Date: January 31, 2008 10:52:57 AM HST

Subject: South Africa 

 

 Monday, January 28, 2008 – Port Shepstone

 Pauline Duncan is a 63-year old white South African.  A former elementary school principal, she also served as mayor of Port Shepstone during the final years of apartheid, from 1988 until 1991 or 1992 (apartheid ended in 1994).  Currently, she spends her time working with all races, trying get them to work together to improve the lives of the poorest people in Nyandazulu, the rural area which surrounds Port Shepstone.  She is also the most amazing person I’ve ever met, and she gave me what I’m pretty sure is the most intense day of my life.  I hope what follows will do small justice to her; I know I will never be able to convey the true intensity and meaning of all that I saw and heard.

 

I wrote the above paragraph late at night, then went to bed, deciding that before I continue writing, I had better allow those two claims (most amazing person, most intense day) to percolate a bit in my mind before I send them off.  Days later, having pondered other impressive people I’ve known and intense experiences I’ve had, I see no reason to alter what I said.

 But how do I begin to untangle the threads of this incredible tapestry of unbelievable poverty, beauty, ugliness, corruption, joy, sadness, brutality, and gentleness that made up my day in Nyandazulu? A linear chronology doesn’t seem adequate to the task, but I’m not sure how else to proceed, so I’ll at least begin that way…

 Yunus and I met Pauline in front of her home in Port Shepstone.  I think Yunus wanted me to experience this day on my own, so he dropped me off and went off to do errands.

 

Pauline drives a stick-shift VW Golf old enough to have hand-cranked windows and manual door locks. The car’s perfect, she says, for the rural dirt “roads” she frequently travels (this proved to be entirely accurate).    Less than a minute after I got into her car, we encountered someone she knew: Sifiso Dlawini, a Zulu with a metal leg brace who walked with some difficulty using a cane.  He was returning to his home in Nyandazulu, and since we were headed in the same direction, she offered him a ride, which he gladly accepted.  When we arrived, we saw that he was lucky enough to have secured new, low-cost housing. The house, identical to all the others in the closely spaced development, is a clean, one-room, two-windowed concrete structure about twelve by sixteen feet.  In front is a small, neatly tended garden of which Sifiso is proud.  The only problem, he said, is that the place has no water, and being disabled, he must pay a neighbor five rand (about 75 cents) to haul his water from the pump to his house.  The house does not have electricity, but probably because no one in the development has electricity, he did not mention that as a problem (Pauline had to ask).  He posed for a picture in front of the house; then we left him to see other parts of the area.

 Difiso’s development was one of the tidier ones we saw.  The poorest ones are those inhabited by squatters, whose homes are made of odd pieces of wood, tin, and other discarded materials they can find. Some squatters pay the landowners a small rent for the privilege of calling a few square feet home. Needless to say, water and electricity are seldom included in the rent, or even available.

 

Other dwellings may be smaller or larger than Difiso’s, and some appeared to be comfortable by Nyandazulu standards, but what most of them have in common, aside from a lack of electricity and clean water, are often crumbling walls, doorways with no doors, window openings without panes of glass, disintegrating tin or thatch roofs, and a general aura of poverty the likes of which I have never seen. The rotting housetrailers on cinder blocks that so shocked Deb and me on our trip through the Mississippi Delta region seem like upper middle class housing by comparison.

 At one point we came to the top of a hill where we stopped to admire a scenic vista of rolling green hills bisected by a thin dirt road.  Pauline pointed out that the lands to the left of the road, planted with sugarcane waving softly in the breeze, were separated by an electrified fence from the lands to the right of the road, which were just as beautiful but contained scattered shanties instead of sugar cane.  This division, she explained, was the result of the hated Group Areas Act, instituted during apartheid, under which blacks who had occupied the fertile farmlands for generations, were uprooted and their land sold to whites, who set up plantations which they still hold today.  The fact that Zulu tradition requires that they worship at the site of the bones of their ancestors, which lie buried in the seized ground, made no difference to the government, hence the electrified fence to keep them out.  Some blacks have petitioned the government to get portions of their land returned to them, but with little money to buy out the current owners (who bought the land from the government), chances of success are slim. Instead, they remain housed in what they call – for obvious reasons – “Tin Town.”  I thought, as I heard Pauline explain the Group Areas Act, and still hope today, that there is a special place in hell reserved for those who instituted such a devastatingly heartless policy.

 

Pauline pointed out two other houses during our drive, both of which are impressive compared to those that surround them.  One belongs to the most powerful person in Nyandazulu.  Just past his house, the pavement ends and the dirt road begins.  As we approached the other, Pauline said, “Do you see that house?  That belongs to a killer.”  She then explained that during the last years of apartheid, violence was so widespread that not only were whites killing blacks and vice versa, there was a great deal of black-on-black killing as well, often for personal or economic reasons or to assert and consolidate power.

> The owner of the house had killed several persons, maybe many people.  Pauline was criticized for attending his funeral when he was killed, but she explained that the dead man’s supporters were influential in the community and could be of help to her; thus it was necessary for her to put aside her personal feelings for the sake of those she was trying to help.  Shortly after telling me this anecdote, she stopped and gave what appeared to be a warm greeting to a man who was walking on the side of the road. She extended her hand in greeting, the man grasped it, and they exchanged pleasantries in Zulu for a few seconds.  After we moved on, she turned to me and said, “That’s the killer’s brother.  He’s probably killed a few people too.”

 Primitive as they are, the dirt roads which wander through Nyandazulu are a blessing to those whose homes they reach, because at least the residents can come and go via taxis (small vans which carry up to about a dozen people at a time).  Pauline mentioned that it is not unusual for someone who, say, buys a mattress, to have it dropped off at a point on the road closest to his or her house, then enlist neighbors to help carry it the rest of the way, which may be more than a mile from the road.

 Eventually, we met up with the beaders and sewers, who do their crafts in a government-built community center.  I know several women back in the U.S. who do beadwork, and, in order to save their eyesight, they all do their work with the aid of a large rectangular magnifier.  These women, of course, had no such help.  I am hoping to place an order with the woman we met at the office supply store for 1 1/2″ x 2″ patches with “Puns” embroidered in buff against a blue background, which students can pin to their clothing on football game days.  The profit on such a sale would be of great help to her.

 We visited two schools in the area, one a community college, and the other a local school for children aged five to fourteen.  The college, perched dramatically on a hill overlooking a beautiful expanse of territory, is modest by western standards but stands out like a gem in this area.  The trunk of our car was searched both on entering and leaving the college.

 

The other school, the condition of which reflects the economic level of the community it serves, was the scene of the emotional highlight of this most emotional day. As we walked towards the administration “building,” we passed overcrowded classrooms bursting with the cutest young faces imaginable.  Many of these beautiful faces were those of orphans – AIDS has taken an appalling toll in this country.  All the children are poor, some desperately so.  The principal explained that some of the girls could not romp around or climb trees during recess because they wore no underwear  – they could not afford any.  Others had no shoes, or bookbags, or any of the most basic personal items which might provide a measure of dignity or enable them to at least fit in with their peers.

 At this point, Pauline began to explain the reason for her visit, but she first asked for written assurance from the principal that the donation she was about to give would be used not to buy books, or supplies for teachers, but to help the neediest of the children satisfy the needs just mentioned.  The principal wrote a pledge of assurance in the school log book, and called in three women from her office to sign the book as witnesses to the pledge. Explaining that the donors wished to remain anonymous, Pauline then handed the principal 2000 rand (about $300).

 

The reaction of the four women was unrestrained joy.  Someone walking into the room at that moment might have guessed that the women had just received word that they had won fifty million dollars in the California lottery. I had been wiping away tears all day; now it took everything I had to keep from breaking into uncontrollable sobs.  I managed to keep my composure, but I did wipe away tears as unobtrusively as I could (something I am unconcerned with now as I type this).

 The women could not thank Pauline and the donors enough.  After we left, Pauline, also grateful for the donation, said with a sigh, “We are so tired of having to say thank you.”  A few minutes later, she revealed to me the names of the anonymous donors: Yunus Peer and his brother Gora.

 I saw hundreds of students as we toured Nyandazulu – in classrooms, at recess, walking along dusty roads – and they all were dressed in perfectly clean uniforms, their white shirts so spotless that they almost appeared to be starched.  I mention this because at one point in the drive, as the road was about to cross a stream, Pauline pointed out a place where the stream widened into a calm but rather murky pool.  “That’s where the women do their laundry,” she said.

 We spent five hours in Nyandazulu and did not see a single haole face.  Although every person save one among the hundreds we met, encountered or made eye contact with smiled, waved, or greeted us warmly, Pauline mentioned that her haole friends fear for her safety every time she makes one of her frequent trips through these all-black rural areas.  Afterword, when I asked Yunus about this, he confirmed that very few whites might have been able to safely make the journey that we did, not because of the color of their skin, but because those with nothing would likely want to take whatever they could from those with something. Yet Pauline said that she feels safer in these all-black areas than she does in Port Shepstone, and to me, her actions and demeanor supported that statement beyond any doubt.  She didn’t know everyone we encountered; it only seemed that way as she smiled, called out greetings, and stopped to talk (in Zulu) with dozens of people.  At one point, gazing at a beautiful scene of distant green hills with tiny, ramshackle houses scattered about, she said with great feeling, “I love this place.”

 

Date: February 1, 2008 9:01:24 PM HST

Subject: South Africa 

 

— Win Healy <win@logn.net> wrote:

 From: Win Healy <win@logn.net> Subject: Re: South Africa #2 Date: Fri, 1 Feb 2008 07:56:23 -0500 To: jay seidenstein <jayseidenstein@yahoo.com>

> Jay,

> I am moved from my preoccupations with the struggling economy of a small New England town, with high taxes and relatively high unemployment, to write an inadequate response to the most impressive person you have ever met and the most intense day you have ever spent. Given that you have “met” Mike Gearen, Ruth Fletcher, Art Bowen, Liz Foster, Bobby Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln and myself, I had to pay attention to Pauline Duncan.  And what impressed me about your account of Pauline is how seldom either you or she talked about HER.  She seems to walk softly yet leave a substantial footprint.

> I was also very impressed by the extent to which your account of that day described what happened to others as compared to what happened to you, though your emotion was very much in evidence. You mentioned the “Puns” patches as potential links of your experience in Nyandazulu and your other life in Hawaii.  Have you thought of any other links?  Are there projects that you, like Yunus, will be undertaking to maintain those links?  One of the things that always impressed me about Yunus was his ability to truly be in two places at once. No mere voyeur he.

> Thanks for sharing your experience!

> win

> 

 

Date: February 6, 2008 10:09:30 PM HST

 

 Thursday, January 31, 2008 – Mthatha

 Mthatha is a dusty city in the Eastern Cape, one of the most beautiful but poorest provinces in South Africa. The city has three or four high-rise buildings of fewer than ten stories, and Trinset Teacher Training College occupies several acres just outside town, but Mthatha’s claim to fame comes from the fact that Nelson Mandela was born and raised nearby.  The Nelson Mandela Museum, located in town, celebrates Mandela’s life and achievements through photos, a few artifacts, and quotations from his autobiography, “A Long Road to Freedom.”  Mandela, while an inmate at the infamous Robbin Island Prison off Capetown, wrote his autobiography on scraps of paper, the text of which was then copied in minute script by another inmate onto a single sheet of paper, smuggled out, and delivered to a sympathetic publisher.

 

The museum also has a wing on either side of the main room, each of which contains gifts and letters presented to Mandela after he became president. During most of his twenty-seven years on Robbin Island, it was illegal to display a picture or icon of Mandela – it was even illegal to mention his name or talk about him in conversation.  In attempting to erase his name from the public consciousness, the law resulted in the opposite effect.

