Freedom Day 2010

April 27, 2010

Today is Freedom Day, a national holiday in South Africa commemorating the first nonracial democratic elections.

In his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela remembers voting on April 27, 1994, on the second of four days allowed for the elections, the first in which the majority of residents had been allowed to participate:

“I marked an X in the box next to the letters ANC and then slipped my folded ballot paper into a simple wooden box; I had cast the first vote of my life.”

Mandela was elected president with nearly two-thirds of the vote. Most of the nation and the world rejoiced at this peaceful, democratic end to apartheid. It was a year after he had shared the Nobel Peace Prize with F.W. DeKlerk (the man he defeated in the 1994 election), four years after his release from 27 years of prison.

The African National Congress still holds power and will for the foreseeable future, but his successors, Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma, don’t have near the leadership abilities or star power as Mandela. The glow of the peaceful transformation has worn off in real life, even as promoters try to burnish it anew for the spotlight hosting soccer’s World Cup this year provides. The thorny legacy of apartheid brutality and inequities survives. Even Mandela noted in the final words of his lengthy book, “I have discovered the secret that after climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb.”

Zuma is a charismatic if controversial president, popular among many groups (excluding the educated elite). He used his address marking 16 years of freedom to remind outsiders (those still living on the economic margins do not need reminding) that the effects of the Group Areas Act, two decades after its repeal, are still obvious: "Many still live in areas once designated for black people... away from economic opportunities and civic services."

The president is being attacked politically from many sides, predictably by Helen Zille, leader of the opposition Democratic Alliance, and most strikingly from the South Africa Students Congress, which decried severe economic disparaties:

“We have secured a democracy that gives the rich the right to rule the roost in our political and economic terrain,” according to one news report on today’s commemoration. An article posted on afrik.com drew many comments, including those claiming the ANC engages in “reverse racism” because of efforts aimed at empowering black entrepreneurs and another wondering why, if the society is nonracial, every official form requires people to state their race.

Time magazine managing editor Richard Stengel collaborated with Mandela on his autobiography and is the author of Mandela’s Way: Fifteen Lessons on Life, Love, and Courage. In its brief preface, dated November 2008, Mandela writes:

“In Africa there is a concept known as ubuntu—the profound sense that we are human only through the humanity of others; that if we are to accomplish anything in this world, it will in equal measure be due to the work and achievements of others. Richard Stengel is one of those people who readily grasps this idea."

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I don’t presume to know what is really happening or should be happening in South Africa after my single four-week visit, but I did see these things with my own eyes, illustrated in the photos above:

Parliament celebrates soccer.

A little girl at a playground outside the Cape Town Waterfront’s largest shopping mall on Easter weekend.

A little boy at dusk the Saturday before Easter on Robben Island with Cape Town and mainland mountains across the choppy sea.

Men in a township off the scenic Garden Route, mid-week in the middle of another beautiful sunny day.

A private garden belonging to a member of the black elite.

Township women offering roasted goat heads for sale.

A woman making crafts by the seaside (the Atlantic Coast south of Cape Town) to sell to tourists.

Albie Sachs, one of the authors of South Africa's constitution, a lawyer, scholar and activist, happy with his son Oliver (named after Oliver Tambo) and his wife Vanessa, an architect, at the Durban Art Gallery on Human Rights Day, March 21, 2010

Readings and Musings

I read Nelson Mandela’s autobiography Long Walk To Freedom, of course. I read Elinor Sisulu’s biography of her parents-in-law, Walter and Albertina Sisulu: In Our Lifetime. I read Antjie Krog’s reportage and reflections on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa. I read Charlayne Hunter-Gault’s New News Out of Africa, Uncovering Africa’s Renaissance. I read veteran South African journalist Allister Spark’s books and columns. My Google alert brought me daily news updates of South Africa. And when I was in South Africa, March 7-April 5, 2010, I read various daily newspapers and talked to people I met about their country’s history and present. Now, I'm just beginning to reflect on my readings and the realities I saw.

