Both/And in the Motherland:

A Black American Looks at South Africa

By: Josslyn Luckett

 I know, I’m from America. I travel with my United States of America passport many places with virtual ease. It’s 2006 and if you want to talk about empire, please, Bush and Condi and them taking it to a whole new level. But when I get to Africa, it hits me I sometimes forget about the number the original gangster imperialists, the British, did on my motherland. The wounds run so deep--from slavery and genocide, to cultural, even dietary wounds. For instance: why every black and brown person in South Africa gotta offer me tea and scones? I have nothing against clotted cream, but could a sister get some peanut sauce up in here? Some kudu? Some pap? I have to go deep into a remote village in Mpumalanga before I’m offered greens and watermelon...thank God. I mean, thank the ancestors! Thank God and the Ancestors. Am I ever in the land of "both/and."

South Africa, the new South Africa is still a land of extreme extremes. The obvious one of course is the grotesque wealth right up against what looks like endless poverty. Cape Town in particular feels like a small stretch of Malibu, mixed with the UCLA campus and then imagine the rest of Los Angeles as miles of black and coloured townships, many without indoor plumbing or electricity. I feel angriest in Cape Town. Soweto, where I stay my first three nights, in contrast feels filled with pride. You see so directly the positive results of struggle. I find myself late one night in a back room at Sakhumzi’s Restaurant, on Vilakazi Street, virtually the starting place of the ‘76 uprising. And I’m not marching but doing the electric slide with these young cuties who could easily be cast in a reenactment of the former protest outside, you know? These faces look like the faces I just saw in devastating black and white portraits at the Hector Pieterson Museum--named for the first student, brother, son, 13 year old Hector, who was murdered for wanting to learn his own language. On this night we raise our hands to wave, snap and toast, no black power fists necessary. Our power is in our bodies, our groove, our diasporic smiles and deliciously liberated hips. Sunday morning at Holy Cross, a black Anglican church across the street from the museum, the groove continues. I feel so moved to watch these mothers beat the bible like a hand drum...the percussive bible, another sacrificed son and his stories pounded into a shape that makes sense for these families who have lost--and found--so much in just one generation.

I feel no groove in St. George’s Cathedral in Cape Town, the place Archbishop Desmond Tutu preached and many call "the people’s cathedral." I see British flags, I see a statue of Queen Elizabeth across the way. I can’t feel Tutu at all, I feel those imperialist thugs recreating Europe on this beautiful black land that rests where the Indian and Atlantic oceans mingle. Where’s Biko? I need Biko right now, not Jesus or the book of common prayer or Elizabeth. I settle for the amazing stories of Sobukwe and Mandela I hear on Robben Island a few hours later...respective PAC and ANC leaders, chained to opposite sides of the island, growing more blind with each days work in the quarry, but, still, free in their minds and building a new nation. Now I feel Africa, now I hear Masekela, Abdullah Ibrahim, Zim Ngqawana, I even hear their Caribbean cousin Bob wailing, "none but ourselves can free our minds!"

All I ever had. Redemption songs.

Profoundly moved by Robben Island, but still irked about the flags at St. George’s, I give an earful to a black priest I sit next to on the ferry ride back. He calmly invites me to "hold these extremes in tension." He lets me know that St. George’s is the place that housed homeless blacks and coloureds when whole neighborhoods were bulldozed. St. George’s is the place where Muslims and Jews came together with Christians to organize against "Empire." He tells me there are atheist Communists who want to be buried in St. George’s because that was the home of struggle. I like all this, feel touched, but I’m not at all internally ready for my truth and reconciliation commission. I’m still mad as hell at the British, and I don’t care if it’s "not how you nation build” I want those damn union jacks and Queen Elizabeth statue gone. Wouldn’t you rather see a statue of Miriam Makeba in that deadly dress she has on in "Come Back Africa" than Elizabeth? This is supposed to be the New South Africa.

Who says we can’t move mountains?

I hear a beautiful poet, Malika Ndlovu sing those words right on time. In an evening of song and poem and peace called "Womantide" at the Baxter Theatre on the University of Cape Town campus, these mountain moving women (with Malika are jazz/folk singer, Tina Schouw and hip hop/soul sis, Ernestine Deane) chill me right out, and I notice the rest of my South African journey takes on a gentler and much more humorous tone.

People here tend to find it hilarious when I say I’m black. I happen to be biracial--my father is black, my mother is white-- yet I think of myself as black, which suddenly makes me Dave Chappelle (a crazy black American in Africa? No! A comic genius...well, maybe both/and). I spend the last week of my trip at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, a college town in the Eastern Cape. The campus housing where I rent a room for the week also houses many of the guest artists so I get to have these great cafeteria breakfasts with jazz singers, dancers and other South Africans trying to figure out creative ways to move mountains. Fitzroy Ngcukana, singer, concert promoter and fiercely PAC is tickled by my confusion with the "coloured" issue and my impatience with why people who look like me in South Africa don’t want anything to do with being black. He introduces me on my last afternoon there to jazz guitarist Jimmy Dludlu’s band. His band looks like a UN summit, but pretty much all the vastly different hued guys identify "coloured." Fitzroy says, "this polite American woman can’t figure out the ‘coloured’ thing." I tell them, "Yeah, everyone here calls me coloured and I’m black." They laugh. The guys immediately point to the lightest skinned member of their group and say, "what would you call him?" I respond, "I’d say, ‘what’s up my lightskinned black brother?’" They fall out, except for my lightskinned black brother who doesn’t laugh but looks...lifted. He seems to seriously beam with pride and says, "I like that!" They’ve just come from a fast food restaurant and have to-go bags they are about to get into. I share that my country is hardly free of race/color madness. I say, you guys had the pencil test (a test coloureds had to take, if you stick a pencil in your hair and shake your head, if it comes out "good” if it stays in "bad") we had the fine tooth comb test and the paper bag test. An Indian looking--but lets me know he’s coloured--musician holds up the paper bag in his hand to the lightest guy. I tell them "he gets in the club," and on that note I hit a comedic home run and I’m out.

I roll my suitcase down High Street, headed for a Greyhound bus back to Cape Town, to catch a plane to London then L.A. It’s just before sunset and I’m hit with this emotional wave of not wanting to leave that seriously slows my roll. This is followed by an audio wave that stops me and my suitcase all together. These three marimba players on the other side of High send 9 no 10, maybe 20 part harmonies across the street to say...not "goodbye," but maybe, "keep holding the tension sister, that’s how you build the music." Redemption songs. Ingoma.

I pull my suitcase into my favorite pie shop to get one last spinach and feta for the 15 hour bus ride. The white woman who seems to own the place, who hasn’t been particularly friendly the other times I’ve popped in, sees my bag and asks: "Heading home or leaving home?" The "to be or not to be" of my African journey, right? She softens, maybe hearing my voice, I’m not just another coloured spinach and feta freak, I’m American (sigh). She wishes me safe journey, and I notice she’s beautiful when she smiles. I turn to start to wheel out of there and she suddenly hands me two more pies on the house, "they won’t feed you on the bus."

I want to weep. I don’t know, she might have even been British. Obviously kind. And offering me feta, not clotted cream. I love South Africa. I am going home and leaving home. Both. And...