In Grahamstown the Madeline cake tastes like red wine and cigarettes. But a student past that began in 1994 jars with the present.
The grander narratives — of impoverishment and social divisions in a dichotomous town riven by race, class and a lingering apartheid spatiality — remain unchanged. In some instances it has worsened.
Unemployment is thought to be as high as 80% by residents of townships like Vukani.
In the middle-class part of town though, Grahamstown appears less historical: Neon-lit franchises and malls with drive-through tortured chicken outlets pock-mark the landscape — replacing family-owned originals like Bambi’s burgers, Wellingtons (with their home-made pies and sour worms a staple for many students at the old journalism department building) or That Pizza Place (where legend had it that the discounted prices was mainly down to the rat meat filling).
The Vic, a scene of student debauchery and indiscretion as a dingy nightclub had survived those halcyon moments to re-emerge as The Victoria Hotel. A bit like returning to Grahamstown to find the bisexual male slag who snogged anything in sight was now the preacher at the cathedral.
Students have changed as much as they haven’t. This became apparent on Sunday night after Soweto Kinch’s set at the jazz festival.
Socially conscious
Kinch’s gig was not so much the hurricane of sound that was the previous night’s collaboration with vocalist Andries Schaerer (who, as a jazz-noise artist uses his vocals in ways that must leave even very good trumpet players and hip-hop producers stinging with jealousy) and Standard Bank Young Artist for Jazz, Bokani Dyer.
But it was still exceptional. Kinch played pieces mostly from his latest album, New Emancipation. A socially conscious saxophonist and rapper, Kinch’s set included a critique of the current global financial crisis, called Love of Money — where ominous rhythms set the base for his raging against “the faces behind the faces”.
Although, there was an unavoidable ripple of laughter when Kinch introduced the piece by saying: “Most of the words and ideas here explore the meaning of freedom and yet we live under the tyranny of banks and bankers.” Kinch was, obviously, standing under a huge banner for the Festival’s title sponsors, Standard Bank, at the time.
But, blogging is about not letting reporting and reviewing to get in the way of the tangential stuff, apparently. So, to the aftermath of the gig and the two commerce students who’d joined a pack of roving reporters for a Sunday night-cap.
Upper-class refugees
You realise Rhodes students haven’t changed much when they tell you a place is around the corner and you’re walking halfway across town, grumbling, heaving for air and with fingers too frozen to dial a taxi.
But the students have changed too. There appear less black kids from the lower classes at Rhodes as opposed to 15 years ago. The university feels much more of an enclave for refugees — black and white — from the upper-middle-classes.
After a third-year journalism lecture at Rhodes last year it was startling to be approached by so many middle-class black kids who were uncomfortable with projects involving reporting on poor communities because there was no connection with the condition of impoverished blacks in South Africa.
15 years ago Rhodes’s elitism felt more institutionalised. Now, under a progressive vice-chancellor like Saleem Badat, the institution feels much less so, the students, perhaps not.
And while cellphones were suggestive of a derided yuppie-ness by students in the year SA celebrated its first democratic elections, its patently a very different world now.
The blind leading the blind
One of the third year commerce students taking us on a midnight marathon around Grahamstown admitted to tweeting every third second of her existence. Even the inanities of a late-night drinking session get spelled out to her 900 followers.
That and other delicious tidbits: The tweet-happy student, who has lived in the suburbs from a young age and admits to being “conservative” and having lived a Model C life, is a self-proclaimed ambassador for the Team Full Panty in Winter campaign, you see.
She says 200 followers “were given to me” by a celebrity comedian former boyfriend, the other “700 I had to work very hard for”.
It was impossible to establish what “working very hard for followers” entailed — but it did sound like a service delivery promise from a local government official.
Rob van Vuuren of Corné and Twakkie fame (who, was also at Rhodes a long time ago and now has about 10 000 Twitter followers) was unable to enlighten me, either, over a beer at The Long Table.
The future making the present redundant
His one-man live show, which is on daily at 12 noon, covers his stoned sperm and their inability to get off the testicular couch for a spot of swimming. He’s recently adopted a baby and that journey is the new material covered in the show.
Naturally a detailed list of questions has also been forwarded to Twitter to establish guidelines as to what one is allowed to do with followers: merely assault them with narcissism or whether there are cult-like benefits to go with it.
Being a Luddite isn’t a joke. But it became apparent that tweeters like the third-year student (with a gauche enthusiasm for followers and gleaning information from around the country through Twitter) are the future making the present redundant.
Should we worry when the future (which is doing a minor in Journalism) tells us that they’re not really sure what their parents do because “I don’t want to pry and get too personal”?
For more from the National Arts Festival, see our special report.
