Spoonful

Sitting at a café in Cape Town gazing up at Table Mountain. Getting nostalgic for South Africa. On Saturday, in two days, I fly to Jo ’burg and London, ending my sojourn in southern Africa.

All the customers and the seeming owner of the café are white. The waiter and cook are black. A black man stands outside the café walking around selling brooms, mops and spoons. Another black man wears a yellow vest, hoping for tips from watching people’s cars while they shop. A white woman drives by in a bakkie with two black man in back. Laborers she hired?

I visited St. Cyprian’s School today. It’s in the central city bowl, in the ‘up market’ neighborhood on the slopes of Table Mountain, and so I walked there from my hotel. Hiking there seemed the way to go in part because I wasn’t sure I could get an Uber during rush hour. Almost all South African bus drivers are on strike nationwide. On the hike to school I passed two almost empty water reservoirs.

My friend, Dave Carr, gave me a tour of the campus. In the art building, there is a large drawing by the student that uses the images from the Sistine Chapel to comment on Trump’s immigration policies. St. Cyprians is located on what was an once a wheat farm. The school’s administration works out of the old manor house. The owner’s family lived on the first and second floor and the slaves lived in the basement.

I met with the students on the school’s leadership team for Round Square, an international network of schools. Dave Carr, the Round Square coordinator, does a great job developing student leaders. It was fun to be interacting with a smart passionate group of young people.

I asked the girls to introduce themselves and tell me their favorite Round Square activity or what they most appreciated about Round Square.  Most of the girls had been on multiple international adventures with Round Square. The one black girl in the group was among the last students to talk. She spoke articulately about what she liked about Round Square; however, alone among the group, she hasn’t been on an international trip.

The English class I sat in on was reading Americnah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The students read her novel Half of a Yellow Sun last year and some of them even read her book Purple Hibiscus for another class. One of the students criticized Americanah for being too oriented to Western readers as opposed to African readers.

I also sat in a history class. The classroom walls were covered with posters and photographs and quotes. Many of the people and images were from the United States: Maya Angelou, Diana Nash, Fannie Lou Hamer, Martin Luther King, “We Can Do It.” The person who appeared most frequently was Angela Davis. I told the teacher that I had organized a Round Square conference a few years ago and we had Angela Davis as a keynote speaker. She swooned with envy.

The class was about the French Revolution. The repeal of the Edict of Nantes sent 400,000 French Protestants (the Huguenots) out of France.  Some of them came to South Africa and founded Franschhoek (‘French corner’), the place I was the last few days, and the first South African wineries. At the time of the revolution, over half the French government’s budget was going to debt service for wars. The most recent war that the French peasants and merchants were paying for—the Catholic Church and nobles being untaxed–was France’s involvement in the ‘American war of independence.’

Dave and I walked to a nearby restaurant for lunch. To get there we had to cross a stream coming down off Table Mountain. It had running water in it from yesterday’s showers. Dave couldn’t remember the last time he had seen water flowing in this creek.

As the clock turns past three, traffic outside the café picks up, both in the number of cars and the number of pedestrians. The pedestrians are almost all black people walking downhill, presumably heading home after a day working at the homes of well-to-do families living on the slopes of Table Mountain.

The man with the mops and brooms stands by the side of the road, hoping for a sale. I can’t carry a broom to the UK, Jordan and back to California. I do think I can squeeze a wooden spoon into my luggage, so I’m off to buy one.