Tag: South Africa

Categories
Home

At Christmas, dreaming of fake Chinese food…

xmas_dayOn Christmas Eve in 1908, New York City Mayor George McClellan shuttered the city’s 550 movie houses, saying they had inadequate fire exits, the Times reminded readers recently. The theaters reopened a few days later.

I’m glad Mayor McClellan relented because seeing a movie on Christmas Day is one of my favorite traditions. As many of my tribesmen can tell you, the routine involves a late-afternoon movie – a 5:00 p.m. showtime feels ideal – followed by going out for Chinese food.

In Manhattan, Christmas morning may be the quietest day of the year. The hum that seems to run through the city the rest of the time ceases. It can be a great day to read, to volunteer or to walk.

In the afternoon, I would head to a theater filled with moviegoers who by then are dreaming of the wonton soup and hoisin sauce they will savor later at a restaurant packed with those of us for whom December 25 offers all the fun of a holiday without actually having to observe anything.

Hunan Park, a restaurant that used to be on Columbus Avenue between 71st and 72nd Streets but closed a few years ago, topped my list. I still can taste the restaurant’s jade chicken, which featured white meat flanked by green beans in a spicy sauce.

I can’t vouch for the food’s tie to Chinese cuisine, but my girlfriend, who’s half-Chinese, seems pretty sure the link was tenuous. I asked her how she knows Hunan Park wasn’t typical of regional Hunan cooking. “Because if you ate there, it wasn’t,” she replied.

Still, the food was terrific. So was the scene. On Christmas the place filled with Upper West Siders fresh from the AMC Loews Lincoln Square 13. The dining room’s decor looked to be from the 1980s. Signed headshots of Dan Rather and other celebrities adorned the walls near the register, which was bookended by bags of takeout. On cold days, the floor-to-ceiling windows that fronted Columbus Avenue fogged with steam from all the soup and dumplings.

I’m feeling nostalgic for Hunan Park here in South Africa, where a woman corrected me recently after I wished her happy holidays. “It’s ‘Happy Christmas’ here,” she said. “In America you soften it because you don’t want to offend anyone but here even the Muslims say ‘Happy Christmas’ and it’s fine.”

At first, I attributed her response to her being South African, until I read that two-thirds of Americans prefer to say “Merry Christmas” while 18 percent prefer “Happy Holidays,” according to a poll released Monday by Farleigh Dickenson University. Fifteen percent say they’re indifferent or would rather people not say anything. The greeting also varies by political party. Eighty-two percent of GOP’ers prefer saying “Merry Christmas” compared with 55 percent of Democrats, the survey found.

No war on Christmas here. In my reverie, I’m back at Hunan Park. If I were there I would hang my jacket on the back of my chair in the overcrowded room and look forward to being passed a pot of tea while I practically drool in anticipation of the fake Chinese food to come.

Categories
Favorite Places

Born to Run

cedaraI played Bruce Springsteen’s “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” on my iPod randomly one day while walking with our dogs, Tala and Juma, at a farm here in South Africa that we like to visit.

The song, which appears on the album “Born to Run” and tells the story of Springsteen’s E Street Band, resonated with me in a way it hadn’t previously. Maybe it’s the lyric about being all alone and on own’s own, which feels like an anthem to this stranger in a strange land, even if I’m hardly alone.

Or perhaps it’s the connection between this place and home. The green hills that roll to the Drakensberg here in Kwa-Zulu Natal and New York City, which I left, each have a scenic grandeur. As it happens, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band are slated to play their first shows in South Africa this January.

Or maybe it’s that listening to “Born to Run” makes sense at a farm where the dogs and I go to run. If anyone were born to run, it’s Tala and Juma.

The Zulu guys with whom we share the road and I exchange a thumbs-up when we pass one another. Everyone’s smiling.

Here’s the song:

Categories
Favorite Places

Clifton Beach No. 4

beachsceneAt Clifton Beach in Cape Town on Wednesday I watched as the last of about a dozen swimmers emerged from the blue-green water on a 78-degree afternoon. The group had been swimming freestyle, about 25 yards from shore, traversing the four beaches that link to one another in this strand that sits just north of Camps Bay. “Maybe only 10 or 12 days a year when the water’s this warm,” one of the swimmers told me as he shook water off him. “It’s like the south of France.”

By then it was early evening and the beach was dotted with clumps of teenagers and families on blankets. A circle of boys passed a rugby ball to one another. Parents held babies. An old man wearing a pea green polo shirt and yellow headphones used a detector to scavenge for whatever metal might be buried. Three Indian guys played beach cricket.

Behind the beach and across a strand of road loomed Lion’s Head, a mountain that rises nearly 2,200 feet with ribbons of houses chiseled across its lowest section. The mountain provided a background to the action on the beach, where Odo, a 20-something Zimbabwean who came to Cape Town at the age of eight, sold hats from a selection he carried under his arm.

