By Dario Bursztyn
Cape Town. City of natural beauty, and the beauty of its women and men who love their land. Hills of strength given by nature and hills of people struggling to make the common be shared in common, for all.
Cissie Gool House is that hill all together. An occupation, a community, a way of going up in the middle of a society that decided to put their people down. The powers and the powerful that thought -and think- that one part of them, of us, became the excess, useless.
But the inhabitants of Cissie Gool House built a new world. Indeed. The house of the commons that in assemblies and traversed by love decided that they are meaningful, their land is meaningful, their organization is meaningful, and their project invincible.
Organization, many decades ago, meant success. Then, organization in some organizations meant hierarchy and the end of internal democracy. Different wonderful projects ended in a bad way due to this wrong way. But organization on a grassroots level would always mean the key to going onwards, being better.
That is why the word ‘beauty’ has to be challenged. Beauty is not only a green garden. Neither a white sand beach. Beauty is also the time given and perceived from neighbors and comrades to share the fresh air of a different way of living. The community, many times was said, is much more than the addition of one plus one plus one. It is what that addition creates at the same time, giving birth to something worth doing.
We, as visitors, became speechless at Cissie Gool House. A true learning experience. Eventually, no new houses for each of the inhabitants of the common house should ever break the spirit of the community. You built the most difficult achievement ever: being aware that in common everything can be solved, and as fragments and alone, there’s only misery and the triumph of capitalism that needs consumers, not brothers.
Dario Bursztyn, Argentina