noble people from an older time

Anthea is a coloured woman doing a research PHD on the Khoi San people, said to be the early inhabitants of South Africa. In her day-job she is the manager of the local Mugg n’ Bean, a coffee emporium you will find in most towns here. We met her at the Main Street Market, a new idea in Plett where locals and visitors get together over food and wine and music and where they don’t pay high tourist prices. During the evening you come to notice its cooperative character. All the food stalls share responsibility for supplying plates, cutlery and glasses, tidying up – every little item returns to its place at the end of the evening. Last night featured the blues music of Albert Frost, a well known South African bluesman. I had to take their word for that – he was good, though. Very good.

The Khoi San were two peoples, we are told, and one reared cattle while the other hunted. The hunters were successful chasing their prey on foot because they hid small water containers over a wide area of the bush while the animals, though fleeter of foot, grew tired and thirsty.

There were “fall-outs” between the Khoi and the San. Eventually they came together but were driven west by settlers. Anthea speaks of them with passion and admiration. The men, she says, were real fathers to their families and communities, faithful in the feeding and protecting of their wives and children, faithful, too, in their marriages. One hopes we can learn from these noble peoples from an older time.

Speaking of marriage, the owner of Milkwood Manor asked me if I would “bless” a marriage in a few days time. The local pastor who had agreed to perform the marriage rite suddenly decided to go off on vacation. The couple, by the way, had requested that the pastor should make no mention of God at this wedding ceremony. Yup. Sea without the water, air without the oxygen, Guinness without the collar, The Coffee House with no coffee. The only thing I don’t get is why the pastor didn’t just say “No!”

the sound of thunder in a butterly's wing

It is said that a great storm has its beginning in the silent flap of a butterfly’s wing. In Paternoster, just before I left the Cape in early May, I prayed for a storm. And I wondered if a dream about men being transformed might have wings. Little did I know then that a butterfly had already tilted its fragile frame towards the sun and somewhere in the distance a hurricane was already brewing.

A man’s heart began to change. He had been drinking a bottle of whiskey a day; his marriage was slowly dying, his children drifting away from him for their own protection. One day he prayed, asking his wife for her forgiveness. He stopped drinking suddenly and completely. Four months later, there are twenty five men being transformed. There is a storm raging and the women and children are feeling a warm new wind on their faces. They are saying it is the Holy Spirit.

People of faith and people of none read this blog. Let’s just see where this little butterfly takes us.

Paternoster is as beautiful and as peaceful as ever. This morning began with a drizzle more in keeping with the West of Ireland, finishing this afternoon in bright sunlight. A tortoise ambled across the road not far from where we earlier saw giraffes munching the high branches of scattered trees. We had gone in search of Weskus Mall. We got lost. The tortoise would have made it in better time!

Tomorrow, after we get some time with our friend Sandra from Veldriff, we head for Montague and the lovely Mimosa Lodge.

the festival of eid and the mad pastor

If you turn right up Chiappini on leaving through the gates of the Salesian Institute and carry on up the hill, you enter a warren of brightly coloured terraced houses, red, yellow, green, purple, beige, and maroon. Today the little streets are crowded with women and children sitting on the doorsteps and on the kerbs eating their food. Smartly dressed men come and go in cars, entering and leaving houses, shaking hands, some indulging in extended greetings with each other.
It is a Muslim neighbourhood and today is Eid, a festival day marking the end of Ramadan. An old man coming towards me down the steps of the mosque told me it was their Christmas Day. He was all smiles and shook my hand with great vigour as we wished God’s blessings on each other. In that moment, on Chiappini, on the festival of Eid, the hearts of a Christian and a Muslim were united in the blessings of the one God.

On the other side of the world, a Christian pastor was planning to burn copies of the Koran. I wondered what the old man might think of that. And God. What does He think?

I am sleeping in the cloister of the Institute. It is on the top floor and from the high balcony you can see all the way across the bay to Milnerton and Blaauberg in the distance. On Saturday night you can hear the loud boom, boom from the gay nightclub up the street. It goes on until 5am; long after Cubana on the other side of the road has sent everyone home. During the World cup, the whole thoroughfare of Somerset Road was throbbing and heaving with match day crowds who coursed in and out of the many restaurants.

By comparison, it is now as quiet as a cloister.

a dream with wings or pie in the sky

Paternoster is always for me a place of solitude where things contradictory and befuddling can come together like a flight of geese wending its way across an evening sky. Even the painful troubles of a region seem to fade in the reddening light of dusk. This pair of geese flies home today after nearly three months immersed in the wonders and tribulations of the Cape. Our thoughts come together in a formation of sorts. Perhaps a formation that will set a pattern for the return journey.

The problems of the male loom large in the picture before us. Toxic masculinity and the failure of the male identity. Followers of Capewonders are familiar with this territory. Murder, rape, child abuse, gang warfare are all features of a society in travail. And not just here, but everywhere in one degree or another. But, what to do?

Two Sundays ago I spoke of the problem at three Catholic Masses in one middle class parish of Cape Town. The people who spoke with me afterwards were women. Each had a story of family relationships disintegrating, unhappy husbands, aimless sons, insecure daughters. Modern sociological thought emphasises the role of inevitable global trends as the cause. Psychology looks to the fragmentation of the individual in the face of powerful social forces. These and other disciplines of our 21st century world seem to wobble and waffle in the face of the challenge.

For many it is difficult even to know how to frame the question. Does the world need its men to be restored? And to what? This community, perhaps like all other communities, does need its men to be restored. And it needs them to be restored as true fathers of their children and the wider family around them. It’s the piece that’s missing. Men do the biological bit; the rest is left to women. Women long for a new generation of men who will be true fathers; who will cherish rather than abuse, affirm rather than destroy; men who will protect rather than endanger, love rather than hate.

