race relations in South Africa

One thing we did NOT particularly like about Cape Town was the still very pronounced impact of generations of institutional segregation and Apartheid. It is most prominently expressed in terms of economics: the only black families one finds in “fee areas” like Boulder Beach or Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens are those working there, cleaning the grounds; the only blacks one finds in downtown restaurants are the waiters. The socio-economic divide mirrors the racial divide with frightening precision; there is virtually no deviation between the two.

And the most common public interaction between whites and blacks is framed in inherently unequal economic relationships as well: boss interacts with employee, customer interacts with worker, passerby interacts with beggar. It’s hard to imagine growing up your whole life having only related to blacks in terms of unequal economic transactions: as employees, as workers/servers in stores and shops and even homes, or as pesky beggars on the street. Never as neighbor, never as fellow church members or teammates or co-worker… never as anything meriting equal deference. Quite a skewed reality. Yet it’s a common one for white South Africans. And that knife cuts both ways, as blacks grow up with an equally skewed reality (I’m called “boss” all the time by Swazis and black South Africans, simply because I’m white. Drives me nuts-- this casual bit of slang is no accident of language, it’s descendant of a warped racial reality). So it’s no wonder that most aspects of SA culture are still quite segregated, from swimming beaches to public transportation, regardless of government policy. The Southern US cities have nothing on the South African cities in this regard. And it’s going to take a long time—at least two generations of equal employment opportunity, I’d think—before Cape Town’s social and racial diversity becomes the valued asset it should rightly be.

I’m not an expert in race relations or the impact of institutionalized racism on social/cultural development, but it’s pretty easy to see the post-Apartheid struggles and how they’re reshaping both the big cities and small towns of South Africa. These struggles reveal a deeply wounded, culturally fractured country. We Americans tend to think of post-Apartheid SA as being “on the mend” or “over the hump,” but in my observation it is still very much threatened by them; by no means are the past and present inequities meaningfully reconciled. I saw this in Cape Town, in Durban and all the other areas of SA I’ve been. But I must say, Cape Town seemed to me the most progressive—certainly more than Durban—perhaps due to a higher raw number of service-sector economic opportunities there, and perhaps also due to the central role that Nelson Mandela has played in shaping that city’s recent identity (the prison that held him for 26 years sits just offshore on Robben Island, a tourist ferry ride from the Cape Town waterfront).

One last thought on this topic. As difficult as the US’s process of desegregation and racial reconciliation has been, I think South Africa’s society actually has it much, much harder. Too many reasons to get into here, but there are totally different dynamics going on, from language barriers to overlapping colonial footprints to oppressed majorities (not minorities)—so it’s not exactly comparable to the US’s struggles with race relations. They aren’t simply “40 years behind” in their Civil Rights struggle or something… theirs is a different kind of struggle.