Since Sunday is an “everything is everything . . . or almost” day here at muntrem.com, and having made my trip from wealthy, white Europe to less wealthy, black Africa, I anticipated I might write about how people are the same everywhere and the only thing that matters is that we treat each other well. And they are and it is.
Still, at the airport, my friend Mona meets me, along with her friend Nava who tagged along. They are from Malawi and Zimbabwe respectively but are also both of Iranian descent, a fact which may or may not have something to do with their families knowing each other and why they have been friends for ages. (I lost the full details to our laughing and because they hand me a blessed coffee of welcome as well as help me navigate obtaining a local sim card.)
On alerting Mr. Dash that I’ve landed and am with them I get the following text: “They are the champs of the global south massive.”
We stop for a meal in a mallish space which, from the inside, might be anywhere architecturally—Boston, Miami, outside the ring road in Amsterdam—except that almost everyone eating is white (there are notable exceptions) and everyone serving is black (and there are no exceptions).
Since coming to Joburg for the first time five years ago I’ve always thought that if all the walls in the city were just taken down it would be for the good. (Every compound and house here comes with walls and most of these with barbed wire at the top. Fortification against a better history. ) Let everyone deal with the consequences for a little while and then, after the chaos, you’d have more equity and one of the great places to live in the world.
Nava disagrees. She says you have to deal with the underlying problems first.
She is probably right. For sure, without her, I never would have figured out how to get into the door of where I am staying, a failure that would have had nothing to do with North/South and everything to do with my failing to read the instructions sent to me by my AirBnB host.
This AirBnB sits on “an estate” that is a golf course with low-rise condo buildings all about. No lack of wall required to fence all that in, with coming and going done at a guard station where you check-in and out or use a code that raises a gate. The prison feel of coming and going is what differs most for me about life here and that in Amsterdam, a city that once sat behind a wall too, though not one this long.
I walk to “the clubhouse,” to sit on a deck that includes a view of an expanse of hills unavailable in the flat and pinched Netherlands and where the golfers have now become drinkers. Half are black, half white. But all the tables are one color or the other.
Yet what strikes me most today is the walk there, something the size of these grounds permits. Along a fairway or two, as night descends, I am hearing birds of an entirely different stamp than those from the aviary in my Dutch hood.
For the first time today I am aware of being somewhere else than where I have been for the entire pandemic.
Local singers will tell you where “here” is, these birds seem to sing. Otherwise, their song suggests, the only job is to stay lost in the beauty of creation.
Thank you for sharing your keen eyes and listening to the song birds. Do you know Michael Franks? One of my favorite jazz singer/song writers opines about song birds.