Postcards from the Threshold – Dianne Hofmeyr

Albert Memorial 1904 

This is not exactly a Boxing Day post – for that you’ll have to go to Dec 26th 2011 but Essie Fox’s on Christmas cards reminded me of how each year my mother-in-law put the same old favourites on display – some going back as far as the first Christmas after her marriage.

It was finding Susannah Clapp’s ‘A Card from Angela Carter’ in my Christmas stocking that reminded me of how histories can be woven from a few sparse sentences. Clapp has written this slim volume drawing from a few postcards Carter sent to her as a friend… like a paper trail of her life. Carter’s words are terse and funny and the images on the postcards often unexpected and baring no relation to the message.

The book made me dig out some of my own old postcards from the threshold of the last century. In the early 1900’s postcards would have been what email is to the early 2000’s, just as telegrams were what texting is today. Between the short sentences, it’s often the words left out that give the glimpse into history.

The Albert Memorial postcard above is dated 1904 and addressed to a Miss Brooks of The Dairy, Kew Green. It says: Hoping you have safely arrived with love to all. J. S. Where had Miss Brooks been that she might not be safe? And who is J. S.?

One from my mother-in-law written from her Junior school, Herschel in Cape Town in the early 20’s to her parents, in rounded, childlike cursive describes cutting herself on some rocks on an excursion to the sea, then she writes: I have been doing my best to please my mistress for my sake, their sake, and your sake, so please let me come home next Sunday and bring someone with me.

Her own father in his early teens arriving from Dallas Texas, to take up a position at a Stationers in London declares to his sister: I have been made fun of in London because no one wears their hair parted in the middle and I have had to adopt a side parting.

My father receives a postcard in 1913 aged six, from his father, while he stays in the Somerset Hospital in Cape Town for a few months with tuberculosis. His father writes: Hoping you are getting well. Daddy will see you on Sunday. One wonders if this, in typical Edwardian fashion, is the first visit he’ll have from any family in the time he’s been there? (the word ‘daddy’ surprised me).

The front of the card is rather gouged and shows children in his hometown of The Strand, 30 miles away, promenading on the beach. It’s all quite jolly with boys in boaters and knickerbockers and girls walking arm in arm, compared to the rather grim exterior of the hospital on a bleak seashore next to the Cape Town harbour. I wonder if the scene cheered him up or made him feel worse.

The new Somerset Hospital, Cape Town - 1897

The Strand beachfront, Cape - 1913

So with postcards and Christmas cards now a thing of the past, what about emails and texts? Will they be collected as a record of fashion and whimsy and modern comment – a new threshold to the world? In the mean time enjoy Boxing Day... or rather... the Feast of St Stephen.

www.diannehofmeyr.com

Carnivals and Confederate Ships – Dianne Hofmeyr

Boxing Day or St Stephen’s Day (with Good King Wenceslas looking out) is linked to the tradition of landowners allowing their servants to take the 26th off to visit their families. Servants were given boxes containing gifts, bonuses and leftover food. And alms boxes in churches were opened and money distributed to the poor. But as a child growing up in South Africa I recall Boxing Day being the time when the Cape Malays started rehearsing in earnest for the Cape Carnival.

With the summer southeaster tumbling down Table Mountain, I remember the sound of strumming banjos and banging drums reaching a crescendo. The main celebration takes place on the 2^nd of January when more than a hundred minstrel troops dressed in dazzling multi-coloured outfits, jump and jive through the streets of Cape Town pumping tiny parasols and crooning in the local dialect that mixes Afrikaans and English.

The Carnival started as a celebration of the end of slavery in the Cape Colony on 1 December 1834. Slavery had been abolished in Britain the year before. People taking part in the Carnival can trace their origins back to the Dutch East Indies, Madagascar, India, Ceylon, the Philippines, Japan, Macau and Malacca. They were captured or sent into exile and brought to the Cape to help establish the Dutch VOC refueling station. Collectively the group came to be known as Cape Malay despite their diverse origins.

They were often skilled artisans - silversmiths, milliners, cobblers, singers, masons and tailors and they brought with them culinary secrets that still infuse Cape food and are part of my childhood memories – pickled fish in a fragrant curry sauce served on Friday nights, babotie, minced lamb spiked with almonds and apricots and chutney and covered by an egg custard cream infused with tumeric or saffron, samoosas, the phyllo type pastry triangles filled with curried vegetables and koeksusters, those strands of plaited dough deep-fried and dipped in a cinnamon-flavoured syrup so sweet it put my teeth on edge.

Today a small pocket of brightly painted houses in the heart of the city, called the Cape Quarter, celebrates their culture. But originally many Cape Malays lived in an area called District Six, which was controversially demolished when they were removed to the townships during the ‘apartheid’ era. Since then the area has remained empty - a scar on the mountainside which serves as a constant reminder of an inhuman act.

But back to the swaggering troops of my childhood, dancing and singing of hardship and love and rivalry and mocking the men who were once their ‘masters’ and like the griots of Senegal, also singing of history. One of their most famed songs I remember from my childhood is about the day the Confederate ship, the Alabama, came sailing into Cape Town. Roughly translated its first line goes: Here comes the Alibama…The Alibama comes across the sea…

You have to imagine the long, crooning Cape Dialect that pronounced Alabama as Alee baa maa! (as in Obama). I was convinced they were singing about Alibaba flying over the sea on his magic carpet.

On 5 August 1863, a huge crowd of excited spectators gathered on Cape Town’s Signal Hill to watch the spectacle of the Alabama towing a prize, conquered right in the Bay – a ship called the Sea Bride. In his logbook Captain Semmes of the Alabama wrote that he gave chase to a barque with the United States colours in Table Bay.

The Master might have saved himself if he had stood directly

in for the land; but we ran down upon him under English colours, and he had no suspicion of our character until it was too late. The United States Consul at once protested against our violation of British waters! . . . Put a crew on board the prize (Sea Bride), and directed her to stand off until further orders. The moment the anchor dropped we were crowded with visitors.

As a child I never considered it odd that descendants of slavery should sing of a Confederate ship, nor that the second verse of the song should tell of secret liaisons between slave girls who slept with their masters between the reeds of the riverbed.

So with carnivals and Confederate ships… history is celebrated again and again in the month of December and January in the Cape.

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