This will be my final blog entry from South Africa, I am actually already in Peru by the time I send this and my focus will be there moving forward.
After a little more than three weeks I would hardly
qualify myself as an expert on South Africa but I have learned some things and
formed some opinions on how the country works. One of the things really
highlighted for me was the economic differences in South Africa, not just with
the United States and Europe but within the country as well.
In some ways I feel a bit guilty as the U.S. dollar buys
a lot here and things that are considered expensive to the average South
African are very cheap to me. Foreigners are seen as rich here and I can see
why. 100 Rand is considered a lot to most here but to me that amounts to about
$8.50. A used surf board can easily be purchased here for 1200 to 1500 Rand. I
am not sure what boards cost in the United States but I am sure a good used
board is a whole lot more than $100 to $125 dollars. I paid almost that much
for the wet/dry bag to keep my clothes.
Me with the board donated to the surfing project
In the more rural area of Limpopo Provence to the far
north (where the Madi a Thava lodge is
located and I visited while in Botswana) you still see donkey carts, which
I did not really expect. They tend to be home made things, cobbled together
from wood and spare car parts and pulled by very sad and ratty looking donkeys.
Additionally at every little town there seems to be street vendors in
ramshackle buildings along the side of the road where everything is hawked. You
could get all sorts of stuff, fruit and vegetables, live chickens, car parts
and repairs, haircuts, clothing, and so on.
Cape Town in the Western Cape Provence by comparison does
not have the road side markets, at least not the areas I have been to. But
there are a lot of bazar type shops that appear in the city like the Parade Grounds
and Green Market Square. These differ however, as the Cape Town markets are
more organized and they tend to sell more goods to tourists than the random
stuff I saw in Limpopo.
In the rural area of Limpopo they have poor areas where
there are a lot of little government houses called IDC houses. They are
essentially two room houses the size of a small apartment in Chicago that the
government puts up and sells for about 15,000-18,000 Rand, or $1,250-$1,500
U.S. dollars. I am guessing the cost of a surf board in the U.S. It is
essentially a form of subsidized housing and they are modest but well-built
with a plot of land for a garden. Many of the residents put up and rent out tin
sheds to refugees from Zaire for about 200 Rand a month. The sheds are very
sketchy but after having seen the townships in and around Cape Town I have to
agree that they are a far cry better.
Cape Town has many of the same problems you see in most
every major city. Homeless people live under the bridges and along the train tracks.
Then there are the townships, which are worse than anything I saw in Limpopo.
Some of them are huge with a very dense population and I was told the one by
the airport has a million people or more living in it, but nobody knows for
sure. While the rural areas can be fairly bad, the townships around the major
cities are worse and built from whatever is handy. Corrugated tin roofing,
shipping pallets, shipping containers, whatever people can get their hands on.
The homes are right on top of one another with very little space in between for
anything like a garden.
In both the rural areas and townships the trash is
everywhere. There is no or not a lot of regular trash pick-up so the residents
just dump it into empty lots or drive it to the edge of town and toss it on the
side of the road. Plastic bottles and bags, food waste, old tires, clothing,
construction material, and so on.
Video of the township at Mzoli's Braai space. Don't know if it will actually work.
There is a lot of corruption in South Africa and, like
Illinois, it seems to be more or less expected. However the people of South
Africa seem to take a greater offense to it than they do in Illinois. At least
in the Chicago area where it seems to be ignored to a large extent. While I
have been here there have been any number of stories about politicians taking
money from this or that project and either giving it to their friends or nobody
really knows where it has gone. The president of the country apparently even
openly admits that he has taken money and rather dares anybody to do anything
about it. All the judges and prosecutors who might go after him are already in
his pocket and they don’t want to step off the money train by filing charges
against the president.
