(d)urban(a)

Headed for the Airport in a Few Hours

It's early Friday morning and I'll be leaving for the airport in a few hours to begin the incredibly long string of flights and layovers that will eventually lead me to Indianapolis, Indiana where my two friends will pick me up sometime on Saturday.  Yesterday I spent the day with J and then we met up with R and M to share lunch together at my favorite pizza restaurant on Davenport.  J gave an impromptu speech (for which I unnecessarily teased her) about what it was like to have had me come out to work with them and the Amazwi archive that I certainly wasn't expecting and it was really thoughtful and nice.  I have been trying to think over the past few days about some way to conclude or sum up my research trip and this blog, since the blog will go on hiatus most likely until next year at this same time (fingers crossed) when I return to South Africa (Cape Town, Durban, and Nelspruit area) to "finish" the research I have started here.  I'll continue to work with my research, but in the more "standard" or academic methods of working it into my dissertation project and editing video for conference presentations.

In a way, that's what makes concluding anything difficult - it doesn't feel as though anything is really ending.  I'm excited to re-situate and resume physically living in Urbana, IL, but it's not as though I ever stopped living there in terms of the thoughts, correspondence, and obligations that made me occupy that space, even from afar.  I have been here in Durban and with Create Africa South for just long enough to realize I can say the same thing for this place that is still new and yet has started to become familiar.  For example, yesterday morning I attended a meeting about one of the next steps for the Amazwi project (finding it a permanent, public home where it can be stored and displayed for general and academic use) and I remain committed to sending/collecting/exchanging/composing documents related to all of the projects that I walked into when I came here.  In fact, I have a an overdue report to finish one of these days...

For whatever kind of ending this is then, I want to thank everyone I have met and worked with since I've been here and back in the United States (yay my family and friends).  Our landscapes are dotted with so many startling contradictions - some whose horrors defy words and even time to encapsulate, explain, or heal - and I am grateful for the relationships I have with people (and even places and things) that also challenge encapsulation and explanation for an entirely different reason:  for the wonder and happiness they bring into my life. 

Talking About Race

I've been absent for a few days for several reasons - a few "load shedding" evenings that cut into my preferred writing time and several long days outside filled with sunshine where I've been too busy living here for my last week so I haven't had as much interest in posting.  But there is also another reason - I knew that I wanted to write a post about race, how I've encountered attitudes towards it and how its conception or enactment has manifested in my experiences here, but it's not really something that is easy to write about because it should be attended with care and it is something that is very important to write about.  In individual emails and chats, I've told some of my friends and colleagues the encounters I have witnessed or been (often unwillingly) implicated in, but I have been reticent to write about it more broadly because I can admit - I'm not qualified to say what race relations are like in all of South Africa.  I can only speak to instances I have noticed, that have led me to make incomplete deductions and assumptions about how some people talk about race here and how race is enacted as part of the everyday here.

Another reason I was reticent to write about it is that the difference between where I have situated myself isn't simply that I went from the United States to South Africa.  It is more particular than that - I moved from a Midwestern, academic environment where I primarily lived near and associated with people connected to a large, tertiary institution to the largest urban environment in the KwaZulu-Natal province where I associated with a wider range of people (including those connected to NGOs, the local university, people living in townships, people living in affluent suburbs, and so on).  This distinction is important because what I want to say is - I have encountered and been asked to listen to more overt and linguistically explicit racism - but this is not merely because I am in South Africa.  It is also because I'm outside of a university environment where, at least outwardly - respect of race, culture, and gender - has become a norm or expectation, at least in public discourse. 

Situating my statements in that way, I can say that I have been asked to listen to racist speech here that has absolutely shocked me and is unlike anything I have encountered living in the United States (whether it was in a lower-middle class neighborhood in Hampton, VA, in Los Angeles, or in a smaller Midwest university town).  Perhaps what has been most shocking is the way those who expressed their racist beliefs did not let my presence, often with knowing me for only a few moments, mitigate or impede their expressions of hatred in any way.  I was offended in those moments because it made me wonder if the person actually suspected I would be the type of person to identify with or even want to listen to the sentiments they expressed. 