Zwelakhe Sisulu

After the idealism ushered in by the end of apartheid and Mandela’s presidency, I was shocked by the rude and incendiary remarks of Julius Malema, leader of the African National Conference Youth League, and the apparent absence today of idealistic leaders of the caliber of Desmond Tutu or Mandela. I discussed this with Zwelakhe Sisulu. Many children of the struggle generation have led troubled lives, but he and his siblings are productive, creative members of the “new” South Africa. I first met Zwelakhe casually, at Walter Lippmann House, home of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard, in 1985.
When I saw him again, four years later, he was triumphantly striding into Sanders Theater at Harvard during a spring 1989 dinner commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Nieman program. He had been in detention; it took the intervention and pressure of influential Americans such as Ted Kennedy to get him released. The third time I met him, last month, he was sitting in his office on a peaceful estate just north of Johannesburg. He has extensive interests in mining, energy and media. His sister Lindewe is Defense Minister; his brother Max (husband of writer Elinor) is Speaker of the National Assembly. He noted that his father Walter and Nelson Mandela were products of missionary schools, so were brought up with a strong moral code. Today, effects of apartheid are still harshly apparent in huge disparities in wealth, education and job prospects. Many young people are without direction in their lives or opportunities for productive work. Those who lived through apartheid and the triumphant election that made Mandela president call younger citizens the "Born Free" generations.

Mary Metcalfe
Mary Metcalfe, whom Zwelakhe fondly remembers as “really a champion for the detainees,” is now Director General of Higher Education and Training. The ANC heralded her appointment in August 2009: "Comrade Mary has distinguished herself as having been a champion of transformation in education in South Africa." Prior to this appointment, Metcalfe was head of education for the University of the Witwatersrand.
“When I was in detention in the State of Emergency, we used to refer to Mary Metcalfe as Mary the Lion Heart,” Sisulu recalled. “She actually was the one who was coordinating our studies, so she would supply books to the prison. We ran a school in the prison.”

I interviewed Metcalfe in her Pretoria office. She and her colleagues are charged with helping to alleviate the 40 percent unemployment rate among people 18-25, most of them black. In order to attend university, students must achieve good scores on their “matric” examination. But many students with weaker teachers, their own parents victims of the apartheid education system, don’t even reach the point of taking this examination. A system for life experience credit is in place, but if someone has just been hanging around, that is not an option, either. So her priority is strengthening short-term and college vocational programs where students can learn skills in demand in contemporary society, such as in the hospitality industry. Many South Africans are counting on the exposure of hosting the 2010 World Cup, the first time it’s ever been held on the continent, to boost tourism. Of course, tourists are discouraged by reports of high crime, fueled by that huge cohort of the unemployed. Metcalfe’s department was reorganized after Jacob Zuma became president; higher and basic education were separated. Last January, the Department of Basic Education issued a statement clarifying that the percentage of learners (the country's term for students) in 2009 "who have a attained a bachelor's degree pass in the National Senior Certificate examinations in 2009 is 19.8 percent," not the 32 percent quoted in a speech. "The Minister and the Department have throughout this process been forthright with the public and have presented the disappointing results for public scrutiny," the statement read. That means only a fifth, at best, of high school students even have a chance to enter university, and thousands are without marketable skills.

Education, employment, transportation challenges
There are parallels to the challenges facing inner city schools in the United States, but the problems and disparities seem worse in South Africa, contributing to class and racial resentment. Middle class families I met are scrimping to send their children to boarding and other private schools. Some (commentators I read, people I talked with) fear that Malema is exploiting resentments of the under-educated, restless youth. Malema himself is proud of living large, with showy consumption of luxuries. After weeks of criticism and the murder of a white supremist, Zuma rebuked Malema a few days ago, warning him to think before he speaks.
I had a list of friends-of-friends to contact in South Africa, and thus had the opportunity to visit people’s houses, not just be a tourist. Since I rented a car (and in the first days frequently took wrong turns), I observed many neighborhoods and ways of living. I knew there were rich people. I was surprised at how many fancy homes there are in and around Johannesburg. Even middle class residents have lovely gardens (the climate with lots of sun certainly helps) and are protected by thick walls, often topped with coiled barbed wire, and electric metal gates. You don’t just drop in. Many have separate quarters for domestic workers. Some liberals, I’ve read and heard, swore they would never have “servants,” but it is considered a decent job, and several people told me it's the right thing to do with such high unemployment. Several white people made a point of telling me the black elite also employ domestic workers. Although I saw a few white people jogging or walking, most of the people I saw walking, in neighborhoods and along the highways, were black. I saw very few people on bicycles.

