A Tale of Two Worlds

Excuse the cheesy title for this entry, but I find that, more than anything else here, I am the most struck by the disparity between the affluent areas and the, for lack of a more nuanced word, poor areas. While the neighborhood around the University of Cape Town is relatively mixed economically, even there two levels of service infrastructure exist side-by-side. One example is transport. There are private cars and taxis for the wealthy(and in South Africa that still means largely white), and cheap, crowded, "unsafe" (depending on who you talk to) trains and mini-van taxis for everybody else. This pattern of parallel yet vastly different standards of living is particularly evident in housing. This was quite evident on Sunday, when a friend drove me about 30 miles away to the small city of Stellenbosch. Along the way, he narrated the history and racial makeup of the different communities that we drove by. Long after the repeal of the Group Areas Act (the apartheid law that segregated housing areas), Cape Town´s outlying communities are still divided by race, and the quality of housing varies by designation. Black, Indian, and Colored (a particular designation used here for people of mixed race who are descendants of a blending of indigenous Africans, imported slaves from Malaysia, and early White settlers who are concentrated in the western part of the country, the former Cape Colony) South African largely continue to live in segregated communities, and it is the Black areas, townships and "informal" settlements that have the highest densities and the fewest resources.

Stellenbosch itself is a dramatic example of this continued separateness. Part wine tourism destination and part college town, this historically Afrikaner city (of about 100,000 people) might as well be any American college town. The climate is a lot like parts of inland California or Eastern Washington, and the city boasts safe, clean streets and an abundance of wine tasting rooms, cafes, shopping boutiques, and restaurants. This is orientation week for first-year students, and the streets are teeming at all hours with energetic (and overwhelmingly white) young people. Meanwhile, just on the city limits is a Colored community and a Black township. The latter, Kayamandi (which I visited yesterday), is a typical township where entire families share one-room wooden shacks and entire streets share a common toilet block and water source.

To be fair, economic inequity is a global phenomenon. Perhaps, it is not unusual to have such extremes living so close and yet so alienated. Even the uncomfortable racial dimension is not unique to South Africa. At the same time, South Africa does have one of the world´s highest scores of inequality as measured by the Gini coefficient or index, a widely used measure of income and wealth discrepancy. Perhaps all this makes South Africa an excellent laboratory for addressing the issue of inequality... except that in the 15 years since the end of apartheid, the gap between the haves and the have-nots here is worsening rather than narrowing (see link above). Hmmm...