a new face

My last post caused a surprising degree of tension among friends and family alike. Many were offended by my wording, that I was "finally" proud to be American, and that I was ashamed to be identified as one before Obama was elected as our next president. Even for those of us who travel occasionally out of the country, many of us can often miss the blatant disgust many in the world feel towards our country, misinterpreting it for snobbery or aloofness. It is often neither. Rather, this dislike stems from a perceived snobbery and aloofness on our part.

It has been difficult to convey these perceptions to my critics. But the point of my argument was illuminated in a conversation with a woman yesterday. She congratulated me on our new president, and we began to talk about the shifts that this election would bring. In the interest of not misquoting her, I will not quote her entire sentences. However, my new acquaintance said that before the election, to say one was "American" was like a "germ," that everyone would want to avoid you. Furthermore, she said that she "couldn't help it," that "whenever I see an American I see Bush." We are a direct reflection of our leadership. It is the beauty and the bitterness of democracy.

That afternoon, I also saw on a magazine cover a picture of Obama and the future first family, with the headline, "The New Mandela." Mandela was South Africa's Moses, the saviour of the downtrodden and the hopeless nation. He was also a symbol of South Africa's re-entry into the world after years of embargoes and international isolation. We must be critical of turning Obama into an untouchable, mythical figure, but the comparison is intriguing. It is our time to reconstruct the identity of our nation and re-enter the world.

I have been relatively successful in deconstructing our negative stereotype and shifting my non-American friends' perceptions of our country, but ideally, I would prefer to not wear the mask of the enemy at all. Is it possible for us to have a positive stereotype? And what would that stereotype look like?

"The Obama Dividend"

In his New York Times op-ed today, Nicholas Kristof, a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for journalism, makes note of my contribution to his blog (and my most recent blog post). I am trying to contain my excitement. Enjoy.

you say you want a revolution

I watched the election results pour in tonight from a bar in Cape Town, South Africa. It is clear that the energy and electricity of our country and the significance of this election has vibrated across the world, and for the first time in recent memory, I can shout in the streets that I am American and be proud of the progress, hope, and color that now defines us. For too long, “American” has been a dirty word, and I have been ashamed to hang an American flag, to wear red, white and blue, or to tell anyone that I come from the country that has inflicted so much pain and destruction on the world.

But this morning, as my friends and I left the bar where we were watching CNN and walked along the bustling main road, all South Africans shared our joy and screamed out windows, honked horns, waved and showed huge smiles. We are not alone in our struggle any longer. We have rejoined the world. And I couldn’t be happier.

See Nicholas Kristof's NYT blog, "On the Ground," for my contribution.

down the rabbit hole

"The air is on fire,” she said. Her heavy Norwegian accent permeated her words, rippling like birdsong in her speech like the heat that rippled on the skin of the desert engulfing us. We were on the longest road in South Africa without anything on it; no villages, no electric poles, no cell phone reception, and no sound save the sound of our tires scraping the dust road and the whipping of the wind as the car cut through the void. Mountains merged in the distance, unreachable and unmovable, and valleys of sharp black rock and yellow and violet wisps of flowers looped in and around us. The sun was insurmountable, hot and heavy and a sandy yellow. We were driving deeper into the heart of the Great Karoo, no-man’s land, middle of nowhere, down the rabbit hole and into a vortex of surreal experience, radical expression, dreamscape. We were driving to Afrika Burns.

Tankwa Town, a village that sprouts out of the ground for only a week once a year, composed of hippies, drummers, potheads, painters, bakers, dj’s, bar tenders, dancers, and everyone 

in between, is a five hour drive northwest of Cape Town. We took the N1 through harsh violet mountains and tunnels and vineyards and fruit orchards, through Ceres and beyond, taking an off-road, R355, to lead us onward. We hit a sharp rock on the homestretch, busted a tire, and we danced like flower children in the heat of the oncoming summer as Alex changed the tire. We kept driving, took another off-road into a private nature reserve called “Stonehenge,” and landed in the middle of Tankwa Town, our new home for the next two days. We set up camp as the sun began to set and the sky glowed yellow and rose.

The hyper-reality and bizarreness of the first night at this massive radical art festival in the middle of the South African desert threw me off the ground and into a strange, dislocated place. The village was set up in a massive ring, with people setting up tents in different camps. In the middle of the ring was a large, white dome called “The Wish” and the Man, a derivative of the Burning Man in Nevada with a Khoisan twist; the design originated from a San cave painting of multiple people merged into one figure, a symbol of communal experience. He/She/They would be lit on fire Saturday night. But Friday night, we hopped from camp to camp where tents were lit with lights and held bars (Afrika Burns is a gifting community, so everything, EVERYTHING, was free: booze, roti, chai, bread, drugs, fruit, jewelry, postcards, et cetera), trance music, rock music, creative seating, and vibrant dancing people.  I kicked off my shoes and danced in the dust, and the wind picked up and sent yellow and red flags shooting out straight.  Fires burned.  The music was like a carnival, people were dressed for the circus, and the stars pulsed.  When the lemon pie moon floated on the horizon and bounced higher, it illuminated the world with a blue white glow, and we no longer needed our flashlights or torches or hesitant footing to guide us across the desert plain, littered with shrubs and thorns.  We walked confidently across the emptiness.

