the Other Wes Moore (2010)

by Wes Moore

  "Right there is James Atlas, the writer from The New Yorker. Over here, that's Frank Raines. He is the head of the Office of Management and Budget in the Clinton administration." His pen then moved a few inches over on the picture. "And there I am. This is my Rhodes class."

  I stared at the photo of eighty young faces smiling into the camera. The plaid suits with large collars, the bushy mustaches and overdue haircuts, and the thick knotted ties were all obviously stylish back when he went to Oxford but looked a little funny through contemporary eyes. Then again, my high-waters and medium-size suit jacket didn't exactly qualify me as a fashion critic. I recognized a few other faces in the crowd and realized that, whether they were household names or not, this was an exclusive group that held a significant amount of influence and power. People who could engineer real change. Mayor Schmoke continued to tell me about his experiences as I listened intently. He reminisced about the stimulating conversations that took place in rustic pubs over warm beer. He told me about living and working in buildings constructed hundreds of years before the United States was even founded. He shared with me some of the trips he took around Europe. And he told me about the odd feeling of being a minority, not because you were African-American but because you were an American in the wider world.

  After he completed his anecdotes, Mayor Schmoke ended our meeting. He extended his large, callused hand, and before I could leave the office, he gave me one last order. Mayor Schmoke knew that, weeks after I completed the internship with him, I would be heading to South Africa for a semester abroad. To him this chance to see South Africa less than a decade after the end of apartheid was the perfect preparation for a real understanding of the Rhodes experience and legacy. In his thoughtful, deliberate cadence, he said, "While you are in South Africa, admire the beauty and culture. But make sure you do not leave without understanding the history. Make sure you understand who Cecil Rhodes was and what his legacy is. Know this before you apply for his scholarship." Not sure what to say, I simply said, "Yes, sir," my grip tightening in his hand. I thanked him for the opportunity to serve and began my walk through the archway leading me back into the waiting area.

  I found out years later that it was Judge Robert Hammerman and Senator Sarbanes who gave Mayor Schmoke the confidence to apply for the Rhodes Scholarship. I hope that, in some way, Mayor Schmoke felt like he had returned the favor. Of course, he did more than just point me to the Rhodes Scholarship, he instructed me to learn the larger historical context of the award. Although I didn't really understand it at the time, like Colin Powell, he was telling me that our blood-soaked and atrocity-littered past was important but that the future didn't have to be its slave. Even a legacy as ugly as that of Cecil Rhodes--a nineteenth-century imperialist, white supremacist, and rapacious businessman--could be turned around and used by a person like me, someone Cecil Rhodes would've undoubtedly despised, to change the world that Rhodes and people like him had left for us.

  I had traveled abroad before. I'd visited Jamaica often to see family when I was growing up. I also went to Cuba with a group of Johns Hopkins students to study the island's arts and culture--a trip I used to try to find my long-lost great-aunt and other family members. But this would be my first long-term trip abroad. The fifteen-hour flight would be just the beginning of a much larger journey.

  My January arrival was met with over-eighty-five-degree heat. Because South Africa is below the equator, their seasons are the reverse of ours, so I boarded the plane knowing that I would bypass the winter cold this year. I walked into John F. Kennedy International Airport with my sweater and oversize brown goose-down jacket, and I walked out into the Cape Town heat with just a T-shirt, shorts, and sunglasses shading my eyes.

  "Are you Wes?" a strongly accented voice shouted toward me. The pronunciation made my name sound like "Wez." I immediately knew this would take some getting used to. The voice, an unfamiliar mixture of Australian and Dutch inflections, came from the tall and thin but muscular man now walking toward me in khaki shorts and a Bahama shirt. A pair of sunglasses rested on top of his balding head. "I am," I cautiously replied. He smiled and introduced himself as the director of the study abroad program. He said his name was Zed, which, he explained, was a nickname taken from his first initial, Z, which is pronounced "Zed" in much of the English-speaking world. I had never heard that before but took his word for it. I felt a little disoriented by this smiling white Zimbabwean with the odd accent and strange name. I don't know what I was expecting for my introduction to Africa, but it sure wasn't Zed.