 The dated computers which present the interactive parts of the exhibit no longer function, and of the three television screens which present brief filmed accounts, only one works, but the visitor who spends an hour reading the text and looking at the photos cannot help but be impressed with Mandela’s courage and his dedication to the cause of overthrowing the brutal white domination of South Africa.  By the time I came to the final phase of the exhibit, video footage (on the only television which works) of Mandela’s inauguration as president in 1994, with background music sung by an African chorus, there was not a dry eye in the house (as I was the only person in the exhibit at the time, Mthatha not being much of a tourist destination). A large photo nearby of Bishop Desmond Tutu clapping his hands with joy (one can see the joy in his face) while watching Mandela receive the Nobel Prize adds to the final emotional wallop.

> 

 Like the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, this museum’s contents serve as a reminder that a few committed, courageous individuals can change history. And just as the exhibit on Freedom Summer, 1964, at the Civil Rights Museum served to remind me of my own lack of real commitment to the great moral battle of Twentieth Century America, the exhibit here serves as an uncomfortable reminder of how I was able to put the horrors of apartheid on my emotional back burner. Yes, I was sympathetic to the anti-apartheid struggle – I even signed a few petitions supporting the divestment movement (how courageous of me!) – but I never really took up the cause.

 I could say that part of the reason for my lack of real interest and commitment was due to what I have recently come to see as the terrible coverage that the American press gave to the situation.  With a few occasional exceptions, our print and television media never even came close to conveying the horror and brutality of apartheid and the way the white government enforced it.

 

But that’s not enough of an excuse, especially in my case.  Here comes a confession, one that I feel must make, given all that I have seen and experienced here so far.  And it doesn’t come easy: in the late 1970s, I purchased $2000 worth of South African kruggerands.  The anti-apartheid movement was not in the forefront of my political consciousness at the time, and I managed to sweep what was then a minor discomfort aside.  But I should have known better – in fact, I did know better – and the trip to the museum today has made that disturbingly clear.  My only consolation is that I not only managed to lose $1000 on the investment, but that I was delighted to have paid a tangible price for my ethical failure.

 

There’s another incident associated with my visit to the museum that I want to remember.  Inside the museum, near the entrance, stands a water cooler. It was hot, so I approached it to get a drink. I didn’t see any paper cups, so I asked the guard, a black man, if there were some.  He pointed to a plastic coffee cup and indicated that I should use that.  I was reluctant in the extreme to use a cup that I knew had been used by dozens of people, so I begged off by explaining to him that I had a cold and didn’t want to transmit my germs to others. There was some truth to my excuse: I did think I had a cold (I was sneezing, but it turned out to be due to an allergy).  I think he believed me; at least he didn’t appear to be insulted.  But I can’t deny that I did not want to drink from that cup, and I was happy that I was able to come up with an acceptable excuse so quickly and smoothly.

 

Later that day, as I was reading, “My Traitor’s Heart,” an excellent book on the “problem” of being white in South Africa, I came to the following paragraph: “Someone would press a bowl of bitter tshwala beer into my hands.  Then the hut would fall silent, all the men watching to see whether this uninvited white visitor was willing to drink from the communal vessel.  When I lifted it to my lips, they murmured approvingly.”

 South Africa has made me question values and assumptions that I didn’t think needed questioning.

 

Date: February 6, 2008 10:54:48 PM HST

 

 Friday, February 1, 2008 – Port St. Johns

 The “Lonely Planet” guide describes Port St. Johns, located along the coast in the Eastern Cape, as follows: “The deliciously laid-back Port St. Johns is a magnet for hippy types both young and old.  This idyllic little town on the coast at the mouth of the Umzimvubu River has tropical vegetation, dramatic cliffs, great beaches, no traffic jams and absolutely no stress.  Many travelers, lulled by the clinking of wind chimes and the sound of the waves, succumb to the famous ‘Pondo Fever’ and stay for months.”

 A four-hour drive from Port Shepstone, Port St. Johns is also one of Yunus‘ favorite places: he first started coming here with his family as a boy, and he returns as often as he can to unwind.  He knows a remarkable number and variety of people of various races in town: Wayne, the burned-out haole hippy who owns I Kaya (“My Home”), usually referred to as “Wayne’s Place;” the un-burned-out haole hippy couple who runs the quirky Wood’n Spoon outdoor restaurant next door; various Indian shopkeepers and store owners; and black locals who run the spectrum from wood carver to lodge owner to fisherman to kids around town, just to cite a few examples.  He likes to come here to unwind, and brings his Teachers Without Borders groups here after the workshops end in order to do the same.  We checked into Wayne’s Place on Wednesday night (though Thursday’s appointment would be in Mthatha, an hour’s drive), and we’ll stay until Sunday.

 

The scenic beauty here is as the guide says: the coastline, with beaches punctuated by rocky outcroppings which jut out into the ocean to take the full force of the crashing waves, is even more spectacular than Oahu’s east coast from just past Hanauma Bay to Makapu’u Beach.  Also along the coast, foliage-covered cliffs go on as far as the eye can see.  Looking inland, one sees equally dramatic cliffs, one of which is aptly called “Eagle’s Nest.”

> (Tomorrow Ricky, a hiking guide with an encyclopedic knowledge of the flora and fauna, will lead me on a five-mile hike to the Eagle’s Nest and beyond – to his “office,” two flat rocks where we’ll sit and dangle our feet over a cliff which drops a thousand feet to the forest below.)  Where the cliffs are not quite so dramatically vertical, dwellings cling, some precariously.  Again, the view is scenic, especially if one can ignore the fact that most of the dwellings are shanties.

 

 And that’s the point: how could the person who wrote that paragraph in the guidebook have ignored the shanties and all the other obvious signs of poverty, or even the less obvious signs of corruption: children (some of whom can cry on cue) begging for rands (money) or sweets, mosquito-breeding puddles (created by leaky waterpipes) alongside the mostly rutted dirt roads, unoccupied market stalls downtown, littler-strewn streets – and that’s just the initial picture.  Look a little more carefully and one can see a city park at the edge of the river, consisting of a few decaying concrete benches and grills.  (The park, along with a dock, which no longer exists, is a recent sixteen million rand (two million dollar plus) project.  The city official responsible for its construction drives around in a pimped-out 4X4.) Today was my first full day here, and I’ve already discovered that the single paragraph offered by “Lonely Planet” is woefully inadequate to accurately describe Port St. Johns.  “Idyllic?”  “No stress?” Read on…

 We started our day at Lily’s Lodge, with coffee on the deck which looks out over Second Beach. Lily, a dynamic black women married to a haole doctor, greeted Yunus warmly (as does everyone).  Then, after a bit of polite chitchat, she described her husband’s recent abduction and robbery.

 

As Don prepared to leave his office, three men approached, one claiming to be ill.  After he let them into his office/clinic, one of the men pulled out a gun and demanded cash.  The robbers were not satisfied with the eighty rand Don had in the office, so they ordered him into his car and drove it out of town, where they released him and continued on with the car.  Don was able to get home, and the car was found (the thieves couldn’t go far because Don, wise to the local situation, keeps his gas tank no more than a quarter full).  Yunusthinks that had Don been a merchant instead of a doctor, he might have been killed.

 OK, so maybe some twenty-something coming into town to write a part of a chapter in a guidebook might not be made aware of a story like this, although Don was hardly the first such victim (the quarter-filled gas tank is a big hint).  But had he walked along the coast past The Gap, an incredibly scenic spot with views along the coast and down into the crashing surf below, along a dirt road, he would have come to Port St. Johns Senior Primary School.  Though the school has a million-dollar view, one look at the “physical plant” would show that the word “idyllic” represents a cruel irony to the students and teachers who spend their days here. The two buildings are as rudimentary as rudimentary gets.

 

Yunus approached one of the adults, who turned out to be the principal, and began asking questions about the school.  Two hundred ninety-five students enrolled in kindergarten through six and their six teachers occupy six classrooms.  Inside one of the classrooms, jammed with desks, bulging cardboard boxes (there’s no room for shelves), and decorated with a few posters, the principal pointed out where the wind had taken away part of the ceiling.  She also pointed out small footprints on the wall below the hole in the ceiling indicating where children had broken in to steal the food that had been stored in the room.

 While we sat inside, the students were gathered outside to wait for delivery of their meal: two slices of bread each, with either butter or jam, depending on the day.  The food is supposed to arrive between eight and ten a.m.; it was noon.  Additionally, the caterer is obligated to supply each student with one container of juice per day, but the number of containers never suffices for a week, explained the principal. Someone is short-changing the kids and pocketing the money.

 And those are only the minor problems – at least the bread arrives eventually.  The school has had no running water since it opened three weeks ago, and the level in the storage tank is running low, the principal said.  Electricity?  Though the school is wired for electricity, it hasn’t had any since 2002.

 

 2002!  The principal has written letters, but going through the proper bureaucratic channels doesn’t seem to work in much of what I’ve seen of South Africa. She’s been principal for eighteen years, and has three more years to go until she can retire.  She looks tired.

  Maybe I’ve chosen the guidebook writer as a convenient whipping-boy – I know it’s not fair to expect him to see what Yunus and others have shown me so far here in South Africa.  I guess I’m using him to make a point: this is an amazingly complex place, difficult to describe, necessary to experience.

 

So what of the Port St. Johns Senior Primary School?  Yunus and I drove to the local headquarters of Eskcom, the national electric company.  There he talked to someone in Customer Services (I’ll refrain from commenting on that term), who not only appeared to be sympathetic, but offered no excuses.  “That should not be,” she said, then promised to contact the appropriate company official in Mthatha on Monday. She gave Yunus her private cell phone number so he can keep in touch.

 Yunus next drove to the hardware store in town, where he talked to the owner – a friend – about the situation and requested that he use his influence to contact the appropriate Eskcom officials on behalf of the school.  The owner, who had – free of charge – previously supplied and installed a fence at the school, pledged to help.

 One final note: I have heard from several of you who have said that you admire what I’m doing here. Those comments, while kind, are embarrassing to me, because I have done nothing.  I have had the privilege of getting an education the likes of which I never anticipated, but please, please don’t think that I have earned a shred of your praise.  My test will come in the future.

 

Yunus, on the other hand…What I have mentioned in my entries so far constitutes a fraction of all that he has done and is trying to do.  He’s been a dynamo of good works – large and small.  I’ll write more about him in future entries, but suffice to say for now that I’m ready to nominate him for sainthood.

 

Date: February 15, 2008 1:47:45 AM HST

 

> Monday, February 4, 2008 – Port Shepstone

 I probably should have mentioned by now that despite the impression I’ve given so far, not everyone in South Africa is poor.  I’ve seen attractive houses, later model cars than I drive, restaurants and upscale hotels.  In less than a week, I’ll cruise a high-end shopping mall in Johannesburg the equal of any in L.A.  Moreover, almost forty years ago in rural Cambodia, I saw people living an even more basic lifestyle than most people here in South Africa do; none of those peasants had electricity in their one-room thatch huts, for example.  They didn’t seem to be depressed or angry about what they didn’t have, so I wasn’t depressed or angry at seeing what they didn’t have. So why did I think “traditional” rather than “poverty” when I saw those huts?  Because there are no “haves” and “have-nots” if everyone has roughly the same amount of wealth and thus lives the same lifestyle.

> 

> 

 In South Africa, the gap between rich and poor is huge, and the effects of that gap became obvious to me today as I taught three classes at Port Shepstone High School (PSHS).  The best way to explain this is for me to go back a few days to January 30, when I did my first guest-teacher gig at Siyapambili School.  A rural school several miles outside the small, dusty town of Harding in Kwazulu-Natal Province, Siyapambili, meaning “out in front” or “leader,” packs twelve hundred students from grades seven through twelve and a couple of dozen teachers into two long, narrow buildings (class size ranges from seventy to eighty).  I didn’t count, but there could not have been twenty classrooms in the school.  Aside from the classrooms, there is a faculty prep room, and a few offices, and that’s it – no science labs, no art room, no music room, no gym, no cafeteria.  The classroom I visited has no fans or air conditioning (it was a hot day), no maps or posters on the wall, only a chalkboard at the front of the room.  To state the obvious, this is a poor school, and judging from the dwellings that we saw within walking distance, the students who attend it are poor.  (By the way, walking distance in South Africa equals driving distance in the U.S., but more on that later or in a future entry.)

