This Time Last Year We Were In South Africa On The Western Cape

We had just finished one of the most exhausting, exhilarating things we had ever done:  working at a  camp outside Johannesburg for teenagers whose lives have been affected by HIV.  There is not a day we do not talk about what we did or saw there, and probably not a week that goes by without one of us saying: "When we go back..."  I learned so much on our trip, and at camp, that sometimes it felt like my brain was moving faster than I could process the information.

I loved it. 

By the time we landed in Wilderness, we were ready to put our feet up, lay in a store of food at the Pick n' Pay, buy some new books (I had given away most of mine, including ones I had not yet read, to some of the campers) and rest for a good long time.  I had lost about ten pounds at camp from working hard, and getting dramatically fewer calories, since there was no alcohol and no snacks other than what my friend Manu brought back from Jo'burg and shared with us.  Our hosts left for their own Christmas vacation -- they went camping somewhere, leaving us the keys to their house in case we needed anything.  The one thing she told us was:  "Do not go to the beach on Christmas!"  She warned us in great detail that terrible things occurred there on holiday that we would find strange and threatening.

So of course we did go to the beach on Christmas.  Nothing terrible was happening, and it reminded us once again that the scars of apartheid were still very deep, for we suspected our hosts had actually never been to the beach on Christmas.  Instead of the bacchanal we had been told to expect, we found extended families, grilling on hibachis, many wearing red and white fluffy Santa hats. 

If you think this kind of racial disconnect is peculiarly South African, go watch D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1915) why don't you?  Anyway, we had a lovely time socializing on the beach.  We then went home and had spaghetti and salad for Christmas dinner, having agreed in advance that our gift to each other was this trip.

On the Beach at Wilderness, Western Cape, ZA

Anyway, Merry Christmas to my friends in Jo'burg, Soweto and Durbs: this post is really a Christmas card for you and a way of saying thank you, a year later.  For those of you who are just home from Sizanani, I hope you are recovering from being wowed by the kids.  Mbali, I'm sorry I missed you when you were here this summer, and please come back.  William, be careful on Christmas brother, because we love you!   Kabelo, big, big hugs for you, your mother and the children.  Siza, don't you give Mbali a harder time than she needs to keep her in line, ok Vocelli?  Yolanda, I hope you are being good (not!) and that you moved forward on your business plans.  Enos, when are you bringing your plays to the US? Eliot, stay sweet, ok? Kedi, I need a band-aid!  Mphu, I will learn Zulu:  at least some.  I promise.

And dear Manu, our conversations and your music is always with me.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Bafana Bafana! Radical World Cup

As those of you who were reading Tenured Radical last fall know, our household (minus the travel-averse Portuguese Water Dog) spent several months living and working in South Africa. Therefore, although work will not be entirely suspended today chez Radical, tasks will be chosen with an eye to their compatibility with World Cup football. I am also wearing my orange National Sea Rescue tee shirt for luck. I haven't gone mad, however: good wishes aside, Bafana Bafana (which roughly translates from the Zulu as "The Little Guy") has small hope of beating Mexico today.

Life is not a Matt Damon movie, my friends. And football is not rugby. Thank god.

However, football does offer more options than a Matt Damon movie: if South Africa loses, I will switch hemispheres and root for Brazil, which is easy to do, because I don't give a rat's a$$ for the United States team.

In other news, can we please not take this opportunity, in which South Africa gets to show off just a little bit, to caricature South African sexuality? Yes, along with intense poverty, sexual violence is a terrible problem in South Africa, as is AIDS. But frequent assertions in some of our best American newspapers that, because Jacob Zuma has been married five times and currently has three wives, polygamy is legal in South Africa are ill-informed. Polygamy has no legal or civil standing in South Africa. It is a Zulu tradition that powerful men keep more than one wife, and Jacob Zuma is a very well-to-do Zulu who can afford to have as many wives as he likes. Not only does it cost money to maintain each wife and her children in her own household, but one also pays a steep bride price, or lobola, to the woman's family before a marriage can take place. Zuma has been roundly criticized for his polygamous practices and illegitimate children -- five out of twenty have been born outside these marriages -- by Christian churchmen (South Africa is 80% Christian), his political opponents, and more cosmopolitan South Africans. But one suspects that Zuma's public embrace of Zulu identity is part of his popularity: polygamy is a shrinking practice, but not unusual in the areas of the country where the ANC is strongest. Illegitimate births are not particularly stigmatized either, particularly when the father acknowledges and takes financial responsibility for the child, but also because it is not unusual for parents not to wed until they can do so respectably -- in other words, when the husband can pay lobola and set up his own household.

