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My place is my skin. The first layer of my landscape.
Some days in this pannekoek weather, my South African skin glows. Some days when the South Easter blows, this South African skin crawls. For this place. Who the fuck voted Hendrik Verwoerd as one of SA's Greatest South Africans? And Steve Hofmeyr? To be born in this place … does not always mean you belong to the same tribe of your skin.
I feel like a dictionary of South African English. I am a sugar-bird. I am a calabash. I am a Cape cottage sunbathing in Paternoster. I am an assegai flying through the Valley of a Thousand Hills. I am a Kruger rand sitting on Table Mountain. I am a Bitterkomix girl dancing in the Durban Art Gallery. I am a bindi on your forehead. I am a rooinek. I am half Ixopo, half Camps Bay. I am very Main Road Wynberg at month-end on a Saturday morning listening to isicathamiya singers foot-shuffling outside Checkers. I am Umtata. I am Port Shepstone. I am the Mlungu Nkonjane. The white swallow that migrates. The one who refuses to nest. The one of whom the amaZulu say "you are the tribe that see sunlight though your ears because you are white". We are a tribe who don't stamp our feet wildly at harvest time chanting "Azshee, Azshee" as we have no real claim to land. But that doesn't mean we have nothing to harvest. Even though it was me, many times removed, this same skin before, that fucked with this soil in the first place.
If Africa did not have a pointy tip, would the one who always named and shamed have stopped to set foot in our garden? They say when Jan van Riebeeck first set "his men to dig the garden he had come to make" in 1652 he started the "alteration of the South African scene, the South African soil, the South African plants. White settlement first at the Cape and then all over our whole country has profoundly altered the SA environment, notably the plants that originally made up this environment." This you can read in Veld Splendour, a botanical magazine, published in the '60s by The Department of Agriculture in a creepy little chapter called "White Man's Tracks". Now in 2004, dubbed the mother sister earth, Wangari Muta Maathaai is the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. So fuck you Van Riebeeck, as her Green Belt Movement has planted 30 million trees. And they're all indigenous.
There's a new harvest coming. And she's female for sure. Can a Renaissance be gender-driven? Is it green or black? If it's not a colour, is it a new language?
"For the European to learn an African language 'from the outside'," says SA's
Nobel Prize for Literature winner (2003), JM Coetzee, "will not
be enough. He must know the language 'from the inside' as well,
that is know it 'like a native', sharing the mode of consciousness
of the people born to it, and to that extent giving up his European
identity … Is there a language in which people of European identity,
or if not European identity then of a highly problematic South African-colonial
identity, can speak to Africa and be spoken to by Africa?" (White
Writing, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1988)
Coetzee speaks of the quest for an authentic language pursued within a framework in which language, consciousness, and landscape are interrelated. But what will we speak? What will we sing? How will we dance? Eleven tongues, eleven songs, eleven tribes, eleven dances. Will we reinvent one another through the language of art? African imagery swims down the Umzumkulu River and into our design, breathing freshness of spirit. We may wear a Bafana Bafana or Steve Biko T-shirt, but we know that even an aloe painted on a shwe-shwe skirt won't heal our skin. But it will remind us who we are.
So who am I? I am not Afrikaans. I am not Xhosa. I am not Zulu. My name does not mean "Freedom". My name is not Nkululeko. My name means "graceful lily". Aren't lilies indigenous? I, an arum? My real name is Susan-Jane Kathleen Livingstone-Blevins, which I guess means I am as English as Graham Greene - he who wrote: "'That nigger going down the street,' said Dr Hasselbacher standing in the Wonder Bar, 'he reminds me of you, Mr Wormold.'" Because we are all the same. Singamaphuthi ahlathi linye (We are blue bucks of one forest). I am as English as a passage out of Dorothy Wordsworth's journal: "I walked with Coleridge and William up the lane and by the Church, and then lingered with Coleridge in the garden." I am as English as Hampstead Heath, Damian Hirst and Florence Nightingale. God yes, David Livingstone too, he who had a slave called Susie.
