Khayelitsha: Our New Home

Yesterday, Zimasa - a friend from the market - brought us to her cousin's circumcision ceremony in Khayelitsha.

Khayelitsha is one of Cape Town's townships - huge, informal settlements of people living on the outskirts of the city. From the N2 freeway, all you can see of Khayelitsha is miles and miles of shacks, all crammed together in what looks like endless heaps of brightly painted, corrugated scrap metal. This is Site C, one of the most destitute parts of Khayelitsha. In the rest of the township, people's homes range from similar metal shacks to small but decent houses with plumbing and electricity.

The celebration was held in one of these better houses, somewhere deep in the maze of Khayelitsha. When we took the exit off the N2 and began winding our way through the endless stretch of shacks, I tried to remember the turns - left, right, straight for many blocks, left again, right again - but even so, it didn't take long before I had completely lost my sense of direction. We drove for a while down what seemed like a main street - on either side, there were many shacks painted to say things like "Beauty Hair Salon" or "Platinum Cafe". It was like a main street in any town, except all of the buildings were small, corrugated metal shacks, most of them enclosing no more than about five square feet of dirt floor. The street itself was paved and beautifully maintained, bustling with cars and minibus taxis. And everywhere there were pedestrians - men in jeans and t-shirts, children in colorful mismatched clothing, women with earrings, handbags, and well-coordinated outfits. 

When we pulled up to the house, the yard was full of men and women - the men in dark, nondescript streetclothes, and the women mostly in colorful traditional dresses, wraps, and headscarves. (Although there was one woman wearing a pink “I heart NY” sweatshirt over her traditional clothing.) They all stopped what they were doing and stared at us in silence. But once we got out of the car and Zimasa began introducing us, they broke into huge smiles and each of them shook hands with us warmly. “Hello baby! Thank you for coming!” many of the women said to me, and hugged us all in turn. It was really touching and completely unexpected to see how happy they were to welcome us to their celebration – they showed us around the little house, introduced us to everybody, explained what was going on at each stage of the celebration, fed us, talked to us, urged us to come back someday. Back in the States, we would hardly have gotten the same reception if we had randomly showed up at, say, someone’s wedding party.

Here in Khayelitsha it was all the more touching to me, because we were not only strangers, but complete outsiders to them in just about every possible way. They didn’t resent us for being rich and white (all of us were white to them, although I’m Chinese and Mikail is Bangladeshi). They don’t have much food, but they were happy to share it with us all the same. It’s hard for me to understand how they could welcome us so openheartedly, in spite of the fact that we come from completely different walks of life.

Some of them offered us a taste of umqombothi - their homebrewed beer - which they were passing around in a paint bucket. 

The beer itself looked and smelled a lot like some sludgy mixture of campfire smoke, paint thinner, and rubbing alcohol. I couldn’t bring myself to try it, although Ryan and Zimasa both had a sip as the others looked on, all of them grinning broadly. “How do you like it?” they asked. “Can’t get enough of it,” said Ryan, wrinkling his nose, and they all laughed.

Later, as I was sitting with Zimasa on the step outside, one of the men wandered over and started talking to me. After discovering that neither Mikail nor Ryan was dating me, he told me, in that very earnest and serious way that only the slightly drunk can manage, that he wanted me to marry him. Too late, I started protesting and making up a story about a boyfriend back in the States, but Zimasa next to me was laughing so hard that pretty soon I was laughing too.

“But I love you!” he implored me tipsily. 

“But you are drunk!” scoffed his friend, who was also drunk, sitting on my other side.

Eventually some of the other men came and pulled him away, laughing and telling me not to worry about him.

The ceremony itself was fascinating to watch, although most of it happened in Xhosa, so Zimasa had to whisper to me what was going on. The circumcision actually took place a month before, and her cousin had just returned from spending that month in isolation, in preparation for his final coming-of-age.

In the first part of the ceremony, he sat in the house on the floor, surrounded with all the women in the family. He was wrapped from head to foot in dark blue blankets, his head bowed in deference as one by one the women got up and lectured him on the responsibilities of becoming a man. They were all extremely severe, as though they were chastising him for doing something very naughty, like stealing the car keys or staying out all night at a party. But once they finished, the mood changed completely – they all stood up and began smiling and singing and dancing, and we could hear the men singing too from outside the house. The women helped Zimasa’s cousin stand up, and he was half led, half carried out of the house to join the rest of the men in a shack in the backyard, where they sang and passed around the homebrewed beer in the paint can, and gave him more advice about being a man.