South Africa

This weekend’s New York Times travel section featured Cape Town in it’s “36 Hours In . . .” feature. I’ve no idea why anyone traveling to Cape Town would spend so little time there.

One can quibble with some of writer Michael Wines’ choices. And his perplexing analogy at the beginning of the piece. (”Cape Town is South Africa’s Los Angeles to Johannesburg’s New York) is crazy on so many levels it boggles the imagination. (Joburg as New York? Cape Town as the vapid, self-indulgent landscape of LA? It makes me wonder which Wines understands less, the US or South Africa.)  Still, it is nice to see the United States’ “paper of record” feature Cape Town in this way and to be reminded of some of my own past trips to one of my favorite cities on earth. 

More Zimbabwe correspondence from my friend.

The following are some more of the observations I made
during my short holiday in Zimbabwe:-

The country still does not have a formal currency. It
is still printing and using bearer cheques as legal
tender. Besides, the bearer cheques were and continue
to be in short supply resulting in long and winding
queues at banks. People spend hours on end in order to
withdraw money. After standing in the queue for so
long sometimes they are told that you can withdraw a
maximum of Z$5million or are advised that ‘cash is
finished try another branch or else come back
tomorrow.” Like I said in my earlier mail $5million is
nothing especially when people would have wanted to
withdraw larger (for those who have some money in the
bank)sums to buy food, pay rent, school fees etc.

The consequence of this scenario is continued queues at
banks everyday (i.e. areas around banks now resemble
huge or mini-political rallies) and people who have
other means of earning money are not motivated by this
situation to deposit their money with any bank
especially if you no longer have any say over when and
how much you want to withdraw. So instead of money
circulating in the formal market large sums of money
are circulating in the informal (black) market.

The agrarian reform programme is also being seriously
hampered by shortages of essential inputs such as seed,
fertiliser and other chemicals. In a season where
above rainfall figures have been recorded its
virtually impossible to do successful farming without
essential inputs. The effect of this is that many
resource-poor small-scale as well as some large-scale
farmers’ pieces of land are lying idle. This renders
agrarian reform almost meaningless.

In the first place, land should have been allocated on
the basis of capacity to do farming not as a campaign
or political tool.

More of the often tragic news from Zim as it comes in.

A friend who works in South Africa but who is a Zimbabwe native visited his family over the Christmas holidays. Before he left I asked if he would send me a report upon his return so readers here can get a sense of things from the perspective of someone who loves his country but laments what has happened to it. For reasons that I hope are obvious, I am granting him anonymity.

Zimbabwe has become hell I tell you.

Nothing positive is coming out of that country. Its a
country riddled with serious food shortages. Its hard
to believe that life in this country is now
characterised by empty supermarket shelves, salaries
that are far far below the poverty line and ever
rising inflation which is making food, transport,
school fees, uniforms, rent etc unaffordable.
Inflationary trends are also fuelling serious
speculative tendencies in the market. In the capital
the situation is extremely untenable. It does look
like a capital anymore. One of my friends who lives in
Harare calls it a ghost city.

To quote some figures for you: When I arrived in
Harare for the festive period on 22 December a crate
of eggs cost Z$5million, bread $1,5million, beef
$9million per kg and chicken was $20million, but when
I left on 6 January a crate of eggs sold for
$12,5million, bread $2million, beef $18 per kg and
chicken was selling for almost $40million. I have a
friend who is a senior officer with the Parliament of
Zimbabwe. He is earning $27 million a month. These
rough statistics should give you a picture of how bad
things are. What it means for example is that a person
who earns $27million is earning one or no chicken per
month - what of other needs. I tell its tough.

Some people have simply decided to quit their jobs
because they cant afford transport to and from work.

My son’s fees were $12million per term up to December
2007. For the first term this year I will need to fork
out $400million - Can you imagine this. By the way
these a very huge figures considering people’s net
salaries. School facilities have deteriorated to
astounding levels. Below is an article from the
Standard Newspaper to give you evidence of how things
have degenerated.

“Zimbabwe: Schools Fall Apart As Education System
Crumbles”

A visitor might think it’s a farm garage. There is a
broken down tractor, old, rusty stoves. An ancient
deep freezer lies nearby. A closer look would compel
the visitor to think twice. There are piles and piles
of decrepit school furniture — chairs, desks and
drawers.

You don’t expect to find broken-down chairs at a farm
where productivity is in full swing. Forget the
guesswork. Welcome to Cranborne Boys High in Harare.
Years ago, the school was the pride of both
administrators and students.Now it’s a microcosm of
the decay and disaster that has befallen our
education.

One teacher said: “Cranborne is in an advanced state
of decay.” The classroom walls are dirty, the desks
and chairs broken, the floor tiles have peeled off.
Most worrying, all locks, bulbs and sockets in the
classrooms in the secondary block are missing –
stolen?

