Friday, June 30, 2006
South Africa
| Driving through a small, conservative Afrikaaner town one of my hosts summed up the situation here perfectly: ''No doubt you have discovered in every South African city there is the town and then the two or three townships where most everyone lives.'' Indeed, this is exactly what I had found in my six weeks in this incredibly diverse and complex country. At first glance it all seems pretty clearcut, and in some senses it is. The vast majority of blacks live in subhuman conditions in these squalid townships, often without proper housing, electricity, running water, garbage collection... the list goes on. The schools are as poor as the crime rates are high, and HIV/AIDS infection rates creep towards 50%. Unemployment exceeds that, with others trying to scrape by as street vendors, ''lawn boys,'' or workers in the suburban chain stores.  These lilly white suburbs are another world entirely, with green vegetation bursting from behind the barbed wire of the sprawling gated communities. The aim here is a controlled environment where a person can go to work, shopping, and home, perhaps never having to see the sky above his or her head. The reason is an overblown but not unfounded concern about crime. Sometimes you wonder if living in this state of fear is even worth it...The contrast between these two worlds seems too stark, and the evil too obvious. But ask a few questions and you'll be left with many more. Take for example the issue of providing housing for township residents. The government has built so many tens of thousands of houses since 1994, but has several times this figure left to go. Township residents are understandably critical of the delay, while whites curiously second-guess the govenment building such small houses (then in the same breath cursing the high taxes...) Indeed, there is a debate if the government should be building these houses at all. You see, many of the residents of the Cape Flats, the site of Cape Town's sprawling townships, are from the Xhosa culture with family still living far away in the rural areas of the Eastern Cape. Why should I pay to build them a second house, asked a politician from the more conservative Democratic Alliance? I don't think this was an entirely unfair question, but all the same my answer was  that you and your father's system of colonialism and apartheid destroyed their traditional way of tribal life, forcing blacks to migrate en mass to the cities in seach of work. It seems obvious to me that the main purpose of both these systems was economic exploitation, seeking to create a cheap, uneducated labor pool for the mines, ports, and such.From here it isn't hard to see how the practice of splitting families for migrant labor (which continues today) lead directly to the AIDS explosion in this country. The importance of this issue cannot be understated since it is orphaning a generation of children, thrusting the elderly into raising entire extended families and depriving communities of their most productive workers. Visibility of the issue is good, but the stigma remains, a product of Africans difficulty talking about sex. This is frustrating since it takes time to overcome a generational problem such as this. The same can be said for the educational system. How much can you expect of teachers who were not properly educated themselves by the apartheir regime? Especially given their meager pay and resources which they must work with? All together, it's enough to get you down. That is until you remember that just fifteen years ago South Africa was a police state with formal segregation of the races and no opportunities for blacks. I think back to the civil rights movement in the United States and how long is took / will take for those wrongs to be righted. A grasp of the long term picture is crucial, and a regional context doesn't hurt either. For the next countries on my itinerary would be grateful for problems such as these... |