I don't want to relate each moment in explicit detail, but there is one that is representative of how a white, paternalistic, colonialist attitude still exists in some South Africans (this particular person is an older woman in her 80s who has lived in Durban all her life).   In my first encounter with her when I told her what I had been researching in terms of NGOs that organize craft production with "marginalized" groups her response was simply, "Oh, they're good with their hands, aren't they?"  I sputtered through a response about how wide varieties of people enjoy craft production, both as an activity or as a potential means for economic advancement, but I really held back what I wanted to say about her problematic comment.

During my next encounter with her, however, I couldn't ignore the explicit hatred she expressed.  When the subject of crime arose, she described the indigenous Africans in South Africa as "savages" who had "ruined the country."  I was genuinely surprised that a word that figured so much in 18th and 19th century British colonialist texts actually remained in circulation.  I tried to remain calm and suggest that she consider where the construction of an idea of "savage" came from and reminded her about what kind of country, in terms of universal human rights, she was positing as ideal or "unruined."  Finally I excused myself and told her I did not want to listen to her hate.

As much as I have encountered far more explicit racist and stereotypical generalizations about groups of people in Durban and South Africa (these large groups being referred to as "the Blacks", "the Coloureds," "the Whites," "the Nigerians," "the Indians," and so on), I can say that overall, I have encountered more discussion about race and its relationship to the nation.  As much as this discussion has sounded problematic to me - in terms of my issues with its typification, racist assumptions, and so on - at the same time I have to say:  people are talking about race.  People talk here about what it means and what race relations are like here.  They express anxieties about the predominance of the African National Congress while applauding its past efforts towards universal rights, including suffrage.  They worry about the transition of power from Mbeki to Zuma.  In nearly every conversation and encounter I have had, however problematically a person has expressed it, people nearly always reference and talk about what is going on, what has changed, what remains a problem, and what the future looks like.  It's even in the South African "soapies" that play each day, where issues about crime, HIV/AIDS, poverty, housing, and so on, become active parts of these dramas (in contrast to the, in my opinion, vacuous, self-obsessed, whitewashed American soap operas they play in syndication here that largely deal with personal problems over broad social issues).

So to try to sum up what I have been trying to say - I have been shocked to hear that explicit racist and colonialist beliefs are alive and well, but I have also been so impressed that an active concern with the country (its development, its relations between people, and its role both regionally and globally) is so widely shared and discussed.

Food Notes: Cook a Bunny

------However sensational the title sounds, cooking a "bunny" is actually really easy.  You just need to prepare a curry and then, instead of serving it with rice, prepare a quarter or half of a loaf of unsliced bread for each serving (it's nice for everyone to get a loaf-end, so if you're making it for multiple people, you might opt for smaller loaves of bread so each person can have half a loaf).  To prepare the bread, use a sharp, serrated knife and cut the loaf in half.  You're going to stand the half up on a plate on the end, so if this is rounded or uneven, you may want to shave a little of the end off to make it even (don't take too much of the delicious crust off).  With the same knife, cut a square in the bread and ply it up gently to get the block of loaf innards out intact.  Fill the hole with curry, sprinkle with coriander (or cilantro, as many of us refer to it in the US), pop the bread top back on, and serve.  If you're a "n00b" then you might need utensils, but after your first few bunnies you can eat the entire thing with your hands relatively mess-free.

Choosing a bread:
The range of choices are wide - in Durban most bunny chows are served on a half white loaf, but I bought a seeded brown bread from the market to use instead since I prefer whole grain breads and like to avoid refined and bleached flour.  I also liked the slightly harder crust that really helped me spoon the curry goodness up.  Generally speaking, you want to choose a bread that has a firm crust so that it can hold shape even with hot curry inside of it.  I think it would be fun to experiment with individual dinner rolls to serve "bunnies" at a party, but then again I usually think any miniature version of a food item is loads of fun.  There are exceptions to this rule I'm sure.