Americans might be interested to know that polygamy, although a hidden practice in the United States, is also not entirely illegal (although it can get you excommunicated from mainstream Mormonism), as long as other laws that regulate sexuality and the family are not broken. Prosecutions tend to occur only if the multiple "marriages" (which have no legal standing beyond an initial marriage, and almost always occur within a religious community) involve breaking other laws against incest, statutory rape, or welfare fraud; or violate the tax code.

What South Africans tend to be more concerned about are accusations of rape filed against the President in 2005, which were officially dismissed, but tarnished Zuma's reputation; and his numerous illegitimate children which, in a country where AIDS is a critical policy issue and condom use is officially promoted, sets a bad example to say the least. But these things pale in comparison to other problems; corruption, housing, unemployment, the collapse of public services, deficiencies in education and the yawning gap between rich and poor.

If you have suddenly become interested in South Africa (and I hope you have), Karen Tani has provided a good reading list at Legal History Blog. Might I also suggest Nelson Mandela's autobiography, The Long Walk to Freedom? In addition to being a memoir of one of the most important activists of our time, it is an excellent short course on the political history of modern South Africa. You will also learn a few things you need to know about Zulu culture and tradition, so as not to speak about the ruling clique in the ANC with utter and complete ignorance. For a call to arms issued by young intellectuals in the new South Africa, I recommend Leslie Dikeni and William Gumedi, eds., The Poverty of Ideas: South African Democracy and the Retreat of the Intellectuals (Jacana Media, 2010).

You might also want to start following three South African bloggers, two of whom are currently in my sidebar. Afrodissident targets reactionaries, demagogues and corrupt public figures of all kinds, particularly those (like Julius Malema, head of the ANC Youth League) who pose as radicals. Khayelitsha Struggles is written by activists from inside the vast township on the Cape Flats that stretches from the Capetown airport down to False Bay; the most recent post announces a "township" of tin shacks that will be built outside the multi-million dollar Greenpoint stadium to protest dollars that were diverted from housing for, and extending utilities to, the poor. Constitutionally Speaking examines political and social issues in South Africa from the perspective of constitutional law. Although today he admits being temporarily uncritical due to being caught up in the excitement, go here for blogger Pierre de Vos's "World Cup Guide To South Africa."

Ayoba!

Political Football: A Review of Invictus

We are in the last week of our two-month South African adventure. This is the stage of a long trip when the desire to squeeze every last drop out of the experience is in active competition with the urge to just throw away all your filthy clothes, get on a plane and go home. Now.

And at this moment, your favorite Radical got a nasty stomach flu, and was unable to do anything at all.

Except go to the movies, where we saw Invictus. This is the new film directed by Clint Eastwood that stars Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela and Matt Damon as Francois Pienaar, the captain of the South African national rugby squad, the Springboks. It memorializes the year after the historic election in which Mandela took office backed by a resounding majority of South Africans, most of whom had voted for the first time in their lives. It is a self-consciously uplifting movie, in which swelling music cues the viewer to moments of high emotion, even if little in the script has given you anything to be emotional about.

If you have seen the movie you might say: what script? I'm not sure I would have had a clue what was going on if I hadn't been reading memoirs and histories of modern South Africa for the last few months. Scenes with any dialogue at all are few and far between, and since we already know that South Africa did not collapse into anarchy after 1994 and that the Springboks did win the World Cup in 1995, the only real suspense in the movie is whether Madiba is going to be assassinated by a rugby fan (which we also know didn't happen.) The cinematography is fantastic, and also self-indulgent, given how little story there is. The editor clearly went off to lunch and never came back, as the film is close to three hours long. If you like this sort of thing, there are many scenes of nice male behinds in little white shorts that hide a large, grunting mass. ("Why are they doing that?" my companion whispered. "It's a scrum," I said, divesting myself of one of the two things I know about rugby. "Yes, but why are they doing that?" she persisted.)

Needless to say, if you are not already in love with rugby, and have been waiting for your whole life to have someone make a movie about it, you may feel as lukewarm about this movie as I do. On the other hand, the movie is so long and repetitive that if you know nothing about rugby, I can guarantee that by the end of Invictus, even though you will have learned almost nothing about South Africa, you will have learned the rules of rugby. In fact, the entire last hour is consumed by the World Cup rugby tournament. Political lesson? The way to Afrikaaners' hearts was through their cleats; black South Africans, in turn, were gracious in victory and could, metaphorically, "learn how to play a new game." By winning the World Cup (which they could not have done without the spiritual leadership of Nelson Mandela), the Springboks ensured that the new South Africa would be a harmonious one.

