Moans, bones and Cobblestones: A Summer in Italy

I wanted to enter this article in a travel writing competition, but the competition does not permit previously published articles and this one appeared in a 2012 Activate. I thought I would post it here instead: 

By the middle of my trip to Italy, I was sick, tired, and my ankle looked like an angry blue puffer fish. I had seen the wonders of Rome, stared in awe at the wastes of Pompeii and when I arrived in Naples – and I fell prey to swarms of gnats, a selfish Argentine and the common cold.

A sort of inertia, enflamed by travel fatigue and the various irritants of Italy’s most controversial city, overcame me. My ankle made me loath to walk. Our room was such a bright orange and so hot that, in my more dramatic moments, I swore I was burning in hell. Bitter thoughts turned on the amount of money I was spending, and I started wondering whether saving up a year’s salary for my Italy trip-of-a-lifetime had been worth it.

The answer is, of course, a resounding affirmative.

The Trevi Fountain - photos by yours truly

My trip started with a few days in the Netherlands, where I met up with my sister before we departed for Rome. What followed were 17 days of a self-indulgent, ruin-packed tour that I had agonized over for months – it was a dream come true. We began in Rome, swept down to the ruins of Pompeii, festered in the bowels of Naples and then traipsed up to Tuscany, where a sunset watched through the green shutters of a Tuscan villa restored my wanderlust.

My hate for Naples is somewhat unfair, but due to a confluence of unfortunate and unexpected events, I abhorred the very air of the place – the hot, gnat-filled night air.

When I started my trip, I was armed with a piece of canonical travelling wisdom: things will go wrong. I knew this, and adjusted my expectations accordingly. I knew that I would get sick. I anticipated food poisoning. I was even 100% percent sure I would twist my ankle somewhere along the way.

What I, stupidly, did not anticipate was snoring, the Argentine and weird European toilets.

Being young and not even modestly rich, we stayed in hostels for most of our trip. It was amazing to see the national stereotypes come to life as travelers came and went. I must say, however, that I am not stereotyping the Argentine based on nation. I call him the Argentine simply because that was the only fact we could exchange between his broken English and my single-word Spanish. “Hola!” only gets you so far.

This Argentine is perhaps the foremost factor in my bad experience of Naples. In the eight bed mixed dorm room we shared with him, he was hated by seven others. He treated that crowded orange room as though it were his own. While the rest of us toiled in fitful, sweaty sleep, he would switch off our air-conditioning. Naples in the middle of July reaches the high 30s, and doesn’t cool down at night. Imagine eight people in a tiny, ranging on dilapidated room in 38 degree (C) heat and no air conditioning, fan or airflow.

And then there is the snoring. I was not aware of how many people suffer from this affliction. I met the nicest Canadian girl on our first night in Rome. We chatted about the weather, our travel plans, our countries. When she turned in, my sister and I agreed that she seemed exceedingly pleasant.

And then she fell asleep.

Whereas men snore with a loud and pronounced hack, hers was the continual scrape of a saw over glass. Unsurprisingly, the Argentine’s snores. He brayed like a donkey, and on the night his friend shared our room, they snored in chorus.

The toilets... I won’t go into. Suffice to say that, in South Africa, we’re used to them being designed without holes in strange places that serve no discernible purpose.

But, for all my complaining, it did actually turn out to be the expected trip of a lifetime. Once I got some solid sleep, medicine for my cold and ice for my ankle, my enchantment with Italy resumed.

The Roman Skyline

Barberini Fountain in Rome

Rome is beautiful, crowded, crumbling and ever in repair. Magnificence does not begin to describe the Eternal City. But for all the glory of St Peter’s Basilica and the Colosseum, my favorite site was a small monastery on the Via Veneto – what used to be Rome’s swankiest street in the La Dolce Vita days.

This Monastery – Il Convento dei Cappuccini – contains six crypts that are decorated by the remains of over 4000 Capuchin monks. No one is completely sure what drove one of their brothers to liven up the crypts with installations such as “The crypt of Shin-bones and Thigh-bones”, but his interior-decorating has attracted such visitors as the Marquis de Sade and Nathaniel Hawthorne. The first crypt – “of the Three Skeletons” – contains an epigraph that reads: “What you are now we used to be, what we are now you will be” in three different languages.

