(d)urban(a)

Food Notes: Pap

I ate pap, a ground maize (called "mielie-meal" here) porridge nearly every day during my trip to Mpumalanga.  I like it best when it has a pudding-like rather than firm texture.  It reminds me of and looks just like grits, one of my favorite foods that I ate while growing up in Virginia and still like to eat (although it's not especially practical cooking grits for one person, the way they stick to the side of the pan).  I always preferred savory grits heaped with butter, salt, and pepper (and preferably served with a gravy) to the sweet, syrupy breakfast grits I would sometimes be asked to eat. 

Pap is a staple food enjoyed mostly by the indigenous black populations and Afrikaner populations here, so at the first dinner we shared together in Hazyview, M and Mrs. G wanted to know if I actually ate pap.  The Lodge we were staying at didn't make especially good pap in my opinion - it was too firm (almost like a hard polenta) - but I had some much more tender pap while we were staying with D's family in Mahushu.  After I told M we call the same basic dish "grits" in the US (apparently the only difference is that grits tend to be made from yellow kernel maize and pap from white kernel so the whole kernel can be used for the meal), she started calling it "grits" too just for fun.

Although in some areas pap is primarily a breakfast food (apparently in the Cape provinces), in Mpumalanga we ate it as an accompaniment with savory meat dishes (usually stewed beefs or chicken) and often with a side of chakalaka.  This is a spicy African vegetable relish that is delicious!  I must remember to bring a jar of it with me and get a recipe for it before I leave.

The funniest part about pap is trying to wrestle with it when you stir it while cooking it on a stove top.  It almost reminds me of trying to battle "the blob" from the classic horror movie.  In this picture, S and P, sit by the large pot of pap they cooked for our final day's meal at our Muhushu workshop.  Battling with the pap is much easier when you have a large pot and spoon to cook it.

Becoming a Part of My Research and Representing the United States

I was intrigued today by a BBC Headlines feed that read "World views US 'more positively'"so I linked to the article.  Apparently, a BBC world service poll shows that 35% of the "world" says the US has a positive influence, up from 31% from last year.  Apparently now only 47% of the "world" thinks the US has a negative influence, down a whole 5% from last year.  I haven't read through the whole report (downloadable as a pdf) to understand exactly who the "world" is (from what I can tell so far, the sample "world" doesn't include South Africa but does include Egypt and Ghana).  However, the article helps me reflect and frame a phenomenon I experienced over the past two weeks during my research trip as a representative of the United States. 

Entering the environments of the two workshops (each potentially gathering 50-60 "marginalized" women over a period of 5-6 days to create stories, sketches, and cloths documenting their life experience and perceptions of democracy), I certainly knew that I would not function as an invisible observer of events.  I knew that my presence would be noticed by the participants and have to be framed somehow.  However, this particular framing of my presence - as a representative of the United States - was both a surprise to me (it was not the framing I attempted to create for myself) and functioned in a couple of interesting ways.  Although the workshops differed widely in terms of setting and available material resources, my presence was explained at these workshops in the same, two ways:  1)  as a researcher from the United States interested in the project and 2) as a potential contact of United States-based assistance for participants involved in the project.

On the third day of the Parliamentary Millennium Project/Create Africa South Workshop, I approached  Selma Theron, one of the many journalists that visited the workshop, to ask for her contact information in the hope that I would be able to obtain her publication's (Hazyview Herald) coverage of the workshop.  She was instantly interested in my presence and took my name and information and asked to take a photograph of me.  I was surprised that Friday to find that she published the photograph in the article with the caption beneath reading, "Ms Martha Webber, a student at the University of Illinois, was part of the project."  In a moment of almost silly self-reflexivity for me, I found myself a "part" of my research and being reported on in a document that I would be analyzing for research. 