  I had applied for and received a grant to go to South Africa through the School for International Training, a Vermont-based program that offers the chance to live overseas for a semester or more. That semester, fourteen of us left our respective corners of the United States and traveled to South Africa. We went to school together at the University of Cape Town and studied culture and reconciliation--a subject for which post-apartheid South Africa had become a living laboratory. Aside from the formal curriculum at the university, we would spend our time learning the language, learning the country, and learning more about ourselves than we ever imagined.

  I sat in the back of a spacious van loaded down with bags and a group of confused and overwhelmed American students, staring out the window. I was dumbstruck by the natural beauty of the country. I could see the clouds rolling off Table Mountain and the crowds of wealthy South Africans casually peering into the pristine water at the V & A Waterfront. I was impressed by the natural beauty, but I knew that Africa wasn't just a giant safari. My grandfather, who'd worked throughout Africa as a missionary, would often share the truth with me about the tremendous cultural diversity that lies within the continent. But I was in no way prepared for the massive skyscrapers, gorgeous beachside drives, and awesome monuments I saw on our initial trip in the country. This city could have been dropped onto any American coast and nobody would have batted an eye. Or so it seemed until we moved out of the downtown and into the townships where we would be living. Our van eventually exited the expressway at Langa, the oldest township in South Africa.

  The legacy of apartheid was glaringly obvious in South Africa's cities. The institution of a legal, government-sanctioned racial caste system was overturned in 1994 with the first democratic elections, but its effects still haunted the country. Government-supported racial segregation had given way to economically enforced segregation. And, given the significant overlap between race and class in South Africa, whites, coloreds, and blacks all still made their homes in different locations.

  Langa was established in 1923 as Cape Town's first black township. Similar to Khayelitsha, Gugulethu, Kopanong, and other historic townships in South Africa, it was created for the sole purpose of isolating black Africans in small, destitute enclaves where laws were instituted to control the residents and police entered to harass, not to protect. When these townships were established, Afrikaners, or whites of Dutch ancestry, made up 9 percent of the population. Black Africans, who generally lived on only 5 percent of the nation's land, made up over 80 percent of the population. These were South Africa's "projects," areas where despair and hopelessness were not accidental products of the environment but rather the whole point. It was obviously a far more egregious situation, but I could sense faint echoes of Baltimore and the Bronx in the story of these townships.

  The van bounced steadily up and down as the shocks attempted to adjust to the transition from the paved, multilane highways to the pothole-laden, dirt-covered streets of the township. Kids, dozens of them, lined every street we drove down, staring at the vehicle as we cautiously cruised by them. Their smiles were bright, and they gave us the thumbs-up as we rolled past them, as if they had known us from somewhere else, which just reinforced my disorienting feeling of familiarity.

  A few minutes after entering Langa, we stopped in front of an understated white home in the middle of Mshumpela Street. Zed looked over his shoulder from the driver's seat and shared another gigantic smile. "Wez, th
is is your stop." I stepped out of the van and walked to the back to pull out my one overstuffed bag, my entire wardrobe for half a year crammed into a forty-pound Samsonite. My white Nikes kicked up dust as I made the short walk from the van to the front of the house. This would be my home for the next six months.

  A short distance to my left I saw a vertigo-inducing sea of shacks, rolling out as far as the eye could see. The walls of these houses were patchworks of wood or aluminum or metal or whatever scraps were lying around. Spare pieces of metal were propped up as roofs, and pieces of torn cloth were hung as curtains. These shelters were lined up in a sort of organized chaos; they seemed improvised and temporary, but they'd been there for years. Well, some of them at least. I would later find out that, every few months or so, the fires that burned in makeshift stoves would flare out of control, jumping from one tightly packed shack to another and burning out a whole section of the shantytown before they were extinguished. A week later, all the shacks would be rebuilt, and it would be business as usual. As I moved closer to the home where my host family lived, I couldn't stop staring at the shantytown. Living in the Bronx and Baltimore had given me the foolish impression that I knew what poverty looked like. At that moment, I realized I had no idea what poverty was--even in West Baltimore we lived like kings compared with this. An embarrassing sense of pride tentatively bloomed in the middle of the sadness I felt at my surroundings.