Categories
Travel

Black Tonic

blacktonic20 milliliters espresso. Iced tonic water. Natural sweetener. Espressolab Microroasters. Cape Town.

Categories
Travel

Some sounds of South Africa…

I rode along this spring with traditional health practitioners from iTEACH, en route to an event to promote medical male circumcision here in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Their songs made the trip something special.

Categories
Life Travel

Thanksgiving in South Africa

tableThere’s a crack my tribesmen tell. It goes like this: two Jews, three opinions. That’s how Thanksgiving had started to feel by the time Saturday arrived.

That’s right: Saturday. Three of us had decided to host the holiday for a group of Americans and our South African guests, and for days we planned…and wrangled. I proposed we serve both turkey and lamb but my co-hosts vetoed the idea. One guest emailed that he planned to bring a Peking duck. “No,” we said. To brine or not to brine: that was another question. Thursday or Saturday? I’m still unclear why we waited. By the weekend the back-and-forth produced 59 email messages and left me wondering whether we could pull off the holiday.

Whatever doubts I had dissolved by Saturday. The day began sunny but by nightfall the rain arrived. No worries, we had pitched two tents, one to serve as an auxiliary kitchen and the other for the bar, which we adorned with strings of Christmas lights.

Krista grilled a turkey on the braai, the South African term for barbecue, one of two birds we prepared. Rachel prepared scalloped potatoes that were sliced razor thin and piled layers deep. Jordan made potato latkes – our dinner conincided with the fourth night of Hanukkah – fried in duck fat that we ate with a dollop of sour cream. Thobe baked jeque, Zulu steamed bread. We also had mashed potatoes, two types of stuffing, green beans, cranberry sauce, Waldorf salad, sourdough bread, cheese, wine, coffee, and, thanks to Kate and Amber, three pies: pumpkin, apple and pecan.

I served as greeter and bartender. The specialty cocktail of the night was Jack Daniels – in tribute to America – with dry lemon, in honor of our host country. The combo seemed to be a hit, judging by reactions.

Before dinner we went around the table and everyone said what they were thankful for. For our South African guests, the dinner was both their first Thanksgiving and their first Hanukkah. After dessert we lit the menorah. Everyone took a turn.

Categories
People Travel

Ubuntu

car_ditchThere’s an African ethic know as ubuntu, which holds that our common humanity derives from what we share. No person is an island.

“In our culture, there is no such thing as a solitary individual,” Archbishop Desmond Tutu has said, describing ubuntu. “A person is a person through other persons.”

I experienced ubuntu firsthand on Saturday, after our Toyota Yaris became stuck in a drainage ditch while my girlfriend and I were en route to the Drakensberg mountains that line the border between South Africa and Lesotho.

The mishap occurred as I reversed the Yaris on a narrow dirt road and failed to see the ditch in time. Luckily for us, the car lodged on the ditch’s rim, which held the vehicle in place. Otherwise the vehicle could have overturned with us in it.

As we stepped out of the car and contemplated calling a tow truck, we resigned ourselves to our plans for the sunny, 70-degree day being upended by the accident. Just then, a car arrived and three Zulu guys jumped out.

They didn’t ask whether we needed help.

Instead, they sized up the situation without our having to explain anything and then filed into the ditch with the goal of pushing the car up and over the edge.

About then a second car appeared and then a third, and out poured the passengers of both vehicles. In all, we had six men ready to lend their strength to the effort. An Indian man arrived in his pickup truck. The group hatched a plan that the truck would tow while the rest of us pushed.

In what seemed like five minutes, the car was back on the road. Though the men did not ask for anything in return for their aid, I offered them some bottles of water that we had in an ice chest in the trunk.

In that instant, nine people on a road in rural South Africa came together in a community.

Ubuntu.

Categories
People

Nelson Mandela’s long walk to freedom

purple mandelaI recently read “Long Walk to Freedom,” Nelson Mandela’s autobiography. Besides being an amazing tale of one of the world’s great leaders, Mandela’s account of the development of his political consciousness fascinated me.

Throughout, Mandela writes about lessons learned in the politics of the anti-apartheid movement. The story he tells is, of course, one of struggle and ultimately triumph, but it’s also a story about politics. While reading I bookmarked some of Mandela’s descriptions of life under apartheid, his childhood and his outlook.

Here’s Mandela, who practiced law in Johannesburg, describing life for black South Africans under apartheid:

Africans were desperate for legal help in government buildings: it was a crime to walk through a Whites Only door, a crime to ride a Whites Only bus, a crime to use a Whites Only drinking fountain, a crime to walk on a Whites Only beach, a crime to be on the streets past eleven, a crime not to have a pass book and a crime to have the wrong signature in that book, a crime to be unemployed and a crime to be employed in the wrong place, a crime to live in certain places and a crime to have no place to live.

Mandela spent 27 years in prison after being convicted on charges of sabotage and conspiring to overthrow the apartheid government. In the following passage he discusses his incarceration.

