hangin out at hope st.

dunno what he was trying to do here, but…

my brother was really sure that this was the best possible place in my apartment to sit and relax…

this is love, you see?

this is beautiful, you see?

while i was visiting friends and celebrating my birthday in budapest, libby was back in cape town, hosting her friends erin and amanda, beginning her semester of studies at UCT and contemplating the nature of love (in general, and specifically between us)…

this is love, you see?

and also this is beautiful, you see?

Mama Jean: Morning Glory Comes

Life At Home: At War With Bed-Bugs

Apparently from the Student Society for Law and Social Justice conference, we brought home with us some bed bugs. The little bastards annoyed us to no end (despite multiple attempts at “deep-cleaning” everything), till we decided to fumigate the whole place, which was a major ordeal, but worth it.

Here I am with my fuck-you-bed-bugs face:

Life at home: Friends and Paintings

Starting in August, my friend Paul started moving out. There were some good things about living with him, and being his friend. One of my favorite things about having him around were the times when we made big feasts together. Paul especially loved meals where he would make a big pot of Pap, which ate with chicken, and my friends and I would eat the Pap with some vegetable dish that I would make.

My friend Bernard, a french chef in his 70s, used to run a wonderful little cafe near my house, but it became too much work and so he shut it down. Now we just meet to share a meal, or a salad, or a walk, and to talk a bit. He is a good man, interested in living a simple, anti-racist life, full of good vegetarian food.

Young, from Munich, contacted me on couchsurfing and spent the night. A radical philosopher, he was one of my favorite guests from couchsurfing. And, he help put up this painting I bought, which depicts a moment during the may anti-immigrant violence, when a group of refugees were sitting on the ground, waiting for the authorities to take them to a safer location.

Libby loves to paint her face, and loves it if her face painting skills can be used on others. I think she did a great job on this sun:

Life at home: Gardening

Libby’s arrival brought a new level of daring to the balcony gardening project. We bought a few new potted plants (a flower called a Red Devil, Oregano and Lavender) and started planting more from seeds (Morning Glories, greens, and we attempted peppers and tomatoes, but haven’t succeeded yet).

This is Not A Hero!

There has been a “rash” of vandalism in Cape Town lately, declaring that certain colonial European/settler leaders (all of whom are still memorialized by large statues, nearly 20 years after “democracy” has taken root in South Africa) are not heroes. One would think that such a statement is unnecessary given the three decades of warfare here to end white minority rule. But somehow it still needs to be said that white people that aspire to dominate this nation are not now, and should never have been, considered heroes. With the rate at which the vandalism is cleaned up, one would get the impression that the Black government of “liberation” is somehow opposed to desecrating the memory of men that once proclaimed that Africans are worse than dogs, fit only to be enslaved, degraded and robbed from in every which way. I, for one, hope that this “rash” of vandalism continues, and even gains popularity…

Walking down the street one day after picking up my laundry, i found that Louis Botha, the first Prime minister of the Union of South Africa, a fierce fighter in the Boer War on the side of the Boers, and a strong advocate (even going to the extent of suppressing an Afrikaner rebellion against such a decision) for the colonization of “South-West Africa” (now Namibia) had been vandalized. I arrived only at the point when the dirty deed was being cleaned up by the workers of the city…

I was able to capture more clearly the desecration of Jan Henrik Hofmeyr. As Hofmeyr is dedicated a whole square, near my house, and I didn’t know who he was, I had to look up information about him. Turns out he was a prominent Cape Dutch (now Afrikaans) Politician, a leader in a brotherhood of Afrikaners, who eventually made a formal alliance with our man Cecil Rhodes. Despite the fact that others in his brotherhood refused to work with him because they were disgusted by the imperialistic attitude of Cecil Rhodes (see below), Hofmeyr persisted in his attitude of “reconciliation” towards the British, and traveled to Europe, on behalf of the Cape Dutch community, to advocate for the Act of Union, just before his death in 1909. Strike another one up for the alliance of all white people against all others!

(interestingly, Hofmeyr’s son, who had exactly the same name, was marginalised within the Afrikaans community for advocating, even if mildly, for nonracialism…)

Someone also attacked good ole’ Cecil Rhodes’ statue in the Company Gardens. To remember what a totally indefensible asshole Rhodes was, one needs only to remember some of his quotes:

Exhibit A:

“We must find new lands from which we can easily obtain raw materials and at the same time exploit the cheap slave labor that is available from the natives of the colonies. The colonies would also provide a dumping ground for the surplus goods produced in our factories.”

Exhibit B:

“Remember that you are an Englishman, and have consequently won first prize in the lottery of life”

Should I go on? Alright, one more should suffice.

Exhibit C:

“I contend that we are the first race in the world,
and that the more of the world we inhabit
the better it is for the human race”

Alternative Sightseeing

i bought a fancy map of cape town so that i can begin, in the style of the my good friend lajos, some alternative sightseeing of the city. i started with anne, moving from district six (the sight of the largest forced removals in cape town, most notably when the area was declared to be a ‘whites only’ neighborhood in 1966 and 60,000+ people were forced out, and the buildings were bulldozed. no whites or buildings replaced the old residents during apartheid and very little re-development has been done since) to ndabeni (the place where 20,000 africans were forced to move out of district six at the beginning of the 20th century, which is now just an industrial area), then to pinelands (the intentionally designed suburbs built for whites only in the 20’s, which meant that the people of ndabeni had to be forced out, again, to langa).

here’s some photos from the district six section…

between my house and district six there’s this amazing filth pit:

but also some beautiful wall art:

district six:

another piece of great wall art:

trafalgar park, on the border of district six and woodstock is quite a nice space to be in:

Totally Not the Roof

Anne, a couchsurfer that stayed with me for a few days, decided to help me figure out how to climb up onto the roof of my apartment building. These videos document our successes at this task. In classical NGO format, I present here maximum documentation of doing nothing at all…

eurafrique revisited #7: the new sitting area

on libby’s last day in town, she gathered the materials to make a nice sitting area in the corner of my apartment that had been ‘dead’ for months:

since she left, the chairman helped me to make it even nicer: