The vision that gave hope to PMB children

SOUTH AFRICA, Christmas Day, 1973. A white boy, nearly 11 years old, is sitting on a lounge carpet listening as his family chat. All too soon, as it so often did back then, the talk shifts to race.

As the prejudiced words begin to fly, the boy thinks: “How can they mock people who are living in poverty — people who aren’t living in proper houses and who can’t get a decent education and who struggle every day to put food on their table? How?”

So, as children do, he looks up at one of the adults and says what he’s just thought. Silence follows. Then a pat on the head and a patronising voice saying: “Ag, but you are so young. You don’t know what is really going on.”

Everyone carries on talking, leaving the little boy with no real answers.

Thandanani Children’s Foundation director Duncan Andrew (45) still remembers it all vividly.

As he reflects on the organisation’s 20th anniversary recently, Andrew has found himself reflecting on his own life. He says he feels a personal closing of a circle since that day as a child.

Andrew saw Thandanani, which works with orphans and vulnerable children, through its greatest challenge, a financial crisis in 2004 and 2005. He was employed as a development programme manager, and then took over as the director after the crisis struck. Five years later, his turnaround strategy has been hailed as a huge success, with Thandanani being nominated for a national award recently.

“It was strange reflecting on that Christmas Day,” says Andrew. “Where did I get those questions and thoughts from? It wasn’t like I was exposed to a life in the township. It was just basic fairness of common humanity. I just couldn’t understand how people could ignore the suffering that was taking place and respond in such a callous way.”

Born in 1963, Andrew grew up in Ladysmith and Durban. He attended Queen’s College in the Eastern Cape and then returned to Durban to study. With a masters degree in psychology, Andrew moved to the Pietermaritzburg campus in 1991 to do his internship with the student counselling centre.

Andrew recalls how some of the interns went to Edendale Hospital in 1991 to observe a group of volunteers looking after abandoned children. Those volunteers were a part of Thandanani, a newly established group that tended to about 70 children living in the hospital.

Andrew remained at the counselling centre for seven years and got to know Pietermaritzburg intimately. In 1998, he was promoted to director of the student counselling centre at the Natal Technikon in Durban, where he remained for four years.

Andrew then moved to Cape Town, where he entered the world of NGOs. “I was appointed as the public education and training manager at Triangle Project, an NGO that did HIV-Aids-related work,” he says.

Three years later, Andrew decided to come home, and got a managerial job at Thandanani. He arrived for work on October 15, 2004. He hadn’t been there a week when he was informed by his acting director that he — and the rest of the staff — would not be getting paid for the rest of the year because there were simply no more funds. “I thought they were pulling my leg at first, but then it became very clear that they weren’t.”

Andrew helped the staff process the news that their jobs were more or less doomed, but also tried to find solutions to prevent that doom. “We had our backs against the wall. We were either going to close or we could fight to carry on.”

Andrew and the staff chose the latter option. “There was some very hard and quick thinking. We engaged internally in a very consultative process, because it was up to all of us to pull this organisation out of the situation.”

Andrew started to see hope. “What became clear after interactions with the staff was that over the years Thandanani had done extremely good work and had a good reputation — but that reputation had been slightly tarnished in the period leading up to the crisis.”

With outside stakeholders volunteering to get emergency funding, Thandanani had to operate on a limited budget.

“We had formulated a short-term survival strategy, which included operating on reduced hours and reduced salaries for a period of time to allow us space and time to generate income for the organisation again.

“Fortunately, the goodwill that did exist towards the organisation —and because we had a clear plan to get out of the crisis and knew what we needed and for how long — meant that a lot of the existing donors did then come on board and contribute additional funding.”

During the crisis, the director, a lot of management staff and the board resigned. A new board was appointed and the position for director was advertised. Andrew got the job.

The wave of resignations meant the organisation could start afresh. “Thandanani emerged with a much clearer understanding of who it is and how it functions.”