There was once a giant swimming pool, full of clean,
sparkling water. Now, it’s half-filled with dirty
water. Only frogs and mosquitoes find pleasure here.

The Standard has established it’s not just this former
group A school that is collapsing.

From classrooms, sporting facilities and grounds,
there is evidence most public schools in Harare are at
various stages of decay as the economy continues its
free fall. It’s the fate of most government
institutions today.

Raymond Majongwe, secretary general of the Progressive
Teachers’ Union of Zimbabwe (PTUZ), taught History and
Commerce at Cranborne High in 1997-98.

Last week, he said “It was a wonderful school, with
top-of-the-range facilities. Now the infrastructure is
run down.”

Majongwe said the problem was not confined to his
former school, but to public schools all over the
country.

“Our members all over the country tell us how schools
are collapsing. The level of vandalism is shocking.
It’s happening and nobody seems to care,” said
Majongwe.

“When the ministry was functioning properly you never
expected people who vandalised school property to get
away with it. Now, it’s different.”

Most headmasters said their “hearts bleed” as they
continue to preside over collapsing schools, once the
envy of the region.

They said the rot started around 2001 when President
Robert Mugabe’s government cut back the schools’
budgets after the farm invasions and a crisis spawned
by the violent 2000 elections.

In a populist move, the Minister of Education, Sports
and Culture, Aeneas Chigwedere, imposed such low fees
most schools could not raise enough money to operate
as in the past.

Primary schools still charge $1 500 a term for a
child, not enough to buy a marker. Schools are forced
to rely on levies.

Headmasters say the levies have been politicised by a
government determined to make education affordable to
people suffering under the worst economic crisis since
independence.

Parents now decide the fees they can afford. Their
proposals are forwarded to the ministry for approval.

“This is not different from a customer deciding the
price of something they want to buy,” said a member of
the Queensdale, Harare, SDA. “A few vociferous parents
with limited incomes can push for a $20 000 levy for a
term. Parents know it cannot buy anything, but might
be forced to approve it. That money is enough to buy
one exercise book.”

Until last week, Cranborne charged $30 000 — enough
to buy two loaves of bread. After a recent parents’
meeting, the ministry set the levy at $200 000, still
far short of what is needed.

A Harare headmaster said approving these unrealistic
levies was not easy. “It can be termed a Chigwedere
circus,” he said. “The ministry needs to know the
parents at the meetings, the minutes, their signatures
and how many voted for and against. Then he would
determine whether or not to approve it. The process
can even take over a month.”

The Standard was told ministerial approval could be
secured when the cost of whatever was needed had
quadrupled or when the commodities were no longer
available.

“In that case, how are you expected to run a school?”
asked a headmaster. “Our hands are tied. We are
bystanders as schools collapse.”

Rural schools are the worst affected, as most parents
have no incomes to fund the day-to-day expenses of
their schools.

“At our school, chalk is now rationed,” said a Gutu
teacher. “One teacher, one chalk, for days. When
supplies run out, we teachers have to improvise: write
with our fingers in the ground, the sad reality these
days.”

N.B. Over and above these problems are the perennial
electricity cuts/shortages and lack of constant supply
of water.

This could suffice for now. I write on other issues in
my next email.

Its a pity that financially I am not yet in a position
to take my family out of that country. I also fear for
them if we have deadly riots similar to the ones in
Kenya in the post-March elections period.

Just an FYI: An Economist correspondent from New Zealand has been posting a daily diary from South Africa this week. He introduces himself:

JUST to clear up any misconceptions: I am not, and have never been, The Economist’s South Africa correspondent. The extent to which I am not may soon become obvious: still, this point is best made at the outset, as someone else’s reputation is at stake here.

Neither am I just a tourist, though: I’m here to carry out research on behalf of The Economist’s guide to Johannesburg, which I have edited, from London, for a couple of years now. Past users may be relieved to know that I don’t actually write the guide—the aforementioned correspondent takes that role. But that with which you work, it is perhaps wise to know, and if nothing else, my employer’s august name tends to open doors that might otherwise stay shut.

There are a few useful insights, some views that an outsider probably finds insightful but are fairly banal, and some fairly jejune commentary, but the whole thing is worth a quick read as travelogue.

I have previously discussed the controversy over changing names of municipalities, streets, and the like in South Africa. These debates tend to be so contentious because they operate at the nexus of history, identity, ethnicity, and mythology, a potent brew anywhere, but particularly pungent in post-Apartheid South Africa. 

About a year-and-a-half ago I tried to wrestle with some of these issues with regard to both naming but also urban identity in South Africa. Given that there is once again momentum to officially change Pretoria’s name to Tshwane, I’d like to revisit some of those thoughts:

One time when I was staying at a hostel in Cape Town in 1999 I overheard a young woman . . . dismissing South African cities as not being African at all, but rather too European. It was a pretentious thing to say from someone who, come to find out, had spent all of three total weeks in Africa, but felt fully comfortable pontificating at length about the fundamental nature of Africanness, urbanness, and African urbanness.

