Setting up house and settling in

After an itinerant first two weeks, last weekend I was able to move in to the place where I will stay for the rest of my time here. It is a spacious one-bedroom cottage (pictured at right) in the front yard garden of a house near to the university. It was nice to unpack fully, but the best part so far (besides that view of the side of Table Mountain in the background) has been having a full kitchen. I've had fun stocking the cupboards and doing some cooking and baking. My landlords (a UCT professor and school librarian, both semi-retired) are wonderful, and they are great resources both for my project and as I explore the neighborhood. I have my sister to thank for the connection, as she stayed here ten years ago while doing research.

I've started to explore farther afield from the UCT neighborhood. In part, this is due my becoming more comfortable navigating the transportation options, such as the ubiquitous mini-van "taxis," as well as having found a used bicycle (pictured below). The bike is not flashy (which may not make it theft-proof, but should help); it's a classic, basic machine that has already had a liberating and joyful effect on my daily travel.

My getting out more is also largely thanks to having linked up with some other American visitors (all of whom have cars!); there is a second teacher here (from Boston) on my program, and also a professor from Miami U (in Ohio) here on a Fulbright with his family. I've also met a family from Seattle who is here for six months. All this has meant some social invitations, including a few dinners, being invited along on an excursion to Cape Point yesterday, and a Table Mountain hike planned for VERY early tomorrow morning. These emerging friendships are a nice counterbalance to lots of time spent researching and reading, which has been enjoyable but also rather solitary. A large contingent of foreign students from all over Africa and the world (including a conspicuous number of Americans) has arrived at the university this past week, and the South Africans are starting to show up to. I look forward to meeting more people through classes, which start next week, and through playing some soccer on campus (I've found a group that plays indoor soccer during the luch break).

Race and "transformation"

So, it's time to broach the thorny topic of race. Unavoidably, due to its history, South Africa society is highly racialized. Discourse at all levels – media coverage and conversation, government documents and statistics, political rhetoric, and daily individual interaction – is framed in race terms and replete with race references. I find this a welcome contrast to home, where race issues are often discussed, at least in “polite” society, mainstream culture, and the academic realm (read “white dominated” in all three cases) in such general, indirect, or politically correct terms as to be nearly completely deprived of their urgent relevance to the daily life.

The ways in which modern (a.k.a. “post-apartheid”) South Africa is racist, however, is a more complicated question. Certainly, institutionalized racism endures (and parallels with the United States are unavoidable); patterns in housing and educational access are stark examples of this. At the same time, many South Africans, including many of its youth (those in the so-called “post-apartheid” generation,) seem quite committed to living out the reconciliatory tone and promise set out in during the dismantling of apartheid and the birth of the democratic “rainbow” nation. (For anyone unfamiliar with South Africa’s constitution, its preamble is worth a read.) Currently, the desire to host a safe, successful World Cup and support of South Africa’s national soccer team, Bafana Bafana (victorious over Zimbabwe last night!), are being used as rallying causes for national unity and lauded as opportunities to showcase South Africa’s harmonious racial integration. As much as South Africa is a work in progress, the ambitious project of building a new, free, and equal society (generally referred to as “transformation”)is moving forward, and the World Cup presents an undeniable opportunity to advance it.

Working against this progress are some familiar bugaboos of dismantling institutional racism. For example, the Black Economic Empowerment program of affirmative action in the business arena has led to accusations (and realities) of tokenism, reverse-discrimination, and corruption. Also, past racism and discrimination, while very real, make convenient scapegoats for a government that is not managing to bring basic service delivery to large segments of the country’s poorest citizens. Some populist politicians have stirred up racial tension with inflammatory rhetoric (ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema, for example) that reinforces negative relations, exacerbates division, and, at its most extreme, stirs up fear, anger, and hatred (even leading to violence). At the same time, those opposing change (almost exclusively members of the formerly privileged racial groups: Whites, Indians, and Coloureds) have been quick to resort to racist explanations for everything from political corruption and business failure to poor educational results and even losses on the Cricket field.