The infrastructure here also suffers, quite possibly due
to the corruption. Things don’t get fixed in a timely manner. For example a
stop light in Muisenberg has been totally out the entire time I have been here
and I was told it has been for months now. Roads don’t get timely repairs and
things have a tendency to break. There are also high parking fees, speed
cameras all over the country, and what sounds like ever climbing electronic
tolls. Sounds just like Chicago and Illinois because it is. The extent seems to
vary by Provence but one thing that all South African’s have in common is “Load
Shedding”. Load Shedding occurs over the entire country and is where the power
is turned off to large areas for two hours at a time in order to save
electricity and protect the system from overload. It starts at 10:00 am and
rolls to a new neighborhood every two hours right through 10:00 pm. Think of it
like planned rolling blackouts but nobody knows in advance when their area will
go black or not. It is not just residential areas but business areas that get
hit by Load Shedding too and if you have a restaurant or other business, you
are just out of luck for the two hours if your power goes out and you have to
close. The hours the power is off and the days constantly change too so it is
really like playing the lottery as to who is going to be in the dark and when.
Apartheid ended a little over 20 years ago and before
that the black and colored populations were not allowed to own business or
property. And for the black population, movement around the country was
restricted. It is hard to believe that in this day and age things like this
went on as recently as 1990 but it was only until heavy international pressure
was brought that South Africa reversed course in 1993 or 1994.
South Africa has a long history of racial segregation
going back to the colonial days, but things like the passbook law came about largely
after the 2nd World War. The passbook law said that if you were
black or colored you had to carry this book on you at all times as a form of
identification. It would say where you were allowed to go, when you could be
there, where you had been assigned to live, and so on, and if you did not have
it on your person, it would result in immediate jail time. It is rather ironic
that soon after defeating the Nazis in WWII, an allied country would start to
implement similar laws as were made for Jews. Real protests against the law
began in the 1950’s.
Areas could also be declared for whites only and there
has been a history of both black and colored South Africans losing their place
to live overnight when it was declared white land only. One infamous example
was District Six in Cape Town. This area was the predominate area where black
or colored people lived in Cape Town. There was an entire community built up in
the area which is just off where the Cape Town Train Station is today and ran
south. In the late 1960’s the area, which has become the center of life for
black and colored populations going back to the turn of the century, was declared
white only and everybody was forced to move out in a form of racial cleansing. People
lost homes and businesses and much of the area was bulldozed to make way for
big homes and shopping centers.
District Six museum
Derek did not seem to want to talk about it but this
includes my host’s family who were displaced. Today reparations are starting to
be paid out for this but it is a very long and difficult process to prove you
owned a home or business in this area as records were often not kept afterwards
and it may come down to old family photos to prove you once live in one place
or another.
Re-appropriation of farm land and business is occurring
elsewhere as well and at at Madi a Thavha lodge in Limpopo, we were told as
much as 99% of the businesses in that area have been ruined by this because the
people who got them had no idea what to do with them. Or the simply stripped it
for what they could and leave what is left to rot. One example was a private
wildlife preserve near the lodge that used to be one of the nicest in South
Africa. Six months to a year after it was turned over the locals had stripped
anything of value and shot and killed all the animals. Things were just turned
over without any kind of training or help to run it essentially it often became
a hand out from the government that was simply used to immediately strip
whatever value was in it. In that region things have started to change some but
it had taken a younger generation to break habits and get educated on how to
run things before the area has started improving.
I am not sure what much of the younger generation thinks
but I did have several older people tell me that things ran much better and
less corruptly during the Apartheid days and that they miss this. The police
were a lot less corrupt than today, there was less violence and crime, and the
infrastructure was in much better shape. The people who have told me this may
not be whom you expect either, as it was always black or colored people who
told me this. I think it is safe to say, however, that they don’t miss or wish
a return to the injustices of the Apartheid days but miss a time when the
government was much more efficient and less corrupt than what South Africa has
today. The younger generations seem to equally dislike the corruption issues
but seem to have a better overall outlook for the country in the long term. So
perhaps it takes a generation or two before people’s attitudes and outlooks
really begin to change. If that is the case than South Africa should start to
emerge into more of an economic powerhouse in the next decade or two.
