There are some interesting acts of communal memory happening in Cape Town.
What a week. First we had Cape Town-boy-makes-good Mark Shuttleworth’s Sixty-Six Shit-Hot Sunsets That the Rest of You Earthbound Assholes Will Never See, broadcast live from Outer Space.
Unfortunately I was only in Cape Town, out here on the Southern edge of the pitiful, overpopulated planet Earth. Unable to leap free of the planet’s natural gravitational pull, I found myself on a journey into the unexplored spaces of the inner human universe instead.
There are some interesting acts of communal memory happening in Cape Town. One is the Holocaust Museum, situated on the greater campus of the Jewish Museum, a skip and a jump up the street from Tuynhuis and Parliament.
The Holocaust Museum comes from the breast of South Africa’s tiny Jewish community, most of whom lost all trace of the families they had left behind in Latvia and Lithuania when Adolf Hitler unleashed his final solution to the problem of a Jewish presence in Europe.
Why Cape Town? you might ask. Well, a number of survivors of the death camps that accompanied that Holocaust actually made it to the Mother City, and are living there to this day. The fact of their survival, and their subsequent involvement in the social and economic life of Cape Town, is reason enough. But more than that, the Holocaust is everyone’s story – a constant reminder of humanity’s inhumanity towards itself, but also of the possibility of its redemption.
But just down the road, close to the old fort around which the city of Cape Town slowly took root, is the District Six Museum – a reminder of another kind of genocide. This was a genocide that set out not to take lives on a grand and horrifyingly deliberate scale, but which was part of a greater plan to destroy people’s souls. Uproot a community by violent means, and you take away their reason for living. Either way, it’s genocide.
Where the Holocaust Museum rehearses the cold facts and asks for your appalled recognition, the District Six Museum somehow manages to give the impression that you are walking into a living monument to human transcendence, where the past can actually be reclaimed.
The Holocaust Museum is tiny, organised, and impressive. But I have visited this territory before. The repetitive oppressiveness of history hangs over me as I follow our guide round the tight twists of the museum, depressed all over again as she describes this hurt that I know so well.
The small picture of the children whose bodies have been horribly burned in the course of some unspeakable series of “medical experiments”, who still stare out, naked and trusting, at the camera lens, is what breaks me. It’s unspeakably awful to view pictures of piles of inert, gassed, adult bodies. But I can’t handle seeing half a dozen doomed children reaching out to me with their silent, wide-eyed faces devoid of all accusation, and who I can’t touch, but who will be dead without meaning tomorrow, that bright trust in me still in their eyes. Or maybe not, anymore.
The guilt is mine – I, a conscious, active, muscled adult, could reach through that fragile camera frame and save them. But I didn’t. And I don’t. This is why there is a Holocaust Museum.
Reclamation is about people. I am standing in the main hall of the District Six Museum when I am approached by none other than Mac McKenzie, former lead guitarist and angry face of a punkish 1980s group called the Genuines (pronounced jen-you-wines) looking strangely mature and healthy in his straw hat and three-quarter length black leather coat, blaming his blooming looks on the simple fact of moving back in with his mother here in the Cape of Storms, and eating properly for the first time in years. And drinking lots of tea instead of lots of Tequila.
Mac and I met in Amsterdam during State of Emergency days. But once the struggle was over, we all had to find new realities. So Mac came back to Cape Town, a city that always takes you by surprise because of the mountain and the sea and the champagne air. And the moody winds, and the bitterness.
Mac is picking gently at his guitar in the hushed hall of the Methodist church that this museum was once, giving something back to the sacred space in the heart of a white Cape Town that gave him nothing, but rather took it all away. Reclaiming something just by being there. Defiant and now softly, rather than loudly, genuine.
There is something about walking into that old, wooden-ceilinged church, where the descendants of slaves used to worship and sing and talk, that brings oppression, genocide and redemption into a single space that my mind can take hold of, without being overwhelmed. The tobacco-stained detail of Welcome Dover stoves and a mother’s doek and her hand in her armpit as she tries to come to terms with the death of her son in another act of Cape violence, deliberate or accidental.
The Cape, like the Russian Steppes and the Swiss, German and Austrian Alps, and the lazy, winding, gypsy Danube, is heaven and hell at the same time. Violence is randomly awesome, spurred on by the need to survive, and the urge to deface the image of an imperfect and inaccessible god.
These two extraordinary museums are linked by the ongoing theme of a bottomless fund of man-made evil. And yet they are also linked by a sense of hope, and the ultimate triumph of the human spirit.
Talking of evil and redemption, this was also a week when we were still reeling at the news that Wouter Basson had got off scot-free. And in a bizarre twist, a former struggle attorney managed to convince the courts that a black journalist should get no relief against an ugly allegation by a senior Cabinet minister that a white editor had put words in her mouth, for racist reasons, when she had said critical things about a black president-to-be.
She, a liberated black woman, had thought those thoughts for herself. The court ruled her out of order.
What a week.
Archive: Previous columns by John Matshikiza