We Are Not Such Things (5 page)

A year before landing in Cape Town, I’d been to South Africa on holiday. Those days in the Karoo had offered me a hint that living in the country would be nothing like that three-week vacation, when we took a safari just outside of Kruger Park and saw a pride of lions, dozens of elephants, the far-off silhouette of a leopard, and a pack of endangered spotted African wild dogs chilling out in the bush, licking their balls and nuzzling each other like regular pets, except that they could run at forty miles an hour to gut and devour a gazelle. In Cape Town, we lay about on palm-tree-lined beaches, which were too sunny for my New England tastes. The white people on the beaches—and there were mostly white people on the wealthy stretch of beachside suburbs known as the Atlantic Seaboard—looked like descendants of Russian oligarchs,
Baywatch
actors, and/or the cast of your average reality television program: lots of enhanced breasts and chiseled six-packs, displayed with unabashed vanity.

But when I settled in Cape Town for two years, I found the city disconcerting. I landed in a white enclave by the seaside, where my husband’s Jewish family and their insular, tight-knit community lived in the houses typical of well-off South Africans: pale-colored cement rectangles surrounded by high walls lined with barbed coils, electric shock wire, or shards of broken glass.

The white Capetonians I met at first had been raised in a country steeped in racist policy and educated according to a racist curriculum. History books reinvented colonial commandos who slaughtered indigenous people as heroes. During apartheid most whites had never seen the living conditions of blacks. Opposition groups were banned, their leaders in exile or prison. The media was heavily censored. In 1977, for example, 1,246 publications, 41 periodicals, and 41 films were banned in South Africa—most of them putting forth an anti-apartheid view. The government also controlled TV, radio, and, to some extent, newspapers. After apartheid, most whites still turned away from the reality of daily life for their black compatriots, never visiting townships, denying or justifying the continued inequities between the races. Therefore, most white South Africans of a certain age, and accordingly their children, had become—through grand design, through osmosis, and through their own choice to accept the status quo—entrenched in racism.

A friend of mine once suggested that an anthropologist would do well to study the ways of the white tribes of South Africa. The white Capetonians I met liked working out, getting their hair done, shopping, displaying large diamonds, driving flashy cars, eating sushi, and cooing at their dogs, both pedigreed and rescued. They referred to things that tickled their fancies as “stunning,” “spectacular,” “unreal,” and “
out
of this world.” They dished local gossip and talked about money and business. They discussed families who had been lucky enough to emigrate to the major white South African resettlement destinations: the States, the U.K., Israel, Australia, Canada. No matter how many assets a person possessed in South Africa, he was guaranteed to moan about the country going to pot, and how a trailer in Sydney was better than a mansion in the most beautiful city of the most advanced country on this doomed continent.

They peppered mundane conversation topics with casual mentions of the black majority, most of whom they feared and few of whom they knew on a personal level. South Africa has no ingrained culture of “political correctness,” and so, on the subject of race, many people are generally far more forthright, nonchalant, and openly offensive than Americans. The white South Africans I met casually attributed to black people a number of negative characteristics: laziness, dishonesty, savagery, stupidity, ungratefulness, ugliness. They were puzzled by my sputtering protests, and regarded me as a naive foreigner (which I was, but for other reasons). They blamed all the problems in modern-day South Africa not on an intricate and complex set of political and socioeconomic issues running back centuries, but rather on the intrinsically hideous qualities of blacks. If the country was going to pot, this was because black people were fundamentally incapable of leadership. Presenting them with an endless list of horrible white leaders throughout history did nothing to change their minds.

“Blacks are lazy, and you’d know that if you worked at a corporate. I’m not being racist, I’m just stating the facts.”

“Sponsor a black child to go to school? Oh, right, because they end up being such
model citizens
.”

“I sure as hell
am
racist. The difference for you liberal Americans is your population is fifteen percent of them, but ours is nearly ninety percent.”

“It’s about the trees. They came down from the damn trees.”

“It’s not racist to be scared of black people. It’s realistic.”

