“My pa, my father was a garden boy… My ma, my mother was a kitchen girl… That’s why I’m a socialist, I’m a socialist, I’m a socialist!”
The Kaif crowd looks up from their samoosas, startled. Who’s that singing? And dancing! Where did these people come from?
“My pa, my father was a garden boy… My ma, my mother was a kitchen girl… That’s why I’m a socialist, I’m a socialist, I’m a socialist!”
The Kaif crowd looks up from their samoosas, startled. Who’s that singing? And dancing! Where did these people come from?
In an instant, that ever-recurring question of whether to go to the double Statistics lecture or chill at the Kaif has been effectively banished from the collective consciousness. Not that it was every really a question. I mean, they don’t usually sell Smudge in the Barratt Lecture Theatre.
Last Wednesday, 28 March, there was yet another reason to stick around and partake of the richness and diversity that is Kaif culture at the cafeteria of Rhodes University. In fact, a call went out to “Occupy the Kaif!”
Like the Occupy Wall Street protests against corporate greed that have plagued New York and other major cities in the recent past, “Occupy the Kaif!” was a stand for the Earth. You see, a lovely little practice by the name of hydraulic fracturing (or, somewhat more expressively, fracking) is being brought to South Africa. Fracking is a technique to extract natural gas from the bedrock, and involves the injection of very large amounts of water mixed with toxic substances into the rock, fracturing it. This releases the gas, but also pollutes the groundwater. The process releases methane (a greenhouse gas) into the air in large quantities. It has even been thought to cause earthquakes.
This is what the oil company Shell would like to do in the Karoo, right here in the Eastern Cape. There has been a moratorium in place preventing this, so that the practice can be further researched, but this moratorium was lifted at the end of March. Who knows what will happen now?
The protesters were in the Kaif from 8am to 4pm speaking to passers-by about fracking, signing interested people up to a mailing list, and just basically calling for “Research before Wreckage!”
Then, at lunchtime, things got really busy. Two bus-loads of people from Joza and eThembeni in Grahamstown East came to join in the protest. That was when the singing started. And the toyi-toying.
That was when the mild curiosity of the Kaif crowd turned to active interest, alarm even. And all they wanted to do was eat their samoosas in peace.
The protesters finally came to rest in front of the library steps, to discuss what could be done about fracking. For once, the people of Grahamstown were standing together to work out a solution to a problem. Not an “East” problem, or a “West” problem, but a Grahamstown problem.
