Steven Otter

I had my hopes stacked high for this book. I'd waited ages for the paperback to come out, had been a fervent ANC supporter, nearly moved to Cape Town to send my son to a revolutionary school there, and at that time went to Khayelitsha. This is the feeder township of black workers some 30km or so in the dust plains outside of Cape Town. It is a mixture of an established community and an informal settlement of tribal peoples living very poorly in anything they can find to build four walls and a roof.

The book didn't deliver. It's a shallow work by a journalist who moved to Khayelitsha because it offered cheap accommodation and, he hoped, a chance to really 'be African' in the black African sense. It could have been wonderful. What emerged was a story of a camaraderie between men playing pool and drinking a lot. Not really an experience that is unique to the township or even Africa. There appeared to be no intellectual life, no work except for shebeens, food stores, second-hand furniture and taxi-ing. All there was, it seemed, was a subsistence life of no education, just drinking and eating, promiscuity and AIDS and above all crime. Still, it fulfilled the author who felt more truly African there than anywhere else. Sad.

I can't say I know Khayelitsha well, but when I was there I saw a lot of very enterprising people with small businesses. One man was making flowers from tin cans that sold in Liberty's in London, another was carving exquisite furniture, a woman was running a breakfast-and-lunch box kitchen for school children, another had a lean-to, corrugated iron and found-wood guest house for adventurous whites looking for the 'real township experience' for a night or two (she was featured on Oprah!) There were schools, clinics, intellectual and musical societies, sports, chess and martial arts clubs, radio stations and churches, especially the Roman Catholic one which was very active in building up businesses. In short, all the elements of a society that was doing its best to move on up.

I don't know what the word or phrase for it is, but the opposite is when someone black moves entirely into white culture and abandons their own and are then generally sneered at by whites and despised by blacks. I think the US phrase is being an 'Uncle Tom'. That's what the author seems to have done in reverse and seems to take his greatest pleasure in being called black 'inside' by living the most average, impoverished inner-city life he could have experienced among all races in any city in the world It isn't non-racism, it is an expression of it that is benign but still suspect.

I didn't not enjoy the book, but I kept hoping the next chapter would produce the depth and insight into a culture mostly foreign to me. But no, it was another shebeen, another shack, another victory at the pool table, so in the end, I was glad finish the book, leaving the author playing in his universal boys' club and mistaking it for some kind of deep African cultural truth.… (plus d'informations)