Really! Racial reconciliation was all about rugby? You don't say? But it's true. At the beginning of the movie, whites and blacks are barely speaking to each other, except at the urging of Mandela; by the final goal of the final match, blacks and whites are hugging each other, and black Africans have utterly forgiven decades of brutal colonial domination. The Afrikaaner police state that murdered, tortured and dismembered thousands of people, often quite randomly, has melted into an invisible past. Afrikaaners, on the other hand, have also extended one big hug to the people they kept a boot on for decades: they have given up racism, painted their faces in ANC colors, taken the maid to the World Cup final and been relieved of their fears that the country will descend into political and economic chaos that will send them fleeing to Canada and Australia.

Do I have to say that I found the movie hugely disappointing? And it isn't just because the interpretive gloss of Invictus isn't true (at the same time, I happen to be reading Antjie Krog's amazing account of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Country of My Skull in which the violence perpetrated on all sides, and the messy incompleteness of reconciliation, is described in moving detail.) It's because Eastwood, Freeman and Damon all have really good politics, and they have made a Hallmark Card of a movie that is designed to take South Africa off the map of the American mind as a place where American money should be targeting specific problems of health care, education, housing, and economic inequality that were engineered during the apartheid era with the full cooperation of the United States government and many powerful American corporations. Interestingly, in May 2008 the United States Supreme Court ruled that three law suits suing over 50 US corporations for their role in apartheid may be tried in US courts under the Alien Torts Act. And in December, 2009, slightly more than a week before the release of Invictus, the Center for Constitutional Rights filed a lawsuit against Ford, General Motors and IBM for their support of the apartheid regime.

From the beginning, the big debate about reconciliation in South Africa has been whether it can occur without compensation. It's not just that millions of people were deliberately immiserated under apartheid for over half a century, and resources redirected to lift the condition of Afrikaaners (who themselves believed that they had been unjustly held back and impoverished by the English.) It's that millions of people are still immiserated by the world apartheid made, and that Nelson Mandela could not unmake by becoming a rugby fan.

It is also true that the hatreds bred by apartheid and the violent resistance to apartheid could not breed a new world either. Mandela knew that, and the story about the Springboks is a small part of what he really did to effect a peaceful transition to black citizenship and an ANC government. But by telling a story about the power of sport to resolve political problems, Eastwood, Freeman and Damon have simply played into an old and tired American nationalistic myth about race that has nothing to do with South Africa, either in 1995 or now.

Happy New Year From Cape Town

For me, January 1 is not only the beginning of a new year, it is when I heave a sigh of relief that the holiday season is over.

Last night, after having drifted off to sleep around 10:15, I woke up as a party at a nearby apartment was chanting "Five! Four! Three! Two! One.....Happy New Year!" I threw on a shirt and stuck my head out the window. Fireworks went off over at the V & A Waterfront and individuals lit Roman candles in the street, sending colorful balls of flame sixty feet into the air. It was about 65 degrees, clear and breezy. I thought about going home soon; about my new South African friends and how I will stay connected to them; about my rowing buddies with whom I have celebrated the last two New Year's Days by racing in sub-freezing weather; and about the St. Anthony's Society back in Shoreline, that puts on an outstanding fireworks display outside my bedroom window every year.

Then I went back to bed.

One of the odd things about this trip has been experiencing three holidays -- Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's -- in a South African mode. First of all, it is summer here, and these are all holidays which are either historically American (as in the case of Thanksgiving), or ones on which being cold and spending wads of money make them characteristically American. When it isn't cold, certainly for Christmas, it seems Not Fair. I recall the Christmas in my extreme youth when I received a sled on a day that was 50 degrees and raining; and an even warmer New Year's day when I was dashing around the West Village in a tux and a little red bow tie at 5 A.M. feeling like I had been transported to another planet.

Like many people (only some of whom will admit it) I don't categorically love the holiday season: some of my favorite Christmases have been spent eating Chinese food and going to the movies in a deserted New York city scape. I come from a small family, and although I remember the excitement and fun of many of our holidays with great fondness (including the one where a small black kitten launched himself five feet in the air to steal a turkey drumstick, galloping off to consume it under the Christmas tree as we all laughed helplessly) academic life is not conducive to holiday-making. Thanksgiving? A precious six days to catch up on work, and by Sunday night you would rather eat glass than teach the last three classes and give exams that no one wants to take. Christmas Eve? The day that follows grading season, when you are finally free to do all your shopping at consumer-choked malls. New Year's? Oh hell -- here comes the American Historical Association meeting, and I haven't even ordered my spring books yet, much less sent my paper to the comment and chair.

You know what I mean? However, this year it has occurred to me that if I only put more thought into it, I could turn this sucker around. This year, my holidays looked like this:

Thanksgiving: a day like any other day, celebrated in a beach community outside Cape Town. No one but us knew it was Thanksgiving. I happily reviewed all the Face Book status updates from my Native American friends who, for obvious reasons, aren't fooled by the happy Pilgrim and Indian feast thing, checked "Like" on all of them, and made myself a big sandwich for dinner. The two of us watched the sun set as sea kayakers in sleek vessels raced madly around the bay; we then turned on the BBC to watch Barack Obama pardon the turkey. It occurred to me that he should have eaten the turkey and pardoned Leonard Peltier instead. That's what Nelson Mandela would have done.

