In the townships-walking with the hag Pt. 1

African Gospel Church, Langa

Crone: Two things, my lord, must thee know of the Wisewoman. First, she is … a woman! …and second, she is …
Edmund: Wise?
Crone: You do know her then?
Edmund: No, just a wild stab in the dark which is incidentally what you’ll be getting if you don’t start being a bit more helpful. Do you know where she lives?
Crone: Of course.

-Blackadder

In ancient lore it is said the Goddess has 3 faces. The first is that of the Mother, who nurtures and protects, who lovingly raises her children and cares for them. The second face is that of the Maiden, the lover, the partner and companion. And the third face is that of the Crone, the hag, the wise woman who shows things as they are, who is beyond Illusion, who knows who she is and offers the plain, unvarnished truth.

Africa can be all of those and sometimes at the same time. In the past, when I first came, and fell in love with her, she showed me her pretty side, her wedding dress, her finery:  the extraordinary orange Namaqualand daisies which spread for miles in the spring, punctuated by the purple, blues and reds of the vygies, the small succulent plants which clung to the landscape; the warm orange of evening running through her hair, as the sun sank into the grasses of the veldt and drew glowing outlines of the wild animals grazing there. It was so serene, so dreamily beautiful that I fell madly in love, photographed greedily… and vowed to return.

Then last year, on my return, the Maiden had disappeared and the Matriarch appeared. I came to see her as the mother of our species, how the land nurtured and fed to humans living upon it. My photographs focused on the land and my horizons began to brush the top of the picture frame. The silence of the Tankwa Karoo enabled and allowed me to experience her as Gaia, as the Mother. In the quiet of my own night I was able to draw near and see this aspect of her revealed; the crops of the Swartland, the wind combing the crops in the Overberg and the visceral experience of the Seweweekspoort. Birth, Death and Life, plainly revealed, should I care to look. And I did.

But, because I was both entranced by her beauty and in need of self-nurture, I was not ready for the Crone, the third face of the Goddess. It was not yet time. But inwardly I was happy to acknowledge her beauty, and give thanks for the way she fed me. I was not, however, ready to see her Wisewoman side, to see the way things really were. After all, when we first fall in love, we want to keep our illusions as long as possible. That is what True Love is all about, if popular songs are to be believed.

But my photographic preparations to come this time were somehow dispirited. I was somehow over the wildflowers; I was happy to look at giraffes articulating themselves clearly and slowly across the veldt, but I had no wish to lug an enormous lens half-way around the world to capture it for my own consumption. Much easier to buy a book, where an expert had done all the work for me, had prepared a consummate aide-memoire which would allow me to cruise the backroads of my memory. And use the baggage allowance for something else.

I was looking forward to reacquainting myself with the South African landscape, but after the huge journeys of last year, I was not sure what I wanted to see. It was as if, having seen the vast wonder of the South African landscape, I was now rather satiated. That photographer-as-consumer thing again…

But somewhere, somehow, in the depths of my subconscious, I made a wish, perhaps a little less carefully than I might have done. Having seen the Maiden and the Matriarch, there remained only the Hag, the Wisewoman. And I wished.   But I did so unconsciously, with the result that when she appeared, the Hag took me by surprise.

Fast forward.

A township tour had been organised for me. After days of hearing how Cape Town is the most beautiful city on the planet (I am half in agreement at this point, but Auckland still has my primary vote), I was about to venture into its other side, to see the part the black ANC government is trying to conceal from visitors to the FIFA World Cup beginning in a few weeks. I knew it was to be an organised tour, but I figured that I could see beyond the plastic/safe which would be presented to me, would have the opportunity to look a little deeper.

You see, in the four years I have been coming to South Africa, a different ethos has emerged. While it is perhaps not as unsafe here in Cape Town as it once was ( or so it appears to me, but that may be familiarity breeding lack of caution), there are places I have been warned not to go, especially being a)white b) obviously a tourist and c) carrying expensive cameras. So I have stayed away from the townships, from the shantytowns and the shacks, having been warned that should I venture into some of them, I might well expect to disappear without trace.

But this trip offered me the opportunity to look a little deeper, in an environment which would have degree of safety about it.

