25 Feb 2009 – Zuma Rally

Once again, Saturday was split between homework, sleep, and small ventures into town. We made the most of the laid-back day because Sunday would be devoted to a very unique, all-afternoon ANC rally in the township of Khayelitsha. While many people went out to the city for dinner, the boys stayed behind to cook a much-anticipated dinner on the braai, and the few of us who’d stayed behind joined them for s’mores around 10 o’clock.

Much has already been written about Sunday’s events on Marita’s blog (including one of my own posts about the rally), so my descriptions here might be best supplemented with those posts, as it was a very exciting experience, and hardly possible to capture with a simple chronology of the events…

Sunday morning we were out of the house by 9:30, travelling by group van to a police station on the Cape Flats, where we would be meeting a bus bound for Khayelitsha Stadium. ANC president Zuma – whose credits include such descriptions as “grade three educated”, “common man”, and “alleged AIDS denialist” (all of which are debatable attributes) – was scheduled to make a speech at 2PM to an estimated tens of thousands of supporters. The ANC is a party synonymous with the freedom struggle during Apartheid, and as the party of Nelson Mandela and South African democracy, it continues to draw support from the majority of black South Africans, regardless of the party’s policies or individual scandals. Of course, this is not to suggest that the ANC, which currently holds more than 2/3rds of the seats in Parliament, is not worthy of its broad base of support, only that it has remained a political powerhouse in the fifteen years since the birth of democracy. Accordingly, the rally drew more than 20,000 supporters, most of whom came from within Khayelitsha and the surrounding townships.

The energy of anticipation was palpable from the moment we stepped onto the shuttle bus and were introduced to the booming cheers and soulful rally songs of the ANC. But the excitement hit all new levels when we stopped to pick up ANC t-shirts. Back on the nearly-full bus, we rolled past informal settlements while doing our best to join in the rally chants and drumming beats on the plastic sideboards. The streets near Khayelitsha Stadium were crowded with vendors, police, and countless local residents when we arrived, and we shuffled through the throngs of jubilant supporters (and countless odors) down the street to an opening in the cement wall that surrounds the “stadium” field.

It took a few minutes to get our bearings, as Jeremicia – who’d invited us to the event – settled us into a temporary spot amidst the crowd. We were too far from the temporary stage to see any of the speakers, but the event had not officially begun, and we spent the next twenty minutes mingling with the friendly people that surrounded us. We both took pictures and posed for them (for we were a demographic anomaly within the crowd: a group of “white” students at an ANC rally in the townships), and as we chorused the few lines of the ANC chants we could recall from the bus ride, we attracted even more amused looks and grins.

Once the initial speakers appeared on stage, we’d already reentered the stadium through a different gate and a marginally stricter security check to find our grassy seats just in front and to the left of the stage. We sat in front of a line of temporary metal fencing, which was all that separated us from the thousands of eager supporters crushing their way forward towards the stage, but on more than one occasion the barriers were nearly toppled by the enthusiastic crowd. Despite the security roaming the area in their neon vests, children began climbing over and sliding beneath the fences soon after we’d situated ourselves. They dashed around the empty dirt and grass by the sides and back of the stage or plunked down next to us to watch the event, but the futile struggle between the crowd-control police and the multiplying fence-jumpers was an ongoing feature of the entire afternoon. On more than one occasion, we were almost trampled by a flock of barefoot children as the police shooed them back away from the stage. But the atmosphere never grew contentious, and the speakers became more and more vivacious until Zuma, himself, appeared to deliver the long-awaited address. As he spoke directly to the people of Khayelitsha – and therefore using the traditional Xhosa language – we could only interpret Zuma’s messages through the expressive reactions of his target audience. We caught bits of the speech when he switched to English to run down a list of ANC achievements in social security and economic development, but otherwise we merely listened to the shouts of the crowd and the president’s charismatic but indecipherable delivery.

Most of us did not expect the dancing that followed the speech, let alone the way Zuma playfully jumped into the celebration on stage. But we readily stood to join in the musical merriment as the political rally unraveled into a community dance party at the stage-front. The children who’d sat amongst us during the speech now encouraged us to sing and dance to the (apparently well-known) musical performers who graced the stage, and the contagious excitement lasted nearly half an hour before the flood gates collapsed and the sea of once-restrained supporters came trampling toward the stage. We chose this moment to make a timely exit, retreating back up the busy street to the shuttle bus, and pausing only for a frenzied photo-op with a group of township residents outside the stadium.

The exhaustion that shown in our faces and slouched postures on the ride back to the house belied our general feeling of awe and appreciation for having just experienced such a rare cultural event. Even as we occupied the familiar, (relatively) quiet space of the group van, it was hard not to feel slightly dazed by the overwhelming sensory overload of the rally we’d just left.

Sunday night was a low-key affair, with much of the house uploading pictures and videos and processing the afternoon’s events. Monday we all headed out to our internships, conscious of the fact that our first major papers for our internship course were due on Thursday, and many of us needed to conduct informal interviews with our coworkers to gain more insight into the organizations. Between research on the history of South African social security legislation and small tasks at the Black Sash office, Cassidy and I made time to formulate the necessary questions for the office staff, whose answers we would use to support our research on the organization’s history and policy environment. Tuesday followed in much the same pattern at work, except that because Cassidy had to seek out help for her computer that had crashed the day before, I was on my own at Black Sash for the day. [Note: It is now Wednesday, and we’re finding that technical assistance – even with computers under warranty – is almost impossible to come by in South Africa.]

Though the past few mornings have been cool and moist, the afternoons have been unbelievably hot. The usual ocean breezes that prevent the stagnant summer air from settling have been irritatingly absent since Sunday, and for the third day in a row, the sun has baked the city into a lethargic shell of inactivity. Sweaty laborers slump in the shade of their construction projects, commuters linger outside the poorly-vented, sardine-tin minibuses with fretful resignation, and the business people who can afford to stay in their invaluably air-conditioned offices don’t even brave the walk to the cafes at lunch. When I arrived home after work on Tuesday, nearly half the house was already sprawled out by the pool (not quite as green as before), having abandoned the upstairs common room-turned-sauna without hesitation.

And yet, even after dinner, when it was time to convene for the weekly house meeting, the stifling heat had barely begun to lift. Still no wind. So we opted to move the meeting poolside, and proceeded to have our group discussion in the waning light of the evening. Few would disagree that the mood of the meeting was infinitely improved by the location, as our feet dangled into the refreshingly cool (if not slightly opaque) water.