Musing Beneath the Berg

Homes #6 Part 1: A Muizenberg Elegy

In the dark days of April 2020, I hugged a tree that was still just about alive. In the centre of the courtyard below my flat, her roots largely hidden by paving bricks, she was nonetheless pulsing enough with the source to attract birds and for me to hold her in gratitude: a humble Muizenberg being. I also bent down to the grass on the communal lawn which I had neglected till then, till that time of being kept so close to home. I practiced eurythmy exercises, barefoot on the lawn, given for difficult times. Nobody batted an eyelid at this quirky behaviour. Because, Muizenberg. When some weeks later the government allowed us out for 3 hours in the morning, to get exercise, we did so on the grasslands beside the vlei, the estuary for windsurfers and migrant birds and a bit too much ecoli: the 'village' emerging en masse to meet and greet in times of remote work. There, beside other trees bent at impossible angles by the south-east wind, I caught up with friends I hadn’t seen in years, which I don’t think was quite the point. Muizenberg kept us steady, as this place so often has. For the last decade or so, though, I’ve been so pulled to my work in other communities that I’ve only recently refound my roots here. It’s been a joyful ‘homecoming’. Many have been the times that I’ve connected with Muizenberg locals elsewhere over this decade, and seen how much Muizenbergers have had a positive impact in other projects, institutions and gatherings; and I think this place we’re based in, or have passed through for enough time to catch a whiff of spirit, has more to answer for there than we might expect.

In fact, in my case, I've been based here nearly half my life, which I never expected. Once upon a time it was just the first beach south, back when I was living in the student suburbs of Observatory and Rondebosch. Boxing Day (Day of Goodwill) and New Year’s Day holidays are still a testament to that, as vast numbers swell the beach here on their rare days off. Back then (as now) you could get here easily on the train by day, or I have a memory of somebody driving us here drunk, and skinny dipping in the midnight moonlight. I had no sense then of the imperial history of the place; of the millionaire background, of upper class tourists learning to surf back in the colonial heyday, of Rhodes and Bailey spending their ill-gotten diamond gains all over and roping Herbert Baker into designing buildings, including that mansion in the coastal dune zone where nobody else got to build, or the fake-quaint cottage on the Main Road where the ultimate bastard Englishman spent his last days. Bailey's Cottage deliberately growing up on the sea side of the railway tracks, perhaps a quaint little fisherman’s thatched cottage, if a diamond magnate hadn’t commissioned it. No, back then I had no sense that I would come to live here myself, or of how the community was trying to drag itself away from such an unacknowledged imperially-sanctioned-dark-money past. There were times when even driving as far south as Wynberg or Constantia was an exotic student experience, taking in parties on smallholdings far from the city centre, but still not as far as this False Bay beachfront.

Stone-house Muizenberg is one of the faces of the area. The grandee one, where often the stones might have been quarried in some other distant part of forever England, the roof tiles imported from Italy. Looking up at the more ancient stone features, the faces of the mouse or of Sergeant Muis or of whatever other tales of lore we have above us. For like Cape Town city centre, we have our mountain that comes down to the sea, not quite as grand but just as beloved as the Table. Farmer Peck’s Valley strides up the middle with its stream and, these days, its weekend charismatic worshippers, though Farmer Peck’s old tavern which lay below it two centuries ago is now a tertiary college - under the most infamous modern monstrosity around here, the multi-storey Cinnabar building, which can be spotted from the city centre, generally speculated to be the result of apartheid-era planning bribes. But this has always been a place of worship of course: how could such an obviously God-given location not be? From mysterious solstice monoliths to the colourful Islamic kramat on the edge of the sloping park, a stone’s throw from the elegant façade of the synagogue (even if most of the area’s Jews only arrive in the December holidays these days), and just above Christian Community FM radio station. There’s a bunch of Christian buildings here too: a simple church on the Main Road coming in, and in the past a range of Congolese and Angolan churches when the refugee community was bigger around the turn of the millennium, though they’ve mostly moved through now. Youth With A Mission on one street corner, and the George Whitfield Anglican Theological college all over the place, somewhat unexpectedly in a place that also boasts open mic blues evenings at the Striped Horse, our zebra-themed brewery tribute to the traditional red pub one, and more tattoo parlours than you would expect. I guess the missionaries came in to save us.

