9 posts tagged “grahamstown”
Grahamstown is quite a charming place with its quiet streets and old colonial buildings nestled between the hills. But, like all small towns out in the middle of nowhere it is also somewhat peculiar. I think the over familiarity one acquires with everything in the town after a while makes it seem peculiar, in the same way that saying a word over and over again makes it sound more and more strange. The locals can also be quite odd. There is this one guy for example who wears a jet-black wig, black sunglasses, a black Stetson, tight black pants and a black top, everyday. He is in his forties and looks like a faded musician. He probably is. I have never seen him smile or talk to anyone. He always seems to be walking somewhere urgently.
A large part of the population is made up of students at the university and school kids. They occupy the town centre and most businesses are geared towards them in one way or another. Sometimes I feel annoyed at always having such young people around me. It is impossible to watch a movie at the cinema for instance that is not filled with kids. Bars, clubs and coffee shops are all filled with students who are for the most part incredibly irritating. I wish there were places for a more discerning crowd like there are in the cities. When the holidays come round Grahamstown feels completely deserted. All the university students and school kids go back home and the locals have the town for themselves for a few months, but it is not much fun sitting at a bar when you are one of three people either.
I was speaking to a teacher here the other day who said that he first came to Grahamstown thinking that he would stay for a year or two and then move on like most people do. But 25 years have gone by since then and he is still here. When I asked him what made him stay he said it was the peace and quiet of the town and the wild landscape of the Eastern Cape, which calms his soul. I tried to imagine myself staying here for that long, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t even imagine living here for 5 years. I would miss meeting new people like you do in cities too much and going out to interesting places. I would feel lonely here.
When my sister tells me of her favourite haunts in London and of the fabulous mix of people she met over the past year, I really get the itch to go there as well. I can imagine Nancy and I living fast in London far easier than I can imagine us living nice and slow in Grahamstown. As pretty as it is here, we both feel quite bored and that is a serious condition to suffer from. I think Nancy could bear living here as long as she knew that there was a time limit to it and that we would defiantly be moving to a bigger city down the line. She can be put her mind at rest though. Once I have accomplished what I set out to do in this little town I will be ready to pack my bags and take on the world again.
This morning while the gardener was trimming the hedges around the house he came across a huge Boomslang… for the third time this summer. Boomslang means “tree snake” in Afrikaans and males are easily recognisable by their bright green colour. They can grow up to 2m in length, but what makes them really scary is the fact that their bites are deadly. The venom is a haemotoxin, which prevents blood from clotting and this causes internal or external bleeding that can be fatal. Lovely.
The landlord called someone from the zoology department at the university to catch the snake, which he did with absolute calm and equanimity. I suppose after catching so many snakes he knows exactly how to handle them and what to do in the unlikely event that he is bitten. He assured us that there are many more snakes on the property and that we should keep an eye out for them when we are in the garden. Lovely.
Some Boomslang trivia:
- Shredded skin of a boomslang is one of the ingredients to make the Polyjuice Potion in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.
- The poison of the Boomslang snake features in the Agatha Christie thriller, Death in the Clouds.
- A character named Boomslang is a Marvel Comics supervillain.
Almost everyday for the past year I have been going to St. Andrew’s College and the Diocesan School for Girls across the road as part of my teacher training. In that time I have become quite familiar with the two schools, especially College where I did the bulk of my teaching practice. I have made friends with the staff, gotten to know the kids, learnt the layout of the campus and generally figured out how things run.
Just as I am well settled into the school though I am done with my teaching training. Today was the last day I had to go into the schools, and I must say that I am going to miss it. Both of the schools are lovely places to teach. The pupils are polite and respectful and the staff a welcoming team. The schools are beautifully maintained too, which makes working there that much more pleasurable. With all the resources and facilities available at the schools there is no limit to what can be taught or produced by the kids and that too makes them stimulating, creative places to work.
Going into a school next year with the usual discipline issues and a low budget is going to be a tough adjustment. Hopefully I’ll get a job at a school more in line with College and DSG and avoid the harsh reality of teaching that is the norm. I leave for Johannesburg this evening to see my cousin and his wife who were recently married in Italy. While I am up there I’ll drop my CV off at some good schools. Then I fly down to the Cape to see my sister and go for an interview at St. Andrew’s brother school in Claremont. When I return to Grahamstown next week I’ll have an interview lined up at an art school across the road from the university. I would imagine that at least one of the schools will offer me a post for 2008. In the mean time I am still strongly considering going to the UK next year to find a post there. The exchange rate between the British Pound and South African Rand is 14 to 1, which makes it an attractive option from a financial point of view. Also, the chance to live a train ride away from various enchanting European countries is appealing.
My fate at the moment is subject to the way the wind blows, but I am not too put out by that. Whichever direction I go to from here seems fine.
