Those Detroit Blues

Note - This article originally appeared on the website of Trebuchet Magazine and can be found here: http://www.trebuchet-magazine.com/detroit-just-bad-really/

No city evokes the sense of urban, industrial decay quite like Detroit. Once America’s fourth largest city, Detroit has fallen to eighteenth in the latest census, losing nearly a quarter of its population in the last decade alone. Houses stand empty and abandoned, often the victims of arson attacks and metal thieves. Packs of feral dogs roam the streets.. Unemployment hovers around 19%. Three of five children live below the poverty line, half of the city’s streetlights are no longer operational, and you could get a pizza delivered to your burgled house before the police get there.

Despite all this, Detroit is on the up-and-up. Young professionals are moving back into the city centre. Artists and musicians are taking advantage of the fact that property prices are at an all-time low, and upscale shops like Whole Foods are settling in to Midtown. Friends of mine recently bought a house in the historic Corktown neighborhood, just outside downtown – three bedrooms, two bath – for $60,000. Detroit has a wealth of art and cultural experiences still at hand.

It is criminal how overlooked this post-industrial gem really is, and I’m here to change that. In the first of this two-part series, I’ll be looking at the city’s rise and fall. How did Detroit go from industrial behemoth to Mad Max-inspired wasteland? Does it really play host to a secret race of mole-people? Just how bad is it really? In the second, I’ll try to convince you that, yes, Detroit is a city that is worth your time.

Much of early America’s wealth came from the vast untapped resources at its disposal. Detroit started out as a French fur trading post back when beaver skin top hats were all the rage. The city grew throughout the 19^th Century as several Gilded Age resource barons took advantage of Michigan’s timber fields and copper deposits. However, it took a transport and manufacturing revolution for the city to really take off. In 1903, Henry Ford founded the Ford Motor Company, a move that would turn Detroit into the world’s automotive capital, The Motor City.

As a manufacturing powerhouse, the city became a key component in America’s “arsenal of democracy,” during World War II. Detroit alone accounted for nearly one-quarter of the United States’ tank production over a five-year period. After the war, factories transitioned from planes and tanks back to automobiles, spurring a car culture and suburban sprawl that would eventually lead to the city’s undoing. As the burgeoning interstate highway system clawed its way through the city, massive concrete, six-laned arteries took middle-class families out of the crowded city center and into an ever-sprawling suburbia.

Detroit was at its zenith in the 1960s. Over two million people called the city home and enjoyed the country’s highest income per capita. By 1960, one in six Americans were employed directly or indirectly by the auto industry, but it wasn’t all blue-collar car guys. Culturally, Detroit could compete with any other American city in terms of music, art, and entertainment. Motown Records started up in Detroit in 1959, cranking out 110 top ten hits in a decade. Diana Ross, The Four Tops, The Jackson 5, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, The Temptations – all hit it big recording in the Motor City.

Today the city’s music scene might be better known for Sixto Rodriguez, the aged folk guitarist who was at the center of the Academy Award-winning documentary Searching for Sugar Man. His Establishment Blues (1970) spoke to Detroit’s slowly evolving political/economic crisis as the latter half of the century unfolded –

“Garbage ain’t collected, women ain’t protected
Politicians using people, they’ve been abusing
The mafia’s getting bigger, like pollution in the river
And you tell me this is where it’s at.”

He wrote those words a few years after the Twelfth Street riot, one of the most destructive civic disturbances in American history. Over the course of several days 43 died, over 1000 were injured, and more than 2000 buildings were destroyed. The riots prompted massive urban flight, especially of the white population, to the outlying suburbs.

The city had always had its racial tensions, as did most of the Midwestern United States during the Great Migration, the movement of former slaves from Southern states to Northern manufacturing towns at the turn of the century. The competition for low-skill, blue-collar jobs was fierce and helped to radicalize a strong following for the Ku Klux Klan. However, the death knell for any chance at racial integration in Detroit came not through violence or race hatred, but through a 1974 Supreme Court case, Millikan vs. Bradley, which held that de facto racial segregation in schools, through district housing policies and redlining (charging blacks more for banking credit, health insurance, etc.) had to prove intent to be considered in violation of US law. In other words, policies that produced overlapping class and racial inequalities were not segregationist. This all but guaranteed white flight from Detroit’s inner city, as anyone with money fled to more affluent areas.

