Africa

Greetings from Stellenbosch, the historical intellectual center of Afrikanerdom. I am here for a conference on sport history at the University of Stellenbosch, and as I did with Melville, I have seen changes in this picturesque little university town.

Clearly the city parents here are no fools. No longer can Stellenbosch be merely the epicenter of Afrikaans intellectual life in South Africa. Seeing its potential as a tourist town, as the crossroads to the country’s booming and burgeoning wine routes, as a close bucolic escape from Cape Town, the city has marshalled its resources. The Afrikaans accent might loom heavily over so many conversations here, but above all the universal language of trade and commerce and tourism looms largest of all. Where even a decade ago most shopkeepers and bartenders greeted patrons in Afrikaans as the default, now it is as likely that you’ll receive an English greeting. Whether this qualifies as progress or cultural abandonment is in the eye of the beholder.

My three nights here follow one night in Cape Town, where I’ll be returning on Wednesday. Cape Town sits in one of the world’s most fortuitously beautiful settings. Nestled between the water and the mountains, with Table Mountain as the main though not sole backdrop,  Cape Town stands as the symbolic representation of South Africa to the world even if the vast majority of visitors to the country arrive via sprawling Oliver Tambo airport in the decidedly less picturesque megalopolis that is Gauteng. No longer is there a truly recognizable Midrand, that space between Johannesburg and Pretoria, as expansion and growth mean that the suburbs of the one city are close to blending with those of the other.

The conference is going well, though for a host of reasons I’ve missed most of it and will make up time tomorrow, when I’ll give my paper on rugby, race, and nationalism in the New South Africa. I’ve met some old friends — one a PhD student at UT, a five hour drive from my home, who I nonetheless seem only to see in South Africa — and made some new ones, and that, in the end, is the real purpose of conferences. 

[Crossposted at the FPA South Africa Blog.]    

Sawubona!

I’m writing from the 7th Street Guesthouse in Joberg’s Melville. The trip here was quite the trek, involving many layovers (Houston, Jackson, BWI, Dulles, Dakar) and more than one trip in an automobile, but I finally got into my B&B at about 8:30 South Africa time last night.

Not wanting to go to sleep and end up wide awake at about 4 in the morning, I went out and visited some old haunts. One of the striking aspects of Melville, and I think it tells us something about South Africa, for good and ill, is the subtle but definite ways in which it has changed since I first started coming to this little Joberg semi-suburb a decade or so ago. It is still fundamentally the same — a little oasis of affluence and upscale dining, drinking, and shopping options in a village that feels far from the Central Business District that is actually not far away at all. Many of the restaurants and other businesses that were here in the late 1990s are still thriving, though there has also been turnover and there are new places competing with the old.

But what is remarkable, and I think telling, is how much more, well, African, Melville has become. Not so long ago Melville was affluent and white. It was rare to see a black person not involved in labor or else on the streets. But today Melville represents a ployglot mixture of the New South Africa. There is no ideal racial climate anywhere in South Africa yet, but Melville just about qualifies inasmuch as the South Africa tourism board could present a pretty good face with videos and pictures from just about any restaurant in these few blocks.

And yet black, white, Indian, or coloured, the crowds that descend upon Melville do share one thing that separates them from the masses across the country: overwhelmingly they are wealthy. I do not want to quibble about what I mean by wealth. I am not saying that everyone I saw last night is rolling in money, driving BMW’s (though many do), and could retire today. But I am saying that they are distinct from the vast majority in this country in that they could afford the R250 dinner, followed by round after round of R25 drinks and R15 beers.

And in a sense this is good inasmuch as the increased black presence in Melville shows that there is a growing black middle (and upper) class making their way in the country. At the same time what it tells me is that South African divisions, which have always been both class and racial, with the latter more powerful than the former, have turned 180 degrees so that while race will continue to be a dividing line in the country, class draws even more permanent lines.

