GUILT AND CAPE TOWN

Imagine Malibu without all those Californians or Santa Barbara, with a flat-topped, granite mountain just a few blocks inland from the sea.   That is Cape Town, stunningly beautiful, yet complex, where the weather is always perfect and there’s nary a cloud in the sky.

South Africa has 47 million people of which 12%, only 5 million, are white.  Just around the corner from every multi-million dollar (white) neighborhood, just over the hill from every tony beachfront (white) community, is a township teeming with (black) poverty and third-world infrastructure and containing 10x the population of the white areas nearby.  The Townships are never seen (unless, as we did,  one takes a wrong turn),  hidden off the main roads and byways.  But everyone knows they are there.   It is the third world abutting the first, with all of the spoils of the colonial era on display, in full panoramic color, a constant reminder of the imbalance between the races.  Based on mere observation, it would be easy to believe that there is a huge white majority in this country, similar to the U.S.     The only black people we see are those in the service and construction industries – waiters, housemaids and road crews. Why, Yosy and I ask ourselves, would anyone buy a $10 million house here, when 42 million people are underprivileged, without jobs, attend second class schools and live in massive shantytowns, where unemployment is above 50%?   Isn’t there a revolution just around the corner?  What will happen when 90+ year-old Nelson Mandela, who has lead the country out of apartheid and into legal equality with an obsessive insistence on peace and reconciliation, passes?  Isn’t it only a matter of time before the huge population of the black poor demand a larger share of the spoils from the whites? 

My friend Jaqui and her husband, Michael, South Africans born during the apartheid era, (which ended in the 1990’s), say that there is no need to worry.  The blacks here have seen the results of divesting the whites of their power.   Zimbabwe confiscated white farms, killed and injured many of the white citizens who had lived there for decades, going back to the time when it was known as Rhodesia, and took over control of the government.  Farming plummeted (the local population had never learned to manage the land) and inflation reached more than 1 million percent due to political mismanagement.  Zimbabwe went from a rich and well developed country to a poverty-stricken African one, where people are hungry and desperate, and corruption reigns.   The blacks of South Africa don’t want a Zimbabwe here.   It will be worse for the blacks then than it is now, say our friends, and the blacks know it.  No worries.

Still, that doesn’t alleviate the guilt, which, for me is more pervasive here than it was in much poorer West Africa, where everyone (except corrupt government officials) is equally destitute and hungry and the spoils are kept behind very high walls.   Here, the whites are well-fed, have fancy cars and homes, and good-paying jobs, while the overwhelming majority of the country is left out of the mix and without access to the good life.

Despite the guilt, I am catching up on important and much needed hygiene rituals.  Jaqui took me for a manicure, which was administered while lying down – that is, I was put on a massage table, with plush towels, while the manicurist worked on my nails.   How decadent!    I’ve had a pedicure and a facial, and I take two hot showers every day. I’ve been stuffing myself on buffet breakfasts, gourmet dinners and everything in-between.

We visited Robben Island, about 7 miles offshore, where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for 27 years.   Former political prisoners acted as guides, while their former Afrikaan guards captained the ferries that took us to the Island.  Our guide was a prisoner from 1982 until his release in 1990, with Mandela.   He told us about the guards who buried two prisoners alive up to their necks, beat them and then forced them to drink the guards’ urine.   The prisoners survived and now work on the Island, side by side with their former guards.   That is Mandela’s Truth & Reconciliation policy in action.   As long as former tormentors tell the truth (and there are many eyewitnesses who can verify the veracity of a story), there will be no prison terms, no penalties, only Reconciliation.  It is a policy that has been successfully adopted by Rwanda after the genocide there and has helped both nations heal from their respective dark histories.

This morning, at 7 am, we climbed Lion’s Head Mountain, adjacent to Table Mountain, with Jaqui and Michael.   It took a little longer than usual, an hour rather than 45 minutes, and though not horribly strenuous, it was nevertheless fairly difficult for us New Yorkers not used to climbing much more than a flight of stairs.  We used chains, ladders and hand grabs near the top to climb the mountain’s steep, rocky face.   The 360-degree view of the sea, the mountains and the city below from the pointy top was as if from the clouds and the sky and I could have stayed there so much longer.  But some people have to work, (Jaqui & Michael) and so we made our way down fairly quickly, and had a wonderful breakfast overlooking the bay and the rocky coast.

I could easily live here (were it not for the hidden misery lurking all around, in plain sight).