#1: An Up-Close View of Economic Inequality.
Johannesburg, Feb. 26, 2010.
I’m here to get started on a book, Uhuru {Freedom] Revisited (Africa World Press/Red Sea Press), a series of interviews with Africans working with, alongside, or against their governments, as they try to deliver on the promises of Independence, or majority rule. The broad theme of this, the first of three such trips, is education as a means for redressing inequality.
Three weeks will be spent in South Africa; then two in Botswana; and the last two, joined by my wife, vacationing in both countries. Eat your hearts out: it is the end of summer, warm and dry with lovely cool evenings, in what some locals call “Jo’burg,” or even “Joeys.”
South Africa, the stumbling, vibrant, and complex new democracy; Botswana, smaller and so well-ruled in the half-century since Independence (1966) that it is sometimes called (with unsubtle racism) “the Switzerland of Africa.”
On February 19th, just before 8 a.m., South African time (1 a.m., New York), I arrived at Oliver Tambo airport and immediately set to work putting flesh on two cliches. These are the gap between rich and poor and the complex mix that comprises this, the continent’s newest majority-rule nation. Each of the first two dispatches will feature one big cliche.
In 1994, the Freedom Charter of the African National Congress (ANC) promised to meet the people’s basic human needs. Thus began the reign of the nation’s first-ever majority rule government. Fifteen years after that sweeping, exhilerating promise, it is still, in large part, promise. Current President Jacob Zuma’s renewal of the pledge, on February 12th, the twentieth anniversary of Nelson Mandela’s release from prison, was greeted with quite a bit of skepticism, ranging from mild (“not much seen yet on the ground”) to severe (“who does he think he’s kidding, this stooge of global capitalism!”)
The first cliché was recently given point (if it needed any) when South Africa climbed past Brazil to the top of the world’s economic inequality tables Everyone I am here to interview, ranging from the heads of NGO’s to leaders of social protest movements whose own heads are often wanted by the police, recognizes this obvious problem. True, the middle class has been leavened by many non-whites, and there has been a remarkable surge of the majority, black population into, for instance, the universities.; that much progress is undeniable.
Yet you still see the cliché embodied every moment you spend in South Africa, in countless images, from the stick-thin men in ersatz uniforms who watch your parked car -they insist– for about two SA Rand, or US $.027; to the walled compounds with beautiful bushes and trees peeping over, and with security company signs bolted on, heavy on words like “armed” and “proactive.” Oh, and, by the way, if you tell a car watcher or a roadside seller (of hangers, sunglasses, soda, pity) that you have no change, but that you will bring some next time, and if you act decent about it, the response is likely to be in kind. For whatever reasons, the poor here seem much more forgiving and less importunate than their New York counterparts.
On the day of my arrival, I got lost on my way into the city. In part because I had flown for over fifteen hours in the company of a gaggle of vocal babies, and in part because of the road-and-transportation boom (express buses, train lines) in preparation for the hoped-for bonanza of the World Cup, which begins June 11th, I experienced an unprogrammed, extended whirlwind tour of many neighborhoods.
One of these, Hillsbrow, my guidebook sternly calls a “no-go zone” for visitors. (If further reason for my flop as a navigator is needed, I had already had a minor road accident. More on that from your correspondent, Candidus Americanus, in a future dispatch.)
Traditionally home to English, Italian, or eastern European Jewish immigrants, all of them poor, Hillsbrow is now a vertical slum and a destination for the poor from all over sub-Saharan Africa. The single non-African in this neighborhood, so far as I could see, I inched through narrow, winding streets overrun by bulging markets and lurching urchins, with my car windows rolled up and no expression on my face. As it happens, being lost in a menacing, nameless city had figured in my nightmares for years..
Hillsbrow is the teemingest place I can imagine. In Nigeria in the 60′s, I loved teeming towns and cities, because they seemed mostly benign, and because I was a young exoticist. (Even the street sellers had more merchandise, in those days, if the comparison is meaningful.) For the half-hour, or three days, that I spent in Hillsbrow a week ago, I concentrated on keeping my fear at manageable levels. My favorite fear lines are from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: “Fear at my heart, as at a cup/ My life-blood seemed to sip!” It slurped from mine.
The kindness of some strangers, however, and the presumed indifference of everyone else, made that day an alloyed nightmare. Several black people tried really hard to help -and to comfort–me.The final stranger, a roly-poly blonde Afrikaner housewife, consulted her map book (I bought one the next day), jumped back in her car, and said, “Just follow me, I’ll get you there.” She might as well have been wearing wings and a robe. “But wasn’t she,” you ask, “acting out of some kind of racial solidarity?” Please! As if…
Ron Singer
Ron Singer’s writings on Africa have appeared in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, democracy now, The Georgia Review, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. He also writes poetry, prose ...
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