Reconciliation Day: this is a South African national holiday analogous to Thanksgiving, but one which graphically demonstrates the difference between South African nationalism and the odd melting pot nationalism that we are used to in the United States. Originally called Dingaan's Day, December 16 commemorated the victory of the Voortrekkers over the Zulu Nation in 1837 at what became known as "Blood River." It was the moral equivalent of celebrating the Battle of Wounded Knee as a national holiday, but the reason it is also the equivalent of Thanksgiving is that on the eve of the battle, the outnumbered (but heavily armed) Afrikaaners swore an oath to G-d that in exchange for granting them victory, they would build a church on the spot and always celebrate a day of thanksgiving. In the view of their descendants, G-d came through (so, in a more American vernacular, did Smith & Wesson.) Hence, in 1910, December 16 became known as the Day of the Vow (later Day of the Covenant), when Afrikaaner nationalists rallied the faithful -- not against those people who are indigenous to Africa, who they already considered to be permanently defeated -- but against their English oppressors.

I know it's confusing, but it's a complex country.

On December 16 1961, Nelson Mandela, Joe Slovo and others founded Umkhonto weSizwe, or Spear of the Nation, the armed wing of the ANC. Subsequently, December 16 was often a day of tension and violence. While Afrikaaners dressed in kapies and rode around in ox wagons, the Afrikaaner state celebrated its hold over the majority by police beatings of random black people and tear gassing demonstrators when necessary; Africans and their allies contested apartheid by demonstrations and selected acts of terrorism planned for that day. Hence, once apartheid crumbled in 1994, the day was re-named the Day of Reconciliation, in an act deliberately aimed at quelling competitive nationalisms. Shutting the door on a bad past and moving on is something we would never do in the United States. For example, our fear of offending Italian voters and putting a dent in Hallmark Cards' revenues prevents us from acknowledging publicly that Columbus was the first European to launch the program of slavery and decimation that was eventually extended from Hispaniola to the rest of the hemisphere.

If we were South African, we would re-name it Italian American Appreciation Day, or Encounter Day, and be done with it.

In any case, I spent Reconciliation Day at my work site, and listened to 150 black Africans from many walks of life sing "Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika"with their fists over their hearts. It was very, very moving.

Christmas: Associated primarily with the beginning of summer and the school holiday, as far as I can tell. The South Africans where I was -- in Johannesburg and the Garden Route -- do not indulge in the mania for decoration that we Americans do. Gift giving did not seem to be a big deal either. I managed to purchase six pre-baked miniature minced pies from Woolworth's (an upscale food store here, known as "Woollies" by all and sundry.) Prior to a spaghetti dinner prepared on a hot plate by yours truly, we went down to our local beach, where hundreds of African families were holding braiis (cookouts) on the beach. Drinking was heavy, but genial, and you could spot the occasional beach reveler in bathing trunks and a Santa hat.

I will be processing my experiences on this trip for some time to come, I am sure. But one of the things these very toned-down holidays made me think about is that South Africans don't appear to associate celebration with conspicuous consumption. A holiday is pretty much a day without work, maybe an extra church service, and that's it. Perhaps there were trees, presents and lavish dinners behind the high walls and electrified fences that middle and upper class people invest in here, but if so, you didn't see these things in public. South Africa, for all the excesses that are attributed to those at the very top, is also drastically poorer than the United States, and people often deliberately refrain from displaying nice things in public lest they become a target of violent envy. I carelessly mentioned to a friend some weeks ago, struggling to articulate the difference between how each country presents its economic public face, that even kids who are poor have iPods in the US. "Then," she inquired sincerely, "What makes them poor?" I began by saying that I live in a society where there is no felt obligation on the part of the state to feed or house anyone, or guarantee them an education or a living wage (which is why people are poor), but found that I couldn't explain why US parents will then scrimp and save to give a child the perfect sneakers, a prom dress or a cell phone contract.

Oh well: it's only the first day of 2010. Happy Radical New Year, dear readers!

