Kings & Cabbages

Africa is incredibly beautiful; before going there, the only things I knew about it that Charlize Theron came from there, its the parsley bed for Hollywood stars with a yen for international motherhood, and that you have a lot of droughts and dying people there. Its stereotypical to fall in love with Africa (Isak Dinesen). Maybe I have, though? The land just pulses with life. Every land does–nature is just so uniformly miraculous–but there’s less of a corporate stamp on the landscape than in the US.

View from Louis Trichart Resthouse: Sunrise in Africa

Botswana Lake 2

And the Gorgeous Cape Town: no place ever made me want to pack up and move so bad as the Cape.

Pic of the cranes on the bay: View from Hotel

Textile stall in Cape town Market

View of Tabletop Mt. from the Car

Parrot in the Capetonian Hotel; if you tried to pet it, it would bite your fingers.

Cape Town View

Bob Marley in Cape Town Market: he's right up there with Barack Obama and Michael Jackson as the most popular stars in SA

Someone's house in the Capetown mountains; can see the bay on the one side and the mountain chain on the other

The same house; also has a swimming pool. Sighhhh . . .

More pics to come. Keep posted!

This August, I traveled to South Africa; it was an amazing trip. So much to see, so much to feel—and to eat. We were with an book tour that visited around six or seven cities–including a foray into Botswana—over a hectic 19 days. I traveled to Jo’burg, Pretoria, Louis Trichart, Mafikeng, Port Elizabeth, and Durban. As a US progressive, the most famous thing about South Africa is apartheid; the triumphant story of Nelson Mandela trumphing the brutal Afrikaan government and bringing democracy to the racial oligarchy. Most interstingly, the news on the street is that apartheid is alive and kicking; it’s been transposed from legislation into economics. South Africa still has four classes of people; coloreds (9%), whites (8%), Asians (3%), and blacks (80%). Just imagine—the smorsgaboard of racial diversity I’m used to seeing in the US distilled down to a neatly topographical four classes. Reconciliation just meant launching a tiny class of black haves, dressed with the  rhetoric of social equality; most of the black population still lives in  shanty-towns.

I’ve never seen houses like these, not even in the slums of Lahore; a mass of rickety patchwork tin huts with the clothes drying on the lines outside, the fissures and gaps and slats welcoming the play of elements. Here’s a photo taken from my cellphone from the bus; it couldn’t zoom and the quality is slightly crappy, but hey.

Not even the poor people huts in neighboring Botswana looked like that. Minorities higher up in the food chain, such as the Indians, have had luck in capitalizing on the new opportunities and venturing into mainstream. You hear a lot about how the black leaders (Jacob Zuma) are missing the opportunities the whites are giving them in changing the condition of the people, but the fact for the masses is that it’s incredibly hard to lift yourself up against the decades of legalized brutalization: apartheid afterall, was a precise system of control in the way people lived, worked and died. The bulwark of roads, infrastructure, and distribution of resources enabling it to work is still in place. One of our hosts said it best about the violence in post-apartheid society; it’s not that apartheid made society safe, it just contained the effects of the brutalization and degradation. Now,  the violence has exploded into society at mass.

Rhetoric notwithstanding, its clear to see that the haves and have-nots are still divided along racial lines. Walk into a roadside Wimpy’s by the highway (which btw, has great coffee . . . Starbucks, eat dust), and most the people sitting and dining are whites. Wealthy cities like Cape Town are mostly white. The society is a lot like the title of Franz Fanon’s book, only in reverse; black mask, white face. Promote the image of a few black capitalists, models and literati, but the hands on the scepter of the mining, logging, agricultural, minerals and precious gem corporations are still mostly white. The Indian community is an interesting reflection of the social contradictions. They feel squeezed in the middle between the white and black capitalists (the non-white races have significant tensions dividing one of the other).