Xenophobic Violence - Hate Making Headlines in SA

Between election season, Ashley Simpson's wedding, and a story about an Oreo Cookie truck overturning in Oregon, there isn't much space left in the US news media for international news. And given the recent devastating natural disasters and the further unfolding humanitarian catastrophes in southeast Asia, I was surprised when South Africa was once again in the headlines on cnn.com and the BBC World News for all the wrong reasons. For those of you unaware, South Africa, notably Johannesburg, has been hit be very serious, very violent mob attacks against foreigners over the last week. My purpose with this rather somber blog, therefore, is to first offer an on-the-ground account of what's going on and, most importantly assure you of our safety, and, second, to offer my usual unsolicited opinion on the matter.

First and foremost: Jeremy and I are fine, but aware. The violence is generally confined to the townships and the scary parts of the Jo'burg CBD that we probably wouldn't visit anyway. The perpetrators of the horrific attacks are mobs of poor South African blacks taking out their anger over the government's apparent inability to lift them out of poverty on other (similarly poor) foreign nationals, mostly from Zimbabwe. While we are fortunately not confronted directly with the violence, it has touched us indirectly. Some of you know that I have been teaching physics in Alexandra, a township east of Jo'burg and the ignition point of the violence last week. In light of concerns for our safety and that of our students, we canceled classes this week and are looking into options for bringing the kids to our office this coming week as it will likely still be unsafe to be there. My Zimbabwean colleague is understandably especially concerned. One of the support staff in Jeremy's office, a South African, had her house (a generous term) in Alexandra township looted and burned...the mob even stole her cooking pot. We of course continue to take our usual precautions and certainly we take the situation very seriously, but do assure our friends and family that we aren't in any immediate danger and of course promise, promise, promise, that if we were we'd get the hell out of here immediately.

Second...why in the world is this happening? My simple one-word answer: poverty. Once again, I believe we are witnessing the violent manifestation of poverty. Poverty is more than sad pictures of kids with swollen bellies and appeals by rock stars. It is angry, violent, it burns people alive and steals a cooking pot. It is a savage mob, embodying all that is bad and evil in this world. It is people with nothing to loose loosing their dignity and right to exist as human beings.

30 percent of the South African population is unemployed, uneducated, angry, and has nothing to loose. We have between 3 and 5 million foreign nationals, and the large majority of these are from Zimbabwean. The Zimbabwean immigrants are largely illegal and are easy targets for whites and blacks who want to complain about the crime in South Africa. For the two of you out there who don't know, Zimbabwe is in a state of economic chaos, with inflation at 160,000 percent and 80 percent unemployment. The ruling party's (Zanu-PF) refusal to release the results of national elections for over a month before declaring a runoff was shocking at best and insidious at worst. Thabo Mbeki, president of South Africa (who happens to be Robert Mugabe's brother in law) insisted that "There was no crisis" and refused to overtly pressure Zanu-PF to release the results. Needless to say, most of the Zimbabwean immigrants fleeing for South Africa are poor and also have very little to loose. I read an editorial in the paper last week criticising the South African government for not putting more pressure on Zimbabwe not out of concern for the principles of democracy, but because of the additional pressure the immigrants put on the economy for jobs and services. Apparently, if even one third of the Zimbabwean immigrants went back home, South Africa's unemployment would drop by double digits. This may be true and I believe that stable neighbors would make for a stable South Africa. But still, the angry mobs are using the foreign immigrants as the archetypal scapegoats that humans have relied upon since time immemorial as an excuse for our inability, unwillingness, or simple failure to solve our problems. Frequently, that problem is poverty.

When it took power in the early 1990s, the ANC pledged to build millions of homes, bring clean water and sanitation services to the poor, and to begin righting the wrongs of apartheid. Certainly there have been improvements, but there is a long, long, long way to go. There are a few blacks who have become very rich off of the government's Black Economic Empowerment policy, but still only a quarter of all black South Africans have received a high school education and the median annual income among working-aged black males is less than $2000 USD. To make matters worse, immigrants from Zimbabwe and further afield in Africa arrive in South Africa willing to work for even less than that as domestics and security guards. Imagine the despair when you loose your $2000 a year job that does not even feed your family to begin with to a foreigner who will work for $1000 a year because his family is starving in Zimbabwe and he will go without food himself just to send a little bit of money back home. We have poverty here in South Africa and poverty abroad moving to South Africa, a lethal combination and a sad one at that.

There is an interesting twist to this wave of violence against South Africa. In the struggle against apartheid in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, neighboring southern African countries provided refuge to ANC leaders in exile as well as guerrillas training for forced resistance to the oppressive regime of the National Party. Oliver Tambo and President Mbeki are some notable South African freedom fighters who spent significant amounts of time in exile. Now South Africa has to bear the burden of the brutality of the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe in the form of exiles and illegal immigrants and many would say that South Africa has hardly risen to the occasion. This irony has not been lost on scores of columnists and op-ed writers.

We have only 2 more years until the Rainbow Nation that Mandela promised the world hosts the world for arguably the greatest sporting tournament in the world. Right now we are dreadfully off course. I actually for once give credit to Jacob Zuma, current head of the ANC, for doing more than issuing a bland statement "condemning the attacks." But we need more than statements. We need police officers to stop the stake outs against people using their mobile phones while driving and start restoring order in the townships and CBD. And the ANC needs to have the courage and humility to stop looking after just a few cronies and start addressing the real scapegoat here: poverty.