Is It? Or, On Christmas Eve, A Historian Puzzles Over What Happened At Camp

Several days ago my partner and I completed two weeks working in a South African summer camp for teenagers who have been affected by HIV. A few campers were actually infected and being treated with antiretrovirals (ARVs); most had lost at least one parent and other close relatives to the disease. As our stay progressed, the question of who in South Africa's mostly black townships and rural villages has not been affected by HIV was very present in my mind. Current statistics are that 1 in 8 South Africans are infected, although this is an estimate that many people will tell you is too low. As South African journalist Jonny Steinberg points out in his recent book, Three Letter Plague: A Young Man's Journey Through A Great Epidemic (Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2008), the stigma attached to a diagnosis and the erratic quality of health care extended to the poor means that many of those infected have never been tested; that many who have been tested are shut out of poorly administered treatment programs and simply go away to die; and that those who die from the effects of HIV, thirty years after the mysteries of the virus were first uncovered, are said by the hospital authorities issuing a death certificate to have died from tuberculosis, meningitis, or other opportunistic infections.

The camp I worked at is partly funded by an NGO that cooperates with the ANC-led government, and was originally funded by the Bush administration through USAID. It extends educational and medical resources to South Africa's poor majority, almost entirely black and often living in townships, large urban clusters of mostly tin shacks where basic sanitation and nutrition issues have contributed mightily to the havoc HIV creates in the human body. But the camp addresses another problem as well: that the disease also creates tremendous social disruptions in the kin networks that, as feminist anthropologist Carol Stack argued half a century ago, often help the poor to survive world-wide. Such disruptions have a particularly devastating effect on the young and on post-apartheid upward mobility. One young Soweto woman (I'll call her R) whose care I was charged with at camp described how HIV had transformed her life in this way: "Two years ago my mother died, and I moved in with my aunt," she said. "Then my aunt died. Now I live with her oldest daughter." In addition to going to school, she cares for two children who are both younger than eight; she also does the cooking and cleaning for the family to earn her keep.

Now reader, don't respond -- if you can help it -- with comments about how sad this is, since this girl is not sad about her own life. Quite the opposite, in fact, and as I have said in an earlier post, the South Africans I have met are simultaneously dissatisfied about their political leadership, angry about broken promises and inadequate public funding, and more optimistic about the future than an American would be in similar circumstances. For example, I am quite sure that R misses her mother, because she said so. Besides -- what child would not be distressed about losing two homes in three years? And yet, although she has quickly acquired the responsibilities of a grown woman, one might also point out that she has lost homes and also found new ones. As I got to know her, and she talked to me more as a friend than as a stranger who had accidentally become one of her camp counsellors for a week, I came to know her as a gritty, determined young woman, resolutely facing forward and ready to make a go of it in a South Africa where opportunities exist for the poor but can be exhaustingly difficult for an individual to grasp all by herself. R loves to read, she loves science and she hopes to go on to university to become a chemical engineer. The other girls in our cabin, several of whom were already mothers of children they cherished, had a similar grit. They spoke warmly of their love for books and for science, of the universities they hoped to attend, and of the careers they were willing to fight for. And having watched many of these young women in action, I have hope for them and for their dreams on this Christmas Eve.

One of the turns of phrase that expresses what I learned in my two weeks of camp, and that captures the suspension between what seems impossible and what the young people I knew claimed they would make possible, was this complex interrogative phrase: "Is it?" I heard it most frequently from a young friend and co-worker who was part of my activity team at camp (which was, dear reader, Nutrition class.) Said in a tone of gentle inquiry, or sometimes just acknowledgment, it was a listener's response to an unfamiliar story. Depending on context, it meant roughly the following:

"Is that so?" A polite acknowledgment that one has just said something interesting that requires no response.
"Tell me more." A heavy emphasis on "is" urged the speaker to expand on the previous statement.
"I find that hard to believe, but do go on." In this case, the phrase would be expanded to "Is it, now?" Skepticism was hardly definitive among my new friends, whose graciousness is unsurpassed in my experience. But the conversation that followed "Is it, now?" was usually actively comparative -- you tell me about yours, and I'll tell you about mine -- without being in the least argumentative.

This phrase -- "is it?"-- keeps returning to me as I try to sort my memories of camp, and of getting to know in brief and often surprising intimacy the wonderful South Africans I met there. I am trying to have faith that if I keep writing the stories people told me, recording my memories of what happened as accurately as I can, something will begin to emerge that will address the most basic question a historian can answer: "What happened?" In the two weeks I was at camp with several dozen counselors (all but ten of us South African, the majority Zulu from the Johannesburg and Durban areas) and 150 African campers between the ages of 12 and 20 (standard six through pre-matric) I heard dozens of stories like the one I opened this post with. And although I took notes, made recordings and took pictures I have yet to wrap my highly schooled intellect around what I saw, listened to and observed during these last two weeks (hence, my inability to post even after I returned to internet contact four days ago.)

