A trip through time and space

I am trying to fully understand the trip Jack and I just took, the people, the places, the events, past and present. It encompasses so much, the details of it are overwhelming. Just traveling from Oakland, California to Cape Town, South Africa is a monumental task. You are literally moving through space and time and you feel the enormous weight of them both as you make that trip. It was as if we moved from the here and now of our lives in America through space not just to another spot on the globe, but to another time, another era.

The effect of so much of what South Africa was is still present, you can see, hear, smell, and touch and be touched by it. I know that every place holds its history. If it is not immediately evident, with a little digging it can be revealed. But in South Africa all one needs to do is turn a corner, glance out a window, or look into the eyes of the person you just asked for directions and you can feel the weight of the past pressing in on the present. The present is such a fragile thing, and so many people must work so hard to make sure the past remains in the past. Navigating the present and mapping the future are serious endeavors that are not taken for granted, because every moment in the present is so delicate, so valuable, so precious. We don't have that sense of time here, we walk over, around, and through our history as though it never happened. So many of us take today for granted and assume the arrival of tomorrow without reflection and only a little worry about those things that matter the least. As we go about our daily lives, as we move through space and time ignoring the weight of our collective past and indifferent to the fragility of the present, we are putting off a task that only grows larger the longer it is ignored.

The Blood Knot is a journey through space and time, it began with our trip to Cape Town, South Africa. Right now I am not sure where it will lead or when it will end, but I look forward to the rest of the journey.

Prelude to "Tell the truth and shame the devil"

Robben Island is an amazing place. We went on a rainy cold day, traveling across choppy seas (about a four foot swell). You could see the island in the distance, and as we got closer I wondered what that ride must have been like for the heroes that made it, they were shackled below deck in darkness.

The first political prisoner in South Africa was a man named Robert Sobukwe. He spent all of his confinement alone, and he was considered such a threat that he was not allowed to speak to anyone, for years. He is the beginning of a long chain of heroic people who eventually brought down Apartheid.

Here are two quotes about Robben Island by two of the most famous men who were there:

"In the struggle Robben Island was known as the 'university.' Not because of what we learned from books, but because of what we learned from each other." - Nelson Mandela

"The most inhospitable outpost of Apartheid." - Oliver Tambo

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Click to view a larger map of Robben Island:

More pictures from Robben Island:

With Thulani, a former prisoner at Robben Island:

The Townships, Colored and Black

The Townships -- where do I start? They are unimaginable, unforgettable, seething, intense, hopeful, forlorn, needy, independent, Black and Colored, and bursting with possibility, depending on which one you visit.

We have spent the last two days, with a little help from my friend Songs Ngcongolo, visiting Black and Colored townships. Their names are: Langa, Guguletu, Khayeliysha, Athlone, Heidiveld, Manenberg, Philipi, and Belville South. Some are poor, some are middle class, some are a mix of both. They are creations of the Apartheid era, they are also places where people live and work and raise families and dream of the future, or can't see a future and just try to get to the next day.

In Langa, Songs takes us around and shows us various areas in the township. Langa is the oldest township in South Africa. The housing ranges from one room shacks, like the one described in our play, to two story brick homes in an area called "Beverly Hills." Incidentally Beverly Hills is literally across the road from an area filled with shacks where people have no plumbing. There are schools, small shops, churches, small eateries, and bars. Everywhere you see people going about their daily lives, going to work, kids in uniforms going to school, driving, walking, talking, laughing, seemingly unfazed by the circumstances that surround them. Unfazed but not unaware, everyone we met spoke of their desire for change. Either in their own lives, or more generally of change for South Africa and all her people. Be it social, political, economic, or educational, it was something that was on every one's mind. This ability to live and get to the next day in spite of what one faces in life is a big part of our play.



Songs introduced us to his friend Nkululeko, his name means freedom. He is a man in his forties who lives in the house he grew up in. It started as two rooms, a kitchen and a bedroom, and the family added to it. Nkululeko is a master drummer, he plays in a band named Amampondo that is hugely successful in South Africa. He has played with Hugh Masakela, Airto, Flora Purim, and other musicians of note yet he lives in the most humble of abodes next to a shebeen called Fanie's (under Apartheid a shebeen was an illegal bar). He and Songs introduced us to everyday life in the township of Langa.

Nkululeko and Songs:



We ate at a place called Tigers, a butcher/restaurant/bar. That's right, all those things under one roof. You go in the butchers and pick out your cuts of meat and some seasoning, you go into the next room to season your meat and it is cooked on a hardwood charcol fire, you go to the terrace to order what you want to drink, your meat is brought to you, and you eat. It was the best food we ate in South Africa.