Speakers at both workshops used this first framing - as a researcher from the US interested in the project - to attach importance to the project.  At each closing ceremony (the first on Thursday 20 March and the second on Saturday 29 April), motivational speakers referenced me in their speeches and suggested that the project the women had just participated in possessed importance since I was from the United States and had come to research it.

Perhaps even more fascinating, however, was how in both closing ceremonies, motivational speakers (in the case of the first workshop, a different speaker than the first) framed me as a potential contact of United States-based assistance.  At the first workshop, this was Cathy Dlamini, Chairperson of the Ehlanzani Women's Council, who suggested to the audience that, now that I had met "marginalized" women from the rural areas of the Mpumalanga province, I could serve as a potential resource in identifying NGOs or other groups based in the United States to assist them.  Implicit in this suggestion is an understanding of the distribution of the "wealth" of NGOs that many critics have identified - the majority of NGOs and their economic power tend to be based in the "North" yet look towards the "South" as sites to distribute aid/assistance.   Dlamini's suggestion was set within a speech that thoughtfully criticized the Parliamentary Millennium Program/Create Africa South Workshop as a superficial engagement with the citizens and concerns of the community.

Both of these positions I was given - often by people who had only met me for a moment - fascinated me and in some respects made me uncomfortable (at least in the sense of the amount of responsibility I was given and the inflation of my importance - don't they know I'm just a feeble graduate student?!).  These framings have certainly given me a lot to think about as I slowly transcribe and organize the pictures, audio files, fieldnotes, and video footage I collected over the past couple of weeks. 

I don't know what the "world" really thinks of the US, but I can say that the participants of these two workshops (both facilitators and cloth producers) viewed the US (in which I functioned as a tangible stand-in or synecdoche) as a place that can offer funding, assistance, and opportunity.  In a rural area embedded within a country that generally can offer very little, inconsistent opportunity for economic mobility and access to basic infrastructural needs, then, the US appears positively.   

Reciprocality in Research

Today was one of the most beautiful days in Durban since I have been here.  Fall has really arrived, which means mild days that reach up to 80 degrees Fahrenheit but mostly stay breezy and in the 70s.  The nights cool down so I no longer need to run the air conditioner in the evening at all.  It felt great to be outside so instead of taking the Mynah bus between a few of my errand stops, I ended up walking quite a bit today.  I spent most of my day completing tasks I would consider part of the relationships I have established with my research subjects (many of them who have become my friends).  These small acts of reciprocality are an important aspect of these relationships - throughout the trip many of the participants, M, Mrs. Gambushe, and I engaged in little ways to express appreciation and affinity with one another.  These could take the shape of helping or completing a task for someone who is feeling tired or overwhelmed, getting someone tea or a snack, and even sharing my cache of chocolate.  There were several things, however, I wanted to do when I returned from the trip to show my appreciation as well.

After organizing my digital photos at home, I created several photo CDs so that Create Africa South and M can have photo records of the two workshops we completed.  By the time I leave I will also give them data DVDs that contain footage of CAS activities during the ceremonies and workshops.  I went down to Davenport Centre to a photo store and printed out about 80 photos.  The first 5 were for Maureen, a woman I interviewed and became friends with at the first PMP/CAS workshop in Hazyview.  We spoke several times before I asked if I could record an interview with her and during one of our conversations she asked if we could exchange addresses.  I agreed and offered to send her some photos I had taken of her and of us during the week.  I also mailed her a copy of the newspaper article about the event and a copy of a speech given during the closing ceremony (she had requested it from the councillor, but he had already given it to me, so I offered to copy it and mail it to her).  I hope to keep in touch with her - in part to do follow-up next year to understand if or how the workshop affected her life in any way, but also to ask after her and her family that she told me about.  The rest of the photos were for two photo albums I created for M and Mrs. G:  the albums humorously document the ups and downs of our trip together.  After reading for a while outside, I spent the late afternoon assembling them so that I can present them either when I go into the office tomorrow (at least to give M hers) or when we are all together in Umlazi working on our sewing project again next week.