Neeria, my guide, quickly came to realise I was the Tourist from Hell, one of those obnoxious individuals who are not interested in being tamely trotted around the traps and buying souvenirs from all the artists desperate to make a living; no, I kept wandering away from the accepted routes , looking around corners, venturing deeper into the projects than I should have done, all the while with Neeria running after me, adjusting the programme to meet the selfish demands of my insatiable curiosity. Finally we established a working relationship. Our tour van would park somewhere along the route and we would walk and talk until we caught up with it again, while I performed an erratic shuffle down the streets, sniffing here, photographing there… Because Neeria was so good at what she did, she began to see what interested me, and constantly adjusted the tour to enable me to make more and more photographs.

And so we began with Langa, possibly the oldest of the townships, then worked our way through Gugulethu, then Nyanga, until finally we found ourselves in Khayalitsha, the biggest and most sprawling of them. Each had its own vibe, its own sense of place; each seemed to demand a different response. Nyanga overwhelmed, with its flies, smoke- blackened shacks  and  chaotic energy; it was an assault on the senses. Gugulethu seemed somehow on the up, entrepreneurial., and, while Khayalitsha was accepting in the daylight, the message was clear: enter at your own peril after dark.

However it was the overwhelming sense of ennui in Langa, of a performance played once too often which forced my hand/vision. I would walk down streets which had been built on the ephemeral, on a too-translucent hope and enthusiasm, but which were oft en unfinished, ideas which had been abandoned. It was as if any idea to lift the human condition from the morass of hopelessness was eventually overcome at some point and sank back into a torpid exhaustion, into a hopeless lethargy. The dullness of the colours only seemed to sum it up.  The bright spots, the bright points of energy in this greyness were the people themselves.

We met a woman in the RDP (Reconstruction and Development Program)  area, where those luckily enough to live in the spartan cinderblock houses were making moves forward. She and her husband had opened a small B&B where guests could stay. The large plasma in her tiny lounge told of her wealth and prosperity. She and her husband had done the alterations themselves (no building permits here..)

But it was Neeria herself, who had grown up in Crossroads and Nyanga who made the difference. A township girl herself, she and her mother, Nthuseng, had made the crossing, had found a way out. I don’t want to live like them, she told me. I want to own my own business, to employ people, she said. And I have to work for that. So I stayed at school and I studied and I studied. Every chance I could get. It was the only way to get out of here.

But she was an exception. The broken windows, the security fences and barbed wire, the dust and dirt and rubbish told a different story.

As we walked, I asked her about welfare, which Kiwis take for granted. There really isn’t any, she replied. There is a benefit for unmarried mothers provided by the government. And a lot of young mothers get pregnant quite deliberately to get some income, to survive..

We talked of the HIV/Aids epidemic, of the millions  of people infected. I had heard that in parts of South Africa, nearly 45% of all pregnant mothers presenting at ante-natal clinics were HIV positive. She confirmed this.

Then, somewhere out on the edge of Langa, out where modern homes had been built to house the shantytown inhabitants, I saw it.

The African Gospel Church.

Out on the margin of a road, someone had attempted to sing the Gospel of Hope again. The church was anything but resplendent, with no spires and vaulted ceilings to inspire terror in the hearts of the peasantry and encourage the loosening of their purse strings. It was a simple, corrugated iron structure, without foundations, roughly situated on the sandy soil. There was a wrought-iron security gate across the door (even churches were not sacrosanct here), and some faded and rotting net curtains over the window. Overhead, lines of high tension wires threaded the air and, background left, I could make out the cooling towers from a now-defunct and abandoned power station where, Neeria told me, young Xhosa males underwent their initiation rites, and this further heightened my impression that someone had pushed the Pause Button on Progress. Or perhaps just ripped  away the Shawls of Illusion. The Truth was not unvarnished. Nobody  around here had money to buy varnish anyway…

It wasn’t much of a church, really. If it was still in operation. ..It was perched out on the edge, remote and somehow ignored. But it was there.

For a time I looked at it, in wonderment. Then a subversive thought insinuated itself…

Perhaps the Son of a Carpenter, were he here 2000 years later, would be more at home in this shack, spreading his gospel, than in the lofty vaulted spires of some great cathedral, surrounded by the purple and red opulence of cardinal investments, where the discomfort he would bring would be massive.

Here, down in the  townships, where Hope seemed to have shrugged its shoulders, raised its hands in hopelessness and walked away, a small church, whose building costs were maybe a few hundred rand , some elbow grease and a lot of determination, had found a footing in the corners of the project.

And somehow, I sensed the Crone in the background.

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Published on Wednesday, May 5th, 2010, under The making of an image, Thinking about Photography and Art