By the time the 1980s rolled around, Hollywood gave us Robocop, Paul Verhoeven’s hyper-violent (for the time) cop flick about a crime-ridden hellhole where mega-corporation Omni Consumer Products own the police, and mafia bosses share power with business execs.

Sci-fi dystopia is meant as a warning. It should never be this prescient.

As housing prices plummeted, property taxes did as well. Services suffered. Police and fire systems faced severe cuts. The city tried to raise taxes to offset lost revenue, prompting even more migration into neighboring, lower-tax counties, thus further eroding the tax base. Despite falling population, the city had difficulty cutting services to match their diminished needs and continued to fund lucrative pension schemes on a borrowed dime. The city now has twice as many pensioners as public employees, and it can hardly afford to pay any of them.

Desperate to clean up the pension problem that hammered any chance at a balanced budget, in 2005, Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick engineered a $1.44 billion deal with Wall Street, leaning on derivatives and complex credit swaps to fund the failing pension schemes. The deal imploded with the financial collapse and now represents nearly one-fifth of Detroit’s $20 billion debt.

(A quick sidebar on Kwame Kilpatrick. If you, like me, love a good story about slowly unfolding, long-running train wrecks of hilarious, humiliating, brazen, and absurd corruption. You will love Kilpatrick. Detroit’s mayor from 2002 to 2008, he was recently sentenced to 28 years in prison for crimes including mail fraud, wire fraud, racketeering, obstruction of justice, and tax evasion. Beyond the blatant corruption, he is probably best known for hosting a party at the mayoral mansion that involved several exotic dancers. When Kilpatrick’s wife returned home early, she attacked one of the women, Tamara Greene AKA ‘Strawberry,’ and sent her to the hospital. Days later, Strawberry was murdered in what investigators suspected was a deliberate hit by a member of the Detroit Police Department. Kilpatrick continually meddled in the case, removing special investigators and costing the city millions in wrongful termination lawsuits. Kilpatrick’s full biography really has to be seen to be believed.)

Today, Detroit is on the verge of a historic bankruptcy case, one that will decide the future of the city. The Republican governor of Michigan has appointed a bankruptcy lawyer to govern the city’s finances. If the city defaults, pensioners will receive pennies on the dollar for their retirement plans, the city will be forced to cut even more essential services, and the Detroit Institute of Arts may have to sell off some of its impressive collection of modernist and post-modernist art to keep the doors open.Despite all of this, the city is still an impressive monument to a specific time and place in American history, and, I firmly believe, it is on the up and up. I have recently spent several days in the city, and I fell in love with it. In the next article, I will tell you why you should check it out and why a city that is so far gone still has so much left to offer.

Touring Mbare Township (Part Two)

In the last post, I visited Mbare, the oldest black township in Zimbabwe’s capital Harare. The neighborhood is dominated by high-density, low-income housing, the most visible of which are the long rows of ugly brick and cement apartment buildings known locally as hostels.

Ooh...spooky.

Overcrowded, dirty, and dilapidated, from the outside, these hostels look like hell holes, the only refuge for people living on the edge. It’s difficult, from the safety of a vehicle driving through the township to comprehend the lives that are lived in these dreary blocks. From other travels and experiences in poor countries, I knew that even in hardship, there is life. That people smile, cry, love, and die just as in every other place in the world. I wanted to visit, to see and gain a real feeling for the place, rather than sit back and let prejudice craft an experience for me.

Mbare is more than Zimbabwean. It’s a cultural melting pot that has brought together men and women from throughout the region. During the Rhodesian era, the white government used the township as a kind of holding district, a ghetto for working class men who provided the labor for the factories and other industries in the capital, Salisbury. The hostels were built to house men and men only. The showers are unisex; the apartments are small and cramped. They weren't designed to hold families.  Women weren't allowed in the townships. It helped keep the male population under control. The apartments weren't meant to be homes, merely housing. The policy dehumanized an entire population. Labor was merely an input to serve the country’s industrialization.

