SMOKE, SMILEYS, SHABEENS AND THE MESSIAH

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SMOKE, SMILEYS, SHABEENS
AND THE MESSIAH

In 1927 the first Township in Cape Town, Langa,
was established when blacks, mostly Xhosa people,
were removed from their homes and resettled here
to make room for white expansion. Langa means sun
in the Xhosa language.




She stood amidst the swirling smoke, like an apparition.

The earth below her was coal black, baked by thousands of fires and pounded hard by millions of feet. Behind her were low tin shacks, the walls leaning at impossible angles, the waves of corrugated metal glinting in the sun. Above, the sky was a dense blue, with nothing to interrupt the color of the cosmos beyond. She wore a floppy hat and a nondescript dark dress. Her face was smeared with what looked like white paint. I thought she was a shaman. Her eyes peered out through the smoke, the darks parts glistening, the white parts red-veined and bloodshot.

“No, it’s Calamine lotion,” she told me casually, “to block the sun.”

She spoke with the confident air of a businesswoman. What I had romantically mistaken for metaphysical symbolism, she had placed there for perfectly practical reasons. She would be standing out in this hot, shade-less place all day cooking Smileys. After stirring the fire, she put her poker down, and with the precise elocution of a college professor, she delivered a short lecture about the art of cooking and eating a Smiley.

On a rough table that faced the narrow street sat the heads of three white and one black sheep. They were casually piled on top of one another, like one might arrange fruit in a bowl. She explained to us that in the open fire behind the table, the sheep’s wool was singed off using the pieces of hot iron that edged the fire. They were almost glowing red, as if in a blacksmith’s forge. The heads were then scrubbed with a wire pad, put in a large cast iron kettle, and boiled to perfection. The skulls were then split with a cleaver, the brains scooped out, and then the Smiley was served up on newspaper. Every part, eyes included, is eaten and savored, sprinkled with spices and devoured with bread. You can eat them here or take them away.

“Do you know why they are called Smileys?” she asked.

But before we could answer she bounced a cooked head on the white table, its lips drawn back to reveal a set of smiling teeth.

There was, of course, no chance to interview the sheep to see if he found this at all amusing.

“It’s hard to come up with a favorite portion,” said Steven Otter, in his book Khayelitsha. “While the brains are juicy and tender, the gums and cheeks are tougher, but no less tasty.”

Nthuseng, our guide, now led us down a narrow lane, the ground once again as black as charcoal. It was clogged with adults and children, some sitting on low boxes along the edges of the path drinking beer, some tucked away in truncated alleys, some moving slowly, some running excitedly. All, however, with a quick smile and a greeting. She turned and stepped through a low doorway and we followed. After leaving the sunned brilliance of this day, my eyes were sightless in the dark room. As they slowly adjusted, I heard Nthuseng call out greetings in Xhosa, and heard the replies.

“Now we will drink some African beer,” she announced, as the five black men inside the shack, and the women preparing the beer, appeared out of the darkness as if by magic. One man was drinking from a large pail. Another stood, wobbled a bit, and shook our hands. The others sat quietly at the edges. The room smelled of smoke and yeast.

The floor was dirt, with the same scorched appearance of the lane, and beneath the Smileys. Only this time it seemed petrified, as if it had been turned into black polished stone by the weight of history. The owner of this traditional “Shabeen,” where African beer is brewed and served, was a woman, not at all uncommon in the commerce of the Townships. She turned to the barrels behind her and ladled out the home brew. The pail was bright silver, and when she set it down amidst all of us it looked somehow stunning against the blackness of the floor. The brew foamed, then jostled and swayed within the confines of the pail as she retreated to her seat near the barrels.

Nthuseng then began to speak. She explained, with much reverence, that before taking the first sip from the pail she would remember her ancestors and ask them to be present, the ones she never knew, the ones from deep in her tribal past, for they were all here, always.

“In the South African spiritual tradition, time is not a barrier,” I heard a traditional healer say when I first arrived.

