Once upon a time I composed blog posts in my head as I went about my day. At the first opportunity, I sat down at the computer and the words just ran out of my fingertips. It was easy to blog.

These days it isn’t so easy. I always considered myself an ethical semi-anonymous blogger but blogging under my real name seems to have muzzled me a bit. Also, I just don’t have that constant blog post composer running in my head all day. Instead, I have songs on repeat, endless To Do lists, and topics I want to learn more about. If I do occasionally find myself mentally stringing a few sentences together, they disappear before I find myself with wordpress in front of me. I suppose this is a very long, drawn-out apology for my silence. I’d like to promise better performance but I can’t help but wonder if perhaps my blogging peak is just behind me.

Anyways, we’re going to Cape Town in less than two weeks (Ack!!!!). My goal is to undertake a more intentional photography project while I’m there than I have before, but to do it in a way that doesn’t compromise the family visit and holiday aspect. I’m not sure if it’s possible but I’m going to try.

I’ve been reading Transforming Cape Town, published in 2008 by an American anthropologist, and it’s truly absorbing me. It’s making me realize just how naive I was about Apartheid. I knew it was bad but I didn’t realize just how bad. And I knew its legacies would take generations to overcome but I didn’t realize just how insidious and numerous those legacies are. A few facts that are sticking in my mind:

- the 2001 census indicates that 39 percent of Cape Town’s households earn incomes below R19,200 per year (at today’s exchange rate that’s about $2700 CDN. In other words less than we’re spending on airfare to get there.
- a 2002 report quoted in the book says that a quarter of blacks are unemployed (although in some townships the figures reach 70 percent) but only 3 percent of whites are unemployed. I’ve always heard that it’s very difficult to get accurate unemployment figures in the townships because of all the informal settlements in South Africa – nobody knows exactly how many people live in them, and people are always moving in.
- One person quoted in the book said that the most shocking thing about the end of Apartheid was seeing pornography for the first time. This speaks to me of just how effectively the government censored absolutely everything.
- Before Apartheid, Cape Town was the least segregated city in South Africa. Post-Apartheid, it is the most segregated city in the country.
- The racially segregated neighbourhoods created by the Group Areas Act remain largely unchanged. Under this legislation, thousands of families were evicted from their homes and removed to townships that were and are far from the city centre and jobs without decent public transit.

The book contains a good mix of introspection and personal stories of people the author met while in Cape Town between 1999 and 2004. In university my friends and I had a habit of dismissing all other fields of study besides ours (English). I always considered anthropology deeply flawed because of its emphasis on the people being observed to exclusion of the people doing the observation. This book is changing my mind, in large part due to the author’s introspection and initial disillusionment with the field of anthropology. In many cases, I think I could easily apply these thoughts to the act of photography – or at least the kind I aspire to do. For example:

“Intensive fieldwork is a gloss that covers a vast array of promiscuous techniques and messy encounters.”

“anthropology’s use of the phrase participant-observation to describe our research technique doesn’t clarify what we really do, which is watching. Watching people interact and situations unfold is actually a much more threatening undertaking than the neutral-sounding observing, a fact often well understood by those we watch.”

I think I still need to come to terms with my watching.

Here are a few more quotes that stopped me in my tracks:

“We as a world need South Africa to succeed and pioneer a model for meeting the challenges of poverty and racism.”

“The glamorized representation of poor people’s homes in the book [Shack Chic] suggest a new aesthetic – poverty fashion? – that celebrates the innovative creativity of the poor while saying nothing about the injustice of poverty.”