You spend days interviewing, observing, scribbling in notebooks, holding up a tape recorder. Later you pore over notebooks and tapes, sift the wheat from the journalistic chaff, search for that one moment, that single situation, that pearl-like utterance that captures precisely the spirit of the subject, the place, the story.
If you're writing about Cape Town and the Colby-Bates-Bowdoin program based in the city, there are too many choices.
The lead could be Noah Lambie, a free-spirited Bowdoin junior, hustling around a new schoolyard basketball court in a crime-ridden Cape Town township where lay-ups are an enticement to keep kids out of gangs--and alive.
Or it could be Zelda Jansen, the program's resident director, navigating the narrow lanes of a colored township and saying that even 15 years ago she never dreamed that the apartheid government would fall. "We didn't even smell democracy," she said.
Or maybe Kristen Heim, a Colby junior who, when she first arrived in race-based Cape Town society, used her fingers to put quotes around the term "colored," commonly used in South Africa. "In my first host family, they said, 'After a couple of weeks the quotes will come off,'" Heim said. They did.
In Cape Town, contrasts and contradictions abound. It's a beautiful cosmopolitan city complete with a Ferrari dealership--and the abject poverty of sprawling squatter settlements. It carries with it still an abhorrent racist legacy, yet African-American students who have been to Cape Town talk of finding for the first time escape from the subtle racism of America.
Cape Town is a place where unquenchable optimism springs from the violence and poverty of the racially segregated townships like wildflowers after a forest fire. It's a city set like a jewel into a crown of roan-colored mountains that overlook white-sand beaches and turquoise seas; yet in the downtown, glue-sniffing beggar children sleep on the sidewalks like litters of puppies. When CBB students take to the townships for community service, they are venturing where many white South Africans have never set foot even once.
"There isn't any such thing as 'life in Cape Town,'" said Colby History Professor James Webb as he wound up his first semester at the CBB center last fall. "There's only life in Cape Town depending on the neighborhood you live in and the racial group you fall into."
Administered by Bowdoin (as the CBB London Center is by Colby and CBB Quito by Bates), the Cape Town program was conceived four years ago by a steering committee that included professors Randall Stakeman, a Bowdoin Africanist; Catherine Besteman, a Colby anthropologist; and Charles Nero, professor of rhetoric, from Bates.
 The CBB Center in the Cape Town suburb of Newlands, where students take classes and congregate. |
South Africa, then just five years into its post-apartheid life, offered students an opportunity to witness history being made. The Nelson Mandela-inspired victory over the apartheid government handed the people of South Africa a country that was in some ways ravaged but in many ways a blank canvas. Still racially segregated today by custom and economics, if not by law, the country faces overwhelming problems, including its moribund economy, rampant AIDS and endemic unemployment. But still, it managed "the changeover," as South Africans refer to the end of apartheid, without the civil unrest that has wracked Zimbabwe and other parts of the continent. Now, for the first time, South Africans of all races are deciding what sort of country they will create.
"It's like seeing the United States right after the Constitution," Stakeman said. "Everything in South Africa is in flux."
Besteman, who was to spend second semester in Cape Town this year, sees the political struggle of the 1980s replaced by an identity struggle. "It's kind of edgy that way," she said. "Nobody knows quite where they fit."
Since 1999, students from the three Maine colleges have been folded into this swirling political and social mélange.
The Cape Town program differs from London and Quito CBB programs, all funded by an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant, in that it was expressly designed to give CBB students exposure to all levels of South African society and to emphasize community service. Students take courses taught by CBB faculty, who rotate in and out of the program, and at the nearby University of Cape Town. Community service is tied to grassroots organizations rather than foreign NGOs, and students collaborate with, rather than oversee, those they assist.
"We didn't want our students to in any way feel that they were saviors or messiahs going in to cure the problems of the little people of the world," Stakeman said. "We wanted them to get the idea that they were just temporary laborers in the same vineyards."
Vineyards are an apt metaphor in a region where wine is big business. But the vineyards to which Stakeman refers are the teeming townships of the Cape Flats, the area designated for nonwhites in the days of apartheid government.