Inside the Colosseum 

View from St Peter's Basilica's Duomo

Wonderful little panini joint outside The Vatican's walls

Pompeii cannot be described to the uninitiated. The paradoxical wonder of history captured in a moment of abject terror is something that should be experienced to appreciate. You have to stand over the screaming, smiling and choking casts of people long decayed to get a sense of their terror, and their significance.

Memento mori: one of Pompeii's famous casts

Gate to one of Pompeii's three Necropoli

Naples did have its charms

Once we moved on from Naples, Tuscany recaptured my exhausted imagination. It is a different world: Rome, Pompeii and Naples all have stronger ties to the ancient. Tuscany is art, countryside and the pastoral personified. Walled cities, rolling hills, 18^th Century Villas with antique furniture, creaking floorboards and dark hallways fulfilled all my time-travel fantasies. We got up at five in the morning to see the sun rise over the hills outside Sienna. In Lucca, we followed a medieval parade and watched a cross-bow contest.  In Florence, I slowly circled David and guiltily admired his bum.

It was worth a year’s toil. Expectations were met, disappointed and dashed. I marveled at the majesty of Rome and Tuscany, felt bitterly aghast in Naples and it only took me 15 minutes on the cobblestones of Pompeii to twist my ankle.

The Tuscan landscape as seen from our Villa's backyard

Farm implements on the hill

In Siena

Flag throwing in Lucca during the Medieval parade

The unutterable pleasure of breaking spines

The Gone Away World is strangely not Gone Away. It is sitting in my book shelf, boiling, seething. It is waiting, somewhat impatiently, for my caress. It bears the marks of our relationship. I have broken its spine, discoloured its pages with my progress, and it crinkles alarmingly when I open it, a sweet and soured smell of some sort of citrus and my old perfume wafting from the pages.  

The Old Kingdom is similarly non-complacent. It rubs backs with The Gone Away World. Its pages are fresher, even though it is older, but the corners turn from being dragged to Grahamstown and back these three years.  Mattie and the North Woods are safely at home. A Gathering Light might not have survived another trip. These are my books, and they bear the marks of my reading experience.

I’m sure they whisper among themselves and accuse me of neglect. The problem is, I am held captive in other worlds. Since I started my three year English course, I have been rushing through the landscaped pages, from Ancient Greece and Jerusalem to a City of Glass I desperately wanted to shatter. From the moors of northern England to the sticky heat of Ayemenem, where the God of Small Things tortured me for my attachment. Borges mocked me. Marquez wrenched every emotion possible from my baffled mind. This year I was thrown onto Crusoe’s island – enthusiastic at first, but the devil truly is in the detail – and plunged into Dickens’ seedy London, in which I revelled.

These books, these writers, have characterised my life since the moment I delved into The Goblet of Fire at the age of ten. Before this I read every now and then. The stock-books for a young girl were always available – Nancy Drew, Sweet Valley Kids – but before fiction enraptured me, I was more interested in the non-fiction books about the supernatural. My sister and I would fight for momentary possession of The Haunted Realm – a book of black and white photographs that electrifies my imagination to this day.

I do not know whether my public library back in Pretoria still has this tome. I have not been there in years. Once fiction gripped me, I started buying my books.  I would spend hours searching for a series that had it all – fantasy, adventure, action, drama, romance, horror. I revelled in the blood and guts, the triumph, the danger, the parries and blocks and broken bones – the broken hearts – I wanted the twist of the knife, the unlikely survival and the hero’s kiss.

To this day I am of strange turn of thought. I blame the books that whisper and call for my attention. There are worlds still to satisfy my every craving, slake my every lust. I will search them out and, one day, they will line my bookshelf.

Their spines will be broken, their pages thumbed in angst, indulgence and pain. Their covers will hold me and hide me, and they will whisper among themselves as I traverse their worlds.

(Journ) The Bones of History

This was a project for my Writing and Editing class. The assignment was to immerse ourselves in a particular path through Grahamstown and find something to write about along the way. Being my grim self, I chose to go investigate Makana's cemeteries in search of the settlers' physical history. 