One of the few things I can articulate clearly at this point, other than expressing my endless gratitude to the friends I made at camp who answered every question I asked and who were equally curious about me, is that I was dazzled by language itself for the two weeks I spent surrounded by the young black citizens of the new South Africa. As in a few other parts of the world I have been in, South African counselors and campers easily slipped from language to language (there are thirteen official languages here, including English and Afrikaans), and one of my closest friends was often beside me at key moments when campers or counselors were singing or performing, offering a priceless translation service that often included instruction on how a particular word was used and why.

The number of languages also sometimes had an effect on my brain that could only be described as crossed wires: I recall speaking to a camper once and hearing, to my dismay, the correct phrase come out -- in Spanish. He looked at me with amusement and replied, "Bonjour?" And yet although I came to understand virtually no words, as time progressed, I also grew to have a better idea what people were talking about by following expressions, tone and gestures. I learned to understand, for example, when a disagreement among the campers I was assigned to had escalated into an actual quarrel and needed to be dealt with. But I was also dazzled with the new expressiveness that English took on as well. Another wonderful way of speaking was the use of the word "borrow." "Can you borrow me a pen?" for example, is quite different from saying "Can you hand me your pen?" or "Can you give me your pen?" It expresses gratitude for your generosity in advance, acknowledges your connection to your own pen, and expresses a sense of obligation that will surely result in the timely return of the pen.*

When I mull over my experiences and my new South African friendships on this Christmas Eve, a part of my brain keeps saying "Is it?" I learned so much, but I also know it was so little. I have many things in my head, but I don't yet know what to make of them-- except that every experience I have had was a good one in some way, often because an African person was willing to take the time to explain, and to "borrow me" a bit of knowledge that would allow me to understand an event or song enough to record it in my notes. My friends taught me enough for me to have a glimpse of what it might mean to know more.

One vivid memory I have is, in the din of the dining hall, one of my campers would say after I asked her for a translation, smiling and shaking her head in mock reproof: "Radical, you must learn Zulu."

Is it?

***************************

*Returning pens is a skill my administrative assistants at Zenith know I could use some work on.

Letter From Johannesburg: Bafana Bafana

We arrived in Johannesburg yesterday and, although we did not visit the City Bowl on our first trip to Cape Town three weeks ago, for the first time since we came to South Africa it feels like we are in the Big City with Big City People. We are staying until tomorrow at the Crown Plaza Rosebank, which is in a suburb (think Westwood in LA or Park Slope in Brooklyn, rather than an American-style suburb) developed in the 1950s, as the apartheid regime was in the swing of creating separate living zones for “Europeans” and “non-Europeans.”

On the way into town from the airport I asked the driver why the South African football team is called Bafana Bafana. He replied, “`Bafana’ means a little guy who fights and win against the big guys. People started calling them that because in apartheid we could not compete with other teams around the world so we fell behind. So now we are ‘bafana’”

That perfectly describes my sense of this place three weeks in: this is a young nation that is eager for the world to know it better, and know it for the beautiful and friendly place it is. Part of why it is interesting to follow the preparations for the FIFA World Cup, for example, is that South Africa is painfully aware that people may still not want to come here, that most of the world does not know the new South Africa well, and that what they do know is crime, crime, crime. If fans are afraid to come to South Africa, the World Cup will not be the opportunity everyone here wants to show their best face, no matter how well they prepare. So the stakes are very high for this event next June: a lot of money has gone into capital improvements, which will be a worthwhile investment regardless, but the new stadiums and sports complexes will be a painful rebuke to a government that has a lot of claims on its money

It is simply true that crime is an obsession in South Africa: people tell you this, you don’t believe it, and then you come here and the warnings are endless. When and where to go to ATMs, don’t walk on the beach alone, never be alone anywhere, unless there is an electric fence, bars on the window and Chubb armed response on the way. While there are crimes that are shocking to US eyes (last year it appeared that “necklacing” might be back in the townships – putting a tire doused in gasoline around someone’s neck and lighting it, a technique invented for police informers in the 1980s) much of the crime is gang-related, poor people are the victims of the worst violence, and it is not dissimilar to crime we read about every day in American papers. Home invasions of affluent whites also receive a lot of attention, mostly because they can be terrifyingly brutal, but also I think because a lot of white people are obsessed with whether they, or their children, should remain in South Africa, and home invasions speak to a more generalized sense of apprehension even liberal whites feel when they are out of power in an African democracy that has not yet decided what it will be.

And yet, speaking as someone who was once attacked by a knife-wielding ten year-old on the Lower East Side when I stopped him from stealing my bike, has had one friend murdered and seen a total stranger murdered with a baseball bat, been sexually assaulted (the majority of women have been), has suffered two burglaries in two different cities, has been pick-pocketed, had cars broken into more times than I can count, it just isn’t clear to me that I am in more danger in South Africa than I am at home. Some of these crimes happened in dicey neighborhoods and some didn’t, but my feeling is that there is something very different in why people talk about crime in South Africa.