Andrew’s developmental approach as director has given freedom to his staff to take their decisions in order to grow.

“It’s a type of organisation that needs a director who facilitates in an open, co-operative, transparent and inclusive style of decision-making. People have to be involved in decision-making, so they understand the rationale behind each decision.”

The little boy sitting on the carpet wanted to make a difference to those living in poverty. The full circle Andrew has travelled means he can do that now.

“My role at Thandanani has been the most fulfilling position I have ever been in. A gogo will just go off at one of the development facilitators in absolute gratitude, or a kid will just smile and not stop smiling when you give them their new pair of school shoes. It’s those little moments that make this all worthwhile.”

This article first appeared in The Witness on May 21, 2009

The land has spoken

“The land has been talking to me,” says Professor Cherif “Zwelethu” Keita, the Malian-born director of the French and francophone studies Department at Carleton College in the United States. “It has spoken to me and I have delivered what it wanted: the truth.”


The truth Keita speaks of is contained in his second documentary, Cemetery Stories: A Rebel Missionary in South Africa, which was screened at the 2009 Durban International Film Festival last week. It links 19th-century American missionaries William and Ida Belle Wilcox to John Langalibalele Dube, and reveals how the missionaries’ friendship and mentorship of Dube helped the black teacher and clergyman on his path to success.

Keita was given the name “Zwelethu” by the Inanda elders and the Dube family, who received him into their family after his first award-winning documentary, Oberlin-Inanda: The life and Times of John L. Dube. “Giving me that name was a prophecy,” says Keita. “It started to reveal to me the centrality of the land issue in Wilcox and Dube’s political struggle over the years, hence my strong desire to bring the two families together.”

However, Keita couldn’t understand exactly why a Muslim Malian language professor based in the U.S. was conducting such heavy research into Christian missionaries in South Africa. “Near the end of my research the answer came,” he says. “My house in Northfield, Minnesota, is located right next to a cemetery. And in that cemetery are buried the parents of Ida Belle Wilcox. I believe the land was speaking to me. I believe her parent s wanted me to let the world know the good they had done for downtrodden South Africans, because before I started doing my research, their family thought they were a failure in South Africa.”

The Wilcoxes had been a failure, in Western terms. Most white people who immigrated to South Africa in the 19th century did so to seek their fortune. Not many came to liberate the black South Africans from a lack of education and opportunity. But that is what the Wilcoxes had done. And by the time they returned to the U.S. in their late 60s, they were bankrupt and William Wilcox had to work on an assembly line in Detroit. The couple died in poverty in California, without any acknowledgment for what they had done.

Before Keita’s research, Reverend Jackson Wilcox had only one memory and one inheritance of his grandfather, William. A memory that he never finished anything he started, and a wonky book shelf, an apparent testament to his inability to complete any project.

“It was my duty to reconnect the families and restore pride to the Wilcox family,” says Keita, who brought Reverend Jackson from California and his daughter Deborah from Alaska to South Africa in 2007 to meet the Dubes and to see the mission station the 19th-century Wilcoxes had built in Tembalihle and Cornfields, near Estcourt. The Wilcoxes met with politicians and were enlightened as to how their ancestors had lived and thanklessly worked for the poor.

“We need unifying stories like this to bring us closer to each other,” Keita says. “Positive stories help feed growth, particularly in a time where there is a war of cultures and religions in the world.” He says the Wilcoxes did their work for all races. “Without their sacrifice, we might not have had the liberation struggle in South Africa,” he says. “The Wilcoxes were ahead of their time.”

Indeed, in Wilcox’s own words, which were published in an open letter to Dube in the first issue of his newspaper, in April 1903: “The truth for which you stand is mighty and will prevail”. The truth has finally prevailed, thanks to Keita and the land, which he believes sent him on this long journey.

