Josephs House

It’s a cold winter evening in Cape Town. The news reporter on the T.V propped in the corner of this small concrete house is busy concluding her report with images of the first snow to fall on Table Mountain in many years. The TV is slightly fogged from the breath of the 15 or so individuals packed into the tiny living room of this NGO sponsored concrete build that recently replaced the Thetha family shack, their home since arriving in Masiphumelele Township in 1991.

We’re here to celebrate Sipho Thetha’s 30^th birthday. It’s cramped but convivial with Sipho’s ageing mother wrapped warm in the corner whilst his young niece and nephew, now fostered by the Thetha family following the death of their parents, weave in and out of legs stealing crisps and giggling. We sit and stand as best we can and try to fit into the small space that is home to a family of 9, split between two bedrooms and a living room cum kitchen.

In the corner, beneath the TV now dripping with condensation, lies a rumpled blanket and pillow. They belong to Joseph, the soft-spoken eldest son of the Thetha family and paternal figure to a family that never knew their father. He’s been sleeping here since May when a large fire gutted over 1,000 shacks and 16 concrete builds in the northern part of the township, including his own.

Joseph sits quietly, chatting idly and waiting for the lounge to clear so he can roll out his mat and sleep before his early shift working security at the local mall. His is one of three monthly wages that service this family house. He earns 2,500 rand a month and works 6 days a week. I ask how things are going with the rebuild and it’s soon apparent that he’s heard nothing. He offers a smile and a resigned shrug as he begins to clear an area to sleep and we file out into the cold.

Driving out of Masi, passed the weather beaten shacks, red brick builds of old and more recent cement shells now going up, I wander how it can be that a man’s house can be destroyed by a well-publicised fire, one which drew significant media attention and international aid, and yet several months later still nothing is done. So I begin to read up and am met with a worrying and revealing insight into contemporary politics in South Africa.

To walk through Masi, this small Oceanside community of 40,000 or so inhabitants, is to take a stroll through South Africa’s recent past. First convened in 1992 as a bunch of shacks in the bush, this community was an initial beneficiary of Nelson Mandela’s RDP plan – a revolutionary programme designed to give South Africa a modern day welfare state and drag it out from the legacy of Apartheid rule. Concrete houses, ‘RDP houses’, went up, dirt paths were tarred and became roads, a primary school was built and a clinic installed for the then 8,000 settlers.

RDP is still a common term in South Africa today and is often used by the residents of Masi when referring to the new builds still going up around their community today, replacing the shacks that continue to sprawl around the township’s fringes as more and more people sweep in from the countryside seeking education for their children and jobs: unemployment in many Eastern Cape towns is now touching 90%. Indeed, Joseph called his own home ‘RDP’ and, like many in this Xhosa community, he sees it as a gift from the ruling ANC and part of the emancipation of a people disenfranchised by Apartheid. Like the majority of his community, he voted ANC in the recent elections. And yet his house still sits in ruins and he doesn’t know why.

Joseph’s house is actually the product of a housing initiative lead by an international NGO, one of several that has been working in the Western Cape to meet the significant shortfall on public housing in the face of reduced government spending: money coming from overseas donors and converted into liveable homes for South Africa’s poorest. The red tape surrounding Joseph’s ruins lies here, as the NGO doesn’t have the budget to rebuild and no South African insurance broker will accept the cost. This seems a reality more consistent with contemporary economic policy in South Africa, where any semblance of a welfare state has been sold out in favour of something far more destructive.

The fact is there’s been no RDP housing in Masi for a long time. Take a walk down the main street and you’ll soon see that most of the brick builds carry names like ‘Habitat for Humanity’ or ‘Mellon Foundation’: NGO’s filling the void. RDP and any semblance of the welfare state it once promised went out of the window in 1996 when Thabo Mbeki, a self proclaimed Thatcherite, took over the presidency and bought with him the new GEAR policy, an open embrace to the free market, the WTO, the IMF and which effectively turned South Africa into the continent’s first Neoliberal experiment. Cue an end to pubic spending, the dismantling of worker’s rights, open trade borders and a stock market now open to foreign investors. Globalistion arrived in South Africa and it became clear that where the National Party had once drawn its lines across racial borders, so the ANC was now prepared to wage a new war based on profit margins and windfalls against the very people who they claimed to represent.