There are others in Muizies who worship numbers: the former ANC MP, Ben Turok, was brother to a Cambridge boffin and thus for a couple of decades now we have housed the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences, home to the most prestigious while least sociable bunch of post-doc researchers you could imagine (though I was intrigued last year by one of their public lectures on the mathematics of origami). All contained in one of the multi-storey art deco buildings that pop up unexpectedly here. We do an annual ‘architecture walk’ through the area for the students at my school, because Muizenberg has such a rich range of styles, if you just look up a little. Any complaints about our two-storey cob house plans were quickly dropped when the architect took photographs of the surrounding area, which is eclectic in a way I’m very fond of, down to a random observatory roof and another art deco piece a block away that looks like a ship collided with a slice of wedding cake.

The people here have always been a little more bohemian than other areas, in my humble opinion. If it was officially classified ‘white’ by the old NP racists, on the ground it was known to be ‘grey’. More recently, the number of bakkies being loaded up for Afrikaburn each year might give away the bohemian status of the ’berg, but also the number of theatre productions, musical gatherings, funky designers, yoga and dance classes, and obviously surfers.

The most obvious thing about Muizenberg for tourists is that the waves here are great for beginners on the board. Surfing might not be a creative art in its own right but it seems plenty of those who like to tune in to the tides are also ready to play in other ways. The surf shops of today have multiplied once more, after those dingy decades; and some, like Gary’s Surf School, have become history in their own right (“the oldest surf school in Africa”, it declares), as well as the artisan surfboard crafters. We should also mention the writers, much more recent ones than Agatha Christie (whose surfing exploits a century ago are rather hilariously remembered now on a local ‘blue plaque’). I wrote short stories and poetry in a room overlooking the ocean, in the Natale Labia museum (one of those aristocratic leftovers from that distant heyday), on a workshop run by a family member. She and her partner lived in one of two delightful old houses right next to each other that shared a gate, beside the suburban rail line. Muizenberg was progressively groundbreaking in the nineties and noughties in a funky and mostly female way, in my experience. On one side of us, in the small cottage we lived in before building the cob house, we had a publisher neighbour with a three-legged cat called Mephisto. And Alive dance studio was launching belly dancing as an embodied feminine force long before it was fashionable.

Perhaps our murals are not as prominent and all-pervading as those I witnessed in Mexico, but they still show up in lively fashion on many of our local walls, inevitably with ocean themes. Mosaic fish too: there are plenty of local ceramicists and sculptors and artists that I bump into now that I have a little more time to be home-based. And smiths: creative workers in metal, because Muizenberg has always had a grunge edge in the time I’ve known her. House gates and burglar bars are more imaginative than in other parts of town; as are the occasional metallic creatures appearing out of roofs. It’s a seaside town with a deeply edgy past so you can’t expect rampant gentrifying to take out all our teeth; and carnival creations are often being conjured up in Muizenberg workshops.

When I arrived in the late nineties, the surf was still up but the facilities on the front and the village itself had seen much better days. One of the beachfront prostitutes slept on our small stoep through the winter months with her boyfriend; they initially took the gap after dark and unnoticed, quietly crossing our little yard, but the snoring gave it away to us as our own bed was the other side of the wall. We allowed them to continue through the cold rainy season, partly because we knew her kids, wild warm-hearted girls who later spent time playing with our little babies, before they moved off to a care home. Yet the deprived nomad spirit lived on in the hood, and the shebeens carried on their trade – three of them in our street at one point, rocking out with central African vibes till the early hours, one at Don Pepe, a forlorn ex-Portuguese restaurant & “hotel” with serious overcrowding. There were plenty of ex-resident slumlords making a killing out of the poor.