While wandering through the quiet streets, we met Luso, who agreed to show us around the hostels and introduce us to some of his friends. Luso was a Malawian who had stayed on after the government cleared the slums that had cropped up around the city. Known as in Shona as Murambatsvina, “Operation Clean Up,” or, more literally, “Operation Refuse the Dirt.” In 2005, the government moved bulldozers and heavy equipment into the poorest of the urban areas, ostensibly to clear dangerous informal housing and clean up crime. Many saw it as an attack on opposition supporters, as the MDC drew much of its support from these underserved areas. Within weeks, the townships had been transformed, at the cost of many peoples’ homes and livelihoods. Some returned to the rural areas. Others left the country, never to return. Areas that used to resemble Kibera in Nairobi or Kayelitsha in Cape Town now look much like they did in the 1950s – just overcrowded, underserved high-density housing reminiscent of American projects or English council estates.

As Luso led us through the property, we came upon some children playing at gymnastics. They had set up a large truck tire at the end of a long stretch of pavement bordering one of the apartment blocks. With a long run up, they would launch themselves from the concrete, stomp the rubber rim of the tire and use the force to catapult their bodies up and over, performing a full flip before landing on a pile of stacked quilts and blankets. They did it over and over and over, sprinting down the concrete, hitting the tire, and flying through the air. Occasionally they would land on their feet, more often they ended up on their backs or at times with their nose planted in the cushions. The kids were fearless, as only kids can be. They weren't old enough to remember the bulldozers that destroyed their neighbor's homes.

The run-up.

He hits the vault!

Stunning, simply stunning.

His competitor.

And a flawless landing! (Kinda)

Luso introduced us to his friend Sylvester, a short, powerfully built man who’d filed his front teeth into points. Though young, lack of proper dental care had rotted the points into jagged, brown clumps. He wore a shirt advertising his allegiance to ZANU-PF, but I wasn't sure, and didn't want to ask, if he supported the party or merely supported the giving away of free shirts. The government has a strong hold on Mbare. Campaign posters mark several buildings and trees, but it’s unclear if it’s politics of the heart or of the stomach that affords them such support. A free tee-shirt or hat can go a long way. Giving away food before an election can go even further.

Sylvester led us up two flights of dimly lit, heavily worn stairs. The hostels were built in the 1940s, and the cement stairwells exhibit the smooth, rounded corners of long use by many people. A woman ran a small shop at the entrance to the building. She sold tomatoes, onions, oil and other essentials one commonly needs on short notice. As we reached the second floor, we met Sylvester’s friends, all young men in their twenties and thirties, sitting idle on a Tuesday afternoon. One could fault them for not working, but the reality of Zimbabwe is an unemployment rate that is catastrophically high, up above 80% in Zimbabwe's formal sector. Women often work informally buying or selling goods in many of the townships’ markets, but for the men, who are more used to hard labor or more masculine pursuits, there is little demand their labor. Sylvester’s friends smoked marijuana and watched the world go by, much like their counterparts in Western project houses.

Sylvester’s room was small, maybe only fifteen square meters. He shared it with his wife and younger brother. His brother used to live in another building, but had to move in when a kitchen caught fire, smoking out the residents and damaging the building. So it goes. Sylvester owned a television, a bicycle, a radio. He made do off of “one day’s work, when it comes. One day here or there.”

RGM watches you eat.

Kitchen, Living Room, Bike Storage, Bedroom

What struck me about the hostels was that, even though they looked filthy from the outside, they were actually very clean. There was an obvious pride that the residents held for their homes. The walls held years and years of smoke from candles and cooking fires, the paint was cracked and peeling, but the floors were clean, the toilets, shared between dozens of people, serviceable.

We left the hostels for one of the local shabeens. With no women and little entertainment, many men escaped through alcohol. The Rhodesian government encouraged this, building massive community taverns with shaded courtyards and cheap beer. Though they sell bottles of Castle and Black Label, the shabeens do most of their business in local brews. Oscar and I split a bucket of chibuku, the sorghum beer favored all over the African continent. Eighty cents bought two liters of the thick, sour concoction.

