and out of my bubble? I don’t think I live in a bubble – well I like to think I don’t. I don’t know what the correct analogy would be. Perhaps I live in an elevator? Able to go from one place to another, remembering the previous floor I was on, even if I am 10 floors above? Maybe it’s not a great analogy. But I do move from one space to the other, I move from Peter’s lunch of jam sandwiches to my full fridge, from the bed Yamkela shares with her mom and brother to a seat at my favorite café, from filming in the suburbs of Constantia or lying on the beach with friends back to Dunoon or Masiphumelele or Nyanga or Khayelitsha, to lives of people that I know, people that I feel close to, and yet lives that I know I do not know. Can I ever fully know their lives, their challenges and joys? There are boundaries that we create unintentionally, boundaries we choose to put up and boundaries that maybe just are. And yet as I write this I wonder if I am wrong about that last one?

Last Thursday, I got up at 4 a.m., picked up my cameraman Bart at 4:30 and by 5, we were at Peter’s home in Masiphumelele to film his morning routine. Peter came to South Africa in 1994 with his mother and older brother from Rwanda. His father was killed in Rwanda, I don’t know much more of their story. When I asked Peter why they left Rwanda he said because there was a problem between the Hutus and Tutsis, but he wasn’t sure which one his mother was. Today his mother runs a crèche with over 100 children.

Last May, during the xenophobia attacks, Peter and his brother fled to stay with their mother’s friend in a nearby suburb. Their house was robbed, beds, mattresses, clothes, school things, anything you have in your home, just stolen. And until a new shack was built blocking the view, he could see bed through his neighbor’s window. He regularly sees a little girl wearing his 6-year-old cousin’s clothes. “Its actually shocking,” he told me, “cause you think in your mind, what did we do wrong to deserve such pain our lives? What did, where did we go wrong? What did we do to them? For what reason do we deserve this suffering? I ask the same question but no one responds.” He added, “Me myself I don’t think I have an answer for that. I don’t know if I have an answer for that.”

Reflecting on that day, Peter told me he was not ready to die. “I want to die a special way, instead of a violent way,” he said.

The shoot ended with Bart riding partway with Peter and his friend to school, first on a taxi, then on the train. Bart rode only one stop and left Peter to continue on to school. I met him in Kalk Bay and we went for coffee at a lovely café. There we were, at 7:45 a.m. A 10-minute drive from Peter’s life, at 7:45 a.m. surrounded by other people enjoying their morning coffee with a view of the Indian Ocean. So how could we have moved from one space to the other so quickly? We spent a good part of our coffee talking about that. In this country that is often so stratified, where many people never see how others live, we go from one space to the other all the time. Many others don’t – whether from one area or another, whether because of fear or language or race or access, they have difficulty moving between these worlds. But what does that mean for us? I don’t remember all the details of our conversation nor do I have an answer, I’ll just pose the question for now and leave you, perhaps, to help me with an answer.

Dispatch: The New Year

Rosh Hashanah usually comes and goes for me. I enjoy the holiday, I celebrate, I pray, but I don’t normally breathe deep and take it as the beginning of a New Year. Tomorrow I am working from home to make my challah and this year I am taking advantage of a mid-September New Year. I am going to try to use it as it was meant to be, a time of introspection, a time to plan changes in life, to think about starting anew. An opportunity to make a new start -- despite this week’s rain, in the midst of the challenges of the editing process, and as I continue to sort out what it means for me to live in South Africa.