The people who said such things were not dropouts from the boonies. Rather, they were well educated and widely traveled: a lawyer, a businessman, a designer, a farmer, a small business owner. And they were decent people, too. The racists of South Africa are a kindly lot, who are helpful and resourceful, community-minded and polite. They’re a good laugh, fine company, and fantastic to have by your side if you’re in a pickle. These very bigots, many of whom I hardly knew, have driven me across the country, saved my dog’s life, provided me top-notch medical care, given me free room and board when I needed it most, generously hosted me in their homes, and cooked me meals. And they don’t just help other white people. I have seen them feed the poor colored beggars, even as they roll their eyes; offer free and compassionate legal advice to the very black people for whom they have previously expressed disdain; put their gardener’s children through school; and buy beautiful houses for their maids, complete with furniture.

Usually, when the racists know black people personally, they are capable of seeing them as individuals. But on a larger level, to them black South Africans seem to meld together with their inept, corrupt black leaders, into an indiscernible mass, a majority that is steering the country toward mayhem: economic free fall, widespread violent crime, a crumbling public healthcare system, a broken government peopled with cronies. It is this mass—not specific members of it—that is the enemy. Before the mass existed (or more accurately, when it was disempowered and hidden), white South Africans lived in a kind of utopia: agreeable dirt-cheap labor, all the fruits of a gifted land, beauty everywhere for the taking, lovely neighborhoods with open doors, and all the suffering contained behind borders at a good distance.

Once I asked Easy about a friend of his whose actions were inconsistent. What he said makes as much sense as anything: “He’s a human being. Sometimes he’s good, sometimes he’s evil. Sometimes he is
comme ci
. Sometimes he is
comme ça
.”

I met plenty of exceptional white South Africans, of course. I came to know a yoga teacher whose many boyfriends spanned the racial spectrum, and a corporate mom born into a conservative Afrikaner family who married a Congolese basketball player. I spent time with some of the old white freedom fighters, who remained as committed to racial equality and justice as ever. I hung around a bunch of my husband’s high school friends, well-off thirty-something men who were focused on their various apolitical endeavors, like creating a Burning Man–type festival in Africa or bringing Cape Town its first New York–style Jewish deli or attending ayahuasca ceremonies for spiritual healing. And I knew plenty of young white activists who worked with the country’s most disadvantaged, including a man fluent in the Zimbabwean tongue of Shona who had devoted his life to helping African refugees gain footing in a new land.

However, according to the wealthy white citizens I met at first, townships—the impoverished zones created by the apartheid government to segregate black South Africans—were the epicenters of the crime epidemic sweeping the country, the places out of which black badness oozed. During apartheid, people of color had little access to white areas, generally allowed in during the day to work but banned after close of business. Once the laws that controlled people’s movement had been dismantled, that violence spilled out, affecting whites as well as everyone else (though whites complained most vigorously, crime actually affected them far less than it did their dark-skinned compatriots). South Africa, with its soaring crime rate, was now among the world’s most violent countries, with a murder rate five times that of the global average. Every day across the country there were 502 assaults, 475 robberies, 172 sexual offenses, 47 murders, and 31 carjackings. Every day, 714 houses were burgled, 202 businesses were robbed, and 349 cars were broken into.

Instead of seeing these daily terrors as the result of tyranny, many South African whites came to associate them with the enduring
swaart gevaar
, or black danger. The threat of the
swaart gevaar
—the concept of an overwhelming and inherently bloodthirsty black majority that needed to be contained lest it consume everything in its path—had been used to persuade a white electorate to vote into power in 1948 the National Party, whose platform came to be known as apartheid.

I could see these townships, Gugulethu in particular, from the highway leading away from the airport: a glimmering sea of corrugated tin shacks separated from the road by only a strip of grass, upon which I once saw a man squatting for a shit while casually flipping through a magazine. This accounted for the faint fecal stink that wafted out from the slums, especially on hot days. I was eager to see inside, but I was informed, repeatedly, of the dangers of those ghettos, which teemed with ruthless gangs high on a type of rough local crystal meth called
tik
.

