My Mecca

Far, far south – and far away from everywhere – this ‘Mecca’ was built by Helen Martins in the tiny village of Nieu Bethesda in the dusty Karoo.

It has little to do with Makkah, the holiest city in Islam, a place she’d never visited. But it has everything to do with my own ‘Mecca’ which isn’t a place at all...

In 1945, ‘Miss Helen’ began building her ‘Mecca’, transforming her home using cement and wire, pieces of glass and plastic, and finely crushed glass which she used to coat the brightly painted walls and ceilings. Later, with the help of assistants, she built over 300 sculptures in her garden of owls and camels, and other animals and figures, almost all facing east.

I can only imagine how laughably crude and strange – and maybe even a little nightmarish – her fantastic creations must have seemed to the conservative Christian villagers, inspired as the sculptures and murals were by the Bible but also by the poetry of Omar Khayyam and the work of William Blake.

Under Apartheid, her collaboration and friendship with her assistants, especially Koos Malgas, a farm labourer from the so-called ‘coloured’ community, only added to her own Afrikaner community’s disapproval and mistrust.

Although the reclusive ‘Miss Helen’ had little to do with the villagers, once a year she would invite them into her home, every mural and all the mirrors and brightly coloured windows illuminated by dozens of lanterns and candles.

However, in 1976, at the age of 78 she took her life. No one knows for sure why she did it. Her home, known as ‘The Owl House’, fell into disrepair but in 1996 became a museum and national monument, and is now visited by the curious and appreciative from around the world.

As a teen, I was deeply moved by Athol Fugard’s play The Road to Mecca which is based on the life of Helen Martins and had been drawn to ‘The Owl House’. But, finally getting to visit years later as a student teacher with a group of teens, it wasn’t so much the place that inspired me after all – it was the imagination, determination and hope of the untrained artist behind it.

And, of course, the hours and hours of creative activity which transformed her home and garden into this unique ‘Mecca’...

You can read more about Helen Martins and 'The Owl House' on Wikipedia. And about The Road to Mecca at http://litmed.med.nyu.edu. And if you'd like to find about more about Nieu Bethesda: http://www.nieu-bethesda.com.

Ludicrous

Today is Nelson Mandela’s 94^th birthday.

Twenty-four years ago, 72 000 people attended a concert at Wembley in London to celebrate Mandela’s 70^th birthday. I wonder how many of the thousands of people at the concert, or watching it at home, would have imagined – or dared to hope – that Tata Madiba, as he is affectionately known to so many South Africans, would still be the father of a democratic South Africa well into his nineties. And that his birthday would have become an annual international day (known as Mandela Day) on which to honour his commitment to justice and equality in South Africa.

As a teen in South Africa, I could only read about the concert in Number One, one of my favourite music magazines. However, as Mandela was banned and imprisoned, I wasn’t allowed to see any pictures of him. How ludicrous that I could read about him but not see him – and that someone actually had to black out his face in every copy that was sold in South Africa..!

You have to laugh... and appreciate just how far we’ve come...

Well, at 25 pounds a ticket, the concert raised 3 million pounds for children’s charities in South Africa.

On Mandela Day, we're all urged to give 67 minutes of our time to a charity or to someone in our local community – to take a small step towards improving the lives of others, and arguably our own.

“It always seems impossible,” Mandela once said, “until it’s done.”

What a gift and an inspiration he has been, not only to South Africans, but to so many people around the world.

You can read more about the activities that took place this Mandela Day at: http://www.mandeladay.com

So arb

arb (ärb)

adj.

South African English Slang
1. Based on or subject to personal whims, impulses or caprice: “That was such an arb thing to say.”

2. Having little or no application or relevance

3. Having no specific purpose or objective
v. arbed, arbing, arbs
1. To wander about aimlessly: “I just arbed around the mall all day.”

[From Standard English arbitrary]

A friend recently reminded me that before everything was “totally random”, it was “so arb”. I’d forgotten how often we used the word “arb” as teens and university students.

So Nineties, I thought, and so local. I hadn’t thought that it might be South African English slang – or, perhaps more specifically, “White South African English” slang. But I spotted the word in a post on a local blog dating back to 2005 so I guess it’s still arbing around Cape Town with young urban middle class English-speaking South Africans – of all colours in post-Apartheid South Africa.

With a little help from: http://brainwavez-watman.blogspot.com and http://www.thefreedictionary.com 

Rewind

There’ve been a whole bunch of Eighties bands and singers in South Africa this summer – Rick Astley, ABC, Howard Jones, Go West, Nik Kershaw, Marc Almond, Midge Ure, Sting – even the Village People (who’ve been around since the Seventies!) joined this ‘rewind’ to that decade.

