Photo by Usama Ali from Pixabay
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Do we experience a sense of moral obligation to a place or location other than a nostalgic bond?
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An evening’s discussion at the Filosofie Kafee, convened monthly by Lamé Ebersohn, at the Breytenbach Centre’s ATKV Bôrdienghuis, helped this writer to think about how to value the citizens of her town.
Find your hope, then, on the ground under your feet.
Your hope of Heaven, let it rest on the ground underfoot.
The world is no better than its places. Its places at last
are no better than their people while their people
continue in them. When the people make
dark the light within them, the world darkens.
– Final stanza from A poem on hope by Wendell Berry
Recently, it was Heritage Day in South Africa.
The populace – the shoppers who swell beyond the pavements and into the grimy road, the agricultural workers who come in from the farms in their hundreds on trucks, the growing number of loiterers who drink on the sidewalk outside Sterns or Nikki Siebritz’s jewellery shop, the throngs who frequent Church Street – have peopled themselves elsewhere today.
The braai day smells have mellowed. Victoria Park, with its rose garden, is locked for the day, a big black chain securing its wrought-iron gate. You travel down the road, away from the NG Moederkerk at the very top, with its panoramic view of the entire length of the street; then you go past the private school, housed in what used to be the Pastorie, and then past the ornate grey NG Kerk hall with its neat Cape Dutch facade. Everything locked up. Past African Bank, predictably closed on a public holiday, because banks have always proclaimed that money doesn’t move on non-business days.
But then there’s a shop that’s open for trade. It is 4:00 pm in the afternoon, and it’s a cell phone repair and technology shop. (You never know when you might need that type of service.) Next to it, the chicken and chips shop is also open, and if you allow your eye to travel further down the street, you’ll see that a handful of others are also open – what one might collectively refer to as “the Chinese shops”, if one were prone to generalise.
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It feels like Hong Kong in the ’80s.
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Inside this Quick Fix Tech, a man stands behind the counter. The fluorescent lights blow out any possible shadow that might fall from the products on the shelves, any dust that might have gathered during the long shift. Earphones, cell phone cases, hookah pipes – it’s all here: all the paraphernalia, outside of the actual cell phones. Everything looks squeaky clean and desirable. It feels like Hong Kong in the ’80s.
Jaggi is his name. He says he is working today because he doesn’t have family to spend leisure time with. He’s been in South Africa for roughly three years. The shop belongs to his cousin, who has lived in the country for 15 years and is married to a coloured lady. Like his cousin, he is originally from Pakistan.
Jaggi eases into the conversation like a jaguar; he shows hardly a moment of concern about being questioned by a stranger. There’s nothing heightened or distanced, just an easy type of stealthy presence. His thick, dark hair makes waves at the back, like Cs curling upwards, and the rings under his eyes are a slightly darker shade than his skin. I guess his age correctly – 28. He is bowled over.
He lives two streets away, in an apartment that his cousin arranged for him. Yes, he likes Wellington, but he’d like to try other Boland towns, maybe Malmesbury or Moorreesburg. There is less competition there. Yes, he does know some of the other Pakistani traders in Wellington. (He mentions the people who run the shop next to Mannie’s Fisheries and the one directly opposite the Spar.) For the rest, he doesn’t really mix with them. He might see them at mosque, yes. But he sees other people at mosque, too. There are even white people who attend mosque, he says: “About two to three percent,” he estimates, pleased to surprise me. (Later, I learn from a colleague that this percentage can be quite high in some Cape Town mosques.)
And what does he do here all day, if there are few customers? “Oh, I fix phones when I wait,” he says, as though I should know that. He learned to fix cell phones a long time ago, he explains in an offhand way. He says it as though it were something he did on the side while drinking his mother’s milk. Nothing remarkable. A genetic predisposition.
So, why is he here, and what’s the attraction? I try to associate with him. Maybe it’s like being an exchange student or an au pair who travels from Cape Town to Europe. You go to another country for the adventure. Has he experienced any xenophobia? “No, nothing. We have papers to be here,” he says in a matter-of-fact way. Does he want to go to other countries? “Yes.” What is the best country in the world? “Pakistan.”