But in this, my South African skin, I do not feel English at all. My mum, June Margaret Elizabeth Randall-Meech Ireland, she is English. She with her English accent. Me with my flat South African accent talking through my teeth: "Blek. Melk." She with her British passport. Me not wanting one. She who listens to what she still calls the English Radio. Me who listens to Lotus FM in the car. She with her staunch views on Winnie Mandela: "She spends millions on herself, sunglasses, facelifts, jewellery and you know she killed that 14-year-old boy Stompie? The first boy I kissed, his name was Stompie." She rages on while pouring another cup of English Breakfast tea: "She was the one who said, 'We've got matches.'" For Christmas I shall quietly slip Njabulo S Ndebele's The Cry of Winnie Mandela into her English stocking. Wish I could get it signed. If I was a good girl I'd get her what she wanted - the latest Ruth Rendell. Why do I so want her to be South African, like me?
And Craig Native, the SA fashion designer, the great big black rock star hope of sourcing a cultural identity through the cloth, is actually no Native at all. His real name is Craig Naidoo. I wear Craig Naidoo. Am I a Native? Is a Naidoo not an African? Designer of Kashmiri brides in Durban, Francois Vedemme, is not French at all. He is a Van der Merwe. Zinzi and Black Coffee are South African fashion labels - but with white designers. Whose heritage is fooling who? And as Africa was the beginning for all, exactly whose heritage is it anyway?
And what is this home? Is it this Cape Town wild city of steep mountains with avalanche mists and seas of melting ice? Is it this strange city where the two oceans meet, but the people are still divided? I live in this city where the noonday gun splices another day with a history of a continent that has endured Two Thousand Seasons of hell. I live in this city in our first decade of freedom. I was born in Tekweni (Durban) where you can smell the dhania as you land. Like Jozi, Durban embraces all that it means to be African. But in Cape Town, a place they like to call Cape of Good Hope, it's the shattered face of Humpty Dumpty: "Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the King's horses and all the King's men couldn't put Humpty Dumpty together again." They are trying to put District Six together again … they started with culture … a museum … but what of the rest of this city so fragmented? "Turning Africa around will not happen overnight" is the sound bite from Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo that is our modern-day rap song of the New Partnership for Africa's Development [Nepad].
Mapping my skin, or yours, will never be the culturally-specific desire of some alcohol or cigarette brand manager's proudly South African wet dream. Grid me not as I swig from a Black Label quart; as I sip from an Ngwenya glass of damn fine Merlot. I listen to Hindi rap and Afrikaans punk. I hail Valiant Swart as our Elvis, Brenda Fassie as our Madonna, and Zola, our King. And I truly dig the groove maskanda of Busi Mhlongo. She our Glam Urban Zulu from Tekweni, who wears Gucci sunglasses and has a facial once a week. She who arrives in Holland, is whisked away by limo with armfuls of yellow tulips, to dinner with the Prince, and then on to her sold-out concert. But oh heavy hour for her dire lack of well-paid celebratory gigs back home.
"See Africa through new eyes," they bray. What do I see? I see the architectural beauty of the braid, the bliss in simple design of the Orlando Pirates logo, that gentle curve in the design of a Zulu headrest. They've always been there. Now it's just slickly documented in a hip fanzine called Afro, sponsored not by our NAC (National Arts Council) but by the Swiss Arts Council. This new visual African design language is as ancient as our baobab trees and as cosmic as a Mazisi Kunene poem. Because, ultimately, South African design as our language is everywhere, from Zambuk to Lucky Star pilchard packaging, to our Lifebuoy soap.
Just as our African puppets, Mr and Mrs Angazi, carved from the wood of the mango tree, are jiving loose-limbed to the rhythms of a maskandi guitar strumming to their own poetic realism in the street, we too have African fonts. They ululate to a street barbershop aesthetic with even a Shoe Repair and Biltong font. This authentic and original collection of African iconography is fit for a king. They say King Goodwill will approve. Halala! Read all about it in i-jusi. Halala!
And does it help if I plant indigenous, and try speak indigenous? I feel so. I even gain comfort when I drink and eat indigenous, read indigenous and listen to indigenous. And it's not because I want some fucking indigenous edge. It is just living in this place that feeds my skin. This country of funerals. This nation of death. But we are strong and hardy like the oleander - we are the "Selon's roos" growing wild in the garden of our future graves. We are the people that write stories that are dark and violent. Like SA. A white trash babe from PE may be my half-baked hero. But she's my hero.
