South Africa

In an exciting change, the Foreign Policy Association is combining this South Africa Blog with the Africa Blog, which will be the new permanent site of FPA Africa commentary. I will continue to post heavily on South African issues, but this transition will be better for me, as keeping both blogs has not always been easy,  it will be more convenient for readers, and will serve the FPA best. Basically everybody wins. Shortly those who attempt to access this blog will be redirected to the Africa Blog. Thanks for your continued support.

Exiled from her native South Africa for her political stances for more than three decades, the African singing voice of a generation, the embodiment of the Pan-African ideal, Miriam Makeba was many things in her rich, at times tragic life. Her passing, which came right after a performance in Italy on Sunday, has inspired memories of this great woman and her myriad gifts not only to music, but also to humanity.

Here she is performing arguably her greatest song, “Pata, Pata”:

40+ hours, one lost piece of luggage, three movies, several television shows, two read books, several newspapers, and virtually no sleep later, I arrived back home last night. I am catching up on life and will resume posting soon.

[Crossposted at the FPA Africa Blog and at dcat.]

After three weeks here in South Africa, this evening I will board a South African Airways plane bound for Washington, DC’s Dulles International Airport via Dakar, Senegal. If all goes well I will land at 6:00 am eastern time tomorrow, Tuesday, at which point I’ll hope that I can get to BWI in time to catch my onward flight that will eventually take me back to Texas.

Leaving South Africa is always bittersweet for me. I love this country, its people, its culture and politics and sport and even, in odd ways, its history. And every time I leave I have no real idea when I will next be back. Next year? 2010? As of right now, I am simply not sure. South Africa is a part of my life, a vital part, and when I leave I will miss it even as I am excited to be home again, to see my wife and friends, to sleep in my own bed, and not to live out of a bag.

Over the course of the next few days I will continue my assessments about what i have seen and done in the hopes that it will continue to shed light on how I see South Africa right now, in the middle of 2008. Between now and then I have much traveling to do with a very cranky back. in the airport I am set to see a Zimbabwean friend who has fallen on difficult times here in South Africa. And then I’ll leave South Africa again, knowing full well that I will return, soon if not soon enough, to this place I have so come to love over the last decade-plus.

[Crossposted at the FPA Africa Blog and at dcat.] 

My apologies for the silence here for the last week or so. Traveling in South Africa sometimes means not having the sort of internet access or opportunity to write as I might like. The last few days have taken me from Cape Town to Grahamstown and Rhodes University, one of my old homes. From there I came up to Johanneburg where my South African adventure will end without the hoped-for Zimbabwe trip for reasons simultaneously byzantine and prosaic.

In the next 48 hours before I leave for my return flight to the US I shall make some observations about a number of facets of South African life as it is in 2008.

[Crossposted at the FPA Africa Blog and dcat.] 

At the end of the day, travel is, for me, about people. Whether I am returning to Africa or to the UK, places I visit regularly, where I have lived and worked, or whether visiting someplace for the first time, such as when I went to China a couple of years back, the most important component to me is always the people I meet, and friends new and old. This is not to say that there are not other factors — work, for example, certainly requires me to travel quite regularly, and provides the justification for these trips. And like anyone who leaves home a lot, I like experiences as well, whether cultural, aesthetic, adventure, or what have you.

But the most important element of travel is people. I am staying in Sea Point, in Cape Town, with my good friend Doug, a black Zimbabwean who has lived in South Africa for more than a decade. We met in 1997 when we were at Rhodes University, in Grahamstown, and he is one of the people I always try to meet up with when I return. The time here will be too brief, but it is important, indeed crucial, that i spend it here. The conference in Stellenbosch provides another example. I walked into the conference venue knowing of a handful of the people there but actually knowing only one, a grad student at The University of Texas who I nonetheless always seem to see in South Africa. By the time I left Stellenbosch yesterday I has made a handful of new friends, some of whom I’ll maintain contact with professionally, a few of whom I will likely remain friends with over the years.

In some ways I think I’be grown almost sanguine about the opportunities travel affords me. I brought my camera on this trip, have been able to see some new places and revisit old ones, and have yet to snap a single shot, which probably seems like a waste, but in my eyes just remonds me of all of the time I have spent here and the ways in which I try to immerse myself.