Many of the black working class get around via mini buses. There are fleets of them that stop along designated routes and can also be flagged down. Drivers struck and blocked traffic in Soweto while I was there in protest of the government’s modernized “rapid transit” buses, which ply some of the same routes. Although there are cars for hire and taxis like we think of them, these mini buses are also called taxis. According to a website dealing with worldwide transportation issues, “South African taxi drivers shuffle an estimated 10 million commuters to and from work every day… An introduction of more buses could ultimately see their taxis being phased out. In South Africa, a taxi is a symbol of their owners’ status and financial security.”

Transformation, nonracialism
In official literature and some conversations, the words transformation and post-racial or nonracialism come up. It’s clear that implementing those ideals in such an uneven and imperfect landscape is complex, especially with an ingrained culture of classification by skin color and ethnicity. Almost everyone I met still classified themselves and others by race and talked about it in ordinary conversation. I know from studying social psychology that our brains automatically jump to characterizations of others – male/female; old/young; black/white; safe/dangerous; like me/not like me. After more than three weeks in the country, I realized I had become accustomed to this way of thinking and speaking, and was taken aback when I met Zayd Minty in Cape Town and asked what his ethnic background was. He said he refused to engage in such discussions, that it should be a non-issue. I felt guilty that I had succumbed so quickly to this stereotyped way of thinking and glad he reminded me. And it’s not that I met only black people and white people. I met Indian people and colored people who told me that was their heritage. When I first met Justice Albie Sachs, in Chicago where he was a visiting professor last winter, he told me that his union with his wife would have been illegal under apartheid. He is white (and Jewish); she is colored (and beautiful). Now they have a tousle-haired, 3-year-old son, and people are more likely to marvel at their age difference than any differences in skin tone. I also met several gay couples, including happily married ones. The South African constitution, which Sachs helped write, is progressive. It specifies: “The state may not unfairly discriminate directly or indirectly against anyone on one or more grounds, including race, gender, sex, pregnancy, marital status, ethnic or social origin, colour, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion, conscience, belief, culture, language and birth.”
Legally, there is no problem with same-sex marriages. As in the United States, however, tolerance is greater in urban areas than in rural ones. The rate of rape in South Africa is appalling, and some rapists deliberately target lesbians, according to news reports and documentation by such NGOs as Gender Links.

Patriarchy
It is still a patriarchal society. There are many competent women in Zuma’s cabinet, and Helen Zille is the premier of the Western Cape and leader of the “official” opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, but no woman is poised to run for the presidency. Zuma has three wives, one fiancée, one ex-wife (who was appointed Foreign Minister by his predecessor), and many children. It made news last week when Zuma agreed to get an HIV-AIDS test, following widespread criticism that he was setting a bad example by having unprotected sex with women not his wife, most recently with the confirmation that the baby of a friend's daughter was his 20th recognized child. People in South Africa are upset that taxpayer dollars go to support the staffs of the three First Ladies and that, due to the custom of having government offices in Pretoria and the legislature in Cape Town, each politician charges cars and living expenses in both places to their government accounts. My old friend John Mojapelo said people feel they “owe” the ANC for their liberation, and won’t vote the party out. Indeed, it seems entrenched for the foreseeable future, from my shallow understanding.
As Metcalfe told me, “Gender relations in this country are still very conservative.”

She noted that all official documents give strong support and even require quotas “to address those gender imbalances, but those are very resistant to change in deep consciousness and in changing the dynamics of how people relate to each other and the dynamics of how power operates.”

Then, pausing to think this through further, she merely added: “Yeah.”