 

 I was asked to present a class on American history and politics.  That being a rather broad subject, I decided to give the learners (students are usually referred to as “learners”) a brief introduction to American geography and democracy, then let them determine the focus of the class according to the questions they had.  I drew an outline map of the U.S. on the chalkboard, located New York City; Washington, D.C.; Chicago; and Los Angeles (putting “Hollywood” in parenthesis next to Los Angeles, because given the worldwide popularity of American films, everyone’s heard of Hollywood, right? Wrong). I then mentioned that I live in Hawaii, and asked if anyone knew its location.  One student tentatively raised his hand.

 

The students were attentive and polite for the rest of the period, but they were very tentative and asked few questions.  I found myself lecturing on what I thought they might want to know rather than responding to questions about what interested them. After class, their teacher assured me that the learners had been interested in what I had to say, but that they were so unfamiliar with the U.S. that they didn’t know what to ask.

 Skip to today, five days later.  I’ve just finished guest appearances in three classes at PSHS.

 

Built as a “whites only” school, located in a formerly “whites only” neighborhood, the vast majority of PSHS students are now black. The three-floor building easily contains twenty times the classroom space that Siyapambili has, although PSHS has only seventy-seven more students (with fifty-nine teachers, approximately twice the number at Siyapambili).  In addition to science labs, gym, athletic fields, and nicely landscaped grounds, there’s an indoor garden.

 When I mentioned, upon introducing myself, that I live in Hawaii, the student sitting nearest the world map immediately pointed to its location.  The class happened to be studying the Cold War, so the teacher asked me to talk about the Berlin Airlift, the Berlin Wall, and the Cuban Missile Crisis, which I proceeded to do in the same detail and at the same academic level as I would have done had I been at Punahou. Students were not shy about asking questions, and I felt much more at ease with the give-and-take in this class than I did with the one-way nature of the class at Siyapambili.

 

The next class was even more fun – and the students even more impressive.  The teacher felt comfortable abandoning her planned agenda for the day, so I introduced myself and opened the class up to questions.  What’s the difference between the Democratic and Republican parties?  Does Obama have a chance to win the Democratic nomination against Hillary?  (In every class in which I have spoken, including the one at Siyapambili, there has been intense interest in Obama).  What is the Bush administration doing to help with the AIDS crisis in Africa?  (When I complimented Bush for increasing AIDS funding for Africa, the student who had asked the question responded by claiming that the U.S. is doing less to help than is Canada.) Why did Bush refuse to sign the Kyoto Agreements on global warming?   And so on.  (I had less time in the third class, but the students were similarly forthcoming with their questions.)

 Yunus did not sit in on any of my classes, but as we discussed them afterwards, he pointed out that the students at Siyapambili School are no less talented or intelligent than those at PSHS, but that the academic gaps between the students result from a gap in opportunities.  Teachers at PSHS are better qualified.  Students at PSHS don’t walk miles to and from school each day, and when they do arrive home, they have books from which to study and electricity to enable them to study.  (Most rural students have electricity in their homes, but very few have books of their own to take home.)  Just as important, while the students at Siyapambili (and other rural schools, of which Siyapambili is representative) come mostly from families which have not yet reached even the first rung of the socio-economic ladder and may not even know the ladder exists, those at PSHS come from families and associate with peers who have had the ability to climb the ladder and have the tools and self-confidence to continue climbing even higher.

 

Date: February 15, 2008 10:30:13 PM HST

 

 

 Thursday, February 7, 2008 – Sharpeville Township

 Before I came to South Africa, I tended to equate the term “apartheid” with segregation, but now I realize that like everything in this country, it’s a lot more complex than I originally thought.  Made official in 1948, apartheid refers to a series of laws intended not only to separate the races, but to ensure white domination of South Africa through a series of legislative acts.  Legislation classified South Africans as either white, Indian, colored (mixed), or black. Interracial sex and marriage became illegal, and under the Separate Amenities Act, separate schools, hospitals, buses, and beaches were established.  The Group Areas Act reserved the most desirable land for whites and forced other groups which had previously occupied those lands to move to townships, most of which were indescribably crowded and squalid, and often lacked even the most basic if services.  The most famous of the townships was Soweto, located outside Johannesburg, but Sharpeville, also outside Jo’berg, became almost as famous as the result of the massacre that occurred there in 1960.

 

The last legal vestiges of apartheid ended in 1991, but driving through the Sharpeville, one would never know it.  The squalid picture is one of appalling poverty and overcrowding.  The better dwellings are tiny, closely spaced cinderblock or cement houses; the worst are tinier, even more closely spaced scrap wood and tin shanties.  Most stores look abandoned; one has to look twice to discover that they are in fact open for business.  And the township remains virtually one hundred per cent black; I didn’t see another white face anywhere we went, including the site of the Sharpeville Massacre, which today contains a small museum (which was closed when we arrived), a community library, and a memorial garden containing sixty-nine markers, one for each person killed (178 were wounded).  The absence of whites didn’t surprise me, because honestly, Sharpeville isn’t the kind of place that one would come for a stroll.  Yunus, while not afraid, did suggest that we lock the car doors and roll up the windows as we drove slowly through the streets.  And although the “Lonely Planet” guide, supposedly written for the more adventurous traveler, does mention the Sharpeville Massacre, it omits the site from its recommended destinations (“…there’s nothing specific for visitors to do…”).

 I felt at ease in the library, where students from elementary through high school age studied or chatted quietly with each other.  Those who looked up and saw me smiled.  An alcove contains eight or nine panels describing the events leading up to the Massacre and the Massacre itself.  Residents of the township gathered outside the police station on March 21, 1960 to protest the hated Pass Laws.  These laws required blacks and coloreds to carry state-issued identity papers, and further prohibited them from visiting or staying in towns without permission. Couples could not live or even visit each other in a town if only one of them worked there.

 According to the information on the panels (which is confirmed by other accounts I have read), the crowd grew rowdy but was unthreatening. I realize that the white policemen might have interpreted the situation differently, but whatever the interpretation, not only did the police open fire, there were no shots returned and most of the dead were shot in the back as they fled.

 

The Massacre received international attention, and it led to demonstrations, work boycotts, tighter restrictions, and more protests and arrests – basically, it upped the ante in the struggle (not long after, Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment).  When Nelson Mandela signed the constitution in 1996, the ceremony took place in George ThabeStadium, not far from the site of the Massacre.

 By the time I exited the library, the guards were getting ready to close the memorial garden, but they allowed me to spend ten minutes there.  The modest garden site contains sixty-nine chest-high cement cones, each topped with a small metal disc etched with the name and age of a slain victim (the youngest was twelve).  Two small, bubbling, ground-level fountains, connected by a thin stream of water, bisect the garden.

 The most meaningful – and the most touching – part of the visit came in a conversation I had with one of the two young guards after I left the garden.

 

While Yunus talked with one, another told me of his desire to become a lawyer.  He appreciated the logic of the law, he said, and felt that he could successfully do the coursework.  But he had no money to pursue an education, and though he didn’t say it outright, he implied that he felt fortunate to even have the low-paying job he currently held.  Had he been a needy Punahou student (a contradiction in terms?), I would have encouraged him to try to live frugally in order to save money for school, but I knew how hollow and unrealistic this advice would sound, so I gave him no false encouragement.  We parted with smiles, handshakes and hugs, and photos.

 My time in Sharpeville was not finished – I needed to top it off by getting arrested.

 

Across the street from the memorial sits the fenced-in police compound, a modest few buildings. No one prevented our entry or questioned us, so we proceeded to stroll through the grounds.  We came to two windowless jail cells, with heavy white doors, and Yunus informed me that these were the same cells which held black prisoners during the days of apartheid (the other, newer cells, had windows).  I pulled out my camera and snapped a photo of the old cells.

 Almost immediately, a young police officer approached me and said, “No photos allowed.  You are under arrest.”  I looked for a smile or a laugh to indicate that she was joking, but though her tone was not threatening, neither did she punctuate those words with a smile or a laugh.  I was not afraid – I honestly didn’t expect to spend the night in one of those two windowless cells (I later found out that they were already occupied).  But I quickly realized that I had committed a faux pas; I should have asked for permission before I took any photos, and the officer was simply trying to make the point that no photos were allowed.  The captain approached to reprimand me, and I apologized and offered to delete the photo (an offer he never took me up on).

 

Yunus used the incident as an opportunity to start a conversation with the captain, which lasted for about twenty minutes.  How many officers do you have?  What is the size of the area of your jurisdiction? What are your major problems?  Within a few minutes, his sympathetic ear and occasional genuine compliments had erased the discomfort I had caused, and we learned a lot about the problems of police work in Sharpeville.

 As with education, the problems stem mainly from a lack of money.  Three police stations serve the township of more than a million people.  His station has only four police cars to patrol an area the size of Kailua, yet this isn’t his biggest problem, as he doesn’t have enough police officers to keep even four cars on the roads twenty-four hours a day.  Drugs are a problem, but desperation born of poverty is more of a problem, as the captain expressed sympathy and understanding for the man with nothing who robs to feed his family.  Among the most desperate are the large number of recent immigrants from neighboring Lesotho, who live in squatter camps with no electricity and water.  They manage without electric power, but they take water from the pumps in the neighborhoods of the permanent settlers, who resent the fact that the water they pay for is stolen by the newcomers.

 

Date: February 16, 2008 11:25:19 AM HST

 

 Friday, February 8, 2008 – Pretoria (am), Evaton Township (pm)

 Yesterday I was arrested; today I went to prison.

 

 No, I’m not quoting a line from a Merle Haggard song.  Yunus; Fred Mednick, head of Teachers Without Borders (TWB, the organization with which Yunus is affiliated); a white South African woman named Engela Pienaar and I visited Odi Correctional Center outside Pretoria to check out a computer education project for prisoners which has been made possible through the efforts of Engela and furthered by the donation of six computers from TWB.  I knew that I would learn a lot from this visit, but I should have known by now that much of what I would learn would surprise me and challenge my assumptions.

 Although I hadn’t slept well last night (hey, how well would you sleep if you knew you were going to prison in the morning?), the anticipation of what lay ahead kept me running on adrenalin.  I wasn’t nervous (I assumed that if the situation was at all risky, the authorities would not have allowed us to enter the prison), but I was excited to be in a new and unusual situation.

 

The first challenge to one of my assumptions came almost immediately, as we met with Robert Potgieter, one of the wardens.   Given his last name, I concluded that Potgieter, an imposing haole with chiseled features reminiscent of the French actor Gerard Depardieu, comes from Afrikaner stock.  (A brief historical note here: AfriKaners, descendents of the original Dutch settlers, or Boers, have historically been the most antagonistic and brutal to the native black Africans.  The legal beginning of apartheid dates from 1948, the year that their political party was able to win control of the government.  As a group, they most resemble the southern rednecks in the American civil rights struggle.)  I expected him to be a hard-liner, and so I was surprised at how much sympathy and empathy he showed towards his prisoners, the vast majority of whom are black.  Commenting on the high recidivism rate, he said of the repeat offenders, “I don’t blame anyone.”  Due to South Africa’s forty per cent unemployment rate, offenders find it extremely difficult to get jobs after their release.  And when their families go hungry, he understands why they will steal in order to get money to feed them.

 

Expressing gratitude for Engela’s efforts at providing educational opportunities for his prisoners, Potgieter explained that funding for job training and education (primarily literacy programs) falls far short of what he considers necessary.  A trip to the prison library, consisting of fewer than two hundred books, supported this claim.