Countdown To My Return

Today I met M at the office for the first time since we've been back from our cloth workshop trip.  Yesterday was her first day back at the office - she and I both contracted minor bacterial infections either from ingesting contaminated food or water during our trip and she had to see the doctor on Wednesday.  Luckily, a nurse practitioner prescribed ciprofloxacin "just in case" during my travel consultation prior to my departure and I started taking it late Sunday night when my stomach cramping became severe.  I was surprised at how rapidly I felt better and I was never completely debilitated so I feel pretty happy about the entire situation.   In the office we did a little work on the Mahushu cloths produced during the second week workshop - just arranging them on individual white foam boards and placing the printed photograph of each participant with her cloth.  Although I took images of the cloths through each stage of production, I will photograph the final cloths from each workshop after we press them on Monday.

Today we mostly discussed what I'll be doing for the next three weeks until I leave.  I'm mostly excited about returning, although I will miss the landscape here and the friends and work I feel like I've barely just started getting to know.  I'm really happy to return to Urbana and visit with my friends there before everyone scatters for the summer (myself included... I feel as though I'll be wandering until late August when the semester begins).  Also, the University of Illinois American Indian Studies Program and Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory are organizing a really fascinating symposium, "Decolonizations" scheduled a few days after my return.  I'll be honest - it has been some time since I've been in a roomful of "academics" so I'll be interested to see how I will react to discussion of topics very close to what I have been researching here (questions of subalternity, agency, and indigeneity) but in "academese"."  I'm reminded of Arjun Appadurai's introduction to Globalization (2001) where he identifies and bemoans the rift between the everyday activities of grassroots globalization activists (such as those operating in indigenous NGOs like the one I've been working with the past few months) and the language and conceptual models promoted by academics.  He argues for necessary collaboration to traverse this rift; this is certainly an argument I have relied upon to justify to myself and academic audiences my particular research methodology.

Today we scheduled some deadlines and appointments to start moving towards reaching conclusiveness over the next few weeks.  Tomorrow, M and I (and M's twin sister, whom I am super-excited to finally meet) will go to uShaka Marineworld, partly to indulge in my need to occasionally be a tourist here (they have a snorkel lagoon I may splurge on! Also, they have dolphins performing tricks to 80s music!), but primarily to see the Umcebo Trust shop there - it's a non-profit organization that sponsors craft production for people with "special needs."  I continue to be interested in craft production economic schemes that target "special needs" producers (particularly in how this target is defined and how these producers are recruited).  By Wednesday, M and I need to complete three distinct funding proposal projects we have started, which includes completing the update of CAS's Amazwi project basic materials (mission statement, project flow, budget, etc.) that we include with each particular proposal.  On Thursday we finally return to Umlazi to work with Mrs. G at the sewing center.  She stopped by the office today and we discussed a proposal she is working on to have her products considered for sale by the tourism industry of Reunion Island.  I'll be writing the materials for her and creating a CD that catalogs the products she would like to be considered for sale.  I'll complete those documents by the following Monday so that we can submit everything by the 15th.

Finally, next Friday I'll be returning to KwaMashu to reconnect with Z, the a/v coordinator for the  community center.  I'll be teaching a section of Writing With Video in the fall at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and Z and I have decided to collaborate so that my students in the class can interact and exchange videos with videographers and documentary-makers in KwaMashu.  I'm really excited about the collaboration (although I'm anticipating technological and time difference difficulties) - I've always emphasized the exploration of global issues through local situations in video production (a medium I feel is especially suited for capturing "the local").  I'm actually "virtually" presenting a paper about teaching the global through the local in video production in New Orleans this weekend.  Thanks to my colleague and friend Patrick Berry, who is presenting the paper for me at the annual Conference on College Composition and Communication.  I'm sorry to miss out on the grillades and grits there.

Taking the Day Off

Taking time off to spend a Saturday on the beachfront.