  I was five feet away from the door covered in peeling white paint when it creaked open. A short, rotund woman with cropped and curled hair, beautifully clear, dark skin, and a radiant smile walked out. She was wearing a dress that reminded me of the West African-inspired kente cloth attire I had seen in the States, but hers was an intricately meshed pattern of black and white, the traditional Xhosa colors. Xhosa was her tribe, and Langa was a mainly Xhosa township. It was also the tribe of Nelson Mandela, Govan Mbeki, and many other heroes of the African National Congress.

  I smiled and extended my hand to introduce myself, and was immediately wrapped up in her arms. She hugged me as if I was a family member she had not seen in years. "Molo!" she exclaimed into my ear as our cheeks pushed against each other, the Xhosa word for hello.

  Her affection was infectious, and I squeezed her right back. Once she let go, I noticed her children standing behind her, a son named Zinzi, who was a few years younger than me, and a daughter named Viwe, who was eight years old, waiting to welcome me to their home. Zinzi moved toward me, his short, dreadlocked hair spiked up on top of his head.

  "Hey, bhuti, how was the flight?" he said in a deep baritone voice. Bhuti, the Xhosa word for brother, was not used loosely. The family went out of their way to make me feel welcomed, at home. Viwe was a sightly but shy girl who stayed close to her mother's hip as she gave me a quick hug. I imagined how odd an experience it must have been for her having this American enter her small home to live. She knew nothing about me. In retrospect, I guess I did know how she felt. I felt much the same way.

  The week after I arrived, I walked into the kitchen to find only Mama sitting there. She was making herself some tea and asked me to join her. I sat down at the small wooden table next to the stove, the shaky tabletop stabilized by pieces of cardboard stuck under the legs. This was where most of the family's meals were eaten. She poured the boiling hot water into mugs with tea bags already placed inside and brought our two cups over.

  "So tell me more about yourself," she began.

  I had been spending so much time with my home-stay brother, Zinzi, his friend Simo, and the other Americans I'd come with, and attending our classes at the university, that I had not had a chance to really speak with her yet. Our tea turned into a three-hour marathon of stories about our lives, fears, and dreams. She explained to me the color dynamic in South Africa, how there I would be considered colored because I was not dark enough to be considered black. Colored was a concept created during the apartheid era to further isolate the races--coloreds received more privileges than blacks did. Not many more, but enough to seed antagonism between the two groups. The lighter your skin was in apartheid South Africa, the better off you were.

  I learned about the music of the apartheid era and how it was the musicians and artists, even more than the politicians and activists, who informed the world about the country's injustices. I also learned about ubuntu--the Xhosa word for humanity--and the power of authentic leadership as exhibited by giants like Nelson Mandela and a thousand other self-sacrificing visionaries who had managed the unforeseen transition from apartheid to democracy without a bloodbath.

  On our third cup of tea, Mama began to tell me about her husband and his role as a freedom fighter during apartheid. She told me about how he and his fellow soldiers were intimidated, arrested, and beaten for failing to comply with government rules about carrying personal identification cards. I listened in amazement and horror as, through trembling lips, she talked about the hopelessness the people felt during this time and the pain of knowing that this level of segregation, this level of poverty, this level of depression was being imposed on a people for things they were in no way responsible for, or should be ashamed of. Finally I had to stop her. "Mama, I am sorry to disturb you, but I am very confused. After all of this pain and heartache, how are you now able to forgive? You seem so at peace with yourself and your life. How are you so able to move on?"