I respond to this place with its many skins, to write and create. If I wrote a play about the cultural identity of a dysfunctional white trash family set in the '80s in KwaZulu-Natal, would anyone sponsor me? If I wrote it as a novel, would anyone care to publish me? Every skin has a story. In SA, in 2004, our NAC won't even sponsor an award-winning play by a Muslim woman about our post-September 11, post-Enron world. Yet it's so politically poignant, so very now, and highly engaging. They tell her she can get funding if she includes other cultural or religious perspectives. Deal me Black as spades, if you please. What about the Muslim perspective? Aren't Muslims African? As artists and writers in SA we naively hoped an intellectual like our newish Arts and Culture minister, Pallo Jordan, would help clean up our cultural funding mess. And I thought our skins were no longer a domino game?
They say you can know a place by its voice, and its theatre. Then why do we need to Michael Jackson our souls? Why do we need Rocky Horror and Queen revivals? Why make black men do Jane Fonda star jumps to African drum beats in orange afros and cheap purple satin suits? To feed your cultural "bravo" well-manicured sheep bleating in Pashmina's and Pearls. Smack-me-up bitch for a dose of cross-cultural fornication. Bastardised musical theatre is the sickest form of colonial irrigation. He who creates feeding off our Africa to inject British opera with Africa's home-grown spunk assassinates any grappling sense of cultural identity. Why turn us into some karaoke or gospel-induced West End cartoon? Who wants to be bottle-fed on mopani worms singing Verdi in Xhosa?
Yet in 2004, in this place, some think they are "helping" Africa "find" its unique voice. We have a strong voice, thank you. We have many strong voices, siyabonga khakulu. Sibongile Khumalo, Rebecca Malope, Mazizi Kunene, Lesego Rampolokeng, Pieter Dirk-Uys, Madala Kunene, Brenda Fassie, André Brink, Skeleton, JM Coetzee, Antjie Krog, Max du Preez, Ingrid de Kok, Sandile Dikeni, Robin Rhode, Moshekwa Langa, Koos Kombuis, Lauretta Ngcobo, Senzeni Marasela, Berni Searle, Usha Seejarim, Mike van Graan, Athol Fugard, Sue Williamson, Jeremy Wafer, Thandiswa Mswai, Ronnie Govender, i-jusi, Fokofpolisiekar, Godessa, Moodphase5ive, Gloria Bosman …
And there's our President Thabo Mbeki insisting: "Define yourself." He who believes we shall "create" a "caring, people-centred African future and the African child will prosper".
Our land has many voices, but our base is as African as our baobab trees and it's in blinding technicolour like our Barberton daisies. Still, you can't help listening to Lesego ("a gun's cough is a man's laugh") Rampolokeng, the gloomy prophet of a hailstorm rapper's delight. Because, like a local Kalahari Surfer's song, "I am interested in the future ..." and I'm fucking concerned … "lest the future be an orphan".
Ten years is a decade, ten years is a freedom. But what's fresh about this harvest? The black man is a president, the black man regains. But what's an African renaissance? What's an African dream? Like a Public Enemy album, what is this: "Fear of a Black Planet''? Ten years is a decade. Ten years is a freedom. Ten years is a nothing, when you've lived 2000 seasons.
I want a rib for peace
a rib for freedom
a rib for good health
a rib for education
a rib please for some real art
and a cage for our plague
and four ribs for the orphans;
lest they start
swinging
face-blue dead
from our trees.
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Suzy Bell writes a weekly column for
the Tuesday Review supplement of The Cape Times,
is a former arts editor and prior arts critic for The
Mail & Guardian. She was the winner of this year’s
Stellenbosch Impress Creative Writing competition. Currently
doing her MA in Creative Writing at UCT with supervisor Andre
Brink, and is working on her first novel, Paradise Valley,
and a collection of short stories. She works as a creative
director specialising in arts and culture projects and established
the Red Eye art project at the Durban Art Gallery, a monthly
multi-media, cross-cultural arts event which just celebrated
its fifth birthday in 2004. 
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