South Africa: Two Realities That Will Hopefully Converge
It’s with exhilaration but also sobriety I return from Africa. It’s a continent of limitless potential and beauty but also riddled with cruel injustices. Twenty four years after freedom, South Africa still seems under the grip of apartheid, and segregation may be officially over but it is evident everywhere you look. And although there is so much progress, and many inspiring and amazing things in this country, a small minority still subordinates the majority.
The rules are different for whites and people of color. In the affluent parts of Cape Town, white people own most businesses and hotels, eat in fancy restaurants, look at modern art in the Zietz MOCCA Museum, sleep in the $5k a night Silo hotel, buy expensive things on Bree Street, jog in the beautifully manicured parks of Greenpoint and warn you of savage criminals, junkies and gangs in the townships where people of color live in deplorable conditions. Blacks and coloreds ride in from far away to labour quietly in the kitchens, clean your bathrooms, provide security for white moms and their tender babies, drive Ubers, wait on you in restaurants, pack the African handicrafts you bought to take back to America and go about the charade of equality with dignity and grace but also a barely disguised knowing that little has changed.
Of course I’m oversimplifying things and nation building takes a long time. Things are never black and white and the reality is obviously more nuanced and complex, but this is the distinct impression I got as a first time visitor and the many black South Africans I spoke with confirmed it. There were mostly white visitors from around the world at the District 6 Museum which is a record of the 60,000 black folks forcibly uprooted from the area in the 60s. Black and other South Africans still feel these massive injustices in their bones- they don’t need to visit museums to see it. So, when someone writes “All Lives Matter” in the record book at the museum, clearly they missed something about this country. Still, the many white people I met also feel the inequity and share a love of this unique city. I’m sure bridges will be built in time.
As my Uber driver told me last night: “We have two oceans and the great Table Mountain and the African spirit is old and beautiful and although some tourists come here expecting giraffes and zebras on the streets we are a modern country now and we have a new President and the rain has stopped and it’s a new day”.
I’m excited for the new day in South Africa- You’re a great country. Thank you for everything, I will be back soon.