  She gave me an easy half smile and took another sip from her mug. "Because Mr. Mandela asked us to."

  I'd expected more. I'd expected her to tell me that she was still working on her revenge scheme, or that she was afraid their weapons were too strong so there was no use in fighting. But her simple and profound answer helped me to understand that ubuntu was not simply a word. It was a way of life. Her candor and exquisite simplicity framed the rest of my trip and helped me better understand the land I was living in. It also helped me complete a thought that had begun that night with my father and developed through my training and education, and my time with Mayor Schmoke in Baltimore.

  The common bond of humanity and decency that we share is stronger than any conflict, any adversity, any challenge. Fighting for your convictions is important. But finding peace is paramount. Knowing when to fight and when to seek peace is wisdom. Ubuntu was right. And so was my father. Watende, my middle name, all at once made perfect sense.

  A few days later, I finally had a chance to talk to my mother on the phone. I was excited to share all of my experiences. And she, having never been to South Africa, was excited to hear my detailed descriptions. She updated me on how everything was going back home and then shared a piece of strange local news.

  "Everything is fine, but I have something crazy to tell you. Did you know the cops are looking for another guy from your neighborhood with your name for killing a cop?"

  A few weeks before I was set to leave South Africa and return to the States, I was walking with Zinzi and Simo from the kumbi, or bus station, back to the house. The once overwhelming sensory overload of township life now seemed second nature to me. Kwaito, a South African mix of hip-hop and house music, blared from cars that passed us. Children kicked soccer balls back and forth on the dirt-covered road, with large rocks serving as goalposts. Women spoke loudly to one another while carrying bags in their arms and on their heads. The sounds of the quick, click-ridden Xhosa language was everywhere. I was beginning to understand the language, and the feel of the street life. My stride through the Langa streets was slower and less frantic than it had been. I was finally feeling at home.

  My friendship with Zinzi and Simo had also grown significantly. Every day after class, we would walk around the neighborhoods, talking to girls on the university campus, going to Mama Africa restaurant to grab one of the best steaks I've ever tasted, or watching cricket at a local watering hole. All of this felt particularly sweet in these last days, as the nostalgia that kicks in at the end of any meaningful experience had started to affect us. Simo looked up at us and said, "So both of you all are leaving soon? What am I suppose
d to do then?" Both Zinzi and I were about to embark on journeys. I would soon be heading back to the United States, where, in a matter of months, I would be accepting my degree from the president of Johns Hopkins, William Brody, who had become a cherished mentor and friend. Despite entering the school with lower scores than the average student, I would walk across the stage as a Phi Beta Kappa graduate who was also the first Rhodes Scholar in thirteen years at Johns Hopkins and the first African-American Rhodes Scholar in school history.

  Zinzi, now seventeen years old, was preparing to take the same path as generations of Xhosa boys before him. He would be leaving soon to spend four weeks in the "bush," where he and dozens of other boys would join an aggregate of elders and learn what it means to be a Xhosa man. Within days of arriving, the young men would be circumcised, their foreskins removed like childish cloaks now deemed unnecessary. During the weeks it takes the circumcision to heal, they would learn about the history of the tribe, the battles they'd fought, the land they protected, the leaders they'd created. They would learn about what it means to be a good father and a good husband. The boys would meditate and pray together, eat together, and heal together.

  They would return to their homes as heroes. A large feast would be cooked for them. They would wear all white for the month after returning, symbolizing that a boy had left but a man had returned. They would be spoken to differently, viewed differently. I asked Zinzi if he was scared.

  "Not really, man, we all have to go through it. Besides, I saw when my older brother went through it and how much respect he got. It will be fine."

  "Yeah, but I can't imagine that whole circumcision thing without any drugs, man. Way too painful if you ask me!"

  Simo smirked at the thought of it while shaking his head. Zinzi laughed and said, "I hear you, but it's not the process you should focus on; it's the joy you will feel after you go through the process."