Other local inhabitants at the turn of the millennium were the gangsters in the house next door to ours, who bought with cash and erected barricades to keep out the cops. Broken bottles in the servitude between us were the evidence of the mandrax being sold out the back. (Mandrax was a crude apartheid-created drug problem, a downer imported and even manufactured by apartheid security forces to the Cape Flats to zone out the locals and stop them getting too rebellious, sometimes even sprayed into crowds. A nasty kind of headache sedative pill thing that crushed up and smoked through a broken bottle neck gives you a moment of relaxation and not much else. It was initially popular with 70s disco crowds around the world; the US managed to clamp down on its production, though arguably only because ‘better’ products came along. But in South Africa it remains widely available, often illicitly imported from India).

Things gradually took a less ferocious turn, partly thanks to a very Surrey financial adviser who wanted to raise property prices again so he could move nearer the golf course down the road in Clovelly. That could sound sarcastic, but still it’s worth remembering what the late Nicholas Vaudrey did back in the day, prompted into action by the murder of local Jewish resident Sydney Seftel at the end of the nineties. Nicholas used to walk up our street and bellow at potential drug purchasers things like “Go home! Does your wife know you’re doing this?” Then he got more proactive, put a CCTV camera on his roof, caught the local cops taking bribes, and ultimately the Muizenberg Improvement District came into being to help clean things up. One new year my new family were at home when midnight came (I was out performing at a gig). They’d already dealt with the makossa and the rumba from the shebeen down the street and the gangsta house music next door, when operatic Wagner blasted out, on Nicholas’s superior sound system, drowning out the street in a moment of sweet revenge (he was out elsewhere and had set the timer). His Anglo attitudes could be a little snobby, and in the end he started requesting people stop hanging washing publicly (heaven forbid we start behaving like Italians or something); but Clovelly was waiting for him. Suddenly the house next door was under auction; we walked through, ‘admiring’ the ripped-out fittings that they’d taken with them on their hectic and hasty final departure.

At one end of the beachfront, by the railway station on the side of the African Soul Surfers building, there’s some old Victorian style painted adverts for “Kent’s Drapers and Outfitters” left over from a bygone era. Except, not. In 2003 I joined plenty of other locals as an extra on the beach, in a period B-movie about shark attacks in early 20^th century New Jersey, ‘Twelve Days of Terror’. Whatever the dubious qualities of that particular production, it was quite fun to spend a couple of days being paid to hang at the beach in period costume. And the dilapidated beachfront got a much-needed makeover, including painting of anachronistic adverts on walls! Which prompted much of the area to start turning around for real too. This was great on one level. We had an internet café, Breakers, back when that was a thing, run by Axel, a highly educated guy from Congo-Brazzaville making it good. Plenty of the refugee community were on the up in the relative tolerance of our hood, when ‘xenophobia’ against fellow Africans from further north was otherwise on the rampage across the country. I kept meeting people who were concerned for us “because of all the Nigerians in Muizenberg!” Nigerians at the time generally had a reputation among South Africans for being criminals, though the only real one I met in Muizenberg was a very gentle masters student I chatted to on the train (with a French-speaking mother, hence why he felt comfortable hanging out with these particular francophone local immigrants). But those from the DRC, the Congolese Republic, and Angola, if they made it out of places like Don Pepe, were generally quite stymied by the system. Rents were going up as the place emerged from its peeling paint phase. How to continue building community when the village was straining with typical SA tensions?

These were the kinds of questions Muizenbergers were wrestling with in the 2000s. Community spirit in times of diversity. I guess Muizenberg has been an appealing home for so long for me because enough locals try to find answers, even if they’re imperfect or short-lived. This place encompasses so much of life; as the waves continue to pulse with the beat of the eternal.