We're busy enjoying Billy and his antics so our son-in-law Jonathon writes:
I think I'm beginning to understand the iconic status of the 'Black Power!' picture of a fist clutching barbed wire that we saw painted on the wall in Soweto last sunday, and that was popular on T-shirts and reggae albums in the UK in my childhood in the 70s and 80s.
Nowhere in the world have I ever seen so much barbed wire. In all its various forms, straight, curled, rolled up, with razors, above and below electric fences, supporting flowers and rotting on concrete posts. When we arrived in Johannesburg last weekend we stayed in Melville with Laura's cousin Lucy and her long-term partner Bongani. The houses, with one exception, were heavily fortified with 3-meter high walls topped with an array of barbed, razored and electrified wires. Most gates had a sign warning that they were also protected by 24-hour armed response security. Lucy and Bongani's house didn't advertise this, but a solid gate opened electronically to let our car in and then slid shut behind us. The high walls had spikes on the top and the windows were barred or leaded and there were metal grills over the door to the guarden. They explained that the security measures in their neighbourhood were put up hastily (you can tell) in 1994 after the elections when white people feared attacks from blacks and coloureds. Even now, though theirs is a mixed neighbourhood, the fear remains. It is fear of the violent poor, but here poverty is overwhelmingly related to colour.
On a short drive into Soweto we saw the tin shacks of a squatter-town and the concrete sheds making up workers' dormitories. I wasn't aware before coming here that South Africa was still such an impoverished, segregated country, clearly developing very slowly, especially in terms of the vast and widening differences between blacks, coloureds and whites in maternal mortality, infant and childhood mortality and rates of tuberculosis. What is shocking is that economically South Africa is doing well, though in terms of health it is moving backwards, lagging behind many other African countries. We should take note of this in the UK as we move away from a universal standard of healthcare towards a South African system of different tiers and standards of care for the poor and the wealthy.
In Soweto we visited the Hector Pieterson Museum, a memorial to the 13 year old boy who was shot dead by police in 1976 during a protest by school-children about the forced teaching of subjects in the Afrikaans language. His accidental death, albeit in the line of police fire, was the spark that set off the civil uprising in the city and beyond. The museum is at the end of the same street where Nelson Mandela used to live and Desmond Tutu still does. London is gearing up for a summer of discontent and an enormous march in London on 26.3.2011 is planned shortly after our return. There are calls for protests as radical as industrial action by doctors and a general strike. When I announced that I wanted to join the march, Henry said, 'what's the point, it's not going to change anything'. Aside from Henry's natural pessimism, he has a point: the death of a child, not the marching of children was the spark which triggered the uprising here, and the underlying discontent and suffering were the fuel that sustained the fire of protest. It makes me wonder whether significant change is likely in the UK, where the threats are of future rather than present suffering. Suffering comes from exclusion. In South Africa it was and remains primarily exclusion on racial grounds, but in South Africa and the rest of the world, the dividing lines are increasingly less to do with race or religion than they are to do with poverty. At home there will be exclusion from healthcare, education, housing, employment and so on, all long assumed rights. These exclusions will be the fuel for the protests, but as yet there is not, nor is there likely to be, anything like the actual suffering people have had here. We will probably need our own spark as well.
In Kimberly, the regional capital of the Karoo, where we met with Tom and Emma, we visited the De Beers-owned museum at the Big Hole diamond mine (1871-1920). As a tourist award-winning attraction it has a movie theatre, an underground re-creation of the mining tunnels, a history of diamonds and a quote from Za Za Gaboor, 'I've never hated any man enough to give back my diamonds'. In the book I've read while I've been here, Cry, the beloved country by Alan Paton, written in 1948, one of the black characters, John explains, 'South Africa is not built on the mines, it is built on our backs, on our sweat, on our labour'. 'For three shillings a day ... we live in the compounds, we must leave our wives and families behind. And when the new gold is found, it is not we who will get more for our labour. It is the white man's shares that will rise, you will read it in all the papers.' Later in the book a white South African explains from his perspective, 'There wouldn't be any South Africa at all if it wasn't for the mines' ... 'if mining costs go up much more there won't be any mines, and where will South Africa be then? And where would the natives be themselves? They'd die by the thousands of starvation.' The novel brings up the dilemmas of the white man Jarvis who cannot find any moral justification for allowing blacks to suffer so much in the pursuit of wealth, whilst social progress is subordinated, 'It is permissible to develop any resources if the labour is forthcoming. But it is not permissible to develop any resources if they can be developed only at the cost of the labour. It is not permissible to mine any gold, or manufacture any product, or cultivate any land, if such mining and manufacture and cultivation depend for their success on a policy of keeping labour poor. It isn't permissible to add to one's possessions if these things can only be won at the cost of other men. Such development has only one true name, and that is exploitation.'