I woke up Saturday morning when my body became too hot to sleep any longer.  The sun rose fast, and the heat rose faster.  We ate muesli with soya milk, banana, and strawberry jam, and whole wheat bread spread with lime green avo.   And then we ventured out across the camp to explore the art installations and the generosity that our neighbours were releasing to us.  We painted our bodies inside the Wish, 

and I played with the light and the lens. We checked in our egos as the Ego Booth, and emerged from the "Ego Tunnel" with paint marked on our faces like warriors. We were welcomed into tents offering freshly baked bread (they had constructed their own oven) with honey and butter, cool aloe and honeybush tea in shallow white bowls, and small glasses of ginger chai. Children biked by wearing pink wigs and with streamers flapping behind them, calling out, "Marshmallows! Marshmallows!" and handed us a skewer with a line of pink marshmallows stacked on one another. When it became too hot to bear it any longer, we retreated to our camp and had pasta salad with pesto, tomato, chickpeas, and avo. Our tent was sweltering, though, and I knew I could not stay inside all afternoon. I grabbed my book (Salman Rushide's The Satanic Verses) and found the chai tent. I collapsed on their pillows and slept away the heat of the afternoon. When I awoke, they offered me crackers with mussels and tabasco sauce and red wine, and then I returned to my tent as the afternoon began to cool.

The sun began to set and the sound of drums began to rise. I walked over to the drum circle and my friend Sam offered me his djembe. We played for a long time. I could say an hour, I could say 15 minutes. We had no clocks, no watches, no conception of time save the sun and shadows it cast. My hands and arms ached all night afterwards, but it was the most beautiful measure of pain. I returned again to the chai tent where they fed me more chai and vegetable roti, and I returned to our tent to pass out in the cool, dark night with Miriam, who had been feeling unwell. I slept through the music vibrating across the plain and woke to find the most beautiful sight I have ever seen. We did not know how, but far off in the distance, yellow stars were slowly curving into the sky to join the white ones that were burning billions of lightyears away billions of years ago. And they did not extinguish. They created their own constellation of golden luminosity in the black sky.
I woke Miriam and we were silent in awe. We joined hands and started walking in the direction of the stars, caught in rapture at their beauty and curious to break their mystery. When we were only a few hundred metres away, the Man was lit. We kept holding each other's hands and raced towards the Burning Man, closer to the screaming and cheering and dancing. And then we watched all the extremities, the hands and legs and heart and heads scald off the figure, crackle and smoke up. The core, the centre beam, burned for hours. The soul was the last to go.

Lily and I decided earlier to write down our fears and burn them in the fire. She ran up to me once Miriam and I arrived, face flushed and glowing. "Did you burn your fear?" she shouted.

"I lost it!"

"What do you mean you lost it? Find something else to replace it, quick." I ripped a thorny branch out of the earth. We ran screaming at the fire and threw it in, and Lily shouted, "THAT WAS HER FUCKING FEAR!!!"

Miriam and I sat for a long time looking at the roaring fire, watching naked people dancing off in the distant field and dressed in only painted hearts and fairy wings, and stoned people dancing like wild leaves, and sober people sitting and standing and watching the flames, just like us. After we'd filled our eyes and ears and hearts, we danced. And danced. And we kept dancing all night long until the moon rose and long after.

waiting

Thabo Mbeki resigned his leadership of the dominant ANC (African National Congress) party and his presidency of South Africa on 21 September. Ehud Olmert resigned his leadership of Kadima and his position as Prime Minister of Israel the same day. Many of us in South Africa hoped President Bush would follow suit, but I guess you can't ask for everything.

We can wait. The world has been sitting on its hands for the last eight years, willing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to end and oil prices to fall and jobs to reappear and for Americans to get a clue. The spiral keeps tunneling deeper. But if we can learn anything from Africans, it is the refined art of waiting. And I am not only talking about how Africans will stand in a grocery queue for twenty minutes waiting for check out, or sit on the curb for an hour with the rain pelting their head waiting for the bus, or sit in their market stall in silence for an entire day waiting for one customer to glance at wooden elephant statues on display. I am also talking about how Africans will forgive, almost to a fault, everything that has been inflicted upon them, and continue to wait for an improvement in circumstances that may never come. They wait in Khayelitscha and wait for the day their children will live somewhere other than a corrugated tin and wood plank shack that floods during the winter and spring, and they wait for they day when a black woman's ambitions will soar higher than the position of a cleaner. But many black South Africans, at least those with whom I am friends and with whom I have shared conversations, do not seek revenge on the roots of the problem, on apartheid and white Western exploitation. Revenge does not solve anything. They forgive and they progress when they can and wait when they cannot.

And so our country too, the United States, is learning to sit for hours in the rain, waiting for it to evaporate off our skulls and constricted chests. We are not waiting alone, though. That hope and waiting is shared by the world, and especially by Africans. Calm, silhouetted images of Barack Obama are tattooed on street signs, on garbage cans, and on walls. His myth and his symbols stretch out in a network around America. I do not believe in myths; I am too jaded and realistic for that. But I believe in policy, both hard political and economic plans and strategies and soft cultural permeations. The latter is already making headway domestically and globally through visuals and discourse, and the significance and applicability of the former is becoming all too relevant in the last few weeks alone in America. So we can wait. And we can forgive. And we will eventually move forward.

skipping ahead

We drove back along the coast and through the narrow, windy mountain passes by sunset and sunrise.  The last day, we drove 160 km for twelve hours past clusters of turquoise villages blossoming across burnt green hills, past rows of elongated lumber pines planted perfectly in dotted lines, past people returning and arriving and in between.  We drove over one final mountain pass, climbed a hill, turned a corner and the world opened up to a sheet of human stars enveloping the land, Cape Town lit up by night.  We nearly cried from relief and exhaustion.

