Home Sweet Home in Stellenbosch

Stellenbosch found itself at the centre of a public art controversy lately.

A new statue of former president, Nelson Mandela, has caused ructions in the heartland of conservative Afrikanerdom, but not for the reasons you might think.

The artwork, which was created by Afrikaans landscape artist, Strijdom van der Merwe, and approved by the Nelson Mandela Foundation, was unveiled outside of the Town Hall on Plein Street last Wednesday to great fanfare.

Consisting of a concrete block clad with white marble and etched with areas of the South African map that have played a key role in Madiba’s life, a laser-cut steel silhouette of his face has been placed on either side – to great effect.

Along the ground in front of the statue, one of his most famous quotes is also displayed. It reads: “Never, never and never again will this beautiful country of ours be oppressed by one over another.”

Very apt for a town that has the dubious honour of being the birthplace of apartheid, with academics at the university here having dreamt up the philosophy in the first place.

But it isn’t the Afrikaner community that’s up in arms over the presence of the new statue. Oh no. It is instead members of the ANC Youth League who are seriously disgruntled about it.

They accuse the municipality, which is controlled by arch-rivals, the Democratic Alliance (DA), of wasting R800,000 (£72,000) on the artwork when the money could have been better spent on catering to the needs of the local population living in informal housing settlements.

For the sake of clarity, the DA is also the governing party in the Western Cape and the ANC’s official opposition at a national level. Although somewhat complicated in lineage terms, it traces its roots back to the anti-apartheid movement of the 1970s and 1980s.

Anyway, while it seems to me that the DA’s argument that it is trying to honour Mandela as an international statesman and the country’s first democratically-elected president seems reasonable, I also sympathise with the point made by the ANC, no matter how political.

Kayamandi

A similar kind of debate took place in the North East of England, where I come from, following the erection of Anthony Gormley’s Angel of the North statue on a hill near Gateshead.

While everyone outside of the region seemed to rave about it, a lot of local people were somewhat less enamoured. In a deprived post-industrial area, which in the 1990s was in desperate need of regeneration, many felt that the £1m in Lottery Funding would have been better spent on activities such as job creation.

But the living conditions in Stellenbosch’s Kayamandi township, particularly in its Enkanini informal settlement area, have nothing on Gateshead.

Kayamandi, which means “sweet home” in the Xhosa language, would seem, on the surface anyway, to be anything but.

To illustrate the point, a local charity, Prochorus, indicates that a huge 70% of the population still don’t yet live in the promised government-built Reconstruction and Development Programme houses, but instead dwell in shacks made from anything serviceable that can be found.

To make matters worse, the infrastructure, which includes sanitation and running water, is widely reported to be inadequate.

But to upgrade and extend it would cost a huge R3 billion over the next seven years, according to estimates put forward in a book called “Sustainable Stellenbosch – Opening Dialogues” by Lauren Taverner-Smith of Stellenbosch University’s School of Public Leadership.

Unfortunately however, she believes that there is currently a funding shortfall of at least R1 billion.

And this already difficult situation is not exactly being helped by the huge influx of migrant workers from the poorer, more rural Eastern Cape.

Although this migration has been going on to a greater or lesser extent for nearly 100 years mainly due to the employment opportunities offered by the local wine industry, there has nonetheless been a veritable population explosion over the last few.

Vision AfriKa

In fact, the number of Kayamandi residents has now nearly tripled from 12,000 to 33,000, only adding to already high rates of unemployment (30%). Other problems include high levels of malnutrition and HIV/AIDS infection as well as low levels of literacy.

But within this challenging environment, there are beacons of hope. One of them takes the form of a non-governmental organisation (NGO) called Vision AfriKa [www.VisionAfriKa.com], with which I’ve been working on a voluntary basis over the last few months after a friend mentioned them to me.

The charity’s aim is to support the personal growth and development of selected 13-to-18 year olds in order to complement and enhance their standard education and help them to become the success stories of tomorrow.

A key issue for many children from deprived backgrounds is that they have deeply-ingrained negative perceptions of themselves, their communities and their ability to succeed.

So the goal is to help them reframe their views, acquire vital life and leadership skills, which include critical thinking, and encourage them to take responsibility for fulfilling their own dreams.

To its credit as only a small organisation with nine full-time staff, Vision AfriKa assists nearly 400 young people each year. While the majority are based in Kayamandi, there is also a secondary site in the nearby rural settlement of Vlottenberg about 8km away.

As for my role in all this though, I’ve developed an editorial strategy to help the NGO raise its profile, not least in a bid to try and boost its fundraising activity.

I’m also acting as content editor, which means helping a busy team of youth leaders to write informative and interesting news stories for the web site as well as internal reports and the like.

And, it must be said that they do amazingly well seeing as none of them are trained writers and nor do they have English as their first language. I’m not sure I’d fancy it.

But they really are proof of their own pudding, which is that just about anything becomes possible if you’re prepared to give it a go.

A glimpse of South Africa’s underbelly

There are a couple of things over recent days that have given me pause for thought.