Family values
I discussed what might be called in America "family value issues" with several people, including Thabang Titotti, my guide to the Cape Town flats. He said people in the townships value education, but on a daily basis, if a parent gets a chance to work for a few days, he or she may ask an older child to skip school and watch the younger ones. Many of the parents and grandparents are illiterate, he said, so there is not a culture of reading (although I saw many people all over the country reading newspapers). He told me Vicky Ntozoni, who runs her own B&B in Langa, sends her own four children into Cape Town to school, believing that they will get a better education there than in the township. Zwelakhe was close to his father and to Nelson Mandela, whom he knew his whole life and served as press aide when Mandiba made his post-prison triumphal world tour. Zwelakhe credits his mother, Albertina, with holding her own family and many others together with strong deeds and values.
“Our home was really a community center. [His childhood home in Soweto is right across the street from a clinic, where his mother helped deliver many babies.] My mother was one of the first nurses and midwives. Our home was also a transit center..." (for people on the run, for people just moving to the city).
He said people would leave clothes for the extended family, so he found himself as a boy literally in the “big shoes and big suits” of struggle leaders. “Clothes were dumped at my house," and with them came stories: "This was so-and-so’s who was sentenced…” Life was hard, but inspiring. "It was not just the sense of the extended African family, but the extended ANC family" He says he has childhood “memories of joy and happiness and memories of sadness,” but he remembers more the sense of sharing happiness. The community also had the ability to share pain and comfort one another.
He told me the prior weekend, at the suggestion of his 10-year-old grand-nephew, the extended Sisulu clan gathered at the Johannesburg Zoo. There were more than 60 of them there, presided over by Albertina. A long walk with a happy ending for his family.

Not so scary, but...

Many aspects of life in South Africa for a white woman, an academic and a writer, were not nearly so scary as some people had predicted. Comfortable, familiar, even. But so much is unpredictable. So many people are scarred. Sachs, for instance, lost an eye and an arm when secret police tried to kill him. I met a woman at the Art and Social Justice conference who had been imprisoned by Somalis for 10 years. So, on the surface, things seem fine. But…
And then there are the quite different ways people live their daily lives: the middle class and up behind gates at the driveways and bars on their windows. The poor and working poor in townships, where people come and go freely, but “know each other’s business,” says Titotti, who no longer lives there. It’s not as brutal and demeaning as wealthier people might imagine, but it’s not so romantic as some would have it, either. And then there are the economic refugees, many from Zimbabwe, begging in the streets, mothers with babies squatting on concrete medians throughout Johannesburg in between asking motorists for money.

Coming home
On the plane on the way home, I read Krog’s latest book, Begging to be Black. In it, she posits an ancient interconnectedness of black people, exemplified by Chief Moshoeshoe, who reigned over what is now Lesotho, a mountain country completely encircled by South Africa. She wrote part of the book on an academic fellowship in Berlin, where she explored African and Western philosophy and tried to come to grips with what it means for her to be Afrikaans, with a mother who introduced her to classical music and endorsed apartheid. Krog believes Mandela was misunderstood from a Western, Christian perspective, and is better comprehended from a communitarian point of view as exemplified by Moshoeshoe. She calls out her own naivete, and tries to explain in English the concept of ubuntu: “a world view based on the idiom umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu – a person is a person through other persons.”

Photos
The portraits are of Mary Metcalfe in her Pretoria office; Zwelakhe Sisulu outside his office north of Johnnesburg; and Albie Sachs speaking to the Art and Social Justice conference in Durban about choosing the architecture, design and art work for the highest court and Constitution Hill.Other shots are of a weed growing above the wall at the prison museum on Constitution Hill; a cafe in a township along the Garden Route; scenes from the township of Langa outside Cape Town; a new Cape Town condo with a BMW outside; downtown Johannesburg; a typical gate between the street and a home in Johannesburg; domestic workers in a suburb; barefoot streetchildren inside the Durban Art Gallery watching a video of soccer games between schoolchildren held earlier that day and week; schoolchildren visiting Constitution Hill; dancing among delegates to the Gender and Local Government Summit, and a commentary on the end of the Mandela era by the famous South African political cartoonist known as Zapiro (Jonathan Shapiro).

