As it was early Sunday afternoon, the colorful streets of Bo-Kaap were largely empty and quiet, except for little children loitering in the shade of a building and women hanging laundry on the lines. We walked several blocks along the ridge, and then decided to take Ben’s advice on a restaurant and climb a very steep hill to the highest point in the neighborhood, to eat at The Noon Gun (which is named for the cannon on Signal Hill that is fired everyday at noon). It was a hot and laborious trek to the stucco building at the top of Longmarket St., and so we were more than a little disgruntled to find that the restaurant is closed on Sundays.
Thankfully, the owners noticed us waiting outside, and opened the door to let us purchase beverages. We spent about twenty minutes enjoying the view of the harbor, the city, and the mountain from the look-out by the restaurant, and then headed down into the city for lunch at a café near the outdoor market on St. George’s Mall.
Monday morning Cassidy and I were back at Black Sash, working on the State of the Nation project until lunch time. We’d gotten word that we might be running to Parliament on Wednesday to pick up documents related to the Budget Address that will be delivered that afternoon, and we handed over our IDs to be copied and sent to the necessary security personnel. But throughout the morning, we began to realize (through dribs and drabs of information we overheard) that something important was planned for Monday afternoon.
I suppose it is not uncommon in an internship to find oneself out of the loop – or at least missing relevant background information – a great deal of the time. Working in a new environment, with issues and networks of people that are unfamiliar, it can be hard to figure out the tasks and projects everyone else is involved in around the office. The Black Sash has done a wonderful job accommodating us and incorporating our skills and desire to help into their current projects, but because of the pace and multidimensionality of the workday, we often aren’t entirely informed about the schedule of any given day.
And so the sudden invitation to accompany Nyembezi, the National Advocacy Programme Manager, to a public Parliamentary session came as a huge surprise. Just after lunch, Nyembezi told us to grab our IDs and cameras and follow him up the street to the building we’d just spent half of Friday gawking at through wrought iron gates. Wide-eyed and grinning, we shuffled after him, all the way to the security desk at the public entrance of Parliament. We moved through two security checks and across a cobblestone court before we arrived at the entrance to the Old Chamber, the room used to hold official Parliament sessions until 1983. The building was completed in 1885, and it was grand and ornate with its Corinthian porticos and pavilions. Nyembezi seemed to know every person we passed, and introduced us to several government officials, including the CEO of the South African Independent Electoral Commission, Pansy Tlakula.
We had a chance to walk around the Old Chamber for several minutes before the green leather seats filled in with men in business suits and women in bold-printed dresses. No one gave us explicit instruction, so there were many moments of confused standing, smiling, and nodding brightly at various diplomats and civil servants who greeted us or talked around us to one another. Political schmoozing in a foreign Parliament is disorienting enough, even without the complication of the language barrier.
We were allowed to sit right on the main floor because the session was not very crowded, and we sipped our complementary guava juice as the meeting was called into session. The topic of the public session was the recent provincial re-demarcation issue in Gauteng and North West provinces. South Africa has 9 provinces (most closely compared to US states) and 283 municipalities (most closely compared to US counties). Under the 1996 Constitution, the South African government cannot re-demarcate the borders of a province or municipality without consulting the affected communities, first. But the border between the wealthy, developed Gauteng Province and the rural North West Province has recently been re-demarcated and disputed, especially in terms of the economic and electoral impacts on affected municipalities.
The session started a bit after 2PM, and ran about two hours, towards the end of which, Nyembezi gave a five minute speech on behalf of the Black Sash. We did our best to stay attentive throughout the meeting, despite the fact that even some of the diplomats in attendance were nodding off. Nevertheless, having the chance to listen to members of the national government and civil organizations discuss efforts to prevent community protests and sort out re-demarcation voting concerns was enlightening and perspective-altering. The most striking part of the session was that even despite the formal setting and the gravity of the issues discussed, there remained a sense of joviality in the proceedings. On more than one occasion, a far-reaching remark by one speaker was followed by a room full of hearty chuckles, which were infectious enough to spark our own laughter, even though we didn’t fully understand the comedy of the situation.
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