The pail of home brew was passed around the room, each of us taking our turn. For this was how it was done - the common vessel, shared by all. There is a word here, “Ubuntu” which epitomizes the strong African cultural emphasis of sharing. More specifically the concept of ubuntu teaches that humans are what they are because of the ways in which they interact with each other. In a more spiritual sense, Desmond Tutu says that ubuntu happens when a person understands that “he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished.” No one is flying solo. No man is an island. The Buddhist concept of emptiness.

We climbed back into Nthuseng’s black Mercedes and drove to the “hostels” where men once stayed during the apartheid era. It was here they slept, ten or more to a room, when they came from the country to work in Cape Town. The buildings have the appearance of a much harsher version of the projects in Roxbury, and indeed I was reminded of my work there as we walked into a courtyard. We stepped over scattered trash and past fluttering laundry to visit an extended family that now lives here.

A young woman sat next to a bed, her baby squirming behind her. The room was perhaps 2 meters (6 feet) by 3 meters (9 feet). In it were a stove, three beds, a television, and dressers.

Without moving from her chair she slapped the bed behind her and in front of her, and motioned to the third.

“Five sleep here, four here, and three there,” she said with a certain amount of resignation,

“Yes, it is hard,” she said. But one of her daughters is doing well in school, she tells us, and maybe next year she will be able to move.

Next we are in a shop where a big man sells fried bread, smaller versions of Portuguese flippers. He smiles broadly when he mentions the “Springboks,” the South African team playing tonight in the finals of the Rugby World Cup.

“In the past the blacks felt that rugby was for the whites only,” he said, “and we, the blacks, were only interested in football. Then in ‘95 when Mandela was President, and we won the World Cup, he united us as a Nation. ‘We are all South African,’ he told us. Now we love rugby too.”

We walked back to Nthuseng’s car while eating the hot bread as she held a running conversation with the youth lined up in the street. I think one of them was telling Kristen that he loved her.

We drove a short distance to the “Beverly Hills” of Langa, as Nthuseng described it, to Radebe’s B&B, where one can stay in relative luxury. Here the shacks are left behind and the bathrooms are inside. As we sat at the dining room table, I asked Nthuseng how it was that South Africa was able to move from apartheid to democracy, from a white dominated government to a government controlled by the African National Congress, and avoid violence? How was it that the “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” could succeed? What kept the justified anger and rage that must have been felt by the black community from boiling over?

She hesitated a moment, not to think of an answer, for she knew it immediately, but more to honor the moment.

“We had a Messiah,” she said.

Behind me was a framed picture of Mandela. He was smiling regally, looking off, dressed in a white top that strikingly resembled a liturgical vestment. It was the same framed portrait you would see in an Irish household in Dorchester, of John Kennedy, the same place of honor that would be held for Martin Luther King in Roxbury.

“When he got out of jail,” she said, ’There was such joy in the streets. Oh you should have seen it.

After driving away, two cars blocked our path, their drivers chatting, seemingly oblivious to the clog they were creating.

“Now that man just asked the other one, ‘How are you?’” Nthuseng told us. “That’s a real question here, and the person who asked it has to know how you really are, and that includes your chickens, your mother, your sick brother, how things are back in your village. So we just have to wait a bit for him to give a proper answer.”

We drove then to Khayelitsha, the largest Township in Cape Town, where more than 1.2 million people live. It’s impossible to describe the low one story metal smoky sprawl here. So maze-like are the little lanes, it is a true wonder that anyone can find their way around in Khayelitsha.

“You can drive around this place for five days and never finish it,” Nthuseng told us as she turned a corner.

“You can buy anything on this street,” Nthuseng said as we passed displays of mattresses, windows, car bumpers, sinks, bathtubs, panels of sheet metal, wood scraps, lumber, a barber shop in a shipping container, the ashes of a burnt shack, and thousands of people in the streets. Then we passed racks and racks of grilling meat, smoke rising and shifting, the women vendors squinting and waving at the grey incense as they reached in to turn their sausage and slabs and ribs.

