Bradley checked his watch and said we must’ve missed the noon canon, which is a canon that gets shot off at 12:00 and used to be a way to set your clock or watch but now is traditional and tends to frighten visitors and children.
The Keiskamma altar is in the style of the Issenheim altarpiece, which was made in France in the 1500s. It was made at a monastery that was treating people with ergotism. Ergotism in those days came from eating bad bread, with a fungus in it. Symptoms of the disease are divided into the convulsive and the gangrenous.
The Keiskamma piece was made mostly by women in Hamburg, which is a South African village in the Eastern Cape. The village is poor and a good number of people there have or have died of HIV/AIDS.
A girl from the village was working at the museum as a guide for the altarpiece. She told us all about it and with Bradley on one side and her on the other opened the heavy wide panels and showed all the scenes of the altar. She said all the books about the altarpiece were sold out but this video playing on the small television set on the pedestal to her left explained how it was made and was (the DVD) available for purchase. She said the altar’s been touring around the world but is almost done now, but that it’s too big to be put in the church in Hamburg.
We walked into the slavery museum but there was a rather unreasonable and ocularly-fatiguing amount of text on the walls and we got tired of reading and walked back outside into the sunshine.
We walked down Government Avenue, a leafy sidewalk away from traffic that goes past the national library and parliament and one of the president’s houses. Bradley and I talked about President JZ. We agreed that while he may well be a convicted rapist and doesn't know much about AIDS, he at least doesn’t disdain and talk above the poor people who’ve elected him – unlike his predecessor.
A flock of schoolchildren came at us. School’d gotten out. They were wearing baby blue blazers with some complex school crest over the breast and baby blue vests and ties. The boys were wearing wool slacks and the girls skirts. Most of the kids were coloured or black.
We waded through the children. I asked Bradley what language they were speaking. …English, he said.
We passed the Company’s Gardens, which was made by the VOC to grow food for the passing ships. It’s a public park now that’s lush and quiet and has a lot of tourists and homeless people sitting and hanging out and walking around inside it.
We got to the end of the path, back to a busy street.
I asked if we could get some coffee.
We walked down the street to the original Vida e Caffe, which is a chain all over the country now. It’s a simple chic café, with a big red awning out front. The design of the signs and menu have a like “Keep Calm and Carry On” British royalty PSA aesthetic. The logo’s a shield with a cross inside and a crown on top.
It’s near the art school of the University of Cape Town and near a lot of design and media studios. There was one kid sitting at a table inside with a greasy pompadour and a checker vest. On the wall was a big slab of cork with the Vida e Caffe escutcheon carved in bas-relief. There were designer t-shirts and bags for sale in the back near the bathroom. It was standard hipster fare: faded bright colors, precocious child-type illustrations.
Bradley and I got cappuccinos at a table out front. I faced the street and could see Table Mountain. The clouds had cleared and it was blue and clear and warm like a fleece blanket.
The coffee was served in a white ceramic cup that had the red emblem stamped onto it. It came on a white saucer with a tiny spoon and a square of Lindt dark chocolate.
There were some kids next to us at a table looking at fashion sketches and thumbnail photos in an album. The girl with the book had horn-rimmed Ray-Bans up on her curly hair. She was wearing a dark purple plaid shirt and black short shorts.
Bradley and I talked about what he studied and how he ended up in South Africa and how he did his PhD in Cape Town. The traffic was noisy. We had to speak up.
We sat in the shade and lounged and I looked at this enormous stone mountain glowing in the sun and thought how tiny Mount Royal in Montreal looks compared to this thing.
We walked back to Gov’t Ave. and went to the National Gallery. There were three shows on. The first in the front hall was a solo show on Alexis Preller, who was a 20th century white South African painter. His stuff is a cross between like Diego Rivera and Juan Miró and Thomas Hart Benton, but based on a lot of old African culture. Most of his paintings are portraits of objects that look wood-carved, with a lot of arcs of color floating around.
The next show was a photo exhibit on the four South African Nobel Peace Prize winners: Albert Luthuli, Desmond Tutu, FW de Klerk and Nelson Mandela. There were paintings and sculptures and photography by recent South African artists, too.
There was Mashego Segogela’s little wood sculpture-tableau “Satan’s Fresh Meat Market” – which has got black demons eating various human body parts and an angel in white filming things with a camera and a green shack with more limbs dangling as if to dry and cure and another demon working inside.
There were sculptures by Wille Bester like “For Those Left Behind”, which is a sculpture of a fat white police officer at a machine gun with a pit bull behind him, its mouth in a harness. They’re on top of a wheeled pedestal. The whole thing is made of old metal machine parts, soldered together.