“It’s a meal and a drink!” said Chibwe, a retired civil servant who frequented the bar on a Tuesday afternoon. “When you want a meal, but don’t have much money, you drink this. And you get drunk too!”

Despite it being 1:30 in the afternoon on a Tuesday, there were still a handful of men at the bar, mostly old age pensioners or middle aged security guards waiting to start the night shift. The old men dressed impeccably, pressed shirts and stylish hats harking back to an earlier time. When you have so little, you take pride in your appearance. It’s one of the few markers that you have any control over. These guys weren't alcoholics, but they did drink. The shabeen on a weekday afternoon is as much a social space as it is a drinking place. The leafy garden keeps the worst of the spring heat at bay, and if you’re lucky, someone will come along to buy you a drink.

The old men

Buying the chibuku

“I can’t stand the chibuku, it’s for me, Blue Diamond.” Phenias was a war veteran, or so he claimed. When I pressed him further, I learned that he’d joined the army in 1980. If he were an independence fighter, he hadn't fought for very long. I slipped him a dollar, and the fifty-five year old ambled off, returning several minutes later with a small plastic flask. Its blue lid and crystal clear contents belied a poisonously powerful local vodka. He mixed it with equal parts with water. “You have to dilute it,” he said, giving me a drink. Even diluted, it tasted like a mix of rubbing alcohol, coconut, pineapple, and benzene. I nearly choked. I’d be sticking to the chibuku.

Poison

Two liters of goodness.

We spent the afternoon drinking and chatting. I tried to raise some political questions, but whenever I did, Phenias took the opportunity to answer for the group. It’s a common problem I've encountered in Zimbabwe. If there’s one person there who is staunchly pro-Mugabe, he or she dominates the conversation, cowing others into quiet agreement. I wanted to hear other voices, other opinions, but Phenias dominated the conversation. I quickly had little to say to him. By three o’clock, the worst of the heat had passed, and we left Mbare.

Driving past the hostels, the shabeens, the Mai Musodzi Community Center, and the Pioneer Cemetery, I could reflect a bit on what I’d seen. Certainly, it was nothing out of the ordinary, but the boring of the everyday brought life to the community. Before I visited, I might stare blankly out the window of a bus passing through the township. I might see a certain community hall or a dilapidated hostel and think little more of it. Now that I know a bit about the township’s history and its people, I can’t unknow what I've learned.

These people, these places, they’re real to me now, they matter. In a place like Mbare, where even Zimbabweans fear to go, this recognition is what matters. Not the recognition of a white man, but just the simple acknowledgment that they inhabit one planet, the same planet as I. It’s a powerful connection for a community that has long been overlooked.

Touring Mbare Township (Part One)

Mention the name Mbare to an upper-middle class resident of Harare, and the reaction you get will inevitably be one of, “Why would you ever want to go there?” It’s got a reputation, and it’s not a good one.

Garikayi “Oscar” Makuyah hopes to change that. He used to live and work in Johannesburg, leading bike trips into some of the city’s townships and destigmatizing areas known for high levels of crime and poverty. He recently returned to Harare and is looking to do the same for his home city. It’s an uphill climb, but the view from the top could change the way people live in the long-neglected neighborhoods.

Mbare is the oldest township in the country. It was founded in 1907 as the English settlement of Salisbury began to expand. As the growing city industrialized, men from the rural areas and as far afield as Mozambique, Zambia, and Malawi began to settle in the quickly expanding suburb of Hariri, a name that the capital later took for its own upon independence. The Rhodesian government built male-only hostels in the 1940s to accommodate the growing population and corral their labor force. These still stand, their brick and concrete exteriors chipped and cracked, their windows missing, broken, or rimed with dirt. People crowd around the doors and open landings, taking refuge on cool concrete shaded from the midday sun.

Mbare still houses one of the country’s largest produce markets, a reminder that locals used to provide most of the city’s fresh vegetables long before white farmers dominated the agricultural landscape. The local flea market is the biggest in the city, selling second-hand clothing and other goods. Its name in Shona, Mupedzanmho, means “the finisher of all problems.” It’s the last, best stop for all your fashion needs. More importantly, the market is a hive of activity, potentially generating millions in the informal sector. “It’s a multimillion dollar environment,” says Oscar. “But no one knows, as everything is liquid. It’s just cash flowing in and out.”