Skipping ahead.

The past couple of nights I've gone out to our favourite club, Chez Ntemba, a fantastic place vibrating to South African house, Congolese, American pop, and glistening black bodies.  It's located on Long Street, the place to be night or day, transforming from a world of cafes, boutiques, and bookstores by day to a pulsing hub of clubs and bars and scents of falafel, sausage, tobacco, and beer by night.  I am writing this at 4:30 in the morning, my body collapsed on my bed but my mind still active after spending the night with a huge group of friends from Norway, America, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Tanzania, Germany, and Burundi.  I love it.

I loved it last night too, when I went out with my girls and was either drenched with sweat in the club or freezing in the wind outside.  After we left the club, we walked to a falafel nook to wait for a few other friends who wanted to dance a bit longer.  We were approached by a slight willow of a boy with his dirty hoodie pulled up over his head and his long eyelashes crowning his wide dead eyes.  Like all of the other homeless children haunting Long Street at night, he approached us with open palms and a soft voice asking for money.  One of the girls gave him a few rands.  I do not like giving money.  Instead, I asked him if I could buy him something to eat.  His face lit up.  We shook hands, my own cupping his small one with overgrown, greenish nails and colourless skin.  His name was Edward.  He was twelve years old.

I followed him through the hoards of people on the sidewalk as he darted through the small narrow spaces between couples and crowds in the same way I used to do when I was too small to be noticed.  He walked into a convenience store, and pointed to the cornflakes on an upper shelf.  I stretched up on my toes to reach a box, pulled it down, and handed it to Edward.  He grabbed a bottle of milk out of the refrigerator.  He looked at the bags of chips, and looked at me, asked if he could get one.  He picked out shiny green bag and said, "It will be for, what do you call it?"  

I responded, "A snack?"  

"Dessert!"  His smile was genuine, but injured.

I asked him how he would be able to eat his cornflakes and milk, and he said he had a bowl and spoon.  I stood in line with Edward beside me and paid for the food.  R27, about US$3.  The cashier put in a gray plastic bag.  I handed it to Edward.  He looked at me in the eyes and said clearly, earnestly, "Thank you."

I said "You're welcome."  He walked out the door before me and evaporated into the night.

I returned to the falafel stop to breathe and talk with my friends.  Aya left the restaurant, came back 10 minutes later.  She said that she had seen an old woman with a gray plastic bag with cornflakes and milk.  She asked the woman, "Is that boy your son?"  The woman said she had no idea what Aya was talking about.  Aya responded, "You took that food from that boy!"  The woman stuttered, insisted that a woman had just bought it for her.  Aya told me this story.  I nearly screamed.  Maybe I did scream.  In moments of anger it's difficult to determine the volume of your own voice.

I hate that children are roaming the alcoholic streets like rats at 3 in the morning.  I hate that it's cold outside and they don't have any warm clothes to wear.  I hate that I was wearing black suede boots and a low-cut black dress with a sash and dark kohl on my eyes with a jacket wrapped warmly around me.  I hate that they are begging for money and food.  I hate that my belly was full of Savanna Dry cider and tapas.  I hate that we berate them for poor manners when they keep pestering us for money we do not give.  I hate that they are all black.  I hate that they are too small to defend themselves.  I hate that someone bigger and meaner can come by and rip generosity out of their cold hands.  I hate that I didn't buy something that Edward could have eaten immediately.  I hate that Edward did not choose candy bars but chose something healthy, something that would provide meals for the next several days.  I hate that Edward lied to me and said he attended school to appease me.  I hate the system that pushes children into this world with no escape route, no white flag.

in the search of great art

We left Swaziland and drove through Kwazulu-Natal to make it to Drakensberg Mountains on the border of the country of Lesotho (less-OO-toe), a country contained within South Africa.  The distinctions between this part of South Africa and the country from which we had just ripped ourselves away were few.  Men and woman walked in the hillsides and along the road with long, ten metre stacks of reeds and lumber piled on their heads.  Zulus and Swazis will really carry anything or their head: buckets of water, an axe, produce.  We passed flocks of people waiting at unmarked stops along the road, anticipating a minibus that would take them home for the day.  We passed rows of people walking along the road from the farm, from school, from cleaning, from the hills.  We waved and they would wave back with broad smiles, toothy and toothless.

We made it into Drakensberg after the sun set, and stayed in a cozy B&B where a lovely woman named Baby made us fried eggs, sausages, and thick slices of toast with butter and jam the next morning for breakfast.  She was a master knitter and sewer, and showed me the wool cardigans and cotton jumpers and button-down shirts she created to give to local workers who needed them.  Her designs were flawless and precise, practical and durable.  I was awed by her generosity and grassroots contribution to enable the struggling working class in South Africa (the unemployment rate here is 50%), a race and class she had probably been taught to fear and hate as a white girl in this country.