 Following Warden Potgieter’s welcome, a Mr. Mikwa led us on a tour.  A medium security facility built for 892 inmates, the red brick structure currently houses 1354 men, all above the age of twenty-one (all prisons in Gauteng Province are overcrowded). Prisoners are housed dormitory-style; single cells are reserved for what the warden called “problematic offenders.”  (Another surprise: currently only one inmate occupies a single cell.) The staff consists of 264 permanent officers and sixty-four “student interns.”

 

 As we waited for Mr. Mikwa to begin the tour, I wandered over to stand at the edge of a class which was being held in part of the covered courtyard. Seventeen prisoners sat on benches arranged in a semi-circle facing the instructor, a fellow prisoner dressed in the common orange uniform dotted with the word “Corrections” in a circular pattern.  On the chalkboard, the instructor had written and underlined the word “Anger Management,” then added “Frustration” and “Religious Delusion.”   “Religious Delusion,” Yunus explained, most likely referred to the violence that resulted when one inmate would place a curse on another inmate and/or his family.  I had a difficult time hearing the instructor, but at one point I clearly heard him utter the sentence “Unnecessary arguments lead to uncontrollable anger.”  My presence at the edge of the class eventually attracted the attention of all seventeen students, and interestingly, every one smiled upon making eye contact.

 In fact, the most surprising aspect of the entire two-hour visit to the prison turned out to be how unthreatening the atmosphere seemed to be.  Although this could hardly be called a “country club” prison, we saw very few inmates behind bars.  Many walked about seemingly on their own, and I noticed a surprising number sitting in casual, even friendly conversation with their guards.  At one location, I noticed a recipe for beef stroganoff written on a chalkboard.  The only threatening look that I noticed came from a white, blue-eyed, blond-haired, tattooed guy with a patch of beard growing down from under the middle of his lower lip.  If Metallica ever needs to replace a band member, this is the dude to call.

 

Towards the end of our visit we finally got to see the computer lab, which is run by a middle aged, computer nerd-looking haole guy.  Four six-week courses comprise the computer education program: computer literacy, repair and maintenance, advanced course, and networking.   There is great demand for the program, but enrollment is limited because the lab contains only twenty computers.  The director chose one of the program’s graduates at random to testify about its effectiveness, and he was effusive in his praise.  Having gone through all four courses, and with more time to serve before his release, he expressed a desire to progress even further in his education, and a frustration at his inability to do so because of the shortage of computers.  He proved to be a most effective advocate.

 Strangely enough, visiting the prison proved to be a less depressing experience than having visited the various rural schools – for two reasons: 1) the prison was in better physical condition than the rural schools, and 2) it’s more depressing to see children in need than adults in need.

 

But the next school we visited, although located in an area of extreme poverty, provided us with an uplifting experience.

A year ago, Yunus arranged a donation of twenty computers to Letsema-Ilima Primary School in Evaton Township, and he wanted to find out if they were being used effectively. (There’s more to donating computers than simply presenting them to a school.  Space must be found for them, electrical wiring must be done, security must be arranged, someone must be found to manage the computers and train teachers and students in their use, etc., etc.)  Amidst poverty equal to that of Sharpeville, the modest but attractive brick school has a staff of thirty-three teachers to serve 1240 learners, with a classroom ratio of 1:40. Seventy per cent of the kids’ parents are unemployed, and those students pay no fees (most public schools charge modest fees), so students make up the shortfall by collecting and recycling aluminum cans, massive piles of which filled a section of the playground. One effort earned the school enough to pave the formerly dusty playground.  (Punahou, by contrast, won a Jack Johnson concert by winning a recycling contest.)  Computers donated by Yunus‘ TWB have made computer education here a reality, and the school’s reputation is such that it has a waiting list for future students.

 

The room which houses the seventeen computers (spare parts cannot be found for three broken computers) formerly served as the staff room/faculty lounge.  Asked how the staff felt about giving up its lounge, the principal replied, “Excited.”

 On the chalkboard in the room someone had written the following, which I quote verbatim and which needs no comment: “I love my computer and my friend.  Also my parents.”

 

Date: February 17, 2008 10:41:15 AM HST

 

 February 9, 2008 – Johannesburg

 I’ve fallen a week behind in writing these journal entries.  My days have been so full that before I’m able to write down everything that needs to be said from one day’s experience, I’m thrown headfirst into the next day’s mind/heart-blowing adventure.  In the case of my visit to the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg (Jo’burg), I’ve needed the week to even begin to get back to some kind of emotional balance.  I recall writing that my visit to the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis in 2002 was the most emotionally powerful museum I had ever visited. The Apartheid Museum is its equal.

 I knew that this museum would pack a punch as soon as I purchased my ticket. The museum has two entrances: “White” and “Non-White;” visitors enter whichever entrance is randomly stamped on their tickets.  As a “Non-White” visitor, I entered a long hall “decorated” with signs such as that reading “Europeans Only,” and with enlarged photos of ID passes which non-whites were required to carry wherever they went during the apartheid years.  At the end of the hall, a life-size photo of four serious-looking white men sitting behind a long desk put me in the shoes of someone approaching the Classification Board, which determined the race to which the applicant belonged.  Sometimes members of the same family would be assigned different racial classifications, the consequence of which could mean that they would not be permitted to live together. In such cases, they could appeal to the Classification Board to attempt to correct the mistake.

 These Pass and Classification Laws constituted only two of the 148 laws and decrees enacted under apartheid, the object of which was to keep whites in a socially and economically superior position by keeping the blacks, Indians, and coloreds (mixed races) in inferior positions.  The effect of these laws was to dehumanize the non-white races, which in turn made it easier for the whites to pass even more dehumanizing laws.  How else could the government not only force blacks en mass from areas they had occupied for years, but move them to vast tracts of barren, dusty lands on which were constructed only latrines (and not enough of them)?  As I went from one heartbreaking exhibit to another, I grew more amazed and impressed that when the majority of blacks took over after apartheid ended, they were able to refrain from slaughtering – or even discriminating against – the white minority.

> 

 The exhibits, consisting of photos, text, artifacts, and video footage shown on large and small screens, are arranged chronologically and in meticulous detail.  Presented alongside the evidence of overwhelming repression, the evidence of resistance serves to emphasize the heroism of the thousands of ordinary citizens who fought that repression, from Nelson Mandela to the anonymous schoolchildren of the Suweto Township, scores of whom died in the June 16, 1976 uprising.   (This uprising, by the way, launched youth to the forefront of the anti-apartheid movement, where they joined union members in spreading the resistance.)

 I can’t describe the hundreds (thousands?) of photos, artifacts, and written descriptions in the museum, but several overwhelmed me enough to warrant mention: the three, three-foot by eight-foot, bare, windowless solitary confinement cells; and the room with 133 hangman’s nooses suspended from the ceiling in seven rows of nineteen – one for each political prisoner executed – most immediately come to mind.

 But for sheer malevolence, nothing tops the yellow “Casspir,” a thirty-foot long by twelve-foot high armored vehicle used to ferry police and troops into demonstrating or rioting crowds.  With tires four feet in diameter, the vehicle appears to have had enough room to hold up to two dozen men, with enough headroom for some of them to stand up inside so as to better level their guns at the surrounding crowds. The smell of old oil wafting from the “Hippo,” as it was called, added another dimension to the assault it made on my senses.  Climbing into the vehicle, I was able to view police surveillance footage on a TV, at full volume, complete with police whistles, of one of the massive anti-apartheid demonstrations in Suweto Township.  It felt like the next best (?) thing to being there.  Though I didn’t feel sorry for them, I did understand how afraid the men in this Hippo must have been.

 

As I toured the exhibits, I thought often of two important differences between the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa and the civil rights struggle in the US.  Those struggling in the U.S. remained peaceful in the face of all sorts of provocations, while the leadership of the ANC (African National Congress) adopted targeted violence as one of its tactics. This became understandable to me as I considered the other major difference between the two situations: African-Americans in the U.S. constituted a minority of the population (hence the emphasis on pacifism); in South Africa, non-whites made up the vast majority of the population (hence the emphasis on targeted violence).

 

But I am left with one overriding similarity between the two groups of oppressed peoples.  Given the odds against success, I consider those who placed their lives on the line in the 1950s and ’60s to be the greatest heroes in our history.  I am even more impressed with how few of those who endured discrimination, death threats, and beatings appear to be bitter towards their former oppressors – maybe it’s because they can look back on their achievements with the pride of knowing that they changed history. Similarly, I look with wonder and awe at the black Africans who forsook violence and accepted Nelson Mandela’s Peace and Reconciliation plan after they were finally able to overthrow apartheid.  They, too, ended up heroes on the right side of history.

 

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.

 

Date: February 27, 2008 6:46:58 AM HST

 

 Saturday, February 16, 2008 – Soweto Township

 For the past eleven days, with the exception of the four days Yunus and I traveled to Swaziland, we have been staying with the Ahmed family in Roshnee, a formerly all-Indian township in Vereeniging, about twenty-five kilometers outside Jo’burg.  Razvi, Yunus‘ classmate since his high school days at Waterford and his best friend, is married to Firdose, and they have three children: Raeesah (14), Nabeel (12, but almost 13, he says) and Shakeel (9).  Their hospitality has been such that I have come to feel like a member of the family, except that Firdose still keeps trying to make me eat more than I should.

 

Although Roshnee is no longer a designated Indian township, Indians make up more than ninety per cent of its population.  The Muslim call to prayer echoes through the township on loudspeakers five times a day, beginning just before sunrise  (4:45 a.m. at this time of year) until about an hour and a half after sunset (8:15 p.m. tonight), and the three kids attend madressa four or five times a week.  One of the meats at breakfast one morning looked a lot like sliced ham; it struck me as strange for a Muslim family to offer ham, but I didn’t say anything, thinking that every family makes its compromises between religious doctrine and religious practice.  Days later, when the topic of food came up, I asked Firdose about the ham at breakfast, and got a look as if I’d accused her of murder, then an assurance that the meat was in fact beef.  Fortunately, she has a sense of humor, so no harm, no foul.

 

Razvi, a physician (Ear, Nose and Throat), has a private practice and has also been practicing at Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto Township for more than two decades, which means that he found himself in the middle of some of the worst violence in modern South African history.  More on this shortly…

 I had been told that Baragwanath is the largest hospital in Africa and that at one time it was the largest in the world, and I’ve read about how central it has always been to the people of Soweto, given that it’s the only hospital that serves that huge township.  So at my request, he took me on a tour of the place; Shakeel came along as well.

 How do I tell you how HUGE Baragwanath is – capitalizing “huge” won’t do.  Razvi doesn’t know how many acres its many buildings occupy, but how’s this for huge: physicians make their rounds by car.  Or this: it has its own power plant and its own police station.  Or this: the building which housed nurses (and now houses some nurses and mostly AIDS patients) appears to be about ten stories high.  Many of the low-rise buildings formerly served as military barracks, and frankly, they still look more like barracks than hospital buildings – inside and out. As we passed the emergency surgery unit (there is also an emergency medical unit), Razvi mentioned that tonight being a Saturday night, doctors can expect to perform sixty emergency surgeries.  In fact, Baragwanath is a great training hospital: doctors come here from all over the world to experience a range of cases in two months that they won’t get in five years at home.

 

My senses told me that this is a poor person’s hospital: bathroom and trash odors mixed with the normal hospital smells.  Hospital waste packed in black household trash bags sat in various unsecured outdoor locations waiting to be picked up. Patients, a few of whom walked the grounds while hooked up to IV units, were mostly dressed in soiled or unhygienic-looking pajamas.  It took Shakeel to ask what I was thinking (and already knew the answer to): “Daddy, why is this hospital so dirty?”  “Because they don’t have enough money to pay enough people to keep it clean,” Razvi replied.  He then mentioned to me that Baragwanath currently operates with a shortage of six hundred nurses.