The Wilcox and Dube families are now reunited and often write to each other. Reverend Jackson Wilcox is currently writing his autobiography, thanks largely to the inspiration of Keita. “Thank you for helping me rediscover my grandparents,” he wrote recently to Keita. The Dubes in turn told Keita: “We cannot repay you for teaching us and the whole of South Africa about our grandfather — you are a member of our family.” Keita, who has done this research over 10 years as a hobby, plans to write a book about the two families and about his own personal spiritual journey. “I will write it soon,” he says. “I have no other choice.”

Who was JL Dube?

The clergyman, teacher and founding editor of iLanga Lase Natal newspaper was also the founding president of the South African Native National Congress, which became the African National Congress. His father, Reverend James Dube, abandoned his claim to the chieftaincy of the AmaQadi clan to become one of South Africa’s first American Zulu Missionaries in the 1860s at the Lindley Mission Station in Inanda. It was here that John was educated and where he met the Wilcoxes.

The Wilcoxes and the Dubes

THE Wilcoxes, educated at ultra-liberal Oberlin College, U.S., arrived in South Africa in 1881 as missionaries of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions and they settled in Inanda at the Lindley Mission Station. In 1887, Dube travelled to the U.S. with the Wilcoxes and attended their alma mater, Oberlin College. Wilcox gave Dube the opportunity to work in a printing press and let him give speeches in his church. By the end of his time at Oberlin, Dube had written his first book about educating black South Africans, A Familiar Talk Upon My Native Land. Dube and the Wilcoxes returned to South Africa in the 1900s. The Wilcoxes started the Zulu Industrial Improvement Company in 1909 in Tembalihle and Cornfields, the first shareholding company in South Africa made up of sympatheti c whites and 300 blacks who wanted to give Christian blacks the economic power to withstand land appropriation by the Natal government. Keita believes the 1913 Native Land Act was in response to this measure, and its effects on Native landownership completely bankrupted Wilcox. The Inanda community made a collection of money to send blacklisted and impoverished William Wilcox back to the U.S., while Ida Belle Wilcox went to Bulwer to teach and earn money so she could return the following year in 1919. They never returned to South Africa, where they had hoped to die and be buried among the Zulu community. However, Keita is currently working on an idea to make this wish come true in some form. So stay tuned for the rest of the story.

This story first appeared in The Witness on August 11, 2009

Listen to the children and learn

Chana Rothman has a dream. And, she wants us to be a part of it. Matthew le Cordeur spent the day with the New York-based musician in the Valley of a Thousand Hills.

Singer and music educator Chana Rothman is currently on a three-leg tour of South Africa, where she has shared her knowledge with children and youth in the communities of Kayelisha, Soweto, kwaMashu (where she worked “with the most soulful and prophetic high school students”) and the Valley of a Thousand Hills. It is here that Rothman has found the roots to her dream’s fulfillment: to see successful musicians incorporating the sound of children and youth to share their visions for the future.

Rotham’s trip was funded by Limmud, a Jewish conference at which she spoke about her role as a Jewish musician. In addition, Rothman organised extra-curricular activities in which she could share experiences with youth in disadvantaged communities and, in turn, listen to their stories. “The music I heard coming out of these communities was amazing,” she told me on our way to The Valley of a Thousand Hills. “It’s really a short leap to go from their singing culture to creating songs that have their own messages, which really need to be heard on a wider level.”

Which brings Rothman to her dream, an idea she says started brewing wildly in Cape Town a few weeks ago. “I want to see more established musicians coming from these backgrounds, because adults just can’t come up with the same kind of music,” she says. To explain what she means, Rothman starts to sing a Jewish teaching: “The old shall dream dreams, and the youth shall see visions. And our lives shall rise up to the sky. We must live for today, we must build for tomorrow. Give us time, give us strength, and give us life.”

“So,” she says, explaining the song, “the young shall see visions and work towards them and we need to see the world through their eyes. I believe the only way the world’s going to listen is if well-established musicians give them an endorsement and work with them. Many successful musicians have come up through the ghetto, the township, so I have the assumption that they’d want to give back.”

