So I may not remember everything that transpired the other night in Gugulethu, but here's what I do know. That is the most African thing I've ever seen.
African African. No pandering to white tourists, no pre-made pre-meditated pre-paid bullshit, no stereotypes, no kitsch. When I turned in to Mzolis' street my car was instantly swarmed by the masses of people, moving and shaking to the sixteen different sources of music, all of which contained catchy beats and ... something else. I was worried I'd hit someone, no one else seemed worried about anything at all. It's a very white thing to be worried. I switched seats with my South African so he could park the car while four hundred and sixty two people attempted to occupy the same space.
This was the second time we had switched seats on the drive. The first was right before we drove up to a road block to get in to Gugulethu itself. They were "checking for drunk drivers". In South Africa that's another way of saying the cops were having you blow into a breathalyzer and looking for bribes to let you continue on your way. What you say? Eh, township life I say.
He didn't want to drive through because they had just pulled him over there on his way to pick me up, and he didn't have his license and the car is registered to some other girl that I bought it from (yeah, yeah I'll get on going to the South African DMV but if you think the US DMV is bad... I need a full two months to prepare for that trip). Of course, because he's not white, they gave him problems. When I drove through they smiled and asked me to blow onto the little black box. The black police woman tsked, shook her head and said "Oh it's positive!".
Having not had anything to drink in probably a month, I was confused. Then panicked. Was this woman joking about charging me with a DUI? Luckily, she cackled and waved me on, obviously amused that she'd just given yet another foreign white girl coronary heart failure. It took me several minutes to recover. Perhaps that's why I wasn't feeling completely up to task of driving through the massive party that is Mzolis.
We bought a bottle of whiskey and then met up with friends. We had a massively good time. Everyone is in the street, dancing, talking, laughing, making more friends. It's drunk and disorderly, but not in a violent way. There were hundreds of people gathered, people from the neighborhood and people from all over South Africa's southern suburbs. But there they gathered to get away from the gunshots and the street fights and the heaviness that is township life. Here they came to be happy.
It reminded me of a tailgate, Africa style. People park and pop the trunk, open the doors and play their tunes. They dance in the street while the sun goes down, sharing beers and telling stories. Along the sides of the road there are guys running braais (barbeques) to cook up the big orders of meats from Mzolis itself, which is supposed to be a butchery, after all. Gugulethu is an interesting township, one of the only ones where the black population and the colored population live side by side without any serious racial conflict. Maybe this massive party is the glue that holds them together. Maybe it's the meat. Whatever it is, it's working.
Why do I say it's so African? It has to be the vibe. The crowd is dense, and so is the smell of human beings. People are clustered around one another, their voices loud, their ears close. Everywhere, people are smiling. Laughing. Making jokes with strangers just to laugh some more. There's an overwhelmingly good vibe.
Here, in the middle of a township, in South Africa's famously dangerous and violent streets. One of the many conversations we had was about race. We laughed that we were the only two white people left after dark, then we laughed about fear, and about racism, and about the Boers and the blacks. We laughed until we ran out of things to drink and had to find food. So we laughed as we ate "ghetto style" on a street box. Huge sandwiches full of french fries and meat, unwrapped haphazardly in big sheets of paper. All six of us sharing together, picking out pieces, laughing at how messy we were together. My South African ate half of mine, not thinking I would notice. I was too happy to care. It all was so communal, and that's something we certainly lack in our starch white American culture, something we find so utterly surprising. It shocks us into happiness. That's how African it was.
- Rh
No comments:
Post a Comment