I think some of these guys are getting a bit long in the tooth to still be playing their old hits – again and again...

But I do still love a lot of the music from the Seventies and Eighties because I grew up to it.

I recently pulled out some of the first cassette tapes I’d bought – only to find, of course, I had nothing to play them on.

So I thought I’d look on YouTube for one of my favourite bands – and videos – from the Eighties. 

It’s dated and cheesy but I guess it’s just the kind of thing an 11 year old would dream of...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djV11Xbc914

Taking off

Growing up, my brother and I both had BMX Raleigh Burners. They came out in the early Eighties and were bright and tough – they may be old school now but they were the latest and so popular back then!

We didn’t race or know any tricks but my brother had a go and set up a few stunts in our back garden. My favourite was a ramp at the side of our Portapool. We didn’t have a big garden but would pedal as fast as we could from the front garden to the pool at the back – up and fly off the top of the ramp – and, for just a moment, seem to hang in the air, before dropping and hitting the water, and slowly, slowly – so we pedalled all the more furiously, pushing against the weight of the water – sinking to the bottom. Then we’d pull our bikes out and race back to the far side of the garden to do it all over again...

And it was all the more fun because it was summer so we’d get back from after-school sport and take off still in our P.T. shorts and t-shirts, laughing all the way back in our clingy clothes.

Here’s a photo of my cousin Roz, and my brother Rich and I on our BMXs. We were visiting my cousins on holiday.

This year my brother has been hard at work building a house for his family. And this week my cousin and her three year old daughter are flying out to Malaysia to set up home with her husband there. She’s lived in the UK for – what? fifteen years now? – so this move is very exciting and, I think, a little scary.

But, I also think, so many of the best and most fun adventurers simply start out with a bike...

Give a girl a bicycle and she can go anywhere. Or believe she can – and that’s a start and what counts.

Owlish

In many parts of the world, owls have been – and may still be – associated with all kinds of dark and dreadful fears – of death, spirits both protective and sinister, witches and wizards, thunder and lightning, shipwreck and robbery, drunkenness, blindness, idiocy, whooping-cough, hair loss..! There’re just too many to mention.

But owls have also symbolised wisdom and knowledge – which is perhaps why a group of owls is called a parliament (– though I’m not convinced that all parliamentarians are wise and knowledgeable..!).

In South Africa too owls have been feared.

I grew up with an African scops owl in our garden. It used to perch in a big tree outside my brother’s window and we’d sometimes sit and watch it before it got dark. Scops owls are small, agile and solitary, and only have a single type of call – kind of a ‘prrrp’ every five seconds or so. It’s almost monotonous and not at all urgent, but it became such a comforting sound to fall asleep to. You can listen to it here: http://www.owlpages.com/sounds/Otus-senegalensis-1.mp3

Scops owls use their sharp beaks and powerful claws to kill their prey (mainly mice and rats) which they tear and swallow, regurgitating the indigestible parts (like bones and fur) afterwards. We used to find these pellets beneath the tree – they were quite dry and odourless, the tiny bones intact and easily identified.


These owls I sketched were, unfortunately, on display in the Albany Museum in Grahamstown. I tried to capture something of their fascination and beauty anyway.

A barn owl

A slightly squint owl

A startled owl?

And for everything about owls: http://www.owlpages.com (And of course Wikipedia!)

Stumbled upon

I stumbled upon these in Stellenbosch recently – they’re part of 20 Stellenbosch, an exhibition of South African sculpture created over the last two decades. Most of the sculptures are outdoor so intended to be ‘stumbled upon’ at various locations around town. This is perhaps the best way to experience sculpture – unexpectedly sharing your own everyday environment, but arrestingly so.

This figure is one of a pair called ‘Grounded I and Grounded II’ by Angus Taylor and is constructed of rammed earth (including stones and plant matter) and steel. Taylor says that the raw materials suggest ‘an innate awareness of belonging to African soil’. I love how solid and larger than life both figures are, but somehow still vulnerable to the changing weather and to everyday wear and tear. I also liked how this figure seemed to be – a little impatiently – waiting to cross the road.