The sun is harsh on the faces of the settlers.

Father, mother and little girl look into it, stony eyes invulnerable to the inexorable rays. Voluminous skirts and worn boots find root in a mottled stone plinth, in which a plaque announces the sculptor, Ivan Mitford-Barberton, and the date of construction – 1969.

The statue is surrounded by huge, hulking stones. A way off is the monument building – a huge light brown and grey exercise in rectangles and concrete. A half-hidden monolith proclaims the precinct as a national monument, celebrating the achievements of the 1820 British settlers.

There is another monument in Grahamstown that honours the region’s settlers. I only notice this one after I had driven beyond the Cathedral and visited two cemeteries in search of the places that literally hold Grahamstown’s past.

This second monument is on an uneven patch of grass, across the road from a childcare centre and surrounded by colourful colonial-style houses and new developments. It was built in the shade of the same trees whose leaves anoint the broken graves of its subjects.

The true settlers are afforded more shade in Grahamstown Cemetery than the generic statue on the hill. The three graves in one plot – two big and one small – are much more poignant than the expressionless faces of stone and the landscape of twisting trees and gnarled stone is more forgiving on the eye than the harsh silhouettes on top of the hill.

I would not mind being buried here. Barring vandalism and neglect, or perhaps because of it, the cemetery is more wistful than the dwellings of the more recently interred. Its broken fence and creaking gates are painted a light, sky blue, and the windswept graveyard bends and breaks to march of at least a century. The graves themselves are old and older, none completely intact, and they face all directions. Wherever I step, I feel like I am treading on someone’s bones.

This old and decayed place is more removed from death than Makana’s other cemeteries. It is in the middle of a living, breathing community. Makana Municipality Cemetery, in contrast, is at the top of another slope, on the unpaved road into which Fitzroy Street unravels. The landscape is bare, and graves, new and newer, stretch over a flat, treeless expanse. Roads within the cemetery cut them into blocks, and a wicked wind whips at the crooked tin and stone grave markers. These are the newly dead, and the landscape is the future home of the dying. It is much more oppressive, much ranker with the idea of death and loss.

It does not take long for me to return to the pretty cemetery, where I discover the second monument.

As I take pictures of the rough stone block, a little girl in the yard of Jack and Jill Day Care waves me over. She poses and giggles. Her friends rush to the lens, smiles pointed, “cheese!” playfully exclaimed through missing teeth.

As I pack away my camera and return to the monument on the hill, I cannot help but wonder in which cemetery they will be buried.

To the Dean of Students: A defence

This is a response to the letter the Dean of Students, Dr Vivian de Klerk, sent to the editor of Activate regarding my article on the Dagga Couple. The Dean’s letter appears before my response, and my original article is posted below. The views expressed in this blog post are (this time) completely my own, and do not necessarily reflect those of Activate or any of its writers or editors. 

Dear Editor

I write in response to the article in Activate (20 March 2012): “Dagga couple for the ‘re-legalisation’ of weed”, which is an alarming example of an insidious advocacy group making irresponsible claims. The issue of drugs, and specifically marijuana usage is of grave concern to my Office, given its attendant risks, and I therefore seek to set the record straight through the medium of the same paper which was so generous in airing the views of Ms van der Wielen. In her article, she makes little attempt to provide a balanced view of dagga and its effects, and implies that there is no empirical evidence regarding dagga’s negative effects. This is biased, misleading and dishonest. The article is a mischievous blend of some facts and half-truths mixed with a few wild claims, resulting in conclusions that any competent Philosophy 1 student could dispose of without difficulty (assuming, of course, that they weren’t high on dagga). But the danger is that such an article could be very affirming for any (uncritical) student who seeks to justify why they use cannabis. Indeed, the article provides the uninitiated and adventurous student with grounds to try it. 

To ensure that our students do indeed get a balanced view about cannabis, hopefully before they try it themselves, I have therefore asked a few local professional experts to supply our campus newspapers with the kind of empirical evidence that Activate apparently could not locate. I’d also like to ask that Activate take a more responsible and balanced editorial line in future.