Learning Manners and Nearly Drowning in Uganda

Last week we were lucky enough to have two public holidays...even luckier when our good president, Thabo Mbeki, declared an additional third public holiday. It seems that the Day of Goodwill, March 21, fell on the same day as Good Friday this year and, as a result, hard working South Africans missed out on one of their holidays. And so people complained all the way up the food chain. Now, the Rand is struggling against the dollar, the economy is having a tough time because of the power outages (commodoties are holding South Africa together, check out the price of gold), crime is pretty high...so, what would make everyone feel better? Another day off work! Unlike the U.S., public holidays are not optional here...so our employers had no choice but to quickly add in another day of overhead for everyone. I can't exactly say we were unhappy about this development.

Jeremy and I took SAA flight 161 4 hours north to the equator and the shores of Lake Victoria...Uganda! It just so happened that Jeremy ended up with some work to do (inspecting a rice paddy) one day so we decided to make a holiday of it. Entebe Airport is right on the shore of Lake Victoria...and the runway actually crosses the equator. Being a geography buff, Jeremy was in heaven.

We stayed three nights in Kampala and even managed to get in 18 holes at the Uganda Golf Club. Much to Jeremy's dismay, playing at the equator did not correct his slice.

Kampala is a really neat town...just big enough so an expat can enjoy some creature comforts, but small enough to make moped taxis and efficient way to get from one end of the city to the other. It was also really nice to have the opportunity to walk around at night with out fear of crime...I forgot how much we missed that in Jo'burg. Maybe we should move there next...

On Tuesday morning we were scheduled to be picked up at a shopping mall and be transported from Kampala to Jinja, about an hour and a half east of Kampala along the shore of the lake. This is where the lesson in manners and just being a good person comes in. Being a plan-ahead sort of woman, I took the opportunity to find a toilet before embarking on the journey. Seeing a sign marked, "toilets," I marched off and, in doing so, walked straight passed the janitor, an older woman, who was sweeping the side walk. To my dismay, the door to the public toilets was locked and so I turned around and went back to the janitor to ask if she'd be so kind as to unlock the door for me. Before I could get my request out, she interupted, saying, "you just walked straight passed me and you didn't even greet me or say good morning. But now, now you need my help and only now are you paying attention to me." To say that her comment stopped me dead in my tracks is an understatement. As I pulled my jaw off the floor and tried to get my face to stop turning red, I did my best to apologize. I haven't felt so humbled ever, I don't think. Interestingly enough, she didn't hold a grudge. She said that, yes, the toilets were still closed but, "you cannot help nature so I will unlock them for you." She even walked in with me to make sure there was toilet paper. So a lesson in humilty and forgiveness, and all before 7:30 in the morning. Darned if God doesn't pick unlikely places and people to deliver some very important messages.

Meanwhile, we arrived in Jinja...the new extreme sports capital of Uganda. I didn't know they had an old one, but there you are. We stayed at the Nile River Explorer Backpackers...if nothing else to remind ourselves that, yes, we are softer than we used to be and we really are getting older. But, for $11/night, it's hard to argue. The backpacker's served a good breakfast, played the important English Premier league games, and had a cool bar complete with a picture of Idi Amin (someone's idea of a joke?).

We went mtn biking, as usual with our bike rides we were the tourist attraction. The kids in the villages we passed through made a game of trying to keep up with us, running surprisingly fast in bare feet. They were so cute and happy that you could almost ignore the swollen bellies, the telling sign of malnutrition.

The following day we played some more golf, undoubtedly the most painful 9 holes Jeremy has played in a while. Fortunately the evening G&T canoe/float trip through Lake Victoria and the source of the Nile provided an opportunity for him to forget about it. We did exactly 10 minutes of paddling and then our guide happily announced that the bar was open...pulling out on of those big orange Gator-Aid cooler things...filled with G&Ts. Our travelling companions were two Americans, one who works for the UN World Food Programme in the Sudan and another who works for a non-profit that aims to lend focus to the plight of women in war-torn countries. Suddenly Jeremy and I didn't feel so noble in our career choices. After a couple G&Ts, we did manage to convince Brian, the UN WFP worker, that he should come rafting with us the next day...he might still be bitter about that.

The Nile...it is 6700 km long (longest in the world) has an average monthly flow at our put-in site (just below Lake Vic) of 2.25 billion cubic meters per month. That's a lot of water. I've done a lot of rafting in Colorado and West Virginia....and never have I exited the raft involuntarily so many times. At the safety briefing at the outset our guide aquainted us with the "get down" command...where you stop paddling, squat in the raft, and hang on until your knuckles turn white. They don't have the get down command on the Arkansas River. Pictured are the Bujagali falls. Again, the tourists are the attraction...a bunch of school children were on a field trip to look at the falls and watch the rafters go swimming. The sign should have warned us away. I wonder who the Bujagali Falls Management is?

We hit 12 rapids, half of which were class 5. We portaged half of the last rapid...it was a class 6. We put in for the class 5 portion at the bottom. A "gentle" set of rapids called "The Bad Place." Just as an aside, when it comes to rapids (as opposed to ski slopes), their names really do have meaning...it's not just to scare tourists. As we entered The Bad Place, our guide gave us the "get down" command with a new twist. We were also to seriously THROW our paddles out of the boat. Reason being, so that when we were thrown out we'd be less likely to take a paddle to the face. Unfortunately I caught a paddle to the hip and have a bruise that looks like a Picasso painting. While I can't say that I truly feared for my life, I will say that running myself through the washing machine would have been more relaxing. The worst of it was the force of that much water ripping your shorts off! Clearly I wasn't drowning, because I did have the presence of mind to pull them back on. I am happy to report that I am recovering well from the whiplash and can't wait to go raft the Zambezi...