Gender Summit, Johannesburg

I had made two visits to the Gender Links offices (www.genderlinks.org.za) for preliminary interviews, chiefly about its ambitious plan for a first-ever summit on local government and women's issues in Southern Africa. This summit was originally supposed to start on March 8, International Women's Day, but was pushed back to Human Rights Day -- the same time as the Art and Social Justice conference. On Tuesday, March 22, I had a commitment from WomensENews to publish a piece, so flew back up to Johannesburg from Durban to cover this conference.
Here's a link to my piece on it, which ran March 28, 2010:
http://www.womensenews.org/story/the-world/100326/local-african-leaders-strategize-enhance-safety
The photos are of the Gender Links founder Colleen Lowe Morna, right, and participants at the final banquet.

Cape Town

C

CAPE TOWN: March 30-April 5, 2010

iKhaya Lodge

My lodge is on a one-way side street. Somehow, though, I found it by car, and as I explore more it is in a convenient location, not touristy, but set among small offices (psychotherapists, for example), decorators and other artsy folk. It’s in walking distance of Parliament (which has giant inflatable soccer balls outfront in support of FIFA bringing the World Cup to Africa for the first time in June), and, I found out later, many attractions, including the Waterfront. It’s friendly and low-key and the bill for six days including breakfasts is less than one night at the game reserve!

Number One to see here is Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu, among many other male political prisoners, were incarcerated for years. I take a taxi to the waterfront and learned from a bored-acting woman at the information booth there were no tickets available the entire weekend. I persevered and went to the ticket window where I was able to purchase one for 3 p.m. Saturday. Not ideal, but better than missing it altogether.

Table Mountain

Another must-see site here is Table Mountain. Actually, you can see it from most of the city most of the time, but going to the top involves driving part-way up the mountain and then, if it happens to be a warm holiday week, waiting in line for nearly two hours for the chance to buy a ticket to ride in a cable car to the summit. Helpful signs note that you could have paid a bit more, ordered your ticket on the Internet and skipped to the head of the queue. But, in the case of high winds, which are frequent, the cable car does not run, so it’s a toss-up. The cable car floor rotates so that all the passengers can be face-to-face with the granite and sandstone horizontal face of the mountain and get the panoramic view of the sprawling city on lower hills and seashore below. You can also walk up the less challenging sides of the mountain. At the top of the mountain, hard to make out from its base, are trails, a souvenir shop and a restaurant that serves wine, beer and different kinds of food (kind of like today’s college cafeterias, with the salad bar, the burger line and the full meal choices).

Cape of Good Hope & Boulder Beach Penguins

The next day, I drove down the Cape of Good Hope, to Hout Bay, Noordhoek and across the steep and windy Chapman’s Pass from the West to the East side of the peninsula, with lunch at Simons Town and then a few more kilometers to the penguin colony at Boulder Beach. The colony is protected by fences and gates, but the penguins are very friendly and sometimes end up in the parking lots and nearby yards. They let people get right in their faces to photograph them and make a funny braying sound, hence their name, the Jack Ass penguins. (Although officials are trying to get these warm weather ones to be known as African penguins.) Got my feet wet but did not swim.

On the way, shot vendors on highway cutouts selling crafts and hides, including zebra, which I had been excited to see in the wild only days before. At lunch (see menu board), many of these animals were on offer to eat.

Taste of Jazz

Going to Africa alone as a single woman, planning every detail myself, was somewhat daunting, especially since so many people and publications advised never going out alone, much less at night. But this night, Thursday, April 1 was balmy and thousands of people were expected in Greenmarket Square for the free concert, part of the 11^th Cape Town International Jazz Festival, which runs Saturday and Sunday and is sold out. It was also Maundy Thursday, so when I arrived by taxi, I was greeted by a digitized sign behind the stage that said the concert would resume at 8:05 after the church service was over. Thousands of people were in the square (last year police estimated 8,000). About 8, who should show up but the politician Helen Ville, a former reporter, now Premier of the Western Cape Province and leader of the “official” opposition, the Democratic Alliance? Through her press secretary Melody Kuhn, Ville had, after weeks of e-mail back and forth, refused my request for an interview. Clad in a long red jacket this evening, she led the singing of happy birthday to the square (350 years as I recall) and announced that it would soon get free WiFi. (I really could have used that; I had to pay for Internet access during most of my trip.) Then she and a lucky few onstage shared birthday cake and champagne. As a caution, I had stashed my stuff in a plain plastic bag so as to look like a local. There were plenty of police and ordinary people of every hue around, so the admonitions seemed silly. I was glad I went, glad to find a taxi waiting after my delicious dinner for one at an outside bistro.