We are staying in De Aar, a town of 45,000 which used to be the rail crossroads of the Karoo. Passenger trains would go frequently to Port Elizabeth, Cape Town, Johannesburg and Namibia. From where we are relaxing in the rectory of St Thomas' anglican church we can see the decaying ruins of the rail junction where steel sculptures are now industrial supports for wild plants and perches for birds. It is reminiscent of some impoverished Texan towns we drove through in 2009 with the pot-holed roads and crumbling pavements, intimidating edge-of-town liquor stores stocked with cheap spirits for the poor, beer for the better off and unlabelled gallon containers for the very poor. Here was the first liquor store I had shopped at where the cheap brandy selection exceeded the entire wine selection of four bottles by about 10:1. This is a town where drinking is a means to an intoxicated end which is why it has the highest incidence of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) in the Karoo. The barmaid in Pringles, the main pub in town, was wearing a FAS T-shirt and explained that it was illegal to serve alcohol to anyone who might be pregnant. She looked visibly anxious when Laura revealed her 33 week bump as she sipped a Castle Light she had been served earlier.
There is a gap in the market for beer with flavour. I suggested to Bongani that he could import ales from Brewdog, the brewery in which I have a tiny financial interest, to break the mass produced fizzy lager monopoly here.
This town, De Aar, has its share of barbed wire, more decorative than protective in the poor, coloured neighbourhood I strolled around this morning. People were friendly and children lined up in order of size to be photographed. A drunk put his arm around my shoulder and his sober colleague called him away, explaining that the drunkard was supposed to be working for him, but now he had to hire someone more capable. Perhaps it was the iconic visibility of a Leica dangling around my neck that made people instantly recognise that I was carrying a camera and ask me (as they so often do in very poor places) to take their picture. Only one person asked to see the picture on the back of the camera, perhaps people here are afraid to ask, or perhaps they are unused to digital cameras or tourists. De Aar isn't a tourist town. A white farmer who was training for his annual water-polo championship in the olympic-size swimming pool which is crumbling like the railway and green as the Serpentine, was perplexed as to why anyone would come here unless they had to. He thrashed me in a series of ten 25 meter sprints, and looked slightly disappointed that the first sign of a training partner in months wasn't much competition for a farmer, cum competitive water-polo player with a lake in his back yard and a 50m pool in his nearest town.
One of the most decorated homes I photographed this morning was at 84 Wentworth St adjacent to where we're staying with Emma and Tom in the coloured part of town. Coloured is a label for people who are neither black nor white, and from many perspectives, economic, education, health etc they are more disadvantaged that people labelled black. Wentworth street has on its west side a series of crumbly breeze-block bungalows interspersed with rickety tin shacks. The owner had yellow stars hammered out of oil cans fixed into his barbed-wire fence. The corrogated steel that made up the walls and roof of his ramshackle home had a beautiful patina of faded, peeling paint, rust, flowers and flags growing up and over it. He introduced himself as Mr W.J. Muller, and was surrounded by his six children, as thin and muddied, shy and curious as any I've seen on my travels to India, Nepal or Afghanistan. He asked me to come in to his tiny garden and photograph his children with his menagerie. There was a pair of ducks and some ducklings, some chickens and a couple of rabbits in a tiny muddy yard. I asked if I could bring Billy around later on to meet them all and he happily invited us.
By contrast the white side of town, no longer either exclusively white, nor exclusively wealthy, though there are no whites in the black and coloured areas, has wide avenues of brick and stone built houses with some beautiful gardens. There are some exceptional properties, some dating from the 30s or 40s and some quite new. Others only a couple of plots away that have fallen into ruin.The municipal swimming pool to which we returned today was built in 1974 and like the tennis courts and the stadium it has fallen into disrepair since the 1994 elections. As we swam in the green water this afternoon, a member of staff poured in a couple of gallons of liquid from plastic containers labelled hydrochloric acid, 'to purify the water', in the shallow end, right next to where we swam with Billy. A couple of hours later we're not suffering, the gurgling from our bellys has more to do with the excessively meaty diet than the pool water.
Mr M said with a smile, as Laura, Billy, Emma and I arrived, 'this never happens, we never have visitors like this here'. Billy was a wonderful bridge between the families. As is usually the case when lots of children grow up together, they were confident and delighted to take care of him. He was introduced to the ducklings, rabbit, chickens and kitten and very quickly lost his initial shyness. I'm sure if we were staying longer he would make some friends here. He was completely lost in excitement when the 12y old neice of Mr Willy J Muller gave him a duckling to hold. He beamed at the crowd of about a dozen children who squeezed up against the fence in the tiny back yard to watch him.
Tomorrow we're heading for the coast. We're more relaxed than we have been for months after 3 days relaxing with Emma and Tom. Billy is completely at home with them, full of energy and affection. He can point to an elephant, a zebra and a lion with roughly the same degree of accuracy as a baby monkey which reminds us that we're fundamentally all from the same place. We're looking forward to seeing real wildlife in Addo and the sea in Cape St Francis in a couple of days.
(E: I have lovely photos I want to upload but the signal is once agin so poor that I have had to give up - again.)
