Home-coming?
Sometime around 1992, I had returned to South Africa briefly after an absence of ten years. The visit was prompted by the news that my mother required open-heart surgery and a valve replacement due to a congenital defect discovered when she had almost died during a recent mastectomy.
Mandela had been released, and very powerful feelings of home-coming surged through me as I landed back in South Africa from Tanzania, where I had been working again. The emotions that choked me as we flew around Table Mountain on the approach to Cape Town were almost unbearable—also clearly laced with concern for my mother.
An old school friend had offered us her beautiful home in Bishopscourt where we could all be while my mother recuperated in a magnificent garden overlooking the Kirstenbosch botanical gardens below the mountain. Perfect.
Ronald had joined me, and we discussed the possibility of re-establishing a base in a post-apartheid South Africa. These were confusing times with many whites pessimistic and leaving for other places. However, I felt that I wanted to return, and the idea of having a family home in Cape Town took root. There was only one area I would explore—Kalk Bay, a community less divided than most. Of course, there were scars, but there did seem to be more of a sense of solidarity between the fishing community and other long-term residents. In 1992, the process of gentrification had not yet got under way.
We only visited one house, which I had seen in the huge property section of the weekend paper. On the show house day, we were the only visitors, and I knew it was for us. It was ten days since my mother’s operation, and on her first outing, she took a drive to Kalk Bay to visit this house and climbed the few steps up to the front door. She had recovered incredibly quickly. Knowing that I was contemplating returning to Cape Town acted as a tonic, and she was full of energy and excitement. We stepped into a new chapter with the purchase in both our names. She was thrilled, and so was I, and my youngest sister moved in soon thereafter as I was still involved with frequent travel and consultancy work and would be for the next couple of years.
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In early 1994, Ronald and I established ourselves in Maputo, Mozambique, as peace accords had been signed and he was seconded to the UN mission there by the Swiss Foreign Ministry to develop systems for ensuring the first democratic election process. Independently of Ronald’s plans, I was engaged by the Norwegian Embassy, as Norway from the outset was committed to ensuring that a gender perspective was integrated into all aspects of the reconciliation and reconstruction process.
So, for the first time in ten years, Ronald and I found ourselves working in the same place at the same time. He had come directly from a sojourn in El Salvador, and a little later, I joined him from Geneva. My Portuguese was more than passable, and I could function fairly easily. I remember these months as being full of music and Mozambican rhythms as the country began to believe that peace was possible. The national dance company played an enormous role and was perhaps the central player in the strategy to establish conditions for holding elections. A nationwide education and training programme travelled throughout the country, with music and dance reflecting peace. The extensive network of trained observation teams from both parties ensured that the first elections were free from fraud.
At Christmas, I went from Maputo to Cape Town and spent some time in Kalk Bay, where I reconnected with my godson Jonathan, now twenty years old. After a great walk and climb up the mountain behind my house, I saw the ad in the Weekly Mail and Guardian for a position to establish an African Gender Institute at the University of Cape Town. Later, I sent off my application from Maputo and then returned to Switzerland to join Ronald for a period of rest and recuperation in the mountain village of Leysin after our busy but successful year.
I received the call from Cape Town in late January 1995, asking if I was serious and would be prepared to fly out for an interview the following week. Ronald suggested a walk in the woods to get in touch with my real feelings. The prospect of my returning to Cape Town was clearly before me. I returned to the warmth of our little chalet with a smile and nodded. It was decided. I was about to turn 44, and I knew I would be returning to my home.
With a two-year contract, a container was sent with some of our belongings from Nyon, including my precious grandmother’s piano, which was now about to make its third ocean crossing in 94 years, hopefully to find its final resting place. I need to explain how and why it was in Nyon.
Seven years earlier, in 1988, when there had been a frustrating wait for donor support for the programme in Tanzania, I had felt myself spiralling down in the anticlimax. And I was depressed. Even the beauty of the lake and wooded surroundings of Nyon, through which I walked daily and distractedly, did not lift my spirits sufficiently. In communication with my mother, concerned about my state, she suggested sending the piano across to me. She was contemplating a move, and the timing seemed right. My mother had intuited the need for music to return to my life. It was twenty years since I had left home for Cape Town and left my grandmother’s, my mother’s, my piano in Port Elizabeth.
So, I looked forward to its arrival via Rotterdam after a long journey by sea. And it finally arrived, carried up the spiral staircase by some grunting men. My emotions overwhelmed me as it entered into the living room—I saw my father listening, allowing tears to flow unabashedly after his whiskey, a stream of memories of musical moments as the ghosts of two sets of grandparents and extended family entered the apartment. Seeing the sheen of rosewood and the piano’s presence under the old beams made me cry. In an effort to explain my emotional reaction, I said to the men, “les sentiments sont lourds.” The huge man replied without smiling, “Oui, madame. Le piano aussi. Trop lourd!”
And there the piano sat, adapting and settling into its Swiss environment. This had been its second ocean crossing since it had been made in Berlin in 1901 and transported to South Africa. I am not sure when my grandmother acquired it, but my mother remembered as a young girl the soirées in their small boarding house in Port Elizabeth. Several long-term boarders were musicians, and there were regular evenings of singing and recitals. This Bechstein piano had been associated with my maternal lineage possibly since the 1930s.
There was music from my father’s side too. My paternal grandfather founded the Port Elizabeth Maritime Silver Band during the Second World War to raise funds for school feeding. And my grandmother Janet had been a popular vaudeville entertainer. Cockney, from the East End of London, she went by the stage name of Matilda Go-Lightly! A large, warm woman with a delightful sense of humour, she delighted in her own ‘troupe’ of twelve grandchildren—ten girls and two boys—encouraging our creativity and performance in song and dance. We were always putting on shows for our parents and assorted visitors. These were very happy years, and all these memories found their way to Nyon and hovered in the space around the piano.
My mother had included some of my old sheet music, and I tentatively tried to find the notes of the Appassionata. She had also sent over a camphorwood Chinese chest, part of her trousseau, which she had given me along with my grandmother’s alabaster lamp some years before. I was grateful that the delicate, beautifully shaped petals of the shade were all still intact after their long voyage.
However, soon after this, while I was still reconnecting with my piano, the long-awaited funds from Norway came through, and for the next several years I merely caressed the piano in between missions.