Incredible poverty and deprivation across the road from Beverly Hills and the undeniable pulse of a vibrant everyday life, this was Langa.

The other Black townships we saw were Guguletu and the largest township in South Africa, Khayelitsha, a place that is home to 1.4 million people.

The Guguletu Seven -- A memorial to seven young black men who were killed at a crossroads in the township.



The next day we went to Colored townships. Their names are Athlone, Belville South, and Heideveld, and all three are working middle class communities. However, being classified Colored didn't insulate you from poverty and one room shacks, remember the circumstances of our characters in Blood Knot. We also saw Mannenberg and Phillipi, both Colored and both achingly poor. That was where we saw how Zach and Morrie (the brothers in our play) lived. Their lives under Apartheid are still being lived today after that horrible system has fallen.



In Belville South we met another of Songs' friends, Rodney Adonis. He was enormously helpful to us. He gave us insight into the life of a Colored man in the 1960s, the time of our play. We talked about the state of mind and psyche under Apartheid. How as second class citizens with a few more privileges, a mindset of fear could be created, whereas for a Black person who had no rights, not even citizenship and nothing to loose, there was often no fear. We discussed the different ways that horrid system impacted the lives of the people it oppressed, both Black and Colored. We saw so much, felt so much, learned so much.



It is very hard to put it all into words, so I'll stop trying. I'll try to put it all into my work on stage. It's a daunting task, but that makes it all the more exciting. Wednesday we went to Robben Island and we heard the most incredible story about that place from a former political prisoner. I will not try to speak for him, we recorded his words and we will put them in the blog, either as audio or transcribed text. I'm just going to call that post "Tell the truth and shame the devil."

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More pictures from the townships:

More help from my friends.......

S'bangizwe Yekiso is a friend of mine. He is an infinitely interesting young man, filled with energy and enthusiasm and a genuine love of people and life. He works for a wine company called Thokozani. He took us to the Langa Methodist Church yesterday as his guest. Now lets get two things clear right now. One, nobody who reads this can pronounce his name, and two, between me and Jack we figure Jesus was alive the last time we both were in church. I can help you with number one, everyone calls my friend Gege (pronounced Geygey, like heyhey). With number two, you'll have to go directly to Jesus for help.



The service at the Langa Methodist church was an amazing experience. We drive to Langa, a mostly Xhosa black township, and we find the church by following Gege's directions. We drive around a bit looking at Langa. We'll spend Monday and Tuesday there, so we go back to the church and park. Jack and I are obviously not from Langa, but people are warm and friendly, saying hello as they pass. There are a lot of young men and women gathering, the men have on blue blazers and the women have on blue skirts and berets. They are apparently the choir, because they gather and begin to warm up, singing the beginning of various songs. Gege arrives and greets us. At first he doesn't recognize me, the last time we were together I had a ponytail, but we connect and I introduce Jack and he takes us inside and gets us seated in the back and tells us he will see us at the end of the service. From the moment we sat down, there was the most amazing singing happening. The church was a long room with a raised pulpit at the front and row after row of simple wooden pews. They slowly filled up while the young people at the front continued to sing so beautifully in Xhosa. By 10:20 or so the church was packed. The youngest members were seated up on the dais just behind the minister and to his right, looking out at all of us and filling the entire room with their pulsing highly rhythmic and physical energy and their rich soprano voices.

Then the minister began to announce the scripture to be read in a mix of Xhosa and English, as Langa is mostly Xhosa, and solo singers would begin to sing after the readings. This is when we were just blown away. The entire congregation, hundreds of people, young and old would come in right on cue singing in harmonies and full voices, filling the air with the most incredible sound I have ever heard. It brought back memories of church services I attended as a child in Georgia with my relatives (back during the time of Christ), but the singing there did not top this. It transported you on waves of melody and took you out of yourself to another place here in Langa with people you didn't know, but with whom you suddenly felt part of. We were introduced as the Africans from America, and felt the warmth of the congregation's welcoming greeting. Jack leaned over to me and said, "now I'm African."

With that achieved, we sat through the rest of the service with all its great singing and the lighting of the AIDS candle and the stirring sermon: "don't run with the chickens and ducks, you are not one of them, you are an eagle, learn to fly, realize your potential, soar like an eagle!" We sat through all three hours and forty some minutes of it.

Then, back to the hotel and we meet Gege at the cigar bar across the street, there wasn't much open, and he helps us with all this language and pronunciation stuff (invaluable), then he's off to the rest of his day, leaving us to the rest of ours. A little help from my friend.......