 

Razvi’s able to keep all this in perspective, given all he’s experienced here, because things are better than they used to be.  Example: one day while Razvi was on duty during the worst of the Soweto anti-apartheid riots, a policeman dragged a prisoner into the emergency unit.  The cop literally dragged the prisoner because his legs had been broken (by the cop, surmised Razvi), but in addition, he had placed the prisoner in legs irons.  Razvi asked the cop to remove the leg irons so that he could work on the man’s legs, but the cop refused – he was afraid that the prisoner would run away!  Razvi insisted, explaining that 1) the prisoner’s broken legs made it highly unlikely that he could escape, and 2) he (Razvi) couldn’t work on the guy’s broken legs otherwise.  The cop grew frustrated, and asked Razvi to leave the area for a minute, which he did. Seconds later, hearing a gunshot, Razvi rushed in to see the prisoner’s brains and blood all over the cubicle. The cop calmly walked away.

 

After the hospital tour, Razvi drove me through parts of Soweto.  The first thing I learned – and what you sharp-eyed readers have already figured out – is that I’ve been spelling “Soweto” wrong -it’s not “Suweto,” but “Soweto,” an abbreviation for “SOuthWEstern TOwnships.”

 Though there’s no confusion about how to spell it, there’s a great deal of uncertainty about the number of townships that comprise greater Soweto and the number of people who live in this vast area southwest of Jo’burg.  Some townships have officially merged with others during the past few years; other have merged unofficially – the resulting estimates of the number of townships range from twenty-nine to eighty-seven.  The official 2001 census numbers the population at 900,000, but other, more reliable sources multiply that by five.  Razvi estimates it at around four million.

 

Before today, I had heard of the Soweto uprisings of June, 1976; the rest of what I knew came from having just read My Traitor’s Heart, by Rian Malan. Here’s what he says about Soweto at the time of the riots: “There was a drastic shortage of houses and schools in Soweto.  There were no cinemas, no bars, no hotels, no modern shopping centers, no recreational facilities, and no electricity.  The place was a giant labor barracks, grimly utilitarian, and intentionally so.  The mad scientists of apartheid wanted urban blacks to be miserable.  They wanted blacks to get out of white South Africa, to go to the homelands. Soweto was one big apartheid atrocity.”

 The riots began over a seemingly peripheral issue.  (Again quoting Malan), “…pupils at several Soweto schools had gone out on strike against the imperial Afrikaner government.  Urban blacks reviled Africaans as the language of the oppressor, and most black schools chose English as their medium of instruction.  The Vorster government felt slighted. It didn’t want its Bantu vassals becoming Anglicized, so it decreed that certain subjects would henceforth be taught in Africaans.  It didn’t matter that many teachers and pupils could hardly speak the language, or that their textbooks were in English.  The Vorster government ignored petitions and turned away deputations, so the students called a strike…A few stones were  thrown, and the police opened fire, killing two young boys and wounding untold others.

 “The schools and government installations were destroyed first.  Then the mob turned on anything associated with the white economic structure, burning trucks, delivery vans, shops, and banks.  The tinder had been accumulating for generations, and once it caught the conflagration was unstoppable.

 “The police…put the rebellion down at a terrible cost in lives.  When the fires finally died down several months later, there were four hundred black corpses, or five hundred, or seven hundred, and the police were firmly back in control.  Newspapers proclaimed that the situation had returned to normal, but there was no longer any such thing.  South Africa’s psychic landscape had been transformed. Blacks saw that they had shaken the white power structure to its very foundations, and they suddenly had hope.  The tide of history had turned.”

 

Soweto continued to be a violent place for almost the next two decades: white-on-black violence, black-on-white violence, and black-on-black violence. Some was revolutionary violence, some simply the result of violence becoming the norm.  And, given what can be expected on a typical Saturday night in the Baragwanath emergency rooms, I might be excused for assuming that Soweto continues to be a violent place.

> 

 Yet I learned today that there’s more to the place than this.  Though almost no whites live here (other than those married to blacks), Soweto is not an all-black community.  Originally a set of townships with a mixture of blacks, Indians, and colored, the government later decreed individual townships for individual races.  Today the townships are again mostly mixed, but some are de facto populated by a single race.  As we cruised through Kliptown, I saw only black faces.

 And though what I saw of Kliptown consisted of the usual signs of poverty, I’ve heard and read that Soweto has its middle and even upper class dwellings. Glancing through the October, 2006 issue of Getaway (an African travel magazine), I came across an article entitled “48 Hours in Soweto.”  The haole author attempts to dispel the notion that Soweto is a dangerous place for fellow haoles to visit, yet he was accompanied by a black companion during his two-day visit, and he recommends to readers of Getaway (clearly a magazine intended for a haole readership) that “it is essential to take a local guide if you are in any doubt about where you’re going.”  I haven’t been in South Africa for long, but I know that he’s not referring to the possibility of a visitor getting lost in an Indian area of Soweto.

 

And how do I interpret the following brief incident?  At one point on our cruise through Kliptown, we pulled off onto a side street to make a u-turn.  A car had stopped a few feet ahead of where we turned around, and a half-dozen or so young black men were hanging out.  They did not look threatening to me.  All of a sudden a police car showed up, and two black policemen got out.  They lined the young men up and proceeded to frisk them.

 As we were leaving Soweto, I asked Razvi, who in his two decades at Baragwanath had waded into the most violent of situations, if he had ever felt afraid. “Never,” he said. Crowds would part when they saw the round “Baragwanath” sticker on his car’s windshield.

“And do you ever feel afraid these days?” I asked. “Not afraid,” he replied, “but I am more cautious.”

 

A few words on My Traitor’s Heart.  When I knew I’d be coming to South Africa, I asked Heather MacMillan, a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology (focusing on Africa) to recommend some books for me to read. She recommended only one – and it was My Traitor’s Heart.  Rian Malan is a white man descended from an historic and powerful white family, some members of which have been responsible for passing and enforcing some of the more odious apartheid laws.  The book deals with all the complexities and contradictions of being a white man in South Africa, and though I am not well-read on the subject, I know why Heather stopped after recommending just this book.  You know how the blurbs on the front and back covers of a book are usually exaggerations meant to entice one to buy the book?  In this case, every word of praise is deserved – it’s an incredibly powerful, moving, and honest book, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.  It’s the only book I’ve ever begun a second time immediately after having finished the first reading.

 

Date: March 7, 2008 1:49:59 AM HST

 

 Saturday, February 23, 2008 – Cape Town

 Though apartheid consisted of almost 150 laws and proclamations, I’ve noticed that certain museums focus on the effects of specific, especially odious laws (the Sharpeville Museum’s focus on the Pass Laws, for example).  The District Six Museum in downtown Cape Town fits into this pattern; it has been brought to us courtesy of the Group Areas Act of 1950, which allowed the government to seize desirable lands for whites, while ordering blacks who had occupied those lands to move into townships or rural areas.

 First settled in the early 1800s, District Six developed into a lively mixed race area despite (because of?) deliberate neglect by the government. In February, 1966, under the authority of Group Areas Act, the government proclaimed it a “white” group area, and sixty thousand non-whites were forced out over the next fifteen years, most moving to the barren Cape Flats area (which today is the most economically depressed part of Cape Town).  The museum, housed in a Methodist Church, shows visitors what has been lost.

 

Most of the items and displays are personal, giving the place a down-home feel.  In addition to photos, newspaper clippings and maps, one sees original street signs, homemade banners, murals and quilts, and children’s toys.  Sections of a “Namecloth” contain messages from former residents and museum visitors. The complete cloth measures one and one-half meters wide by more than one kilometer in length – and it’s still growing.

 The museum presents both individual and neighborhood stories:  one can listen to recorded music from popular post-World War II dance bands, or step into a small beauty parlor/barber shop, or read poems and stories about life in District Six.  It was not a wealthy area by any means, but I did get a sense of its vibrancy.

 One display shows a public washhouse built by the government.  Women originally washed their clothes in a stream that passed through the district.  To prevent bubonic plague, the government built the washhouse, which it permitted the women to use for free.  Then someone in the government decided that charging a fee for the use of the facilities would be appropriate. The majority of the women were too poor to pay, so they went back to using the stream.  The government rescinded the fee, and the women returned to the washhouse, at which point the government again instituted a fee, at which point the women went back to the stream.  Finally the government relented and abolished the fee.

 

Deb and I have talked at various times about the use of the word “evil” to describe people or governments.  She thinks – and I agree – that too-frequent use of the word drains it of its power.

> In addition, I think that in some cases at least, the word suggests a certain malevolent intent.  I don’t, therefore, think that the District Six Museum constitutes evidence of evil in the apartheid government (though I do think that there are many other policies and instances that do, but that’s another, long entry).  The museum does show a perhaps parallel quality to evil, however: a remarkable inability – or unwillingness – of the people in power to empathize with the people affected by their power.

 

Date: March 7, 2008 2:29:11 AM HST

 

 Tuesday, February 26, 2008 – Cape Town

 Years ago, there was a German language teacher at Punahou who would get upset whenever someone mentioned Hitler or the Nazis during a lunchtime conversation.

 It’s not fair – there’s so much more to German history than Hitler, she’d say, yet it’s always “Hitler did this, the Nazis did that.”  Not wanting to anger her any more than she already was (she always seemed on the verge of anger), I’d remain uncharacteristically silent.  But I remember one time when I decided to not let that comment go unchallenged.  I came back at her with the point that like it or not, people are responsible for their country’s history, and if that history is less than flattering, it’s theirs nevertheless; they’re stuck with it.  I don’t remember who said it, or if he or she said it this way, but one can’t escape history.

 

I’m reminded of this as I think of the museums I’ve visited here in South Africa.  Yes, I did visit the National Gallery to see its modest art collection, and there are other art museums that I’ve skipped. But the museums that matter here are the ones that illustrate so vividly and painfully the cruelty and outright barbarism practiced by the minority of whites who controlled South Africa.  These museums matter also because they show just as vividly the heroism and humanity of those who resisted and suffered and eventually emerged on the right side of history.

 This is what the Robben Island Museum is all about.  It’s one of the can’t-miss attractions in Cape Town primarily because Nelson Mandela spent eighteen of his twenty-seven years behind bars on Robben Island (as prisoner #46664).  I almost decided to skip the trip because the boat leaves from the V and A Waterfront (see entry of 2/20 – 2/22), but I figured that if Nelson Mandela could tolerate eighteen years on the island, I could tolerate another hour at the V and A.

 

For a most of the trip, I wondered if my sacrifice had been worth it.  Though I was instructed to arrive fifteen minutes early, the boat left a half hour late, which meant that I would have less time on the island.  The boat, an old tug, belched oily smoke which the wind blew in my face.  Dark, threatening clouds obscured the postcard view of Cape Town and Table Mountain from the island.  And the guide on the required forty-five minute bus tour of the island not only could have done her presentation in her sleep, I’m not certain that she was in fact awake.

 Then our group disembarked at the prison building, where we changed guides and everything changed.  All of the tours through the prison are led by former inmates; our guide was a former political prisoner who had received a life sentence for having blown up a power plant (yes, he said, he did it, but added proudly that no one had been killed or injured). A large man who appeared to be in his fifties (he affectionately referred to Mandela as “the old man”), he spoke without histrionics or emotion, letting his stories and anecdotes stand on their own.

 

Several of his anecdotes told of how the authorities tried to break the prisoners’ spirits. Prisoners were required to work in the limestone quarry extracting and breaking rocks, though the rocks were never used for anything.  Some prisoners would move the rocks from Point A to Point B; then they’d be ordered to move them back to Point A the next day. Moreover, prison authorities deliberately mixed political prisoners in with common criminals, hoping that the criminals would brutalize the political prisoners.

 But this didn’t happen, claimed our guide. Instead, the political prisoners politicized the criminals.  (When the authorities realized this, they separated them.)  And the prisoners educated each other: those who could read were obligated to teach those who couldn’t.  Though they were the ones behind bars, they seemed to be on the offense.  Though our guide didn’t say it this way, the prisoners at Robben Island acted like they knew that time and history were on their side.