 

The first relates to the immense amount of poverty and deprivation that there is here in South Africa and the fact that, all too soon and without even noticing it, people like me, even if they reckon that they have some kind of social conscience, can all too easily find themselves insulated from, and inured to, it.

 

When I first came to this country, I simply couldn’t tear my gaze away from the vast expanses of corrugated iron that are the townships on the outskirts of Cape Town, and which seem to stretch on for ever as a testimony to human misery – and as a reproach to the rest of us for allowing this abomination to be.

 

While some progress has been made in building small breeze block homes to replace these tumble-down shacks that lack even the most basic sanitation, it’s difficult to imagine how anyone could live in such conditions. It really is a testament to human endurance as well as people’s innate adaptability and ability to survive no matter what.

 

But as time goes on, to my immortal shame, I find myself staring less and less at these scarcely habitable monstrosities as I sit in my comfy rental car and I wonder if, after a while, I’ll even notice. It’s scary how quickly you get used to the impossible.

 

Closer to home, meanwhile, there’s the matter of the relative value of R500 (£35). The other day, I met up with a lady who, under the auspices of the Catholic Church, organises a couple of soup kitchens for children (and all too often hungry adults too) in Cloetesville, one of the ‘coloured’ or mixed race areas of Stellenbosch.

 

One of the key issues she faces is that, as tends to be the case everywhere, it’s the same people from among the congregation who keep on providing the vital veg, meat and other necessaries such as rice and lentils each week. The local Spar also gives bread that’s just passed its sell-by date when it’s available, which really helps too.

 

Stark contrasts

 

But when it’s not, she has to try and eke out a R500 monthly donation from someone that likewise has to cover the cost of gas and any other supplies that may not have materialised for whatever reason.

 

Which is all well and good, but the fact that my beloved and I spent more than twice that on a posh lunch at the IndoChine restaurant at his favourite wine farm, the Delaire Graff, to celebrate our twelfth wedding anniversary this weekend, does make you think.

 

Don’t get me wrong – it was a fabulous experience. They seated us in a lovely blue wood, semi-circular loveseat that would have afforded stunning views of the mountains if it hadn’t been so misty and wet that day, although the quality of the food and expertly-matched tipples more than made up for any deficits weather-wise – and the company was superlative too, of course.

 

But the contrast with the soup kitchen scenario was stark. While friends have told me that I can’t right every wrong in the world, which is true, it did serve to point up to me the huge canyons between those who are lucky enough to have in this country and those who haven’t. Because there’s not even anything approaching the UK’s increasingly despoiled social security system to fall back on here as a safety net. There’s nothing.

 

And so, with unemployment rates upwards of 25% across South Africa, and a huge 50% or so in many of the townships, one of the few things that all too many people rely on to get by is charity and hand-outs, if they can get them.

 

So my role in the soup kitchen context, while meagre, will hopefully prove at least vaguely useful. The idea is that I take letters stamped with the official emblem of the Catholic Church to the various supermarkets in the vicinity in order to ask them for veg donations, hopefully on a regular basis.

 

White, middle-aged males

 

Once pick-up times/days have been agreed, it’ll be my role to deliver any offerings to the hall at St Mark’s church and to help with sorting it into two bundles, before it’s carted off to the good women of Cloetesville for cooking up.

 

And it does appear that Cloetesville is a community in need of help in more ways than one. According to the care professionals that I’m working with to put on a substance abuse educational drama at the end of September, it suffers from the worst addiction rates in the Stellenbosch area, closely followed by the Idas Valley, another coloured community in which we’ll be holding a second event. So things certainly aren’t easy there.

 

The second thing that gave me pause for thought this week though was the apparent plight of a growing number of white, middle-aged South African males. I’d met a couple of guys for lunch and we were talking about the useful role that the almost forgotten art of story-telling can play in corporate life by helping to stimulate discussion and get a point across in an entertaining and memorable, as opposed to dull PowerPoint-y, kind of fashion.

 

As this form of consultancy is only nascent here, I inquired about who their customers tended to be. They replied, with a remarkable lack of bitterness, that things weren’t always easy because large corporates were effectively no-go areas for them as they didn’t fit into the black economic empowerment (BEE) agenda. As a result, most of their work was generated, via word of mouth, from smaller, more flexible organisations that were more able to fly below the radar.

 

And similar tales of woe seem to be making the rounds elsewhere. Nearly everyone you speak to in the white community appears to have a story about a friend, or friend of a friend, who found their services were no longer required after training up a BEE successor, a situation that resulted in them not only losing their job, but in some instances, their home.

 

So, while John Simpson’s article on the BBC website entitled ‘Do white people have a future in South Africa?’ (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22554709) may have been leaped on in fury by the establishment over here (http://www.africacheck.org/reports/do-400-000-whites-live-in-squatter-camps-in-south-africa-the-answer-is-no/), it would appear to have at least a grain of truth in it, no matter how politically unpopular.

 

And when push comes to shove, what is very clear is that poverty and hunger are no respecters of colour.