21 in Afrika

The mosque in Bo-Kaap

Bo-Kaap is another colored community in Cape Town. This town is actually in the heart of the city. We visited the Bo-Kaap museum and got a really nice tour. Our tour guide taught us a lot about Cape Town’s history and the colored people’s history, and how they coincide. The houses were formerly slave quarters for colored people that families decided to keep once slavery was abolished and within the last 15 years the community took initiative to remodel and paint the houses. Because the town is so historical, home owners are only able to add on to the back of their houses and not the front. The houses are typical colonial Dutch style. The community is pretty famous and also one of the most used sites for fashion photography in the world for its unique vibrant houses. Our tour guide walked us through the community, took us to a spice shop, the community mosque (the oldest mosque in SA), and gave us a typical Cape Malaysian style lunch =)

We got to go to a game at the Cape Town Football Stadium!! It was built specifically for the 2010 World Cup. It looks pretty cool and we watched a match between the Ajax (Cape Town, pronounced I-Yax) and the Pirates (Orlando, Soweto). It was a heated match and the crowd was sooo live! Most people are fans of the Pirates because Ajax is a fairly new team. The game ended in a tie 1-1. The vuvuzelas were everywhere!! The vuvuzela is a long plastic horn that was traditionally used to call community members to meeting but now it is mainly used at football games. It makes an extremely loud monotone noise, which can get pretty annoying after a while lol. They don’t sell beer and hotdogs in the stands, instead they sell doughnuts and hot chocolate mmm =) Even though I was tired from a long week of lectures, I had lots of fun!

Soo I never told you all about my homestay family =( Honestly it’s really hard to keep up with this blog thing. Maybe it’s because I’m not used to blogging and on top of that I have done soo much, I feel like I have to choose what to post or i’ll blog for hours… that’s actually what I plan to do today! So Oceanview is a colored community in Cape Town, it’s pretty small and you pass it on the way to the peninsula. Anyway, back in Feb we (CIEE students) were all assigned a family and a homestay sis or bro that was also a CIEE student. Of course I had the pleasure to get the crazy, Italian, New Yorker, Kristen as my homestay sis. Needless to say we had a BLAST!! Our family, the Delcarme’s, is the largest family in Oceanview. The couple, Abi and Diana, have 2 daughters, one is 21, Tamaron, and one is 17, Andrea. I was initially really worried about the whole weekend, I did not know how they would accept me especially with all the racial tension that I had felt since I first arrived in SA. Also, I was worried about little stuff like how I would adapt to the fact that most families did not have a bathroom sink (it’s a luxury apparently). Most colored people live in the Cape Flats which was where they were moved during apartheid. Before apartheid many lived in District 6, and the people of Ocean View lived in Simon’s Town, a beautiful little beach town.

Back to the Delcarme’s…they are such a warm, loving family and accepted us as if we were a part of their family. They had a party in honor of our arrival that weekend =) We also celebrated Abi’s mom’s birthday on the Sunday before we left. We promised the family that we would come back and visit again and we did a few weeks later. This time we celebrated my 21st birthday =) Once again we made lots of memories.

Diana taught me the most… she told me that she participates in the homestay weekend because she wants to show us that you do not need lots of money in order to be happy. All you need is family, music, God, and love. The colored community reminds me so much of black Americans, we come from a similiar background and go through the same struggles of violence, gangs, drugs, poverty, and racism. I identify more with coloreds than black Africans because their culture reminds me of black Americans and just the way the act in general. I think it is because of their background.

The colored people of Cape Town were originally called Cape Malaysian Coloured. They were stolen from Indonesia by the Afrikaaners (Dutch frontiers that came to SA) starting in the 1600s. Upon coming to SA they intermingled with whites and native Africans, which created more diversity in the colored community. It is hard many times to distinguish whether someone is colored or black, because in the states it’s all the same. They have a distinct accent though and most of them speak Afrikaans, which is a mixture of improper Dutch and a few other languages.  I can say soo much about these people. But the long and short of it is that, it took me months to figure them out but nonetheless, I love them! They accept me and I accept them, they may be crazy and loud at times but that just reminds me of home =)

MZOLI’S!!! 

This place is not too pleasing to the eye but when you go inside its a whole other world. It’s in Gugulethu, a township here in Cape Town. So when you get here you buy raw meat by the rand (South African currency)  and pap (kinda like grits), after you buy it then you wait (for a longg time normally lol) for it to be braaied (South African style BBQ….way better than the states BBQ). The meat is nothing short of amazing with lamb being my personal favorite, but you can also get sausage, pork, and chicken. You eat the meat with your hands and scoop up pap with every bite… delicious! It’s open on saturday and sunday but most people come on sundays. There is live music and a dj and people will party and dance allll day! There are families, couples, and groups of friends, white, black, colored… everyone comes together to eat, drink, and have a great time =) and yes you can buy alcohol on sundays in the townships…shhh lol.