Date: March 17, 2008 4:48:12 AM HST

Saturday, March 15 and Sunday, March 16, 2008 – Florence, Italy

I arrived in Florence in the late afternoon of March 13 and though I have spent the past two days on a different continent, I don’t feel that I have really left South Africa yet. There’s still a lot that I want to write before I allow myself to direct my attention elsewhere – topics and themes that either transcended my individual daily experiences or are “big” enough to warrant their own entry. For those of you who have had enough already, don’t worry – this won’t be on the quiz.

Some of the topics are related and/or intertwined: the ugly siblings crime and poverty, for example. Others, such as portraits of people whose nobility and humanity I don’t want to forget, easily stand alone. So on with it…

For those of you who are not Punahou people, I’ll begin one topic by explaining that Jim Clarke is a friend and a math teacher who has been to South Africa twice as part of Yunus’ Teachers Without Borders team, and he considers what he did there as valuable as anything he has ever done. First semester, we saw each other almost every day at 7 a.m. We’d stop, and he’d bring up one South Africa topic or another – he seemed more excited about my impending trip than I was. The topic of safety came up most often: where I could safely go and what I could safely do. In retrospect, I think it came up so often because he didn’t quite know what to say to me about it; he didn’t want to scare me, but he wanted me to know that I would need to travel carefully. So he’d tell me that I’d need to stay away from certain places, but then he’d add that every city has places which visitors should steer clear of. So I never quite got his message.I get it now, though, maybe more clearly than he intended it: crime is a major problem in South Africa. I’m not sure if it becomes this clear to tourists, but it certainly became obvious to me.

Gates, fences and walls are everywhere; everywhere, that is, where there’s something of value which can be stolen. The variety is endless – some are attractive, wrought iron works of art; others are utilitarian cement walls topped with curled razor wire. Even the vast majority of homes in gated communities patrolled by armed guards sit behind walls or fences. Whenever Yunus and I approached a school, someone – usually a student – ran out to open a gate – and close it behind us. Security company trucks advertise an “armed response.” And Razvi’s home in Roshnee outside Jo’berg has an iron gate just outside the heavy front door; whenever a visitor or a member of the family enters or leaves the house, even if for only a few minutes, they must lock the iron gate. Each home, school, or place of business is a fortress.

Yunus and I stayed with his cousin Mood in a prime, beachfront area of Durban for a night. As we parked, Yunus clued me in: open the trunk of the car, take out my suitcase, and get inside the apartment building (which has an elaborate security system) – and do it quickly.

Was he being overly paranoid? A few days earlier, driving my rental car north from the Durban airport on my way to the Hluhluwe-Imfoloze game parks, I listened to a radio station’s daily fifteen-minute crime report. The report’s latest advice? Don’t make cell phone calls in public places such as downtown streets and shopping malls because thieves have been snatching the phones. At Hluhluwe Park I struck up a conversation with a young couple from Durban, and I asked them if the radio report hadn’t been a tad sensational. Oh no, they said, confirming the report and proceeding to tell me story after story about how crime has affected them personally. “If you do not have a wall or a fence around your property, you WILL – absolutely, positively – be robbed,” one said, “unless you are so poor that you have nothing worth stealing.”

Two nights later, while he stayed overnight in Durban, someone broke into Gora’s car and (unsuccessfully) tried to steal it.

The obvious explanation for all this crime, especially for a Marxist historian like me, is poverty. Whoever has been reading these entries knows without me having to say any more that poverty abounds here in South Africa, yet certain images and incidents have been especially haunting to me.