And so markets opened up, foreign money flooded in, the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. The world’s press celebrated the true liberation of the rainbow nation and the creation of Africa’s first real economy, seemingly blind to the irony that it was still the former Nationalists that were profiting all along by selling the state’s assets, assets they still owned, to the highest foreign bidder rather than passing them onto the new ruling ANC.

So where do we find South Africa today and where does Joseph fit in? Where the ANC may once have justified their open embrace of the free market as a last gasp in the face of an overwhelming apartheid debt (passed on in 1994, not written off) that rendered the RDP impossible, it seems that the compulsive greed that comes with an unfettered capitalist economy has replaced any lingering revolutionary zeal and a duty of commitment to a loyal electorate.

South Africa now possesses the highest wealth divide and violent crime rate in the world. South Africa’s adult illiteracy rate is also one of the world’s highest, unemployment reaches 50%+ in many townships and HIV rates continue to touch the 30% mark amongst adults over 30. Understaffed hospitals and oversubscribed schools are the norm for those without the cash and private security, private health care and gated communities are the only alternative for those that can afford it.

Take another look at Masi, a community of 40,000, which benefits today from one high school, one primary school and one clinic. No police station, no fire station (all the more shocking given the recent fire). I recently waited six hours at the local public hospital with a young boy who had been run over. Arriving at the hospital he lay on a wooden bench in obvious pain with a large graze on his side and laboured breathing until the single doctor on call was able to see him and administer a pain killing injection and a course of paracetamol.

‘If the pain in your leg is still there in a week’ he said, ‘come back and we’ll give you an x-ray’.

A week later, driving through Masi, I was stopped by the father of the child. In his hand he held the bill from the public hospital. Which he couldn’t afford.

I think back to the Equal Education conference I attended at Oliver Tambo hall in Khayalitsha in June, where a 17-year old girl stood before a packed auditorium which included the minister for basic education and berated her about the condition of her school. A school which lacked not only text-books and white boards but windows and functioning toilets. And this was a city school, the state of the country’s rural schools, many without water or electricity let alone a functioning and equipped teaching staff, is one major contributing factor to the mass migration to the city. I think about the regular evictions from informal settlements for people falling behind on their electricity of rent payments as prices from Eskom, South Africa’s single electricity provider, continue to raise rates.

Then I think back to a World Cup that cost South Africa 400 billion rand of public money. A World Cup that, in reality, was convened to inspire investor confidence in South Africa, to boost the flow of foreign money into a market that wages open war on the poor by keeping public spending down and government intervention in the economy to a minimum. One also wanders of FIFA’s intentions as it looks to Brazil for 2014. No 2 on the World’s inequality list.

So what’s next? The ANC continues to march to victory in the polls despite the growing discontent of a people seemingly ignorant of the true cause of their pain. It is in this maelstrom that the outspoken and highly controversial figure of Julius Malema has been warmly embraced amongst the poorer communities as the rising star of South African politics, preaching his gospel of privatisation and land redistribution against a backdrop of corruption allegations. Whether he will succeed in rising to the top of South African politics is a matter of time and the ANC seems increasingly inclined to keep him at arms length. But history proves that it’s hard times that open the door to extreme politics. And for many in South Africa today, Joseph included, these are the hardest of times.

‘Ya, Malema can be good for us’, affirms Joseph as I turn to leave.

‘He speaks the truth and there are no lies with him’.

lame duck

For a country with as rich a political history as South Africa, it's a nation that can seem very bland at times. As the ANC cake walk to another victory at the polls you can't but wander where the next generation of politicians in this great nation will come from.

