Diary of a Palestinian Exile’ in Cape Town: Reflections and Connections
Bradly, while driving me from the airport to Cape Town said:
“Don’t believe everything you see, the truth is buried much deeper”
His words prepared me for what was to come.
|
“The first thing that you have to experience here is the District Six Museum,” was a remark that Lucille, my spiritual guide and inn keeper, had insightfully made that morning. I passed District Six on my way to the Museum and it was there that I discovered what was hidden below the sixty hectars of empty expanse near the port; a place that was once called Kanaladorp, (place of sharing), by some 66,000 people who once inhabited it.
|
Kanaladorp
|
|
My first encounter with District Six reminded me of South Africa Forest, that site on the road from Lake Tabariya (Tiberias) to al-Nasrah (Nazareth), in present day Israel. A commemorative plaque dedicates the pine forest to South Africa for ‘its support for the State of Israel’. If one looks more closely between the trees, one can see some masonary stones strewn around, with old cactus plants still growing that is all that remains of the Village of Lubieh. The village was destroyed and its population ethnically cleansed in 1948, as was the fate of some 471 Palestinian communities. That
|
Lubieh
|
cataclysmic human tragedy the Palestinians collectively call the ‘Nakba’ (catastrophe),which forced the majority of Palestinians out of their homeland.
District Six Museum is the hub of the continuing struggle for return and restitution, by a community that was forcefully evacuated from the most ethnically, religiously and culturally diverse community in Cape Town. African “Blacks” were the first to be evacuated in 1901 and the remaining mixed community of freed slaves, merchants, artisans, artists, musicians, laborers, and immigrants, were gradually forced out after declaring District Six a ‘white area’ in 1966. By 1981 some 66,000 had been forcefully evacuated and their community bulldozed to the ground.
The struggle of District Six symbolizes the movement for return and restitution by all uprooted communities, victims of Apartheid, in South Africa.
- In 1979 Friends of District Six was established
- In 1987 Hands Off District Six Committee was formed
- In 1989 the District Six Museum Foundation was established
- In 1991 the Group Areas Act was repealed
- In 1994 the opening of the District Six Museum
- In 1995 the Land claims Commission was established
- In 1996 the Land Claims court held in the Museum; District Six Beneficiary Trust Formed
- In 2000 a Homecoming ceremony took place and the District Six Beneficiary Trust was entrusted to redevelop the land. Some 20,000 people were to be accommodated in approximately 4000 units (40 hectars).
In 2004 first two claimants to return to District Six and handed keys to their new homes.
|
|
First Visit to District Six Museum
Noor was the first person I met on that first visit to the Museum. He is one of the founders of the Museum and is currently an Education Officer and runs the museum shop. Soon after I arrived that morning, a group of people came in and Noor began his guided tour. He began by showing them where his home was on the big floor map. He talked of his family that appears in the nearby pictures and later pointed to a cloth that was made of hundreds of meters worth of material, and inscribed with the names, addresses and information of the ex-residents and their
|
Noor at museum
|
descendents. Names were literally added daily with a felt marker and later embroidered by volunteers of ex-residents. We were taken around a multidisciplinary installation ’streets’ that celebrated the cultural diversity of District Six, and invites visitors to interact with the contents. Ex-residents themselves continue to update the installation with inscriptions and artifacts. There were sounds and sights of the area, with audio oral histories. I was saddened by the story of how a music group broke up because its members were forced to leave District Six to live in different and distant communities.
Human Rights Day at District Six Museum
Exactly 35 years earlier, on March 21, 1960, demonstrators against the apartheid pass laws were gunned down by police in Sharpenville. I returned to the museum that day as a special program was to be held. The scene I saw was one of children reclaiming the old-church-turned-museum, transforming it into a concert and dancing space. Children were playing music and dancing alongside Cape musicians with whom they were engaged in workshops. In the background was the altar that now had applique’ banners hanging from the ceiling, by different religious groups (Muslims who were a majority, Christians and Jews) from the old community.
