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Monday, February 23, 6:23pm SA time | 10:23am IA time
The flight into Johannesburg arrives on time, but I feel as though I’ve traveled several lifetimes, not just time zones. Hours of turbulence that rocked the route throughout the night has rendered me sleepless and drained of adrenal glands. I am a nervous flyer (read: terrified) so I spend the hours of turbulence vacillating between trying to either control the plane with my thoughts or releasing my ego into the void.
Despite all of this, landing in Africa fills me with a floating happiness that can’t be thwarted by the exhaustion. I am traveling on a reading tour with the International Writing Program – a tour organized in collaboration with the US Consulate in Cape Town and through a grant from the US Department of State – and we have set off to a participate in a packed schedule throughout South Africa, including the city of Kimberley in the Northern Cape and concluding in Cape Town. At this point in the trip our group consists of Christopher Merrill, Kelly Bedeian, Kia Corthron and myself – & we race to the next gate. Our plane to Kimberley leaves in less than an hour, so we scramble through customs and baggage re-checking in the Johannesburg airport. There is barely enough time to register yet that we are actually here, we have made it from Iowa to South Africa.
As our plane descends into Kimberley, we see a series of giant holes in the ground. It is actually hard to call them “holes” they are more like oddly circular caverns and they are enormous – each one dug right into the earth, looking slightly like Great Pit of Carkoon (a singular Star Wars reference). Kimberley has a long history of diamonds and diamond traders, and these holes signal we are entering it.
We are greeted by Amy from the US Consulate and our host Sabata-mpho Mokae, a former resident at the International Writing Program (2014) and now a lecturer in creative writing at the newly formed Sol Plaatje University. Â Sabata, a man of boundless energy and effort, has organized our time here in Kimberley with fantastic skill, weaving seminars, readings, community events together with ease. You can tell immediately that he is a highly respected and revered person here, as well as warm and kind. They pick us up, and drive us into town, to The Kimberley Club, a notorious hotel in colonial fashion that reverberates with a provoking history. Founded in 1881 by Cecil Rhodes (see: Rhodes Scholar; see: Rhodesia), The Kimberley Club was a meeting place for the men of the burgeoning diamond industry.
We get lunch, but it feels like we should be getting dinner. I am suddenly starving, an intense hunger that Kelly tells me comes with the jet lag. I have fooled myself into thinking that I could manipulate my body in such a way as to avoid it. But as we sit down to eat, my body is made of balloons. Tired, tired, balloons. In addition to this, something I didn’t expect: I feel like I moving back and forth, up and down. The whole time we sit at the table (and even now, as I type this) I can feel the swaying and rocking of a turbulent plane in my muscle fibers. Still, the air here is magnificent – warm, soft – a type of weather that redistributes the lines between my skin and the atmosphere, so soft that I can barely feel my own boundaries. I am in love with Kimberley.
After lunch we head to one of the main attractions in town: The Big Hole, an emblematic site of the South African diamond rush. Here is where the fraught and provoking history of Kimberley begins to truly come alive, this “City of Diamonds,” this “City of Opportunists.” Kimberley was the first city in the world to illuminate their streets with electricity – even before London – but this feat, as great as it was, was only a by-product of the booming diamond industry in the town, once named “Big Rush.” The street lights hummed with power from the large generator which had a first purpose was to facilitate the explosive and invasive mining. In this way, diamonds lit the city. Men traveled here to find fortune, but it was Cecil Rhodes who succeeded in developing a streamlined industry around the extraction and created an industry that was hugely successful and fraught with labor exploitation, deaths, mining tragedies, and abuse of African workers. This is a story that is just now beginning to being told: how workers dug the Big Hole by hand – this enormous cavern like a mountain inverted, this hole so deep that the birds find a new sky inside of it, gliding several hundred feet below us over the turquoise water – workers manually shoveled out this pit with spades and pick axes, all while un-or-barely paid.
It hangs in the air, this history & we are staying at – and enjoying despite – the locational apex of the dichotomous realities of these mining years, The Kimberley Club. This colonial hotel is delightful, quaint, quiet, with excellent food and an easy, friendly air – yet the ether and vibration of its disturbing history exists (Cecil and the other men, gathering, making tons of money), intertwined with the mahogany and stained-glass, interjecting itself into the place, and rightfully so. It is reminding us to continually listen to the previously untold histories and see what truly occurred. It is a comfortable environment, hued with the uncomfortable knowledge of a despairing and heart-wrenching past, and I set the intention try to sit with both of these feelings, holding them together in observance, with the focus on actively listening.
Tomorrow, we will head to Sol Plaatje University – a newly forged institution that is growing at an exponential and exciting rate. Here we will share and participate in creative writing seminars for an array of writers, from high schoolers to professionals. The university’s motto is in three languages: “Lesedi al Africa – go Batho” (Setswana), “Lit bit Afrika – via die Mensdom” (Afrikaans), “Light from Africa – For Humanity” (English): a hopeful indicator that the streets in Kimberley are being lit again, this time with the insight of all things literary.