Only in Grahamstown do you see donkey carts about town. This is a drive by shot I took on my old Pentax Optio, so the quality is not the best. Since LoriG asked so nicely see a picture of them I have been on the look out for a few days. Isn’t it funny how you might see things every day but when you make a point of looking for them they are suddenly nowhere to be found. The donkey carts are a perfect example. Every time I have my camera on me to take a shot there are simply none to be found. So Lori, this is about as good as it gets I’m afraid.
This is a sign in front of one the entrances to the university in Grahamstown. It says that no donkey carts are allowed onto the premises. I think it’s funny.
It is not an uncommon sight to see donkey carts around Grahamstown, in fact they are a distinguishing feature of the town. They come from the surrounding rural areas and bring in things like firewood to sell. While the master is plying his wares the pair of donkeys wait side by side under a tree perfectly still for hours on end. They must sleep standing up with their eyes open.
I enjoy the theatre productions at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown more than anything else. Over the past week Nancy and I have seen some absolutely amazing performances. Until this evening the most amazing play we have seen was a story of a young girl who had a sexual relationship with a forty-year-old man when she was twelve and confronts him years later at his place of work long after he has already served time in jail for the offence. The script was like prose and the acting was so raw with emotion that it was like watching an event in real life unfold. At the end of the play the actors were in tears as well as many people in the audience. The play raised issues about morality and justice that sparked conversations amongst the audience as soon as the play ended and it has lingered in my mind ever since.
Tonight Nancy and I saw another play that also blew us away but for different reasons. It was titled Interracial and dealt with the implications of interracial relationships in South Africa, particularly between black and white people. As we were ushered in we were given a sheet of paper that read:
FROM THE CO-WRITER/DIRECTOR
1. Apologies
Please note that this play is performed by a predominantly black cast, unlike as advertised in the National Arts Festival programme. We deeply apologise for this, but, after the NAF programmes went to print, we experienced problems with securing the rest of the white actors we needed for the production… This is when we decided to re-conceptualise the entire production as a means of … “damage control” (as the phrase goes), and dropped the white actors we had intended to use… We based the entire play on the problem of finding white actors and used this very real problem to explore race relations in the country… A thousand apologies, if you came to the play expecting white actors… but this matter was truly beyond our control… As a final note, I would like to add that what you are about to see is not a documentary, but pure fiction.
2. The new cast list
…
I didn’t think much of it, besides wondering how the black cast would highlight the interracial aspect of play without the help of an interracial cast. The play began with the ‘director’ on the stage discussing the problem with the cast. Instead of changing the story the director insisted instead that the actors play the roles of the white characters. At first the actors argued that it would be hard to do because their accents and mannerisms wouldn’t fit, but the director insisted and the play commenced as a “rehearsal” with the director taking a seat in the front row with the audience.
After a few minutes into the story it was obvious which of the characters were meant to be whites. The actors certainly had no trouble imitating accents and ways of speaking and, as the director had said would happen in the beginning, the audience honestly began to see them as whites. However this was suddenly cut short when one of the actors whose role was a white school teacher stopped in mid sentence and told the director that he felt ridiculous acting like a white person. He said that white people have different hang-ups to black people. He said something like, “White people are different. I mean they have panic attacks for fucksakes… I suppose black people also do, but we wouldn’t call them that, and we wouldn’t go to a doctor for it and take medicine for it... And they have stuff like Prosac. Which black man takes Prosac? They’ve probably never heard of it!” The director tells the actor that he needs to draw off his own problems and substitute. That is what actors do, he said.
The story continues with white schoolteacher finding out through the services of a staunch Afrikaner private detective that his wife is having an affair with a black man. The teacher is mad with fury and heartache and it is later revealed that he and the detective come up with the idea of having them both killed by a couple of black ghetto kids hired to do the job.
And so the play unfolds with a various interruptions, like when the director decides to cut a particular scene, or hands out a revised part of the script to the actors, or has a quick meeting in the middle of the stage, or deals with some of the uncertainties that the other actors who have white roles are experiencing.
When the play reaches its climatic and emotional ending some 3 hours later and the lights are starting to fade, the director storms on the stage and says that the whole thing is ridiculous. The play does need white people to play the white characters he says, and that without them it doesn’t work at all. From that point on the director launches into an impassioned diatribe where he condemns white people for not participating in a play that was meant to have an interracial cast. He agues that whites have no problem finding blacks for their plays but blacks cannot find white people willing to be in theirs and that this perfectly illustrates the one sided effort at reconciliation in South Africa. Blacks are the ones extending the hand of friendship he says, not the whites. He starts shouting that whites are as racist as always and as he does so goes into such a rage that the tendons in his neck are popping out, he starts sweating and every word is spat out. I hate the fucking whites he screams. Fuck them! Fuck white people! He starts kicking and throwing the props around the stage before marching off out the hall.
By now the audience was in shock. Some people in front of us had already got up and left. The cast lined up and took a bow but despite their tremendous performance throughout there was only a smattering of applause. I looked around the hall and noticed that people were gathering their things and getting ready to leave. The white people in the audience who happened to be outnumbered by the blacks looked a bit nervous. Everyone seemed eager to get out of the theatre hall quickly. The air seemed electrified. It felt kind of dangerous. As if the smallest thing could spark a fire at any moment.
