The Funambulist is a magazine and a podcast engaging with the politics of space and bodies.
We have a francophone version as well!
https://thefunambulist.net/shop/65-after-soweto
The Funambulist
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It’s how we learned to swim. It’s how they learned to swim, and those before them. She holds out her arms so I can doggy paddle back to her. When I was older we would swim races to Warfie. The train would pull into Kalk Bay station and we would run onto the sand to jump over the shadows of the
carriages until the train passed and then run back into the water."
"Even for those of us who were allowed to stay, the threat of forced removal to the Cape Flats continued to loom over our heads."
thefunambulist.net/magazine/fif...
"In Kalk Bay, we learned to swim on Fisheries Beach, which was first written about by the Dutch colonizer and slaver Simon van der Stel, Governor of the Cape in the 1700s. It was also the beach where the British colonizers processed southern right whales and boiled their blubber to send the oil
to England to illuminate British lamps. An Apartheid beach for Coloured people who had to travel from the Cape Flats—where they had been relocated by force far from the city and the shore—in the dark by bus and train to get a spot under the tunnels of the railway line. Slave descendants returning to
to the beach with joy on their faces. Dancing to the banjo. Spirited bodies flailing on yellow sand. I marveled at them, fully clothed, excited to spend the day in Kalk Bay, our place.
Julle gaanie daar onner nie! [You don’t go down there!] Unless we were a clan of friends and cousins from the
the community. My mother swam in a shorts and a t-shirt or in her dress. She never owned a swimming costume. She put me on her back and I swam to Warfie rock. I held on to her, tightly, because in that moment she was mine. All mothers swam to Warfie rock with their children. It was rite of passage.
The Funambulist
The Funambulist
The Funambulist
The Funambulist
The Funambulist
The Funambulist
We were both born in the mid-1970s in Cape Town, surrounded by oceans. Despite all that liquid expanse that had brought our varied ancestors to port in a place alive with crossings of all kinds—some…
