(d)urban(a)

Why (d)urban(a)?

I updated the "About" page with an explanation as to what the name for this blog means.  It is early Saturday morning here and I have so much to say about yesterday, my first day at the CAS office, but I am still struggling with how I can say what I need to. 

The name for this blog, (d)urban(a), refers to the city I am currently living in for the next three months, Durban, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, and the city I have spent the last three years living in, Urbana, Illinois, United States. Their names connect formally through the word "urban," but the concept "urban" manifests itself in each of these cities in markedly different ways in terms of scale, population, city structure, and development.

The coincidence of name may not last - there has been a proposed name change, as Durban was named in 1835 by British white settlers arriving from Cape Colony who named the strip of land along the coast after Sir Benjamin d'Urban (governor of the Cape Colony at the time). A couple of years ago many of Durban's street names were changed to honor activists (mostly those affiliated with the African National Congress) who spent years struggling against apartheid and its Group Areas Act.  In 2000 the unicity council of Durban was renamed to "eThekwini," the original name for the greater Durban area.  It derives its name from the word "itheku," which refers to the horns of the bull (the shape of the bay is said to resemble bull's horns).  In terms of the city, the name KwaKhangela has been proposed, as this was King Shaka's name for the area prior to colonization.

What does Democracy mean to you?

I have willfully avoided describing my first day at Create South Africa (CAS) because it simply overwhelmed me.  I'll try later today to put a narrative into text since I'm spending much of the day reading outside in the shade or in my room in Glenwood (a relatively quiet, suburban enclave in the city).  For now, I want to discuss one project M (whom I will work most closely with at CAS) introduced me to on Friday and the particular question it poses to its participants.

CAS has recently partnered with the Parliament of the Republic of South Africa's Parliamentary Millennium Project, "Perspectives On and Of Africa."  The PMP supports CAS to conduct quilt workshops with groups of women (living in both urban and rural areas) in each of the nine provinces of the country.  M had just completed her first workshop in December with a group of about thirty women from the Eastern Cape province and the next workshop is scheduled for March right here within the KwaZulu-Natal province.  At the beginning of the week the women are asked, "What Does Democracy Mean to You?" and by the week's end each woman has narrated (orally for those participants who are illiterate) a response to the question and accompanied it with a sewn quilt panel using mixed media of cloth, thread, and beads.  Translators working for the PMP assist in the translation of the narratives from their original language (which, depending on the area, is usually in any one of ten official African languages or possibly in Afrikaans) into English.  Eventually these quilt panels will be framed with the narratives (both forms) and a photograph of the panel's creator for display at the Parliament in Cape Town.

On Friday M and I pored over the English translations the PMP had sent along to edit them further (making small changes in grammar, syntax, and sometimes diction).  M speaks seven of South Africa's official languages fluently to my one, but I suppose my background in composition instruction came somewhat in handy (I never imagined I would be so grateful for the time I spent, both as a student and an instructor, enmeshed in the brambly rules of English grammar offered by Diane Hacker and her kind). The overwhelming majority of responses cited the following four components of democracy:
potable water
electricity
paved roads
close access to health clinics
I will be entirely honest to say that my particular background unprepared me for responses that were so immediate and concrete.  What I wonder is, what is the difference of conceiving of democracy as equality of access to an essential bundle of material, social goods and conceiving of democracy through other abstractions such as equality before the law, rule of law, or human rights?  Additionally, how have universal or global conceptions of democracy been put to use compared to site-specific or local understandings of democracy?

The question of how to conceive of democracy remains an important and highly contested one here in South Africa, particularly as the years from 1994 when South Africa formally achieved complete enfranchisement of the population elapse.  The practical and widespread implementation of this formal achievement has been criticized on many fronts (nationally and globally).  For example, last Tuesday (29 Jan 2008) John Minto, a New Zealand anti-apartheid activist who organized the 1981 Halt All Racist Tours, rejected a nomination for the Companion of OR Tambo Award (a prestigious award whose past posthumous recipients include Ghandi and MLK Jr).  In his rejection letter to South Africa president Thabo Mkebi, Minto insisted, "when we protested and marched into police batons and barbed wire here in the struggle against apartheid, we were not fighting for a small black elite to become millionaires.  We were fighting for a better South Africa for all its citizens."

