New research by the invaluable South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR) indicates that murder rates in South Africa are actually down 30% since 1994-1995. This news flies counter to the stubborn narrative of South African crime escalating out of control. It also should provide something of a palliative for those wringing their hands over whether or not crime is going to make next year’s World Cup a bloodbath. (It should. But it won’t. The naysayers will say nay. What else would we expect them to do?) For those who want to lose themselves in a mass of data about crime in South Africa, I refer you to the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) webpage on that topic.

The unlit but smoldering poweder keg in South Africa is the poor. The end of the Apartheid years represented a nearly incomprehensible transition in South African history and was surely one of the high points in the often grim history of the 20th century. But while the African National Congress has done much for many, it has not been successful at nudging poverty numbers down or employment numbers up.

Granted, the ANC inherited a nightmare economic circumstance made worse by the malign neglect of South Africa’s black masses who were corralled into Bantustans and Townships and battered and abused by a system that saw the black masses as an exploitable labor pool or else as a dangerous enemy. The National Party created the current situation. Worse, the National party exacerbated it.  But the ANC inherited this state of affairs, and the bulk of the population feels as if it has not reaped the fruits of democratic transition.

And there are increasing signs that loyalty to the ANC will no longer suffice for South Africa’s poor. South Africans are reaching back into a tradition of protest and are demanding services, jobs, and fundamental material improvement in their lives.

And to his credit, Jacob Zuma, who has never lacked the populist touch, is reacting. He has been meeting with community leaders, saying the right things, promising his  and his government’s support. But talk is cheap. And change will be expensive. How Zuma deals with these lingering and seemingly intractable issues will go a long way in determining the success of his presidency and his legacy in the country’s history.

Two examples from South Africa of people getting ahead of themselves:

Some South Africans, including Local Organizing Committee chair Irvin Khoza, fear that South Africans are not catching World Cup fever. This strikes me as a pretty groundless concern. I was in South Africa during the Confederations Cup and saw plenty of spirit and came to the conclusion that the country is going to do just fine as World Cup hosts. But what does Khoza want from South Africans at this stage, some ten months before the tournament opens? The typical South African can be both excited about the prospects of 2010 and can go on with their lives in the interim. The country is dealing with a recession, food prices have reached record highs, people have other things going on (including the just-completed track and field world championships and the ongoing successes of Springbok rugby) and probably see no need publicly to wave the flag for the World Cup. When Khoza says “Every street, every corner, you must feel it. You must feel that the show is in town” he may be right, but surely that feeling is necessary during the actual events, and not ten months prior. And as Derek Carstens, the LOC marketing manager points out, resources are finite and timing matters, and he plans to begin the real rollout for the event in December. This is a non-story from all I can tell.

Meanwhile, members of the ANC have begun calling for Jacob Zuma to become a two-term president of both his party and the country. While this is to be expected, is it not a bit early to be talking about a second five-year term for Zuma, who has yet to complete his fourth month as the country’s president?

After nearly twenty recession-free years, South Africa’s economy just experienced its third quarter of negative growth. Still, given that South Africa was late to feel the global economic crunch and that the contractions have been somewhat modest compared to what some might have expected, hopefully South Africa will benefit from recovery soon. The country certainly already has enough economic issues to deal with, especially among its most vulnerable population.

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.

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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.

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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.

It appears that tensions are already brewing between the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and President Jacob Zuma. Who could have seen this coming? Other than me, and plenty of others, I mean. (Pardon the self indulgence.)

COSATU feels as if it catapulted Jacob Zuma to the presidency, not only by its support in the recent elections, but perhaps more importantly, by supporting Zuma in the Zuma-Thabo Mbeki split. As a consequence, COSATU, which has always felt it deserved a greater voice in the political process, is demanding its pound of flesh. At the same time, however, Jacob Zuma might be discovering some of the political and macroeconomic realities that Mbeki saw. Governing the country is a lot harder than appeasing even the largest and most powerful of interest groups, and COSATU is an interest group, even if it is not only an interest group.