It was Wednesday.  We made it to a nature reserve called "Giant's Castle" after a two hour drive on thin strips of road through isolated township communities set in dry, grassy hills.  Once we got near the reserve, we spotted springbok and baboons from the road.  Megan and I 

hiked for over an hour by a clear gurgling stream and we finally arrived at the end of our long drives, our long walks, our aching anticipation.  We found ourselves in cool, dark caves with

 alizarin and ochre and white and umbre cows, people, and mythical characters painted on the walls by healers from over 5000 years ago.  The artists were San, or Bushmen, hunter-gather communities who blackened the roofs of these caves with fires for cooking and warmth, who surrounded their transitory space with images from their lives, dreams, and trances.  There were black people lined in a patterned row, a person handing another person a baby, three golden cows predominating one slab of rock.  There was a snake, people dancing, people running, people fighting.  My favourite was a half-man, half antelope with three antelope heads, and a tail with a line of white dots.  An image from a dream or an ancestor.  I had not expected to see work so precise, with each mark so carefully planned and permanent, and to see images so fully developed in imagination and spiritual maturity.  I have seen great art painted on the walls of the Sistine Chapel, but in its own way, this art painted on the walls of caves is just as irreversible and important for its testament to the human capacity to stretch itself in all ways to create something, to leave a mark of its existence in relation to something or someone supreme.

smoke and markets

The heat and the wind set the fields aflame. After crashing at a nearby hostel, Meg and I drove to a restaurant for dinner and we passed a patchquilt of hot white and yellow fires in the distance and right beside the tarmac. The electricity across the region was out because of the wind, and we took showers that night by candlelight. Lying in my bunk bed, nestled in a sleeping bag, I looked outside the window and watched tongues of flame engulf a banana tree then become quiet again, watched dots of light smolder in the adjacent hill. Showers of sparks would drift across the field like fireflies. Even when a tree on the hostel property exploded like a bomb in jets of gas and heat, I was not frightened. Everyone was calm, treated the fires as a common occurrence. Which it was.

I woke up smelling like smoke, and looked outside to see a heavy fog laying across the dull lit world. Except it wasn't fog. It was all smoke. Snow white ashes slid off the glass of our car door when we opened it. Gray ash settled in the corners of our eyes. Some fires still sputtered.

It was Monday. We drove through smoke and rows of pineapple and sugarcane. We set out to explore markets, and found beautiful communities with jacaranda trees and markets set in a tree house. The smoke eventually dissipated and we ventured farther and found another market made from planks of wood lined beside the highway. Each vendor had her own small square of space to sell her goods in this long row of grass baskets, patterned cloth, and beaded bracelets.  The markets were mostly run by women, and it seems that women across 

the world are masters at guilt trips.  Male vendors in Cape Town and Durban will entice you into their shop by showing you a nice carved elephant, a lovely necklace for the pretty lady, promising "a special price for a special customer!"  Women vendors, in contrast, entice 

you into their shops by calling from the entryway, "Please, sissy, just a look.  Just come in and look.  My children are hungry and no one is buying."  One woman even went as far as to say, "We depend on the white people.  The white people haven't been coming."  I felt awful to contribute to this cycle of dependency these woman have on white tourists, because I want them to be able to support their families through sustainable farming, responsible family planning, and selling their handicrafts at fair prices.  Instead, I bought a hand-stitched quilt for the equivalent of USD 25.  I bought a string of beads for 80 cents.  A grass basket with dark and light geometric patterns for USD 5.  And I negotiated down to these prices, insisted that anything higher was exploiting me, the rich white girl.

And then I met Lungile, a wise, beautiful, spirited woman running her own market stall.  We talked for over an hour sharing stories about life, being a woman, laughing with each other and eventually exchanging numbers and addresses.  When I returned to the market the next day 

to say goodbye before we left Swaziland, we talked again for three hours.  After developing these rich friendships with Dumisani, who named me "Fikile," meaning "just arrived" in SiSwati, and with Lungile, who calls me her "American sissy," it was difficult to pull ourselves away from Swaziland.  It is a country with many, many problems of poverty, political corruption, the proliferation of AIDs, and social and gender inequality.  News stories would suggest that the country is utterly helpless in the face of such dire crises, and even Steve Colbert would suggest in a recent skit that Swaziland (and Africa in general) lacks any moral code and Africans are unable to constrain their primitive carnal nature, as evidenced by the thousands of "bare-breasted virgins" parading before the king.  (Note: Reuters, as cited by Colbert, is incorrect in claiming that the Reed Dance was started in 1999 by King Mswati.  I conversed with women in their sixties who remembered their own experiences as maidens in the Reed Dance, and have discussed it and researched it further in my course on African Religion; it is indisputable that the Reed Dance is a very old tradition.  Furthermore, the breast as a sexual object is a Western perspective that is relatively new in African and especially Swazi culture.  In precolonial culture, the breast was not considered something sexy and shameful to be hidden away from the public eye.  It was a part of female reproduction and a symbol of fertility to own and be proud of, still visible in young Swazi women's comfort with their bodies in the Reed Dance.  Other cultures place equal sexual connotations on other body parts, like the ankles or the nape of the neck, and so we must remember that the breast, by nature, is not a sexual object; it is our culture that has defined it as such.  It is a mammary gland.  For my male readers: Really?  You find a mammary gland sexy?)  We cannot and should not pass judgments so quickly on people we have never met or seen, as based upon secondary reporting from biased sources.  In my experience, I have never felt so embraced by a people in my life.

