Friday, April 30, 2004
“Some three thousand poems disguised as people on an almost-too-perfect-day” – Ani DiFranco
I was listening to this song “Self Evident” last night, trying to write a paper on attitudes toward skin color in antiquity, only the third paper I’ve written all semester. Ani was spilling and spilling about the Trade Center and America in and out of the world, and then today I clicked my way to the New York Times online only to find that Bush and Cheney sealed off their questioning session by the 9/11 commission from the media and the public, sealed it tight as a canister of anthrax. In another one of my lectures, we’re talking all about South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the months of PUBLIC hearings meant to jumpstart a democratic discourse, to doctor some of the gaping wounds of the past. And in my class on Language Policy, my professor told me how U.C.T. had a banned reading room during Apartheid. If you wanted access to Marxist materials, you had to sign your name and exactly what works you were leafing through. And under America’s Patriot Act, if I’m not mistaken, the government has access to library records, without explicitly saying what they don’t want people reading in the name of justice.
Last weekend I went to Lesotho. It was an adventure in various methods of public transportation. We spent the nights going there and home on a Greyhound, drinking tea and staring at movie screens bouncing back and forth with the bus. We saw the sunrise in Blomfontein on the way there, and played pool at the man-made waterfront of the land-locked city, S. Africa’s judicial capitol, on the way home. We waited for a mini bus taxi to fill up with people, three hours waiting, on the way there, to get to the border, and then the five of us made the perfect sum to send the mini bus taxi back to Blomfontein, on the way home.
We were enveloped in bustle in Maseru, Lesotho’s capitol, both ways, women with bowls of bread on their head, blackened corn rotating on metal pans, neon colored juices in dented plastic bottles, sacs of muffins cooling and clumped. Motion like embroidery everywhere, colors moving in and out in space, knotted.
We took another bus through winding roads up to Malealea, a village polka dotted into hills. All along the way, people got off the bus with crates of eggs, body-bag sized containers of snacks to stock stores. We got off at the Malealea Lodge, the white-owned resort center evolved from a store at the corner of the village. Our room had a thatched roof and a couple candles to use when the power shut off, cause it did, every night at ten. And we could look up from outside and feel like we were inside of a giant salt-shaker, speckles of light coming through the dome above. Guides from the village led us on hikes, one to a waterfall, another to a gorge and a woman holding a baby invited us in to her mud hut, not all five at once. The Lodge creates jobs, but it doesn’t. That’s what Zachary said. There are A guides and B guides and they alternate weeks and sometimes they spend the money for alcohol and dajja and fights break out. And half a dozen kids who come up to your waist come up to you and escort you to the Village craft shop for coins. A boy told me his English name was Alex. I asked for a Sesotho name. I got Liduma. I think it means “sound”, like something you hear, or maybe as a prefix for asleep.
“What’s that music?” we ask as we walk. “It’s the cows”. Lesotho was my first exposure to rural South Africa. “Lesotho is a very poor country,” Joseph told us as we climbed into a valley. He’s fifteen and wants to be a lawyer. The poverty there is different from Kayelitsha, where less than a kilometer away people swing golf clubs that cost more than school fees parents can’t afford. Lesotho is smaller than New Jersey, totally surrounded by South Africa, and has more people than Namibia, but not so many more. The women carry bundles of wood on their heads in Malealea, up dirt paths, past sheep and goats and cows whose bells play symphonies.
At the lodge we meet a group of retreating lawyers and real estate agents from Jo’burg, who insist we eat their leftover stir-fry and an American/Canadian guy doing HIV/AIDS work all over Africa who buys us beer. A band and a choir from the village perform in the evenings. There is a metal box for tips. Coins clink like cow-bells. “We came to Africa to see Lesotho,” my friend joked. “We came to Lesotho to see Africa.”
I was listening to this song “Self Evident” last night, trying to write a paper on attitudes toward skin color in antiquity, only the third paper I’ve written all semester. Ani was spilling and spilling about the Trade Center and America in and out of the world, and then today I clicked my way to the New York Times online only to find that Bush and Cheney sealed off their questioning session by the 9/11 commission from the media and the public, sealed it tight as a canister of anthrax. In another one of my lectures, we’re talking all about South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the months of PUBLIC hearings meant to jumpstart a democratic discourse, to doctor some of the gaping wounds of the past. And in my class on Language Policy, my professor told me how U.C.T. had a banned reading room during Apartheid. If you wanted access to Marxist materials, you had to sign your name and exactly what works you were leafing through. And under America’s Patriot Act, if I’m not mistaken, the government has access to library records, without explicitly saying what they don’t want people reading in the name of justice.
Last weekend I went to Lesotho. It was an adventure in various methods of public transportation. We spent the nights going there and home on a Greyhound, drinking tea and staring at movie screens bouncing back and forth with the bus. We saw the sunrise in Blomfontein on the way there, and played pool at the man-made waterfront of the land-locked city, S. Africa’s judicial capitol, on the way home. We waited for a mini bus taxi to fill up with people, three hours waiting, on the way there, to get to the border, and then the five of us made the perfect sum to send the mini bus taxi back to Blomfontein, on the way home.
We were enveloped in bustle in Maseru, Lesotho’s capitol, both ways, women with bowls of bread on their head, blackened corn rotating on metal pans, neon colored juices in dented plastic bottles, sacs of muffins cooling and clumped. Motion like embroidery everywhere, colors moving in and out in space, knotted.
We took another bus through winding roads up to Malealea, a village polka dotted into hills. All along the way, people got off the bus with crates of eggs, body-bag sized containers of snacks to stock stores. We got off at the Malealea Lodge, the white-owned resort center evolved from a store at the corner of the village. Our room had a thatched roof and a couple candles to use when the power shut off, cause it did, every night at ten. And we could look up from outside and feel like we were inside of a giant salt-shaker, speckles of light coming through the dome above. Guides from the village led us on hikes, one to a waterfall, another to a gorge and a woman holding a baby invited us in to her mud hut, not all five at once. The Lodge creates jobs, but it doesn’t. That’s what Zachary said. There are A guides and B guides and they alternate weeks and sometimes they spend the money for alcohol and dajja and fights break out. And half a dozen kids who come up to your waist come up to you and escort you to the Village craft shop for coins. A boy told me his English name was Alex. I asked for a Sesotho name. I got Liduma. I think it means “sound”, like something you hear, or maybe as a prefix for asleep.
“What’s that music?” we ask as we walk. “It’s the cows”. Lesotho was my first exposure to rural South Africa. “Lesotho is a very poor country,” Joseph told us as we climbed into a valley. He’s fifteen and wants to be a lawyer. The poverty there is different from Kayelitsha, where less than a kilometer away people swing golf clubs that cost more than school fees parents can’t afford. Lesotho is smaller than New Jersey, totally surrounded by South Africa, and has more people than Namibia, but not so many more. The women carry bundles of wood on their heads in Malealea, up dirt paths, past sheep and goats and cows whose bells play symphonies.
At the lodge we meet a group of retreating lawyers and real estate agents from Jo’burg, who insist we eat their leftover stir-fry and an American/Canadian guy doing HIV/AIDS work all over Africa who buys us beer. A band and a choir from the village perform in the evenings. There is a metal box for tips. Coins clink like cow-bells. “We came to Africa to see Lesotho,” my friend joked. “We came to Lesotho to see Africa.”
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