Food Notes: Mutton Kebab Roti

Saturday I spent the morning at the Essenwood Market in Berea Park.  Every Saturday morning, several rows of stalls filled with crafts and food cover part of the park.  Bypassing the braai (the very popular Afrikaans barbecue), I finally got to try some of the Indian food I had heard so much about before arriving in Durban.  The city and its surrounding areas has a population of at about one million Indians in large part because of a massive influx of Indians as indentured laborers in the mid-19th century.  They came to the KwaZulu-Natal area primarily to work in sugar plantations or the mines for the British.  Their imprint on the local food culture here has been indelible - there is even a particular curry widely known as "Durban curry" that I hope to try soon.  On Saturday I had a kebab sandwich - it was made from ground mutton and served on roti, unleavened flat bread.  The kebab was delicious - very spicy with strong accents of cilantro and coriander. 

Election News Around Here

I'm looking forward to reading news of Super Tuesday tomorrow in the US and the major news outlets here in SA have provided some coverage of the US election season - in fact, when I landed in the Johannesburg airport I was surprised to see the giant front-page headline devoted to news that Ted Kennedy had officially announced his support of Barack Obama.  However, another election has occupied much of the media's attention here.

Over the last week, reference to the economic and political crisis in Zimbabwe and its upcoming elections has arisen in nearly every conversation I have had.  Bordering South Africa to the north, Zimbabwe has been in an economic spiral for the last seven years with most major news outlets attributing the current hard currency shortage and hyperinflation to President Mugabe's compulsory land redistribution policies beginning in 2000.  While the idea of the redistribution was altruistic - it was meant to reclaim land for indigenous Zimbabweans from the small minority of whites who possessed over 70% of land - the implementation of the program and the subsequent standstill in farming and mining has made the redistribution project a disaster.  The situation in Zimabwe has been so grim over the last seven years that the World Health Organization reports the average life span for Zimbabweans has halved - from 69 years in 2000 to 35 years today.  BBC News and CNN have been banned from filming and reporting in the country and the government has enforced strict suppression of the press and free speech.

Thousands of Zimbabweans are fleeing the country each day, many into South Africa with the Zimbabwe Civic Action Support Group, amongst other groups, estimating that about three million have fled to South Africa since 2000.  SA president Thabo Mbeki has attempted to mediate efforts in Zimbabwe, especially in regards to its upcoming elections, which are scheduled for March.  Charges of electoral rigging have already been waged against the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union - Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) party, led by President Mugabe, which has been the ruling political party since Zimbabwe's independence in 1980.  Today, it was just reported that talks to unite the two factions of the Movement for Democratic Change have collapsed, a failure that may ensure Mugabe's reelection next month. 

Food Notes: Jerky and Boer Ethnic Pride

You can find it at convenience shops in the airport, at stands in local outdoor markets, and even in the larger supermarkets around here.  It's meat jerky - called biltung here - and it may be made from ostrich, wildebeest, springbok, other game meats, beef, or a blend of several of these meats.  The jerky is also inextricably connected to Boer ethnic pride.  During the "Great Trek" of the 1830s and 40s, a group of about 12,000 Boers, later called Voortrekkers (Pioneers), migrated from the Cape Colony to the areas now known as the Natal, Free State, and Transvaal regions.  For the most part, historians suggest this group was fleeing from recently imposed British rule but population pressures and constant border wars with Xhosa-speaking African groups along the eastern frontier of the Cape Colony may also have contributed to the move.  Along the way, the voortrekkers relied heavily on dried meat jerky to sustain them.  I sampled an "ostrich chunk" that I purchased from major food retailer, Woolworth's, and can't say that I was particularly fond of ostrich.  The flavor struck me as somewhat heavy or "gamy," but it is a flavor that many find very enjoyable. 

Create South Africa

Although I wrote earlier about Create South Africa's quilt project with the South Africa Parliamentary Millennium Project, I finally feel more prepared to write about my involvement with them so far.  In November of 2006 while writing a review essay on "material rhetoric," I included a catalog from the exhibition "Weavings of War:  Fabrics of Memory" in my consideration of "material" engagements with the public sphere.  In that essay I argued that a rhetoric of material insists textiles and clothing possess materialized agency, like Alfred Gell's notion of a secondary agent in Art and Agency or the notion of an actant in actor-network-theory.  In positing a rhetoric of material, we can challenge the Western depth ontology that devalues surface and expand the possibility of what may count as rhetorical engagement, as well as the types of cultures and actors who can produce rhetoric.

Part of the "Weavings of War" exhibition included the "memory cloths" created through one of Create South Africa's workshops.  These embroidered quilt panels disrupt expectations for craft work - they negotiate between invention and commonplaces within embroidery and quilt practice.

