Getting to Know Ocean View

Ocean View, Cape Town, was established in 1968 as a township for coloured people who had been forcibly removed from so called "white areas" such as Simon's Town, Noordhoek, Red Hill, Glencairn etc. by the former apartheid government under the Group Areas Act. It was first called Slangkop and the first resident moved in 1 August 1968. It was ironically named Ocean View, with residents being removed from their previous sea-side homes and views. As a result, its history is embedded in apartheid, and there is still much bitter resentment among many people.

The above paragraph is the extent of Wikipedia's brief article on Ocean View, where my fellow American students and I completed a weekend-long homestay as guests of a "coloured" family. "Coloured" is an apartheid-era, though more or less still accepted, ethnic classification, meaning a South African of Malay or other East Asian descent. The ancestors of most Cape Malay were brought to South Africa as slaves for the Dutch colonizers as early as the seventeenth century.

Some of the neighbors wanted their pictures taken as well.

After hearing of our destination a week or so before our trip, I immediately went to Google, hoping to gain a better understanding of the community. To be honest, there wasn't much to be had. What I did read didn't exactly surprise me, but still made me slightly discouraged: gangs, drugs, HIV, unemployment, alcoholism, teenage pregnancies, even, according to Wikipedia, "bitter resentment" amongst its citizens? One short online profile concluded, "Ocean View is still essentially a township where people eat and sleep, and live very constrained lives."

Yikes.

And so, last Friday, I said goodbye to Aunt Julie and Uncle John (by the way, wonderful visit!) and hurried off to catch the bus to Ocean View, mentally preparing myself for an atmosphere of general dejection.

I'd love to say that the websites were 100% wrong, but yes--I did see significant resonances of poverty and marginalization in the lives of my homestay mother, a woman named Nicole in her 30s, and her son Jayden, age 7. Nicole and Jayden lived in a 2-bedroom flat, which they shared with Nicole's sister and her three daughters. They lived in the very same flats that were constructed by the apartheid government more than forty years ago to house the thousands of Cape Malay evicted from their homes along the scenic coastline, which was was hurriedly transformed into "white-only" residential areas.

The flat, inside and out.

Nicole told me that the city is constructing new, bigger public housing nearby, and she'd thought about applying, but knew of parents with 5 or 6 kids in her building and said she didn't want to be "greedy." She mentioned her mother, a woman who passed away recently without receiving any of her promised property reparation. Nicole has been out of work for more than a year due to an illness whose treatment is rapidly eating up her savings. Jayden's school, the only elementary school in all of Ocean View, suffers from severe overcrowding. The park next to their building is too dangerous to walk through alone. Nicole's small kitchen lacks a stove or oven; she cooks using a hot plate and a microwave. They must scrupulously keep track of their electricity usage, or risk using too much and having it cut.

Yet Ocean View deviated strongly from the grim picture the Internet initially painted me. Whether or not they opted to live there in the first place, Ocean View is home, and they are proud of it. Are they "constrained"? Perhaps, if one uses a very narrow definition. Yes, Nicole doesn't own a car, a big challenge when one is trying to find work in a city whose public transport system is mediocre at best. Yet she woke up at 6:00 am on a Saturday to make upwards of a hundred sandwiches to feed a youth group on their beach field trip. Yes, the dropout rate at the local high school would raise the eyebrows of even some Chicago public school officials. But at our first night at the community center, Ocean View teenagers treated us to what was probably the most creative youth dance performance I have ever witnessed.

Nicole's best friend since kindergarten, Carmen, while driving me home from a bridal shower Saturday night, told me about her parents, both forced out of their house in Simon's Town in the 60's. Carmen grew up in Ocean View; had her daughter, Robin, when she was 17. "Most people here, they aren't very well-off," Carmen told me, her eyes staring straight ahead as we made our way along the dark N-2. "But we make it work."

My "host little cousin," for the weekend, Haley, and her neighborhood friend

Ocean View, for all its awful beginnings, is a home. And vibrant, lively, exceedingly resilient one at that. The people make it work. They make it work very well indeed.

(left to right) Sarah, Nicole, Jayden, me, and Michayla (apparently it was Spongebob day)