Rothman is not your ordinary musician. Her style is unique in its own right, but her balance between being a performer and a music educator of children, gives her that added touch. “Children are so energising,” Rothman (34) says. “People always think I am a lot younger than I really am and I believe it’s because I work with children. It keeps me really young.”

The musician, who was brought up in Canada, fuses folk music with progressive worldbeat, incorporating Hebrew prayer and reggae beats as well as breaking out into hip hop in the middle of a song. “People deserve fresh, original, thoughtful music that reflects our changing world,” says Rothman, who credits Michael Jackson as her original muse. “And if it’s done well, it becomes universal.”

Rotham, who is a language person (she speaks French, German, Italian, English, Hebrew and Yiddish), also 

used music as a tool to travel with. It was her tour of Nepal, walking with a guitar on her back through the Himalayas, which truly opened her eyes to world music. “When I arrived in villages, there would be all these check points where officials checked your passport and visa. They were very stern,” she says. “But then they saw my guitar and they’d point to it and ask me to play – it completely broke down all the barriers. I learned this mountain song of theirs, which I started playing a lot. Villagers would flip out when I sang it and they’d all start singing. They really felt happy to hear someone out of their culture singing their song.”

When Rothman went to New York to start her music career, she discovered how hard it is to be successful. “It’s a very commerce-based place, where arts and making money sit together all the time, making it very hard,” she says. “I feel I have built up a community of people who support each other, but even within that it is very competitive. You have to worry about how many people come to your show, because all the venue owner cares about is money, they don’t care about how you play.”

Rotham struck it lucky in 2007 with a music entrepreneur who had a taste for Jewish music. “The Knitting Factory founder, Michael Dorf, really liked my music and wanted to make me an album,” she says. “He brought on board C Lanzbom, an incredibly talented recording artist, who got Sheryl Crow and Kelly Clarkson’s drummer, Shawn Pelton, to record with me,” she says. The result was “We can rise” and it propelled Rothman onto radio waves and music festivals around the U.S. She now plays to packed audiences around the New York state.

Rothman juggles her time between her music career and teaching music at a Jewish school in Brooklyn. “When I do music with kids, it’s not about selling albums. It’s about finding their messages, about what they want to say, about empowering them,” she says. “But when I perform for adults where I am sharing my message, it is about selling albums. It’s very clear in my mind: Music education is one thing, my music career another.”

However, Rothman says her two careers feed into each other. “The way that I am when I perform is very informed by the way I work with children,” she says. “I know a lot of people like to just come and perform – to give and receive as the performer. That doesn’t work for me.”

Rothman uses the word “workshop” as an excuse to get close to young people. Writing on her blog www.chanarothman.com of her experience in the Valley of a Thousand Hills, where she worked with students at the SEM Trust, Rothman says, “I facilitated or participated in a beautiful cultural exchange disguised as a songwriting workshop”. And so it was in Cape Town’s Crossroads district, where she worked with peer educators called the Future Fighters. “These guys sparked a huge call for me as these are the songs we should be hearing on the radio,” she says. “One of them took some major initiative so I invited him to join me in a show at Zula Bar. It was incredible. Mfundo, who has a booming voice, came with two youth advisors, who were both incredible singers. One of them, Megan, sang Miriam Makeba’s Click Song, which I knew and could play along to. That has got to be the highlight of my time in South Africa.”

And so it was, at Zula Bar, that Rotham truly found what she was looking for: A talented musician sharing the stage with disadvantaged youth with incredible passion for music. A dream has started to blossom for Rothman and us South Africans were a part of it.

This story first appeared in The Witness on August 18, 2009

Mourning Father Ernst

Text and photos by Matthew le Cordeur.