From my side, I wish to emphasise only three points that every student needs to consider before trying cannabis: firstly, it is impossible to predict who will get addicted or who is prone to psychosis, and just taking it to see “how it goes” is a huge risk (my source: Counselling Centre and local psychiatrists’ reports). Secondly, dagga is an entry level drug; the real danger is that once a student gets hooked onto the "high" and finds they cannot repeat it, they often move to the next level of dangerous hard drugs (my source: local medical practitioners). Thirdly, dagga usage is of particular concern in a learning environment, because it impairs cognitive skills related to attention, reasoning and memory (evidence: the academic records of known users). I ask all students to consider their own wellbeing and academic future very carefully before they take this risk. 

I would like to take this opportunity to educate those readers of Activate who might fall into the same trap as Dr de Klerk in assuming that an article expresses the views of the writer. Despite the various postmodern doubts concerning objectivity and truth, journalists are still trained to strive for a level of objectivity (i.e. keeping your views out of your writing). Accordingly, there are a few distinctions that might be helpful to any readers who find this concept (and some basic journalistic concepts) difficult to grasp.

Dr de Klerk was obviously under the impression that I had written a column, in which the writer’s views are expressly stated and discussed. These are generally distinguished from articles by their specific place on the page and by sporting a picture of the writer. Similarly, opinion pieces generally have a photo of the writer and appear under the opinion pages. I, in fact, wrote a feature, which thus appeared under the features section. Features are longer articles that either focus on a specific thing (i.e. a profile, which focuses on a person) or investigates an issue. In the case of the Dagga Couple article, the focus was solely on the couple and their campaign. I gave some history of cannabis to provide some context which might not have been widely known (unlike the commonly reported detrimental effects of dagga).

Furthermore, I feel that a distinction between fact and opinion must be explained, since this seemed to be confusing as well. Here I shall illustrate the difference via an example.

Fact: the Dagga Couple, on their website and various other platforms on which they delivered their opinion, said what I reported them saying in my 20 March Activate article “Dagga Couple for the re-legalisation of weed”. If you reference the article (either original or the edited [by others] version that appears on the Activate website), you will see that wherever a statement about dagga is made, I give the source of this statement (which is supposed to alert the reader to the fact that the statements are not my own).

Opinion: Dagga shouldn’t be legalised.

My opinion, in fact. I will not, presently, go into why I think dagga should not be legalised, but will just say that I am probably one of the biggest anti-smokers you might ever come across, and that includes dagga, cigarettes and even hubbly. I also don’t think getting stoned in any shape or form is a good thing.

Thus, in my feature about the Dagga Couple, I explained their campaign, some of their arguments, some of the history of cannabis sativa and some of the impact that this campaign might make. In no part of the article did I personally encourage the consumption of dagga, or any type of drug.

Having posited a defence of my article, I would like to now address the personal attacks Dr de Klerk made in her letter to my editor. Dr de Klerk suggests that my competence is exceeded by that of a Philosophy 1 student, I assume thereby implying that I am incompetent and uncritical.

This makes me wonder whether the Dean is in touch with her student body at all. Dragging my surname into her letter so condescendingly, one might think she didn’t notice that it is in the 2012 Awards, Scholarships, Bursaries and Prizes booklet handed out to graduates. This booklet states that I won two prizes, both of which are based on achieving the best results out of the year for my two majors. It also lists my name under those students who achieved Academic Half Colours. I have been on the Dean of Humanities’ list since my first November examinations. This year, I have not received any marks under 77%. Last year, I achieved firsts in all my subjects.

If I am incompetent and have no critical thinking ability, it doesn’t say much for the university's standards. 

I would further like to say that I am deeply disappointed with the way in which Dr de Klerk handled the situation. I understand that, in her position, she might have concerns about the students’ impressions about drugs and illicit substances. However, in her haste to “set the record straight”, Dr de Klerk committed one of the most basic logical fallacies known to even those competent Philosophy 1 students (I hope) – ad hominem, the act of attacking a person rather than an argument.

