Colby Magazine Volume 91 Issue 1 Winter 2002 Article 8 January 2002 A Brave New World: CBB Cape Town students find inspiration in a nation in flux Gerry Boyle Colby College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/colbymagazine Part of the African Studies Commons Recommended Citation Boyle, Gerry (2002) "A Brave New World: CBB Cape Town students find inspiration in a nation in flux," Colby Magazine: Vol. 91 : Iss. 1 , Article 8. Available at: https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/colbymagazine/vol91/iss1/8 This Contents is brought to you for free and open access by the Colby College Archives at Digital Commons @ Colby. It has been accepted for inclusion in Colby Magazine by an authorized editor of Digital Commons @ Colby. CBB Cape Town students find inspiration in a nation in flux By Gerry Boyle 778 • Photos by Irvine Clements ; ou spend days interviewing, observing, scribbling in notebooks, ing squatter settlements. It carries with it still an abhorrent racist holding up a tape recorder. Later you pore over notebooks and legacy, yet African-American students who hive been to Cape tapes,Y sift the wheat from the journalistic chaff, search for that one To wn talk of fi nding for the fi rst time escape from the subtle moment, that single situation, that pearl-like utterance that captures racism of America. precisely the spirit of the subject, the place, the story. Cape To wn is a place where unquenchable optimism springs from Ifyou're writing about Cape To wn and the Colby-Bates-Bowdoin the violence and poverty of the racially segregated townships like program based in the city, there are too many choices. wildflowers after a forest fire. It's a city set like a jewel into a crown The lead could be Noah Lambie, a free-spirited Bowdoin junior, of roan-colored mountains that overlook white-sand beaches and hustling around a new schoolyard basketball court in a crime-ridden turquoise seas; yet in the downtown, glue-sniffing beggar children Cape To wn township where lay-ups are an enticement to keep kids sleep on the sidewalks like litters of puppies. When CBB students take out of gangs-and alive. to the townships for community service, they are venturi ng where Or it could be Zelda Jansen, the progra m's resident director, many white South Africans have never set foot even once. navigating the narrow lanes of a colored township and saying that "There isn't any such thing as 'life in Cape To wn,"' said even 15 years ago she never dreamed that the apartheid government Colby History Professor James We bb as he wound up his first would fa ll. "\Ne didn't even smell semester at the CBB center last democracy," she said. fall. "There's only life in Cape Or maybe Kristen Heim, a Cape Town Encounters To wn depending on the neigh­ Colby junior who, when she first borhood you live in and the racial Not all of the education in Cape To wn is planned. Much of arrived in race-based Cape To wn group you fa11 into." it comes in the form of unexpected and even serendipitous society, used her fingers to put encounters like these selected from the reporter's notebook: quotes around the term "colored," dministered by Bowdoin (as commonly used in South Africa. On a tour of Cape Point National Park. A the CBB London Center "Inmy fi rst host fa mily, they George Kleyn's knowledge of the Cape Peninsula is encyclope­ is by Colby and CBB Quito by said, 'After a couple of weeks the dic. A retired high school teacher, he turns a tour of the area Bates), the Cape To wn program quotes will come off,"' Heim said. into a lesson in botany, geology, history, civics. The Cape Point was conceived four years ago by a They did. National Park, he says, is home to hundreds of different species steering committee that included In Cape To wn, contrasts and of heather. The mountains in the region are "a botanist's para­ professors Randall Stakeman, a dise." Yet for all of its vastness and diversity, numbers are also contradictions abound. It's a Bowdoin Africanist; Catherine at the root of South Africa's problems, he says. Millions of people beautiful cosmopolitan city com­ Besteman, a Colby a nth ropolo­ have come from the north and east to the Cape Town region, but plete with a Ferrari dealership­ gist; and Charles ero, professor there are few natural resources or industries to support them. and the abject poverty of sprawl- of rhetoric, from Bates. Unlike the United States during its westward expansion, South Africa is hemmed in by oceans and poverty. "Where are people going to go?" he says, pausing from his recital of the Cape's attri­ butes. "This is the Third World. It's not just us." � COLBY · WINTER 2002 I 13 outh Africa, then just fi,·e years into its post-apartheid have been folded into this swirling pol itical and social melange. life, offered tudents an opportunity to \\'itness history being The Cape To wn program differs from London and Quito CBB made. The �elson .