Welcome to the Mother City: Jan 15th & 16th

Jan 15^th

Here’s our first official day in Cape Town. Much of it was spent exploring Rondebosch, the busy suburb nearby. This area essentially served as World 1-1 for us, an introductory zone where we could figure out how to navigate, use ATMs, and cross the street without being annihilated by traffic, which is a lot harder than you might imagine (they drive on the left side of the street here! FYI!).

United States to South Africa: Jan 13th & 14th

Hello all!

I’ve been in Cape Town for almost three weeks now and it’s high time I start to share some of my experiences. My posts thus far have been for the official UConn Cape Town blog- so they’ve been more formal, thought-out, etc. This post will be none of those things! So read on and check out the accompanying pictures!

Jan 13^th

My lovely mother drove me to JFK nice and early for my fifteen-hour flight to Johannesburg. I feel like I said goodbye twelve times and kept looking back over my shoulder as I entered the terminal. I realized I’ve never been this far away from home for this amount of time, ever, period. Even at UConn home is only 90 minutes away (via Ragnhild).

The Golden Arrow

As you might imagine, Mexican food in South Africa is pretty mediocre. At least, this was the impression I got at while dining at a Mexican/Southwest fusion place in town the other night. I was there with a whole bunch of my housemates, and when asked for their opinions on their meals, just about everyone responded with something like “Ummmm, it’s….. good! Yeah.” Then again, it was probably appropriate to have low standards for a white-owned Mexican fusion restaurant on the southern tip of Africa. While joyously celebrating the end of my first week abroad with R15 tequila shots (yes, that conversion’s right!), I noticed that all the customers were white. Since this was a college-crowd restaurant in the leafy, largely white and city-proximate Southern Suburbs, that didn’t particularly stick out to me; however, the entire wait staff was also white, and that struck me as unusual. Every restaurant we had dined at previously had a majority black or wait staff. I thought to myself: where are all the black folks? And then I watched a Golden Arrow bus drive by, packed with black and colored people.

Checking In: Week 3

Hey y’all,

It’s been a whirlwind two weeks. Our orientation schedule has been absolutely jam packed, and tomorrow is my first day at Treatment Action Campaign. There has literally been a lot going on.

I will be using this blog for my personal updates, commentary, asides, humor, frivolity. I am also posting more formal entries on the UConn in Cape Town 2014 blog, which can be found at cptadventures2014.blogspot.com. While the posts on this blog will be generally more casual and breezy, I will repost my entries from that blog here as well. Check out the official UConn blog to read about the full spectrum of my co-educators’ experiences and see some sweet pictures.

I will write when I can- there’s been some great stuff.

Love to y’all,
David

 

Arrival

My first glimpses of Cape Town were seen through the window of an airplane. Sitting three seats in from the nearest window, the first image I saw besides the sky was of the ocean, vast and glittering blue. The plane banked for a turn, and when we leveled out I saw between heads the massive stone immensity of Table Mountain, level with the altitude of our descending plane. After that, I saw glimpses of city and structures before others’ heads blocked the window, and at last we touched down.

We were greeted like family by Vernon, Marita, Ben and Liz, and led out of the terminal to where a bus was waiting. I knew from my prior research that the Cape Town International Airport was located on the Cape Flats, an expansive low-lying region to the east of Table Mountain and the city proper, an area where many of the black townships are located. Our bus took us out of the airport and along a smooth highway, passing shiny warehouses and billboards that advertised the new BMW 4 series, an Afrikaans historical drama, and a new texting app. So far the Cape Town I had seen was consistent with the city’s designation as World Design Centre for 2014, with the glossy images from South African Airways’ promotional Sawubona magazine, the high-tech splendor of Cape Town International Airport, and with the New York Times’ recent article that named Cape Town the #1 place to visit in 2014.

Winter Reading

While I did not accomplish all I had wanted to do over Winter break (including finishing my afghan), I did, however, take advantage of the opportunity to read. I first began reading Nelson Mandela’s autobiography Long Walk to Freedom, which I finished shortly before New Year’s. I found the book to be ultimately thrilling, as it detailed the trials and victories of the anti-apartheid movement and profiled the emotional and intellectual development of a freedom fighter, from guileless child and eager political novice to determined lawyer, shrewd political activist, militant freedom fighter, indefatigable prisoner, and ultimately the father of a renewed nation. I was struck by the incredible collection of people who fought for the freedom struggle, from trusted black elders, to white communist anti-apartheid lawyers, to young black freedom fighters, to colored and Indian activist allies. As a powerful and privileged white western man living in a world with so much class, race, and gender-based exploitation, violence, and inequality, I was inspired by the integrity and action of the struggle’s white allies, who took the road less traveled and fought to dismantle the very system that guaranteed them and their children better lives. Many of the individuals featured in this book left an indelible impression on me.