 As we approached his six by eight-foot cell, our guide acknowledged Mandela’s indomitable spirit as a major inspiration for this positivity.   Housed in a cell similar to all the others, with only a thin mat on which to sleep, he was offered comforts but rejected them because they had not been offered to all the prisoners.

 But Mandela didn’t seem like the only hero to me.  Our guide didn’t say much about himself unless he was asked, but I asked a few questions.  Prisoners were allowed two half-hour visits per year.  Three days before one of his visits, his father took eight police bullets and has been in a wheelchair ever since. This led me to ask another question, one which has been of major importance to me in the weeks I’ve been here: Do you forgive white South Africa for what it has done to you and your father?

 He didn’t answer me immediately – I could tell that he wanted to choose his words carefully.  I won’t put quotation marks around his reply because I’m paraphrasing, but yes, he answered. It’s a long, difficult process and I started working on it when I was here in prison.  We were told to keep in mind that we will be the future leaders, and we must set an example.  Moreover, I can’t change what happened. My father has not forgiven, he said, but I have.

 Thought I’m sure I was not the first person to ask him this question, it seemed to me that he was still working on it – that he was trying to convince himself as well as me.  So a few minutes later I got him alone and brought the subject up again, saying (truthfully) that I admired him for his ability to forgive because I didn’t think I’d be able to do it in a similar situation.  He again hesitated, and though he never took back what he had said before, he mentioned that the police who shot his father were given amnesty after a hearing in front of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.  He attended that hearing, and said that he doesn’t believe that they were truly sorry.  Moreover, he added, they are rich men today.

 I know I’ll never see this guy again.  I regret that I didn’t even ask him his name.  If forgiveness is truly good for one’s soul, I hope he gets there.

 

 As I think about forgiveness in light of all the horrors of apartheid, I feel myself arriving at an answer of sorts.  I notice that most the heroes of the civil rights struggle in America have also forgiven those who trespassed against them.  And maybe it comes down to what I mentioned at the beginning of this entry: maybe (I say “maybe” because I’m guessing here) it’s easier to forgive when you know that you have been on the right side of history and history finally acknowledges it.

 

 

 Wednesday, March 5, 2008 – Ixopo

 

I visited two schools today, both in a part of Kwazulu Natal Province to which I had not yet traveled.  Located about an hour’s drive inland from a point on the coast about halfway between Port Shepstone and Durban, Ixopo is another of those dusty frontier towns in the middle of a mostly agricultural (sugar cane) area.  As do other towns, Ixopo has an established downtown area, with low-rise offices, banks, a few modest restaurants (usually a KFC), and other businesses housed in permanent structures. But, also like other towns of its type, the more exciting and interesting part of town stands a few blocks away, still in town but nearer the outskirts.  The first words that come to my mind whenever we pass through these areas are “teeming humanity.”  Vendors, most operating from small, shaded shelters, sell whatever they think might interest passers-by: fruit, used clothing, tools – the picture is of a poor people’s swap meet.  The sidewalks can’t hold all the people, so they spill into the streets, some darting out from behind double-parked cars, where they somehow manage not to get hit by cars maneuvering through it all.

 We came to look at another of the rural schools, having stayed here last night at the home of another of the Peers – Mehmood (“Mood”) and his wife Nafessa. He’s an attorney and former mayor of Ixopo, she’s a physician, and they deserve an entry of their own, which I hope to write sometime soon.  For now, it’ll have to do for me to say that all of the Peers that I have met share two characteristics: they offer visitors an incredible hospitality, and they have chosen to work for the good of those who most need help.

 At Yunus‘ request, Mood had arranged for me to teach a class at Little Flower Catholic School, an attractive place which appears to have been well supported by the Catholic Church since its founding in the 1930s (the school was founded in the ’30s, not the religion).  I’ve taught at about half a dozen schools in various parts of the country on this trip, I thoroughly enjoy doing it, and I ‘m at the point where I’m totally at ease in front of a class.  Moreover, I think that I’m able to convey to the students the ease and enjoyment that I feel.  Some classes have had a tight academic focus (the Cold War, the American Revolution, the Civil Rights Movement), others have ranged wider in focus, with me taking questions on various topics concerning American lifestyles, politics and history.  Whatever the focus, however, I’m aware that I begin with a huge advantage: being a haoleAmerican, I’m different enough to be interesting to students (at least to most of them; there are slackers in South African schools as well).

 Until today, I had taught two classes at each of the schools I had visited; today I taught only one, but it was two classes combined into one, consisting of juniors and seniors.  All but one of the students was black (the single exception was Indian).  The teacher, Gilbert Mxumalo, who had an obvious passion for history, was clearly excited to have me as a guest, and he conveyed that to the students.  Though it began inauspiciously, the class proceeded to acquire a rhythm, and it ended in a way I’m tempted to call dramatic.

 

I hope I can convey this; I’m going to go slowly and methodically through it, because otherwise it’ll be difficult to understand how we got to where we did.

 I started as I usually do, with a brief description of where I’m from.  I drew a map of the U.S. on the chalkboard, located New York City and Los Angeles, mentioned that they are about five thousand kilometers apart, then I located Hawaii and Honolulu five thousand kilometers from L.A.  Most of the students hadn’t heard of Hawaii, but when I mentioned surfing, most faces lit up in recognition.

 

Then I played what I have come to call “the Obama card,” which I use because it’s a good ice-breaker. I explain what the idiom “name-dropper” means; then I say, “I’m now going to be a name-dropper” (which usually brings smiles and occasionally brings laughter).  “How many of you have heard of Barack Obama?”  Today only two students (of about 40) raised their hands.  I asked one to inform her classmates, which she did (which brought a few more nods of recognition).  Then I said, “Well, he graduated from my school, and I was his teacher.”   This has never failed to elicit a response, and today was no exception; they seemed eager to be a part of my class.

 I do feel obligated to be biographically accurate, so I always mention important facts about my relationship with Barry (he was “Barry” back then): 1) I did not have him as a student in a history course, but rather in an after-school phys ed basketball course (I occasionally joke that I taught him to dunk), and 2) I did not have even the slightest influence on his life; in fact, I’m certain he would not remember me if I met him today.  And if by some small chance he would remember me, it would be as the teacher who was such a terrible basketball referee that it frustrated and occasionally angered him. (This, too, provokes laughter.)

 

I also tell them that although Barry appeared to be an intelligent kid, his passion then was basketball, not academics, and that if I were to think back on the thousands of students I’ve known and make a list of the five hundred who I thought might someday be running for president of the United States, there’s no way that Barry would have made the list.  “So,” I say, “for those of you who think you may not be a great student, it’s never too late.  Barry was your age when I knew him, and look how he has changed over the years.  With any luck, you, too, will have some years ahead of you.”  (By the way, with the scourge of AIDS spread across this country, I am always aware of how significant the words “with any luck” are for these students.)

 

So having played the Obama card, I moved on, but not with the ease that I had in some of the other classes.  I told them that I’d prefer to respond to questions they ask rather than try to guess at what they might be interested in, but these kids were shy, and only a few asked questions.  At one point, after I had asked them for their opinions on the affirmative action program in South Africa and gotten no response, Gilbert (the teacher) stood up in exasperation. “Don’t embarrass me,” he said.  “You know about affirmative action; you have written papers in English about it.”  I tried to soften his criticism by saying that I too have reprimanded my students when they have been too shy to ask questions of guest speakers (in truth, I haven’t actually done it, but there have been times when I should have).

 I decided to try another strategy: to let them play teacher and me play student.  I have learned quite a bit about South African politics since I’ve been here – it’s easy to learn quite a bit when one starts out knowing nothing.  And I’ve been interested in the current unpopularity of President Thabo Mbeki, for though he doesn’t have the common touch that Jacob Zuma, his tainted but popular and likely successor does, he seems like a decent sort to me.  So, mentioning that I’ve learned something about South African politics but still feel like I have a lot to learn, I asked them to explain why Mbeki is so unpopular.  “Is it just because Mbeki can’t dance?” I said.  I had heard this phrase before; it has been used as a metaphor to describe Mbeki’s formality and stiffness, and my using it had three positive results: 1) it let them know that I knew and cared about their nation’s politics, 2) it provoked howls of laughter from the kids, relaxing the atmosphere, and 3) it gave the students a discussion topic that they cared about.  They cared, by the way, because most of them are Zulus, and Mbeki, a Xhosa, has been accused of staffing the important government posts with Xhosa to the exclusion of the Zulus, which my students were not at all reluctant to explain and condemn.

 So at this point I felt that the ice had been broken with at least the majority of the class.  By this time, incidentally, we had gone past the class period, and Gilbert had phoned the principal and received his permission to extend it another period.

 

I had another question for them, and I told them I was genuinely searching for an answer and that I hoped they could help me find one.  I know about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its emphasis on forgiveness for the offenses of apartheid, I said. But tell me, how do you forgive?  Are you able to forgive?  I didn’t receive any answers to these questions, but I don’t think that their silence stemmed from a shyness or lack of interest on their part; rather, I got the impression that they had never – or rarely – considered the question, given the fact that they themselves had not experienced apartheid. So I decided to risk a new, more to-the-point, far more controversial one.  I said, “In case you haven’t noticed, I have white skin” (laughter).  “How do you feel about white people?” I asked.  Again I don’t quite know why, but again I got the strong feeling that they had never been asked this question in a classroom setting before – maybe because the ambiance seemed to get more serious.   A student raised his hand and I called on him, but before he could speak, I said something like, “Now keep in mind that I would not have asked this question if I didn’t want to hear the truth from you.  I didn’t come to South Africa as a tourist; I came here for an education. I want the truth.”  “I like white people,” said the student who had raised his hand.  I don’t recall his explanation, but it seemed, if you’ll pardon the pun, pretty white bread.

 

Then a girl in the back right-hand corner of the room raised her hand.  She had been one of the most verbal and articulate in the class till this point, but she spoke briefly and without explanation.  “I hate white people,” she said.  Then a boy in the rear left corner of the room, one whom I had called upon for an earlier response and with whom I felt good vibes, said, “I also hate white people.  They act like they are superior to us”  (quite a few nodded their heads in agreement). Then another said that he liked white people because he liked their technology (!). After that, I got one reply from each side, but subtle facial reactions from the silent ones gave me the impression that the ones who expressed dislike were speaking for at least a good part of the class. Then the girl who had declined to give an explanation raised her hand.  “Have you heard about the four boys from the University of the Free State?” she asked. I said that I had…and here I need to digress for a bit. Last week, two videos made by four white male college students surfaced. One shows the students duping five black maids into eating meat that had been urinated on; the other shows one of the students (from behind) urinating into a teapot, before serving the tea as well. The students later claimed that it was a trick video made to shock their friends and that they really hadn’t urinated into the food and drink.  But as I knew when I read the story, the message had been received by people like the thoughtful girl in my classroom and the damage had been done.  I don’t remember her exact words, but she said that she felt that the actions of the four boys symbolized the way many whites felt about blacks (I do recall that she, too, used the word “superior”).

 

Two other pieces of information from the newspaper story I read did not get brought up in class, but nevertheless add outrage and poignancy to this incident (is “incident” a strong enough word to use?).  The first quotes Professor and Vice-Chancellor Frederick Fourie: “They (the students) thought it was good, clean fun but it was clearly packaged in a way to say something offensive.  The packaging wasn’t innocent.”

 Did this man – the vice-chancellor – really say that – that the students thought it was good clean fun?   Does he really believe that the same students who had decorated their dorm walls with pictures of apartheid-era leaders think it was good, clean fun? And that the real problem, rather than content, was packaging – did he actually utter those words?  Talk about institutional racism….