I do think that part of it is a kind of generalized anxiety disorder on the part of whites. Until 1994, whether they believed in apartheid or not, there was a big, bad state, a lot of acreage and a huge police force separating the black majority and the white minority. And while all the whites we have conversed with are attuned to the new South Africa, few are happy. Many speak about their anxieties by admitting that they have urged their children to go to university in Australia, Canada or England, and imagine making a life elsewhere. Some will say, only slightly belligerently, "Apartheid was a terrible thing. But it's our country too, you know." Part of me wants to say, Is it? Then I think that I made my home in a place where the main difference in the colonizing project was the ruthless decimation of the indigenous population, and I think it's much better to listen and learn.

But another aspect of this that is clearly cross-racial. Crime is one of five serious and widespread grievances against the ANC, the party that has a virtual monopoly on political power right now: the other four are education, housing, AIDs and corruption. Jacob Zuma, the recently elected president, is facing great expectations in all five departments, expectations that are tempered somewhat by the fact that he was recently brought up on sexual assault charges and escaped a conviction for corruption on a technicality. I’m not sure what that technicality was: one of my informants said dismissively that it was because the documentary evidence presented had been Xeroxed (which seems like a pretty good grounds not to convict if you ask me, but what do I know?) But as our elderly Afrikaans cabdriver (who worked in the finance ministry prior to his retirement shortly after Mandela was elected) said, “If Zuma does half of what he says he will do it will be alright.”

Of course education, housing, AIDs and crime are all connected to each other, and the country’s deficiencies are all a legacy of the apartheid regime. There was a great deal of violence, by the state and against the state, prior to 1994; AIDS had a special opportunity in South Africa because of apartheid labor systems that took husbands away from their wives for all but three weeks of the year; and the education provided to the majority of South Africans was deplorable prior to 1994, even more so because students organized against the state by boycotting school. While nation-building is a difficult and imperfect process that surely takes more than 15 years, it is also the case that the ANC party leadership appears to live very, very well; their connections are in a position to become very wealthy; Thabo Mbeki, the previous president made headlines by announcing, among other things, that AIDs could be cured by beetroot and other traditional remedies; and the vast number of Africans live in 12 x 12 dirt-floor shacks, many of which have been built out of prefabricated tin by the government in places like Khayelitsha on the Western Cape so that voters can be moved to dilute the colored and white vote there, and then more or less abandoned, the permanent houses that were promised left unbuilt. This strategy of moving voters around like chess pieces is failing: the ANC just lost its first election since 1994 in the Western Cape to a new multi-racial party, and organized protests in the townships are increasing pressure on the Zuma government to deliver on its promises.

But I would like to say one thing, having given you, dear reader, the short version of everything I have learned so far: this is one of the most interesting and exciting places I have ever been. The African people, and many of the whites, I have spoken to, are very hopeful about the future despite the daunting nature of these political and social problems. Ordinary people are also incredibly, exuberantly from my point of view, politicized. An unexpected outcome of the struggle against apartheid and its aftermath may have been that casual acquaintances in taxis, shops and restaurants talk to you about things like democracy. Our Afrikaans electrician back in Cape Town said at one point, for example, that he wasn’t sure democracy could work in South Africa. “What would work better?” I asked.

He thought for a minute. “Socialism,” he said finally. “Or perhaps communism. What we need to do is equalize the wealth in this country, not create a larger class of wealthy people who are also black.” And then he explained why.

You see what I mean? When was the last time you had such a conversation with someone you didn’t even know, much less in the United States. And when was the last time you had a chance to live in a country that was still bafana?

Posts may be suspended for the next two weeks: the Radical is traveling into the countryside of Natal where an internet connection may or may not be available.

And Now For Something Completely Different: A Journey To South Africa

Over the next two months, I will be writing you from the other side of the world: the Radical family has decamped to South Africa. It's what we call travel, as opposed to vacation: a working trip, where time is set aside for study, learning, and writing, as well as relaxation and seeing some sights. For several weeks we will be in the Western Cape, mostly in and around Cape Town. In December, we will head up to the Johannesburg area to work for a few weeks, and then circle back down along the southern coast (what is called "The Garden Route." ) We will return to Cape Town for several weeks prior to our return to the United States. We will be in South Africa for a total of two months.

In this initial post, and in those to follow, I am trying to guard against sweeping statements and observations. Because I am an academic, and trained to do precisely that, I am sure that I will fail. But I will try all the same. It's my experience that taking one's self to an entirely different place creates a drastic shift in perspective that feels like a wave of new knowledge, but that the prospect of really "knowing" much about the place or society one has entered is much farther off. But here are a few snapshots.