Choosing a curry:
If you're in a hurry for curry (sorry, I had to), then you could always buy a premade, bagged curry.  Decent brands in the Midwestern United States include Tasty Bite (they also offer several vegan options) and SWAD (choose wisely).  If you want to make a curry, it's all about the curry powder blend you purchase or create yourself!  I would like to think I'm an amazing chef, but when it comes to curries, the spices you use (their variety and freshness) make all the difference. 

For my bunny, I made a potato and lentil Cape Malay curry.  This is a blend of seasonings that emphasizes sweet and savory contrasts over spicy heat, like the spicier Durban (or "Durbs" as it's called) curry blend or the fiery hot "mother-in-law" curry blend.  If you are lucky to be near a large spice market, like the one here at Victoria Street Market, you can watch the curry blends being mixed together.  You might sneeze a lot, but it's fun.  The Cape Malay curry blend I chose references the mixture of Malaysian/Indonesian and Indian presence on the Cape of South Africa as slaves and indentured laborers in the 17th century.  The blend's highlights include whole cumin seed and lots of ground cinnamon.

My improvised potato-lentil Cape Malay curry recipe:
5 small potatoes (white rose are good or Mediterranean - both have thin skins)
1 onion
3 TBSPs Curry Blend (I used Cape Malay)
1 tsp minced garlic
1 15 ounce can of lentils
1/3 cup plain yogurt
1 15 ounce can crushed tomatoes
olive oil
salt and pepper to taste

Consider making the curry the day before you want to eat it.  It gives the stew time to get to know itself.  If you're cooking for the same day, consider cooking it earlier in the day.  Boil the potatoes first , drain the water and let them cool so that you can peel the skin from them easily.  Chop the onion and mince the garlic if you're not lazy like me (I buy the minced goodness that comes prepared in jars - no more smelly garlic fingers!).  Brown the onion and minced garlic in your olive oil and, as the onion is getting translucent, add your curry powder and let that fry with everything for about 3-5 minutes.  You don't want it to burn (lower your burner to medium heat), but you want to really heat up and bring out the flavors of your spices before you get everything wet.  Then add your can of lentils (I like using a can over dried because I don't drain them completely so the lentil goo adds some moisture to the curry).  Did you cube those potatoes after you peeled them?  You should have.   Add those cubed potatoes in the pot.  Then add your crushed tomatoes.  Stir this all together for a while.  I usually wait for the lentils to get soft and friendly with one another before I add the yogurt, which really makes the color of the curry come out and gives it a nice creaminess.  Add some salt and pepper and give it a good stir.   Let the curry get to a nice simmer and then lower the heat to maintain that soft simmer.  Cover the pot.  Go fiddle with something else for a little bit.  Stir occasionally while you're thinking about other things (like beads of water glistening on cilantro or how nice your neighbor's cat can be when he wants to be pet).  If you've got spicy taste, consider making some sambals (diced chillies, carrots, onion, and fresh tomatoes) to use as a seasoning for your curry.  Stare out the window.  Stir your curry.  This should continue for at least an hour - since it's not meat, there's no worry about anything being "raw" - however, you want to let the flavors mix up with each other so the more patient you are and the more you allow the curry to gently simmer or at least sit for reheating later, the better.

I don't know about you, but I'm stuffed.

World's Largest Chess Game?

Eskom has stepped up their scheduled load shedding in the central urban areas - the office lost power today around noon - thankfully right after I had printed out the materials Mrs. G needed to submit to Tradepoint Durban today.  The load shedding was previously limited to the suburb and township areas outside of Durban (leaving me relatively unaffected), but they have now started cutting downtown areas for hours at a time.  On Tuesdays and Thursdays, they're supposed to affect my area from 6-8pm, something I'm not looking forward to.  It's hard eating, let alone preparing food, in the dark.  In most affected areas, banking stops and only cash-based commerce can continue.  Mrs. G went to the Tradepoint offices and M and I had to find an Internet cafe to work from.  Luckily the "Workshop" - a large mall in the city centre was running from generators.  There were men lined up on each side of this giant chess board, watching these two players.  I don't know that I've seen such a large chess board in a public space before.  Today was long but beautiful - M and I walked around the city - from the Workshop to Victoria Street Market Area for fabric.  We could walk everywhere because it was cool enough not to have to rely on local taxis.  Amongst the crowded sidewalks in the market area I saw Mrs. G - she said the reception of her products at Tradepoint was encouraging.  They will give her a decision by Tuesday but she seemed to be in a good mood about her exchange with them.