We get by with a little help from my friends...

I made arrangements to meet Ivan and Fanny LeKay at the Clock Tower and from there we would all go to lunch. It's Saturday Sept. 1st and it is cold and rainy, but these are warm, generous people who have helped us enormously in our effort to learn the complexities of race and color in South Africa.

Jack and I get to the water front a little early. The Clock Tower is a well known local landmark on the Cape Town waterfront. It was once an industrial and commercial waterfront. Goods, including slaves from the Malay peninsula and Madagascar and central Africa came and went. There is an actual clock tower facing the water, now it is the hub of a lot of the tourist activity and a lot of commercial activity in general. Read that as SHOPPING, BIG TIME! Hotels, shops, restaurants, a trip to Robbin Island (we'll go Wednesday), water taxi tours, a little outdoor amphitheater. All kinds of street acts performing as you walk by. You name it, it is there. My friends arrive and we start walking across the waterfront to a large mall. We pass a lot of street performers, singers, dancers, a comedy act at the amphitheater, but one catches my eye and ear. He is a black African guy sitting against a wall playing a wooden flute and shaking a gourd. He is barefoot, and where he is it is particularly windy and cold. I notice him as we pass on the way to the mall. We get to the mall and it is large and bustling. We proceed to a very nice seafood place and we sit out in the mall so we can see the people pass as we eat.

Ivan and Fanny are wonderful people, they tell us about growing up colored in South Africa. Ivan tells a story about his parents, one dark and one very light. His mother has not seen her sister in years, after a lot of negotiation it was agreed they would meet at a hotel in Durban. Now Durban was a good distance from Ivan's rural home in the western Cape, but his dad agreed to take his mom to Durban. They drove to the hotel in Durban and he dropped his wife off and went away, he had to leave because it was a colored hotel and he was too dark.

Fanny has a similar story involving her mother and her mom's sister. They have not seen each other since their early adulthood. Fanny's aunt is about to marry a white man, she is light enough to pass for white, and has. After some very intense negotiation, it is decided they will meet at a colored hotel and the Aunt's husband to be will not attend. If he did there would be no wedding. They meet and just as in the case of Ivan's mom, the two sisters never meet again.

I hope I don't sound like a broken record, but race and color are the thousand pound gorilla in the room, and in the U.S.A. we act like he isn't there. We continue to talk and eat, I talk about Blood Knot, the plot and characters, I mention the locale of the play, the township of Korsten. I refer to it as black, Ivan says no, it's not black it's colored. I am momentarily stunned. I realize I am still viewing the play through the prism of my experience with race and color at home. They are very similar, but the details are very different. That is why Jack and I are here, to learn the details of the world of Blood Knot. That is why I am so indebted to my new friends in South Africa, who lived colored, who lived black, who lived through Apartheid and are willing to share that with us.

We finish eating and talking and we leave and start to go back towards the clock tower and Ivan and Fanny's car. Then Jack realizes that he has forgotten his jacket and starts back to the restaurant to retrieve it. Ivan and Fanny say their goodbyes and leave and I am alone on the waterfront. I am watching the people and the water, feeling the brisk wind and enjoying the smell of the sea, and then I hear it, the sound of a wooden flute and a gourd. I look towards the shrill melody and the rattling rhythm and there he is. The black African guy. Still sitting and playing in the cold. I see a young girl stop and give him some coins, but mostly people ignore him. He's not colorful or showy or friendly, or funny or charming. He looks poor and like he might smell a bit. Jack comes hustling back into my sight line and I hail him and we start back to where we can get a taxi. Jack is walking a few paces ahead of me, he is always a few paces ahead of me, and I notice the gourd and flute guy again. I am right in front of him, and just on impulse I stop and drop a few rand in his basket. We don't look at each other and I walk on, telling Jack to slow down. We hail a taxi and head back to the hotel.

Blood Knot, race and color, the U.S.A., South Africa, poverty, religion, sex, education, family, all that makes up life. As an old friend once said, "don't go, we have to figure this out."

The District Six Museum

Today we went to the District Six Museum and we met Noor, the founder of the museum. So what, or more appropriately where is District Six? District Six is now a large empty area on a hillside in Capetown, it was a thriving neighborhood. Noor is a South African man of Indian descent. He is sixty two years old, his story and the story of District Six are inextricably linked.