Monday mornings normally start quietly for me in Hilton. I stumble through to the kitchen where I read the newspaper over a prolonged cup of filtered coffee. It’s a good start to the week. Several weeks ago, however, my routine was broken by a phone call. “Father Ernst has been murdered,” my mother said, her holiday spirit clearly broken. “We’re coming home early so we can go to the funeral.”

Father Ernst. Murdered. Life just stopped for a second. Then, it broke back into action. I scrolled through my cellphone. Sister Irene. I dialed.

“Sister, what has happened,” I asked. “Oh, I was just about to call you. They have murdered Father Ernst,” she said, her voice weak. “Who,” I asked. “Robbers, I think. They wanted the money for salaries, but he had already paid everyone,” she replied.

Father Ernst - murdered for money. The man I ate breakfast, lunch and dinner with when I was just four; the man who let my family live on the mission station for five years; the man at the centre of my childhood kingdom. And now, he is dead.

The memories just come rushing back in of my childhood. It was 1985. For political reasons, my parents decided to leave our white-picket fence lifestyle in Hout Bay for the dusty and isolated region of Maluti in the Transkei. We were given permission to live in the old convent at MariaLinden Mission Station, because the Precious Blood sisters had recently moved into new quarters and the building was vacant.

We were welcomed by a man you’d easily find in a novel: that mysterious, wise man that you had to take time to understand. Father Ernst was a big, strong man in his mid-50s who spoke only when he had to. Our family was invited to eat with him until we got our kitchen up and running. We had to be there, clean and dressed, at exactly the right time, so father Ernst could say grace and eat. It was never a good idea to be late. We had entered the life of a monastery.

“I don’t want to eat peas,” I would say to my mother at the dinner table. She’d look shyly up at Father Ernst and apologise. “No, no, no,” he’d say in his Austrian accent. “Don’t worry about it.” Slowly, as the weeks and months passed, we broke down the barriers of unfamiliarity until, eventually, we were like family.

Those were the most memorable days of my life; my formative years, you’d say. The ones that made me the man I am today. Sister Irene and I would spend hours together in the fields farming away, and I have a clear memory of the Ixopo-born nun sitting on a white tractor with me sitting on her lap, steering. They were exciting days for my dad, as he entered a career of community work and eventually priesthood. They were adventurous for my oldest brother, who collected birds’ eggs and started colonies of rabbits and pigeons. And they were meditative days for my middle brother and my mother, both of whom struggled with the isolation.

Returning to Mariazell for the funeral on Friday, June 5, 2009, was like returning home to our old family. A distraught family, albeit. The mission, now 115 years old, was abuzz with activity. Over 1000 people had turned up to pay their final respects in the impressive basilica. Four bishops, 15 priests and a 20 monks and nuns squeezed into the side wings, while the church itself was bursting at the seams. And in the middle of all of this, lay Father Ernst in a coffin, his face battered and bruised; his body still.

Of the many speeches given, house master Mr Matabane’s was by far the most powerful. He told the congregation how he was one of the first to discover his colleague’s body.

“I didn’t believe it was him. I said to the people who brought me there, ‘but where is father Ernst?’ and they said, ‘this is father Ernst’. I could not believe it,” he told the church.

The Bishop of Mthatha, Sithembele Sipuka, highlighted the three murders of Catholic priests in South Africa this year and called for justice to be served. Knowing politicians were present, he lamented the lack of religion being taught in schools, even at missionary schools. “Over 80% of South Africans are Christian,” he said. “And yet, we can not teach it properly at school. And it is showing in the moral breakdown of people in this country.”

Another leader stood up and said, “The men who murdered father Ernst could very easily be in here today. We will catch you and justice will be served.”

A procession of clergyman, colleagues, the school band and the congregants then began a long march from the church to the cemetery, passing Father Ernst’s house – his dogs yelping for attention behind the fence – the scout hall he so passionately ran and eventually the school he built up over the many years.

