On the otherside of the wind

I went to a part of Gugs yesterday that I've never been before; Barcelona informal settlement. It's just opposite the cemetery on Klipfontein Road, only a couple of blocks down from Mzoli's. I drove behind the director of the organization I was visiting and turned off Klipfontein onto an untarred lane. For a while I was so focused on negotiating the rocky bulges and dips of the road that I didn't really notice what I was driving past. When the road evened out a little, I looked up. I've spent years in Cape Town's townships, in formal and less formal areas. Barcelona is something else.

It's been really windy in Cape Town these last few weeks, but in a world of buildings with solid foundations, you can't really see the wind. You can feel it around you, feel it moving and breathing and gusting, but it's presence is always transient. When it's gone all that's left of its temporality are displaced leaves and litter. At least in the parts of the city that are west of the airport...

So when I lifted my eyes from the stony ground to the shacks around me, I wasn't expecting to see the wind. But I did. I saw the wind hanging off flapping wooden planks, I saw it dance around corrugated roofs that bounced. Residents have tried putting tires, rubble, anything with a bit of weight really, they've put it all on those roofs to keep them from dancing with the wind, but dance they do. I saw the wind in the gaps and the holes and the funnels and the absences. I saw the wind where other things used to be. It bends my mind really, that the DA tends to blame "third forces" for service-delivery protests in places like Barcelona. I invite them and their bright blue Tshirts to go and look in the gaps and in the holes and in the funnels and to show me where those third forces sit waiting. Go and turn over the rocks too heavy to have been moved by the wind and show me where those third forces hide. Because surely there's no actual reason for the people who live here to be anything less than satisfied.

We stood in the wind, shouting at one another over the noise that it made as it flew past the pale yellow shipping containers, as it banged on the walls, fighting to enter the classroom within.
"I know it doesn't look like much, but we've really made some changes here," the director tells me.
"No I can see," and I can. The stony ground has been flattened, the litter and weeds removed. Two of the three containers are freshly painted and there's a fence that encircles the property.
"Let me show you the back," he says.
I follow him around the containers, walking carefully between three wet circles on the shaded ground. There is no water here, no bathroom. When the children need to pee, they come out here.
"When we painted the container, we really struggled. We couldn't get the weeds out so we squashed them down."
The scrubby bushes are flattened at places, their stems bent into the ground.
"The ground is just too hard here, we couldn't get the plants out. So we just stood on them instead."

We walk back to the central courtyard and then back up the gently sloping hill to where we've parked our cars. "You've got to think what it will look like in 5 years, maybe 10 or 15," he tells me.
"Yes," I agree, "you've got to have vision."
Vision, imagination, hope. I try to see something else as I stand there in the creeping heat. I try to fill the absences with colour, try to smooth the unruly edges into coherency. The wind beats against me so I shake his hand and retreat to the still bubble of my car.

The City Press published an aerial photo of Nkandla last week, it didn't look anything like this.