Millions live in continual fear of the ANC's militant, radical and still youthful Julius Malema but there's no alternative being offered up elsewhere. Few if any young South Africans seem genuinely interested in meaningfully engaging in politics. In fact youth culture in South Africa can feel as shallow as it is narrow at times and does a fantastic impersonation of the banal and comfortable youth culture peddled by American soaps and sappy teen dramas: off beat bohemian posturing on the outside, yet driven by a steady, conventional and excruciatingly mundane corporate beat.

There seems to be such an obvious opening as the struggle veterans of the ANC grow older and more corrupt and the DA makes inroads but will never truely win the hearts of those that experienced apartheid. Where is the young party waiting in the wings, ready to embrace the ideologies of the struggle and update them for the new, united, young South Africa?

Or do we have to accept that the best we can muster is the Cape Party? That the pinnacle of our year will still be the arrival of Coldplay? And that for some the arrival of Starbucks will be the final advent of true democracy.

Maybe Apartheid has left a legacy of apathy amongst some young people here. They'll continue to live in their bubble until it is popped around them and Malema slips in. At which point there will be a mass bailout to Perth and the fingers pointing to 'them'. 'Them' who ruined 'our' perfect country.

'Us', who never thought to engage in the first place.

Isiqalo - new beginnings...

This afternoon I will drive into the township of Masiphumelele on the outskirts of Cape Town. There, a group of 10 high school students will be waiting to join myself and two Isiqalo Foundation peer coaches to come to the beach and learn how to surf.  This won’t be a usual surf lesson though, in fact surfing will play a perfunctory role in what will otherwise be a fun and educational day at the beach where we will learn how to avoid the dangers that stand in our way to becoming HIV free adults.

For the students this will be their second lesson of eight with us. They range between 15 and 22 years old and are all examples of the positives and negatives of a developing schooling system. ‘We’ are the Isiqalo Foundation and we will be delivering our ‘Waves for Change course’, an educational curriculum rooted in surfing which uses the thrill of riding waves to address the social issues of township life that can lead to the contraction and proliferation of the HIV virus.

A couple of weeks ago HUCK ran a video blog profiling a Sunday session with the Isiqalo Foundation. Following its airing, HUCK online editor Ed Andrews contacted me and asked if I would be interested in writing a short column detailing a little more about the inception of Isiqalo and just how I arrived in the townships of the Cape from the UK. A little worried at first about presenting Isiqalo as a vanity project, I agreed as in my own story lie many parallels to the work that Isiqalo does today and that bind our very different communities.

As a teenager growing up in suburban middle England, surfing always maintained an illusory and ethereal presence throughout my days. I longed to surf but with no transport and landlocked, the waves always remained just beyond my reach. Though surf posters filled every inch of my room, they represented a reality that I could only dream of living one day.

Beyond surfing there was little else to fill the void. Middle England can be a dull and dreary place to experience adolescence. I enjoyed playing sports but didn’t have the competitive spirit to really excel so I drifted through my late teens. My saving grace was music and I spent a lot of time delving into the back catalogues of bands like Black Flag and Fugazi, bands whose music was more a visceral expression of an ideology that advocated a strong sense of self and a DIY ethos. In the absence of the ocean, it was through music that I found I could relate and built a small but strong group of friends all dedicated to a similar cause that kept us on a relatively straight path.

I remember my first visit to Masiphumelele vividly. It was early 2007 and I was being guided by Mthandazo ‘Thomas’ Ndabeni, now a good friend and trustee of Isiqalo but then a stranger whom I’d met just hours before on the beach at Kommetjie, a wealthy beachside suburb of the Cape where Thomas and a bunch of kids from Masi had jogged to play beach soccer.

We drove slowly, negotiating potholes and stray dogs in the early evening gloom.  Though the living conditions were marginal what really struck me were the number of kids just hanging around with nothing to do, some visibly drunk or high, others just sitting on the street corner idling away the last hours of the day. The contrast to Kommetjie was alarming, just a couple of km’s up the road yet a world away where teenagers shot the shore break in branded wetsuits and sponsored surf boards or cruised the quiet backstreets on their skateboards. With barely a black face to be seen.