That said, I guess I get a sense of what she was saying without saying it — she had some sense of what is and is not African, and Cape Town did not seem to be it — too white, too cosmopolitan, not tribal enough. In sum, she revealed her own stereotypes about Africa, but couched them in dismissive platitudes. She had her images of what African cities should be, some exotic idea fixe, and when Cape Town fell short of her Heart of Darkness view of Africa, it was Cape Town’s failure, not hers. And of course what better way to solidify one’s credentials as a fan of all things Africa than to blithely dismiss one of the world’s truly great cities by referring to it as “too European”? Then again, I’m the sort of retrograde anachronist who LIKES London, so I am contemptible to begin with.

I could not help but think of that vexing conversation when I spent all day wandering Pretoria, or Tshwane (”We are all one”), as it is also known now. Pretoria was the bastion of Afrikanerdom. It was the heart of Paul Kruger’s Zuid Afrikansche Republiek, later the Transvaal, and Pretoria was the administrative capital of the country, and still is. So it is shocking to wander Pretoria’s streets and look around and think, much like that young woman who so fetishized Africanness, “this is an African city.” I don’t think I meant it in the same way that she did, and a little part of me lamented that white South Africans seem to have forsaken the city that still is in many ways the emotional heart of Afrikanerdom. It is here in Pretoria that the Vortrekker monument Still draws crowds and evokes tears, as it did on Friday when, sadly, too many white South Africans chose to honor the covenant of the past rather than reconciliation with it. Maybe Pretoria is now a “more African” city than it must have been in 1965 if one adheres to a color by numbers view of African cities. And if this transformation is so, it is, on balance, a good thing. But it says a good deal about too many South African whites that it has become this sort of city not because of the demographics, but rather because of white abandonment. To be sure, whites still work in the city, but they come in during the day, park in protected environments, work during the day, and drive to their posh homes in the suburbs at night.

That said, it is nice to see the bombastic statue of Paul Kruger serving largely as a place on which pigeons shit and African children play, blithely unaware of its symbolic past, save perhaps when bothered, verkrampte Afrikaners wait for these cildren to move when they make the pilgrimage into the city to get their photo of their great founder of the Boer republic. I took a picture today of two young black children playing on one of the four Boers that serve as part of the foundation for the sturdy base. I hope it comes out. The picture, that is, not the pigeon shit.

The controversy over what Pretoria or Tshwane will officially be called hits the heart of what it means to be a South African in the new century. The past is past, to be sure, but it is not merely history. And fundamentally, these questions are as much about the past as they are about the present. The past seems capturable, containable, controllable in ways that the present, with its messiness and contingency and infinite possibility (which is itself both exciting and scary), does not.  For those South Africans reluctant to embrace change, whether Pretoria is Tshwane is less about what the city means now than what it once meant, and if what it once meant is so easy to eradicate, that has profound implications for a small slice of white South Africans and their identity in what is at times a frightening new nation.

The ANC Policy Conference in Midrand wraps up today after three days of political dialogue that the Mail & Guardian has described as “robust.” Despite Thabo Mbeki’s protests that things have not been too robust, certain issues that we have discussed here before — succession, the linkage between the party leadership and the national presidency — demand serious, and thus sometimes intense discussion. Mbeki’s desire to downplay internal division makes sense from the vantage point of the party. That same division, however, is healthy for the country. When that debate falls silence is truly when the time to worry will have arrived. Viva contentiousness.

Incidentally, Mbeki has been busy these days. In addition to dealing with feisty ANC politicians he also is the head of the South African delegation to the African Union summit in Accra that, as I reported yesterday, might be pushing toward the establishment of a United States of Africa.

 Meanwhile officials have announced that the main South Africa-Mozambique border crossing at Ressano Garcia is extending its hours from 10 pm until midnight. Anyone who has crossed that border knows that anything that might alleviate congestion represents a welcome change.

Here is a quick roundup of news stories this morning:

For three different perspectives on the general strike in South Africa see this story in the Mail & Guardian,  this from Green Left, and this from The Sowetan. (Hat tip to Peter Limb at H-SAfrica.)  See also this story from All Africa. And for concerns about the effect the strike will have on tourism, see here.

On the latest from Zimbabwe see this account of the ruling party’s meeting with the Movement for Democratic Change. Color me skeptical. This Michael Gerson piece in The Washington Post helps explain why. As does this.

The ANC leadership succession race is heating up. For some analysis see here.

