How I love radio studios. Don't get me wrong, I love TV studios too, but there is something... timeless about radio studios. They don't get all dressed up for one show only to be stripped down and re-dressed, making like they love the new show as much as they loved the old one, like TV studios do. They are.... more balanced than that. I've done lots of radio interviews for SILLMS. I've sat round tables with famous folk on a chat show, I've squeezed into booths on my own, hundreds of miles away from my interlocutor and I've scrambled round central London during my lunchbreak trying to find a quiet spot to talk on my mobile to an interviewer on the other side of the world.
The safm offices at Sea Point look like radio offices look.... except they're, kind of, opposite the sea. Excitingly, when I arrive, there is a certain amount of confusion about how the furniture has ended up where it is. It seems the chairs, the bench, are in the wrong places... maybe there was a bit of a party here yesterday. When the furniture finally comes to rest I take a seat and watch the producers doing their thing. One of them is trying to get hold of and keep hold of two different interviewees on their mobiles. They are both in remote areas, it would seem, and one of them is going in and out of meetings. In between doing this she is talking to Nancy, the presenter, and giving her readings of the names of her interviewees. Kate was a producer. I enjoy watching them, thinking of her, like, maybe she's doing a similar kind of thing in Joburg right now. She's not really dead..... you can see where this was going.
South Africa, like everywhere, has its own set of characteristics, and one of them is that, with 11 official languages, people are constantly mis-pronouncing each other's names. I have a very bad memory and so I cannot remember very run-of-the-mill UK names, and the harder they are for me to pronounce, the harder they are for me to remember. But I fit in round here with my fervent whispers to companions, "What was his name? With a V? With an F. You really say it like that? You're not winding me up...?"
And people have more than one first name. Staff is my hosts' domestic worker - she's been with them for... at least fifteen years. She got on well with Kate. Before I introduce her to friends, especially ones from the UK, I have to tell them that her name really is Staff, rather than it being the name my unreconstructed racist friends call the woman who comes and magics their home into domestic order. Then, the other day, someone said, but what's her real name, her given name, her Xosa name? Hmmmmmm. Embarrassing for moi: I am a Guardian reader and I'd really messed up here - I had no idea. The next time I had the chance I asked her.
"Staff is my name."
"But your Xosa name."
"My parents only gave me Staff."
"So that's your only first name?"
"No, there's Nolwando too."
"Oh, is that what your parent called you?"
"No, that was my husband's family."
"Oh, so a nickname, then?"
"No, when you get married your husband's family choose a name for you."
"They choose it?"
"Yes."
"Do you get a say?"
"No it is for them to choose."
Blimey. If it's not echoes of colonialism, it's patriarchy living high-on-the-hog. Have I mentioned my problems with weddings? I don't think I have, which is a miracle as I have many of them, the central one being that marriage was invented to pass ownership of a woman from her old owner (father) to her new owner (husband) and yet women still love a wedding. This whole Xosa name thing really does rile me up as with so many traditions in the UK... but it means it'll save me social embarrassment of the champagne socialist kind in the future when I introduce people to Staff.... Nolwando.
I have a most enjoyable interview with Nancy Richards and then I rendezvous for lunch with Team SILLMS in the cafe of a hotel which overlooks Artscape and other buildings, as well as a fabulous sculpture ... even looking down on it Artscape looks enormous. By the time I get there, Zach, the baby, has already been whisked away by the waiting staff: they love him. Everyone loves him. He is very cute and well-behaved, but there is something more to it - people want to touch him all the time, have photos as if he is a celebrity. I think I have Zach to thank, though, that when I need some quiet for an interview with Africa Melane on Cape Talk radio just after lunch, they are willing to turn off the restaurant music for me. By the time I'm done, Team SILLMS have gone back to continue the tech and I sit alone, enjoying the view. And then it's back, hidden somehow from me, but there nonetheless, the gentle thrum of my tension. Like a baby with some noisy foil, I can be distracted easily by interviews, they can make me believe I am interesting - that is how the interviewers react after all because it's their job, and presumably behaving as if I am interesting means I hopefully become more interesting. And yet... there is a very real theatre just over there, challenging me to feel the fear and do the show anyway.
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