Umhlanga, or the Swazi dance party

We woke early the next morning and consciously decided to not allow our fear to rule over us. We would not be scared to stop the car, step away from our protective aluminum bubble, and take a photo. We would not be scared to talk to people we may meet, to engage. Meg felt ambivalent about this. She wanted to keep distance as a form of protection and defense, and I wanted to let my defense down but was unsure how. We stopped for petrol about an hour after we left Big Bend, and I stepped outside for the first time, remaining behind the door like a shield, taking a photo of the makeshift market on the edge of the petrol station while Meg repeated sharply, "Jess get in the car, get in the car." I was collecting photographs and images like I was collecting lives, the world. I was struck by the colonising process of it all, collecting and documenting and remaining completely external to everything. We tried to rub our sore egos by insisting that we had made it this far, that being in Swaziland was a first step, but I remained eager to slice away these barriers between Us and Them.

Malkerns Valley holds a lot of craft markets and small cities like Manzini and Matsapha (really just small towns, but large compared to the villages we had been passing), so we drove in that direction in the hope of finding something beautiful. A map of the country may be found here to provide a strong visual for where we visited. We stopped at an ATM in Manzini and although we could use South African rands with Swazi currency interchangeably here, we were both nearly out of the former. Out of the ATM popped bills with pictures of the king on one side, pictures of Swazi industry on the other, such as pineapples, lumber, and sugarcane. We would later use this currency and receive small silver coins with wavey edges (all with pictures of the king) in return.

The city of Manzini was filled with people everywhere outside, interacting, buying, walking. As we drove along during the day, children and adults alike would wave at us with both hands outstretched, large smiles, crying out, "Sawubona!," the siSwati (and Zulu) word to greet a single person. It literally translates as "I see you," a recognition of a person's presence in a physical and spiritual sense. We felt achingly visible as we were the only white people anywhere around, but after a curious look Swazis would continue with their business and not gape or hassle us. We felt welcomed. As I drove I'd take both hands off the wheel to wave back and the people along the side of the road and shout out "Sawubona!" right back.

We drove northwest towards Ezulwini, and the hills cradled us on either side and the wind kicked up red dust. The sun was warm and we were wearing capris and tank tops for the first time since we'd arrived in southern Africa. We had not yet found any craft markets, but to our left hand side we saw a huge crowd of people and triangle flags draped over our heads on the road. We pulled in to see what was going on.

Thousands of girls were being brought into the complex in the beds of large white trucks, grasping long reeds and wearing fiery red, black and white fabrics, brown prints, candy coloured beads and crowns. Completely unbeknownst to us, we stepped out of our car onto the grounds of the Ludzidzini palace of King Mswati III, the last king in Africa. And we were just about to witness the Umhlanga, or Reed Dance, a tradition that draws thousands of theoretically virgin girls

(this year, over 70,000 attended) from across Swaziland to this valley outside the capital of Mbabane to sing and dance for the king and queen mother in an ongoing ritual that lasts about two weeks. We showed up as the dancing and singing portion was beginning to kick off.

Meg and I looked at each other with giddy smiles on our face, and asked each other, "Is this seriously our life right now?"

I wrapped my Nikon around my neck and was immediately approached by hoards of girls interested for why we had come and wanting their pictures taken. We were the only white tourists I had seen yet. I eagerly took photos of people who actually wanted their photos taken, and after the silver button pronounced its affirmative "click," I was encircled by girls looking at the digital screen to see their own faces materialise. The girls were all clutching strong reeds they had individually chosen days previous which would later be presented to the queen mother to encircle her palace. Girls had to choose strong reeds that would not snap, because if they were to break, it is believed that those girls had lost their virginity and would face both public censorship and personal shame. Of course, the rule that all girls participating in the dance are virgins is true in theory only, and this ceremony presents a time for suitors to approach girls and their families and ask for permission to marry. To marry one girl, a suitor must present seventeen cows to her family. In the past, such an exchange was seen as a way to bond to families together through the giving of something or someone so significant to the family unit. Today however, cows are given a defined economic value (around R2000, or about $250 each), and the exchange for a wife is now seen as an economic transaction only. If a man cannot give seventeen cows, he may pay for his wife in currency instead, or negotiate with her family for a fair price. She becomes a commodity to be bought, her value fluid and impermanent.

The girls' costumes were a revolving kaleidoscope of pattern and colour. Specific skirts and wraps signified from which region, village, or family groups of girls originate, and while some wore clipped beaded skirts that sat low on their waists and bounced excitedly across their upper thighs and buttocks, others wore stiff wraps that reached their ankles but left a long slit of their leg exposed, cotton in earth tones with gold, maroon and black triangles, stars, and dots. Some wore bright bunches of yarn and others had a wrap with the picture of the king folded and tied across their torso like a banner. Some ankles were adorned with circles of shells that clapped when they walked, and while some wore sandals, others allowed the soles of their feet to meld with the dusty ground. The wind was strong and the red dusted settled in our eyes, our hair, and billowed skirts and reeds across the flatness.