I remember Thomas laughing when I asked if anyone in Masi surfed and, as if prempting my next question, how he then told me about his own adolescence in Masi, lost of drugs, alcohol and petty theft in the absence of anything else to do.

For Thomas the end of the road came when his crew fell in with hard drugs and started breaking into homes to fuel their own habits. It was at this time that his family intervened and took him to church. It was a hard choice but Thomas remembers the day he left his crew and decided to change. He remembers the loneliness most vividly and the temptation to go back to his old ways but how a youth soccer team he had started kept him on the right path. Today several of his old crew are dead or in jail.

 

I remember the day I left Oxford to peruse my dream of surfing, living alone in a caravan in a deserted field, lonely but sorely committed to becoming a surfer one day and making the life I had dreamt of.

Through Thomas I got to know the community of Masiphumelele. The more time I spent the more I could relate to the issues that young people faced. In them I could see myself as a teenager looking for distractions only this time there were none. Masiphumelele, like townships all over South Africa, has next to nothing beyond shacks and shabeens. There is a community soccer field indentifiable only by the rusted poles. The only other funded institutions are the over subscribed primary and high schools and the HIV clinic.

Drug use, alcoholism, sexual abuse and violent crime are serious issues. At the apex is HIV, it’s prevelance compounded by the various social stigma that keep young people out of the testing clinics. People die in Masi daily but their deaths are behind closed doors. It’s a telling sign of the status quo that the first two signs you see when entering Masi are two billboards advertising funeral homes and burial services.

Isiqalo is the result of two years spent in the community of Masiphumelele meeting and learning from peers and friends. What is most apparent for me as a visitor to these communities is that young people are not disaffected but passionate and enthusiastic in embracing change and succeeding, all that is lacking is the stimulus and energy for something new, something different and something exciting.

Through Isiqalo we want to provide alternative and creative projects to children and young adults alike. We want to relieve a little boredom and create a vibrant, colourful and alternative community for young adults to belong to, a community that they can grow with and one day lead and a community in which they feel safe to openly discuss the social issues that contribute to issues surrounding HIV..

We are not on a mission to develop a new generation. A new generation exists in South Africa. Isiqalo exists to give this new generation its first step.

Ian Mackaye looks old

Ian Mackaye looks old
and i feel sad

A moment of existential uncertainty....

The guy was a menace, nothing less. And yet, for all his petulance, for every barbed comment he spat at the weekend crowd at this known and frequently zooed-out surf spot in the southern Cape Peninsula, I couldn’t take my eyes off him.

As he paddled through the throng you could see the bile rising in his throat as he negotiated another blow-in on rented mini-mal. His leathered, sun baked complexion was not that of your average city worker. His matted maine of long blonde hair, weathered through several decades of ocean use, coursed out behind him as he muscled and barged his way to the top of the line up, openly mouthing obscenities at every man, woman and child that dared stop his relentless charge.

His surfing was neither Zen nor Zeitgeist, more as you’d imagine it to be; a gritty charge down the line with the express intent of annihilating anything that moved. Grim but effective.

And yet, for all the negative energy he purged into the water and those around him, I was transfixed. Not out of respect, or admiration, nor even disgust though I felt my pulse rise as he neared me. I was fixated as in him I could see my own frustrations, borne out so obviously before me in all their unsightliness.

That I could empathise with him made me all the more uncomfortable. That I could appreciate and even relate to this gown man’s petulant display of anguish, kicking and screaming like a child asked to share their favourite toy on this breathless and balmy southern hemisphere afternoon, made me distinctly uncomfortable. I had to leave. Had I become as jaded as him?

A weekday morning some weeks later and I found some great waves at a reef somewhere in the Deep South. Surfing alone but for a couple of other guys the mood was lighter with empty chitchat filling the lulls between the sets as we waited out patiently. As a wave would swing in, any conversation would abruptly end and we’d focus and pull away, each to his own wave, reuniting some minutes later sometimes tying the thread of the previous conversation, other times starting on something completely intangible. Filling the void.