 And this, from the nephew of one of the maids: “Although her job only involved cleaning the toilets and passage, she did their dirty washing and dishes…She loved those four boys.  The fact that it was those boys that did it broke her.”

  Back to the class, which had become very quiet. I knew enough to not throw out any platitudes, but I had no response for this. I said, “Thank you for the education.  I came here to learn, and you have taught me.”

 

 The class ended soon after this – fortunately so because I didn’t know where to go from here (fifteen extra minutes would not have gotten us to the healing stage).  Before they left, I again thanked them for the education, and told them how much I had enjoyed being with them.  I felt no hostility at all from the students, but I didn’t – and still don’t know where I fit into the equation.  I am not a white South African, but I am white.  Were they referring to me?  Most South African students and adults to whom I’ve spoken know that the U.S. under Reagan supported the apartheid government – in fact I’ve gotten questions from students asking why.  (Those few whose knowledge goes back to the 1970s like Jimmy Carter for his stance and efforts to oppose apartheid, by the way).   As the students filed out, I subtly moved to a place where the boy who said he hated whites would have to file past me to leave the class.  I wasn’t sure what I would do as he passed – offer to shake hands?  If I did, would he do it because he wanted to or because he felt obligated by politeness?  I decided that I’d look to his eyes for a sign of what to do, but as he passed by me, he avoided eye contact. Actually, I can’t say with certainty whether he avoided eye contact, or was simply engaged in conversation with another student as he filed past – it’s one more complexity about this place that I’ll never be able to resolve.

 

The articulate girl who had first said that she hated whites made a point to stop and ask me (in what I took to be a friendly tone of voice) if I would be coming back to teach another class.  When I said no – that I had to leave for Port Shepstone in a few hours – she expressed disappointment.  I know that she had found the class meaningful, and of course so had I. I again thanked her for her comments.  Before I could leave, though, another student, who like Barry was, is obsessed with basketball, asked me if I’d like to see the gym.  I of course said yes, and he showed me a neglected but impressive sized gym.  We talked hoops for a while, then he needed to head to his next class.

 

It was not yet 10:30 a.m., but we had another school to see: Ixopo State-Aided Primary School. The school signs should have had quotation marks around the words “state-aided” to indicate irony, because there hasn’t been much state aid here, and what little there has been has not always been appropriate.

 Ixopo Primary State-Aided School exists on three small, dusty “campuses.”  (There’s a strong connection between poverty and dust in South Africa.)  The main part of the school sits behind and very close to the largest food store in town.  Delivery trucks often block the narrow dirt road which serves as the school’s entrance, and the store’s exhaust fans, which operate continuously, present an audible challenge to learners and teachers.  The other two sites are quieter but just as dusty and cramped.  The government had sold some of the school’s land to businesses in town, but new construction to be completed in January, 2009 will unite the campus at one site.  At that point, however, a new problem will arise because the new construction will leave the school with three fewer classrooms than the three sites currently have (and they are already overcrowded; on the main campus, one small room serves as a library, infirmary, music room – it has a piano, and teachers’ workroom). Moreover, the new school will have science labs and a computer room, but with no guarantee that the government will provide lab equipment, computers, or even furniture.  “School administrators and teachers are never asked what they need,” said one administrator.  “We are told what we will get.”

 When the same administrator told us that only two grades have enough textbooks to provide one per child (the other grades have half of what they need), neither Yunus nor I was surprised.  What more surprised us was the fact that amidst all the hardships and disruptions in their school life, these cute-as-can-be kids seemed happy – or at least not unhappy – and remarkably focused.  Are they too young to know how deprived they are?

 

Date: March 11, 2008 8:13:42 AM HST

 

 Thursday, March 6, 2008 – Port Shepstone

 I’ve been lucky enough to have spent the better part of another day with Pauline Duncan in the rural areas surrounding Port Shepstone.  We returned to some places that we had been and met some people we had met on the first trip, and we visited some new places and met some new people as well.  As with the first trip, the day will, I’m sure, prove to have been a memorable one.  (I wonder, by the way, how much time needs to pass before one can call a day or an experience memorable.)

 Since writing my first entry on Pauline, I’ve discovered that the biographical information I gave on her is not quite accurate.  She did, as I said, serve as the principal of a school and the mayor of Port Shepstone, but without getting specific, I should mention that 1) I got some of the dates wrong, and 2) there is far more to this remarkable woman than I had previously mentioned.  A list of this woman’s good works makes Mother Theresa look like Billy The Kid by comparison.

 I met up with her in front of the Port Shepstone Hospice (why was I not surprised to learn that Pauline was instrumental in establishing it?).  A few minutes after we exchanged greetings, she met someone she knew and the following brief conversation occurred: “Are you keeping yourself well?” she was asked.  “No, but I’m fine,” Pauline replied, “and it’s just inside,” she added.  I haven’t known her long and can’t claim to know her well, but that little snippet of conversation seemed to me to be so characteristic of Pauline – ask a question and you’ll get a straight answer: she’s not fine (some respiratory problems – TB?), but she doesn’t want pity or sympathy.  I am concerned about her health, but knew that it would be fruitless to pursue the matter further.

 

As we approached the outskirts of Port Shepstone, Pauline pointed out an area of penned up goats, and explained that goats are the preferred animals for ritual sacrifice because they scream loudly when slaughtered, loud enough to reach the ears of the gods that those doing the sacrifices want to call forth.

 The first item on our agenda was to deliver a photo to Sfiso Dlawini, the Zulu man with a leg brace (the result of having had polio as a young child in the late 1960s) to whom we had given a ride home a month ago.  Pauline had taken a photo of him then, and when she showed it to him on the LCD screen of her camera, he had been so thrilled to see himself that he had asked for a hard copy.  He invited us into his very modest home, a single small room which served as his kitchen, living room and bedroom (the bathroom was a separate half room).  Everything inside was neat and clean (he didn’t have enough possessions to clutter the place) but the smell of kerosene, which he used for cooking, permeated the place.  He had no kitchen table and no refrigerator (because he had no electricity), and the only food I saw was about a dozen small potatoes lying on a newspaper on the floor.

 

 I noticed a book lying next to Sfiso’s bed, which on closer examination I discovered was an American history textbook.  Before I could tell him that I taught American History and that my students used a similar book, he, with great enthusiasm, began telling me how much he LOVED this book.  He opened it and quickly found and began to read aloud a part of a paragraph that he said had great meaning for him: they were lines which described the rights and responsibilities of citizens in a democracy.  These words had great relevance to him as a disabled person, he said, because he was struggling to be treated fairly by the agency with which he, as a disabled person, had to deal.  Do I need to mention that this was a chicken-skin moment for me?

 Next came a visit with the beader ladies, but as with our visit a month ago, we moved slowly, often stopping or slowing down so that Pauline could either photograph cows (she loves cows and can’t resist stopping the car to photograph them) or talk with or call out greetings to people she passed on the roads. At one point, she stopped the car to talk (in Zulu) with three women at work picking up trash along a dirt road.  Good morning.  You’re doing such a fine job here – look how clean the road is!  Which part of the road is your responsibility?  Is your job full or part-time?  (Part-time.) How much do you get paid? (Five dollars a month, I think one replied.)  Before we moved on, Pauline (and I) asked and received permission to take photos of the women, who, like Sfiso, were amused and delighted at the results.

 

I have become more comfortable engaging in conversation in similar situations.  At one point while Pauline went off to look at an outdoor church (no walls, just an arrangement in a sacred place of white stones to form “rooms”), two guys in their early twenties called out to me.  I wandered over, said hello, and soon we were shootin‘ the breeze.  The talk was small, but the friendliness behind it made it a pleasant five minutes.  The fact that I’m haole works in my favor: I’m a curiosity because they rarely see any white people in this area. And in the rural areas, adults rarely ask me for money.

 Pauline has been working closely with the beader ladies to help them develop a sustaining business, suggesting ideas and patterns, setting up business workshops (and convincing the women to attend them), and buying at least one item almost every time she visits their work site (a pleasant group of buildings which form a community center).  Most of all, she acts as an encouraging presence, expressing genuine delight at even incremental progress  “That’s brilliant,” she’ll say, referring either to an idea or a piece of work, or as a substitute for the word “wonderful.” When the women reported that they had sold more than eight hundred rand (about $115) worth of beads at a craft fair, she responded, “That’s brilliant!”

 

I had business of my own to conduct with the women.  When Pauline introduced me to them a month ago, I had come up with the idea for a pin which Punahou students could wear to support their athletic teams on game days: a beaded, one-inch square patch with buff-colored “Puns” against a blue background. The women sold the pins to me for twenty rand each (a little less than three dollars); I hope to sell them to students for eight dollars each, with profits going back to the beaders.  I placed an initial order for fifty pins, which the women delivered to me today. I’m hoping that fifty will be far too few, and further hope that students will purchase enough pins each year so that it’s not just a one-time fundraising effort, but rather part of a continuous business effort.

 We next returned to Inyandezulu Primary School, the recipient of Yunus‘ and Gora’s generous gift of a month earlier.  Pauline had asked the principal for a “Needs” list to take to the Port Shepstone Rotary Club, which had pledged to help the school.  I didn’t see the list, but know that the school’s needs go far beyond what even the most generous organization could provide.  The terminal cuteness of the young children playing in a dusty area too small to be called a playground made this fact even more poignant.

 

The Rotary Club had also agreed to donate eight used computers to nearby Olwandele High School, and Pauline, who had been instrumental in the project, stopped by to tell the principal that the school would probably be getting its first computers. He seemed happy to hear the news, but didn’t seem overjoyed – for what I think were two reasons: 1) Pauline said that there was an excellent chance that they’d receive the computers, but it wasn’t yet a done deal, and I suspect that the principal had heard good news before which somehow had never panned out, and 2) the principal seemed happier that someone had just arrived to fix the toilets, signaling the solution to a more immediate problem.

 

 While waiting outside the principal’s office, I got into a conversation with five or six ninth and tenth grade boys who had been hanging out nearby. Curious about American high school students, they wanted to know if my students also had to wear uniforms.  (I think uniforms are wonderful for South African students, by the way, as they are THE great leveler.)  For some reason they laughed when I told them that in the U.S., ninth graders are called freshmen and tenth graders are called sophomores. As they left to go to class, a ninth grader called out, “I am a freshmen.”  A tenth grader followed with, “I am a sophomore.”    They all laughed again.

 We didn’t have much time until a luncheon engagement, but Pauline wanted me to meet someone she worked with and admired: the Reverend Dr. K.E.M. Mgojo, a powerful moral presence in the area with an impressive list of positions and achievements, including a position on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was set up to attempt to heal the wounds of apartheid.  An old man who radiates dignity and authority, I wish that we could have had enough time together to have discussed forgiveness, but we had to hurry and he, too, seemed busy.  However I felt honored that Pauline chose to introduce me to him.

 “He uses me,” Pauline said as we drove back to Port Shepstone.  “He uses me to say things he can’t.

 

That is my role as a white.  It’s not enough for a whites to say they’re sorry – we need to do something.”

 We arrived back at the Port Shepstone Country Club just as the Rotarians were about to begin their weekly lunch meeting.  It felt strange to end this trip in which every face we saw was black with a luncheon at which every face was white.  Unlikely as it may seem, however, Pauline is a Rotarian herself.

> She’s hardly buddy-buddy with any of them, but I know that she sees her Rotary Club membership as another useful tool in her struggle, and she wanted to not only cultivate the members, she wanted to thank them for the eight computers.  Another useful lesson in the politics of doing good.

 Something I noticed on this day with Pauline that I hadn’t noticed a month ago: she sighed more often, and seemed more overwhelmed at how much needs to be done.  And yet it was such an uplifting experience for me to be with her.  Maybe it has to do with a quotation that she includes with every email message, a quotation which would seem presumptuous and hypocritical coming from most people (including me): “May God deny you an easy peace and grant you instead passion; a revolutionary passion that spills over into the world in acts of compassion, love, justice and integrity.”