The township was founded on the edge of town, lying next to the cemetery, the abattoir, and the sewage works. The cemetery is still there, graves dating from the 1890s still stand, though their occupants are unknown, the copper markers stolen for scrap long ago. The untended plots uncover the history of a city divided by race. The English, Indian, and Jewish graves are segregated into their respective neighborhoods, while the Africans occupy an empty field. “They couldn’t afford gravestones then, so it’s basically one mass grave. They just buried people on top of one another,” Oscar told me. “You can see how big the cemetery is, and then you think about how many more Africans there were. Who knows how many are buried there.”

A view of Pioneer Cemetery.

The plot of land where Africans buried their dead.

Rhodesia was still a member of the Commonwealth during the World Wars. The graves of the fallen have their own designated space, but even in death, race segregates the soldiers. White soldiers are buried hundreds of meters away from the blacks and the coloreds. The latters’ shared space is subdivided as well, blacks on one side, coloreds on the other. Comrades in arms separated by the melanin in their skin. The soldiers’ graves are the only ones that have been maintained. The Commonwealth pays for their upkeep. All throughout the rest of the cemetery, weeds choke the cracked and broken tombstones, plastic and trash blown from the township litter the pathways, and it is clear that some of the mausoleums are used by the homeless for shelter from the elements. In Harare, the ancestors are neglected.

The Sacrificial Cross - A Memorial to Commonwealth Soldiers

WWI Dead. Notice the separation between British South African and Native

Turning from death, Oscar and I visited the Mai Musodzi Community Center.

Mai Musodzi was an African feminist in the early 20^th Century. If there’s ever a woman who deserves more attention, it is one of the pioneer black feminists fighting both patriarchy and racism in one of theBritish Empire’s white settler colonies. She believed in women’s empowerment through what today would be considered “income generating activities.” She organized sewing and knitting classes as well as training for nurses to work for the Red Cross. She pushed for women-run maternity wards in the city as well as registered marriages to protect women’s rights within a relationship.

These were especially important goals in Mbare. The township was never conceived as anything more than a worker’s ghetto, a place to house men to labor in the factories and other value added industries serving a burgeoning agricultural sector. As women moved to the urban areas following husbands and fathers, the Rhodesian government realized that it could use this migration to their advantage, employing women as nurses, domestics, and other professions commonly devalued as “women’s work.”

Today, Mai Musodzi’s name still graces the community center, which is now mostly used for weddings and other large functions. Out back, however, it also houses the Shukokai Karate Club.

Behind this door...lies another door.

We were met by Glover Musariri, a stocky but powerfully built man in his early forties. He is the leader of the karate club and has been practicing his art for more than thirty years. “I was three or four, and I really liked the movies of Chuck Norris and Bruce Lee.” At the age of nine, he joined the club and trained in the Shukokai style under a white instructor who now lives in Durban.

This dude.

He has about thirty to forty students, but his star pupil Brian Kupara is his pride and joy. At the age of 26, he has traveled throughout the region, earning twelve gold medals from various competitions. Glover used our presence to kick him around a little, ostensibly showing us several techniques while giving his pupil a bit of a hard time.

I’ve met kids playing at karate all over Africa, but I've never met one who took it past play. I have to admit; even I spent many summers ‘practicing karate’ with the neighborhood kids, which essentially entailed beating the crap out of one another for hours on end. To actually commit to the discipline and continue to practice for years after was outside our realm. If Bruce Lee ever knew the affect he had on kids around Africa, or even on this one man, I’m sure he would have sprung for a goodwill tour across the continent.

Who could resist? Also, hey ladies...

This is the first of a two-part entry on Mbare. The township has a life of its own that is virtually unknown to the majority of Zimbabweans. It has its own characters, its own history, its own culture. More than anything, I wanted to experience more of this culture – to visit one of the hostels, to drink at the local bars known colloquially as shabeens.

I got my wish, but that’s more for next time.