No longer insulated by apartheid, South Africa’s whites are now free to be unemployed and to slip into poverty and indigence, and a few are doing so. That said, the white minority continues to enjoy disproportionate wealth and access to educational and other opportunity. This privileged position is being maintained while at the same time South African blacks make considerable gains as a group, although these gains are largely being enjoyed by an small portion of the majority population.

According to a newspaper summary, a study just released by the Bureau of Market Research at Unisa ("The largest university in South Africa and one of the largest distance education institutions in the world" - according to itself) reports that white households make up 10.8% of the population, yet accounted for 40.2% of consumption expenditure in 2008, down from 48.1% in 1993. During the same period, the share of consumption expenditure by black households rose from 38.6% to 47.1%. The remaining 2008 expenditure was done by Coloured and Asian households, at 7.8% and 4.9% respectively. The article did not give population percentages for non-whites. (“Spending patterns reveal past inequity,” Cape Times, January 15, 2010, p. 14)

The "transformation" of South Africa is indeed still in process.

A few scenes from Fezeka S.S.S.

I got to spend Friday visiting the Fezeka Senior Secondary School in the Gugulethu township. This was thanks to my friend Swallows who is the school's Computer and Technology teacher. He has a couple of labs to work with, although the Internet service is frustratingly out of order. The school is a science and math focus school, and it also offers instruction in Sotho. This means it draws students from a wide area. The students have six 50-minute periods per day, with a seven day rotating schedule. The facilities are basic, little beyond desks and chalk/white boards in the rooms, but functional. To the delight of the teachers, the school is getting some interactive white board set-ups (as seen in the classroom photo). A Canadian non-profit "Education without Borders" supports this school, including by sponsoring an English teacher. More information about the school, such as a clip from a recent film on its award-winning choir and a link to the Canadian teacher's blog, are one the EwB website. There is also an American volunteer at the school (just graduated from university) who, among other tasks, is helping start a recycling program. Fezeka, like many South African secondary schools, is dealing with the fallout from last year's (2009; unlike in the U.S., their school year coincides with the calendar year) very poor "matric" results (passing rates on the end-of-high-school exams).

More on what has developed as an education "crisis" to come. For now, a good primer is an Economist article contributed by Steve Z.

At work and play

On the work side, I am getting some ground work done for my project. My goal is to visit schools to assess two things: first, how is globalization changing curriculum and teaching here in South Africa? second, how much of these changes are relevant and accessible to under-resourced schools? These same questions are being asked around the world and in the US. Resource-rich schools are linking up on the Internet to share lessons, accessing the wealth of resources available on the Web, developing innovative internationalized curricula, and sending students on a range of service and exchange trips. Meanwhile, many schools and students are being left out of these changes and the connections and opportunities that come with them. I am particularly interested in exploring this gap and contributing to strategies for narrowing it.

I plan to visit a range of schools here, and just this week I have been to the International School of Cape Town and to the Hector Peterson School in Wallacedene township (the school where Kristina and I worked during the Bridges workshop in 2008), with another visit planned for tomorrow to Fezeka Secondary School in the Guguletu township. My hosts will be a teacher and student who also participated in the Bridges workshop.

For play, I managed to find a couple of weekly pick-up soccer games near to the university (unfortunately, they are back-to-back on Saturdays). I had a good time playing for the first time in two months last weekend. Today, I rented a mountain bike and did a nice ride up logging roads and down some manageable single-track trails at a forest preserve about 10K (6 miles) from downtown Stellenbosch. It´s in the 90´s today, and the riding felt a lot like Eastern Washington in the summer.

I´m off to find some water to jump in!

