(picture is sunset view of Devil's Peak and Table Mountain)
For the last day in SA, I was on my own in Cape Town. I walked from the City Lodge Hotel, where our group stayed, to the Fountains Hotel in central Cape Town. As I walked, trailing my new "big trolley bag" and wearing my carry-on bag in backpack mode, I realized that this was my first time loose in Africa while not under the watchful eyes of our tour guides Pieter or Ina, or someone they chose to look after us. As I walked out of the Victoria and Albert Waterfront tourist zone, there were fewer and fewer white faces, no special "security patrol" mini cars hovering around, and more cheap street food stalls, social service agencies, and working people.
Everything was a bit grittier. It reminded me of non-tourist parts of Bangkok, except with a certain tatty opulence. During apartheid, this was almost certainly a whites-only area. It didn't have the bombed-out feel of Johannesburg, but the kind of slight tension of, say, Brooklyn in New York.
The advice I had received, from multiple sources, was that walking around here during daylight was basically safe--usual rules for city walking anywhere applied (be aware, don't look lost, confused, indecisive, etc., and don't display cash, iPhone, and such.
At night, I was advised, one should take a taxi, even for short distances. The problem was that rich and poor people are so very different in wealth, and the poor, especially the many undocumented refugees from Zimbabwe, Angola, etc., can be desperate.
I explored a little during the afternoon. An Internet shop offered connection for R5/hour. It was a dialup-speed connection. I read some news headlines, and decided to go for the pricey, intermittent Wi-Fi in my hotel. I was hungry, and wanted to try a "boerworst," the sausage that forms the mainstay of a brae. After passing a couple of sketchy-looking street stands, I chose a (Cape Malay) take-out counter that featured "strictly halal" foods and a seating area with lots of Arabic placards. Muslims, along with kosher meat companies, "answer to a higher authority," so I tend to trust them.
As night fell, I retreated to my hotel, and blew R200 on Wi-Fi. With my R300 reserve for the airport taxi, I was left short of Rand for dinner. That left me looking at risking (rampant) credit card fraud and annoying the restaurant with a small charge, or risking a trip out of the hotel for an ATM.
The hotel desk clerk solved my dilemma, by having a hotel security man walk me to and from the bank ATM, half a block away.
Like an ionic molecular gradient across a biological membrane, the steep wealth gradient here requires energy to maintain. Fear, security guards, physical barriers, and avoidance of direct interfaces are needed.
The rich prey on the poor in grand scale. 'Twas ever thus. But the poor prey on the rich in small, desperate ways. Mainly, fear preys on everyone.
So, how will SA deal with being a place where the so rich and the so poor mix atop such a rich land? It once had a kind of "good government" and a civility built on shared community values and rule of law. But that was built on a rotten foundation of apartheid. Physical and legal barriers kept the poor and their needs separated from the rich and their abundance.
Now, the gradient that apartheid maintained is partially equalizing. Efforts at affirmative action, and its current incarnation of "black economic empowerment" (BEE) are bringing some measure of justice, but the historical injustice is thus only shifted from blacks to whites.
White college graduates experience BEE as racial discrimination. They weren't yet born, or were small children during apartheid. They didn't personally discriminate against blacks.
Crime is another factor with an impact in life and community. The homes of well off whites in Johannesburg are surrounded by high walls with electric or razor wire fences atop them. Signs on each such house advertise the particular "armed response" security company that protect them.
In Kliptown, in Soweto, kids run freely around the many small shack homes. This was once the black township that served as a ghetto--a residential prison of sorts. Now, it's the wealthy that live in prisons. Surrounded by barbed wire, they cower at night, penned in by fear of crime.
There's a great challenge in building a just society out of a history of injustice. Economic disparity is inevitable. Unless there are the bonds of community, including love for one another and one another's children, then barriers are needed to maintain the disparity.
South Africa has made great conscious steps to foster intracommunal love, through things like it's five-language national anthem, constitutional guarantees of civic equality, and truth and reconcilliation process.
Whether or not they accomplish the kind of social reconcilliation, and a level of "community" that frees people from the prisons of fear and the pain of (even compensatory) injustice remains to be seen.
What lessons the South African experience has for us in America is something to consider. We still have chattel slavery in recent memory, and the residual social effects of racism. Also, we're moving AWAY from socioeconomic balance. The middle classes in America are shrinking, as wealth and income disparities grow. The American rich might do well to rethink their "get ALL of it" tendencies in the light of the poor imprisoned rich folk of Johannesburg.
Finally, learning radical love of neighbor, whether philosophically or religiously motivated, would ease the pain we all feel in an inherently disparate, diverse society.