“We love meat,” Nthuseng said to us joyfully, as she wove through the cars and people. “Oh, a traffic light!” she called out as she pushed down hard on the brake. Three goats sauntered across the road in front of the car. Then she pulled back into the congestion and we were again surrounded by the wild commerce of the Township. We passed a large open-air marketplace with tables laden with fabric, cabbages, vegetables, clothing. There was an incredible vibrancy in the air. Calls and responses, laughter, singing. Then Nthuseng said something I had not exactly expected her to say in the face of this apparent poverty and oppression.

“Look at them,” she told us, “They’re all happy. It’s not about poverty, it’s about celebrating life.”

And certainly there was a celebratory atmosphere everywhere, although I’m sure if Nthuseng were pressed she would qualify this statement, for she was no stranger to injustice and oppression herself. She was born in a rural African village, and credits her grandmother for her own success.

“’Nthuseng,’” she remembers her grandmother telling her, “’There is a thing called ‘school’ and I want you to go there.’”

Nthuseng completed preliminary studies at home then moved to Cape Town with her three children to one of these very shacks in the Township. She finished her studies and become a teacher. She recalls the floor flooding in the winter, her children waking to a river running through her shack. She speaks seven languages and is author of a multilingual dictionary. She owns her own business. So, when Nthuseng comments about life for a black African, she is not doing so in an intellectual sense.

Our last stop was at “the Smallest Hotel in South Africa,” Vikki’s B&B, with two rooms, breakfast and dinner included in the fare. Here Vikki’s daughter told us about the work that her mother does for the children in the community. Vikki’s husband mentioned that he plans to expand, adding maybe two more rooms upstairs. There’s a big screen television in the parlor. “Football World Cup here in 2010,” he explained. Out in the street a young boy dribbled a soccer ball, beautiful flicks from toe to toe, passing from heel to heel as he trotted away. Across the street, in a local shabeen, men drank quarts of Black Label. Brandy glistened gold in their glasses. A few danced shirtless around a pool table. There was a loud, rhythmic backbeat in the room. All were well on their way to exquisite hangovers.

“We have to go,” Nthuseng called to us.

Could we have stayed? Could we have taken a walk to buy a Smiley? Ah, but the stark reality here is such that it would be a sad mistake for a white man to wander these streets alone. Not that this is an anomaly. For any poor place that is surrounded by the rich, anywhere in the world, would carry the same warning. This is no secret. Perhaps it is more a matter of have and have-not, than of black and white.

At the beginning of our tour, as we drove in from the white suburbs, Nthuseng told us that she was very passionate about the work that she was doing, the work of letting people see the Townships from the inside, She hoped they would tell all the world of both the beauty and of the injustice within. She told us that the people in the Townships still appreciate what the outside world did for them when sanctions were imposed upon South Africa. Without them apartheid might still exist. And despite the current poverty, they still remember the days when they were not citizens in their own land.

“Don’t be surprised if someone stops you and tells you ‘Thank you,’” Nthuseng said.

But still, at the end of our tour with Nthuseng, what I desperately longed to do was get out of the car. To walk through that open air market place, to select a piece of meat from those hissing, smoking grills and wrap a slice of white bread around it, to sit and pick juicy meat off a Smiley with a group of men and women, to share a quart of Black Label, to walk down the hot street by myself and call hellos to people, to learn a sentence or two in Xhosa. That day may come soon, or may be far away.

“But at what moment does wood become stone, peat become coal, limestone become marble? The gradual instant.” **

I long for that instant to come.

When it does, I may even eat an eyeball, if one were offered. After all, haven’t I let an oyster or two slip past my lips?

**Anne Michaels, from “Fugitive Pieces”

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Comments

[Sharon Blair]

Full of awe!
Dennis, Your postings make me laugh; they make me cry. They make me extremely envious, which oddly enough, makes me feel very alive. Thank you, Sharon