It is important for me to discuss the symbolic significance of the costumes as well, for no greater purpose than to dispel the myth that "Africans go running around half naked all the time dancing for a polygamous king." It is true that the girls are half naked (or half dressed). It is true that the girls were dancing and singing for the king and the queen. And it is true that the king has 13 wives. (Many Swazis debate on the last point, especially considering the example he sets for his subjects when the AIDs rate in Swaziland is the highest percentage in all of Africa, a whopping 39%, nevermind the ethical and monetary implications of satisfying the sexual and material desires of 13 queens.) However, to look at the festival from a bland vantage point would dismiss the complexity that underlies the costumes and the rituals.

The following information is taken from an article (available on JSTOR for you academics) by Hilda Kuper, "Costume and Cosmology: The Animal Symbolism of the Ncwala,"

which details the specific symbolism of costume worn in four main parts of the body: enhloko (on the head), emtimbeni (on the upper body), elukhalweni (on the hips) and etandleni (in the hands).

enhloko:

• unmarried princesses and girls betrothed to the king wear red feathers in their hair
• married daughters of the king wear their hair in a high bun with a string across the forehead
• wives of the king (queens) wear their hair in a bun with the headgear of a a warrior, inyoni, 'the bird'. includes black feathers on either side of the face

elukhalweni:

• younger girls wear strings of big colourful beads and short skirts of dark cloth; the clothing is called indlamu
• unmarried older girls wear two pieces of print, knotted tightly on both sides to form a skirt

etandleni:

• "Every woman carries an umcusho, a long, flexible, light-coloured branch from which the outer bark has been removed. The trees from which the umcusho is cut vary with the rank of the performer; and those for the queens and for the Ndlovukati have special power. Ordinary women mary carry reeds. The umcusho is held in the right or left hand according to the dance" (Kuper 1973, 617-618).

While we took our fill of photographs, Meg and I were

approached by a slight man with a hawk-shaped nose and small, bright eyes. His name was Dumisani and he became our unofficial guide for the entire ceremony. His voice was even and firm, and he told us the significance of the dance, of the costumes, and led us around the complex to show us the queen mother, the meaning of different flags being flown, and the answer to any other question we may have had. He was also a sangoma, a traditional healer and diviner. I was ecstatic with curiousity. He was patient with my stream of questions and informed me of how he was chosen by his ancestors to be a healer, how he was trained, and how he continues to communicate with his ancestors daily. "All diseases can be cured using traditional herbs and medicines," he told me. "All disease except AIDs." This was the one illness for which there was no remedy, no cure.

Dumisani led us both to an area where the girls would parade through for over an hour, dancing, waving paper shields and swords, and singing rich songs with only the instruments of their voices. We watched, transfixed. My mind floated somewhere between their bare feet patting on the ground, the humming of cries of their songs, the crystal sounds of their beads.

Afterwards, we would head to an enormous outdoor stadium with seats only on one side for spectators, and the same girls would dance before the king and the royal family before creating enormous arcs of colour before them in the stadium. "This is the rainbow nation," Meg whispered.

A video from YouTube may help with an audio and a visual. Skip ahead to 3:05 to see the men dancing, to 3:55 to see and hear the women. And another of the women singing. Enjoy the images.

arriving in swaziland

Before I begin to share my stories with you from this past week, I would first like to thank all of my readers for their interest and open minds and hearts. I do not wish, however, to be a priest sharing parables with you from a foreign continent, elevated to a place where you cannot dialogue with these stories and with myself. I hope instead that you may feel welcome and eager to respond, ask questions, make comments, and feel as eager to teach me as I am eager to share with you. For all who feel compelled, I ask you then to please write comments in response to my posts, and share your own perspectives and responses.

This week was so compacted with new people, smells, landscapes, and colours that it would be impossible for me to detail everything, and it would be an insult to those experiences to summarize them without deeper explanation. I am trapped in a catch-22. I am choosing, therefore, to break up the week into segments, sharing a little at a time, and hope that through their compilation you may be able to see what I saw and hear what I heard from a more holistic lens.

Arriving. Arriving was difficult. No, it was more than that. Arriving was exciting, thrilling, and scary as hell. Meg and I arrived in Durban, picked up our VW Jetta rental car and I sat behind the wheel, stuck in a mixed cd with Aretha Franklin, and began to drive. South Africa, and indeed most of southern Africa, was colonised by the British, and drivers thus drive on the left side of the road. The air was warm and heavy, a drastic contrast to the cold, damp air of Cape Town. Banana trees with shredded leaves and burnt red soil lined the highways. Zulu women and men walked along the roadsides carrying everything on their heads: suitcases, baskets, grocery bags, cardboard boxes filled with onions, carrots, oranges, guava. My stomach was clenched tight and my temper was short, and we drove down the highway looking for the Temple of Understanding, the largest Hare Krishna temple in the southern hemisphere, which was supposedly close by. I asked Megan to look in her guide book for Zulu phrases like, "Hello" and "Where is the..." as we realised very few people in this area of the city would speak English.

