District Six

Cape Town

Day 6

The District Six Museum

tells the story of District Six, an area near downtown Cape Town from which 60,000 "Colored" inhabitants were forcibly removed on accord of Apartheid legislation such as the Group Areas Act of 1950.

Here are links to a three-part post on social sustainability and the redevelopment of District Six that I wrote for JustMeans:

District Six: A Case Study in Unsustainable Development

Does Sustainable Development demand a new definition of "Value"?

Sustainable Design, the Role of the Architect, and a Question of Ethics

On a much lighter note, Kirstenbosch is Cape Town's incredibly beautiful botanical gardens, dating back to the early 20th century.

Return to the Zoo

Cape Town

We went back to the Zoo with the intention of documenting it. I drew a map and Christian interviewed some of the people who were there; we also took pictures to supplement those from our first zoo trip.

We’re thinking about presenting the audio stories we collected tagged to sites on a map – sortof a spatial organization of the stories [or pieces of stories].

Here are some of my notes from the second trip to the Zoo

- The crocodiles were kept below, at the bottom of the hill, and the lions above. According to Nick this had to do with Cecil Rhodes’s intension to inscribe an evolutionary story in the way the zoo was organized: visitors would see less ‘developed’ animals at the bottom and, as they walked up the hill, would eventually work their way up to lions [Rhodes’s favorite]. Today, we would, of course tell a different evolutionary story, probably with apes at the top of the hill instead of lions, but here, I suppose the perceived strength of the animals is written into the science [less evolved = weaker; more evolved = stronger].

- The zoo is a funny combination of classical and picturesque design. There is a very dominant tree-lined central axis [crocodiles to lions] but also a series of winding paths, and vegetation that obscures one's view from those paths.

- As the zoo has long been abandoned, the lions’ cage has recently seen some other kinds of users/inhabitants: squatters, kids hanging out smoking pot, and artists using the space for photo shoots and exhibitions.

- As I was drawing the lions’ den for my map, I met and started talking to Ronald, who lives at the Zoo and sleeps in one of the cages. He had the following words of wisdom to share with me:

"

1] Michael Jackson was the king of pop, but he wore too much make-up.

2] Make-up isn’t good because it hides the face G*d gave you.

3] Colored people don’t wear make-up.

4] Colored people only use water – and cold water at that; warm water dries out your skin.

5] I should use only cold water to wash my face.

6] I look like I have a good heart, not like most tourists who come to the zoo. Most tourists who come to the zoo seem disgusted by the people who sleep there. The tourists think that they don’t notice, but they notice.

7] There’s still a lot of racism in Cape Town even though people don’t talk about it as much as they used to.

"

Current State of the Project

Cape Town

Three things we know about the project at this point…[I think]…

1. We definitely want to document a series of sites, using a combination of audio and visual material.

2. During this trip, we’re going to focus on three sites: the Zoo, the Pan African Market, The Prestwich Street Memorial.

3. We are very interested in possible/potential ways that the project could be expanded via a collaboration with Nick and the Center for African Studies, Ntone and Chimurenga, Ciraj and the District Six Museum, Kate and Greatmore Studios…or any possible combination of those people and institutions.

A few comments about our particular sites:

They are somewhat randomly chosen…places that Christian came across while he was here doing research 5 years ago…places with interesting stories that he is already aware of…and places for whom he knows of interesting people to tell those stories. The “randomness” of this initial site selection is something we’ve talked a lot about: Does it matter? Are we okay with the fact that it makes our project, in some way, highly personal? Is there something more that these sites have in common? What makes the stores about them interesting? Etc.

The randomness aside…I have the feeling that I need to find something about them – individually and in combination – which ensures that I understand why I am taking them on as a project.

The Zoo and Prestwich Street are interesting [and perhaps, we could argue, even in need of our intervention] because the stories associated with them are no longer very accessible at the actual [physical] site. There is not enough visible evidence left for an uninformed visitor to know what happened there.

The Zoo is no longer a functioning zoo; it is more like a ruin of a zoo. And Prestwich Street was the site of some very controversial development when the Rockwell Building [housing a luxury hotel + condos] was built atop a burial ground. Bones found during the excavation of the site were later moved to a memorial site down the street, but the Rockwell itself no longer bears any evidence of its controversial inception.

Both sites are, in a way, forgotton places. Maybe that’s what we’re making – a tour of forgotten places.

Africa, Day 4

Cape Town

The Rhodes Memorial

Cecil Rhodes, a British developer of Cape Town who had a thing for lions built, among other things, a monument to himself. It was designed by Herbert Baker.

Upon visiting the site, I wrote these notes in my sketchbook:

-Woah. Megalomania.

-Did Rhodes see himself as a lion [i.e. at the top of the natural food chain]? Or a conqueror of lions [i.e. even beyond the top]?

-When it was built, one could stand at the monument and look out over “wild” Africa; now, the same vantage point gives one a view of Capetonian Suburbs. What would Rhodes think of that?

Greatmore Studios

In the afternoon we went to Woodstock to meet with Kate from Greatmore Studios and talk to her about our project. Greatmore is an organization that makes subsidized studio space available to local artists, runs workshops and outreach programs, and sponsors residencies for visiting artists.

As is my typical reaction to being in these types of spaces, I had a hard time following the conversation because I was busy daydreaming about what it would be like to have a place to work, surrounded by other artists, with the understanding that I could spend all day every day making art.

After Greatmore, we spent some time on downtown and took a walk on Muizenberg Beach, before heading back to Kalk Bay.

