Perceptions (1 of 4)

First time here. Flying in from a truly exotic location whose airport was about as sophisticated as Zambia’s Lusaka International Airport… as I’m going through immigration, a fellow traveler indicates that this (then Johannesburg International, now Oliver Tambo International) used to be a really lousy airport but they’ve been doing a good job of upgrading it. Find domestic departures and am on to Cape Town. Breathtaking scenery, really chilled vibe… staying on the white side of town (oops, I later learn that everything around the CBD is white… the non-whites were chased 25kms away for the blacks, and a bit closer for the coloreds). Have a discussion with a South African who is later to become a good friend about why she labels herself ‘colored’… why not call yourself ‘caublanasian’ like Tiger does? You know, acknowledge all the bits of dna in you. She unleashes the list of dna in her … and we agree that she may have a point there with that ‘colored’ label.

Die Kaap feels very… European… and like any unconscious person privileged to spend a holiday there, I focus on the touristy aspects… cable car, Long Street, clubbing, wine route, nice restaurants, Camps Bay (home of the rich and famous), (The Republic of)Hout Bay, Cape Point. In the CBD shopping one afternoon and I notice all the hawkers start to pack up at 4.30PM… by 5.00PM not a trace of anyone left. What? Have they made so much money they can close shop this early? I ask… (as I remember coast and how it seems that people there open shops as a hobby ‘cause they close at the same time that workers are leaving offices).. nope, they have to catch public transport home… 25 kms away… and it’s best not to get home after dark ‘cause some of those places are really dangerous. There are places ruled by gangs modeled after the crips and the bloods… and just as bad. While I’m here the big story is (the late) Hansie Cronje, the guy who took money to throw cricket games… everyone’s talking about it in very shocked tones… he says the devil made him do it and as a result, to my untrained eye, it appears that he's not receiving too much condemnation… I’m told it’s because he’s a boere… look at pictures of him and can’t for the life of me differentiate between him and a colored person. A mwenyeji, Indian fellow, introduces me to noseweek… where to go to read about who has stolen what money… He’s a trader, has always been, sells touristy stuff at Camps Bay. He opens up for a minute, sharing how they weren’t allowed to even sniff the air at Camps Bay before democracy… now he spends most days there.

I go back to Nairobi, really jazzed about my trip to SA, all the infrastructure and the availability of most things I could ever want… and the roads! My goodness those are superb roads! And the lights! There was electricity on for miles and miles. And the restaurants, the apartments, the supermarkets… first class, in fact they are “upmarket, world class” two words I later discover are what every building, business, and town in SA aspires to have associated with it.

I’m having customary lunch with 'uncle' jay, in Nairobi, updating him on where I am in my life, an opportunity for him to raise any concerns my old man has but does not want to discuss with me directly [I like my 'uncle' jay… in fact, whenever I want to disgust my sister, I tell her that I think he is the hottest over 55-year old man I know, and that if he wasn’t 'uncle' jay I’d … well, I kinda get the Lara Flynn Boyles and Calista Flockharts of this world with that whole attraction to older guys… something about those silver temples]. He says he took his daughter to Cape Town around the time democracy was docking, and she kept asking him if he was serious they were still in Africa... where were all the Africans? Not much has changed… 7 years on.

As often happens with life (the unexpected turn) I end up returning to live here for 5 years. I’m in luck the first few months ‘cause I make friends with some South Africans and get a politics and history 101 course from them. The first few months anywhere are always the best for political orientation, at least for me, ‘cause i'm like a sponge, absorbing every nuance of the socio-political situation and getting as much data as possible before I decide whether I'm pro- or anti- the establishment. With time I become apathetic… couldn’t care less who is right or wrong… just keep playing that funky economic music T-boz, and let me get mine. But before this state of mind is reached, my appetite for historic background of this country is insatiable, and I attend debates, exhibitions, read the news and then look up the backgrounds of the people, places and events mentioned.