In her letter, Dr de Klerk insults my intelligence, questions my integrity and refutes my competence. Instead of making a rational and mature argument against the usage of drugs, she rather chooses to start her letter by belittling her opposition before claiming to have the ultimate truth. I do not appreciate being thus denigrated by an authority figure who obviously has no idea who I am and what I actually believe.

Had Dr de Klerk stuck to the “facts” she so esteems and left her condescension and derision out of the letter, I would have been happy to write an article that tackles the issue. I might have even used some of the same sources she mentions.

However, the so-called “facts” about dagga are so disputed that I feel prescribing or preaching to the student body is neither prudent nor helpful (I am, after all, only a third year student). As a student myself, I know that students are on the whole educated (let’s hope so, even though Dr de Klerk’s opinion of her student body does not seem to reflect this). Thus I feel that students have been exposed to the arguments surrounding dagga, and other drugs. As a sub-warden, I know that workshops are held every year that address issues of drug use.

I also know (thanks to the research I did for the article) that dagga is being used by a lot of South Africans, and that students are especially prone to experimenting with dagga. However, I do not think that one article, which explains one couple’s views, will sway anyone either which way. My role as journalist is not to tell anyone what to think, but to make them aware of what is out there in the world (which shouldn’t worry the Dean of Students so much, since any “competent Philosophy 1 student” can dispose of what she considers harmful conclusions – or does she assume that the majority of students at Rhodes is incompetent?).

As Dr de Klerk asks Activate to take a more balanced and responsible editorial line, I beseech her to do the following:

• Do your research, so that you may know who you are attacking/denigrating (I do not, in any way, deserve the criticism you have levelled at me) 
• Consider the effect your method of arguing might have on your argument (attacking your opponent does not prove you right and lends no credence to your point, but only makes you seem incapable of actually making an argument that can stand on its own) 
• When stumbling across a situation where you feel that a mistake is being made by a student (although here I suppose you assumed that my intension was to mislead and dupe the unsuspecting Rhodes students, but let’s pretend), rather than attacking the student, lend the guidance and advice expected of your office. 

We are, after all, students who are meant to be learning the skills we should one day employ. Although I suppose that this has taught me to respond to unfair criticism. I will make no apology for my article, and I refuse to believe that students are so daft or weak as to use my article as a vindication for the use of dagga.

Thus, in conclusion, I am shocked and disappointed that someone I previously admired could react with so little consideration, thought and insight. I reiterate: nowhere in my article do I recommend or encourage the use of dagga. I am a top student (and thus by Dr de Klerk’s rationale not high on weed) and, for lack of better description, a model citizen. My views and opinions do not colour my professional performance, and I do not deserve to be insulted by someone who is supposed to have students’ best interests at heart.

Original article - The Dagga Couple

There might soon be 3.2 million fewer criminals in South Africa.

That is, if the press-dubbed Dagga Couple’s campaign to re-legalise cannabis in South Africa succeeds. Jules Stobbs and Myrtle Clarke, owners of the Jazzfarm north of Johannesburg, have issued a challenge to South Africa’s Constitutional Court against the 1992 Drugs and Drug Trafficking Act.

 “In short, the prohibition of Dagga is unscientific, racist, irrational & wrong,” the couple states on their website.

According to most sources, cannabis sativa, or merely cannabis, originated in Central Asia, and its first recorded use was in 2700 BC, when it was mentioned by one of the fathers of Chinese medicine.

Following its initial use, cannabis has stretched over the centuries in varying forms and with varying amounts of support. Ancient Egyptians used it as a remedy (in different forms) for various ailments. Difficulties arose when Egyptian medicine effectively became Islamic medicine, and cannabis’s psychoactive effects classified it under intoxicants according to the Muslim sharia law. Prohibition was enacted ineffectively by the 13^th C, and Napoleon also tried his hand at criminalising the drug. Pope Innocent VIII, of the 15^th C, considered it, according to a UK cannabis information site, to be an “unholy sacrament of the Satanic mass”.

However, there were times when cannabis was vastly popular, and advocated by such figures as President George Washington and Queen Victoria. Some states and countries made cannabis production mandatory, and hemp – which is related to the cannabis plant – was a major industry throughout the world.