\landela-inspired \'ictory over the apartheid programs, all fu nded by an ndrew \N. Mellon Foundation grant, government handed the people of outh Africa a country that in that it was expressly de igned to give CBB students exposure to \l"aS in some \l"a)' ra,·aged but in many \\'ays a blank canvas. Still all levels of South African society and to emphasize community racially segregated toda�· by custom and economics, if not by law, service. Students take courses taught by CBB faculty, who rotate the country face oYern·helming problems, including its moribund in and out of the program, and at the nearby niversity of Cape economy, rampant AIDS and endemic unemployment. But still, Town. Community service is tied to grassroots organizations it managed "the changeo,·er," a South Africans refer to the rather than foreign GOs, and students collaborate with, rather end of apartheid, ,,·ithout the ci,·il unrest that has wracked than oversee, those they assist. Zimbab\\'e and other parts of the continent. J'\o\\', for the fi rst "\\Te didn't want our students to in any way fe el that they time, outh African of all race are deciding what sort of country were saviors or messiahs going in to cure the problems of the the\' \\'i 11 create. little people of the world," Stakeman said. "We wanted them "It's like seeing the United rates right after the Constitution," to get the idea that they were just temporary laborers in the takeman said. "fa·erything in South frica is in Aux." same vineyards." Besteman, \\' ho \\' as to spend second semester in Cape Vineyards are an apt metaphor in a region where wine is big ... Town this year, sees the business. But the vineyards to which Stakeman refers are the political struggle of the teeming townsh ips of the Cape Flats, the area designated for 1980s replaced by an iden­ nonwhites in the days of apartheid government. tity struggle. "It's kind In Cape To wn, coloreds (the term for mixed-race South of edgy that wa�" she Africans) and blacks were forced to live in designated areas south said. "Nobody knows quite and east of the city. The world has heard of Soweto, outside where they fit." Johannesburg, where anti-apartheid riots broke out in the 1980s; i nee 1999, students from it may be less familiar with Cape To wn townships like Langa, the three Maine colleges Lavender Hill, Khayalitsha and Gugeletu. Tor does the world see the "informal settlements," the euphemism for the squatter communities that spring up in post-apartheid Cape To wn wherever there is Rat ground on which to erect a shack of tin or pallets. "It blew my mind to see that," said Jana Richardson, a Bowdoin junior. "I'm from i\1aine. That's one of the reasons I came (to Cape To wn]. Yo u don't have this kind of poverty in Maine. It's very humbling. It makes you thankful for every single thing you have." ln the townships, by comparison, residents don't have much. The townships are the size of cities with the fe el of shabby campgrounds. Khaya litsha, with its dirt lanes and small cinderblock houses, is home to an estimated 1.3-million people, all colored. Langa, the most established black township, is home to 70,000 people, many of them middle class. Langa has spazas, or Previous: extenor mosaic fr om Guga S'Thebe, the com­ munity center m Langa township. To p: the CBB Center m the Cape To wn suburb of New/ands. where students take classes and congrega te. Above: The Cape Penin­ sula from Fa lse Bay. south of Cape To wn. The coastal city 1s surrounded by white-sand beaches that are flanked by mountains and ridges. Right: Hannah Arnold '03 and Sarah Dean ·03 exp/am charactenstics of marshland as part of an environmental science commu­ nity service program at Zen/da Park School in Lavender Hill To wnship. 14 Open-mike nigh t in a small jazz club called Swingers, in Lans­ corner stores, an occasional a Colby junior, worked with downe To wnship in the Cape Flats. restaurant. It is relatively safe, a group of Langa high school The musicians include local luminaries and teenage admirers. and in contrast to townships students as they prepared for Guitarists Errol Dyers and his brother, Alvin, perform to raucous for like Lavender Hill, where applause and, after their set, the American visitor is invited over their matriculation exams, a ti me last year CBB students to the bar to meet them.