Expect COSATU and the South African Communist Party (SACP) to grow disenchanted with Zuma’s leadership of their tripartite alliance partner  African National Congress just as it grew disenchanted with Mbeki’s leadership, and just as it grew disenchanted (but would never publicly admit it) with Nelson Mandela’s leadership, at least in the economic realm. And thus I believe that my ongoing prediction will come to pass: The ANC will someday face its most serious challenge from the left, in the form of a breakaway COSATU-SACP alliance, and not the right. recent transformations in the country’s politics could well lead to a re-merging of the ANC and the Congress of the People (COPE) if the leftist elements do eventually pursue their own course.

Jacob Zuma wanted the presidency. Now he has it. he might just find that Governing is a lot harder than opposing. No one in politics is more popular among his or her supporters than the opponent of an unpopular president right before he steps into office. As a result, though, while such a leader has incredible opportunities to lead, they also have a long way they can fall if they prove to disappoint those who projected their own hopes and dreams on the candidate irrespective of whether or not those hopes and dreams reflected those of the insurgent.

As the Confederations Cup heats up it is becoming more and more clear that South Africans are wildly enthusiastic, perhaps nowhere moreso than in Soweto, about their country hosting the 2010 World Cup. And why not? In sports mad South Africa football is hands-down the most popular sport, and Soweto represents the epicenter of football in the country. South Africans are aware of the problems that beset the country — poverty, crime, undeveloped infrastructure — but are also fiercely proud to be South African, a sentiment that has sustained since the epochal 1994 elections. Hosting the World Cup will allow the country to put forward its most positive face to the rest of the world, and I suspect that because of too-low expectations, most observers will be pleasantly surprised by what I believe will be a tremendously successful month of events. Visitors to the country will have to prepare for occasional annoyances, and should keep in mind that poor planning on their part will not be the fault of the host country. If early signs are any indication, the Confederations Cup is proving to be a rousing success.

South Africa’s beloved Bafana Bafana have struggled in international football in recent years. But the national team played Asian champions Iraq tough yesterday in a 0-0 draw. Given that Spain should be the prohibitive favorite in their group (which also includes New Zealand) Bafana Bafana needs to put up big numbers against the Kiwis, has to hope that Spain does the same against Iraq, and has to give Spain a game. If they do, Bafana Bafana will advance, which would be a great boost for the country’s sometimes-flagging views of the national team.

South African President Jacob Zuma has given his first State of the Nation address and, not surprisingly, economic issues have taken center stage. Will the current slump have an effect on Zuma’s plans? In his speech Zuma promised that the recession will not effect the general direction Zuma plans on taking, but it may slow the pace of reforms. But does slowing the pace of reforms in and of itself force something of a shift in direction, or at least priorities? His speech was relatively short on substance, which seems in keeping with Zuma, whose main appeal is personal rather than substantive, and who has, after all, only been in office for a short period of time.

The latest issue of The Atlantic has a titanic feature on South African President Jacob Zuma. Douglas Foster’s piece is as extensive as anything I have seen in either the United States or the UK.

The kids are not alright. At least not at the University of South Africa (UNISA), where students, appropriating a phrase from the 1980s anti-apartheid struggle, are promising to make UNISA “ungovernable” in a campaign to drive out university vice-chancellor Barney Pityana.

The students claim that Pityana is incompetent, unresponsive to the needs of students and workers, and that he lacks vision for the institution. But there is a political subtext. Pityana was one of the high-profile defectors from the African National Congress (ANC) to the Congress of the People (COPE) while his chief critics are from the unions and the South African Communist Party. This is not to deny (or to bolster) the merits of the students’ case, but let us not be naive and pretend that there is no connection between Pityana’s university governance and the larger political context within which he operates.

For his part Pityana insists that he is not going anywhere. Whether his stance represents whistling past the graveyard, stubbornness, a denial of reality, or a simple statement of fact remains to be seen. But my experience is that when these sorts of things come to a head, the situation tends to veer toward the untenable rather quickly. I would be surprised if Pityana is still in his post three months from now.

The ANC appears not to be dealing with the opposition especially graciously. The party should probably be a bit more aware of appearing to be fulfilling the most dire prophecies that the opposition has laid out for it. To the victor goes the spoils, to be sure. But there is more to governing and leadership than capturing spoils. Nelson Mandela always knew this. It remains to be seen if the current incarnation of the ANC is quite so self-aware.