In any case, Cape Town is raw this morning — rainy and damp, cold — and I have decided to devote a day to trying to catch up on work. I apologize for the fundamentally personal nature of this entry, which lacks much insight into South African politics or history or culture. But South Africa is, for me, more than simply a tableau for politics and work. It is a real flesh and blood place where I’ve spent a large proportion of my life and energies for nearly a dozen years. So today I’ll just work for a few more hours until Doug, my friend, gets home from work, and we’ll go out to eat and for a few drinks before tomorrow, when all too quickly, I’ll be leaving again.

[Crossposted at the FPA Africa Blog and dcat.]

Sawubona!

I’m writing from the 7th Street Guesthouse in Joberg’s Melville. The trip here was quite the trek, involving many layovers (Houston, Jackson, BWI, Dulles, Dakar) and more than one trip in an automobile, but I finally got into my B&B at about 8:30 South Africa time last night.

Not wanting to go to sleep and end up wide awake at about 4 in the morning, I went out and visited some old haunts. One of the striking aspects of Melville, and I think it tells us something about South Africa, for good and ill, is the subtle but definite ways in which it has changed since I first started coming to this little Joberg semi-suburb a decade or so ago. It is still fundamentally the same — a little oasis of affluence and upscale dining, drinking, and shopping options in a village that feels far from the Central Business District that is actually not far away at all. Many of the restaurants and other businesses that were here in the late 1990s are still thriving, though there has also been turnover and there are new places competing with the old.

But what is remarkable, and I think telling, is how much more, well, African, Melville has become. Not so long ago Melville was affluent and white. It was rare to see a black person not involved in labor or else on the streets. But today Melville represents a ployglot mixture of the New South Africa. There is no ideal racial climate anywhere in South Africa yet, but Melville just about qualifies inasmuch as the South Africa tourism board could present a pretty good face with videos and pictures from just about any restaurant in these few blocks.

And yet black, white, Indian, or coloured, the crowds that descend upon Melville do share one thing that separates them from the masses across the country: overwhelmingly they are wealthy. I do not want to quibble about what I mean by wealth. I am not saying that everyone I saw last night is rolling in money, driving BMW’s (though many do), and could retire today. But I am saying that they are distinct from the vast majority in this country in that they could afford the R250 dinner, followed by round after round of R25 drinks and R15 beers.

And in a sense this is good inasmuch as the increased black presence in Melville shows that there is a growing black middle (and upper) class making their way in the country. At the same time what it tells me is that South African divisions, which have always been both class and racial, with the latter more powerful than the former, have turned 180 degrees so that while race will continue to be a dividing line in the country, class draws even more permanent lines.

And I have no idea what the solution to this is. I am no class warrior, I believe in at least the fundemental tenets of a capitalist market economy, and I do not resent success. I was, after all, one of them last night, and one of the changes in my own life since 1997, when I first came, and lived, in South Africa is that my own travels have become decidedly more upscale, though I’m still not far from rich. At the same time, believing in the fundamental tenets of market capitalism is far from saying that ours is a system that is unreformable. And in South Africa there is still need for massive reform. The gross disparities of wealth that any society has are acute here and without alleviating poverty the country will continue to see not only the violent crime that South Africa is so well known for, but also the paroxysms of mass violence such as the xenophobic backlash against immigrants that have convulsed the country in recent weeks.

It is good to be back. I’ve missed South Africa in the time that I’ve been away. I’ll post more reflections here — I’ll probably be light on the usual links-and-analysis approach in favor of these more discursive reflections in the weeks to come.  

[Crossposted at the FPA Africa Blog.]  

At 4:00 am tomorrow (or five hours from now) I’ll get up and begin a winding journey that will land me in South Africa Thursday afternoon. I’ll be there for three weeks, will be traveling extensively for two conferences, some research, travel and holiday, and reportage. I may be out of touch for a bit, but will be updating the blog all along the way as internet access allows.

[Crossposted at the FPA Africa Blog.]

Current crime and fears of crime, coupled with the contentiousness of the apartheid past (and the opposition to it) seem to be encouraging a debate over the role of guns in South African society. Fikile-Ntsikelelo Moya explores the questions involved in this column at the Mail & Guardian.

I want to wish each of you peace, prosperity, and joy during this holiday season. Geseende Kersfees! Sinifisela Ukhisimusi Omuhle! Ikresimesi emnandi!