In an old
Lonely Planet
guidebook I found, nestled between reviews for the extravagant high tea at the pink Mount Nelson Hotel and a most pleasant ride up the aerial cableway to Table Mountain, I read a quick note on the townships, which were situated in the Cape Flats, a depressed belt of sand and bedrock southeast of the city known as “apartheid’s dumping ground”:

For the majority of Cape Town’s inhabitants, home is one of the grim townships of the Cape Flats: Gugulethu, Nyanga, Philippi, Mitchell’s Plain, Crossroads, or Khayelitsha. Visiting without a companion who has local knowledge would be foolish. If a black friend is happy to escort you, you should have no problems.

Lacking an amenable black escort at the time, I waited until one day, less than a month into my stay, an opportunity to pass over those allegedly dangerous borders presented itself. Sam was setting up a project aimed at improving the delivery of basic social services for the poor, and he had been invited by an NGO to see the conditions in Khayelitsha, a sprawling township of nearly 400,000 people just north of Gugulethu. He asked me if I’d like to come along.

On that hot day in November, we met two women at the organization’s headquarters off a main road, a chilly refurbished municipal building surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by a groundskeeper and his two sooty dogs. The lead guide was a fat and pretty black lady, with a flawless complexion and a short ponytail. Her assistant, also black, was a grave, slender woman with cropped hair and glasses; the left side of her body, running from her chin to her hand, had been consumed by fire long ago, and the skin was knotted with scar tissue.

Townships are divided, roughly, into formal and informal areas. The formal areas are generally those built up with simple cement houses along paved streets. Most were constructed years ago by the apartheid government, and have been, over time, expanded by their inhabitants, repainted various colors, remodeled and tricked out or neglected and allowed to fester. Some were constructed more recently by the new black-led government under the Reconstruction and Development Programme, which aimed to help close the massive gap between the rich and poor, and white and brown. These are known as “RDP houses,” and tend to be small, relatively new, identical matchbox homes clustered together. The key to such a house is obtained by languishing on a waiting list. Woven between, behind, and among the legal homes is a web of backyard shacks, built by homeowners and rented out in an underground township economy.

The formal areas also contain hostels taken over by squatters. During apartheid, companies housed black migrant laborers in single-sex dormitory-like structures, carting them to and from manual jobs each day and allowing them one month a year to visit their families in the rural areas designated for most blacks. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, as apartheid edged toward its demise and the townships became increasingly ungovernable, the companies abandoned these buildings and the workers and their families took over. Twenty years later, they still live in cramped, deteriorating quarters under faded signs bearing the names of the original owners:
WJM CONSTRUCTION CORP, UME STEEL LTD, DAIRY-BELLE PTY
. Pigeons roost in the broken shower stalls. Once in a while, a police tow truck pulls out from a hostel’s courtyard, dragging a stolen car behind it.

Informal settlements are plots of previously barren urban land upon which people squat, usually in haphazard tin shacks. They are meant to be temporary, but often become permanent as their inhabitants, mired in poverty, fail to either score an RDP house or rent a better spot. The settlements rise up on township borders and on undesirable land within. They contain a mixture of city-born locals, migrants from the underdeveloped South African countryside, and refugees, asylum seekers, and undocumented aliens from repressive Zimbabwe, impoverished Ethiopia, war-torn Somalia, war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo, and war-torn Burundi. Since the settlements are not government-approved, they receive little in terms of services and once in a while are unceremoniously torn down.

Our guides lived in one such settlement, a maze of makeshift matchbox houses set on gray sand. The plumper woman lived in a tidy single room with her husband, a few children, and the inevitable rat or two. She called her young son, a shirtless ten-year-old with a mischievous smile, and instructed him to watch our car, which we parked in a dirt yard. We would conduct the tour on foot, since the pathways far into the shantytowns—tiny, potholed roads that passed through insecure territories—weren’t built for vehicles. We were deep inside Khayelitsha now, invisible to the outside world.