Cape Town Street Scene

Cape Town Street Scene
Originally uploaded by soucouyant.

Oh! Back home at last! Oh, the streets of Cape Town with your crowded taxis and grungy hippies, hip hop colored boys who claim themselves black, and graffitti galore.

Contrary to what we were often asked, we did not "go out" in Cape Town, which is apparently famous for its night life. Maybe if you are young and white it's great fun, but I had the most fun hanging out with Naomi's friends,South Africans black and colored, other Fullbrighters who weren't annoying, and her friends from Kenya and Zambia.

We hung out in Observatory, made dinner for people, (and sometime breakfast and lunch), went sightseeing, went to a very interesting Future of Hip Hop Conference...

The panel was organized by an African American woman who was studying at the University of the Western Cape, Cape Town area's black university, and this other local colored hip hop dude. There were a bunch of American women there, her friends, also studying at UWC.

It was a weird moment where a lot of the South African's commments and ridicule of earnest Americans, black and white, attempts to "help" them but who ended up helping themselves instead, either by research or a line on a resume, that read, 'Organized Hip Hop Conference in South Africa.' Or there are the feel gooders people look at with a cynical eye, who build a school, help some kids, and then go back to their comfortble lives.

Cape Town has a hip hop scene whose roots remind me of the growth of hip hop in California -- far from the center of its birth, slightly behind the NY scene, but not too far and with its very own flavor. The first big rap artists in South Africa were colored guys from the Cape Flats, the colored townships, and hip hop is still mostly popular there. Not surprising really. African Americans and "colored" people have similar histories...

Another embarrassing moment in Americans in South Africa was the poetry show that happens every year when US spoken word people go to South Africa. The show opens with a local poet or two, then the Americans. This year it was Carl Hancock Rux, the Last Poets, and Beau Sia. They were fine, though problematic (except for Baba Oyewole). The moment I'm talking about was the year before.

You know who goes to shows like that, where politically you're preaching to the choir. Apparently last year, the reports went, Jessica Care Moore forgot, and proceeded to call colored people political sell outs who were fucked up and self-hating...apparently it went on for a while. One of N's friends was like, "There she is, talking to the most politically progressive people in Cape Town, insulting everyone and their families who came to that show, generalizing in the most remedial way." He shook his head. "Americans!"