Moonlighting as a PR Writer

This weekend has been relatively quiet - unlike the ocean, crocodiles, and giant Ridgeback puppies I got to frolic in, near, and with last weekend, I did a lot of reading and writing this weekend.  For the first part of the day today I composed the documents for Mrs. Gambushe that I mentioned on Thursday in preparation for her submission of sample products to Tradepoint Durban.  That put me in the role of a public relations writer where I drew on a lot of the conventions for writing about handicraft items and their producers that I have critiqued in the past.  I have attached a pdf of the complete "letter of motivation describing business and products" that Tradepoint Durban requires, but in a nutshell I retold the selective history of how Mrs. Gambushe started the community centre in 1995 and its role for providing skills development in the Umlazi township area.  After this retelling and providing basic information about the company, I went on to describe the objects she is offering for their consideration as a "fusion of three values that are central to the co-operative:  pride in the new South Africa, pride in Zulu tradition, and pride in the possibilities for women in South Africa today."  I spoke with Mrs. Gambushe about the particular products she was offering for consideration and listened to her describe them and their meaning in order to create this particular document.  I have reached a point where instead of merely criticizing appeals to tradition and women's economic empowerment when it comes to promoting handicrafts, I understand these appeals function and exist as strategic rhetorical commonplaces to situate the products for audiences of retailers and consumers.

I had to do additional research to address Zamukuziphilisa Sewing and Crafts' "Black Economic Empowerment Status."  The government introduced a "broad-based" plan of Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) to redress the previous economic exclusion of Black populations under apartheid.  The official documents are difficult for a layperson like myself to negotiate (at least over the course of a few hours) and I have noticed that there are several online services that offer fee-based assistance to help companies - from micro-enterprises to large corporations - assess their BEE status.  It's somewhat like a point system, where an enterprise receives a higher BEE rating for the number and level of Black (this includes Black, Coloured, and Indian) people and women that own, run, or are employed by the company.  I purchased an edited collection, Visions of Black Economic Empowerment, with commentary and critique of the system and its development that I look forward to reading.  For now, I don't know enough about it, how its intricacies work, or how its implementation/enforcement is effected to take a position on it.  I'm interested to know more about it.

Download ZamuInformation.pdf

Sewing Projects and Growing Election Tension

I didn't get to embroider very much on my own during my trip to Mpumalanga so I have a lot of work to catch up on if I want to finish these projects before I leave.  I taught myself a new open filling stitch in the muslin embroidery cloth:  on the left side of the piece in browns and reds, it's called the "burden stitch."  It may be called that because of the amount of time it requires. I like the dimensionality and texture of it though.

Things have been quiet here in Durban today.  It has been two weeks since Zimbabwe's election and the news and many of us continue to wonder what will happen there.  South Africa's President Mbeki problematically has put no pressure on Mugabe or the Zanu-Freedom Party to release the election results or push movement forward, even going so far as to say there is "no crisis" currently in Zimbabwe.  This statement runs counter to reports of the arrest of a Movement for Democratic Change (the opposition party) lawyer, the unconstitutional amount of time the electoral commission has taken, and the recent recommendation of an emergency regional summit held in Zambia to discuss the issue.  The Zimbabwean police has also banned any political protests to try to outlaw the burgeoning unrest about the lack of presidential election results.  It's hard to tell what could happen next there.
 

Guess We're Having Eagle for Dinner

I finally finished transcribing my fieldnotes today from the two workshops we completed last month.  Among the everyday descriptions of workshop activities, I found a story that I had written down that Mrs. Gambushe related to me during our second week. 