Africa, Day 3

Cape Town, Sunday

The Penguins at Boulders Beach, a confused story of environmental protection.

To read the story i wrote for my JustMeans blog click here.

Drive to Cape Point

A very beautiful drive around the Cape Peninsula, through Table Mountain National Park, and back again to the city via Camps Bay, the Beverly Hills of South Africa. Our tour also include a too-close encounter with a King Cobra.

Burglary

We arrived back at the guest house to find that someone had broken into our room.

Things taken: Christian’s passport and credit cards, my digital camera, 1 memory card reader, aspirin, a plastic bag, some dvd’s, and 1 stick of deodorant [nope that’s not a joke.]

Things not taken: our laptops, our borrowed [super-]nice camera, my passport. In other words, while it definitely sucked, it could have been much worse. I know these things can happen anywhere, but it is difficult not to let this color my view of South Africa. A fact duly noted by the police, when they arrived. One of the officers seems quite concerned that these events would inspire me to tell everyone back home what happened, cementing their [presumably already] negative view of Africa. I told him not to worry, that I thought Cape Town was very beautiful, but I suppose he did have a valid point. Afterall…I just posted this on my blog.

Side note: while an employee from Mountain Men private security was at our guest house immediately, the police took a bit longer. When Judy, the lady who runs the guest house called them to inquire as to why it was taking so long, she was told “well, you know, there is a lot of crime and we only have one car.”

Hmm…

Intent on deriving some sort of larger cultural insight from the events of the day, Christian and I wondered about our own sometimes-justified, sometimes-not travel-oriented [or Africa-related] paranoia.

I’ll admit that my attitude still bears some resemblance to what it was when my brother first left for the Peace Core; at that time I told him [in an effort to explain our mother’s nervousness about his moving to Mozambique] that “there are scary things everywhere…but Africa has…well…more.”

I’m a bit surprised by my own Africa-induced paranoia, given that I just spent a considerable about of time in the Middle East and pretty much never felt scared for my safety. But, what can I do? It is, apparently, not without some cause.

Africa, Day 2

[Cape Town, Saturday]

Waterfront

Prestwich Street

[The Rockwell building, Sean, and the Memorial]

Africa, Day 1

[Cape Town, Friday]

We got up early to meet Nick Shepherd [professor in Archaeology at the Center for African Studies] at the Olympia Café in Kalk Bay, the part-beach-town-part-Capetonian-suburb where we’re staying for the week.

We told Nick about the project we came here to investigate – a series of pod casts about sites in Cape Town that would be a sort of alternative audio tour guide to the city, intended for tourists coming to Cape Town for the World Cup.

Here is an excerpt from our initial project proposal:


Cape Town is in the midst of fundamental cultural transformation. As is the case in any city, new urban development projects both obscure and make visible remnants of the city’s heritage and history. In light of the upcoming 2010 World Soccer Championship, we would like to design a series of image-supported pod cast tours through Cape Town’s past and present, in an effort to expose this post-apartheid city’s complex past, and to re-present it for the new audience of tourists who will be traveling to the city to take part in the World Cup.

In August of 2005, the Gallery of the Centre for African Studies at the University of Cape Town hosted an exhibition titled The Model Man: The Hero of His Own Drama. This show consisted of a series of illustrations and texts by Johan Schönfeldt and Ivan Vladislavic, and presented a coherent story line to connect the iconographic images. By writing the narrative after the images were produced, Schönfeldt references African oral societies, whose history, he argues, is constructed from objects. He asks the audience, “in speech, when does a speaker revert to visuals?” Cape Town Pod Casts takes as its starting point a notion articulated in the exhibition brochure; namely, that objects are an “augmentation to speech.”

Since the end of apartheid, those involved in the design of South Africa’s built environment are faced with an impossible task. Under pressure to undo the injustices of the past, they must attempt to create new, more inclusive, urban spaces for housing and leisure, while in some way paying tribute to the traumatic memories that characterize the city’s heritage. Artists, architects, and designers of the built environment contribute to the narration of a city’s history through the production of monuments, city blocks, apartment buildings, heritage trails, and graveyards – objects that augment stories told about the city. It is our intention to begin to collect some of these narratives – stories of, for, and about Cape Town, several of which are being overwritten by recent urban development.

The Zoo

After an initial [encouraging] meeting with Nick, we joined him and two of his kids for a visit to [what used to be] the Cape Town Zoo, one of the sites we are interested in documenting. Nick led the four of us through the ruined, overgrown site, pointing out where the lions used to live and how the design of the park reinforced a colonialist narrative. The language of Nick’s story – a tale of cultural domination, garden design, and the organicist dimension of colonial history – had the familiar echo of one of Arindam Dutta’s seminars. At once, I missed being in school but was also glad that Nick’s two kids [ages 3 and 6] were in tow, as it necessitated an ongoing rephrasing of complex commentary in overly-simplistic terms.

It was funny to begin my trip to Africa at a place that is basically no more than a reminder of something that was once there. Not your typical tourist introduction, but then, I supposed that is kindof our point.

After the zoo we got a mini-tour of the Center for African Studies at Cape Town University before heading to Long Street, in downtown Cape Town.

Long Street is home to [among many other things] The Pan African Market and the offices of
Chimurenga, where we met with Ntone and Stacie for some more feedback on the idea of Cape Town Pod Casts. The ensuing conversation with Ntone inspired some serious reflection on the proposed project, the occasional moment of self-doubt, and a seemingly-irreconcilable debate about whether it was possible for us to present stories about a series of sites in Cape Town without giving our audience the impression that we claimed to have any sort of comprehensive or essentialist view of the city.