He assures me that an equally successful trade can be made in his home country; that’s not why one leaves, he seems to be explaining. “I am learning myself English,” he reveals. (I refrain from correcting his grammar, because he is clearly impressed with himself.) He takes out his phone and shows me Google Translate, pointing to the app. “This and AI.” When he arrived in South Africa, he couldn’t speak a word of English. And it must be hard; his mother tongue does not even have Latin roots. “I teach English,” I say, feeling like making a trade.
We exchange numbers. Perhaps I will see Jaggi Wahla again. There’s comprehension enough. But I can’t match his passion. Just before I leave, he spontaneously gives me the answer I need for the obvious Why-be-here-in-this-godforsaken-shop-on-a-public-holiday-ja-ja-you-don’t-have-family-around-but-that’s-not-enough-of-a-reason question.
“I love doing business!” His eyes light up. It’s a good thing he feels that way, because he has already said that he plans to man the shop for another hour or two.
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It’s Friday afternoon roughly a week later when I go into the Wellington Cash & Carry, on the corner of Main and Malherbe Streets. I am here for the cabbages. Water and cooldrink bottles, trays of cans and other products, all wrapped in durable plastic, stand everywhere right up to the door, ready for bulk buyers. Long, grey metal shelves stock various individual items. Fruit and vegetables line the aisles near the till. It is dark in the recesses of this shop, where you can buy almost anything you might need. The manager, Monirul Islam, stands near the front, leaning against the shiny railing that continues from the turnstile as a divide between the shop and the two tills, manned by younger men with equally dark hair and eyes. Monirul looks back and forth, his gaze bouncing between the line of customers leaving the shop like coins dropping out of a parking lot machine at the mall, and the patrons arriving, coming up the steep ramp into the shop. He has his hand on his business. “Do people steal from you?” I ask him. “Some people, sometimes. Not all,” he says. I see he is curious, maybe even mildly perturbed, about how I have been assessing his behaviour.
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His wife and family are back home in Bangladesh, where he goes once a year on vacation.
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Monirul has been in South Africa for 15 years. His wife and family are back home in Bangladesh, where he goes once a year on vacation. I am surprised to learn that this is not his own shop; he is merely the manager. I have been here before and have witnessed how he readily does the work of his staff, chipping in with a reprimand or helping out as he sees fit.
He left his home country during a time of political unrest. Now he just works and sends money home. He lived in Worcester when he first arrived. His one good friend in South Africa lives in Worcester. “He’s African and works for the government,” he elaborates when I ask. He has no friends in Wellington, where he is presently working, even though he has been here a number of years. I ask him again, incredulously. Indeed, he has no friends here. “My Worcester friend comes here sometimes, or I go there,” he adds.
The sister store, a Cash & Carry in Worcester, is from whence the fresh produce is delivered. He won’t divulge which farm the cabbage might be grown on. I know from prior experience it is the sweetest I’ve tasted, and so large that it is easily divided up between my household and that of my domestic worker.
There are only the bare minimums, really: cucumbers, carrots, tomatoes, lemons, onions, avocados, peppers – not in the plumped-up displays common in the regular supermarkets; instead, they are left in their unflattering boxes around the counter and the exit queue. The large cabbages are positioned on the counter to the left – four or five of them take up a corner position, also visited by the shop cat. I make my purchases and leave the shop with a cabbage at R35, three lemons at R10 and a lollipop for R1. Within two seconds, the cabbage falls right through the centre of the plastic shopping bag. It is just that heavy. Monirul helps me pick it up and then returns his gaze to the comings and goings of his patrons.
Out on the pavement, it is bustling. People walk along the one-way road, Malherbe Street, towards the Breytenbach Centre, the police station and the town library, the hub of culture and control, all huddled together on the next corner. Despite being a one-way road, Malherbe Street needs careful navigation. Bicycles travel in both directions and people fill the street to the middle sometimes, meaning that you have to drive very cautiously.
Later, at 6:30 pm, I drive past the shop again. It is still open. I am on my way to a discussion about the ethics of place, conducted by Schalk Engelbrecht, who is head of ethics at KPMG. The ATKV Bôrdienghuis at the Breytenbach Centre is packed to the rafters that date from the 1800s.
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He points out that our ethical frameworks prove insufficient when it comes to issues like climate change, AI and social cohesion (or erosion).