While we were away in Mpumalanga, her husband brought home a dead eagle as an intermediary for the man who had procured the eagle and the sangoma (Zulu faith healer) for whom it was intended.  He placed the paper-wrapped eagle in the refrigerator in the house to keep until he knew the sangoma would be home.  The young woman staying with them (she's a refugee from Zimbabwe and has been working on our sewing project at the centre) saw the package in the refrigerator and plucked and cleaned the bird without asking anyone, as she prepared the meals in the house and was just trying to be helpful.  She thought it was a type of chicken or other bird that was meant for eating.  Mrs. G's husband was so angry that she had cooked the eagle.  Fortunately, after a few days the situation blew over when the two others involved agreed not to hold Mr. G responsible for the cost of the eagle.  I don't know if anyone actually tasted the eagle.

Returning to Zamu Centre in Umlazi

I would have liked to post earlier but the "load shedding" (Eskom's euphemism for the allegedly scheduled but still unpredictable rolling blackouts) kept my power out for much of the evening.  I took a nap because there wasn't anything else to do and then, when I couldn't sleep any longer, sat in the dark eating bananas and the other food I had in my apartment that didn't require electricity to prepare it.  Today I returned to Umlazi and visited Mrs. Gambushe at Zamukuziphilisa Community Centre to work with her on developing materials for a proposal to Tradepoint:  South Africa Durban, a transnational governmental and non-governmental organization whose mission is to assist "SMMMEs [small, medium, micro-enterprises] to Access Global Markets."  The Tradepoint located here reaches out to SMMMEs in the area to market and produce items from KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) to be sold elsewhere (usually where other Tradepoints exist).  They also attempt to place items from other Tradepoint-serviced areas within the KZN region.  Currently they are looking for KZN products to promote and sell on Reunion Island.  I worked with Mrs. G to gather information so I can draft a "letter of motivation" that includes her company details, production descriptions for the particular range of items she wants Tradepoint to consider, and to cost and create pricing information and tagging for the three items she has selected for consideration.

When we talked about costing the items, Mrs. Gambushe pulled out a ledger that marked her expenses for the three products that noted the labor time each item took as well as the cost of materials.  She figured a 68% of materials cost profit amount above labor, overhead, and materials cost.  Considering how to price labor amazed me the most.  She suggested a day of handicraft (in this case, some sewing and a predominance of beading) labor here in the Durban metropolitan area should be compensated by R40.  With the current exchange rate, that is a little over $5 US per day.  Inflation here has increased (to give a sense of average costs - a public taxi in town one way is R3, a loaf of bread can range from R3.50 - R7.00, and 1 liter of milk can range from R4-8 depending on the container it is sold in).  I don't know if R40/day is a "living wage" for this area, even with the average costs I have provided.  Defining something like a "living wage" is more complicated and locally dependent than many universal human rights and international labor organizations often concede. 

Even with what seemed to be an appallingly low wage to me, she and I both had concerns the products may end up being too costly for the "tourist/souvenir" market which they will likely be intended for in Reunion Island.  Referencing an assertion I made yesterday, handwork/handicrafts takes time - it can be an incredibly time-intensive low technology - and its value on average don't seem to match the amount of labor that it requires.  So why do "developing" areas and nongovernmental organizations repeatedly turn to small craft production as a way to generate income?  There are a lot of ways to start answering this question, but I suppose the question I have been considering tonight, will the predominance of handwork from "developing" areas continue to compensate so little for labor?