In the 1900s things start to look bad for dagga. Various countries outlaw the possession and use of cannabis and South Africa officially makes it illegal in 1928.

The Dagga Couple claims that its criminalisation and continued status as an illegal drug is due to racist and colonial laws, which are sustained today through propaganda propounded by the United States. The couple also claims that their constitutional and human right to ingest anything they please is being violated by the prohibition of dagga.

“Isn’t it your right to self medicate, to injest[sic] whatever you feel helps your situation?” their website proclaims. “There are countless cancer, leukemia, glycoma, and multiple sclerosis patients (to list but a few ) worldwide in the 21st century, who get 100% pain relief from injesting[sic] dagga, whether by inhaling or eating or drinking the plant.”

Dagga has several modes of consumption, the most popular being smoking joints or bongs
,
and oral ingestion via food. Studies have shown that the active ingredient in cannabis – THC (Tetrahydrocannabinol if you insist on the long version) – is three times more potent if orally ingested, since the smoking of cannabis inhibits some of the transmission of this constituent.

A large part of the Dagga Couple’s campaign is based on their claim that there is no empirical, scientific proof that cannabis is detrimental to anyone.

Furthermore, they suggest that is it s a “victimless crime” (if, they assert, it is indeed a crime). This sentiment is echoed by various articles circulating the online cannabis supporting community, with statements that deny the validity of studies which show any detrimental effects dagga might have.

An article published on MyNews24 from ‘Buzz’, stated: “Just as Apartheid and similar establishments drilled the “White is right” mindset into its citizens, we are still drilled with the misconception that “Dagga is gaga”.”

From an early age, children are drilled with the basics: caring, sharing and staying healthy is good; fire, strangers and drugs (emphasis on dagga) are bad.

Among the reasons they list various detrimental side-effects, the threat of developing Schizophrenia and the idea that dagga is a “soft drug” which leads to the use of drugs such as cocaine and heroin.

Disappointingly, there seems to be no critical response to the Dagga Couple, other than the disapproving comments from church groups and uneasy parents. The call for empirical evidence as to dagga’s negative effects on their website has gone unanswered (except for support messages from fellow cannabis consumers). The information most base their aversion to dagga on is labelled as “outdated”, “misinformed”, “propaganda”, “hearsay” and “unscientific baloney”.

Whichever side of the debate you’re on, you will find “evidence” among the myriad of studies surrounding cannabis with which to stake your claim. The illegal status of cannabis makes it hard to conduct research openly, and thus most people can only base their opinion on hearsay. However, the Dagga Couple has a few veritable points.

South Africa is infamous for its overpopulated prisons, with overpopulation currently at 137.25 % according to the Department of Correctional Services’ website (amaBhungane places prison overpopulation at 139%). However, offenders incarcerated (and sentenced) in 2011 for narcotics charges only stand at 2717. Whether the absence of offenders charged because of possession or use of dagga would even make a dent is questionable. 

Cannabis does, however, remain South African’s drug of choice, and it is estimated that over 3.2 million citizens used cannabis in 2008, and this number steadily rose (although recent censuses have not been completed as of yet). If the Dagga Couple’s campaign succeeds, there will be at least 3.2 million fewer criminals in South Africa. It remains up to the individual to judge whether this is a good or a bad thing.

Sources:

http://www.jazzfarm.co.za/?page_id=195703

http://www.news24.com/MyNews24/Shoot-the-Stoner-20111109

http://amabhungane.co.za/article/2011-01-21-no-escape-from-hell-behind-bars

http://www.dcs.gov.za/AboutUs/StatisticalInformation.aspx

http://www.ukcia.org/culture/history/chrono.php

http://daggacouple.co.za/

National Drug Master Plan – http://daggacouple.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/National-Drug-Master-Plan-2012-2016-June-20-2011.pdf

http://daggacouple.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/South-Africa_Drugs-and-Drug-Trafficking-Act-no-140-of-1992.pdf

http://proxy.baremetal.com/cannabiscoalition.ca/info/Russo_HistoryCannabisChemBiodiversity2007.pdf - History of Cannabis and its Preparations in Saga, Science and Sobriquet.

Thinking of The Help

When I was very little I took the bottle of gin out of our pantry and emptied the contents into the sink.

