Random thoughts about South Africa

Been here nearly a week now and I’m starting to get a very limited sense of this incredible place.  I have a few random thoughts and notes, offered up as they come to mind.

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I visited The Apartheid Museum today.  The museum sits next to a small amusement park with roller coasters and helicopter rides.  The screams from the roller coaster and the thwapping of the helicopters could be heard at the museum and had the unnerving effect of recreating the soundscape from the late 1980s when the state of emergency was in effect here and helicopters and screams were a part of daily life in many parts of Johannesburg and the surrounding townships.

The museum really traces the history of apartheid from 1948 until the Constitution was completed in 1996, with a post script about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and modern day South Africa.  I was struck by the section on the 1940s and how there was one huge wall full of all of the laws that went into setting the legal framework for apartheid.  Many of them are echoed in Canada’s Indian Act of the time, including laws about everything from owning land, to pass laws to drinking liquour and entering into contracts.

The museum pulls no punches.  There are hours of video presentations with brutal violence perpetrated against both blacks and whites, with scenes of police brutality, torture, right-wing white terrorism, necklacing and murder.  One room, devoted to the legacy of execution of political prisoners contains dozens of nooses hanging from the ceiling, one for each person who was killed by the state.  There is a whol gallery focused on the violence of the early 1990s that almost took South Africa to the point of no return. If you had any illusions that the legacy of apartheid can just be wished away, they are dispelled in this place.  It makes the subsequent work of constitution, nation building and reconcilliation seem miraculous.

I spent a great deal of the morning in tears, and when I emerged from the museum after three hours of intense learning, I sat quietly in the garden and sobbed.  When I was a young man in the 1980s I was active in anti-apartheid support groups in Canada, calling for sanctions and insisting that my Church, the United Church of Canada divest itself from the country.  Today I was reminded of the conviction I felt back then and it came back in waves of anger, grief and astonishment.  What a place.

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The Apartheid Museum is interesting in another way too.  It doesn’t have a typical story arc: peace – crises – resolution.  There is no happy ending here, just the ongoing struggle for balance, justice and peace.  And no one is under any illusions in this country that that struggle has ended.  Over the past week I have noticed that South Africans do not tell stories with happy endings.  Instead they tell stries with a much more real structure, stories that live in the cyclical nature of time, of events repeating themselves, of small choices taken with large implications at every turn.  I have been inquiring a little about this as a particular African form of storytelling.  In North America we like the Hollywood ending.  Here, they smell bullshit a mile away.

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The other day my friends Busi Dlamini and Vanessa Sayers and I were having dinner which included ostrich neck stew by the pool where the zebras were drinking and we were talking about unusual foods.  I was sharing some of the North American standbys like oolichan grease and fermented seal meat and they were returning the favour with fried grubs and goat hoofs, they told me about a special dish that is made from the head and feet of a chicken.  The dish is called “walkie-talkie.”

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There is a brilliant film that I saw on the way here called Jerusalema about a gangster/community organizer in Hillbrow, the roughest part of Johannesburg.  At one point as he is flirting with a life of crime he gest out only to run into his former boss at a gas station.  The boss says “crime is the fastest growing industry in the new South Africa” to which our hero replies that actually private security is.

There is no doubt that this is a dangerous city, although I have been staying in affluent suburbs and have perhaps a false sense of security about the place.  On these suburbs, the sidewalks are lined with walls which in turn are topped with either razor wire, spikes, barbed wire or, increasingly, high voltage electrical fencing.  The walls have doors in them that lead to courtyards and gardens, but the streetscape looks like a corridor, covered over with trees.  Occasionally instead of walls you see “palisades” – tall fences topped with three or seven spikes and sometimes with razor wire on top.  Most streets have a roaming security guard whose job it is to immediately report suspicious behaviour which is met with “armed response.”  The largest security firms are ADT and the curiously named “NYPD.”  In the public parking lot across from the “Wollies” where we have been buying food, there are three or four car guards patrolling the lot.  The take note as you park and  presumably  also call for armed responses if someone else leaves in your car.  All of these security folks are really nice.  They chat and say “howsit” as you pass by and they are friendly.  But these guys are on the low rungs.  The armed security guys around are tough looking and aloof.

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Everything is privatized here, not just the police.  The public transportation system is terrible, largely due to the fact that there is a huge fleet of “minicabs” private vans that run on largely predetermined routes.  The minicab lobby is so strong that any attempts to build new public infrastructure are met with threats and actual strikes from the minicab operators and the whole city comes to a halt.  Minicab trf wars break out frequently, wth shooting and murder and maiming a part of business, rendering the services effective on the one hand but insanely dangerous on the other.