The Process of Creating an Amazi Abesifazane Cloth

It was important for me to participate in the two workshops in the Mpumalanga province to meet the participants and to get a sense of the material conditions in which they produce the Amazwi Abesifazane cloths (conditions I referenced in my post yesterday), but also to understand the process of cloth production.  Many of the participants have never embroidered or done hand-sewing before, so I wanted to see how skills were imparted to them (by Mrs. Gambushe, M, and myself) and the choices they made at each step of their cloth production.  At the end of each workday, we collected the cloths from the women to distribute them the following morning.  I am still thinking through this practice of collection - in some respects it made me uncomfortable because of my concern that it was sending a message that we didn't trust the participants as rhetorical composers to work on their cloths by themselves or even care for the cloths through the night until the workshop the next morning.  Despite my concerns about this action, it is an established practice of the organization, and it made it relatively convenient for me, then, to take an image of each cloth at the end of each workday.  I've included the four stages of Thandi Mokwena's cloth.  She was a participant of the first week's workshop, sponsored by the Parliamentary Millennium Programme.  After composing her narrative and drawing a rough sketch for the cloth's design, CAS facilitators told her to hem the border of her cloth quickly with a large, running-stitch, write her name on the cloth, and then choose a more decorative border to complete the hem (she picked a relatively simple, bi-colored running stitch).  From there she transferred the sketch onto the cloth using a colored pencil and began embroidering.  She approached me during the middle of the second day with her sketch and asked me to draw figures to represent people onto parts of the structure she had already added.  During the last sewing day of the workshop she approached me again to draw figures in the small yellow house in the bottom left corner.  Both times as I sketched the figures for her, I referred to her original sketch and asked her if my rendering was acceptable to her.

Hand embroidery is a time-intensive medium.  It allows the producer time to make decisions and to add and subtract items relatively easily (provided the selection of fabric, needle, and thread are compatible and you're not using a large needle with a delicate fabric, for example, and rending holes in the fabric if you decide to remove any stitching).  What has continued to interest me about the embroidery for these particular cloths, is that the images that are slowly and carefully embroidered are meant to represent past histories and living conditions of the producers sewing them.  What thoughts does the producer consider, in this case Thandi, when she is embroidering a small, irregular rectangle that is meant to stand in and represent someone she has known that died?  How does it feel to embroider personal and representative subject matter, especially if you know it is intended for a larger audience?

Material Differences

Now that it has been a week from the two workshops I completed, I have enough distance from them to start analyzing and thinking about them again.  Fieldwork, and all that entails, was more than I expected - particularly this kind of research, where I couldn't leave for the day or even have much time alone at all, as M and I shared a room at both locations (though I have already started missing laughing right before falling asleep). 

I mean "more" as in the demands it asked of me and how each moment seemed like an event I had to experience and record for future consideration.  At one point during the second workshop our host D said to me, "Martha, you're always writing," making me aware that my constant note-taking was quite conspicuous.  A month before the trip I was reading through some articles on fieldwork practice to remind myself of good practices to take with me.  I was shocked when I came across a reference to Bronislaw Malinowski's fieldnotes where he wrote angrily about his research subjects.  A few days into our first workshop, however, I began to understand how frustration can arise in a research situation.  The particular situation I placed myself in - two workshops that threw a new group of participants, organizers, facilitators in two different locations with access to two dramatically different levels of material resources for a five day period in which "something" had to be made - was really frustrating at points.  I confess to having a sentence or two in my notebook complaining about the conditions of "x" or how "y" spoke to me in a certain way that I did not appreciate. 

In terms of the material differences between the workshops - these two pictures stand in for the larger sense of material inequality that existed.  I took the first picture of the table setup for the final tea and closing ceremony for the Parliament/Create Africa South workshop, paid for by the Parliamentary Millennium Programme.  I took the second picture after M, a group of participants, and I arranged the chairs in the creche (preschool/daycare facility) for our closing ceremony.  In both instances, the rooms had been used for the workshop activity and then transformed physically for the concluding remarks.  The differences stand out enough for me not to have to say much about them - I can add that the location for our second workshop didn't have any electricity and that our access to bathroom facilities consisted of a drop toilet (outhouse) in the front of the creche - a much different arrangement than the well-lit and air-conditioned workspace with easy access to a multi-user plumbing bathroom during the first week.  That the same "product" - a woman's story and her cloth interpretation of that story - can come out of these two different spaces and material arrangements continues to amaze me.  However these material differences certainly affect the meaning the participants and local community attach to the activities that occur during and after the workshop.