This panel, created by Pamela Grootboom in the Western Cape in December 2007, illustrates what I mean.  In the lower part of the panel, Pamela depicts two young people on the street exchanging drugs for money.  Above them she illustrates two young people making soup as part of a soup kitchen that Grootboom started in her township.  Both show relationships between people, the former damaging to the township community near Cape Town where Pamela lives and the latter benefiting the community and giving its young residents a safe place to go to help provide meals for themselves and others.  Most of us don't expect textiles or embroidery to approach subjects like drug use and the creation of soup kitchens and for that reason, these cloths arrest our attention more than merely reading a written account of the drug and poverty problem in Cape Town's informal settlements (or in economically depressed areas anywhere).  Besides, many of the participants in the program don't have the facility in writing English to be able to reach audiences outside of their townships anyway.

Reading about the project and seeing a few digital image reproductions of the cloths, however, was not enough for me to get a sense of how the project operates on a daily basis.  My curiosity about this particular nongovernmental organization (NGO) was embedded within a broader interest in handicraft NGOs operating within the "global South."  My previous experience with such an NGO was volunteering for the local 10,000 Villages fair-trade shop in Champaign, Illinois, but that was a comfortable retail shop with several new computer stations to assist management and volunteers in product information and location.  I think that was why I was so surprised when I went to the Create South Africa offices for the first time last Friday - there was such a difference.  The CAS office is located on Palmer Street - basically an alley that mostly houses auto body repair shops - in Durban's relatively crime-ridden downtown area.  The commercial building that houses the cloth archive is bare and the organization uses two PCs and a copy machine that are all nearly a decade old.  During the summertime, the office can grow warm, even with the circulating fan and the breeze coming in from the large window that lights the space, especially on a day like yesterday when M and I spent some time ironing and steaming the cloths before photographing them.  After the first few days I guess what I came to realize is that no matter how small or seemingly insignificant an infrastructure (economically and technologically speaking) - productive work (rhetorical and otherwise) can still happen.  I look forward to writing more about the work that happens during a week-long workshop when the cloths are made and I will have the opportunity to participate (assisting in embroidery and sewing instruction) during the next one in March here in KwaZulu-Natal.

Representations of the United States in South Africa

I have had a lot of friends ask me how South Africans and the South African media here conceive of the United States.  I can only speak of what I have picked up so far from observing popular culture sources (through television, newspaper, and a couple of shopping malls) and a few scattered conversations.  One of the first icons that greeted me when I arrived in Durban was a Native American Chief.  Coming most recently from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where the school has only just (after years of activism) "retired"  Chief Illiniwek as the school's mascot, seeing a giant chief plastered on trash bins throughout the city was pretty absurd.  Spur is a large chain of restaurants  in South Africa - visiting their website is certainly an experience one does not soon forget.  Their theme song greets you with, "take me to the canyon, where the secret tribe plays, I'm hungry for adventure, I've got a taste for life today," as images of a multicultural "tribe" of "Indians" flashes before you.  I've photographed the exteriors of two so far - "Mustang Spur" and "Kansas Spur."  Although I have yet to dine at a Spurs and may never have the pleasure to "saddle up" at one of these "steak ranches", even from standing outside, you can tell the booths are  upholstered with cow print.    Granted, this is one of the more outrageous popular representations of the US, but while on the bus today I spoke to G, a man about my age who was telling me about a friend who moved to Ohio to teach rugby and be with his American girlfriend.  G told me that his friend was concerned with meeting his girlfriend's father, as he was "coloured" (a specific racial category here in South Africa since Apartheid) and his girlfriend was white.  G said he imagined the woman's father looming large on a "Texas-sized" ranch and brandishing a shotgun at his friend.  Although he was joking somewhat in telling the story, it still speaks to how globally pervasive the American "wild west" trope seems to be.  But this is just one of the many representations of the US here.  So far coverage on the news has been limited to two subjects - the presidential primaries and entertainment news (apparently Britney Spears' latest dramas even rate here).  The television programming relies heavily on American productions, in particular US "soapies" (Days of Our Lives, Passions, All My Children), several sitcoms and talk shows (Oprah is very popular here), and a lot of [bad] American movies (Barbed Wire, The Animal, should I go on?).  What I have appreciated in conversation, especially the many I have had with M at the Create South Africa office, is that mostly people have questions about the US - they ask questions about the issues that are pressing here:  particularly employment opportunity, race relations, HIV/AIDS, and drug use. I know I have asked so many questions about the culture here too.  I have valued the open conversations I have been able to have so far, whether it's with M, a taxi driver, or the family who lives in the CAS offices to watch the building at night whose three-year-old son wants to go to America.