Why the last one? When I lived here in 2005, almost all of my days involved journeys out to Nyanga and Khayelitsha, teaching students or engaging in different spaces. For most of last year, while I wasn’t in the townships everyday, I was traveling regularly to new cities, sharing my work, engaging in debates about education, young people, this country’s future. And in the early part of this year, I continued as most of you read, in one of my favorite parts of my job – going from place to place, classroom to classroom and talking to over 200 young people about xenophobia, foreigners, feelings about their country, and everything in between. These days, my dialogue is between my head and my computer. Most days I find myself in my office, staring at a computer screen, turning hours of footage into a film. I am an inherently collaborative person but I do enjoy the editing process. It is a brilliant feeling to find just the right place for a shot or create the perfect sequence. But I am not deep in the South Africa I used to know. Sometimes people ooh and ahh that I live in “Africa.” “Deepest darkest Africa,” some people joke. Do you know many of my days start with the gym, move on to a cappuccino, sometimes some All Bran, sometimes a visit to my favorite café, work, making dinner, going out to dinner, seeing or renting a movie, spending time with friends. It is why, despite the fact that I like to write, I write fewer dispatches, for what should and can I write about? This life could be happening anywhere.

And yet I am here. In South Africa. Life ebbs and flows, I have been reminded, this too will take me through to next January or February and then who knows what a day will look like? But for now, I am renegotiating being here. I started reading Antjie Krog’s book A Change of Tongue a few days ago, to get out of the shell that can be my life and to remind myself of the richness of where I live. For those of you who don’t know Krog, she wrote an incredible book about the Truth and Reconciliation Hearings called Country of My Skull. She is Afrikaans and grew up in a small town in the Free State. This book is historical, sociological and also very personal. It is not always easy to get through but I find some sections so moving, so pronounced in their historical space. I read something so beautiful and profound the other day that I just stopped in my tracks. It is about watching the speech Mandela made in Cape Town on the day he was released from prison. Krog watched the speech on TV in her home, surrounded by friends and comrades. She writes:

“What Mandela says, or the fact that he has to borrow Winnie’s glasses to read his speech because he’s left his own behind at the prison, doesn’t filter through to us. We are suddenly so utterly aware, and linked as we have never been linked before. Each one with every one. He is of us. We could be the most beautiful colour of change the world has ever seen. The man is free and a new time has dawned.”

This is where I live. I live in a place with possibility and opportunity, also with frustration and sadness, that too. I live in a place where my friend Susan interviews Noluyanda yesterday for a job at her organization Students for a Better Future, and while Noluyanda doesn’t have the qualifications for a job, Susan believes in her and offers her a one month paid internship, a chance to gain new experiences and skills. A place where I cheer because Phila is starting her new job on November 1^st as a clerk at Woolworth’s department store. Where I am holding my breath that she and Sithembele have successful auditions at New Africa Theatre in December and can start school next year. Where I have to say no when the aunt of someone in film asks to borrow 2,000 rand for her nephew’s male circumcision ceremony and worry which high school Siyabulela Mpaku will attend next year. My life may involve an office and a lot of time in front of a computer, but it also involves this.

On Sunday, the second day of Rosh Hashanah, I will go spend time with Sipho’s brothers who I haven’t seen in almost four months. How that happened, so much time passed, I can’t tell you. I’ll look at Sunday as a new start for us in this New Year.

L’Shanah Tovah

Dispatch: Journeys Down Memory Lane

The world is small. Our experiences constantly echo one another. We learn from each other, from successes and failures, from wars, leaders, freedom struggles and social movements. Sometimes the connections are subtle and sometimes they are right in front of us.

On Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday when I was 12 my father took me to the Uptown Theater to see Mississippi Burning. If my sister or my mother were there, I apologize, because what I remember is him and me, Gene Hackman and Willem Defoe, and the story of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, the violence, and my keen interest and fear. I don’t think that was the single moment when I got interested in civil rights history, I don’t know that I can pin down a moment, but it certainly sticks in my mind. In high school I sang along to the theme song to Eyes on the Prize when we watched it in history class and wrote a paper for another class called “With All Deliberate Speed?” about the language in the of Brown v. Board decision. My interest in the civil rights movement continued through college and when my friend Caroline put forth her thought that if not born in the mid-seventies, she would have loved to live in Victorian England, I always thought I would have loved the chance to be in my twenties during the Civil Rights Movement, to sit on the bus during the Freedom Rides.