And I have no idea what the solution to this is. I am no class warrior, I believe in at least the fundemental tenets of a capitalist market economy, and I do not resent success. I was, after all, one of them last night, and one of the changes in my own life since 1997, when I first came, and lived, in South Africa is that my own travels have become decidedly more upscale, though I’m still not far from rich. At the same time, believing in the fundamental tenets of market capitalism is far from saying that ours is a system that is unreformable. And in South Africa there is still need for massive reform. The gross disparities of wealth that any society has are acute here and without alleviating poverty the country will continue to see not only the violent crime that South Africa is so well known for, but also the paroxysms of mass violence such as the xenophobic backlash against immigrants that have convulsed the country in recent weeks.

It is good to be back. I’ve missed South Africa in the time that I’ve been away. I’ll post more reflections here — I’ll probably be light on the usual links-and-analysis approach in favor of these more discursive reflections in the weeks to come.  

[Cross-posted from the FPA South Africa Blog.]

The dueling headlines tell of the tricky course South Africa has chosen for itself with regard to the situation in Zimbabwe. It is widely recognized that South Africa has the potential to be the biggest external power broker, whether through sticks or carrots, words or deeds. And so far, it is no secret, South Africa has chosen to act so tepidly that the country’s virtual inaction can only qualify as appeasing Robert Mugabe.

And so for readers of, say, the Cape Argus, it may have been reassuring that At Last, SA Condemns Mugabe. But for readers of The New York Times the message was quite different: A.N.C. Rejects Pressure on Zimbabwe. So which is it?

Well, as the Argus story makes clear, while South Africa did finally speak out against Mugabe, it also helped to block even stronger statements from the United Nations Security Council, which has unanimously rebuked Zimbabwe.  And in so doing, South Africa’s leaders have once again forced the world, which little understands the situation to begin with, to wonder, rightly, what on earth Thabo Mbeki could be thinking? Loyalty, even fairly blind loyalty, to the revolutionary generation is one thing. But at some point that currency was long ago spent. The idea that South Africa owes fealty to ZANU-PF at the expense of the masses of Zimbabweans desperate for change is absurd. Mbeki’s approach mystifies and infuriates much of the rest of the world. It is hard to see how either Zimbabweans or South Africans benefit from such an approach to the gravest regional crisis in years.

[Crossposted at the FPA South Africa Blog.] 

Is President Mugabe beginning to feel the increasing pressure from the outside? There is some indication that Mugabe’s overheated rhetoric of late comes at least in part because of increased scrutiny of his country from regional leaders. Thus his threat to go to war if he loses the run-off and his warnings that people will be too scared to vote seem less like typical Mugabe bombast and more like the desperation of a man who sees his power, and thus potentially his freedom, slipping away.

Meanwhile challenger Morgan Tsvangirai is at turns confident but also wary. He believes that despite Mugabe’s threats and the violence underway that is intended to cow the opposition the turnout on June 27 will be immense and he is confident that he will win. Nonetheless as he looks around his country he sees a nation and a people under siege. The news that the United Nations anticipates a severe food shortage in Zimbabwe, which is hardly flourishing as it is, cannot help matters any.

From the outside world leaders continue to condemn Mugabe’s regime. Leaders in Africa continue to deal with their Zimbabwe dilemma while more and more of them speak out against ZANU-PF. Even Thabo Mbeki has been roused to action, if only to question whether holding the runoff is a good idea and to encourage Mugabe, with whom Mbeki met last night, to engage in negotiations with Tsvangirai. Mbeki’s proposal seems a bit pie in the sky, and more than a little bit too late, but nonetheless reveals that the world is becoming engaged as the clock ticks down toward the scheduled runoff election.

How does a country reconcile itself after horrific paroxysms of violence? Numerous countries have had to deal with precisely this dilemma. South Africa, through its Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), did so most famously and most extensively. And the TRC process has served as a model, an inspiration, and as a template for several other countries that have followed with processes of their own to reconcile the past with the present and with a hoped-for future, though the process was also fraught with imperfections and faced sometimes intense criticism from across the political spectrum.