Easter - a very big deal here -- to the Waterfront!

I knew I was going to be in Cape Town over Easter weekend, but what I did not realize is that almost everything shuts down on Good Friday and Easter, in particular. It’s a common time for holidays (last beach days before Fall and Winter, the kids are out of school and most businesses and offices close. Even the newspaper here is not published on Good Friday!). This made most streets nearly deserted, although there were kids and people in the walkways near the Botanical Gardens (the park itself was locked) and the Iziko Slave Lodge was open for only 15 Rand. The only big gatherings of people and open stores were at the Waterfront. Promotional literature says Cape Town planners used waterfront developments in the United States, such as in San Francisco, as models. This one is huge, encompassing several piers. It is where cruise ships dock (the Seven Seas semester-at-sea ship was in port; the Queen Mary II had been here two weeks ago – I saw it in the Durban Harbor). Away from the tourist part is the working harbor of container ships. The complex includes upscale offices, hotels, shops from cheesy to quite elegant, and, in the main (Victoria) mall, upscale international shops, as well as branches of the ubiquitous local grocery chain Pick ‘n’ Pay and drugstore Clicks. It’s also the departure site for Robben Island, although that sober museum is almost lost among the many other distractions nearby, including street performers from tumblers to drummers to a silver man (just like on the Magnificent Mile in Chicago). There are many outdoor and indoor restaurants. The three I sampled (on different days!) were all delicious, and Sunday’s had live jazz outside, so I did hear live music twice even though I did not make it into the big event at the Civic Center. At 5 p.m. Friday, I met an arts administrator named Zayd Minty, a friend of Colette Gaiter’s, at Fork, a tapas place on Long Street, an excellent base for younger, hipper travelers, who can choose from backpackers’ hotels to fancier ones, including some with hip or hip hop in the names and one called Daddy Long Legs. First time I ever tried ostrich steak, in delicate little tapas-sized servings.

Robben Island

On Saturday morning, I walked to the District Six museum. Somehow, missed it. Asked. No one knew. Turns out I walked right by it, on the other side of the street. Also turns out it was closed, no notice on the door or on the website, guess people are just supposed to know it’s not gonna be open on Easter weekend. Turns out that Saturday IS the day of the big flea market just a short distance away, however, and this one is for real people looking for real bargains, not the “craft” shops that spring up wherever there are likely to be tourists.

At 3 p.m., I was at last on the ferry to Robben Island. I had known that ex-inmates are the tour guides. I had not known that most of the trip around the island is on big buses. The guides, recognizable by their berets, were knowledgeable, the prison stark, even though it has been repainted and the island itself is beautiful, making it all the more poignant to think of the prisoners being able to see the mainland across the sea. Because I had read “struggle literature” before I came, I knew much of what the guide said. But I did not know the story of Robert Sobukwe, who, according to the Boston Globe’s Derrick Jackson, “led the mass resistance to pass laws that ended in the 1960 Sharpeville massacre where police shot and killed 68 peaceful protesters.” Sobukwe was regarded as such a brilliant threat to their rule that the apartheid government made him a special visitor with his own cottage. In other words, he was never formally charged or convicted, never went through the legal system. They would not permit him to speak to anyone and rotated his guards every three months so no human bonds would be formed. He eventually went mad and lost his ability to speak. During the early years of his imprisonment, selected reporters were permitted to see him. After his mental health declined, his four children and his wife were allowed to see him, staying nearby in the walls-within-walls compound, but only permitted to see him for short prescribed periods of time. Eventually, he died of lung cancer. Today, some of the former wardens and former prisoners, if they choose, live in the village on the island, including one of the Robben Island Singers. Jeff Spitz, my Columbia College Chicago colleague, is making a documentary about them and has brought them to Chicago to sing for public school children.

Townships

One legacy of apartheid is segregated housing. Of course, if you have the money, anyone can live anywhere. Although people are free theoretically to live anywhere, many black people live in townships. This is a wealthy country, blessed with natural resources and in the big cities, a First World economy for many. On the outskirts of every city I saw, however, are settlements that range from small but sturdy houses to ones that look like the worst slums of India, Brazil or any other country where shantytowns exist.