We were close to turning around after 10 minutes of no luck when we saw massive white steeples poking out of the trees to our left, and I turned into the temple complex. We removed our shoes before walking inside, and found a group of Indian children being lead in a chanting ceremony of "Hare Krishna Hare Krishna Krishna Krishna Hare Hare Hare Ram Hare Ram Ram Ram Hare Hare" with huge smiles on their faces, arms shot up in the sky, fearless and safe. A woman named Sirvana walked in, dressed in a floral cotton sari with white markings along her brow and nose, a bead bag draped around her neck, who generously offered to show us around the temple and share her beliefs with us. The ceiling was lined with mirrors and murals depicting the life story of Krisha, a sky blue human incarnation of God. Marigolds and leaf garlands created arcs around the octagon-shaped temple, and roses and lilies were gathered in bouquets on the floor. Large windows lined the walls, and some were open to allow in a breeze and to reflect the flickering of the moat below the temple. The floor was marble and felt cool and inviting on our bare feet.

Sirvana stayed with us for over an hour, guiding us through her spiritual life and practice and then taking down marigolds and leafs to tie into garlands around our necks. She then showed us the Indian vegetarian restaurant downstairs where we feasted on roti and ruby red curry with paneer and cauliflower before heading on our way. We draped the garlands on the back seats of the car, where they remained all week, scattering their petals on the car seats. We joked that their sacred blessings guided and protected our car during the entire week, although these jokes transformed into truths and their presence became essential to us.

After we escaped the buzzing of Durban, we entered a solitary space along the coast of Kwazulu-Natal where mountains grew from the ground and then lay down again, where acacia trees started sprouting everywhere and the sky turned a filmy gray, the sun blood red. Houses became scarce and mud huts with thatched roofs replaced them. Then those too dwindled in number. As we drove along, we passed a warthog crossing sign and I shouted "Pumba crossing!," and five seconds later a small gray monkey darted across the road. We both screamed from shock and began to study the road more carefully, finding monkeys camped in the trees and squatting by the road. We made it to the border in the late afternoon, paid R50 (about $7 USD) for a visa into Swaziland, and continued our drive north. Before crossing, the border patrol asked us, "Where are your partners?" How do you explain to this man that you are an independent American woman, traveling without a husband as a protector or guide?

Cows greeted us as we arrived. Cows to our left, cows in the hills, cows crossing the road in hoards, brown and black and unchecked by fences or people. We passed small villages with mud and dung huts, circular in shape, with reeds carefully laid as a roof, and children playing barefoot soccer outside, collecting water at a pump in large dirty plastic jars. No one had indoor plumbing. No one had electricity. Everyone spoke siSwati, not English. I felt like I was a witness of an indestructible, resilient life, one that had surged forward for hundreds of years nearly unchanged. At first judgmental about the poverty and this meager lifestyle, my perspective shifted to one of awe as Megan keenly pointed out the wealth of knowledge these Swazis must possess about raising cattle, about building these homes, about how to live and prosper under these dry environmental conditions. We would also learn later that cows equal currency to Swazis, and this was indeed the rule for most pre-colonial African societies. These people were not mere cowherders; in their communities, those who owned the cows were rich and powerful.

We spent the first night in a hotel off the side of the road. There were no lights for kilometers except those of the stars and the milky way. Crickets chirped in the muggy night air. We felt lucky to sleep in a room with electricity and plumbing, although small ants crawled along the dusty tile floor and the manager spoke little English. It was a bed. And we had made it across the border.

letting it all hang out

The map spills over the side of the bed. It's marked with black penned notes like, "elephants!" or "rock art" or "women's art co-op" and highlighted autoroutes make colourful purple and green snakes basking across South Africa's surface. Durban is our axis, Cape Town is our endpoint, and our goalposts are everywhere in between.

Meg and I are flying out of Cape Town at 7h30 this Saturday, and we're renting a car from Durban and driving north to Swaziland. We don't really know what there is to see and do; Lonely Planet allocates only a mere 20 pages to the entire country in its guide to Southern Africa and details its various hiking trails, villages, and craft fairs. Honestly, I think I want to go to Swaziland just because I love its name. I've always judged books by their covers. It's one of my greatest flaws. But something baptised with such a vibrant face must hold something equally rich, and so we're driving on our impulses with wide hope.

We leave Swazi to re-enter Kwazulu-Natal, a province of South Africa, and from this point forward, everything and everywhere is a hypothesis. The city has worn down our resistance, and so we're driving clear of any starred circle on our map; instead, we're drifting toward the roads without names, where our African friends have told us to drive carefully because cows and other animals randomly and without warning decide to plop themselves in the center of our straight, straight path. We're abandoning touristy beaches for the mountains in Drakensberg where the caves are stamped with thousands of cave paintings, then falling back to the coast in the Eastern Cape to explore the secluded inlets, forests, surfing beaches with white sand, and Xhosa homes whose faces are tattooed with black, brick red and cream triangles.

