Capetown 1998

Part 5

Submitted by Margaret Holub

Next day I taught the Shabbat morning shiur and then led services. It was nice teaching, because people discussed things and it felt pretty lively, despite people's proper manners. That afternoon we went to the Waterfront for the shootout, and then caught a bit of the Africa Cup cricket match on TV. I'd actually gotten a little invested in this one -- the game goes on for five days. The SA team, Bafana Bafana ("Our Boys Our Boys") played Egypt, and, as they say, "the whole country was on edge." We left for a great dinner at the Africa Cafe, a kind of pomo yuppie African restaurant right in Obz -- a memorable feast of foods from all over the continent. They serve portions of fifteen or so weird, spicy dishes, and you can ask for as much as you want of anything -- all on these fabulous bright hand-made dishes. My idea of restaurant heaven. We were served by a gorgeous blonde waitress in a dashiki -- a student from Norway. Rainbow nation. Bafana Bafana lost.

Sunday we went to Boulders Beach, where thousands of penguins roost. They are fantastic animals! Monday some last-minute tsatschke buying at Greenmarket Square, and we were off in the evening for the long flight home. Now I'm at the other end of that long flight thinking about it all. Mickey and I have chatted some about highs and lows of the trip. There really weren't any lows at all -- it was a wonderful trip for us both. The high for Mickey was being with Eddie and meeting and getting to know his family. That was wonderful for me too, especially because they were such unbelievably gracious hosts, indulging our every desire. But for me the high was somewhat different.

When I was asked about expectations before I went, I really didn't have any. What I had was a question. I'd spent my years on skid row in LA, the worst poverty and racism I'd ever encountered. I wondered how South Africa compared. At the end of our little, short trip to a tiny part of a big country, where we saw only a small part of what was to see and met just a handful of people, my overriding sense is this: The poverty is worse in Capetown. Something like 80% of the urban population lives in the townships, and their conditions are arguably worse even than being homeless in LA, if for no other reason than the scale. One million people live in Khayelitsha alone. It's hard for me to imagine life without a toilet or running water. Also, unlike homelessness in the United States, life in the townships is not something that the unfortunate fall into when their normal circumstances deteriorate. It's not even nominally seen as an aberration or a calamity. It is the normal situation for the vast majority of blacks in the country, except those whose rural poverty is even more severe. For immigrants from other parts of Africa, it is apparently a step up, if that's possible. It's also obvious to me that, however nefarious the welfare and housing policies are in this state and country that cause so many people to be homeless, the policies of the apartheid era were worse.

I'm in the middle of reading a book about the legal workings of apartheid, and it is hard to imagine a more heinous set of laws. As the author pointed out, the nazi extermination of the Jews took place in stages. Jews were forced to carry ID, their businesses were expropriated, they were moved into crowded ghettos, they were transported away to distant areas, they were killed by police when they protested, and then they were systematically exterminated in death camps. The author makes the case that, except for the final step, apartheid was fully similar to the anti-Jewish legislation of the nazis. I really had no idea HOW terrible apartheid was -- how detailed and encompassing it was in its injustice. I knew about the whites-only beaches, but I didn't know, for example, that to provide social services in the townships made one liable to arrest. I knew about the passes black workers had to show to be in the cities -- I didn't know that they were 90 pages long and included details about every job a person had ever had etc.

The big difference between Los Angeles and Capetown is that apartheid has ended, and things are just getting worse in this country for poor people and people of color. It is completely, endlessly amazing to me that apartheid was dismantled without a full-scale civil war. And it is further amazing to me that there hasn't been wholesale slaughter of whites in all those pretty suburbs in Capetown. Or a full-scale armed revolt from the Afrikaner nationalist right. Mandela has led the ANC to make a concerted effort to be inclusive of whites, at least to this point, and has tried to reassure whites that their businesses, homes and wealth won't be expropriated.

I can absolutely understand the fear of whites who are leaving in droves -- because it would make so much sense for the newly-empowered majority to simply wipe them out, economically or through violence. And that may yet happen. Instead the ANC is walking a razor's edge, instigating affirmative action of all different sorts at a pace not nearly quick enough to right the huge inequities of the past, yet too fast for many rightly-terrified whites. I try to imagine what the affirmative action debates in the USA would be like if we lived in a country that was 88% of color. So there is a tremendous amount of pressure from both sides -- from those who entirely rightly want the entire resources of the country to go towards making those townships and homelands marginally livable for the huge majority that lives there, and at the same time from the numerical minority but power and wealth majority holder, who are also rightly terrified of being reduced to the poverty of their maids and night watchmen. And in truth, wouldn't it begin to look equitable if 88% of whites lived in knocked-together shacks without toilets or water? But who wants that for themselves, or even more, for their children?

Nevertheless, it is amazingly, extraordinarily hopeful -- because these questions are being asked straight-out, being debated as they should be. I didn't even write about the wonder of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, whose findings were reported every day in the paper and on the radio and TV news (I tried to attend a hearing, but by the time I inquired, they had already moved to the Eastern Cape...) There too a razor's edge is being walked, between addressing culpability in some way that begins to satisfy the wronged majority, especially individuals who were tortured, imprisoned or had family members killed, and at the same time keeping that white minority from fleeing altogether or fighting back with still more violence. It was so heartening to be in a country where the right questions were at least being asked. It is hard for me to even imagine living in a country where things were moving in the direction of more equity instead of more inequity. I don't know how they're all going to stay on that razor's edge without falling into one abyss or the other -- and obviously individual people and policies fall on one side or the other every day. But it's amazing that they're even trying. And that about sums it up for me.

{End of Capetown 1998}

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Copyright Margaret Holub 1998

Last updated 03/14/98 (RGE)