 

Date: March 15, 2008 6:10:34 AM HST

 

 Tuesday, March 11, 2998 – Port Shepstone

 Pauline invited me to spend another day with her and of course I jumped at the chance.  “We’ve been to Nyandezulu; today we will go beyond.”  She meant that we would go deeper into the rural areas west of Port Shepstone; in fact this trip to one of the rural schools would be her first as well.  She brought along a map that she had pinched from the Department of Education which located all of the schools in the province as well as the back roads which led to them. “Just in case,” she said, as she threw the rolled-up map onto the back seat.

 

But first we needed pay another visit to Sfiso, as Pauline had another photo to give him.  He greeted us both warmly, but didn’t invite us in – my guess is that he was not yet dressed, as it was still pretty early in the morning.  I have a great photo of him which I hadn’t been able to get printed in time, but I will send it to him via Pauline.  I am amazed at the delight that people with so little receive from small pleasures like a photo of themselves.

 Since we were close to Bhobhoyi, an area I had not yet seen, Pauline decided to take me through it, giving me a history lesson as she drove.  Though it went underreported by the western press, a great deal of black-on-black violence plagued South Africa from the late 1980s through the mid-90s, as rival black groups fought each other for power.  Ironically, though the groups had a common anti-apartheid goal, they engaged in some of the most vicious fighting among themselves.  (For example, the “necktie,” a tire which was draped over the neck of a bound victim, doused with gasoline, then set on fire, was only used in black-on-black violence.)

 Bhobhoyi had been one of the most dangerous areas in one of the most dangerous provinces (Kwazulu Natal) during those violent years, as newcomers from the African National Congress (the party of Nelson Mandela) challenged the traditional influence and leadership of the Inkatha Freedom Party.  The night frequently brought terror to members of one party or the other – or their families, depending on who had decided to retaliate for the most recent act of violence. The violence continued even after apartheid ended in 1994, culminating in the Christmas Massacre of 1996, in which IFP followers slaughtered outnumbered ANC followers and their families.

 I don’t remember how many men, women and children Pauline said were killed or badly wounded on that day (it was difficult to take notes on the bumpy dirt roads we traveled), but the number was significant enough to be called a massacre.  Pauline was mayor of Port Shepstone at the time, and because most people – black and white – feared setting foot in Bhobhoyi, she was called on Christmas day to go there to arrange aid and shelter for the survivors, who were so shell-shocked that they were literally speechless.

 

As poor today as it was back then, what has changed in Bhobhoyi is the agent of death, as AIDS has become the region’s most prolific killer.  I could – and probably should – write at least one entry on AIDS and how the leaders and people have dealt with it, but for now I’ll mention that I’ve learned that whenever I see a thin or gaunt-looking person, it’s usually accurate to assume that she or he is infected. Undertakers, say both Pauline and Yunus, are becoming rich.  I think it was Nafessa, Mood’s wife who is a physician in Ixopo, who said to me, “I used to go to weddings; now I go to funerals.”   Or maybe it was Pauline; or maybe they both said it.

 Though it’s the most isolated school I’ve yet visited (the nearest named settlement is Paddock, about ten kilometers away), the dirt roads that lead to Mambhogweni Primary School are in good shape – unless it rains.  (Deb and I have been on far worse roads in the American West.)  Local women built many of these roads by hand (i.e., with no power equipment, no architectural plans) and continue to maintain them this way.  We again met up with a crew of three, who were delighted to have us snap pictures of them.

 

By the way, I need to correct an error in a previous entry in which I understated the pay that the women earn.  The state pays them fifty dollars per month for eight days’ work maintaining the roads. (I think I claimed that they receive five dollars.) And if one dies or becomes incapacitated, her job passes to someone else in their family so that the income continues, a significant benefit in a country with a forty per cent unemployment rate.

 We did reach a point at which we decided to consult the map, having come to a fork in the road. A perfect moment for a Yogi-ism, so I explained to Pauline who Yogi Berra was and then quoted him: “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”  It cracked her up, and we both laughed a few minutes later when the fork we took came to a dead end.

 

Despite the initial wrong choice of road, we reached Mambhogweni School rather easily.  It struck Both Pauline and me that its eighty-nine students (in grades K through four), against all odds, seemed to be doing well despite dismal physical facilities.  The school has two feeding programs for the kids, they are neatly dressed (an achievement, given the amounts of dust they encounter each day), and they appeared to be concentrating deeply on whatever they were studying.

> Knowing the principal, Pauline attributed the school’s progress to her strong leadership.  The garden that she has planted, for example, takes one’s attention away from the fact that the classrooms, furniture and learning materials leave much to be desired. Ironically, the school appears to be doing so well that Pauline regretfully told the principal that in all good conscience she could not recommend that the school be eligible for a prize of winter meals for students which a private company is offering, given that there are so many children who more urgently need to be fed.  (These “well-off” children, I’m sure you all must know by now, are in fact very poor.  They are simply not desperate – at least not during school hours.)

 We were able to be of some service, however. When we asked the principal for permission to take photos of the school and the children, she not only agreed, she asked us to be the official school photographers so that they could have photos of each class.  So as we took photos of each class and of individual students, she went on ahead to get the kids all lined up and ready.  I wish I could have photographed the smiles of delight on the children’s faces as they looked into the viewfinder of my camera to view the pictures of themselves.

 

Remember the Saturday Night Live “Wayne’s World” skit in which Arrowsmith pays a surprise visit to Wayne and Garth’s show?  When they realize who has surprised them, they immediately prostrate themselves and chant, “We’re not worthy!  We’re not worthy!” Well that’s kinda like I feel when I’m with Pauline, except that I figure that there must be a nugget of something worthy in my core because I know that she has enjoyed our time together.  We have had meaningful conversations, both personal and political, and we enjoy each other’s sense of humor.  She knows that I have a deep respect and affection for her.

 So as we drove back to Port Shepstone together, I finally felt OK about asking her about her health, and she didn’t brush me off.  “Not good,” she said.  She explained that she has emphysema, and added, “I should have died years ago.”   She’s OK as long as she doesn’t get sick, but she has low resistance to illness, so she tries to stay away from people with colds or the flu.  I inconspicuously wiped away a tear as she talked, and again as I said goodbye to this remarkable person.  And I have tears in my eyes now as I type this, not only for the sense of loss that I will feel, but for how deeply her absence will affect the lives of so many people who desperately need the help and comfort she provides.

 

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.”

 

Date: March 24, 2008 11:51:39 PM HST

(last one, I promise)

 

 Monday, March 17, 2008 – Florence, Italy

As I browse through what I’ve written, I’m surprised at how much I’ve written in such a relatively short time, but as I think more deeply about what I’ve seen and learned, my mental rolodex stops at topics I haven’t mentioned: politics and AIDS are but two examples.  There is so much that I haven’t written about…But enough is enough; it feels like time to stop, even though the academic in me says that I should write a conclusion (I tried, but I’m dissatisfied with what I’ve written.  I think that I need time for it all to percolate some more).  But I feel that I can’t possibly end this without addressing just one more topic.

South Africa faces some enormously difficult challenges in its future; in fact, it would be easy and understandable for one to see these challenges as insurmountable and give up even trying to deal with them.  I’ve been inspired and moved by the many people I have met who refuse to be overwhelmed, who see the glass as one-tenth full and work to do what they can. I’ve mentioned some of them already (Pauline Duncan, Razvi Ahmed), but I want to mention some of the others as well, so that when the Xerox machine at Punahou breaks down and makes my life mildly inconvenient, I’ll be able to put it in proper perspective. And should I need inspiration in order to become a more giving person, these are a few of the people to whom I can turn.  There are many – so many that I wish I had taken more detailed notes about them.  Those who fail to make the list do so because of my failing memory, not because they don’t deserve to be mentioned.

 

Engela Pienaar, who does her best to help prisoners in the Obi Correctional Center outside Pretoria receive an education, comes from Africaaner stock (Africaaners are the stereotypical equivalent of southern rednecks in the U.S.).  Several years ago, her car was hijacked and then stolen.  The police caught the culprit.  He stood trial and went to Obi prison.  Ms. Pienaar attended the trial, but instead of being satisfied that the criminal received his appropriate punishment, she saw the need for education so that others would not be so desperate as to resort to crime.  She has volunteered her help at the prison ever since.

 

Thokozane – I don’t know his last name – teaches at Siyapambili (rural) School outside Harding. He supports several members of his extended family as well as his own.  A dynamic person and teacher, who could be making more money (which he badly needs) by working at a better-paying school like Port Shepstone High School, he knows that he’s needed at Siypambili, so he stays there to try to make a difference.

 

Ray Cele is principal of Mdlangaswa (rural) High School outside Port Shepstone.  He begs anyone he meets who might possibly help him get two extra desperately needed classrooms built.  He knows he’s a pest, but for the good of his students, he keeps pushing nevertheless.

 

Nafessa Peer, Mehmood’s wife, didn’t become a doctor to run an AIDS program, but the disease has had such a devastating effect on Ixopo, where she lives, that she feels she has no choice.  Though some other doctors in the area won’t treat AIDS patients, those are the vast majority of her patients.

 

And then there’s Yunus – the one who ties all these people together.  Being a teacher at Punahou, I have a good idea of how busy his “day job” keeps him, but during the past seven years he has somehow found the time and energy to establish and run Teachers Without Borders in various locations in South Africa during his summer vacation. Not only does he not take a salary for this almost full-time job, he or his mom will often contribute whatever money is needed after all the fundraising has been done. Seeing him in action in various parts of South Africa has been impressive and inspiring. Sometimes he’ll call on a huge network of influential, community-minded family members and friends (including three former mayors) for help, sometimes he’ll go it alone.  He knows how to talk to the powerful, but he can talk to kids as well.  (I remember his greeting a small group of little kids in Port St. Johns: “Why aren’t you in school?” he asked.  He sounded like a kindly but authoritative village elder.)

The needs in South Africa are enormous, but Yunus is a realist.  He knows that one can’t just throw money or computers at problems.  He knows how to ask the right questions: How will the money be used?  Is there security for the computers?  Will the school commit to setting aside a room with enough electrical outlets?  Will there be someone at school who knows enough to teach the kids – and the faculty – how to make the best use of them?

And what may be most impressive of all is that Yunus doesn’t allow the enormity of the needs or the hugeness of the tasks to overwhelm him.  He simply does what he can. What motivates him?  He has enormous respect for his late father, who fought apartheid by doing what he could to help those burdened by its laws (he financed the building of a school in one of the poor black areas outside Port Shepstone, for example).  Shortly after his father died, Yunus’ mother said to him, “Now what are YOU going to do?”  I have no doubt that his father would be proud of what his son has done so far.

 

When I first considered coming to South Africa, it was with the intention of helping Yunus set up a school.  I broached the idea of joining him to help him in this task, telling him and others that I hoped I could be more a help than a burden.

Shortly before I left the U.S., Yunus’ mission changed, as he put the school on hold and decided to focus instead on preparing for the Teachers Without Borders’ workshops he would run in June and July.  I didn’t see how I could be of help in this area, but I had purchased my tickets and had allowed myself to get excited about the adventures to come.  Though Yunus continued to assert that I could be of help, I wasn’t at all sure how.  I hoped that at least I wouldn’t be a burden to him.

In all honesty, I think that I was a burden, though I take comfort in the belief that Yunus knew all along that I’d be a burden, yet urged me to come nevertheless.  I think he knew – no, I know he knew – that South Africa would get to me.  It’s an understatement to say that it has.

I originally wrote  “change me” instead of “get to me,” but I edited it out because it’s too soon to claim that I am a changed person.  Those words carry a challenge, and I don’t feel right using them unless and until I can demonstrate to myself that I have in fact changed. And if in fact I am a changed person because of this trip, I hope the person I have become is worthy of the time and effort that Yunus invested in me.