As long as the euphoria lasted, the comedown from that high was an altogether more protracted affair and I began to think more and more of the interactions I had with the surfers with whom I shared that session. As I pondered, I realised we hadn’t shared so much as we’d each conceded a little ground so we’d each get our fix. There were enough waves to go round, yet there was still the occasional scramble when the real sets pulled through. A mute point maybe, but there were no heartfelt goodbyes as we caught our last waves in, no handshakes and little recognition of a moment stolen from the crowd. No names remembered. I recognised the hollow feeling creeping back into my stomach.

I remember when I first started surfing and the excitement of making it to the back and just sitting amongst the other surfers feeling a deep sense of belonging. In surfing I had found something, and through surfers I could relate. But somewhere along the way something changed. I lost that sense of belonging; the sense of community had vanished.  Why?

Surfing has always proclaimed itself as being a step ahead, as being more than just a sport, with a focus on freedom of expression and championing the surfing tribe as one enlightened mass riding an endless wave to spiritual nirvana. And yet in so many ways I feel surfing is now so far behind. The dream has been co-opted and sold out and surfers are no less enlightened than they are selfish and jaded.  

Why? Increasingly I realise that surfing not only has the capacity to indulge the most negative of human emotions, but it gives them a name: localism, giving carte blanche to brainless acts of brutality. Validating a wave-lust which has obscured our sense of common courtesy and decency, even reality. Why does common sense evaporate the moment we hit the water and why do we never call the perpetrators (all too often the ‘big men’ of surfing) to account?

But this isn’t about localism. The roots extend far deeper and end up at the base of the corporations that now drive the sport. The same corporations that are using surfing to boost the coffers of their multinational clothing empires, empires that are grinding the profits out of surfing’s now soulless core from their faceless clothing warehouses in the far east. Corporations whose soul interest is themselves, who willingly take from a community they purport to support with no intention of giving back: exploitation.

This is about the corporations whose advertising budgets drive and obliquely control the surf media that we surfers so happily and blindly consume. A skew-media that all too often sensationalises acts of stupidity and censors out the ugly and potentially damaging. Why, for instance, were Rip Curl able to put a gag on media following Rip Curl golden boy Mick Fanning’s anti-Semitic outburst a year or so ago? Poor example maybe, but check what happened to Mel Gibson.

More recently, when late World Champ Andy Irons quit the world tour to enter rehab, his sponsors did little to encourage their chief representative and worldwide teen idle to publicly account for his addictions and instead paired him in a marketing campaign with Metallica which championed Irons as ‘punk rock’, anti-establishment, screw the system. A marketing campaign which validated his decision to quit the tour and which made a conscious decision to brush potentially damaging problems deep beneath a heavy blanket of advertising and spin to keep selling board shorts: A decision that was neither punk, nor rock, just more corporate manipulation of a star whose light is now sadly extinguished.

Just as the ageing hippies of the 60’s sold out their own revolution by packaging and selling their counter-culture aesthetic to fund their increasingly comfortable and mainstream lifestyles, so it’s happened to surfing. The sport’s growing popularity has been crudely manipulated and raped by its leading exponents to the detriment of the sport as a whole. You want to find the surf culture of yesteryear? Look no further:

 ‘Repeat after me’ goes one surf clothing tag line. ‘I am free’.

Now buy the t-shirt.

Surfing for me was always a choice against the mainstream, of acting authentically and involving myself in a sport that championed innovation, independence and grace. But increasingly so I see surfing, and myself, merging into the mainstream. The more I can relate to idiots in the water, the more I realise I too have become jaded and co-opted – forgetting the reasons I started surfing in the first place. And for every branded t-shirt I can pull from the bottom of my wardrobe, I can see the paper trail to where it all began. So I pull back, I buy fewer brands, support independent retailers and try to smile more. It’s easy and way more enjoyable. Oddly enough, I once again find myself in the minority.