As I prepare to leave Paternoster and the Cape today, I wonder if this dream has wings. Or is it just another flock of pies in the sky.

pride and prejudice

“Not all the ravages caused by our merciless age are tangible ones. The subtler forms of destruction, those involving only the human spirit, are the most to be dreaded”. So wrote Paul Bowles in the preface of the 1981 edition of his novel, “The Spider’s House”. I discovered the book in an antiquarian bookshop in Kalk Bay near Fish Hoek, a kind of Hebden-Bridge-by-the-sea on the way to Cape Point. A limited edition cloth bound trade copy at R120; it was one of those rare bargains.

Bowles was a New Yorker who spent most of his adult life in Tangier, North Africa, watching people and writing about them. He lived well into his 90’s. In his early years he was a composer of music, sharing an apartment at one time with Aaron Copeland. So, not a lightweight. Another novel of his is “The Sheltering Sky” which became a film with John Malkovich and Debra Winger. His collected short stories are a fitting salute to the genre.

His writings form an astute commentary on the white man’s naïve and inept incursion into the continent of Africa. As you read, you get the sense that Africa stalks him, seduces him, exposes him and then watches him self-destruct. The stumbling and hapless pale-skin is unaware of the unseen predator in every encounter. The visitor, in a reversal of appearances, becomes the subject of the hunt, an object of stealth, caught in the sights of an ancient invisible menace. Like a lost animal in the savannah who has wandered into the wrong territory. In his stories, it is the innocent who are smart and the smart that are innocent. Bowles unveils the Souk and the Bazaar as amphitheatres of cruel irony in which the white man wanders in the shadows, unaware of the penetrating eyes all around him. He always ends up on his knees, perplexed and shaken, shorn of his arrogant presumptuousness, finally revealed as a fool in another man’s land.

As I look around me through the borrowed lens of a Paul Bowles, down here in the Cape townships, I am all too aware that those watching me are sensitive to the foul odour of pride and arrogance veiled beneath the layers of good intentions. The pride and prejudice of the white man. Subtle forms of destruction…and the most to be dreaded.

I dedicate this blog to my friend Paul Bailey with whom I discovered the genius of Paul Bowles.

a woman of africa

She’s a black Xhosa woman from the Eastern Cape. Years ago, like so many before her, she made the journey to Cape Town to build a better life. Three of her six brothers and sisters followed her to Khayalitsha. They died tragically. Tuberculosis, cancer and a horrific road accident, common killers in South Africa, had taken them. Because they had followed her, she carried a heavy burden of guilt. She looks after their children as well as her own. Her husband is also dead.

This devoutly spiritual Xhosa woman came to me and asked if the deep pain in her heart would ever leave her.

We talked for a time about grief and loss and her desire for the wound within to be taken away. She spoke of it as of a living thing that had taken up residence in her, an unwelcome visitor who would not leave. Her language reminded me of how the ancient Gaelic language could give living form to human emotions as though they were unseen companions of the soul. “Ta bron orm” meaning “grief is upon me”.

Towards the end of our time together she told of how her neighbours had begun to seek her out when they were troubled, of how her remaining family in the North would travel to confide in her when they had nowhere else to turn. Together, we shared a picture of how the pain in her heart spoke to them of wisdom and experience, of a woman acquainted with grief, who understood their troubles, a woman who knew the road they travelled, a woman they could believe in.

As our talk came to a close, we were thankful in the prayer that went out from our warm embrace that the pain in her heart was a healing instrument in the hearts of others. For the first time I saw the meaning of the words “wounded healer” and I saw that sorrow can be a sign of strength. With a dignified poise, so characteristic of the Xhosa woman, she went her way. Nondima is her name and she is happy for the world to know her story.

toxic masculinity

There is a problem with men here in South Africa. Readers of Capewonders are familiar with the theme. I have tended to discourse the problem in a spiritual framework because that’s the way I’m wired. But, a few weeks ago, the review section of a Sunday paper carried the following headline:

“Battle against toxic masculinity”

A secular writer in a secular newspaper saying “the abuse of children and women is a scourge that needs to be addressed”. Not very different from another writer, a Christian, Leanne Payne, who names the cause as “failed male identities”.

“Toxic masculinity”. It is an image that fits the problem very well. And not least because the whole body of men in a society is affected. I remind you of Paul in the township of Lentageur who does not visit vulnerable families “because the women and children are afraid of a man”. Any man. Even this good man Paul, who is shackled with a broken image not of his own making. Every encounter with a woman or a child is a battle for him. As for myself, I too have to drink from this cup. How do poor, black people view a white man with white hair who moves around in their midst? What have white men with white hair done to them down the generations? Every encounter is also for me a battle, a battle with an old and very toxic image. One I did not know I had until I came here to this place.

We went to help with the soup kitchen at Kleinvlei on Wednesday. Five large tureens went in fifteen minutes to a long row of little ones, each carrying a small plastic container, some grasping the hand of a parent as they waited in line. Of course it was a heartbreaking sight. But also triumphant. The women of St. Kizito were feeding the children. This day at least they would not go hungry. This day they would not be abandoned. As the last vestiges of burnt remnants were scraped from the last of the large, heavy containers, only one went without food, an old woman who vented her disappointment in guttural Afrikaans. But it may have been about the white man with the white hair. Marian did not translate.

The ingredients for the five tureens cost around R200. That’s about £20. In the evening with our two visiting friends from Skipton we ate at our favourite Italian restaurant around the corner from the Salesian Institute. Including a generous tip, that came to R900, a little less than £90. The doggy bag from two leftover pasta dishes went to a youth bedding down for the night on the pavement around the corner on Chippiani.

Enough to digest. For now.