During this past week we have explored Cape Town. We went to the top of Table Mountain and to the very tip of South Africa. We went on a safari and we did a bus tour of the city. We saw penguins and went to class at the University of Cape Town. We also read the book Dinosaurs, Diamonds, and Democracy as a contexts for everything we’ve experienced so far, and so far I’ve learned a lot.
I talked about this a lot yesterday, but when we had class with Alan I learned a lot more about South African history that had a larger impact on me then anything else we have done so far. We spoke about the apartheid, which means separateness. I learned a lot about the laws that were put in place during this time. From our reading of Country of my Skull I learned a lot about what happened after with the truth commission, and a lot of the unfair laws that were put in place. What surprised me the most was just how similar they were to our own laws that were implemented before the civil rights movement. They had segregated buildings, bathrooms, benches, and much more. The most shocking to me though was how they decided if someone was white or black. The pencil test, where they stick a pencil in your hair to see if it falls out, thus determining your race just came across to me as nonsense. After the safari ride I’m sure a pencil would have stuck in my hair and not fallen out.
Since our own civil rights movement was a while ago we don’t have many visible remnants left from that time. I was reminded that South Africa’s apartheid ended only 16 years ago. Because of this we can still see many remnants from that time today. All of the homes everywhere have fences of some sort around them, most of the buildings do, and to get into the shops near my lodge you have to be buzzed in. You also can still see it when you look at the communities we’ve been visiting so far. The million Rand houses on the beach have a predominantly white residence and this is because other races during the apartheid had been forced to move farther away to poorer land.
Another law that I felt I could tie to personally was the Natives Land Act. This is extremely similar to how they forced the Native American’s off of their land and then compensated them later with land. Alan told us how today he had relatives from places like District 6 who are trying to prove they once resided there. If they can they then will be compensated with either land or money. This is almost exactly what they did to the Native Americans. Being one myself, and a frequent visitor of the Ojibwa tribe in northern MN, I know how they feel about the way they were treated long ago. A lot of tribes are not friendly with the “light skinned” and I worry that similar feelings of anger will continue to brew and possibly intensify as they have with some tribes. The only difference between the Native Americans and the Africans here is that the Africans are much greater in number then the Native Americans that still live today. I can see the possibility of things getting worse because they have the numbers to be efficiently heard.
This leads me to the fact that tomorrow we are going to Gugulethu. On our way to the safari today we drove by a quite a few makeshift homes and it raised a little anxiety as I pictured myself living there for a week. At the same time I’m really excited because I have a lot of questions I want to ask where I believe there answers will give me a better perspective then if I were to ask those who live in million Rand homes on the beach. I’m excited for a new perspective on things, although I realize it will be an emotional time getting to it.