On Easter Sunday, I had arranged a visit to several of the townships around Cape Town, drawn by the opportunity to hear gospel music. As it turned out, we spent less than half an hour in the Lanka Baptist Church. The minister went back and forth between English and Xhosa. The church was modest, with a rough-hewn cross, but a computer projection showed the words to the hymns. The home page of the church featured 2010 at the bottom, with soccer balls representing the zeroes. The parishioners, mostly dressed up, were in the front rows. In the back rows were rotating groups of white tourists, most in jeans and even shorts, snapping photos and shooting video. Afterward, our guide, Thabang Titotti, whom I found out later owns the company, took us into several people’s homes (he knew them), including a woman entrepreneur named Vicy Ntozini, who advertises her B&B in a hand-painted sign outside as South Africa’s smallest hotel. Thabang told me she sends her four children to school in the city, where she expects they will get a better education than in the township schools. We also met Ivy, whose hand was bandaged. She and another woman had been set upon by three or four youths intent on robbing them. She held up her hand defensively and they cut her with a knife, requiring stitches. She sat in her meager home, at least that’s what I thought at first, a single bed, a television, a sink and refrigerator, all in one room. She actually has one of the newer houses, stucco and a plaster ceiling, not tin, next door, where she lives with her four children. Thabang explained that there are three types of township settlements: official, informal and illegal. The first category is government-recognized and has electricity, water and sewage, schools and clinics. The other two are usually nearby, but have no services and shelters made from whatever scraps (tar paper, tin, wood fragments, paper) people can scrape together. Children from those settlements can go to the township schools, although illiteracy is high and encouragement for education is not always present, Thabang said.

We visited another small business, where two women make beer for men who pay to join the club. When the beer is ready, it’s poured into metal cylindrical canisters and set on a wooden mat with a circle where the base fits. That’s where the men put the money. A ledger is kept as to who has paid what. Someone in our group (a Swedish couple, two young women from Germany and me) asked if women could come, since all those sitting around drinking and smoking were men. One of the men replied that the women were home cooking. Yet they were here drinking before noon on Easter.

We also met a tribal healer who explained that most of his patients use his services and those of what we would consider “modern” medicine. His remedies, from the evidence of our eyes, seemed to be mostly animal-based. He had skins, skulls and hides hanging from the ceiling and ropes, and lots of jars of various kinds on shelves in his crowded hut. He also spoke excellent English and thoughtfully answered our questions. The Swedish woman is an orthopedic surgeon, so she had plenty of questions. He told her a lot of the complaints were about stomach problems. He said he does not do a physical examination, but asks many questions before making a diagnosis and a prescription. I asked him about mental health issues. In those cases, he said, he tries to work out a plan with the patient.

Thabang also pointed out the many rough three-sided enclosures where women were grilling meat for sale. Outside one, a live sheep rested among his slaughtered peers. At another, the specialty was roasted goat head. The young German women blanched at this sight, and asked Thabang to stop when he started describing the brain as similar in consistency to cottage cheese, but tasting much better. He said a full head costs 34 Rand, 17 for half.

This trip of more than three hours, including pick up and delivery to where you were staying, cost 380 rand. A 10 percent tip is customary. And I left 50 Rand in the tin box for the township children with Vicky. Well worth it, but now out of local currency again, so, after being dropped off last and thus having a good conversation about his vision for his company, I got into my rental car and headed once more for the waterfront, to find an open ATM (doors were locked and gates secured at the downtown ones, I had discovered on Friday) and to tote up my anticipated VAT refund. Unbeknownst to me, this does not apply to food or accommodation or hired cars, most of my expenses, other than museum admissions. Also, I am supposed to show the stuff to the VAT people at the airport, when I have it mostly bubble-wrapped and/or wrapped in dirty clothes in my suitcase. So, is nearly 300 rand worth that trouble? We’ll see at the airport tomorrow. Had a late lunch, early dinner, wind strong today, came home and promptly fell asleep, so now have time to write this and pack…Last night in South Africa.