A Moment of Introspection

For anyone who is expecting this post to be a tale of adventure and frantic activity--stop right now! As the title suggests, I am in a contemplative mood and this post will be a simple meandering through my thoughts and impressions.

I was struck today by the similarities between the day to day life of Cape Town to that of the US, and even to that of Australia. Cape Town is the famed tourist destination in South Africa, a tribute to the "developing" part of the third world because it seems to be on par with the Western world. But there is a different feel to the air here, a subtle flavor of fear mixed with defiance, an abstract pride in the qualities that the first world would classify as faults. When someone is late to a meeting they laugh and call it "Africa time." If you are mugged walking home from work your family and friends just shrug it off as "carelessness" on your part. The newspapers lament almost daily about the crime and poverty that define the South African nationality, but nobody sees change happening. The reality is that there are many Cape Towns. There is the Cape Town that parties on Long St. and basks in the sun at Camp's Bay, returning to their clean house every evening to lock the rest of the world out with the front gate, the gate outside the front door, and bars over every window. There is another Cape Town, where aware individuals look around them in the suburbs and realize the shortcomings of their way of life--the crime that keeps them captive in their home, the self-sufficient attitude that ignores the struggle of the people all around them--yet they do nothing. There is yet another Cape Town, in which the people view their surroundings with open eyes, attempt to change what they cannot abide, and still fail to make a significant difference. And then there is the Cape Town of the townships.

The townships are real, they are more real than anything. All the photos you see are real, true to life images of the daily suffering of most black South Africans. But the people in the townships, they are not the stereotypical images of poverty and suffering that we of the first world lament when we care to think about it. They are wonderful people. Many of them have jobs, decent clothing, enough to eat, and live a relatively normal life. With the exception, of course, that they are living in shacks built from wood, metal sheets, and whatever else they can find. Now, almost 14 years since the end of apartheid, there are a smattering of high school graduates from the townships attempting to break into the educated workforce and into the tertiary education system. If they make it, these individuals will begin to erode the racial segregation unofficialy enforced by the country's demographics.

On Monday afternoon I tutored English to a class of 11th Grade learners at Sthimbele Matiso High School in the Nyanga township. These students were staying after school of their own volition because they wanted to learn to speak, read, and write the language of the educated South Africa. But not all of them did. There are two Cape Towns in the townships as well: the Cape Town that recognizes the new opportunities available in the post-apartheid world, and the Cape Town that accepts its role in a racially and economically segregated society. This last version of Cape Town is the one that gets to me. I have met so many motivated students that realize what opportunities are there for them and grab hold, hanging onto any small piece of knowledge and skill they can find, that it is somewhat depressing to see the rest of the young learners fall into their role as the lowest societal class. Opportunity passes them by because they are content to live out their lives on the bottom rung of their community. The learners in the English class that I taught were a mix of both worlds, and it was almost enough to overwhelm me to see the two attitudes in the same classroom.

It made me think of our own school system in the States, where students only go to school because they "have to" and cheer for every day that they can steal as a holiday or vacation. But really, many of the learners here lament the days they were forced to remain at home because of a massive teacher strike. They lust after the kind of education that our students take for granted and even resent. I don't think I will ever resent my education or my teachers, who were trying so hard to help us get ahead in the world. Really, there is no benefit to them except to have benefited us.

This post has become much more glum than I had intended, and I think that there are lessons here but I am dwelling on them too much. The wonderful things that I have seen are the balance to the others--the students ready to spare nothing to learn whatever they can, the marimba players that are earning money as well as having fun in constructive ways, the introspection of the communities (despite inaction). But my final conclusion is that this world, this array of Cape Towns, is not so different from the array of lives in my hometown of Portland, and it is not so different from what I witnessed in Australia. People struggle to get by, and it is just a different part of the population that ends up on the bottom in each area. Things are so black and white here, but at the same time they are a wonderful rainbow of possibilities. Where will South Africa take itself in the next decade?