SOUTH AFRICA OMG

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Okay, yeah.  I think I’m gonna try to focus mostly on the main points in the rests of the posts for South Africa instead of telling all the tiny details from event to event, and this one will be about South Africa in general.

 

South Africa has three defining characteristics.  1:  It’s unequal.  2:  It’s dangerous.  3:  It’s physically beautiful.

 

As for the inequality, Apartheid only ended in 1994 when the international community’s economic sanctions on the place were so severe that the rich white people realized they might not be that much richer than all the black/colored/Indians they had power over soon if they didn’t do something, so they had a referendum and voted to get rid of Apartheid so that the economic sanctions would be lifted.  Things have gotten a little bit better since then, at least in the law books, but not so much in real life.  For instance, every company has to have black managers, and companies get more discounts and tax breaks the more black people they hire, and black-owned companies are the most heavily subsidized, etc.  But this has really only helped a pretty small number of minorities, and most minorities still live in crushing poverty with no meaningful employment (near 35% of non-whites are unemployed), leading to just a very high income inequality within non-white races.  Besides that, though, the average white family makes six times more than the average black family.

 

In case anyone isn’t familiar with Apartheid, you should Wiki it immediately, but the history is something close to this.  White people moved in to South Africa sometime in the 1400s or so and have been there ever since, and in the 1800s and 1900s they started having wars with each other and then with the natives (which happened after Britain let the place govern itself).  They started with a war that put any non-white people under their control/fear, and then started making laws from there.  First they defined peoples:  you could be 100% white, 100% black, 100% Indian, and anyone else was “colored.”  Only white people had privileges.  First they made Pass Laws such that any non-white had to have a pass stating their place of origin/birth and where they were going, for how long, and why before they could leave their hometown.  They didn’t have the right to vote.  They weren’t allowed to marry people of other races, and finally couldn’t even have sexual relationships with them.  They couldn’t use white beaches or cars or live in white neighborhoods.  For instance, Johannesburg was a white neighborhood.  “Townships” were set up on the outskirts of cities, and they’re literally miles-by-miles shantytowns with homes made of barely-nailed-together wood and thatched roofs.  Go to images.google.com RIGHT THIS SECOND and search for “Khayelitsha.”  Then imagine it going on for three miles squared.  And then imagine your government making a hundred thousand people live here.

 

Anyway, that’s Apartheid in a nutshell, sort of.  Cape Town is an interesting case because they resisted the rules of Apartheid for a long time, but they finally gave up in the early 1980s and then enforced them with brutality unlike any other place in the country.  Part of the reason the townships there are so bad is because people were forced to move there in enormous migrations against their will from a local government that had protected them for so long.

 

Fun side story, white people used to pay their non-white workers in alcohol so that they’d get addicted and remain poor and besides, they were growing the alcohol anyway so it was like free to give away.  Alcoholism and alcohol abuse is now an enormous problem in all but the white communities.

 

But yeah, another way that Apartheid still really isn’t over is that the people are pretty frequently racist.  Two nights in the port I ran into some fairly well-to-do kids who were either in their last years of high school or their first years of university (that is, these aren’t hicks we’re dealing with) and asked them what they thought of racism or race in South Africa.  They said things like, “You know, black people choose to live like that.  They could do better for themselves and get an education and a job, it’s so easy for them, but they choose to be dirty and to be poor.  Not all of them, but a lot of them.  I’m not racist at all, that’s just how they are.”  It was kind of tough but I somehow managed not to laugh at any of them when they said this.  It wasn’t just that it was racist, it’s that after seeing and learning about townships, you see how incredibly, unbelievably wrong they are about everything they said.

 

Also keep in mind that the townships are a weird purgatory between private and public.  They’re set up by the government and there are rules the government has about what must be supplied to them, but they’re not public housing.  At the same time, you don’t own your house, you can’t get insurance on it and you can’t take a loan out against it or anything like that.  So there’s no one that can do anything for you, not the government or the private sector or yourself.  It’s a terrible situation, but their president is borderline mentally retarded basically so it won’t be fixed now.

 

As for the danger, to start with the obvious, South Africa is the #1 country for rape and #2 country for murder in the world.  I think the statistics are that nearly half of all women report that their first sexual experience was a rape, and that one-third of women report having been raped in the last year.  However, the number of rapes that happen which actually get reported is an incredibly small proportion because punishments amount to a slap on the wrist, and victims are often shamed because the culture blames them.  Men don’t feel any remorse or wrong-doing because they think that the women were asking for it, or provoking it, or that they enjoyed it.  Moreover, rape is usually committed by someone the woman knows.  Twenty-five percent of teenage boys say that jackrolling is fun.  Jackrolling is group rape.  Their president (his name is Zuma) raped a woman but got out of it by saying that she was dressing provocatively and that it was against his Zulu culture to leave a woman unsatisfied.  The court just told him that a man in power shouldn’t be so promiscuous and he probably should’ve let another Zulu handle it.

 

No one I talked to said that it was safe to walk through Cape Town at night.  When we took cabs through, it was deserted except for Long Street, where all the bars and lights and people go at night.  Even there, though, kids said to never EVER walk alone.  When I walked there (not alone), I got offered all sorts of drugs from guys sitting on the corners and on the walls.  The kids also said that if you walk alone, there’s a good chance someone will come up alongside you and ask how you’re doing and then stick a gun right underneath your ribs until you give them whatever they want.  A couple kids got mugged from Semester at Sea – one had his camera taken and the other was shoved on the ground and had money taken – but no one was violently injured.  White people live in gated communities so that they don’t have to deal with the “culture of forced sharing” that everyone else does – which contributes to and highlights the inequality.

 

Finally, it’s a pretty beautiful place.  Cape Town is a coastal city right up against the water and literally about three miles back from the beach is this amazing mid-sized mountain range.  You should again go to Google Images and just look at a picture of it.  Probably they’ll show you a big flat mountain in the background, which is Table Mountain, the biggest of them all.  It’s about 3,000 feet at its highest point.  To its right (looking from the city) are seventeen other plateaus at about the same height but with a smaller surface area that they call Twelve Apostles, which makes no sense but whatever.  There’s a bunch of beaches right near the Twelve Apostles that are super beautiful as well.  You can also go to Cape Point and swim with penguins and then enjoy some more crazy awesome rocks and cliffs right up along beaches, or you can go inland to huge rolling mountains right next to new mountains and savannahs and wineries and vineyards and see where all the crazy animals live.

 

I think that’s pretty good for the culture of the place.  That’s already like 1,600 words.  Sorry about that.