Posted by Czerina Patel:
I’m sitting in a suburb of Cape Town with Luvo (15), Odwa (15), Bongo (18) and Zikhona (14) who are part of the Apartheid Memory Project. It’s nearly December and they’re all getting ready for school holiday trips to the Eastern Cape – a place which they all call “home”.
Odwa says the E. Cape is home because it’s where he was born. Luvo says it’s home because he lived there when he was little. Zikhona says it’s the home of her parents, and where some of her ancestors are from. Dan says that the Eastern Cape is “where we come from – the roots of our people “… and Cape Town, where they all live now, Dan calls ‘”home away from home” – the place where people came to work.’
Here, some of the AMP participants are writing about the Eastern Cape, and about the ceremonies and traditions (such as those around the passage into manhood when a boy “goes to the bush” to get circumcised) that are part of their experience of this place.
November 17, 2007 at 12:17 pm |
I like to go to Eastern Cape during December holidays when we are having ceremonies and rituals. Every year we take a bus there as a family – When we arrive there we sleep for a couple of hours because of the long tiring bus trip.Then on the next day we start working – taking the sheep and cows to graze on the fields.
What I really enjoy there is when there is a ceremony (like the ceremony we have at home when the boys have gone to the bush to become men): We help out when the older men are slaughtering cows by holding the legs, and sometimes fetching new sheep when we are finished slaughtering one of the sheep, while the women are cooking and baking for all the expected guests. When all of that is done, all the people come together and eat meat and drink the African beer and other drinks. After a few weeks, the boys come back from the bush, and the older people have slaughtered more sheep and prepared food to welcome them back. The young men who have just come back from the bush are put in a stable made of wood. Then the adults talk to the men and tell them the ways of life, how to become a real man, not to force themselves on women, and that kind of stuff.
After all of that is done, we as the young boys really enjoy ourselves. First of all in the morning we take the cows and sheep to graze on the fields and after that we have fun or even go take a swim in the river and maybe after a week, we prepare to go home – to Cape Town.
November 17, 2007 at 1:01 pm |
EASTERN CAPE – ” the land of our ancestors” – I don’t go there as much as most people because my family is busy here in Cape Town trying to make money by selling alcohol in our small shebeen.To be exact, the last time I was there was at my grandma’s funeral a couple of years ago, and the only time before that was for six months in 1995 when I was still a young boy.
BUT now it’s different. It is now my turn to face the music because I’m about to be a man, and the journey to manhood in my culture is the most important time for a young man like me. OOh this is going to be a mysterious road for me because only the ones who have walked the road can live to tell the tale, although it’s forbidden in my culture to talk about what happens. What I do know is that there is going to be singing , dancing, drinking of African beer and slaughtering of cows as gifts to our ancestors.Then my journey into ‘the bush’ begins, and so will the pain.
UNFORTUNATELY THAT’S AS MUCH AS I CAN SAY!