Zimbabwe will almost surely have to go through a comparable process, whether in a matter of weeks and months or years. And today Kenya is trying to deal with its relatively brief but still nightmarish political violence of a few months ago. President Mwai Kibaki has declared categorically that his coalition government will not provide blanket amnesty for the perpetrators of post-election violence, once again putting him at odds with his erstwhile rival and uncomfortable supposed government coalition partner Raila Odinga. Kenya’s violence did not endure like that in most of the countries that have gone through formal reconciliation processes, but the chaos that exploded nationwide nonetheless reveals fissures in Kenyan society that runs deeper than the mere electoral divide that provided the proximate causes of violence. At some point Kenya is going to have to address those divisions in something other than a patchwork manner.   

More than a week ago I wrote the following:

Yet another indicator of how bad things are in Zimbabwe? Even with the recent explosions of xenophobic violence aimed at foreigners and especially Zimbabweans in South Africa,  huge numbers of immigrants continue to cross the border and head directly for the maelstrom in Johannesburg and its environs. They have undertaken the quick calculus and decided that whatever is going on in South Africa is no match for what they confront on a daily basis in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.

And while countless Zimbabwean immigrants are choosing to remain in South Africa, increasing numbers have decided to take their chances and return to Robert Mugabe’s clutches. Zimbabweans working and living in South Africa right now, especially those in the midst of the maelstrom in poor urban areas, many of whom fled Zimbabwe because of the dual edges of the country’s political strife and economic chaos, now face some most unpleasant options. 

Yet another indicator of how bad things are in Zimbabwe? Even with the recent explosions of xenophobic violence aimed at foreigners and especially Zimbabweans in South Africa,  huge numbers of immigrants continue to cross the border and head directly for the maelstrom in Johannesburg and its environs. They have undertaken the quick calculus and decided that whatever is going on in South Africa is no match for what they confront on a daily basis in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.

Because everyone needs a bit of a comedown before heading into the weekend, here is a bit of a roundup of Zimbabwe-related stories.

South African President Thabo Mbeki has traveled to Zimbabwe for talks on the country’s disputed election. Acting both as South African head of state and as the Southern African Development Community’s (SADC) mediator Mbeki will meet with President Robert Mugabe, but it is unclear whether he will also meet with the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), making one wonder just what sort of mediation he could possibly envision emerging from his trip, especially since the MDC continues to insist that it will not participate in a runoff that it perceives to be a sham.
As violence escalates across the country death tolls are beginning to rise. Farmers and farm workers in rural areas are especially vulnerable to the violence, as are lawyers, journalists, and trade unionists.

As if the actual and impending violence is not ominous enough, the Chinese vessel carrying arms intended for Zimbabwe that was turned away from South African waters weeks ago is still afloat on African waters. The South African Transport and Allied Workers’ Union (SATAWU) reports that the ship, An Yue Jiang, is still in search of a hospitable port and is headed toward Congo-Brazzaville in hopes of being able to offload its deadly cargo there. Somehow that ship, in both its tenacity and its desperation, but also because of the violence that it portends, stands as a pretty grim metaphor for the cynical machinations of Robert Mugabe and ZANU-PF.

Anyone who has traveled in South Africa and talked politics with people has heard something along this lines: This country is just like Rhodesia, and under black rule we’re going to turn into Zimbabwe. This sort of “When We” alarmism, equal parts racist tripe and romanticized fatuousness is also common among expats around the world and among former colonialists of a certain age. It was thus refreshing to see that Jeremy Cronin, in his Chris Hani Memorial Lecture, addressed this question directly. One need not ardently support the South African Communist Party (I do not) to find a great deal of merit in Cronin’s cogent argument that whatever South Africa’s problems, it is not likely to follow the path of Zimbabwe.

[Cross-posted at the FPA South Africa Blog.]

A diverse coalition has caused China to recall its arms shipment intended for Zimbabwe. Comparable organizations are emerging to address the domestic crisis in Zim while leading religious figures are calling for change in the country. Pressure from outside countries, including South Africa and the United States, is beginning to increase, though Jacob Zuma has made a reasonable point that now is not the time to insult Mugabe.

Will any of this be enough to counter the clear crackdown coming from Robert Mugabe’s ZUMA-PF and the police against the opposition? It is too early to tell. But some elements of this struggle remind me a bit of the global and local coalitions that made up the anti-apartheid movement.