"Good Old Grahamstown"

As city slogans go, this one is as appropriate as any. "Good Old Grahamstown," timeless in its way, changes as everyplace doers, but the changes are largely cosmetic. Peppers, one of my old haunts, is no more, having been replaced by a burger joint and some other establishment. The Old Vic hotel was once the seedy late night, last chance dance club-cum-meat market. It now is actually a classy hotel and retaurant. But it is the same. The Rat and Parrot is still the best pub in town, a great place to get a drink and meal during the day, increasingly crowded and loutish as the night grows old, packed and tedious, the faces changing over the years, but the people remaining the same.

Grahamstown is a university town that also hosts the largest arts festival in Africa and purportedly the second largest in the world behind Edinburgh. I've been to two festivals, may come back for a third this year or next, and during those two weeks Grahamstown transforms itself -- cafes and new pubs and rock clubs and takeaways emerge out of nowhere and return there when all is said and done. But other than that tweo week eruption, and the attendant year-round planning, Grahamstown is virtually inseparable from Rhodes University.

I had almost forgotten what a wonderful place Rhodes is. I have been lucky enough to be affiliated with some pretty good universities -- Williams, of course, and Ohio, but also brief fellowship tenures at Virginia, Oxford, and the University of South Carolina. Rhodes easily belongs in these ranks. In 2004 Rhodes celebrated its centenary, and the university is thriving. Numbers are up, students continue to go on and do great things, the campus is gorgeously manicured, the buildings classic, staid, pleasing, creating small courtyards and an ambience that gently reminds one of a university's purpose. I had truly missed campus, and I am pleased to have several days for us to get reacquainted. I even went for a contemplative walk on the pitch of memories, sneaking onto the Great Field where I played rugby for Rhodes in 1997. I let those times flood back -- here is the patch of field where I made my best play, by these steps is where I suffered through my first team workout since college, over there at Tri-Varsity I took a boot to the face, suffering a gash that required several stitches but continuing to play and thus, in the eyes of my teammates, finally becoming a rugby player. And so on. memories, in the end, are what we are left with, and while there are inevitably regrets about any place and time we inhabit, I am happy to say that so many of my first recollections have been positive.

There are two Grahamstowns, though. There is the one I have tried to evoke here and there is the Grahamstown that developed along segregationist and then apartheid lines. There is elite, affluent Grahamstown. But then there is the majority -- poor, still segregated, street children begging, with the township buzzing and humming but sputtering as well. The townships loom on the fringes, bearing an ambivalent, sometimes hostile relationship to the town. The massive, ugly Settlers Monument sits astride a hill overlooking town, and the view shows the city and surrounding townships, the red slate rooftops of the university and the corrugated tin shacks on the outskirts, the majestic cathedrals of this city of churches and the squalor of the black masses still waiting for the fruits of the post-apartheid landscape to bloom.