South Africa
I visited South Africa twice, and it had a profound effect on me – once in the lead up to Mandela’s release and election to the Presidency and once 15 years later. What an extraordinary difference in such a short period! After I arrived in the Capetown airport, I took a cab into town; there were posted armed guards with automatic rifles on every bridge over the freeway. I thought so this is what a police state looks like. I was meeting with AIDS activists and union leaders and academics and community members of every race; they were preparing their ideas for the expected transition from DeKlerk to Mandela which was in the very foreseeable future; I was there as an expert on health insurance reform. Towards the end of our two and a half days together, they asked me what policies in the US were comparable to South Africa’s apartheid. The best I could come up with was the undocumented workers who did so much hard physical labor in California, were paid very poorly (minimum wages and less), paid federal, state and local taxes, and got very few of the benefits available to US citizens and legal residents, had to live their lives in fear in the shadows of being asked for their papers, and had a hard time understanding both the language and the culture of those in positions of authority.
As I walked around Capetown in the morning before the meetings began, the blacks were doing all of the hardest physical labor. It was hard for me as a first time visitor to know what anyone actually thought or felt. I just observed, smiled and said hello and tried to make small talk. I wondered if everyone had to mask their true feelings and emotions except with family or close friends. I was fascinated by the ability of people to converse in so many different languages -- English, Xhosa or Afrikaans – just to daily communicate with each other.
Afterwards I had two marvelous days to travel with the sister of dear friends and see the beauties and the wildlife of the Cape Region and try to understand a bit more about the intricate relations among whites, blacks and colored required by the racial laws of South Africa. My experience in South Africa woke me up like a sharp electric shock – a cattle prod - about the need to take action in my own life and played a crucial role in transforming my next twenty-five years.
The local San people were nomads and hunter-gatherers. Over centuries, they were conquered and displaced by farmers from the northern and central parts of Africa. Beginning in the 1600’s the Dutch established a colony in Capetown, as a way post to their East Indies trading empires. They fought to settle and dominate South Africa during the 17th and 18th Centuries; they brought Malays and Indonesians to South Africa as slaves. The English fought the Dutch (now the Boers) and took over South Africa as a British colony at the start of the 19th Century; Indians arrived as traders. The British outlawed slavery in all their territories, but South Africans retained it as indentured servitude and a series of laws to disenfranchise black and then mixed race South Africans. Gold and diamonds were discovered and exploited; this led to the 2nd Boer War between the British Empire and the two independent Boer republics at the start of the 20th Century for control of the gold and diamonds. The Boers won an election in 1948 as the National Party to take back control of South Africa from the British settlers; they instituted formal apartheid laws segregating, separating and defining racial hierarchies, declared independence from England and ruled ‘til 1994. Apartheid sought to create three groups: whites who had all the political and economic power, blacks who did almost all the low paid manual labor so essential to the economy and had no political or economic rights, and colored (mixed race and Indians) who were somewhere in between. Hard to believe this was occurring in the aftermath of the Holocaust and the Second World War and harder still to fathom how the US, UK and Israel supported it for so long. In response to growing international economic isolation and diplomatic condemnation and a strong guerilla war led by the ANC (African National Congress), South Africa’s National Party negotiated with the ANC, instituted universal suffrage, and the Nelson Mandela led ANC won the election in 1994. He led a government of national conciliation, a rainbow nation of all colors.
When we came as tourists in 2009, it was the same beautiful nation, but utterly transformed by Mandela’s leadership. In the posh Sandston area of Johannesburg, there were as many affluent black business and professional people as whites. In the Apartheid Museum in Jo’burg and the District 6 and Slave Lodge museums in Capetown, we learned the history of South Africa from the black African perspective. In the local restaurants, blacks and whites danced and ate together. There were wonderful musicians from all over the continent; the one band still seared in my memory was from the Zaire/Congo. One day, our guide might be an-ex policeman from the apartheid regime; the next day a black activist; they were united in praising the peaceful transition negotiated by DeKlerk and Mandela and the incredible healing leadership that Mandela provided for the new nation. One day, we’d be in a winery near Stellenbosch; the next in a nearby township learning to play the drums. New housing and schools were being built at a fast pace in the townships around Capetown, Johannesburg or Stellenbosch; we had the impression that education of new teachers was not keeping pace with the building of new schoolrooms. On the other hand in the countryside, blacks were walking or traveling jam-packed into mini-buses while the whites were driving their air-conditioned cars. Political and economic conditions had improved a lot, but there was a very long way to go to make up for centuries of oppression. There is now a black elite and a black middle class; I’m not so sure there is a poor white working class toiling in the mines and in the other dirtiest, most dangerous and lowest paid jobs. Some people I met 15 years earlier ascended to positions or power and influence in the new governments and are making big differences in the decision-making. The new oppressed were the undocumented immigrants from failing governments like Zimbabwe living in illegal shantytowns. There is still a lot of government corruption in South Africa. So many languages and so many different tribes all jostling for their share of scarce public resources.
We crossed the Limpopo River in a cable car looking at hippos down below us and entered Botswana; it has a comparatively small population for its land mass and one dominant tribe, the Tswana. It was not conquered, colonized and subjugated, but was under a protectorate from the British to keep the expansionist South Africans at bay. It did not have to wage a battle for independence, and its mineral riches were not discovered until after its independence so control of its wealth was not in the hands of Britain or France and private corporations. The government is investing in health and education for its citizens. Each citizen is given a plot of land by the government and a timetable to build their own home. The building blocks are from the land adjacent to the village, mixed with clay and fired in a covered pit; then the home is built by the family. Cattle are kept at night in a nearby kraal of thorn trees to keep out the predators. Local teachers and nurse practitioners are paid by the government, and the government builds their homes in the village of cinderblock with metal roofs.
I invite you to think about this question; how does the triumph of the National Party in South Africa in 1948 parallel the rise of Trumpism 2016-2020?
Prepared by: Lucien Wulsin
Dated: 9/22/20