Presentation and Road Trip

Hello diligent readers,

A mountain of work is obscuring the end of the quarter, but fortunately I still have a day or two of fun before it fully hits. This past weekend I took a road trip with nine other Stanford students to a town called Arniston on the Indian Ocean. It is just to the east of Cape Agulhas, the southern most tip of the continent of Africa. It was a great trip, in which we got to spend time on the beach and also explored a cave just down the coast. The following picture is an example of what the 2nd home beach town Arniston looks like.

It was great to get out of Cape Town, especially in a ‘hired’ care (rental car.) Although the drive was pretty normal, every once in a while there was something that would remind someone of the fact it is South Africa. For example, as we arrived Friday night in the dark, a car without taillights passed us, but fortunately, it quickly sped ahead.

My project with the kids in Nyanga (which they have named: Give Nyanga Knowledge Project) is taking up a fair amount of my time as Elizabeth (my partner) and I are working to finalize the book we are putting together of their writing. After a fair amount of editing with them, their writing is in a publishable state. We had the students write about four different topics, me, family, school/friends, and culture. However, what they wrote tended to be (too) dictated by the questions we would ask and write to guide their writings. Furthermore, what they could say was severely limited by their level of English.

Here is an except of the second half of the ‘culture’ entry from one of the kids named Siboniso (who is on the far right in the next picture.) At first, we tried to get the kids to explain what they thought was positive about Nyanga, but failed to do so, as they see nothing about Nyanga that is positive. Then, the conversation evolved into both comparing Nyanga with Cape Town (although Nyanga is officially part of Cape Town, saying Cape Town generally refers to the city centre, which is filled with wealthy residents), as well as talking about the gangs in Nyanga. Out of all the time teaching them, I do believe they expressed themselves the best when talking about the gangs and what they do. Here is the excerpt:

There are a lot of gangsters in Nyanga. In Cape Town, there are fewer gangsters than in Nyanga. The gangsters in Nyanga hurt others every day. The men in Nyanga drink alcohol and go hurt their wives and their children. In Cape Town, there are no people hurting others. The people in Nyanga shoot each other with guns and rob others and take their cell phone and money. In Cape Town, there are no people who can take something without you saying it is ok. The people in Nyanga fight everyday, and they must stop that.

Quick note: there is definitely violence in Cape Town, just not as much as in Nyanga (hence seeming like there is relatively no violence.) And here is the picture (Siboniso is on the far right):


This past Friday, Tommy (my roommate) and I were in charge of leading the Western Cape Sites of Memory class in which we talked about two events, Gugulethu Seven, and the death of Amy Biehl. Both are opposite examples of the violence in South Africa at the end of apartheid due to the police state and the fight against apartheid.

Amy Biehl was born in a middle-class suburb in California, and attended Stanford where she became interested in South Africa. A couple years after graduating, she received a Fulbright scholarship to help register voters in 1993 in preparations for the first free election in April 1994. However, a couple of days before she was due to leave, she drove friends home to the township of Gugulethu, in which her car ran into a group of people coming back from a PAC rally. (PAC is Pan African Congress, a party in favour of getting South Africa back for just the Africans.) Seeing a white person (Amy Biehl), the mob attacked her car. As Amy Biehl was running away, the mob tracked her down and stabbed her to death right beside a petrol station. Four people in the mob were later convicted and thrown into jail.

After the free elections in which Nelson Mandela was elected, an act created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, headed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. It was established in order to learn the truth about human rights violations on both sides during apartheid. It was also formed to provide a forum in which people could request amnesty for past crimes due to the political nature of their crimes as well as by telling the complete truth of what happened.

The four convicted murderers of Amy Biehl requested amnesty, and their found some supporters from the most unlikely people, Amy Biehl’s parents. They believed in the work that Amy Biehl was doing, and felt that the forgiveness of the convicted killers was part of the healing process that South Africa needed to go through. Eventually, all four were granted amnesty, and two of them started work for (and still work for) the Amy Biehl Foundation, which works to provide after school programs for kids in the townships. The parents of Amy Biehl, with the help of a grant from the US government, formed it. This picture is of the cross that marks where Amy Biehl died, with the gas station sign in the distance. A new monument will replace the current one within a couple of months.

The other event that we presented was the Gugulethu Seven. They were a group of seven men in Gugulethu who were recruited to the armed struggle by people they believed were part of the ANC militant wing. However, the people who recruited them were askaris, namely undercover police officers. The askaris then informed the apartheid police that the newly recruited members were planning to attack the police. So the police ambushed them and killed all of them (many at apparently close range, and some in the back.) This full story of the shooting did not come out until the TRC hearings. The four police officers and askaris who were directly fingers for the murders all applied for amnesty and eventually received it. The next picture is of Tommy and I in front of the Gugulethu Seven memorial.
A couple of weeks ago, a UCT student was stabbed to death right near the local KFC about a five-minute walk away from the house I am staying. Most likely, the death occurred because he tried to resist being robbed. Last Wednesday, there was a huge rally at UCT and where the student was stabbed blaming the government for not being more proactive about fighting crime. They all wore black shirts saying, “Enough is Enough.” For us Stanford students, it is a gentle reminder to be careful and not be too complacent about how safe we feel. Well, back to work, but here is a picture from Arniston.

Until later,
-Andrew