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When a Field Isn’t Just a Field
If you were driving along South Africa’s busy N2 highway from Cape Town International Airport towards the city of Cape Town and you looked to your right just before the abandoned power plant and the Athlone Refuse Transfer Station, you would see a field full of trees on the other side of the frontage road that runs parallel to the highway, behind a concrete fence. To most people zipping past on their way to Cape Town’s world famous beaches and other renowned tourist attractions the field probably doesn’t look like much. You probably wouldn’t notice it, or if you did, give it a second thought. It is overgrown with grass and the trees are small and nondescript. The hulking, dilapidated power plant looming nearby, with its broken windows, concertina wire and ‘keep out’ signs, along with the trash strewn along the shoulder of the road, imbues the scene with an air of forsakenness, the kind that permeates the half-forgotten fringes of many industrial cities in the US.
Now if, for some reason, you decided not to keep driving towards Cape Town, but instead you pulled off of the N2 and stopped your car near the field and climbed the fence and walked into the trees, you might see something surprising. The field isn’t deserted after all. Within the forest of small trees there are people milling about. They are young male members of the Xhosa tribe, which is made up of an estimated eight million people, including Nelson Mandela and many other famous and influential South Africans. These young males are initiates in a right of passage from boyhood to manhood called Ulwaluko. This prolonged ritual involves circumcision, spreading mud and ochre on their bodies, separation from women, fasting, instruction from elders, and prolonged isolation. In more rural parts of South Africa young Xhosa males might still go into the wilderness to experience this isolation, but here, on the outskirts of modern and bustling Cape Town, far from their ancestral homes, there is no wilderness that they can access. So instead they use this field on the edge of the N2, next to the refuse transfer station and the old power plant.
My wife and I moved to Cape Town about ten months ago and had driven past the field many times but I had never noticed it. I learned about the field and its special significance one day not long ago from our friend Thando, who was showing us around the nearby Langa Township, where many Xhosa people live in poverty. Now when I drive past I look through the trees to see if anyone is there and wonder what it must be like for these initiates, sitting in this urban ‘wilderness’ and waiting to become men, like their fathers and grandfathers had done before them, though perhaps far away and in a very different setting. From what I’ve read it seems that the rite is controversial (for health and other reasons) and that many urban Xhosa people have abandoned it altogether. Still, the fact that many of them continue to observe the practice, to find ways to keep doing this thing that obviously matters to them, says, I think, something interesting and important about us as a species. And it also reminds me of what I love most about travel: realizing that sometimes a field isn’t just field.
Travel teaches us to challenge our assumptions, and forces us to see our world from a different perspective. Often what we think we see or think we know turns out to be untrue, or at least different than what we expected; sometimes what appears to be an ordinary roadside field is actually much, much more. This is why I volunteer for Global Explorers. I want to play at least some small part in helping young people have these types of experiences.
Written by Matt Kareus, GEx Board Member
