Introducing Cape Town

My new group of students from the US arrive tomorrow, all excited for their quarter abroad in Africa. Unfortunately, part of my job is to orientate them. It's not that I don't enjoy bouncing about and getting them all enthused for their forays into their volunteer placements, but rather that I never really know how to introduce Cape Town. How do you convey the overwhelming beauty and injustice, the simultaneous magic and tension of the "South African fruit salad" as my colleague, Carol, calls us who live here? A few days ago a friend asked me if my job was challenging. Well no, not in the Good Will Hunting maths-proof sense it isn't, but helping someone make sense of a context that is unknown and potentially uncomfortable can sometimes feel like trying to translate colour into music.

So I take a multi-pronged approach. While telling them about Von Gennep's Rites of Passage Model, and getting them lost somewhere in his liminal space, I put up maps with colour-coded stickers, bits of string, movable labels and all manner of artefacts more often associated with pre-school posters than the walls of an Ivy League campus. I flick big words and big pictures at them, cover them in mountain-related folklore and saturate them with tales of squirming pot-holes, goats and all the other animations moving in, through and around the Nyanga bus terminus:
transaction zones and walkie-talkies.
ethno-epistemology and afro-jazz. indigenous modernities, tik and tik-lollies.
developmental tourism, ubuntu, the Pink Strip in Greenpoint, sandy in-between roads and asset-based-community-developshment. Frantic-frantic and then just throw them into their service placements and hope I've told them enough to keep them afloat in the chaos of the unfamiliar.

Introducing Cape Town yo, it's no joke.