The feeling of danger was heightened when Nancy and I noticed a huge throng of people gathered outside at a pub across the road from the theatre. There were police cars and ambulances all around. We didn’t stop to have a look what was going on though. We just drove on past.
Thinking about the play now, I am not sure if the leaflet we were given apologising for the absence of the white actors was a part of the play or not. In fact I don’t know if there really were meant to be white people in the cast to begin with. Perhaps the whole thing was staged to make the audience question their own racial prejudices and whatnot. Nancy said that she is sure quite a few people did not attend the show after receiving the pamphlet because all the seats were booked yet many better seats around us were open. Perhaps the number of empty seats is what really made the director so angry… who knows?
As much as I love theatre that pushes the envelope, I think the director went too far at the end and ruined it. His denouncing of white people could quite easily have been echoed by some radical blacks in the audience or been thrown back at him by some white radicals and caused a nasty fight. I felt very uncomfortable being 5 meters away from someone shouting how bad white people are - especially when surrounded almost entirely by black people. It would have been be equally inappropriate and reckless for a white actor to venomously declare his hatred of black people and I would have felt just as uncomfortable. Freedom of expression and all that is fine, but there is a limit too.
Every year at around this time the population of Grahamstown doubles because of the National Arts Festival hosted there. People come from all over the country to enjoy a wide variety of theatre, ballet, exhibitions, music, film and activities. What were previously quiet streets become lined with hawkers selling anything from cheap plastic sunglasses to studded leather belts and what were town squares are transformed into huge flea markets with the usual array of stalls selling all sorts of arts and crafts, like scented candles, African curios, leather flip flops, watercolour paintings, printed T-shirts, beaded jewellery, bongo drums and whatnot.
Although I am not one for flea markets, I found a few cool things, like these tall, elongated figures from Benin hand carved from wood. Nancy happily flexed her bargaining skills and bought some lovely bracelets, necklaces and earrings for gifts to send to her friends in Taiwan.
To wrap us we had a nice cup of tea at a place we haven’t tried before. Nancy and I both have a deep love of coffee shops so we are very critical of each one we go to. We quickly take note of the décor, the service, the menu and the atmosphere and discuss what it needs to be perfect. The one we went to today scored 3 out of 10 primarily because the garden was divided by a completely unnecessary and ugly stone wall, the menu was ridiculously overpriced and despite the beauty of the house the coffee shop lacked charm. It was a shame really. Nancy and I turned the place around within minutes, knocking walls out, extending the patio, utilizing the garden and bringing out the character of the 19th century home that the coffee shop is in. Now, if only it was ours…
It is unlike me then to settle for a place I found on the Internet that no one has been able to verify, but I’m sure it will be fine. The reason I took the place is because the owners were very prompt in sending a floor plan, photos and all the details I requested. None of the estate agents I have dealt with so far have been anywhere nearly as professional. Also, as it turns out the owner’s son, who is about my age, will be returning to full-time study himself and doing the same course as me. The only difference is that he will be training to become a music teacher. Furthermore, the owner’s wife is a principle of a school, so I might even get to make a few good contacts through her.
Anyway, my new pad is in an area called Hill 60, which is apparently one of the safest areas in Grahamstown. With safety being the single biggest issue about living in South Africa, the secure location is a plus. It is also only 20 minutes downhill to university by bike and 40 minutes back up again. That should keep me in better shape. While I was living in Japan I did a 45-minute cycle to work everyday. It was a great workout and was quicker than taking the bus. In Taiwan I have really missed cycling as a means of transport. Every now and then you might see someone on a bike (sans lights or reflectors and a helmet), but that is just asking for an accident. South African roads are not the safest for cycling either but at least there is a shoulder wide enough to ride alongside the traffic, not in between it.
Another enormous plus to the apartment is that it is a wireless hot spot, which means I can connect to the Internet any time for as long as I want. This is crack to an Internet junkie like me. I use it for hobbies (like this blog), keeping up with the news and of course, for study. A significant part of my life is spent online each day.
Of all the things I most dreaded about going back to South Africa, not having access to the Internet was right at the top. Knowing now where my fix will come from once I’m in SA has put me a lot more at ease. Nancy is also relieved. When I am down there we can keep in touch using Skype, I can send her pictures and emails and whatnot. When she joins me later on, she’ll similarly be able to keep in touch with her friends and family in Taiwan. Given the choice, Nancy and I would much rather live in a tiny place with Internet access than a huge place without.
The last good thing about the place is that it is not too expensive. It is considerably less than we pay for our little apartment in Taipei, which is already very reasonably priced. I just feel happy knowing that I can pay a years rent upfront and that it won’t leave my piggy bank completely drained.
The PGCE course, accommodation for a year and a car were the three biggest costs facing me. Now that some money has been set aside for each, all that remains to be settled is for me and Nancy to settle in over there and start our new life.
