The Eyes of a Stranger

"The eyes of the stranger are large, but he sees nothing in the town."
- African proverb

Landing in a country you do not know, whose culture is foreign to you, gives you scant authority to describe or discuss the place. But first impressions have their own naive validity that locals may laugh at or perhaps fail to recognize. A new arrival can take nothing for granted. So I am emboldened to begin at my own beginning here in South Africa, where we landed for the first time in March.

My only prior impressions of this place were vague and mostly negative, having to do with the fascistic, terrorist apartheid governments of the last half century, the segregation and suppression of the black African majority by the white minority. This seemed to be one of the great cultural crimes of the twentieth century. And of course I knew about the accession of Nelson Mandela to the presidency, after twenty-seven years in prison as a political dissident. Mandela's generosity of spirit and apparent lack of bitterness toward the oppressors who had stolen decades of his life seemed to me one of the great success stories of the 20th century.

Johannesburg's huge Oliver Tambo Airport was ghostly empty the day we arrived. Only a skeleton crew of uniformed black employees were there, one of whom said she was doing my son a favor to let him into the country, as he did not have sufficient pages in his passport to give his South African entry stamp its own page. The white woman who was hired to drive us to Melville - on some of the most elegant freeways we had ever seen - complained about the government, though she acknowledged it was not "politically correct" to do so.

But the overwhelming first impression here is of security, or rather, the paranoid attempt to attain it, with high walls around many homes, topped with electrified razor wire, signs about "Armed Response" security companies and plenty of large lethal-looking dogs. And this is Melville, a relatively laid-back, hip and racially mixed part of town. Are things really this dangerous?

After a dinner party several nights later our host insisted on driving us home even though we only lived two blocks from their house. It seemed to this stranger that apartheid karma was taking its toll, that the fear was of black retribution against the great white sins of the past, which appear to continue the economic hardships of the majority, in spite of the obvious wealth before us here: large homes, luxury German cars (BMW, Mercedes) and numerous well-appointed shopping malls.

It seems that some things have not changed since 1946, when Alan Paton wrote about the effects on the white minority of oppressing the black majority. "For we fear not only the loss of our possessions, but the loss of our superiority and the loss of our whiteness. Some say it is true that crime is bad but would not this be worse? Is it not better to hold what we have and to pay the price of it with fear?"

In his elegaic & tragic novel, "Cry, The Beloved Country," published just as apartheid was becoming law in South Africa (1948), Paton describes the price the whites must pay to oppress the black Africans: "We shall live from day to day and put more locks on the doors and get a fine fierce dog... and hold on to our handbags more tenaciously; and the beauty of the trees by night, and the raptures of lovers under the stars, these things we shall forgo... We shall be careful and knock this off our lives and that off our lives, and hedge ourselves about with safety and precaution. And our lives will shrink, but they shall be the lives of superior beings; and we shall live with fear, but at least it will not be a fear of the unknown..."

Much of this reality and this karma appears to linger here in South Africa, an odd mix of First World and Third World realities, where the enshrinement of black political leaders has not meant great social and economic changes for the overwhelming majority of this country's poor. There is great beauty here and great sadness, which we will explore in subsequent posts. Whether this land can ever overcome its brutal bigoted legacy remains to be seen.