Date: February 26, 2008 6:04:02 AM HST

Wednesday, February 13, 2008 – Mbabane, Swaziland

Yunus and I made the four-hour drive from the Jo’burg area to Swaziland on Sunday. We’ve been here since, staying in one of the guest cottages at Waterford School, which Yunus attended until the mid-1970s, when the South African government took his passport away. He came for nostalgia and to give an address to the Waterford student body; I tagged along to further my education.

A group of anti-apartheid whites established Waterford in neighboring Swaziland in the 1960s to provide a quality education primarily for those South African students forbidden by the apartheid government from attending white schools. Its student body consisted of many of the sons and daughters of anti-apartheid leaders (including Nelson Mandela’s daughter), and it became a thorn in the side of the government. At the end of Yunus’ sophomore year, his dad, suspecting that the government would take away his son’s passport, found a private pilot to fly Yunus from Jo’burg to Swaziland in the middle of the night, thus evading the check at the border which might have resulted in a confiscated passport. Yunus took his exams, came back to Port Shepstone, and did in fact have his passport revoked soon afterward. Though he never graduated from Waterford, he – for obvious reasons – feels a loyalty to the school. He expressed this loyalty beautifully to the students in a perfectly composed (with no notes) seven or eight-minute address, which also included a non-preachy appeal to public service. The students paid perfect attention.

The school sits perched on a big hill/small mountain above the capital of Mbabane. Its 575 boys and girls attend classes (and some board) in a cluster of buildings which mostly blend nicely with the landscape. The views border on the spectacular, and the well-maintained grounds include a flat, green soccer field (which is a notable exception to all the other rocky, dusty ones I’ve seen). Students smile and greet strangers (at least this stranger) in a manner which suggests self-confidence. I’d call it the Punahou of Swaziland if the school’s computers weren’t so agonizingly slow (no broadband in Swaziland).

I guest-taught two sets of classes: a ninth-grade history class (Monday) and an eleventh-grade I.B. (International Baccalaureate) history class (today).

In the first ninth-grade class, I focused mainly on the American Revolution, with occasional digressions (provoked by questions) into American politics. The second class, with the teacher’s permission, focused entirely on politics. What are the differences between Democrats and Republicans? Can Obama win? Will he be killed?

The ninth graders were fun, but the I.B. classes were really impressive. Their current focus was the Vietnam War – did I think I could teach a class on this? Does a bear defecate in the wilderness? My only problem, I thought to myself, would be that I’d have to cram everything I wanted to say into a forty-five minute period. As I covered each major topic – French Indo-China, Dienbienphu, The Geneva Accords, the Tonkin Gulf Incident and Resolution – I’d ask the students if they understood what I’d said. Yes, they indicated, they did. “So someone tell me,” I asked, “what were the Geneva Accords?” Several hands went up; I chose one girl. Perfect answer. I discovered that they already knew everything I had said, and, I might add, they knew it better than I expect my American students to know it. I entertained questions for the rest of the period, and gave them the following dilemma: you oppose the war; nevertheless, you have been drafted. Will you submit to the draft, refuse and go to prison, or flee to Canada? In the first class, two students raised their hands for each of the first two options; ten chose Canada. In the second class we spent more time discussing the situation, but when it came time to vote, all eight chose Canada.

Clearly, the I.B. kids are an amazingly sharp bunch, but like everything I’m learning here, a complexity revealed itself (which I didn’t notice until I heard a discussion of the subject). The student body is de facto divided in two: the I.B. kids, and all the others. The I.B. kids are mostly haoles from Europe; the rest are mostly blacks from South Africa and Swaziland.

I knew little about South Africa before I came; I knew nothing about Swaziland. What I have learned in the short amount of time I’ve spent here fits nicely into the “more- complex-than-one-would-think” theme that has been hitting me over the head daily.

I’ve been sitting at the keyboard for a while trying to find a way to describe Swaziland without resorting to overused descriptions like “achingly beautiful,” or “tragically beautiful,” but I’m at a loss as to how to say it better. “Ezulwini,” the name of the valley that lies between Mbabane and the slightly larger city of Manzini, appropriately translates as “Heaven.” The gently sloping green mountains which lie on either side of Ezulwini Valley seem welcoming rather than forbidding, the sugar cane and corn below suggest prosperity, and the dwellings on the slopes of the mountains are far enough away to look picturesque. And those people to whom I’ve spoken who live here claim that the black Swazis are friendlier towards haoles then the South Africans are because the Swazis lack the resentment of apartheid that black South Africans have. (Sounds reasonable to me. If I were a black South African, I think I’d start with a hatred of white people, then perhaps change my attitude towards individual whites as I got to know them.)

But a closer look brings a different focus. Yes, some of the houses on the hill with the million-dollar views look like nice places to live, but most of them are the shanties that scream poverty. And then there’s AIDS. Swaziland has the highest AIDS infection rate in the world: forty per cent of the Swazis are infected. A teacher discussing the subject claimed that life expectancy fell from thirty-four to thirty-one IN ONE YEAR. That seems almost impossible, and I’m skeptical (I have not been able to check it out yet), but it is true that Swaziland is the only country in Africa in which the population is declining. Meanwhile, the king, a spoiled thirty-something who while prince used to send his cronies up to Waterford to pick up female students, sets a good example for his subjects by taking a new wife every year.

But here, too, things are more complex than I first thought. The king himself seems trapped between two factions. The modernists (like all “modernists?”) want change, but the traditionalists’ political and economic self-interests lie in resisting change. At this point, the traditionalists have the upper hand, but I wonder what having the upper hand will mean when there’s no one left below.