Five African nations can look forward to faster, more reliable internet service as the result of the work of a private consortium, Seacom, which installed the first undersea fiberoptic cable. The switch went on yesterday in Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, Uganda and South Africa. Rwanda should join that group in the next couple of weeks.

Amazingly enough, my hotel in Cape Town has had virtually no internet connectivity for three days. It is both liberating and frightening to feel this out of touch for so long.

Observations from Cape Town:

Amidst all of the generally pessimistic commentary one reads about South Africa, I suppose it is not surprising that we do not hear more about the housing boom that has hit this country in the generation since 1994. And I do not mean housing boom in the way that many of us have experienced it — as a pejorative reflective of a tanking economy — but rather what I mean is that one of the priorities of Nelson Mandela’s ANC was to build a million new houses. And while he did not quite manage to reach that admittedly optimistic number in his five years in office, it is almost impossible not to notice the effects of that program now.

When I first arrived in South Africa in 1997, the corrugated tin shacks of the townships were ubiquitous. On the outskirts of every city, town, dorpie, or village there sat an even larger township, thouands upon thousands of makeshift homes embodying the resilience, yes, but also the poverty of South Africa’s masses. That poverty (and that resilience) are still a factor in daily life here. But so too is the reality that in huge swaths of South Africa those listing tin shacks, with tires on the roof as a sort of ballast, have given way to solid little homes, modest but very real and indicative of a transformation in this country that too many want to ignore.

Now, admittedly the government seems to have been PR-conscious about the process by which these homes have been built. Travel nearly any road between an airport and the citry it serves and the shacks have given way to these housing developments for the township dwellers. But take a back road and the realities of the housing market still dominate — take the road from the airport to Cape Town and Langa and Khayelitsha seem to have benefitted from the housing exploson — and by and large they have. Take the somewhat less travelled road between Muizenberg and Stellenbosch  and suddenly Khayelitsha still teems with those familiar corrugated tin, cardboard, and driftwood domiciles.

Things are not perfect, therefore. But to recognize the change in housing (and in access to potable water; and in access to electricity) is to recognize concrete change for the good in South Africa.

********

It’s peculiar to see this country through the eyes of a tourist. I have one of my best friends in town making his maiden trip to South Africa. As a consequence, we have done Cape Town the way most visitors do it. Yesterday we did a tour of the Cape Peninsula, something I had not done for a decade or so in that fashion. In the late afternoon we squeezed in some wine tasting in Stellenbosch. The day before that was Robben Island. On Monday, Table Mountain. In the evenings we have had dinner in Counts Bay or at Mama Africa (more on this in a moment).

It’s peculiar to see South Africa in this way because I am almost aggressively opposed to feeling like a tourist in this country I know so well. I have lived here. I have worked here. And just about every year for a decade I have traveled here for weeks at a time. As a result I am not inclined to be treated like a naif or a fool. Or worst of all, like an American tourist, that most loathed and pitied of all creatures.

Yet at the same time, seeing the country again in this way has almost been revivifying. As much as I hate feeling like a tourist in places I have lived or traveled in extensively — southern Africa, to be sure, but also the UK or Ireland as other examples — it also is nice to recognize why tourists flock here. And also to acknowledge that for all of the bad connotations sometimes attached to tourists, especially those who give the whole idea its bad name of cliche and legend, most of us are tourists most places we visit.

It’s ok to take a camera, even to wear it around your neck (why is it that the practicality of keeping one’s hands free while still being able to snap a photo has gotten such a bad name?) if you are going to a new place where you might want to take pictures. I went to Beijing for two weeks for a work project a couple of years back, and while I tried hard not to seem like a complete alien there, the reality is that I was a complete alien, and while I have traveled enough to be discrete about it, I also still have hundreds of photographs from Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City and a dozen other places in between. And why not? The line between being a tourist and being a traveler is admittedly rather obscure, and indeed the differentiation might be unworth the distinction. Yet as I have come to see as I have showed my friend this country that I so love,  being a tourist maybe ain’t such a bad thing after all.

********

That said, could all of the white Europeans and Americans stop fetishizing “Africanness”? Could all of the backpackers and two-week prep school travel tours (so very, very white and so very, very privileged) stop seeking authenticity as a short cut to understanding this country? For all of its pre-packaging, I enjoy Long Street’s Mama Africa. It’s a bustling restaurant and bar that I am well aware puts forth African authenticity in a way that is at best manipulative and reductive, at worst stereotypical and trite (or is the other pairing worst case?) And yet the food is good, the music can be great — though I don’t want to ever hear another American kid say, as I did last night, that “this is the most incredible African experience” when the band is playing a song by Neil Diamond — and hell, ersatz African is probably better than ersatz American or ersatz British, both of which are rampant here.

Apropos of nothing, of course, is the other side of things. At my friend’s behest, and despite my protestations, we went to an Irish (or I should say “Irish”) bar on Long Street last night that is an absolute affront to humanity. And while it may be churlish to say, I have to admit, nothing sets my hair on end more than walking into a bar where a white guy is playing guitar, accompanied by a glorified karaoke machine (in other words, no other live performers in sight) shouting to the crowd (almost all white as well) “welcome to Africa” before breaing into — I kid you not — Toto’s vapid 80s anthem “Africa.”

In the abstract I have no qualms with white South Africans claiming Africanness. It just seems a bit untoward that so damned many of them discovered their Africanness in such close proximity to 1994. It seems even more inappropriate that this Africanness seems conspicuously devoid of actual Africans.

One of the keys to Zimbabwe’s hopes for future success is re-developing the country’s infrastructure. And yet as this IRIN report (which focuses on the cholera epidemic but the larger point holds for the country’s political situation) shows, it is difficult even to come to grips with just how bad the infrastructure has gotten in Zimbabwe.

Here is where I give cause for celebration (and then in perentheses rain on the parade):

In Mozambique there are hopes that the country is going to be able to add 6,000 Megawatts of new capacity to the region’s power pool by 2014. (This seems optimistic. Infrastructure in Maputo, never mind much of the rest of the country, is not exactly top notch. I will be hoping for it to happen, and I believe in aiming high, but I think our optimism should be cautous.)

Rwandan troops will start leaving eastern Democratic Republic of Congo today and the process of full withdrawal should be done by the middle of this week. Given the destabilizing nature of foreign troops in the DRC for more than a decade, this certainly qualifies as good news. (Anyone want to place a bet on how long it will be before either Rwandan troops are back or some other country’s military fills the vacuum?)

Finally, the possibility of pending arrest warrants against Omar al-Bashir and an agreement of sorts between Khartoum and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) seem to signal good things ahead for Darfur.  (Not so fast. Hat tip.)

If you have been reading me long enough you know that I generally fight the Afro-pessimist narrative. But that does not make me pollyanna.