Since I’ve been gone less than 2 years, it feels oddly strange to be back in South Africa. Probably because my memories are still so fresh, but the faces that once populated my days here are now scattered all over the globe. This is the peculiar right of the aid worker I suppose. The friends you make are also travelers, and no one stays put for long.
But its also strange in the way that South Africa is strange. Wonderful and dynamic, but also strange. Sandton, where I am now, is perhaps the strangest – a piece of Los Angelos in Africa, inhabited by the blondest, fittest women and a grossly disproportionate number of $60,000 sports cars. For those who have never been to Africa, or never been to South Africa, this is probably a difficult image to conjure. But it you figure that white South Africans had, until something like 5 years ago, the highest standard of living anywhere in the world you can more easily imagine it. Put it this way – for most of the last 50 years, every white South African essentially had 7 black South Africans working, in one way or another, to make them wealthier – or at least not impeding that progression with competition.
My verdict, much as I love all of Africa, is still out on South Africa. I’m a pessimist by nature, and though South Africa has been heralded by the world as a glowing success story for escaping post-Apartheid bloodbaths during its transition. The future seems less likely to be so glowingly positive. Small changes are afoot that hint at a darker future. Blackouts, brownouts, paperwork that was never there before. Corruption is creeping in quickly – get pulled over by a policeman in South Africa and judge or yourself. All of these are small but pernicious – haunting ghosts of Christmas future for Africa’s golden child. Let’s hope I’m wrong – I often am. But the next generation of South Africans – white and black – may well be researching present day Zimbabwe for insight into problems no one today seems able, or willing, to admit as possibilities.
August 11th, 2007 | by David in Uncategorized
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All Material © 2008 David Snyder