Not much time passed before I heard my parents talking about the shockingly empty bottle of gin. I was in the kitchen while they cooked, and since my sister and I were in the age ranges of six to nine, the only possible culprit they could imagine was our maid.

I waited. My strangely potent aversion to alcohol at the tender age of six wasn’t very well understood by my parents (particularly since I’d only ever seen one of my parents drunk once and had no logical reason to hate alcohol with the venom I encumbered for it). I bated my breath and waited for the sentence to pass.

And then my parents came to the conclusion that, if she was drinking on the job, the maid must be fired.

I swallowed heavily and with a whimpery voice confessed my crime. I cannot remember the punishment, but my parents seemed more confused than angry.

Today, I feel a certain redemptive albeit very small pride in taking responsibility for my action.

I recently watched The Help, which is based on a novel by the same name that exposes the trials and degradation black maids faced in the US during the 1960s. I was entertained and touched, and furious that people had been treated so inhumanely.

A poster for The Help

But before I could get too sanctimonious, I realised that the situation maids in the 60s faced in the Deep South might be more relevant to post-apartheid South Africa than many white middle to upper class families would like to admit.

Even in a post-apartheid society, the average white family employs a black domestic worker. Some of the main issues in The Help ring uncomfortably true to my experience with our domestic workers while growing up, as well as what I saw in the houses of my friends.

I never witnessed or saw a maid treated badly. I can say with confidence that domestic workers my family has employed have been treated well and paid fairly.

But the thought that struck me after watching The Help was that maids still have separate cups and cutlery, and generally use bathrooms outside of the house (in the wake of apartheid laws which recommended separate amenities for different races, many houses or complexes built during the era have toilets and small rooms built apart from the main house).

They still travel far and long each morning to get to their employers’ houses. Our current maid, Emily, gets up at 4 AM to catch the various buses that will bring her to our doorstep. She gets home around nightfall, to a little girl running to hug her mother.

Emily has been working for us for over five or six years. Last year I saw her house in the KwaMahlangu township for the first time. It’s a small shack on a spacious lot that overlooks a valley. As far as the view goes, her little family is set. When it comes to sanitation, privacy and living space, the outlook is less idyllic.

Emily and her two children and nephew outside her house in KwaMahlangu

As we arrived, her sister’s son was bathing in his underwear in tub haphazardly perched on the uneven ground. There was a squeal from the dark shack and a little girl came bursting out, surprised and overjoyed at the unexpected sight of her mother returning home early.

Since we had redone our bathroom, we were giving Emily the shower structure we were no longer using, along with a table and a few chairs.

Trying to write this article makes me shocked at just how little I know about Emily’s past. I know about her present. Her little girl is seven and went to her first day of school not too long ago. Her son is a little bit older, and sported a defiant tilt to his chin as he posed for my sister’s camera.

After our expedition, and after we gave Emily the photos my sister took, she brought me a photo of her daughter dressed in traditional clothes and dancing. She tells me what her children think of school. She asks how long still I will be away at university.

And it’s these kinds of things that make me feel better about the situation in South Africa and what I saw in The Help. My family and I don’t treat Emily with the kind of derision and superiority you see in the movie and hear about from articles in the South African press. We help where we can, and don’t see her as a servant, but an employee and a dear person.

I’m still not sure though why Emily chooses to use the same cup, which is particularly different from the medley we generally use, every day. Perhaps she just particularly likes it. Unfortunately that would be a naive assumption.

The harsh truth is that an old power structure still remains. Emily and my parents are of a generation that grew up in apartheid. Although I don’t think this forms any part in the value they attribute to the other, I can see the conceptions of apartheid seeping into the interaction between them. Emily still calls my father “baas”, and my mother “mies” (short for miesies). She still uses her own (self?)designated cup, and sits outside when she eats.

To my knowledge, we haven’t told her to do so. To my knowledge we haven’t minded whether she does or not. We treat her well. She seems to like us. We like her.

It’s hard to say what I should be bothered about. I don’t think I’m bothered about where she eats or what she uses or what she calls my parents or what we call her. I’m bothered by how these sets of behaviour just fell into place without any consideration.