Foreign Policy has released its annual Failed State Index, and sadly, though not unexpectedly, it is pregnant with African countries. The Mail & Guardian has more here. Not surprisingly, Sudan tops the list. And plucky little Guinea-Bissau is making its own mark by staking its claim as Africa’s cocaine capital.

In recent weeks there have been several travel articles on South Africa. Cape Town and its environs , of course, are always popular, as recent articles in The New York Times and Washington Post reveal. 

But the country’s hinterlands are also popular. The Eastern cape, one of my regular stomping grounds, is a wonderful and often-overlooked part of the country and it is viable for budget travel.

Indeed, the entire country can be very accessible for those for whom every rand will count. South Africa can be expensive to reach, but once there it literally offers opportunities for those with more cash than they know what to do with or for those on a student’s income. 

There was a long span of time when the issue of the South African role in sport was arguably the single most contentious debate in the global sporting community and it was a discussion that came to transcend the voundaries of athletic competition to become a global concern. Sport reflected politics, sports intensified politics, sport revealed politics. From the Sharpeville Massacre in March 1960 South Africa fast became anathema, a skunk among nations, and within just a few years, South Africa was virtually isolated with the exception of a few rogue rugby tours that themselves provided tableaux for theaters of conflict.

 Suddenly Zimbabwe finds itself fighting off threats of a boycott. Zimbabwe-based Roman Catholic Archbishop and leading critic of Robert Mugabe Pius Ncube has spoken in support of Australia’s national cricket team’s proposed boycott of its scheduled tour in Zimbabwe.  Indeed, he hopes that the Aussies will boycott and that England, New Zealand and other prominent cricket-playing nations will follow suit. A number of Australian political officials have spoken up in recent weeks, calling for the Australian cricketers, once again crowned world champions in the latest World Cup, to cancel the scheduled September trip and instead to pay the $2 million (US) fine that would come from the International Cricket Council (ICC) rather than provide the propaganda boost that the tour would provide for Mugabe. Other Australian officials (and most in the Zim government, we can assume) argue that Australia has a responsibility to fulfill its tour obligations. Naturally the ICC responds with boilerplate cant. 

During the years of South Africa’s exile there were those who argued that sport must be kept free of politics. those arguments almost always came from South Africa and its supporters, or from those nations whose national teams (New Zealand rugby, for example) stood to benefit from playing South African teams, or from conservatives who were unwilling to distance themselves from South Africa’s apartheid politics. But the reality is that sport does not stand independent of politics, and like it or not, politics exist. Pretending that they do not is in and of itself a political statement, all the more feckless for being coached in apolitical terms.  Asserting that playing in Zimbabwe (or not so long ago in South Africa) is to take the apolitical role is to be both naive and self-serving. Australia should boycott the September test series. Isolate Zimbabwean sport.

I’m back from a week in England and am still absolutely buried with email and work and deadlines. But here are a lot of links on some of the crucial issues facing Africa and Africans:

The online news editor of The Economist is in Zimbabwe trying to get a feel for things there, to stay out of jail, and to report what he sees from a “Correspondent’s Diary”-cum-Blog called “Robert Mugabe, Man Or Monster?” Meanwhile, it probably should come as no surprise that Mugabe is “not losing sleep” over the prospect of western universities stripping him of honorary degrees they thrust upon him in a bygone era. I should think not.

Nigeria’s presidential election was a nightmare just as were the local and state elections that preceded it. As expected, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has declared Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, Governor of Katsina State, the winner of last Saturday’s presidential election. Equally predictably, international observers scoff at the credibility of the polls, the opposition parties continue to press for protests and resistance, and The New York Times similarly laments the recent farce, though it is tough to discern what real “democratic legacy” they find in Nigeria’s history. J. Peter Pham had an astute pre-election assessment in the World Defense Review (courtesy of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, for which I have been a fellow).

World Politics Watch shows how the April 11 terrorist bombings in Algiers fit into al Qaeda’s larger global plan. Of course the implication of the article is that the real concern is the potential for future attacks in Europe, which reveals a remarkable willingness to pass off African suffering as of secondary significance. Maybe someone should , say, the Somalians that their suffering only serves as a prelude to something more important. 

Closer to the putative focus of this blog (I’ve said all along that while my focus would be South Africa, I would try to place the country within its larger continental context) the Proteas advanced to the semi-final round of the cricket World Cup, but unfortunately barring some sort of miracle, the South Africans, who put up a pathetic 149 all out , their worst total ever in a World Cup and every bit as embarrassing as what they did to England last week, the Aussies are likely to reach the necessary 150 by somewhere around the 25th over. We should know soon enough. As I type this the Aussie juggernaut is at 27-1. South Africans should probably start to turn their attentions toward Amabokkobokko.

It doesn’t all have to be grim, though. Just imagine yourself isolated from it all, travelling along the Skeleton Coast, free of the cares of the world. There the bad news fades amidst the splendour of Africa.