Another Museum, Another Occasion
A group of children were dancing, singing and playing percussion music at the entrance to the Museum of Slavery.
|
|
They were wearing t-shirts that read: “Rape: a community responsibility“. Inside the museum, the history of slavery worldwide is chronicled. A number of activities commemorating International Day of Poetry were going on, including music, poetry and films. I sat to watch a movie entitled “Brown Sugar”. In it the director takes her grandfather and family back for a visit to what was their home and land in Constantia, near Cape Town, from where they were uprooted and their property destroyed. In the film, the grandfather remembers how some elderly
|
Lubieh
|
|
residents, upon learning that they would be uprooted, pined away and died before the evacuation. The film of their moving encounter and recollections, reminded me of a film that a Palestinian friend, Mahmoud Issa, directed. In 1994, he took his family and other villagers who became refugees in 1948, back to the Village of Lubieh for a reunion. His father is filmed looking for his
old trees amid the new trees planted in the name of the South Africa forest. When he finds the three trees he planted before 1948, he eats their leaves and inscribes his name and that of his grandchild who had come with him, on their trunks. To date the villagers of Lubieh are scattered in 26 countries. Mahmoud Issa, who lives in Denmark where a large number of the Lubian refugees live in exile, has helped establish a section on Lubieh at the Danish National Museum. The museum engages Lubians, young and old, and introduces their experience to wider audiences. Annually scores of young Lubians, from around the world, try to visit what remains of their village, but with foreign passports.
|
Meeting Menisa
It was on my last visit to the District Six Museum that I met Menisa, a dignified woman sitting with her crutches next to her. She was embroidering a long canvas of felt pen messages written by visitors. She talked to me about her memories of Kanaladorp, and showed me her photo album and a photo of her as a beautiful, happy young girl in a white dress that appeared in a local newspaper. There were no crutches then. She told me that she would embroider my message if I were to write it on the visitor’s canvas. On my way out that day I wrote:
“As a Palestinian living a long exile, this museum gives me hope and inspiration.”
|
Menisa
|
Noor’s Story
I finally had the chance to read Noor’s book that he signed for me at the end of my first visit. The book contains recollections and photos that he had taken of life in Kanaladorp before the community was uprooted. At first I didn’t understand the photo he had at the beginning of the book, one which captured his family posing during his brother’s engagement in 1967, and one in which there was not one smiling face, on the contrary, they were all sad. He later explained that they all knew, at that time that it would be their last group photo before they were forced out of their home. His father and all his family were born in that very home.
|
My Pigeons Come Home
I will let Noor read the following section from his book:
“By 1975 I was fortunate enough to have saved sufficient money to buy myself a house in Athlone. This meant that I would not have to move to any of the areas designated for ex-residents of District Six. So on a warm day in January 1975, my wife and I with our two children, aged three and five, moved to our new home . With our belongings were my prized racing pigeons, for whom I had built a loft, using the same wood that had made up the loft in District Six.
After three months in Athlone, I felt that it was time to let the pigeons fly free. When I returned home that evening, the first thing I did was visit the loft After three months in Athlone, I felt that it was time to let the pigeons. fly free. When I returned home that evening the first thing I did was visit the loft.
|
|
“Where are my pigeons?” I asked my wife. Not a single pigeon had come back.
After a sleepless night I returned to work the next morning, driving, as I always did, through the demolished landscape that was once District Six. As I drove past the now empty plot that used to be my home in Caledon Street, I saw a sight which shook me to the core: my pigeons, all 50 of them, were congregated on the empty plot where our home had stood .Getting out of my car, I walked over to where the pigeons were. Very surprisingly, they did not fly away, but looked into my eyes as if to ask: “where is our home?”…..
This moving story triggered the following association.
“I Wish I Were a Bird”
Starting in 1998 I lived a very rich four-year experience with a group of 30 children aged between 10-12 years old, and who came from two Palestinian Refugee Camps in Beirut. The multi-disciplinary, active-learning and creative expression project aimed at engaging fourth generation refugee children in researching, reflecting and expressing their views on their issues, lives, and wishes. They used the media of photo-journalism, creative writing, art and film to capture their experiences & expressions
This Al-JANA Center project coincided with the 50 year anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It was remembered by 5 million Palestinian refugees as 50 years of violation of their human, national and civil rights. Palestinian refugees constitute the largest refugee population in the world, living the longest exile, since 1948, and their right of return systematically blocked and denied.
Four years after the project began, the young participants in the group project signed their photo-voice book, inaugurated their photo-exhibit and screened their films in a special children’s festival of their own organization. Their bi-lingual book (Arabic / English) has now been translated into Italian, Spanish and German and their films have received international awards. Today, their project is touring and engaging children around the world.
|
In the beginning of their book they wrote this:
“We are making this book to prove our existence on earth.”