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Engelbrecht is on stage. He points out that our ethical frameworks prove insufficient when it comes to issues like climate change, AI and social cohesion (or erosion). He continues to say that there is not a well-established “ethics of place”. Do we experience a sense of moral obligation to a place or location other than a nostalgic bond?
Soon into the discussion, he reads the poem “On Westminster Bridge” by William Wordsworth. Place, he believes, is “ruimer as ruimte en ligter as ligging” (more spacious than space and lighter than location; it doesn’t translate well, I think to myself). It does, however, remind me of how UCT academic Hedley Twidle describes good literature. “Any writing that enlarges the space around it is beneficial.”
Engelbrecht maintains that place is where culture and nature intersect. It also holds history and connectedness, belonging, unity or cohesion. A place is creative, in the mode of a generative and constative creating of the self. A place does not merely exist as a physical setting; it helps create who we are, while we also continually create and define ourselves through our relationship with that place.
He argues from within the three main branches of philosophy. Engelbrecht suggests that we can’t approach ethics of place via utilitarianism (he mentions Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill) or via deontology (he mentions Immanuel Kant). Ethics of place can only be located in virtue ethics, he believes. It is Aristotle’s idea (perhaps also that of Elizabeth Anscombe and Alisdair MacIntyre, Engelbrecht adds). Quite colloquially put, it’s what we might call a character-building approach to ethics.
So, what is right and what is wrong for a place? He references an idea from Aldo Leopold’s 1949 book: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”
Engelbrecht carefully sifts out the idea of beauty from the quote. Although Leopold (1887–1948) was an environmental philosopher and ecologist, Engelbrecht knows his audience. Sitting in front of him is an audience that holds beauty as a high ideal. What can we understand, he suggests, under the slippery term “beauty”? According to Engelbrecht, beauty points to the fact that a place must maintain its creative potential.
He concludes: To respect a place must include virtues like gratitude, moderation and humility. He makes a brief reference to having patience for hadedas, and, quite surprisingly, nobody smirks. As human beings, we are merely links in a much longer chain of life, he adds. He reads Wendell Berry’s “A poem on hope”.
To apply ethics to the place you stay in is perhaps like Aristotle’s idea of an ideal friendship. It can be built on utility, it can be maintained through pleasure, but it is a form of virtue to relate to a place purely for its own sake, and to be satisfied when it thrives. To be in service to another, or to a place, is not only altruistic. In the end, you do it for yourself, because it’s a feel-good, like you might take your permanent cup to grab a coffee at Vida e. The chances that it will halt climate change and save the planet are close to zero, but you do it because you’re a good person and you try, he says. In my mind, I hunt for the likely people in my town who have permanent cups from Vida e. A branch has only recently opened down in Distillery Road, on the ground floor of the upgraded hotel, bought and renovated by a relatively young Muslim businessman who has turned around this previously notorious, seedy corner near the railway.
Someone in the audience asks a question about the benefit of shared spaces in town. (Engelbrecht has elaborated on the benefit of meandering in your own town, having referred to what he experiences in Stellenbosch.) Does our town offer the parks and the public spaces for people of different walks of life to interact in a way that can bring about social cohesion (a factor in eradicating poverty, says Engelbrecht)? Perhaps. Are such public places used by all? Do people willingly choose to go to areas in our town that are off their solidly trodden track? And what virtues can we foster in response to our own town?
I think about the puzzle of my town – the many people from many places who have congregated here for a plurality of reasons. I know the Cash & Carry is a vital link in a chain of retail stores for the lower economic class. As for me, to strike up a conversation with a shopkeeper is random – even to buy his cabbages. Because tomorrow it might be more convenient to buy elsewhere. Nothing spectacular is to be gotten out of the quick and superficial conversation, and a few cents out of the purchase is hardly something to write home about. Yet, that is not why it was satisfying to go to the Cash & Carry.
Engelbrecht concludes with a useful phrase which explains me to myself: My choice to shop at a particular store is guided neither by price nor by convenience, but by the simple intention of spreading my patronage across the different shops in my town. In this sense, the desire to support a plurality of local businesses operates as a non-calculative generator of conduct. In other words: nothing lost, nothing gained; integrity and stability maintained. As for beauty? I have to wonder whether making a mean coleslaw could count.
See also:
Moraliteit anderkant familieverband: die opkoms van vroeë Christendom