Ubuntu

i write at my auntie's house- a plush apartment in northern Jo'burg and the setting for a weekend of recuperation after the culmination of our 'delegation' around south africa and before a 20 hour bus journey to harare and all that lies in the great country of zimbabwe.

i had the first dream that i remembered about mbira last night- a very happy thing for me as proper mbira players (of which i am a generation away from being) often talk of ancestors coming into their dreams and teaching them new parts, or giving encouragement. in this dream an old man took the mbira from my hands as i was playing a tune i know and said something along the lines of 'no, you haven't got the feeling yet, play the song like this' and played the same song in a way that made all the bits of it fit together in a very beautiful way, but when he handed it back to me again i still could n't master it. i also dreamt about riding my bike over small burgeons of grass and on and on and on.

my auntie works for the UN and it was interesting to hear the inside knowledge before and after on the 'development world' before and after we met representatives from the UNDP (united nations development programme) and the british high commission in pretoria. certainly, especially in swaziland (yet another ex-colony) people look to the UK as a country that may intervene to improve governance (i.e. help install proper democracy) and provide aid and to some extent international recognition for their social stuggles. whilst one of the people we spoke to seemed to genuinely be trying to make headway on the swazi issue (detailed in the last blog post), the un seems like a badly governed country that is as slow to acknowledge the gravity of issues as it is to act on them.

welcome relief to this beaurocracy was abundant in and around cape town. on 16th june, south african youth day in rememberance of the Soweto township uprisings in which mostly 13-16 year old children marched autonomously by the thousand in protest at having to be taught in afrikaans, and were met with live ammunition from the SA police. dozens died and white vigalantes were photographed shooting indiscriminantly at blacks in the townships. at the project we found beautiful and raw performance poetry, ragingly beautiful choirs and strong old marxists who had put the project together with tiny amounts of money and had seen a sharp decline in the amount of young people entering gangs in the area. as a white tourist i like to work to gain the smiles and respect of south african activists rather than be judged on the money i have or potentially will bring in to a project, and this was an excellent case in point. we shared food and music and talked about their home made library, funeral cooperative and reading schemes.

perhaps the most powerful day though was the day we were taken by ex-ANC youth members, who escaped the country in the early 60s to be trained in Tanzania, uganda and zambia in guerilla warfare tactics (Mandela made a speech advocating violent resistance in the late 50s just before he was put in prison and a militant wing of the ANC was established), leaving their wives and lives and coming back into the country to practice what they had learned as the white government got more and more extreme in their own suppressive tactics. we were taken to a place bang in the middle of the beautiful downtown of cape town to see the shrubby hills where no less than 60,000 blacks and coloureds were forcibly removed to the townships to make way for pretty white developments, and then travelled out to three of the townships (read black and coloured ghettos) where they had been resettled.

i have seen slums in india and uganda but never anything on this scale- kilometre after kilometre of tightly packed corrogated iron homes, the ones that were shipping containers looked the most stable, with small fires, tiny shops selling pumpkins and potatos, ladies carrying children on their backs and whole lives on their heads. we stopped and smelt the air where just 20 years ago hundreds were killed, maimed and abducted in running battles with the police, where only 15 years ago the ailing white rulers sent in agent provocateurs to turn zulu against xhosa to prove that blacks were always going to be violent and would never be able to run a country, and where even today we are the only white faces that can be seen. but we were being led by a man whose history and presence commanded respect from us and potential pickpockets alike. this was a comrade whose brother and father had been killed under aparteid, who had left his family to fight for his beliefs and who still, amost 20 years later, was living in the informal housing sector waiting for the government to build him a proper house. another legend we were lucky to have access to.

South Africa in a paragraph is one of inequality with such the extremes so starkly across racial lines that at times it feels like apartheid rumbles on through the much more subtle rule of the dollar, much in the same way that imperialism rules through the dollar rather than the gun in much of the world today. however, despite a government that bleats socialism but actually is liberalising markets faster than you can say 'IMF', the people on the ground have the concept of ubuntu i.e. support and empathy for your fellow man, firmly fixed into them, and i guess this is the only way to keep smiling when the perils of post-apartheid capitalism keep life so hard

and in my travels there always seems room for the absurd (indeed, it is essential). here it involved a 7am trip to an evangelical church in the heart of johannesburg- at least 700 people in a huge room focussing on a slick-haired, greasy brazilian 'pastor' who praised god and money in equal measure. he and many others wore tshirts saying in huge letters 'SACRIFICE IS A MUST'... which ofcourse meant giving shitloads of your money to the church (him). we were subjected to a 10 minute long film, the first 3 minutes of which detailed 'mr chippy' and how shit his life was before he ignored the protests of his wife and gave 2 months entire salary to the church. the second 7 minutes surveyed in details all the material possessions he now had as one of the most successful businessmen in south africa. we were then all encouraged to pick up an envelope from the front, stuff it with as much money as we had (if we didn't have enough we were, happily, allowed to bring it back the next week)... if we didn't do this, it was implied, there was little welcome to be had here. everyone loved the hope this man offered and it was painful at times, however the music they played and we sang to- the reason i was there- was somethign between hard drum and bass and 'feeling hot hot hot' style pop and i danced my tits off.