Clicking and Dancing

The Great PunkyDunky can do the Xhosa click - when you see an x, like in xhosa, you put your tongue in the back of the roof of your mouth and -- you click, and breathe at the same time. There are three clicks in total, two of them sound different and one dounds like the other two

The Great Ducknik and Great Plotnik saw a movie tonight called 'Carmen in Kayelitsha," which is the score of Bizet's opera 'Carmen,' only sung in Xhosa and set in the Kayelitsha township, which is one of the townships that line every South African city, where all the people of color live. There are black townships and colored townships. In the 1960s the government cleared all nonwhite people out of S.A. cities, where they'd lived together for generations, and made them move to the windy flats, into temporary shelters, or no shelters, onto miserable, unfarmable land with no plumbing, electricity, roads or shops. Cherokee and Sioux may find this scenario familiar.

Apartheid is done with and in 2005 getting along is the guide phrase, except people of color still live in the townships and have to take the train into Cape Town every day. Plotnik and Ducknik walked through the City Bowl Rail Station this morning and it was a sea of color and African music, with thousands upon thousands of people walking to and from the trains. Old Hugh Masakela records poured from loudspeakers, along with kweito, the house music of the townships.

The train station smelled like curry. So did Cafe Zorina, where curried chicken and fresh, hot, greasy roti for lunch cost only a few rand.

The three Plotniks -- the Great FiveHead does not arrive until tomorrow - went out dancing last night -- that same Masakela music was now on stage, and the feet cannot stop moving when they hear it. Plotnik is self-conscious about having two left feet back home but the second he leaves the USA his boogie legs come back.

Tomorrow PD picks up 5-H in the morning from the airport while Plot and Duck take a tour of the real Kayelitsha, not the movie version.

So far, the whole color dynamic is what stands out, not what it is but what it was. What is, is people, especially young people, learning how to mix. What was, was rigid classifications based entirely on race, and not necessarily color. Amazingly, most African Americans would have been 'colored' here, not black. 'Black' was reserved for very dark Africans. These poor people had no rights at all, they weren't allowed to even have businesses in their miserable homelands. Coloreds had a few more rights.

The language of the coloreds was, and is, Afrikaans, the language of the opressor. So today in Cape Town people come up to the black kids in the Great PunkyDunky's group and speak Afrikaans to them. When they answer in English, the people speaking to them are furious, because they think they're putting on airs. It's way too complicated to work out in only a few days.

Plotnik isn't in Africa yet. He's still too tired from the flights. But he'll get there. There is an entire continent to think about, where three of five Plotniks are only perching on its tiny southern tip.