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...

crime & security, leadership & reform, and World Cup 2010

Well, so five days in, and it feels like much longer. Some of that is certainly due to how hard my brain is working. I’m hearing different accents and languages all day, I’m having to look over the other shoulder and in the other direction for those cars I hear coming, and I’m having to process a lot of new data from my new surroundings. I am, of course, also on edge due to all the discussion and cautionary tales of violence and crime here. These stories started with the taxi ride from the airport, when I heard about youth dropping rocks onto cars from overpasses, and continued the next morning when a newspaper headline reported vandalism and theft at schools on the eve of their opening. While conversations and media coverage inevitable arrive at reports of crime, I’m keeping in mind the school building theft and park muggings that have recently happened almost literally in my own back yard in Seattle. Two other recurring, and related, themes so far have been preparations for the upcoming World Cup and evaluating the ruling ANC government. Any discussion of the ANC (South Africa’s dominant political party) invariably includes commentary on the controversial figure of Jacob Zuma, South Africa’s newly-elected president.

On the one hand, President Zuma is a celebrated hero of the resistance movement, a charismatic populist, and a beloved representative of the Zulu, the nation’s largest ethnic group. One the other, his critics condemn him for his leftist rhetoric and leanings, his alleged role in a corrupt major arms deal (involvement for which he was belatedly indicted and then controversially unindicted even as his close friend and associate was convicted and sent to prison), and his promiscuous lifestyle that includes multiple wives and a large family, on which he spends lavishly, and an accusation of rape that, although the case was dismissed, led to the exposure of some problematic attitudes about sex and AIDS. (As these stories have been covered in great detail, as you might imagine, more information about any of this is quite easy to find.)

The debate in the media, and among the few South Africans with whom I’ve had conversations about politics (an admittedly small and unrepresentative sample), seems to center around whether or not President Zuma is genuinely committed to making meaningful and sustainable progress on South Africa’s most pressing problems: infrastructure development, massive unemployment (currently near 30%), wealth redistribution, and delivery of basic services. One necessary step will be reigning in the rampant corruption that seems to afflict all levels of government (numerous ANC officials have been accused of enriching themselves at public expense) and to be rampant in the private sector as well. He will also have to decide whether or not to embrace post-apartheid reconciliation and help lead South Africa toward the non-racial democracy that its constitution envisions. Given apartheid’s undebatably shameful history and its damaging, and enduring legacies, it is easy – and often politically convenient – to blame the past for current problems. In fact, such claims inevitably have elements of truth to them. Any path forward is made all the more challenging by a host of other factors, including the global economic crisis, South Africa’s enduring (even worsening) economic inequality (still largely split along racial lines), and the ever-present spectre of Zimbabwe’s collapse and ongoing implosion.

Alec Russell ends his new book Bring Me My Machine Gun: the Battle for the Soul of South Africa from Mandela to Zuma, an excellent and up-to-date history of the post apartheid era (that gets its title from a resistance song) ends with an ominous warning about the fate of the nation if the ANC does not undertake significant reform:

“South Africa will – in a decade or so – find itself led by an ossified ruling party overseen by bickering apparatchiks presiding over a sclerotic dysfunctional state. The dreams of its becoming a beacon for the continent will lie in the dust.”

A chilling, sobering, and discouraging prospect.

However, against this disquieting backdrop is a pervasive resiliency and a cautious hopefullness. This can be seen well in the preparations for and enthusiasm about South Africa’s hosting of the upcoming World Cup. For the soccer-illiterate, this is, in terms of intensity and importance for its fans, the equivalent of March Madness or maybe the BCS, except the teams are from 32 different countries and the tournament is only held once every four years.

To be continued…

Welcome to Cape Town

For those of you just tuning in...

I have finally arrived in Cape Town, South Africa (late last night) and will be starting my research project in the coming weeks (more on that later). For now, I am busy getting settled and adjusting to both a big time shift and a much warmer climate. I've come here after spending almost two months living in Washington DC. During that time, I created this blog in part to keep family and friends up to date and in part as a personal journal. I included a few pictures as well as links to some of the most interesting exhibits and events that I attended. Feel free to browse - and to comment on - these archived entries. Now that I am here, the tone may shift in a more academic direction as I start visiting schools and having other experiences here. We'll see.

Happy new year, and thanks for checking in on me!