Rory Williams
When I first moved to Cape Town, I was in high school. And, in the teenaged anxiety of arriving at a new place, the thing that determined how I felt about the city had nothing to do with politics or the economic outlook or any of the big issues that people talk about.
This was only three years after the 1976 trauma that inflamed the country and sent shocking images around the world, and I knew that Cape Town was part of the system that sparked the flame.
But as much as that was the Cape Town I knew in my head, it wasn’t the Cape Town I experienced personally. My Cape Town was much, much smaller in size and import.
It was the circle of friends who made me feel welcome and glad to be here. It was cycling to school, lunches at the Spur, dances at the church hall, nights at a friend’s house listening to The Moody Blues and dreaming of starting a band. That scale of connection with people and the city far outweighed and influenced anything else I might have felt about the city as a whole.
And yes, it absolutely was a privileged existence that was made possible by the social, economic and political structures of the country.
Many others, whether they grow up here or come from elsewhere, are less fortunate in their experiences.
Obviously.
And that’s the compounding tragedy of it, 40 years after Soweto exploded: that we’re still struggling not only with the system that determines the broad strokes of what our world looks like and how it works, but even with the details of the personal spheres in which we live.
To listen to the disconnected conversations going on all around us, you’d think we were in a movie where Cape Town is the backdrop, but it’s pretending to be someplace else.
The city is a stunt double for Islamabad in Homeland or the collapsed civilisation in Mad Max: Fury Road. We’re enthralled by images that aren’t a true portrayal of the city, and it’s hard to look away and see the street in front of us. We let the narrative follow the lead of politicians who are caught up in their own machinations, and go around in circles chasing the tail of manufactured controversy.
So, even when we talk about our smaller, personal parts of the city and what needs to change, we get sucked up in the maelstrom of party politics or the metanarrative because we see nowhere else to turn.
We are too embarrassed or angst- ridden to risk taking the lead in looking for things that we can be genuinely proud of.
Many countries experience moments when the landscape shifts, when the definition of “patriotism” becomes something easier to grasp.
People love the sports analogy, with Nelson Mandela at the 1995 Rugby World Cup, or Whitney Houston at the 1991 Super Bowl when she made it more acceptable for African-Americans to sing the national anthem by powerfully reinterpreting its rendition.
Those were risky moves. But those occasions do not unite people in an enduring way.
They just open up spaces for people to enter. And we enter at the local level, at the places where we should be connected but are not.
We need to reinterpret what we have, where we are. People tend to assume that if something is interpreted as “bad”, it is inherently bad; but as context evolves, what was acceptable 100 years ago is no longer so, and vice versa.
What changed society’s view of slavery? It didn’t happen by accident, nor was it an instantaneous flip from “right” to “wrong”. It was an unfolding story, punctuated by statements and actions of people from across society, exploring the “adjacent possible” as they connected on stoeps and streets and public squares.
We won’t find connections in the national dialogue by arguing about who is a racist and who is not. And we won’t find connections in our neighbourhoods by hoping that government will magically animate barren scenes.
It’s up to us to co-author the script, to write ourselves out of the fictional hellhole of binary perceptions where there is no debate, no room to shift understanding. How we build the set will determine our level of comfort with the city, and with each other.
From The Moody Blues’ Late Lament:
Cold-hearted orb
Rules the night
Removes the colours
From our sight
Red is gray and
Yellow white
But we decide
Which is right
And which is an illusion
@carbonsmart