Stellenbosch

From Langa, we headed to a Cape Town suburb called Stellenbosch. It is in the heart of wine country and a predominantly white community. We stayed in pairs for this homestay and I was with a girl from Boston, named Alyssa. We were with an Afrikaner (white South Africans) family in a Stellenbosch suburb. The family was very nice and we quickly felt at home. The parents, Louis and Leizel, were very young and kind. They had two kids, Michael (8) and Jana (12). They also were renting out a room to a University of Stellenbosch student named Jeane-Marie (23). She was a fifth-year student who was finishing her graduate program to be a teacher.

Stellenbosch was a difficult homestay and an incredibly reflexive period. Our program directors told us before we got to our actual homestays that Stellenbosch would be the area that reminded us the most of home (in the U.S.). I’m not sure what it was, but for some reason Stellenbosch was the homestay that I had the most difficulty in feeling comfortable in. The family was wonderful and some of the nicest people that I have ever met. But something about it just felt wrong. Perhaps it was because the house and the neighborhoods were so much like those that I grew up in, and I was desperately scared to have to leave and go home. Whatever the reason, it felt wrong to stay in a nice house that had more rooms that necessary and a real shower. There was a maid that came in twice a week to clean and do laundry and she was a Xhosa. I felt like I should be spending my time with her rather than with my host family.

An interesting aspect of Afrikaner people seemed to be that everywhere we went people made it a point to tell us that they were not racist. Our host parents said that they never supported apartheid and didn’t even realize everything that happened under it until after it was over (talk about an upper class bubble). One of my friends actually was at a dinner party when a relative arrived, walked up to her and practically yelled in her face “Who shot Martin Luther King?!” She was bewildered and just kind of mumbled in confusion and he responded “A white guy! Yeah that’s right, white people do bad things in America too.” He then went on to tell her all about how her ancestors did worse things to the Native Americans than Afrikaners ever did to the blacks.

I have to admit that I rebelled strongly against being white in South Africa. Without realizing it, I had built up a negative perception of Afrikaners and was very defensive and apprehensive toward them. One of our lectures talked about group responsibility and we discussed the idea of what it meant to take responsibility for one’s actions. We also talked about the idea of collective guilt and whether or not it was reasonable and justifiable.

We didn’t have too many lectures while in Stellenbosch but we did complete a couple of projects with some University of Stellenbosch art students. One of them was a drawing project in which we drew portraits of the Stellenbosch students as well as ourselves. It was very embarrassing since I haven’t taken an art class since grade school and they were art majors. But I ended up having a good time with it. We also had a photography project while we were in there in which we walked around the town with university students taking pictures of things that we had in common, things that were different, things we were moving away from, and things we were moving toward. It was a cool project but the students that were in our group were kind of dull and were not into either listening to our ideas or talking to us much during the project. Other than that project, it was fun to get a chance to interact with students there and it also gave us the opportunity to give a different perspective on life in Stellenbosch. Apparently it’s a big college town so we were all excited for that kind of atmosphere.

It was nice to be on a college campus again and for our breaks most days we would just sit outside and people watch. Food on campus was cheap which was exciting and we all hadn’t realized how much we missed college life until being there. However we quickly began to see the unique atmosphere of Stellenbosch that set it apart. It is a very conservative area, which was different for us to be around. We had a friend who went to school there that some students had actually met on the plane ride over who hung out with us while we were there. Several times he had to remind us to act differently and after awhile the world Stellenbosch turned into a type of warning about appropriate behavior. One night we went to a rugby game and we were very excited. Pretty much the whole town was attending and it was a really important game because it was playoffs. After being there for a while we decided that it could only be a fulfilling experience if we penetrated the student section. We saw people in body paint and capes and knew that was the crowd we were meant to hang out with. So we made our way over and ended up being in the second row of the student section, we even got our hands on some face paint. However, that too turned into a surprising experience. We actually had people asking us to sit down, and they were other students. Also none of the students were really yelling much or cheering. They just sat back, beers in hand, and said that they liked to relax and enjoy the game (even though these guys were wearing only spandex shorts, capes, and masks and the rest of their bodies were covered in paint). It was kind of disappointing.

Also while there Alyssa and I attended church with our host family. It was another interesting church experience as our host family attends an alternative church. They called it a “charismatic” Christian church. Basically the majority of the service was music, which was good, and they had a huge band and people were dancing everywhere and crying in the aisles. Then they gave different people the opportunity to go up and speak about their faith and then a woman gave a sermon (sort of) it was kind of a cool experience but a couple of different times Alyssa and I had trouble taking the whole thing seriously. After church there was a baptism taking place in the swimming pool outside. It was children who had chosen to accept god and wanted to be saved. So they were being baptized in the pool by a member of the church and one of their parents. It was interesting to learn that things like that do not just take place in movies. There was also a big picnic at the church and they were having a braai and there were huge inflatable bouncing structures for the kids. We hung out with our host parents and had really interesting conversations with them regarding faith and why they felt the way that they did and what drew them to their church. So that was a really nice way to get to know our family and it was especially cool that they were willing to share such a personal and yet important aspect of their lives with us.