Spending the Day in Kloof with the Animals

Thinking About Bilocation

As you may have been able to tell from my uncharacteristically laconic posts, I spent most of the weekend happily away from my laptop and research.  At one point on Saturday M, her sister, their friend, and I flagged down a minibus taxi on West Street near Aliwal and piled in the back as it boomed with Tupac Shakur's "It Ain't Easy."  I couldn't help but smile - it's a song whose pleasing melody and tone challenges its lyrics that speak of difficulty - in that moment the melody of my day was also pleasing, despite my own challenging thoughts about my research and my scramble to reach conclusion here before I depart at the end of the month.  I have noticed those pleasing moments more and more in this past week since M, Mrs. Gambushe, and I returned from the Mpumalanga province; although Durban remains an often unknown city to me, I finally feel as though I've mastered the smaller things (like taking a minibus taxi - which has a language of communication completely unto itself) that make me feel settled here. 

I know that over the next couple of weeks, however, my feeling of bilocation (that experience of being in two different places at once) will swell as I make more plans for what I need to do "once I'm back."  I've never been entirely comfortable with the feeling - I know before I left Urbana in January it was nearly overwhelming, in part I suspect because one of the two places I felt as though I was occupying was entirely unknown to me except through writing and photographs.  I have been thinking about this idea of bilocation in relation to my own experience, but also for a composition course I will be teaching in the fall (besides the Writing With Video course I have written about previously).  For the first time I will be teaching Rhetoric 243, an intermediate expository writing course, and I have chosen the topic of "Travel Writing and the Construction of Difference" for its topic.  The class will focus less on general interest travel writing that may classify itself more as "informative" (such as those found in Lonely Planet guides or magazines such as Budget Traveler), although it will certainly consider the function of and desire for those genres of travel writing within US culture.  Instead I hope we will critically examine a selected history of travel writing (including maps and travel-photography) and criticism that identifies its functions to construct differences, to psychologize the self, and its complicity with or challenge to imperialist projects.   I certainly welcome any recommendations for readings for the class.

In my recent reading, I purchased a collection of writings about the "new South Africa" entitled At Risk: Writing On and Over the Edge of South Africa.  Unfortunately, it is not easily available to US readers, although it contains several outstanding essays from writers who are, as editors McGregor and Nutall argue, writing after the traumatic histories that emerged in the wake of 1994 and are now writing in a wave that draws "into the open the idea that freedom is not what they thought it would be; that it has brought unanticipated challenges" (10).  One essay in particular, "Why Am I Here?", written by Achille Mbembe and translated by Maureen Anderson, stands out.  Finding himself an outsider in South Africa, but identifying himself as an African (Cameroonian to be specific) who too had to watch the disappointing post-colonial transition of his country into independence, Mbembe's description of South Africa speaks of the implications of the past in our present that extends into our futures.  In a section of his essay, he writes,

“Here, in effect, is what distinguishes South Africa from other African nations – the fact that from an empirical point of view, this nation is, strictly speaking, a diasporic nation, a meeting of nations, accidental and brutal to be sure, but a meeting nevertheless.  The country’s successive regimes long tried to efface that Africanness.  At times they dreamed of making South Africa an English county and, at other times, the Holy Land for a particular ethnic group foolish enough to believe in its election by God and, in so doing, willing to wear the mask of death and to set in motion an incalculable violence – a force for harm, carelessness and neglect.  Indeed, the concept of racial supremacy, long dominant in South African life, was not just the very antithesis of liberty.  It was the manifestation of a malady of the mind – racism.  As was to be expected, this denial of liberty and rights for the majority, all in the name of the survival of a single race, fed its social struggles.  These social struggles were modern from start to finish because their central stake was freedom” (167-8).

In his description of SA as a "diasporic nation," I start to see connections between the individual phenomena of bilocation and how it could figure as a national phenomena, at least during English colonialist period and apartheid when some officials in SA would try to view it as existing at once in Africa and in Europe. 

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.

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?

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?