There was the fish and chips lunch I ate in Simons Town, south of Cape Town. Taught to finish everything on my plate (“There are people starving in China.”), I continued to shove food in my mouth even after I had had enough. I probably should have noticed the two people on a bench about twenty feet away, but I was oblivious. When I finally could eat no more and was about the throw away what remained, the woman came over and asked me for the leftovers. She was grateful for the little that I gave them; I wondered how I could have been so clueless as to not have noticed them earlier. I still chastise myself for not having bought them lunches of their own. Another image that will stick with me is one of people walking along roads and highways. No matter where I drove, whether in the rural areas with Pauline or on the highways with Yunus, I saw dozens, sometimes hundreds of black (never white) people walking. I don’t mean walking from their cars to the market; I mean they walked as their primary means of transportation. And they were often miles from the nearest town or visible dwelling. When rural schools let out, dusty roads seemingly in the middle of nowhere would become crowded with students, most walking farther than Abe Lincoln ever did. Closer to the towns, I’d often see women (never men) walking while balancing on their heads maize flour sacks, faggots of firewood, or five gallon containers of water. Pauline and I even saw a woman walking with a huge communal cast-iron cooking pot balanced on her head. She walked very slowly because, as Pauline later learned, those pots usually take two men to lift. I also saw many taxis – not what we consider taxis, but vans – packed with black people, but even though the fares are cheap by U.S. standards, many people who could not afford them walked.

And one more: I know that this movie will stay in my brain for some time to come. Yunus and I are driving along the coast south of Port St. Johns. To our right lies the ocean, to our left stand green hills dotted with the typical dwellings of the poor.

He’s driving slowly because the dirt roads in this area are primitive. Children playing up in the hills spot us coming several hundred yards away; they stop whatever they’re doing and run down the hill, reaching the road just in time to meet our car. They run alongside, begging for rands. One child is so “skilled” at this that he actually cries real tears on cue. Interestingly, in one case a group of women happened to be standing by the roadside. As two children began to run down to meet us, one of the women called out a single word. The children stopped immediately and slowly walked back up the hill. Yunus and I both felt that the woman had reprimanded the kids for compromising their dignity. But then maybe that’s what extreme poverty does to people.

My common sense tells me that someone with nothing will, in desperation, steal from someone with something. And whoever has been reading these entries knows that poverty, thanks mainly to apartheid, is one thing there’s plenty of in South Africa. Ergo, the sad legacy of apartheid is that plenty of poverty means plenty of crime.

There’s a truth to this, but the deeper truth is more complex. I just finished a book by journalist Jonny Steinberg which makes some disturbing conclusions about crime in South Africa. In 1996, police records showed 77,000 armed robberies; records for 2007 showed 126,000. Moreover, for every criminal who held someone up at gunpoint in 1996, 4.1 empty home were robbed; in 2007 the ratio moved to 1:2.4. Steinberg concludes that the fortress building I describe above has worked – it has worked to shift criminal activity from robbing empty houses to robbing persons. “The irony is bitter,” he explains. “An era of fortress building has made us even more vulnerable.”

Along with this has come an increase in the number of murders, with statistics revealing that the victims have shifted from people who know their killers to those who do not. Here’s what Steinberg has to say about this: “As hearts grow warmer to those close to home, so homicidal violence against strangers is escalating. What does this say? Essentially that as the transition fades and the shape of post-apartheid society settles, so inequality produces more rancor and resentment. It suggests that our country is becoming increasingly fragmented and parochial: we are, it seems, less a nation than an agglomeration of spiteful, inward-turned villages. It suggests in particular that young men, who are responsible for almost all violent crime, increasingly regard those they know as objects of respect, and those they don’t as opportunities for plunder.”

I don’t want to turn this into a research paper, but I want to quote one more passage, disturbing though it may be. “During the apartheid years, the liberation movement fashioned an image of the South African masses as inherently dignified, rising above their circumstances to throw off the shackles of oppression. Sure, there were pathologies, but nothing that couldn’t be fixed by civilized public policy, nothing that couldn’t be mended by the acquisition of power. If the cream of South Africa’s activists and exiles had been canvassed on these matters in April, 1994, I doubt whether any would have questioned the proposition that crime would slowly decrease, our overflowing jails begin to empty, our people find a good deal more peace and equanimity in the texture of everyday life.

“Instead, governance has been hard, hard, hard: South Africa’s pathologies so frustratingly stubborn.”