Well (RED) in Cape Town
My South African trip with (RED) concludes in Cape Town, where I meet wildly impressive students, suck at TikTok and barely recover from a female condom tutorial.
The first thing you notice when you arrive in Cape Town is the roiling mash of an ocean off the coastline. In fact, it’s two oceans in one: the cold waters of the Atlantic on the west colliding with the warmer Indian Ocean on the east. It’s a metaphor for the city, two jarringly different existences in the same place. On that spectacularly beautiful coastline, joggers bounce past groups of the homeless.
Cape Town is the second stop on the trip I’ve taken to South Africa with (RED), and it’s one of the most unequal cities in the world. This stems of course from Apartheid, the racist segregation policy initiated in 1948 by the white-ruled Nationalist Party and only dismantled shortly before Nelson Mandela was elected President in 1994. While segregation is officially over, try telling that to people living in squatter camps, made entirely of tin.
The colonial legacy is everywhere, even in the local flora. Our driver points out an Australian eucalyptus tree, offspring of seeds brought in by explorer Captain Cook in the late 1770s. But before I can get sentimental about the “tree of my people,” he explains they are invasive, so thirsty that they absorb a huge amount of the city’s already challenged water supply. You learn quickly there is no beauty here without a toll.
But before you start openly weeping, let me give you some more positive stats on South Africa’s HIV fight. In a country with the world’s largest population of people with the virus, it has the world’s largest publicly funded antiretroviral program. 74% are on “ARVs,” up from just 20% in 2010. Deaths have decreased by 73% in the same time frame. And 96% of HIV positive pregnant women are on treatment to stop the virus passing to their babies. None of this would be possible without investments by the Global Fund, (RED) and partnerships with community-based organizations on the ground like NACOSA, which provides education and health care in schools and on the ground in poor areas.
That said, prevention is key. Over 700 young women contract HIV every day, which is why our first visit on this trip is to Crystal High School. The school is in a depressed area of the city with a fancy sounding name, Hanover Park. But this place is a wonder. It’s filled with teenagers and noisy as hell, but there’s a centeredness and optimism to the chaos. In the main hall/gym/hang out space, the school’s maxims are written on the walls: Pride, Consideration, Honesty, Respect, Accountability, Excellence, Care, Perseverance, Commitment, Discipline, Cooperation, Humility, Gratitude and Live to Serve.
Our hosts for the tour are Tazkia and Kiki, who also play on the girls’ soccer team and excel at Tik Tok dances (after they conned me into trying one, I can reveal that your aged correspondent does not). The school principal is Mr Abrahams, who, after watching my teen-adjacent frolics, told me I should, “be on Ritalin.” This is even funnier in the local accent, which rolls the R. “Rrrrr-italin for you!”
Sex education and academic education are inextricably linked here, with both NACOSA counselors and teachers providing students STI testing and treatment, as well as information on where to seek safe abortion care (from the age of 12) if needed without having to inform their parents. In such a patriarchal society, this pragmatism and efficacy is remarkable. Some of the girls describe visiting sexual health clinics, only to be grilled and judged by security guards who then tattle around the community. Not only are these young women navigating hormones-gone-haywire, there’s an entire universe of predatorial men just waiting to take advantage. There’s a South African term, “Blesser,” which loosely translate as a sugar daddy. “You know, a guy who has sex with you and pays for everything,” the girls explain. “That doesn’t sound like much of a blessing, though?” I reply. I’m met with dark snorts of laughter, the type that older women tend to make.
Kiki says there’s a guy who hangs out on her street who has started saying to her, “You are getting prettier every day.” How does she respond? “I just keep walking.” What about going out? “I don’t, really. I like to stay home.” This is depressing, but then when you ask Kiki what she wants to do, she says, “I want to be a lawyer.” She is so clear in her intention, you don’t doubt her for a minute. And that is testament to the mission and impact of this incredible (sorry, “incrrrrr-edible”) school.
From Crystal High, we bundle in with some of the NACOSA team to the Philippi Safe Space. The space is as raucous and positive as the neighborhood is rough (our driver tells us not to hold our iPhones up in view of the van windows). While it’s a hot day in the middle of the week, it’s packed. There is a woman marching back and forth at the entrance with a megaphone in one hand, condoms in the other. She is rallying the neighborhood to the services in the most direct way possible, by yelling. We quickly dub her, “CMO.”
This is also where we receive our first female condom tutorial from NACOSA program manager Colleen Wagner, a jazzy, hilarious woman who knows her shit and takes none. And wow, these lady condoms are big – you need an infrastructure bill to use one. Colleen whips out a model of a vagina from her jeans pocket and deftly demonstrates how to insert it. (Let’s just say I’ll never look at a figure eight the same way again).
Philippi houses everything from mobile clinics to classes and assistance with online college applications. It’s very groovy-vocational: there’s table tennis and music and some cool young guys in striped sweaters and slides who look like they just stepped out of a Malick Sidibe print. (A couple of reminders: one, money doesn’t buy style. And two, when you try to understand algebra the students are learning, you are dumb).
The next day, our last, is Freedom Day, a public holiday which commemorates the first democratic elections in South Africa on April 27, 1994. Serendipitously, we are visiting the notorious Robben Island Prison, which housed Nelson Mandela for 18 years from 1964 to 1982 (he was imprisoned for 27 years in total). It’s a choppy ferry ride to the rocky island, where you take the same walk up to the prison that the internees took so many years before.
Our guide is a gentleman called Ntoza, who has been a guide at the prison for 20 years. He was an inmate himself in the 80s, one of many political activists who were imprisoned under the Terrorism Act. When Ntoza takes you around, he speaks quickly and pragmatically, explaining that what seems a counterintuitive choice helps both him reconcile his experience and visitors gain understanding.
What is most upsetting about the prison, apart from the grimness, is the casual contempt with which the “Bantus” (Black South Africans) were treated. In the exercise yard, the darker men do not have shoes. In the former canteen, there is a sign detailing food portions: “Coloureds/Asiaties” can have an ounce of jam daily, “Bantus” can have none. The effort taken to be punitive is astounding.
We are then taken to Mandela’s cell, which, in testament to the work of The Global Fund and (RED), is opened to us to briefly take a photograph. Any pictures you’ve seen of the cell online look bleak, but it’s nothing on the reality. A steel bucket for an overnight toilet, a tin plate, a stool and for a bed, a thin mat with blankets that look like they’d give a goat a rash. Mandela spent 18 years in this room. I asked Ntoza if Mandela, him and others were given extra blankets in the Cape Town winter. He barely paused and replied, “No.”
We get on a bus and are further educated by another guide. Talking about Apartheid, he tells us about “the pencil test.” In said test, a pencil is pushed through a person’s hair. Whether it comes out easily or gets stuck is used to determine whether a person has “passed” or “failed” the test. This was not just a device to divide blacks from whites; it was a way of dividing blacks and “coloureds” from each other. One of our team, a young cameraman who just had a baby, tells us that his mother, on observing the baby’s straighter hair, remarked that she was fortunate.
Now, I’m embarrassed to say the only pencil test I knew growing up was the one for your boobs. The one we did, inexplicably, in our teenage years, to see if they were “perky” or not.
And that, my friends, is a potent (and deeply weird) example of white privilege. Just add it to the pile.
While you’re at it, support the work of the spectacular people at (RED)