The young participants chose this title for their book and project:
“I wish I were a bird to fly back to my homeland.”
Moa’taz Dajani
Al-JANA Center, Beirut
May 13, 2007
|
|
For further information and resources please see the following:
www.districtsix.co.za
www.al-jana.org
People in Community are the Solution
People in Community are the Solution
By: Munir Fasheh
We learn from the Palestinian experience- whether in the West Bank or Gaza or in the Palestinian camps in Lebanon- that the most profound solutions to problems are those that stem from efforts of the people themselves, while institutions are dysfunctional and weak. I began to form this opinion during the 1970’s in the West Bank (where I have lived most of my life), and it deepened thereafter during the first Intifada. What was common between the two time periods was the weakening of institutions during which people reclaimed all responsibility for doing whatever was needed for daily life to keep going. We will try within this encounter to collect stories that reflect this disappearing reality. At the same time, we will try to uncover the other side of this coin: an in depth criticism of Western civil society (its instruments and values). Many have done this before, the fiercest critic being Gandhi (this being another hidden fact). In 1909, Gandhi wrote that lifetime exile (to a deserted island) for someone trying to spread Western notions of civility would be insufficient to absolve them of their sins. Among the Palestinians, Al Sakakini was the one to found his first school in Jerusalem that same year (1909), refusing to use grades and prizes.
The story of modernity is the story of undermining and monopolizing: undermining peoples and monopolizing the road to ‘progress’. It is a story of undermining societies and civilizations rich in heritage and history, and monopolizing the authority of determining what is of value.
What makes this mechanism of undermining and monopolizing one of profound impact on destroying beings and societies and life is, firstly, the claim to a single universal path to development (the European way), and secondly, the readiness of Europeans to help others walk along this same path. This triad- undermining people, monopolizing the path to progress, and the readiness to help- represents the axis of destruction in the world today. The principal weapon in this destructive operation has been and continues to be the crafting of instruments claiming to be universal, neutral, and indispensible- like basic education (in all its components), the nation state (particularly participatory democracy), and the measurement of people/communities along a vertical scale, and the (toilet flush). Claiming that these instruments are neutral and that the instruments of development is what led to the misconception that any flaw in its functioning is a flaw in its application, and not in its essence. However, the essence of such instruments is represented by the values that governed the behavior and consciousness of people who fell in the trap of instruments: competing over symbols, control, winning, and greed. The destruction of life in earlier times was due to ignorance, the destruction of modern times is the result of trickery and deceit and a premeditated distraction of people. The machinery of modern progress is designed to eliminate the people in community, to undermine civilizations rich in culture and heritage: schooling undermines language and the knowledge and skills of people by reducing the value of a person to a numerical grade; ‘democratic’ elections deny any real participation of the people in governance by reducing the role of a person to a single vote; the toilet flush destroys the soil and plunders water and organic wastes and pollutes nature in the name of modernization; and development destroys agriculture by defining its value by an index that measures productivity with no regard to everything else; and satellite television deepens illusion and severing and distraction by the numbing of audiences; and the modern state robs classes of people and robs other communities in the name of security. The internet is possibly the first technology designed to be an instrument for the people rather than for those who want to control them and deny them of their capacities and assets. Here we can differentiate between email and Facebook, in which the latter, in my opinion, can be a tool that enables and deepens control.
Denying and undermining peoples’ knowledge and culture and arts and religions and capacities and understandings and consciousness is what started to worry me in 1971. From this point forward, my concern revolved around the need to heal from this malady and replace it with the conviction that people in community are the foundation, and the measure, and the solution. What helped me was the Palestinian situation, particularly in the West Bank where I have lived and worked most of my life. The Palestinian reality did not only help me come to the realization about the depth of the destruction (through the instruments of ‘development’) but also as to how I could remove myself from this reality. The two time periods that contributed most to this realization and change were the 1970s and the first Intifada, during which institutions were paralyzed and people had to assume the duties of life. This also deepened my conviction that people in community are the solution and that nature is the measure [I will discuss many examples and experiences during the Janana Encounter].
In a time when illusions, expectations, hopes and dreams evaporate into thin air, and projects, development programs, and plans are exposed for what they truly are- i.e. in a time that many have lost their compass and are feeling sadness and despair- it is normal to ask: Where can we find hope in current times and what are the sources of strength in society?