Walking past a gravestone, marked “Father Leonard Seoaholimo”, I remembered the first time I had been into this cemetery, aged five.

I told someone after the funeral, “I just saw a priest get ‘dugged’ into the ground.” And so, over 20 years later and metres away, father Ernst was ‘dugged’ into the ground.

The men of cloth stood with their hands raised in the air, clutching the earth that would rest on their friend. Father Tebogo Makoro, who father Ernst had raised and educated at the mission station, gave the call to drop the soil. A furious wind picked up and red dust came swirling out of father Ernst’s final resting place. There was anger in the air. And sadness.

With all losses, however, there are moments of happiness. We were reintroduced to a lot of our old friends at the funeral and I have now started to make an effort to keep in touch. More importantly, I realised a need to tell the story of Mariazell to keep the memory of father Ernst and the many diverse characters of that area alive. This is just the beginning of that story.

Who is Father Ernst?

Father Ernst Plochl (Joseph) was born in Austria in 1931. He was ordained a priest in the Congregation of the Missionaries of Marianhill in 1958. After several years as boarding master in Wels, Austria, he came to South Africa in 1968. He was sent to Mariazell High School where he worked as the boarding master. He then became parish priest at Mariazell from 1970 to 1980 and at MariaLinden from 1981 to 1987. From 1988 to 2009 he was manager and rector of Mariazell High School. He died on the eve of Pentecost, May 30, 2009.

Mariazell High School

This Catholic school is situated on Mariazell Mission Station, about 30 minutes outside Matatiele. Catholic brothers and priests (belonging to the Congregation of the Missionaries of Marianhill) and sisters (of the Precious Blood group) have been based there since 1894, where they have brought skills and education to the people. Famous liberation heroes who attended the school include Mosiou “Terror” Lekota, Albertina Sisulu and Epainette Mbeki. It has always been regarded as a school of excellence, due to the high pass rate of the scholars.

Court Case

Mariazell High School boarding master Mr Matabane is on trial in the Maluti Regional Court for orchestrating the murder of father Ernst Plochl with two alleged accomplices from Pietermaritzburg. The case is in its early stages.

Precious Blood sisters (Sister Irene on the right) with William, Matthew and James le Cordeur at MariaLinden in 1987.

Father Ernst Plochl and Trish le Cordeur at MariaLinden in 1987.

Now...

The funeral procession of father Ernst Plochl at Mariazell.

Matthew le Cordeur and Sister Irene at father Ernst Plochl’s funeral at Mariazell on June 5, 2009.

* This Blog first appeared in The Witness newspaper as a feature article on August 5, 2009

Berlin: Broken, Brash and Beautiful

Text and photos by Matthew le Cordeur.

Berlin. The old Jewish quarter. Winter. Bottle-blonde and self-tanned prostitutes of homogenous nature line Oranienburger Straße just before midnight, their pimp quarrelling with a drunk customer about the lowest-going rate. It’s Valentine’s Eve and business is dead.

Twenty years have passed since one people, divided by an unjust wall, tore it down in search of unification. Here on business for the Berlinale Film Festival, I am seduced by the darkness of this city. Built as a capital by Prussian kings and kaizers, Berliners have sought greatness time and again, but each time their dreams have been shattered. What remains is a lost city. One that is still trying to get to grips with its past.

I wonder about those dreams that were lost as a destroyed people spent years separated by the Berlin Wall. I think about their guilt of being a part of Adolf Hitler’s fantasies. There is a feeling that Berliners are still going through purgatory. There is a subtle mood that lingers around that makes me feel that they don’t want it to change.

It is hard to tell if all Berliners have found that common ground of unification since the wall came down, because today this city is a melting pot of cultural activism and thought. The serious nature of the film festival reveals that with all its socio-political movies. So too does walking the streets. They reveal the city’s vibrant cultural atmosphere, with its magnificent graffiti and juxtaposed buildings of different eras.