District Six was a place where all kinds of people lived. Muslim, Jew, Christian, Hindu, Colored, Black, but no one who was White. That was the problem. The area was a prime location, looking out over Cape Town towards the water. In the early Sixties the government sent out notices to the residents of District Six that they were living in violation of the law and that the district was to become an all white area, they were told to move, they had lost ownership of their property, and it would be bulldozed. Now the impact of that is a bit abstract, until you talk to someone who experienced it.

Noor was born in a house in District Six. This house was his family's home in South Africa since they had been here. His entire life was contained in this area. He stood across the street and watched as the bulldozer came and transformed his family's home into a pile of rubble. He wept as he watched all that his parents had worked a lifetime to build being destroyed. He spoke of a time when people of different religions all celebrated their friend's holidays, how they attended the various places of worship and prayed together out of mutual respect for the religious beliefs of their friends and neighbors. He told how families were broken up. A Colored man is married to a black woman, they have three children, the children are dark. The Colored father is moved to a Colored township, his Black wife and Black children are moved to a Black township, to visit them he is required by law to go to the police station and get a permit for each visit. This is the madness of Apartheid, this is the world of our play.

There is enormous irony here, today South Africa wants to be a kind of multicultural model and yet they had that model in the early sixties in District Six and they didn't value it, in fact, they destroyed it. The demolition of District Six is the backdrop of the world of The Blood Knot. The world of our play is a world in which color means everything. Where you can live, what you can do, who you can see, also how you are seen by the world. Black people were required by law to carry a "passbook," other people carried identification cards indicating their racial category, and this was required of all South Africans, but for black South Africans the circumstance was a little different. If you were black you had to have your passbook on your person at all times. If a policeman asked to see it and you didn't have it, you were arrested and fined, and if you couldn't pay the fine you were imprisoned until it was paid. Your skin color was the fence around your life, you couldn't go over it or under it, you had to live inside that fence.

Today District Six is an urban wasteland, no one lives there. Many want to see it established as a monument park, so the injustices of the past are never forgotten. Perhaps they will succeed, perhaps not.

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Pictures from the District Six Museum:

Day #2 - We meet Songs and talk to Ivan

The virgin blogger is online again. SAJ coming to you from Cape Town, South Africa. Today started at about 6:30 a.m. No matter how far I may travel, I am never far from A.C.T.'s conservatory and our beloved MFA students. I did some work on the upcoming second year production of The Roundhouse. Then I had breakfast and I had to change rooms because my old room was a wifi deadzone. No wifi hotspot, no blog, and we couldn't have that, so I moved all my stuff to another room and all is well. Last night I had to blog from the hotel lobby (oh my, oh my). I am willing to do a lot of things in public, but blogging is not one of them. Now I can blog in the privacy of my room.

I got on the phone and rang up (their term not mine) a number of contacts I made on a previous trip, among them a man named Songs Ngcongolo, a Xhosa gentleman with a vast knowledge of the history of The Struggle and of township life. He came and met with us and we arranged to spend two days with him in various townships. Songs lives in the township of Langa. I also spoke with another friend I made from a previous trip, Ivan Le Kay. Ivan is my age (don't ask) and under Apartheid he and his family were classified as Cape colored and his first language was Afrikaans. He also speaks English, of course, and he told me that he made a point of sending his children to English language schools because he viewed Afrikaans as the language of the oppressor. He now refers to himself as a Black man, something we have in common. Under the old system Songs was classified as Black, he and Ivan and I are all very similar in skin color. Ivan and I shared many stories about our family histories and we discovered many similarities around issues of race and especially skin color that we had in common. In short, darker was bad and lighter was good, and with this distinction came privilege. This was true in South Africa and the U.S.A. We agreed that to a certain extent this is still true.

Think about it and be honest, we respond to skin color, don't we? Forget about what we say publicly, you know in your heart of hearts that you respond to skin color in large and small ways. That idea lies at the very center of Blood Knot and I want to get inside it, eat, sleep, and breath it, so it guides me in my work on this show. I want to confront the truth of that, and take the audience with me eight times a week. I want you to hear the voice of Songs Ngcongolo, he is singing "the Click song." I hope I can download this for you.

The 1st day in Cape Town

Well this is it, we arrived at 5:00 a.m. this morning. This is the longest trip in the universe, we were absolutely a complete and total mess after 23 hours in the air. But miraculously we got the rental car and drove to the Tudor Hotel in downtown Cape Town. It's not bad and it is located in the heart of town. We walked around the area. This city is filled with people who speak the most amazing mix of dialects and languages, it dazzles the mind. Speaking of "the mind" my mind is fried, we have been up all day, so we're going to go eat and then I expect we both will call it a day. Until later.............