Since 1971, I have had a growing conviction that resides and flourishes within me, that people are the source of strength- those people who respect creation and nature, who protect them and live from them and within them, those who create life in their work and the way they live. Most of these people live outside the city, outside institutions, and outside the consumerist mode of living. Their self worth is associated with the good that they do (the skills they master that emanate from the self, in which there is beauty, no harm, and respect). Hence, they remain invisible to experts, professionals and academics that see only one path to progress, measured vertically.
I know very well that the people of the villages and the camps are currently at risk for losing many qualities as a result of urbanization. They remain, however, the homeland of hope and strength. Their word is one of a people who still have strong ties to each other and to their land. But, for people to be the solution, they have to do it for themselves. They have to find a change their traditions while remaining traditional, and figuring a way to preserve the ability of life to recreate itself. I don’t see any hope for humanity if the sprawl of the city continues to devour the villages, destroy life, and consume nature. Maybe the role of the conscientious urban dwellers who are aware of such dangers is to live responsibly and to remind those who live outside the city about the richness they access. The Palestinian village remains- much more than the city- respectful and protective of nature, protective of communal social fabric, and exemplifies the ability of life to recreate itself. The village still tells stories and tales, and engages through people meeting and talking and forming personal relations. In the village, there is greater responsibility about what enters and leaves the body, and what enters the mind and leaves as spoken word. People of the village are still better informed than city dwellers about where the food they eat comes from and what the words they say mean. The city takes without giving. And when and if it gives, it gives what is usually harmful. The city does not give back to the soil as it takes from it. The people of the city have lost their relationship with the land, with the body, and with the meanings related to life. They have lost the meaning of useful knowledge.
We repeat terms such as ‘knowledge economy’ and ‘civil society’ without asking what these terms mask or turn our attention away from. ‘Knowledge economy’ excludes the knowledge of other persons, the knowledge of the source and ingredients of the food we eat and what happens to our wastes, the source and meanings of the ideas and words that we use, nor the truth that science has done much more harm than good. It is difficult for those who have been educated through schools and universities and television screens to see that hope resides in people. In such institutions, no significance is given to the land, the people’s stories, and local economies. Civility as it has existed for the past 350 years has been killing the ability of life to regenerate life. The spreading of consumerism has been its main instruments.
‘People are the solution’ is not just a nice slogan, but one that centers around basic convictions that represent the essence of society. It is based on the idea that a human being is made up of relationships: relationship with the self, with others, with a place, and history and civilization and nature (which together what can be termed as ‘personal identity’). ‘People’ are a product of three interrelated pillars that together form the foundation of community: local soil, local culture and local economy. And a dysfunction in any of these three pillars makes it difficult for the other two pillars to sustain life. Thus it becomes imperative for any community to protect these pillars in order to ensure its sustainability. Possibly the most important creature for local soil is the earthworm, the most important for local culture is the mother, and the most important for local economy are relationships of exchange and building on what is available in the local environment. From here, we can see that one of the most detrimental inventions to local soil has been the toilet flush and other chemicals that kill the earthworm; the most detrimental to culture and the social fabric of community are schooling and the media; and the most detrimental to local economy is the nation state. It is useful to contrast the values that protect soil and culture and economy to those that govern the toilet flush, the education system, media, and governments. The values of the former are the respect of creation and the protection of the life’s ability to regenerate itself; the values of the latter are control, winning, competition and greed.
What distinguishes modern institutions is its role denying people what they can do without relying on equipments and instruments and professionals, such as walking, writing by hand, having face to face conversations and helping one another, or such as the body’s inherent capacity to heal or a person’s inherent capacity to learn, and the capacity of seeds to regenerate. The claim made by modern institutions that they provide support to people is the very reason that ‘needs’, in their present day meaning, were invented (usually meaning bad or harmful habits). “People are the solution” requires us to recall what has been silenced and forgotten. From here, it becomes important to avoid anything that is harmful to nature and conflicts with respect for life, no matter what the rewards may be on other levels. It is also important to engage with exploring what is being silenced and masked. This is what we will be doing this August in the Janana Encounter. Corrupting people has gone to new heights in the past years, and it has caused (for the first time in Palestine) a transformation in the value of land: from a source of living and dignity and belonging to a commodity for sale, and the transformation of the Palestinian to a commodity that serves the highest bidder!