Prison and the authorities conspire to rob each man of his dignity. In and of itself, that assured I would survive, for any man or institution that tries to rob me of my dignity will lose because I will not part with it at any price or under any pressure.

Mandela goes on to discuss the hopefulness that enabled him to survive his incarceration.

I never seriously considered the possibility that I would not emerge from prison one day. I never thought that a life sentence truly meant life and that I would die behind bars. Perhaps I was denying this prospect because it was too unpleasant to contemplate. But I always knew that someday I would once again feel the grass under my feet and walk in the sunshine as a free man.

Mandela’s father died when Nelson was a boy. Jongintaba, a Xhosa chief whom Mandela’s father had befriended, offered to become Nelson’s guardian. Mandela was sent to live with Jongintaba’s family at the Great Place in Mqhekezweni, the provisional capital of Thembuland. Tribal meetings that Mandela attended at the Great Place provided him with lessons in leadership, including the following:

As a leader, I have always followed the principles I first saw demonstrated by the regent at the Great Place. I have always endeavored to listen to what each and every person in a discussion had to say before venturing my own opinion. Oftentimes, my own opinion will simply represent a consensus of what I heard in the discussion. I always remember the regent’s axiom: a leader, he said, is like a shepherd. He stays behind the flock, letting the most nimble go out ahead, whereupon the others follow, not realizing that all along they are being directed from behind.

In the book’s penultimate paragraph, Mandela writes of the challenge ahead for his nation.

When I walked out of prison, that was my mission, to liberate the oppressed and the oppressor both. Some say that has now been achieved. But I know that is not the case. The truth is that we are not yet free; we have merely achieved the freedom to be free, the right not to be oppressed. We have not taken the final step of our journey, but the first step on a longer and even more difficult road. For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others. The true test of our devotion to freedom is just beginning.

Categories
Travel

Identity

foreignerLast Monday, I stopped by a factory in Pietermaritzburg that sells gardening boots. Leanne, one of the nice people who work there, helped me to find a pair in my size.

“Where are you from,” she asked as we chatted.

“I’m from New York,” I answered. “How did you know I’m not from here?”

“It’s your accent,” said Leeann.

My accent. Yes.

Leeann’s question resonated with me because it reminded me of my being perceived by others in KwaZulu-Natal as a foreigner, which, of course, I am here.

As it happens, the Torah last week told a story about identity. In the story, God gives Abraham and Sarah new identities, as part of God’s promise to make Abraham the leader of a great nation. Abraham’s new name reflected his new status.

Identity is with us always. Shakespeare uses mistaken identity in such plays as Cymbeline, the Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night to create confusion and comic effect.

Around the Shabbat table on Friday, some friends and I discussed identity. What is our identity? Where does it come from?

“I was such a different person in high school,” said Kate, one of our hosts.

On Thursday, I visited a coffee bar in Durban. The manager, a Durbanite named Zane, asked me where I am from. “I’m from New York,” I said, enjoying answering the question for the second time in four days.

“Ah, yes, that’s it, I can tell by your accent,” Zane said.

For me this week, foreigner feels right.

Categories
Travel

The Mandela capture site

mandela sculpture at capture siteOn August 5, 1962, Nelson Mandela was driving to Johannesburg from Durban when he was stopped by the police in Howick, about 20 miles northwest of Pietermaritzburg.

For Mandela, who had gone underground rather than surrender to the apartheid government that had issued a warrant for his arrest, the encounter set in motion events that led to 27 years of imprisonment. Mandela’s companion that day was Cecil Williams, a theater director and political activist who had helped Mandela move through the country without detection.

“Suddenly, in front of us, the Ford was signaling us to stop. I knew in that instant that my life on the run was over; my seventeen months of “freedom” were about to end,” Mandela wrote in his autobiography. Here’s how Mandela describes the encounter:

When our car stopped, a tall slender man with a stern expression on his face came directly over to the window on the passenger side. He was unshaven and it appeared that he had not slept in quite a while. I immediately assumed he had been waiting for us for several days. In a calm voice, he introduced himself as Sergeant Vorster of the Pietermaritzburg police and produced an arrest warrant. He asked me to identify myself. I told him my name was David Motsamayi. He nodded, and then, in a very proper way, he asked me a few questions about where I had been and where I was going. I parried these questions without giving him much information. He seemed a bit irritated and then, he said, “Ag, you’re Nelson Mandela and this is Cecil Williams, and you are under arrest!”

On Saturday, I visited the Mandela capture site, which is marked by a sculpture that consists of 50 steel columns between 21 and 31 feet tall. When viewed at a distance of about 114 feet, the columns form a flat portrait of Mandela.

The sculpture, by the South African artist Marco Cianfanelli, was dedicated last year on the 50th anniversary of Mandela’s arrest.

Beside a plaque that marks the actual spot of the arrest, people have left candles, notes and other tokens of their affection along with wishes that Mandela, who turned 95 in July and who reportedly is recovering at home in Johannesburg from a lung infection, might regain his health.