Birthday of a Nation
A swarm of balloons lifted from the stage, spangling the night with green, yellow, red, white and blue, the colors of South Africa’s flag. The entire stadium was hectic with the shouts and exclamations of youth and adults alike, praising the fledgling nation. The adolescents who teemed at our sides broke into flamboyant dancing, arms akimbo, feet flashing on the floodlit grass. They seized our hands, ebullient, and pulled us into their frenzied motions, laughing all the while. Amid the chaos, I met the eyes of my companions. Three Americans on the outs with America, we were encountering a patriotism unlike that we had known, in this southernmost country of contrast, contradictions and brave new idealism.
Athlone Stadium sits squatly alongside the highway, as removed from its surroundings as though descended from space. It isn’t especially grand, but on the Cape Flats, a spread of township housing and truck shops emblazoned with Coke logos, it makes a striking anomaly—as did we, three White women in a mostly Black and (so-called) Coloured crowd.
The event was the Ten Years of Democracy celebration, and we’d come to hear South Africa’s president, Thabo Mbeki, give remarks on the occasion. After a security patdown and a few minutes roaming the vendors’ tables of Indian curries in Styrofoam, peanuts and dried fruit in cellophane, sticky koeksisters in white cardboard boxes and long, stocking-like plastic bags of plums, we settled awkwardly into the bleachers, feeling palpably, radioactively White. As we scanned the bleachers we found schoolchildren in uniform, women in saris, old men and young men and raucous teens, but few other White people: a dozen at most. The Rainbow Nation’s palest stripes had gone AWOL.
Was it the venue? we wondered. Cape Town’s apartheid-scarred geography has made it a city of extremes, the pricey city and the destitute Flats. It is a city designed on racist principles, divvying space and resources inequitably between Black, White, and Coloured, and now, as the city attempts to progress beyond its history, its own structure holds them back, like an obsolete skeleton. Interracial space is rare: a reality at which we chafed. Living in posh Tamboerskloof, in crisp guesthouses arranged by our program, we found ourselves frustrated by our segregation, yet unable to offer a viable alternative. Where else to place us? Were we prepared to live on the Cape Flats? And even if we were, could such an act transcend petty posturing, the self-styling of liberal college kids slumming it?
Instead, we fibbed. When a Cape Argus reporter approached us, seeking, as we later speculated, a White South African voice, we said we lived on Long Street, the foreign backpackers’ hub. It was only a short walk from Tamboerskloof, we rationalized, and better-known besides. In truth, however, we had another reason to place ourselves on Long Street. It insulated us from participating in Cape Town’s racial⁄geographical binaries, locating us instead as privileged, unaffiliated others from abroad.
It was a lie we would repeat many times that night. While strolling though the stalls to buy ice cream, or edging closer to the stage, strangers of every description approached us, lit with genuine enthusiasm. Introducing themselves, they would sometimes ask about our origins—where we lived, where we’d come from, and why we had come. Just as often, however, they’d simply take our hands, beaming, and thank us for being there. As Whites in Athlone, we were accorded a peculiar celebrity. Yet the ecstasy that attended us had less to do with who we were than what we represented: the promise that Mandela’s putative Rainbow Nation might yet be.
Policeman, stunned, congratulated us. Wizened old ladies, laughing, clasped our hands. Schoolchildren flocked about us, unruly despite their uniforms, mugging for photos and jostling for a place alongside us, as young men made plays for our numbers. Our names were repeated like mantras, our hair passed through dozens of children’s timid, inquiring fingers. At home in Chicago, I’d walked through mostly Black areas, and attended mostly Black events; as a tenant organizer, I’d knocked on doors and chatted with residents, and felt my race as keenly as I did that day in Athlone. Yet in Chicago, or New York, or Atlanta, any of American cities I’d lived in, I’d never been received so giddily. Amid this ecstatic welcome I felt a growing unease. If even the slightest effort to cross racial boundaries—that of physically being in Athlone—wrought acclaim, how exceptional must even such small efforts be? In the crowded stadium, the absence of Whites gave the question a silent answer.
In the midst of the hubbub we stumbled into Sizwe Nguqe, the adult leader of a homegrown troupe of youth hip-hop⁄Kwaito dancers and lyricists, based in the township of Khayelitsha. Under a gray bucket hat, his was a warm and unassuming smile. He wore a faded orange jumpsuit across which cartoon figures, sketched in black marker, freely danced: over their heads, and across the left pocket, was emblazoned the group’s name, L-SECTION PANTSULA DANCERS. Amid a growing crowd of starry-eyed youth, who gazed up at him with open affection, Nguqe told us more about the group that spawned his jumpsuit’s blithe iconography.