So a couple months ago, when I had coffee with an American woman working here for a few months and she casually mentioned her mother, maybe I had heard of her, Minnijean Brown, she was one of the Little Rock Nine, I nearly fell off my chair with excitement. Someone from my history book, who I have read about and talked about has a daughter and I'm having coffee with her?! And Minnijean Brown was coming to Cape Town. Since I work with an organization that works with history teachers, I was able to connect them. So it was that two weeks ago, I found myself sitting at a table here in Cape Town surrounded by teachers and a few students, listening to Minnijean Brown Trickey share her memories and experiences as one of the Little Rock Nine. I was so excited to meet her, this was Minnijean Brown, one of the Little Rock Nine. And I was listening to her in South Africa.

It turns out that Minnijean Brown was the same age as Emmett Till. She watched him die in Mississippi before she fought battles for him and Black youth across the U.S. – battles that she perhaps never intended to fight. As this icon of history spoke, I was struck by her humility. She consistently emphasized that what is extraordinary is in fact ordinary. That she was just a girl who wanted to go to a school with great books and science facilities, that she did not set out to transform a town or a country, simply to get the education she deserved. “It’s always simple and it’s always about just plain people,” she said. “It’s not about having extra bravery or courage, it’s about being a regular person. We were 14 or 15 so we didn’t have any good idea.”

As she entered the school, she never imagined the vitriol and hatred she would get from some students. “I couldn’t imagine anyone hating me,” she said. She thought in a couple weeks or a month, the tension would die down. Another reason why she was not so concerned about racism at Central High she said, was because, “I thought this is about old people and these kids must think like me.”

I remember learning about the effort of the Little Rock Nine to get into Central High, but never about what happened to them once classes started. She said there were about 20 nice kids in the school, 100 bad kids and 1900 kids who said nothing, were “silent witnesses.” I thought about the kids I have interviewed about the xenophobia attacks and how many of them may have been silent witnesses. How often have I been one?

MinniJean was eventually expelled for calling six girls “white trash” after they hit her and threw at her a purse filled with six combination locks. She ended up finishing high school in New York, at a primarily Jewish school where she was “furious” to find out that no one in Little Rock had taught her about the Holocaust. I would imagine at that time it wasn’t really part of the curriculum in Little Rock, or many places in the U.S.

She was and still is a fighter. “The punishment is great for people who think for themselves and go against the belief system,” she said. “Does that happen here?”

It was this question that caused me to look around the room and wonder who these teachers were. I’d met many of them before. In struggles and movements, there are some names we know or our history books tell us – Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney, John Lewis, Rosa Parks, the students of the Soweto Uprisings in 1976, Hector Pieterson, Joe Slovo, Walter Sisulu and of course Nelson Mandela. It may be cliché, that term unsung heroes, but as I sat there, listening to this dialogue, I wondered where some of these teachers had been during their struggle. Were they students fighting to learn in their own language? Were they in detention? Prison? Were they young believers of Mandela or Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness? If I have learned anything in my time here it is that everyone has a story. What are there’s? The history of these history teachers. I have been privileged to be in workshops when a few of these teachers shared some of their stories. But what of the others?

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Yesterday, a long day of shooting in the sun ended over scrapbooks of old articles and photos from the eighties. The parents of one of the students in my new film, Becca, were activists during apartheid. Yesterday afternoon, we planned to just do an interview with Becca outside and then film her and her family together. Nothing too profound. Since Becca references her parents in the film and how they are a big part of what inspires her to want to make a difference in the world, my cameraman and I thought it would be cool to see old photos from her parents back in the day. Of course, they didn’t really stop to take photos at that time, however her father has three scrapbooks of newspaper clippings. So it was I found myself listening and filming as Becca and her mother went through these scrapbooks. And so I come back to my thought from above – everyone here has a story. One article inspired Becca’s mother Jane to tell the story of a particular night of riots and protests in Crossroads when she was worried about her husband and his safety. It was not an unusual feeling in those days, but the irony that night, it turned out, was that the Security Police came for Jane and detained her for three months. I have to thank Jane for going through the scrapbooks and her memories and for sharing these stories with us – this journey down memory lane was not particularly enjoyable for her and I imagine not exactly easy either.