I also read “Defiant Desire: Gay and Lesbian Lives in South Africa”, which contained a history of gay and lesbian organization and communities in South Africa, as well as a collection of papers written by queer South Africans. Ultimately, reading this book in parallel to Mandela’s autobiography led me to perceive the social struggles of the white LGBT activists profiled in the book’s history in a more critical light. Much of the history focused on the attempts of middle-class white gay men and lesbians to form groups and create spaces in which they could live their lives freely. The groups that formed were almost all universally apolitical to the ongoing conflict over apartheid. Afraid of exposure (and the possibility to be fired or stigmatized by the homophobic society at large), these groups refrained from taking a position in the apartheid struggle, in my opinion making them entirely complicit in the system of racial domination. For these activists to later campaign for their rights while remaining silent in the larger Apartheid struggle struck me as an indefensible lack of moral responsibility, especially when contrasted with the intersectionality and collaboration that was such a prominent theme in Long Walk to Freedom. This is to say nothing of the fact that ignoring the ongoing struggle against apartheid also represented a complete lack of concern for the lives of black gay and lesbian Africans, who were in many cases forced to live lives of silence or be marginalized in their own already dominated communities. While the white gays faced a legitimate threat of social exclusion with the disclosure of their queer identities, it is difficult for me to reconcile this legitimate oppression with their identities as privileged individuals in an unjust and exploitative society. I hope future reading will further inform my understanding on this subject.

Going to Cape Town

I’m writing this post at 8:18 Connecticut time on January 13^th, 2014, as I fly somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean on the way to Johannesburg. This post will detail the weeks leading up to this moment.

My productive and busy semester ended on December 16^th, when dorms closed and I crammed all my belongings into Ragnhild, my trusty steed, and set off for Danbury. The end of the semester was an incredibly busy time, as I had major deadlines in all of my classes, most of which involved writing term papers. All in all, I wrote 31 pages of academic writing within the span of 8 days, created a group presentation, studies for one exam, and revised 15 pages of academic writing. Due to a combination of a little bit of planning and a few flexible deadlines, I managed to get it all done, though I requested and received an extension on my internship research paper, an additional 15 pages of writing (for 1 credit, no less). Needless to say, I was pretty wiped, but I was still satisfied with the work I had accomplished. Checking out of my room in East and leaving my staff, specifically my one of my supervisors Abby, with whom I’ve worked for over a year, was a strange and alien experience. It felt very odd to be leaving, but at the same time I was glad to not be returning for the spring. At least as an RA, I felt that the spring would have been another helping of the same people, the same dynamics, and I was ready to move on. I will likely next return to UConn in August 2014 for my final semester, when I will (likely) again be an RA in East. I wonder how I’ll have changed?

Winter break was a restful and celebratory time. My grades came in one by one, each shocking me (in a good way!) more than the last. I was able to catch up with several old friends, and I was exceptionally happy to spend that time with them. I also got to spend New Year’s Eve in Boston with two great friends, and then finished Winter Break with a final trip down to Philadelphia with Horse Lincoln to compete in the College Improv Tournament’s Regional Semifinals. We had a fantastic weekend, and I returned back to Danbury Sunday evening, approximately 18 hours before I was to leave the North American Continent for the next 3.5 months. Of course, I did all my packing that night. I was pre-occupied with remembering my “lasts”: my last meal in the U.S. (at Chuck’s steakhouse in Danbury), my last shower (in the first floor bathroom), my last night (in my bed), my last dump (at JFK, I think!). You know, all the important milestones. I also said goodbye to my Grandmother and Grandfather, Aunt and Uncle, Sister, Father, and Mother. I also said goodbye, perhaps forever, to my beloved life partner Ragnhild. With her recent smog test failure, I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to drive with her again, or as I describe it, “riding on the wings of laughing passion”. In all seriousness, I grew up in the backseat of that car, and she was with me through high school and protected my sister and I in multiple collisions. She has emerged victorious over cars, landscaping, and small walls alike. I hope that I will be able to graduate college with her at my side, ideally upon some pedestal or raised platform. God knows she looks good enough for it. She overshadows cars a third her age. I’ve been lucky to have her in my life. I hope I will have the opportunity ride with her again in the future.

I feel like the topic of this blog post has gone badly off track. Let’s end the post by saying that I woke up on the morning of January 13^th 2014, and finally turned my future tense “going to Cape Town” into present tense “going to Cape Town”. And now I’m here! Surprise!