I notice the black people here are generally… not as skilled or as aggressive as say.. Kenyans are… I understand that it’s as a result of Bantu education, and all the atrocities committed during the colonial period (and a recent thought has been that this was the way they resisted the occupation… by doing the barest minimum, and playing dumb), but I curl my lip and ask “kwani what were they doing when us guys were getting independence? Why were they asleep?” I also note that it’s actually equal opportunity lack of skill, across the board and color line, and find out that a lot of whites are in positions simply because of their lack of melanin. With time I get to understand what bound South Africans in chains for a longer time than we… what bound southern Africa for a longer time… that “their wazungus” had come to stay… that “their wazungus” had nowhere else to go, and were therefore ready to fight to the last person in order to stay put. When we got independence, “our wazungus” had options.. they were invited to stay, they could also have run south, to Rhodesia and South Africa, or return to the bosom of mother England. I’ve met several people over-40 who tell me “yes, we used to have a farm in Keenya… I have such great memories of growing up in Keenya”. That’s why it took Zimbabwe a little (lot) longer to see the light of day, and that’s why SA ended up as a negotiated democracy. The lack of a place to return to, that offered as trouble-free a life as that in Africa.

And I discover that the issues here are the same as anywhere else in Africa: land. We want our land back… they don’t want to “give” it back ‘cause they paid for it… and besides… it is argued… the Bantu people were actually aggressors who moved east and south from central Africa, so it wasn’t really your land to begin with. Anyway, if you get it back you’ll still starve, “see case of Zimbabwe”, we are told… it was the former bread basket of Africa, and since “you” took over, it’s nothing less than a train smash. About Zim, I’ll just briefly state two things: they finally see how artificial their economy was (I’m still flummoxed that after 20 years of independence they were having discussions over whether or not ‘blacks’ were competent enough to play on the national cricket team), and “you weren’t really a bread basket if you could come down this far, this fast!” I constantly refer people to the Kenyan case of being brought to our economic knees, and we continue to walk along on those knees… what’s so darned special about Zim… spoilt brats.. suck it up and be men! and women! A friend from there (who I tell exactly what I’ve said here) indicated that some communities have started making their own soap instead of coughing up money to pay for soap imported from SA. Meanwhile, the SA economy is booming because cross-border traders are importing even the most basic of things. And so the discussion/argument continues.

I take a trip to the winelands… oohing and aahing at the vineyards, and the delightful lunch and wine tasting we partake in… I don’t think to ask about the labor, who tends to the vineyard and picks the grapes… until much later when back on Long street and am face to face with a “street urchin”… actually, several of them… begging nicely for money or something to eat. My companion says “they’re still nice here… give it a few years and they’ll get as bad as Nairobi’s parking boys”. I look at them and there’s something terribly wrong… something that has nothing to do with poverty… something about their features. I learn later on, to my great shock and horror, that these are fetal alcohol syndrome babies… and there are lots more where those came from… the vineyards. Yes, those same very bourgie vineyards/plantations… with massa’s house clearly visible and done up beautifully in Dutch architecture, and the worker/slave quarters hidden from the tourist’s view. At some point (in the past?), the workers on these vineyards would be paid part of their wage in cheap wine. That’s right people… how else do you make sure you have an easy, amenable supply of labor?

District 6… once a thriving testament to what South Africa could have been… a multicultural neighborhood where members of the rainbow lived next door to one another, their children played together, men and women talked and socialized together… razed to the ground, everyone sent off to live in the neighborhood designated for their race. Soweto… another district 6, Africans from all parts of the country, from different ethnics groups living in harmony, learning each other’s language and culture… divided along ethnic lines… there was the zulu section, the sotho, etc. And years later, the inkatha party members would attack the Xhosas and others… all part of the divide and rule strategy of those wily apartheid bastards. When I think of the IFP I remember an older lady from Soweto, God fearing, peace-loving, meek and mild as could be… until I brought up the name Mangosuthu Buthelezi… I have yet to see such rage in an older person’s face… it contorted with hate and she spit out how she hated that man, hated him! One of her neighbors had 3 sons killed during the time of that violence… they were cornered in the house and slain there… with the lovely traditional weapons, of course.

