28 January to 24 June 2009
A Second Editorial
Yes, another editorial! Getting the South Africa Journal onto the website is more of a mammoth task than we first appreciated. Now we are faced by summarising our final five months; in which time we have journeyed through all nine provinces, travelled over 8,500 miles and visited seven national parks and major wildlife areas, numerous nature reserves, provincial capitals, the economic and national capitals ... well, the list goes on! We cannot possibly cover everything we have done, and our apologies: what we do include creates a long summary! Again, pictures will come to our rescue; however and in order to reduce the Web Master’s work load, there will be far fewer actually in amongst the prose in the Journal and you will have to use the link that will allow you to see the additional fabulous photos in the gallery.
South Africa: Our Impressions
Before we do and as much for our own benefit as anyone else’s, we should give a brief summary of our impressions of this country and its people.
We found South Africa to be much larger than we had anticipated, it is the size of France and Spain combined, and to contain a landscape of greater diversity and beauty than we had ever imagined; from the Mediterranean Western Cape to subtropical Durban on the Indian Ocean; from the majestic Drakensberg mountain range to the haunting beauty of the vast Karoo semi-desert; from the wildlife of the mighty Kruger National Park to the ancient forests and rugged coastline of Tsitsikamma. It has been a marvellous, unforgettable revelation and all were linked by an excellent and well maintained road system, within which were a variety of near deserted tracks and pistes through stunning wilderness and over numerous dramatic passes.
We were almost left speechless at the campsites we visited; well maintained and comprehensive facilities that would put most in Europe to shame, and all at about £10 or less per night. The extensive and burgeoning growth of shopping complexes and malls containing supermarkets, Woolworths (M&S by another name) and a whole cross section of other known brand suppliers meant that the essential, and the not so essential, were readily available wherever we went and were of good quality and for sale at good prices. The same applied for all aspects of vehicle maintenance; Toyota, for specialist advice and service, as well as motor factors, stocking all the usual DIY items, were in all major towns and cities throughout the country. All in all was very much a’ home from home’ experience.
But what of the people .. Well, it is important to remember that apartheid and its brutality and inhumanity only ended some 15 years ago. South Africa is now an African country and still the most powerful and westernised in the continent; it is also one where the extreme disparity of wealth, one of the greatest in the world, has been on view where ever we have been and it seems a new form of apartheid, rooted in that period of its previous incarnation, has come into being. Leaving aside the mega-rich and we are of course generalising here, the white 10% ‘have’ and the remaining 90% ‘have not’ and any within that 90% that do ‘have’, often do not to the same degree as the white 10%.
The vast majority of the urban black population is still suffering from the after effects of apartheid and the almost total absence of investment in black housing, education and infrastructure before the mid 1990’s; they still live in apartheid era shanty towns, discretely out of view and some distance away from a town or city; a large proportion are unemployed; many dress in rags and live in insanitary conditions; most are desperately poor. For how much longer the blacks can accept their lot in comparison with that of the whites and with the forbearance we have seen, is not known and the effectiveness of the black peoples’ party, the governing ANC, may well determine how their demands for improvement are expressed and met; democratically or violently.
Allied to these conditions has been an historic systemic under investment in social infrastructure making these communities the breeding ground for gang culture and the criminality that spawns. Most of the crime in South Africa is black on black, or against commercial targets and the national hot spot is in and around Johannesburg. Violent black on white crime occurs, but it is important to keep a perspective on this and perhaps with the exception of Johannesburg, such crime is no worse than in some areas of the USA or Europe. We were careful and thus safe until, in March, we dropped our guard and became a black on white crime statistic.
The affluence of the whites has its roots in the apartheid era, when the country was organised for their benefit; today whites can afford to run cars and so visit the out of centre shopping malls, travel around the country (and its campsites) and further afield in Southern Africa in new, top of the range 4x4’s and bakkies; they can afford private( and so, white) schooling; they can afford private (and so, adequate) healthcare; they can afford better housing(and so create, or maintain, white only secure estates);and so on. Whites, to a large degree, seem to continue to hold the levers of commerce in their hands and white farmers certainly retain their stranglehold over the best farmland, thousands upon thousands of productive acres of it.
Whites dominate the tourist industry; in the main they own the campsites, the B&B’s, the private game parks, the game lodges, etc, etc. As we look back on our time here in South Africa, unconsciously we too have become part of the white comfort zone, relying on a white lifestyle; it has been very difficult to meet anyone else, from the black majority, on equal terms.
There were too, from within some sections of the white community, oblique references to the good old days. Today there is the unwelcome novelty of lack of certainty in a once all powerful minority; worry over the crime problem, the general untidiness of everything around them, and that this utility was failing, that minister was corrupt and so on; this litany of the problems of the new era, usually from those of middle age and beyond, normally concludes with an open reference to how things have gone downhill since... ‘democracy’. Those good old days were when non-whites were literally kept in their place by force of arms and by, amongst others, a combination of the Pass Law and demeaning segregation at every level; creating a pool of largely uneducated, disenfranchised cheap labour with no tangible government social support or infrastructure. Little wonder that since the freeing of the majority 14 years ago, the massive and ongoing uplift and empowerment needed to redress the iniquities of apartheid have brought with them aspects, hopefully temporary in nature, that are unwelcome at best and life threatening at worst.
If we are honest we found white South Africans as a group, and in particular the elderly and the Afrikaner, inward looking and belittling of most aspects of black majority rule. Indeed it often seemed that they derived considerable perverse satisfaction from the many shortcomings of the new era. Hopefully those that follow will see that the best way to preserve their minority way of life is to avoid the laager mentality and to be proactively as inclusive as possible of the majority, in particular the very small but burgeoning black middle class, who then become willing stake holders in the status quo .. not the status quo ante. If they cannot, then the white community will be in danger of being sidelined and their legitimate concerns and rights increasingly ignored.
All of this would be worthy of a three day seminar! We have generalised our impressions and concerns perhaps to a point where brevity detracts from a better understanding. It is also undeniably and wonderfully true that throughout our stay we have met, time after time, only with kindness and hospitality from those white South Africans we have become proud to call friends.