Belated musings on South Africa

It’s been a hectic week since we got back from vacation, so I’ve neglected the blog a bit. Oh well – I’m sure you weren’t crying yourself to sleep over it.

South Africa felt a little different this time around – more comfortable than before. I’m sure this is partly attributable to sheer familiarity; it was my fourth visit. But I imagine it also has at least a little to do with my trip to Chad and Senegal. In comparison, South Africa seemed so incredibly first world to me, like it was on another continent. The most basic of the informal settlements in SA, where people live in shelters made out of whatever they can find (corrugated iron, wood and plastic, mostly) are certainly as miserable as anything in Chad, even the refugee camps. But the majority of the townships look no worse than army barracks, with small but orderly brick buildings crammed together. Not comfy, I’m sure, but a damn sight better than the mud and stick constructions in Abeche (where, incidentally, the war has finally arrived and all international humanitarian workers have been evacuated by the French military. That guest house I stayed in is now abandoned).

All that said, there’s still a lot of grinding poverty in that country, and when you see the fuss everyone is going to over the World Cup, it kind of makes you think. (For those of you who don’t follow soccer, South Africa will host the 2010 World Cup, the largest sporting event in the world. It’s a huge deal.) If I were a poor or even a middle class South African, I might have serious problems with my government spending billions of rands on football stadiums and other nonsense when hundreds of thousands of people don’t even have electricity. Oh, I’ve heard the counter-argument – that the World Cup will foster investment and provide some infrastructure upgrades – but I’m not sure those would wash for me if I couldn’t afford to send my kids to school.

Of course, football is HUGE in South Africa, and besides that, South Africans have demonstrated themselves to be a patient bunch of folks. Early one morning as hubby and I were driving through Mpumalanga province, we passed hundreds of people making their way to work along the side of the highway. Some walked, but many waited for buses to pick them up. Both Don and I commented that we had never in our lives seen such orderly lines for the bus. Fifty or sixty people queued at any given stop, in perfect single file along the roadside. Not a single person was out of place. It struck me at the time as rather symbolic. South Africans have demonstrated enormous forbearance since 1994 – granting amnesty to former architects of Apartheid, remaining mostly quiet while they wait for basic services, jobs and land reform. It seems like all of South Africa is patiently waiting for the bus to arrive.

Here’s hoping it comes soon. If it doesn’t, the consequences for Africa will be unthinkable.

Ahem. Anyway, for some reason the photo upload isn't working, so I can't post any pictures. I'll try again later.