This one is called ‘Fallen Angel’ by Beezy Bailey. Bailey describes his works as ‘frozen dreams’ and this figure made me think of Rene Magritte’s bright but cloudy skies. Although it appears to be a woman, Bailey calls himself the ‘fallen angel’ – perhaps a reference to the stunt he pulled back in 1991. He believed that the galleries were excluding his work in favour of black artists so submitted two for an exhibition that year: one signed in his own name and the other signed as ‘Joyce Ntobe’. The first was rejected while the second still has a place in the SANG’s (South African National Gallery’s) permanent collection (even after Bailey revealed the truth and caused a bit of a media uproar).

And this one is ‘Fly Away Home’ by Jaques Dhont and is made of black wattle bark, sheepskin, metal and cow bone (although this last piece is now surprisingly missing!). It’s based on the legend of the flying African which was common among the Georgia Sea Island slaves who believed that some of the African slaves who were taken to the US flew back to Africa. These Africans could magically just spread their wings and fly away. Robert Earl Hayden, an American poet, wrote a poem called ‘O Daedalus, fly away home’ which connected this myth to the Greek myth of Daedalus and Icarus. Wings, Dhont says, represent ‘a means of survival and flight becomes a symbol of detachment and transcendence’. 

'Do you remember Africa?

O cleave the air fly away home

Night is an African juju man

weaving a wish and weariness together

to make two wings

O fly away home fly away'

The sculptures will be on display for a year. You can see more of them at: http://20stellenbosch.co.za

From coast to coast

Surrounded by piles of papers and files and books, there were times when I thought 2011 just seemed to be flying by – and what had I actually done? So looking back at the photos I took over the course of the year was a good reminder of how far I’d actually come... I’d moved down to Cape Town, from the east coast to the west, and caught up with old school friends and friends from Japan and the Middle East. I’d shared a lot of ups and downs with friends on my course and course teachers, and lots of laughs and advice (not all from me to them!) with many of my past students. I came back for a family wedding and spent time with visiting family from the UK. And, of course, I went back to my studies after years of working and travelling in the Middle and Far East – and finally got through all of that coursework.

Looking ahead, I’ll be getting stuck into my research this year and getting back to some teaching. I’ll be driving down to Cape Town in ‘Maya’ which will make getting around and out of the city that much easier. And I’ll be back just in time to meet a friend’s long awaited and, by then, newly born daughter...

These are some of the sights from my travels last year. (I’d wanted to choose a photo from each month but I hadn’t taken enough throughout 2011 – they cover the year anyway.)

Down a dirt road

I’ve just got back from the Wild Coast. My family has a cottage at Hole in the Wall and I’ve been going there on holiday since I was about three. It’s such a beautiful stretch of the coast – and such a privilege to have a camp right at the beach, just above the rocks and waves.

The original part of the cottage is over a hundred years old, and is simple and rather weather beaten. For years the camp had no electricity and no indoor toilet – only a “long drop” (with a sea view) down the hill! We still rely solely on rain water for our water supply. And we don’t have satellite or internet access – though we now have pretty good cell phone coverage.

The Hole in the Wall itself is at the mouth of the Mpako River and is known as esiKhaleni in isiXhosa which means “place of thunder” or “place of the sound”. The local people tell a story about how it came to be formed. The Mpako River was once a landlocked lagoon as it was cut off from the sea by a cliff and a beautiful girl lived in a village near the lagoon.  One day she was seen by one of the sea people (supernatural beings who look human but have flipper-like hands and feet) who fell in love with her and they began to meet in secret. But the girl’s father found out and he forbade her to see her lover. So, one night at high tide, the sea people came to the cliff and rammed a hole through the centre of the cliff with a huge fish. They swam into the lagoon, shouting and singing loudly – and the terrified villagers ran and hid. In all this commotion, the girl and her lover were reunited and disappeared into the sea. At times, they say, the music and singing of the sea people can still be heard.

Well, I already miss the sound of the waves crashing below the cottage at night...

The sea from the deck

Piglets

Reeds and huts and hills

Birds nesting at the hotel

Aloe

The Hole from Whale's Back

A wild mushroom

A claw lily growing on the sand dunes

Whale's Back

Early morning light

On the road home near Zithulele

Children swimming in a stream

(Story sourced at http://www.wildcoast.co.za)

Maybe Mirkwood

I don’t know if it’s true... but maybe Tolkien did visit the forests of Hogsback as a very young child. And maybe, just maybe, Mirkwood did grow out of those long forgotten forests, “like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mould of mind...” 

"All that is gold does not glitter..."

"Not all those that wander are lost."

"There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something. You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after."

"The greatest adventure is what lies ahead.

Today and tomorrow are yet to be said.

The chances, the changes are all yours to make.

The mould of your life is in your hands to break."

J.R.R. Tolkien, from "The Hobbit"