Mbeki's State of the Nation Address Today

I am spending the morning watching coverage of President Thabo Mbeki's State of the Nation Address, which is upcoming in about an hour.  Update to follow...

The address has been widely anticipated and speculated upon already, as it comes after recent setbacks to Mbeki's political standing here.  In December 2007, Mbeki lost the presidency of the African National Congress to Jacob Zuma (whom Mbeki had fired about a year and a half earlier from the post of deputy president of SA and a man who has faced scandals on a few fronts).  Also, there has been an ongoing electricity crisis that has threatened one of SA's largest industries here - gold mining.  Other issues citizens expect Mbeki to address include the future of the Scorpions, an elite investigating unit that may have been disbanded because of its independent pursuits of senior African National Congress figures, and - of course - housing, crime, unemployment, and health care / HIV-AIDS issues.

Looking Back: Mbeki's Address and the Debt of Memory

It has been about twenty-four hours after the address and I have still not digested the nuance of both the speech and its praises and critiques.  The full address has been printed online.  In rereading it after hearing its performance yesterday - I recognize that, while I may never be qualified to assess the accuracy or fairness of its accounts of past and contemporary events, issues, and organizations - the emphasis on memory and its connection to hope remains striking to me.  After recognizing and commemorating his mother, whom he constructs to represent "the rural masses of the Transkei," and several key anti-Apartheid activists and events in the past, Mbeki insists these guests "represen[t] both memory and hope" and "remin[d] us by their presence that ours is a task in a relay race of continuous rebirth so that the dream of a better life becomes a reality for all South Africans." 

We see this connection between the past in the form of memory - particularly memories of the physical sacrifice of bodies through death, internment, and segregation - and its connection to a hope and obligation (Mbeki uses the word "expectation") for the future appear in many places.  In an essay from The Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche explores the collective feeling of debt held by a group or culture towards past generations (particularly in terms of past physical sacrifices) and suggests that as time elapses, the perceived magnitude of this debt mushrooms to a proportion that no subsequent generation can ever resolve or "pay off."  For Nietzsche, the result of this is a sense of guilt that is endless.  If I'm remembering the tenor of his essay correctly - the production of this guilt sickens Nietzsche when he suggests this is how we might understand celebrations of the passion of Christ. 

In the case of South Africa and in this address, the question becomes how can any movement forward (that will likely always be riddled with problems, complications, nuances, critiques) ever be perceived to fully honor or "pay off" the number of lives lost to torture and the number of years activists spent repressed, banished, or imprisoned?  Of course the direction Mbeki has led the country toward and the direction that many people believe Jacob Zuma will lead the country in a year's time are likely to be radically different interpretations of how these memories of sacrifice should be fulfilled.

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There is much coverage of the address on the web, including the following from Roy Hartley, editor of The Times, who provides a humorous and irreverent summary of the address on his blog: 

Mbeki State of the Nation in four sentences:
"I’ve got Jacob Zuma and my mother watching, so have a little appreciation for the political minefield I’m about to walk through, okay?
We’re sorry we stuffed up the electricity thing but we are really, really, really trying to fix it by whatever means possible.
Things look pretty weird with the Police Commissioner on trial and the Scorpions boss suspended, but we are a resilient people that have been through a lot of weirdness before.
All the other promises to fix things and speed up the government made in previous speeches still stand, only this time, I’m going to kick ass because I only have a year or so before Jacob takes over … and you know what’s going to happen then."

Food Notes: Cottage Pie

Before I left Urbana in late January, my friend G made a delicious Shepherd's Pie for a potluck to celebrate my trip.  Now that I am in Durban, I know that she actually made Cottage Pie.  From what I have read, "Shepherd's Pie" in Britain refers to either a beef or lamb stewed with veg and topped with potato mash, but here in South Africa and in Australia they make a distinction between Shepherd's Pie (which uses lamb) and Cottage Pie (which uses beef).  Cottage Pie is sold here in every supermarket (fresh and frozen) and I discovered a company that makes a version for vegetarians.  Since my food posts had been getting a little meat-centric, I thought I would try this version made with textured vegetable protein and lentils.  Although it didn't look especially appetizing, this frozen cottage pie was actually quite good and the veg, particularly the peas, still tasted fresh.  I suppose I'm still left with the question - if Shepherd's Pie should indicate lamb and Cottage Pie should indicate beef, then shouldn't the use of TVP and lentils require another name for the pie?  I welcome any suggestions.