The last show was called Dada South? and had some recent SA art along with the best European Dada stuff – like a sculpture of a Prussian officer with a head like a pig’s, dangling from the ceiling. They had some of John Heartfield’s photomontages for AIZ magazine that he made in the 1930s in Germany. They had the one called “Hurray, the butter is gone!” that has a German family sitting around their kitchen table all happily eating bolts and bullets and bike parts. There’s a portrait of Hitler in the background and the kitchen wallpaper has Swastikas on it.
The museum was closing at five. Bradley and I left and walked out to the gardens in front. The Southeaster wind was blowing but the afternoon was clear and bright.
A little kid ran past us. He’d dropped his green plastic lunch box and it was getting blown down the path just out of his reach. He kept running after it. It got blown underneath the fence around a statue. He squatted down and tried to reach for it but couldn’t. Bradley and I laughed and continued walking.
There was a hill straight ahead of us, in the distance, about a third as high as Table Mountain. I asked what it was.
It was Signal Hill, Bradley said. You can drive or hike up there and watch the sunset.
We drove up and walked around. You could see the new soccer/World Cup stadium near the ocean. There was a red ship in the harbor that goes and back forth to Antarctica. Another ship had printed on its side “PEACE BOAT”, and is apparently a floating NGO. Bradley said the Semester-at-Sea ship stops here too. One day he was near the waterfront and felt there were just way too many American girls everywhere so he looked near the docks and saw their large and entitled S-a-S ocean liner.
I asked him what he thought of the movie “Blood Diamond”. He said it was all filmed in South Africa, actually, even though most of it supposedly takes place in Sierra Leone. For the city scenes they just went to the parts of SA that look a little more run-down and black and typically “African”. The scene with Jennifer Connelly as she gets a cell phone call from a mortally-wounded-but-spiritually-redeemed Leonardo DiCaprio was shot at the V&A Waterfront, which was where Bradley and I’d be headed for dinner and a movie.
There was a partridge and her cheepers walking on the hill near us. I asked Bradley if he remembered how to say “happily ever after” in Spanish.
We drove back down and passed through Bo-Kaap, which is a Muslim neighborhood at the base of Signal Hill known for pastel-colored houses and hilly streets. On the radio there was speculation that Tiger Woods was in Cape Town for sex addict outpatient therapy.
We parked and went to the V&A Waterfront. It’s a luxury mall/hotel/office/apartment complex. Dubai World bought it a couple years ago for a billion dollars. Dubai World is about $60 billion in debt, these days.
We walked up to Primi Piatti, an Italian restaurant chain that, so it says of itself, “embraces creative exchanges and Urban Energy”.
We sat at a table that was outside the restaurant, as it were al fresco, but still inside the mall.
A waiter came over and took our order for some Sauvignon Blanc and a pizza with chicken and broccoli and sun-dried tomatoes. Another waiter came over and asked if we were being served. Their uniforms were day-glo orange jump suits.
We got our bottle of wine in a day-glo orange plastic pail filled with ice. A third waiter came over to see if everything was OK. The second waiter brought the pizza. Later the first waiter started clapping and bobbing his head and dancing around slightly. We were there early and the other tables were empty.
Some of Bradley’s students came up to us. They’d been at the mall shopping for the J&B Met, which is a big annual horse race that’s also kind of an informal fashion show where you’re supposed to dress either expensively or cleverly to the theme, which this year was In Full Colour. The Met is, so it says of itself, “A spectacle of glossy vibrancy and intense exhilaration enveloped in a cauldron of sensual excess that sets the pulse racing.”
The girls said they were having a hard time finding dresses. There was a compromise-suggestion of colorful scarf-wearing.
Our table was near one end of the mall and its big bay windows. You could see Robben Island, the old prison colony, in the distance, from where we sat on day-glo orange cushions, sipping our Sauvignon Blanc.
We finished and walked to the movie theater and met all the study abroad kids. We saw “Skin” a new feature-length South African film about a lady named Sandra Laing, who was born to white parents but had the darker skin of a coloured person. She grew up during apartheid and suffered all sorts of absurd racist things. In one scene her father – played by "Jurassic Park"’s Sam Neill – returns home after trying to get his daughter re-classified as white and sees her by the banks of a stream and stops on the other side of the stream and shouts, in close-up, “You’re white again!”
It was unclear just why the mother of the family was giving birth to coloured-looking children. The film made it seem like that it’s a possible genetic fluke, as if the recessive genes of an ancestor can just pop up from generation-to-generation. It really seemed like the mother was just having an affair with a coloured person but never got found out nor brought herself to admit it.
The movie got out and some of the undergrads wandered off to buy things and we had to wait for them to be herded again. A van came and picked us up and brought us back to Stellenbosch.
Joe had come and said he’d interviewed Carl Lewis that afternoon on his radio show.
We got back to Stellenbosch and the undergrads got dropped off at their respective dorms and were asking each other if they were gonna go out or what they were gonna do Friday and responding that no they had a big day and had a lot of laundry and some reading to do etc.
I got back to my hostel and shut the windows so the mosquitoes wouldn’t get in. I went to bed.