The L-Section Pantsula Dancers meet and practice informally, whenever Nguqe’s students catch sight of him on the streets of Khayelitsha or in recesses at Esangweni Secondary School, where he recently returned to finish his education. I didn’t ask, but it’s probable that he, like many of his and younger generations, gave up his educational years to the anti-apartheid struggle. Nguqe described his group as an anti-gang effort. “When we are dancing, we are not doing crime,” he explained simply. He reminded us of the absence of recreational halls in the townships, of after-school programs, anything to keep at-risk kids occupied. Among the gaggle of factors purported to produce youth gang crime—poverty, guns, the struggle’s violent legacy—the most mundane, boredom, is sometimes overlooked.
Nguqe broke off this line of conversation to introduce a few of his students, who lingered at his side, gazing alternately from him to us. The first, a gangly teenager with a jutting lip and voluminous Afro, introduced himself as Pitch Black Afo—the name of a South African hip-hop star in the upper echelons of the radio beloved. Grinning, he dipped to kiss each of our hands before breaking into a stylized dance move. The younger kids whooped around him, and we giggled. Others rushed up—a prim, popular senior girl, a cheeky four-foot-tall dance ingénue, shy, endearing schoolgirls in uniform clamoring to have their pictures taken.
All afternoon, music acts had courted the crowds: Godessa, the no-nonsense all-female hip-hop trio, Mzekezeke, guru of Kwaito, the township brand of techno, and more. But suddenly, in the bleachers, the kids were wringing out their throats with song, louder than ever before. They were singing the national anthem. On the bombastically lit stage, preachers, imams and rabbis offered a battery of prayers—Hindu, Jewish, Muslim and two Christian sects—in as many languages, a fitting blessing for this country of eleven official languages. Then, in a wash of applause and thrilled light, Thabo Mbeki ascended the stage.
The kids shouted and rushed to explain to us, the presumably befuddled Americans, that this was their president, a great and honorable man. I was reminded that those in power are usually the philistines, the ones ignorant of the world and its cultures, because they don’t need to know. It’s the less powerful, or powerless, who toss out foreign phrases with ease, whose minds have been limbered by an accommodation with power. In South Africa, minibus drivers and short-order cooks opine knowledgeably on the Bush Administration; in the townships, American hip-hop and soap operas blare. Of course, a comparable American competence on South Africa is sorely lacking, and often South African friends would rib us, asking if we’d expected elephants and lions upon coming to Cape Town. Our denials were usually laughed off, dismissively.
Mbeki’s remarks were unexceptional, and owing to time spent in translation, quite short. In Xhosa and Afrikaans the translators transmitted the president’s bland message of hope amid challenges, of pride in progress and faith in the nation’s capacity for change. As he finished the students combusted into cheering and hooting; the lights dimmed and a video retrospective screened on two enormous backdrops. It recalled each year following 1994 and its respective advances, then shifted into a memoriam for heroes of the struggle now gone. With every face, the youth exploded anew into cheers, each as fervent as the last. As with Mbeki, they hastened to inform us of their notables’ deeds, or simply their worth. “Joe Slovo—I love him!” exclaimed one girl, with a rapture most American girls would reserve for the newest teen heartthrob, not the white-haired socialist activist.
Standing beside her, I felt patriotic, a feeling I don’t readily admit. Arundhati Roy once described flags as “bits of cloth that shrinkwrap people’s brains,” a notion I gladly second: in the past year I’d seen the American President gaily dress torture abroad and repression at home in the national banner of red, white, and blue. I had left the U.S. a few months following Bush’s re-election, exhausted and cynical, and on Inauguration Day, I couldn’t bring myself to read the news, even from abroad. Yet South African patriotism didn’t feel pernicious to me, as American jingoism did: it seemed more genuine, perhaps because it was so recently and so dearly won. I knew, of course, that it could be as easily abused. Xenophobia, particularly against other African immigrants, is a growing problem in South Africa, as citizens deride Congolese and Mozambican street vendors as economic leeches, sometimes attacking them or their property. Still, I couldn’t reconcile that reality with the beaming faces of the teenagers who surrounded me. I wanted simply to believe in their flag.
The faces faded from the screens and the stage lights waxed brighter, accompanied by a rumble of drums. On the stage, an adaptable drum troupe lent its rhythms to a dizzying succession of dance groups: Indian, Scottish, Xhosa, and Portuguese, among others, and on the fields the Pantsula Dancers earnestly copied their moves, egalitarian in their zeal. The highlanders’ kicks and the whirling of the garba raas fell into the rhythm with surprising ease, linked by the kids’ own dazzling motions. But when Nguqe, the undisputed master, entered the fray the students deferred to him, clearing a space for him to dance as they looked on in awe. Behind him, a swarm of balloons lifted into the air.
“Do you think South Africa will change?” my friend later asked me.
I shook my head, bemused. “I don’t know. I really don’t know.”
Otium