Again, I say, “phew, I’m glad we never got to a stage where we had ‘townships’ and were divided by tribes in the neighborhoods”, again my ignorance is corrected… but we were at this point… why do you think people above a certain age refer to ‘shags’ as ‘reserve’? we had passbooks, you had to have permission to be in Nairobi. And in that very Nairobi, different tribes lived in different areas of the city, and there is still strong evidence of this past division today.

Returning to the apartheid bastards… I always thought that in order to put in place a system as ignoble as apartheid you had to be some ignorant red neck… not so… the guy credited with being the architect (though Afrikaners say in their defence that it had been de facto for many years before 1945 when it became de jure) was good looking blonde blue eyed phd in psychology, Dr. Hendrik Verwoerd. Yep, he had the wherewithal to really fuck folk up in the mind, and he did not disappoint.

And speaking of top-notch grey matter in the service of apartheid. Not long after I get here, I read about “dr. death’s” trial. Dr. Wouter Basson, a great(?) scientific and military mind paid to come up with the most expedient ways to get rid of the ‘bleksies’. He certainly gives it the old college try… and the bone chiller emerges during the trial… he had help from other governments … there are people out there working on chemical weapons that will selectively kill black people… can you imagine what aids would be doing right now (as bad as it is), if ‘democracy’ had not come-a-knocking? Related to this… a friend whose step father is a doctor in the ‘reserve’ performed a sterilization operation on a black woman who had requested it…. He got a check in the mail, from the government… apparently there was a reward for curbing the fertility of black women.

Back to the trial of Wouter Basson. He is credited with being behind the infamous anthrax-sprinkled free tshirts sent to townships among many other terrible things I have since blanked out of my memory. That’s one reason I avoid things marketed specifically to a black audience in this country… can’t quite shake off that paranoia.
[an aside: I found a Nigerian acquaintance drinking a beer that’s targeted at black men… it’s tagline: “the game’s not over until you sink the black” – feel free to go to town on the implications there, and refer to discussion between Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence in a movie I now forget. Anyway, after sharing my conspiracy theory… it causes impotence – he says to me “you mean it does that? That’s great ‘cause this is just what I need to normalize my appetite!” laughs all around… gotta love those Nigerians].
On the day he is set free (because he committed those crimes away from the borders of South Africa… in south west Africa as it was known at the time – Namibia, and in Mozambique), I am totally outraged. And I think others will be too. I read of no toyitoying taking place infront of the court, and the people I meet are just going about their business. I finally ask a colleague what he thinks of the outcome, and he says “well, the courts have ruled what they thought was best”. Wow! A country where the rule of law is not questioned. I think it’s a wonderful coping mechanism… you put your faith and trust in the law, and even if it lets you down, you just swallow and move on… but your pain emerges as infants and toddlers being raped, jilted lovers shooting the jilter in the head, fatal road rage incidents, girls having to go to the bathroom as a posse during parties – soloing means you are asking for it… rape…, criminals doing terrible things to their victims… it’s not just about robbing you of material things, it’s about robbing you of yourself, of your dignity… I remember a news article I read back in 1994 which said that SA’s freedom was won because the youth had become ungovernable, and the writer was asking how Mandela would manage this ungovernable faction…

And would a story like this be complete if it didn’t include the cacophony of black voices that say “things were better during apartheid”? Oh yes they exist… I encounter several of them… talking about how much better organized the transport and roads were during apartheid. I say “that’s ‘cause your behind was living in primitive conditions back in the townships or homelands, stupid!” just not so… vehemently. I try to explain that it seemed better because the infrastructure only had to cater to the white population and not to everyone as it does now… so of course it’s overloaded. They’re still not convinced. They, like so many of us today, choose to believe there’s a congenital defect in African dna that means we simply cannot succeed. But that’s an issue for another day.
My pointless? I’m getting to it…