These are not times to blindly follow. Obama said as much at his inauguration. It’s a time to act authentically, not just for yourself but also for the guy sitting next to you. Time to open your eyes and make your own judgement as to what you want to gain from this world, not what you think you should want as by then you’ll never have enough. 

And you don’t need to surf to read this. Take a look around. If you can see yourself in the driver of the BMW flipping off the learner for wasting 30 seconds of his day, something is wrong. If you see yourself in the banker extracting his million pound bonus as the economy rots around him, something is wrong. If you see yourself in the bigot, the racist, the misogynist, the hate mongerer, the cleric…the list goes on. Something is wrong.

And it’s time to pull back and question.

I got my kick from surfing. Yours can come from anywhere, if you’re eyes are open.

Things i've not seen

He draws his hands tight into his chest as he folds forwards and starts to contract in rage. At first his fingers curl and his knuckles whiten as the tension grows. The sinews on his arms become visible as the anger moves up and he breathes deep as he starts to spin towards me, his head lifting and his eyes becoming visible. Then we make eye contact, and it’s over. He collapses in giggles.

‘Nice try Lisa’ I smile. ‘My turn’, and I begin the ritual.

We’re stuck in the endless Kalk Bay stop / go, with a waiting time at the red light of fifteen minutes or so, and we’re killing time trying to act the most angry. Finally the light recedes and we push on, arriving in Masi a few minutes later.

I pull to a stop outside Lisa’s shack.

‘Tim, please, my money’.

‘Yoh, I nearly forgot’.

I fumble through the shrapnel for the 3 rand I’ve been guarding that Lisa will use to buy chips and a drink. It’s precious, and he eyes the two coins I hand over warily to ensure they add up to the necessary amount. Once happy, he steps down from the car, and makes for his house where I spot his mother.

Lisa’s surfing is getting good; he made the Cape Time’s this week following a good showing at a local development surf meeting, so I get out to pass on the good news. I make my way between two small shacks, along the mud pathway and stepping to avoid a large puddle of discarded washing soap. I watch as Lisa greets his mother and moves behind her, where she holds his head briefly before turning to greet me.

Her eyes are glazed and she moves slowly to meet my extended hand. It takes a moment but it’s soon apparent she is drunk, and the strong smell of vodka on her breath masks the mumbled greeting she extends to me. She begins to talk but the conversation moves in circles and she struggles to nail a point and eventually runs out of steam. We stand in awkward silence for a moment until she raises a hand in what seems to be apology, and looks sheepishly towards Lisa who is playing in the dirt with his two coins, seemingly unaware of her gaze. She offers me a hand, and I shake it and promise to be back.

Later that evening my phone vibrates with an SMS. It’s Lisa’s mother, asking me to call. I dial.

‘Tim’ comes the faint reply.

It’s Lisa, on his mother’s phone.

‘I am sorry for my mother, she was very drunk.’

‘It’s OK Lisa. How are you?’

‘I’m sorry,’ he continues. ‘I see you tomorrow yes?’ his voice seems worried.

‘Of course you will Lisa, we’ll go surfing again’.

‘OK Tim, see you tomorrow, good night’.

And with that, the phone goes quiet.

A quick tale of a giant strawberry

The man with no teeth is at the stop/go again, pitching through his gap tooth smile to a captive audience as they wait for the reprieve of a green light. Our Tazz is over loaded with willing punters; there are no strawberries on sale in Masi and the man with no teeth has a crate full. If he’ll take 20 bucks then he’s made a sale, and made seven people very happy.

‘35 Rand Me Laaanie, fresh farm strawberry.’

He accepts 20, after a fight.

The strawberries are partitioned amongst hungry fingers, handfuls at a time. Corro gets the prize; a huge, almost gruesome looking thing beset by sweet pink tumours that looks like a warped pair of lips. He juggles it from palm to palm, as a jeweler might handle a prized diamond, holding it up to the light and savoring its bountiful unsightliness in glutonous anticipation. Then, he stuffs it into his pocket, away from prying eyes.

‘Ya, 10 rand’ he grins.

He’s gonna sell it. Cheeky bastard