I'm packing a swim suit. A turquoise and lime sari skirt. Sneakers. A yellow scarf for my hair. A fleece. A Nikon D40. Soap. A book by Ngugi wa Thiong'o. A pen. Rand. The map. A good friend. And not much else.

diversity

America knows diversity. Since second grade I've sung praises of the "melting pot," the most grossly overused metaphor in American history; I stand facing our flag and prostrate my identity to this prayer of indivisibility in unity of difference; I travel the country and see people of different languages, some with heavy dark wool itching their necks and others gliding and sweating under transparent bright silks, I see fishing villages without fences to separate neighbours and I've lived in apartments where I did not know who lived in the flats beside me, I've tasted hot greasy apple doughnuts from an orchard in Massachusetts and iced milky horchata in jumbo styrofoam cups from a stand in Los Angeles. America knows diversity. But it has never known diversity as concentrated and congealed as this country knows diversity.

We talk about race openly. Half the students at University are white. Half are black or coloured. Yes, there is a differentiation between black and coloured here, black versus lighter-skinned black, markers created by apartheid but are still used as labels today because we need those labels to understand the way the economic, political and social strata are arranged here. There are Indians, Malays, Xhosa, Zulu, Africans from Ivory Coast, Congo, Zimbabwe, Senegal, Namibia, Kenya, Uganda. Colours are different. Facial features are different. Religious beliefs, accents, styles of dress, music, all are different. A black African from the DRC is an entirely different person from a black African from Jo-burg. There are people who evade all attempts at labeling, like a fabric dipped in 5 or 6 dyes, colours bleeding in the center, colours collecting in the corners, and others remaining untouched. Where does America know this great collection of skin colour and culture so intermeshed? My high school had not one black girl in my graduating class. We had one Asian, a Vietnamese girl who most everyone peered at curiously but avoided. We were all white, rich, straightened hair with highlights, sporting our Uggs with our plaid kilts. How does a strict culture like this allow for the incorporation of novelty?

Of course, I am being a harsh judge on my country because there are strict divisions here that evade disruption. The division between townships and white surburbia is just one harsh example of South Africa's struggle to break down fences and ideologies. I have, however, never had the opportunity before to dance with so many beautiful black men and be seen as beautiful in return, to not be judged as white or rich or American. I have never had the opportunity to share my apartment with a woman from Zimbabwe who belts gospel music every morning, or a man from Jo-burg who is the biggest diva, frustrated when his instant coffee doesn't have enough sugar (he adds about 5 spoonfuls), or when his fingers will not form Mozart's Don Giovanni on his viola. I can walk 15 minutes from my flat and buy fresh seed bread, or clear plastic packets of shortbread or pistachios. I can walk 5 minutes from my flat and enjoy a bunny chow, a scooped out loaf of bread filled with buttered chicken curry (a hidden curry spot that even Oprah has enjoyed). I can walk 10 minutes from my flat to the train station and hop on a train going towards the beach where I can find surfers or Jewish delis. Or I can walk 5 minutes from my flat and catch a minibus heading downtown for only R5 and dance in my seat to the house music they're playing and then get off downtown, walk 15 minutes to de Waterkant, and taste the most supreme coffee I've ever known.

This is what I came here for. This diversity and a culture and community actively engaging in a transformation from segregation to integration.

surfing in mecca

I have had a very difficult time accepting this new reality.  I am accustomed to transplanting my feet in new soil and shifting my lenses, my perceptions, my language, my internal clock.  It is something I enjoy and anticipate.  But South Africa has been different, and I have been unable to pinpoint the source of my complex settling process.  It is a complex process, to be sure.  At first glance, Cape Town could be a city everywhere and anywhere; I could equally be in Australia, in Los Angeles, in Hawaii, in France.  The mountains and oceans mirror my wallpaper in LA.  The devil-may-care veneer of students, the boho chic that appears nonchalant but is actually carefully coordinated, reminds me of Berkeley.  Walking along bustling streets, one is equally likely to hear conversations in English as well as French, Xhosa, Zulu, or German.  The UCT Library is generous and filled with a surplus of scrumptiously creased hardbacks, but I typically must leave myself an hour with which to print a two page paper, as the printers frequently catch the flu and obstinately refuse to function.  Cape Town fails to sit comfortably in any distinct category.  It frequently morphs without warning.  And thus, I have felt equally without category and equally placeless.  I have been circumscribing my life here, drifting in the corners, rationally aware of its truth yet fundamentally unable to accept it.

Surfing has been my grounding force.  When I enter the water, I must be vigilant to every successive wave pulling at my side.  I do not possess space in my mind to consider the numbness of my fingers in the cold water, the numbness of my fingers when the girls at the shelter clasp them tightly for two hours, the numbness I force myself to feel when refusing money to the young girl knocking on the door to my flat who calls herself "Miss September."  In Muizenberg where I surf, I am cradled by the strength of mountains.  There are mountains behind me, to my right and left, across the stretch of ocean before me, misted blue and violet in the fog.  And every day I surf, there are rainbows.

At first, I did not want to learn to surf.  I was terrified of the waves, of taking a nose dive on my board and wiping out.  I fall off my board often, and I will probably take a nose dive one day.  Fear is not, however, a legitimate excuse to not do something.  Quite the opposite.  Fear is the reason to embrace everything worth embracing.

winetasting in stellenbosch

Sharing some images from a vineyard in Stellenbosch, a 30 minute drive out of Cape Town (one of South Africa's major exports is wine, an export they are seeking to expand in their effort to increase export in manufactured goods rather than solely raw materials), including a couple pictures of Aya (with whom I will be spending 10 days in Dakar, Senegal with her family) and one of Megan, another dear friend.