“We don’t do it here, on the street, you know? We have very nice rooms,” one woman says to me in a thick Eastern European accent. “You are so good looking, you shouldn’t be alone tonight.”

Her money belt strapped on top of her corset, the smooth-talking prostitute is standing outside the Neue Synagogue in Berlin Mitte, which was miraculously the only temple not to get destroyed by the Nazis or the Allied forces.

She seems quite persistent with her request and I could say, “Sure, Valentine’s Eve sex here we come”. Or I could say, “hell no”, and walk on by? Perhaps I’ll do what Gael Garcia Bernal does in Lukas Moodysson’s Mammoth, which screened the night before at the Frederick Straße Palast a few metres away.

It took a mammoth of effort to watch and, although some Berlin audiences booed the film, it was superbly beautiful in its painful examination of abandonment. In one of the sub-plots, Bernal’s character paid a Filipino woman a fortune to go home and be with her son, but instead she looked for him, to be with him.

I think I’ll avoid all those options. Politely, I smile and squeeze past her to face the rest of the gauntlet.

Anyway, I hadn’t come down here in search of a plastic-looking Valentine. Earlier in the evening I had found myself at I Due Forni, an Italian cantina-style pizza restaurant decorated in revolutionary memorabilia and scribbled all over by famous punk musicians.

The Italian waiters were brash and hurried. I would only be served if I promised to eat and get out in an hour, because there were reservations for then. I was led to a 10-person table, which I had to share with other diners. I chose the “Incredible” pizza, with ham, walnuts, parmesan cheese, and fresh rocket on top. The pizza, as well as the loud bustling atmosphere was … incredible.

The restaurant is a place Andy Warhol would’ve eaten at when he came to Berlin, which he did a few times. Perhaps even his muse and film legend Joe Dallesandro (pictured right in Berlin) would have joined him. I’d seen him just the other night, at the opening of his autobiographical documentary, Little Joe. Now 60, the years have taken its toll on his once famed beauty. The film shows footage from his days in the Factory in New York where he acted – mostly in the nude – for Warhol and Paul Morrissey. When he wasn’t acting he was Warhol’s “personal body guard”. After the screening at the International Palast near Alexanderplatz, Dallesandro told us that not much art-making went on in the Factory. “I think Andy [Warhol] felt the same way. If someone commissioned him to do piece, he’d do it jokingly in a few seconds and get thousands for it.” Little Joe is a great for posterity, but the lack of other voices makes it slightly weak. “You can make another version of this when I am dead, then you can interview who you like,” said Dallesandro.

The arrival of yet another diner to the table, a former eastern German called Dr Uli Maier, made the meal a memorable one. Swapping stories, he told me he headed the prosthetic section of the city hospital. Maier shared his love for Berlin’s diverse subcultures and talked about his time cycling around the capital taking photos of people and places.

“I find myself often riding out to the Winterfeldmarkt on Saturdays,” he said as he drank wine out of a small glass goblet. “The people are interesting there and the quality of food is really good.”

He told me of all the fascinating places that Berlin’s nightlife has to offer, including a drug-infested club he discovered pounding away at 3 pm one Sunday afternoon. “I love taking friends on my own tour of Berlin,” he told me. “There are so many interesting places to see.”

It is the mystique with which Maier spoke of Kunsthaus Tacheles that intrigued me the most and he told me to visit the place after dinner. “But be careful of pick-pockets,” he warned. “Also, the prostitutes along the way are quite pushy.”

I had been warned.

Passing the last seductress, who is being interrogated by an aging Berlin businessman, I approach the Tacheles, which stands in all its glorified destruction. Fearing nothing and expecting anything, I step within the main archway of the old Friedrichstadt-Passage.