Prior to our departure, a great many reasonable people (several of whom were friends from South Africa) went on at length about crime here and instructed us on how to avoid it; most also agreed that the Western Cape is less dangerous than the more industrialized areas around Pretoria and Johannesburg, which is where the bulk of the really serious crime occurs. As a former New Yorker, and now an inhabitant of a Shoreline community that is a site for regular street crimes, I consider myself rather sophisticated on this topic, and yet friends urged me to not assume that this knowledge would benefit me abroad. These conversations, and firm advice given here by the people who have been in charge of our lodgings, suggest that South Africans are aware of the possibility of personal violence at all times. We have been urged, for example, to submit to petty theft, much as one was often advised in New York back in the 1970s to carry a twenty dollar bill to hand to a mugger, as it provokes muggers to feel unsuccessful if you do not. But clearly things are different here. Signs on private residences and businesses warn potential intruders that there will be "armed response." Here in the village where we are staying, there are regular patrols by private guards in cars, wearing bullet-proof vests, and carrying automatic weapons. There are also unarmed citizen patrols, who are (as our volunteer neighborhood watch explained to me) "extra eyes and ears" who can call the police in by radio if they see something worrisome.

I confess, it all makes me terribly uncomfortable. But as we tell our students, discomfort is often the sign of a shift in perspective that can help a person learn new things. So I am trying to remain open as to what this more naked show of force might teach me about where I am.

On a certain level, while I don't discount the necessity for precautions. However, it does strike me as strange that whether one is in downtown Cape Town or in this small village on the beach, one is advised to take virtually identical steps to insure one's personal safety, even when one is also told that some spaces are safer than others. This has caused me to think about something that is also true in the United States, and which is a central theme in my scholarship: in most societies, there is crime and there is a conversation about crime, and while the two reference each other, they are not exactly the same. It is something it would profit me to think about in a comparative context while I am here. A second theme is that, as in many places in the world outside Europe and North America, it is a normal political and social condition that the state does not have a monopoly on the means of violence. The high reliance on private security in South Africa may, in part, reflect white paranoia and the fears of the property-owning classes in a country where unemployment is running over 40%. However, it also may reflect the genuinely poor state of policing here. Repression and surveillance are very different tasks from investigation, not to mention the community partnerships and economic development that really reduce crime.

For example, yesterday in De Doorns, a farming community in the interior Western Cape, 1,000 seasonal workers drove 3,000 Zimbabwean migrant workers out of their homes by stoning, accusing the foreign workers of accepting lower wages than were being paid to South Africans. The article I have linked to in The Cape Times does not cite any arrests; last night on the news, only two arrests were reported. In the United States this would just be a stunning outcome, and clearly the news anchor who was receiving the live report from De Doorns was stunned on a certain level. "You can't just have mobs running people out of their houses, can you?" (if you imagine a tonal uptick on the word "can" it becomes clear that this was a rhetorical question.)

Possibilities for the lack of arrests, and the inability of the state to control the mob, spring to mind. One is the vexed politics of policing in a country still so shaped by the ideological, political and geographical work of apartheid. Another is the possibility that the state has an interest in the indirect expulsion of migrants fleeing Robert Mugabe's violence as well but cannot -- or does not wish to -- take it on as a political or legal task. The stream of desperate African refugees exiting Zimbabwe is far steadier and larger than we in the United States, who have largely been exposed to stories of white farmers being driven out by Africans, had been led to expect. We met two young Zimbabweans on the beach yesterday, a brother and sister who arrived as refugees approximately when we arrived as tourists. Lucy told us, as she watched her brother Leonard swim in the ocean for the first time in his life, that the situation for working Africans is so bad that in her view "Only God can stop Mugabe." This opened my mind to the thought that the South African government sees itself as having a moral responsibility to these refugees that it cannot reconcile with its own problem of domestic poverty, inadequate housing and surplus labor. But these are only three possibilities, grounded very much in political theories I know well, and I have not yet found the local sources that might make my ability to analyze this event more place-specific.

To conclude, I am becoming very much aware that the blogger's dilemma is intensified and made more obvious when one is abroad and the temptation to interpret one's observations through the lens of similarity is strong. The freedom to write anything that comes into my head has to be balanced and restrained by a high consciousness about the uncooked nature of my observations and the terrible incompleteness of what even concentrated reading can accomplish in a short time. There is much that I am seeing that is new to me, and pinning it together with what I know, what I know I don't know, and what I have any authority to express an informed opinion about, is going to be a critical challenge for me as a writer and a scholar in the next several months. While I will return to U.S.-based topics from time to time, I will hope to do so as exercises in comparative and global historical thinking, keeping at the forefront of my mind that I have colleagues who have spent their entire careers to date learning the things that are now so new to me.

I hope you will want to stick with me.