I think I will, next time I’m home, ask Emily why she has her own cup and sits outside. I’ll ask her where she grew up, and what she likes to do over the weekend.

I’ll ask her surname, and that will be one less detail that modern society will make me feel guilty for not knowing.

Emily in her very neat one-room home, which she shares with her two children and husband.

Photos of Emily and her family by Nadine van der Wielen (http://snapmepretty.blogspot.com/)

(JOURN) What zombies are really like in South Africa

A train rambles by suspiciously slowly. The moon lights on fingers that curl gingerly around the frame of an open compartment. The wind rips a nail from greying flesh. A face swims out of the gloom, teeth gnarled, eyes glazed, blood dripping from flapping, putrid lips.

It is a zombie train, and if you're standing close enough to the tracks, it has come for you.

This might sound like the scene from another bad zombie movie, but in some societies in South Africa, this is a real fear. The word “zombie” is derived from zonbi (Haitian Creole) and nzumbe (North Mbundu), which refer to the reanimation of the dead through mystical means. Zombies have a distinguished presence in pop culture, but few realise that the cult is based on lore from all over the world. Our recent Writing and Editing project on the tag game Humans vs. Zombies, which was played on Rhodes’s campus last week, inspired me to take a look at South Africans’ belief in the undead.

In South Africa, it is believed that witches turn people into zombies by kidnapping and killing them, cutting out their tongue and sending a magical image (what is actually a plant stem, but which appears as the victim’s body) to the family of the victim in order to avoid suspicion. By cutting out the tongue of the victim, he or she cannot scream or ask for help. Zombies are subdued by strong potions when they are reanimated, which rob them of their memories, willpower and sex drive. Thus, contrary to the Western idea of brain/flesh-craving zombies, South African zombies have no desires other than to eat porridge and work. It is generally believed that zombies are kept for labouring by night, and are stored away during the day. It is also believed that a small child can turn the dead into a zombie.

Actually called a witch train, the above scene was thought to be common (minus the rotting flesh and ripping nails) after railways had been built in South Africa to transport migrant workers. People believed that the witches who created the zombies used trains that did not run on tracks to transport their real-life zombie armies. Niehaus (2005) wrote:

“Witches’ trains are believed to abduct people who wander about at night. Should they board, the conductor will ask them ‘Single or return?’ Those who reply ‘Single’ disappear forever. They are killed, join the zombies on the train, and are forced to work for the witch. Those who say ‘Return’ are beaten and thrown from the train at a distant location.”

While zombies had always featured in traditional folklore, the instigation of apartheid laws, some of which separated communities and forced many people to rely on migrant work for subsistence, exacerbated the fear of community members turning others into zombies. According to Niehaus, this was due to deteriorating standard of living and conditions among black communities in South Africa. “Zombie-keeping”, an accusation freely meted out, was a way of surviving when you couldn’t afford workers.

The persistence of belief in zombies in South Africa was recently showcased when a man claimed to be the traditional singer Khulekani Kwakhe "Mgqumeni" Khumalo three years after his death. The man claimed that he had been kept in a cave full of zombies by a witchdoctor and put under a spell. According to Global Post, crowds gathered in Khumalo’s home village and grew hysterical. Police used truncheons and a water cannon to keep the crowd under control. The man’s DNA and fingerprints didn’t match that of Khumalo’s, and he was later proven to be one Sibusiso John Gcabashe. 

Khumalo pictured next to his impersonator. 

Despite being a fraud, the crowd’s reaction to the news, and Gcabashe’s success in fooling even a few of Khumalo’s family members, is a testament to the strong belief South Africans still hold in zombies. We might sneer at Hollywood gore and blood, but who knows what really happens in the South African night?

Sources:
Niehaus, Isak. "Witches and Zombies of the South African Lowveld: Discourse, Accusations and Subjective Reality". The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Jun., 2005), pp.191-210
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatches/globalpost-blogs/weird-wide-web/khulekani-mgqumeni-khumalo-back-from-dead-musician-video
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/07/us-safrica-zombie-crime-idUSTRE8161IG20120207
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombie#South_Africa