Beyond the intriguing graffiti and impressive but crumbling archway is a squatter camp or hippie village - an artist’s paradise. Steel sculptures crowd a large tent that is filled with tourists and artists. In one corner sits a caravan that has been gutted and turned into a cinema. Outside a dark shack pulls me closer. As I get inside, I find myself in a type of bar. It is one in which the occupants seem stuck, trapped in a bohemian paradise.

I am a tourist in this fantasy. I know that much. There are local artists, but they’re hard to point out. There are also people who want to be locals and who try very hard to act that way. I leave the bar and I hear blends of sounds from punk to metal ring out from the different levels of the building above. The mystery of the place is certainly real.

Once a huge shopping centre built in 1907, the Tacheles (slang for "bringing to an end" in Yiddish) is now a mere a shell of a building. During the last century, it served as commercial outlets and then as the SS headquarters during Nazi rule. Adding to its rich history is that it held French prisoners of war. During the Battle of Berlin it was bombed extensively, but the solid archway remained and the building was used as a storage facility during the Cold War.

Due to a lack of upkeep over decades of war and communist rule, East Berlin authorities began destroying one of its great ruins in the eighties. In February 1990, authorities planned to destroy the rest of the building, but a group of artists occupied it and refused to let it be erased from the fabric of Berlin's history. Since then, Tacheles has been turned into a formal creative space and has attracted internationally acclaimed artists, who have exhibited and performed within the many venues of the shaky ruins.

Because of its cult status, the Tacheles is now a key tourist venue for daring foreigners and, as I enter the building, I hear a cacophony of different languages. Somehow the locals know I’m English.

"Do you want ganja?" a dealer casually asks as I climb up the colourful stairs. "No? How about some cocaine?"

Tourists, drunkards and artists create shadows in the corners of this dark building and the thought comes to me: Do things ever get ugly in this enclave of apocalyptic freedom? The thought inspires another. I need a drink.

The bar on the top floor seems like it is missing a wall, letting in the crisp winter breeze. I climb over a worn-out couch, where young teens nibble at each other's lips, to get to a small bar in the corner. A beer at last. I drink it fast and furious, needing a measure of merriment to make the place more comfortable.

Instead, I have a flashback to The Dust of Time by Theo Angelopoulos, which I had watched earlier that day at the Frederick Straße Palast, which I can see through the broken wall. Willem Dafoe, who I had heard earlier in the day at a talk, starred in the film. Intrigued by his spontaneous decision to act in the film after he bumped into Angelopoulos at another film festival, I felt I had to see it. It’s hard not to find this director’s film’s slightly boring in its excruciatingly slow, but poetic rhythm, but it’s a film that sits with you afterwards, lingering, bothering, and probing you to think more. My flashback is from a scene where the daughter of Dafoe’s character is found, having run away at the start of the film. She is at the top of a deserted building filled with vagrants who call the place their home. Standing on a window ledge about to kill herself, the teenager looks like she could be in the Tacheles standing in front of me. And that scares me just a little.

I don’t feel it now, but there is a possibility I am experiencing a dying institution. The building isn’t called “brining an end” for nothing. There is always a cloud of anxiety, of mistrust, of uncertainty that hangs over the crumbling masterpiece. The artists’ 20-year lease on the building expired a month before I was here. The owners could decide to lay this insane dream to bed and create something more economically and aesthetically pleasing for the benefit of the neighbourhood.

I leave the Kunsthaus Tacheles feeling enriched. There is a magic within these walls that has changed many person’s view on the world. People of all types have seen exhibitions, shows, gigs and films that have opened their eyes to a new meaning of how to live. And the history of the building itself – it’s resilience against all odds – is one of adaptability and courage. If this building can last two world wars - and a cold one with a divisive wall - and still emerge as a cultural landmark, imagine what each one of us can do.

The Tacheles is a microcosm of Berlin, where ageing and dysfunctional activism is cool, but is always under threat from the broader economical players in a place that so wants to move on with its life, to mature into a typically boring European city. Let’s hope Berlin and this fine piece of postmodern calamity can outlast such threats.