Keith Gottschalk

 

Driving Around South Africa with the Roof Down

Welcome to South Africa. If you do a transect near the southern border of the USA, from San Francisco via Dallas to Miami, you'll have a pretty good idea of the climates in our megapolises of Cape Town, Johannesburg and Durban, respectively.

Cape Town is the San Francisco of South Africa, from its brush vegetation, through its culture to its gay-friendliness. But more laid back, and driving on the British side of the road. Cliffs plunging into the sea, postcard views all the way around the Peninsula. We boast the first Imax in Africa, and almost the only philharmonic orchestra. Its multiculturalism includes the descendents of slave artisans from Indonesia. Plus, shoppertainment is big here. Our Waterfront is modeled after "Frisco's wharf.

Johannesburg, like Dallas, is about business and electric storms. Not oil, but platinum and gold triggered off the growth of our largest rustbelt and sprawling conurbation, a sort of beltway running west-east. Corporate head offices range from skyscrapers to campus-style business parks. Most of its working class lives in Soweto. Durban is heat, humidity and beaches. The tourist curios will drum Zulu Kingdom at you from every stall & tourist village. The KwaZulu-Natal Province also has the world's largest Indian diaspora.

South Africa, one of the world's youngest democracies, revels in the paradoxes and contradictions to feed a pub of writers. One republic with eleven kings, one queen, and seven hundred aristocrats on the state payroll.

You want clichés, we got clichés. The first world-and-third world in one country like Brazil. The seventeenth most wired country on the planet, but with one-fifth of adults illiterate. Feminists, fundamentalists and polygamists. Vocal greenies and a vocal gun lobby. Five communists in the cabinet and the best due process on the continent. Try telling anyone who fled Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968 that the first time detention without trial and torture was abolished was in 1994 when a communist became the Minister of Police.

Party politics is lively and complicated. The ruling party is the historic liberation movement, the African National Congress. After eighty-two years in opposition, thirty of them banned and underground, it enjoys a solid 66% majority in Parliament. As a party, it is in a strategic alliance with the Communist Party, and the largest trade union federation, COSATU. As a Government, it is in coalition with the pro-free market and monarchist Inkatha Freedom Party. At provincial level, it is in coalition with the former apartheid oppressor, the New National Party. As a caucus, it admits the one-MP Minority Front, an ethnic Indian wheeler-dealer party. The President appoints as Deputy Minister of Education the sole MP from the black power party AZAPO.

Saintly inclusivity? Cooption? Probably a mixed masala.

Across the House, the Official Opposition, the Democratic Alliance, revels in an in-your-face style that no durn gum'mit will succeed in co-opting it. And more than one offer rejected to prove the point. Alongside it, a bevy of disparate tiny parties, from the Christian right to populist Pan-Africanists.

It is the first Saturday after our Afronaut and youngest internet billionaire lifts off in a Russian rocket to orbit the globe. A charity tin rattles in front of the local supermarket. It is collecting for the carthorse care association. In twenty-first century Cape Town there are over 2000 working horses, ninety-eight years after the first car rattled through our streets. They drag the fruit, fish or vegetables of impoverished hawkers, or scrap metal of second-hand scavengers.

On Friday, in Parliament, the Minister of Water Affairs and Forests, Ronnie Kasrils, launches the national sanitation building campaign. He welcomes to the public gallery the third and seventh millionth South African to be provided with safe drinking water, flown down from their remote villages, still without electricity, phones or blacktop roads. The two matriarchs are in bright ethnic dresses.

On Saturday we pan across the Peninsula to the oldest astronomy observatory in the country, built by slaves for Britain's Royal Navy in 1820. After sunset, the slaves got their own back, stealing building materials to sell on the black market, until this slowed down completion of the buildings. The skilled slave artisans were more forward than Oliver Twist. A delegation of neighbouring cattle farmers protested to the Royal Navy that night after night their livestock was disappearing into a black hole -- gravitationally related to slave nightly barbeques.

The Observatory has the rambling charm of any civil service establishment spanning three centuries. Tumbledown sheds whose origin nobody knows, added to during successive world wars, now host school outreach programmes. Bees have made a hive in the first brass spectroscope. The oldest telescope survives, its dome still rotating on the only off-the-shelf ball bearings available in the 1820s colonies -- surplus Napoleonic war cannon balls.

Today a large marquee is on its lawn. The astronomy director, after a career studying the heavens, has unexpectedly entered them. An astonishing 150 plus people have come to celebrate his life. Astonishing when you reflect that there are barely a dozen tenured astronomers in the province. The Minister of Arts, Culture, Science & Technology apologies he could not come but sends a warm message, as does the Northern Cape Provincial Premier.

The black president of the National Research Foundation speaks of astronomy's then stereotype as "four or five white men with gray hair". Just when the Government has launched a nationwide campaign for corrective action, affirmative action, this Scotsman comes lobbying for funds to build a 'scope more than four times larger than any in the country. The sum is so huge by third world standards that this line item must go to a cabinet meeting. Art and culture want their slice of the cake. After that knife-cut, the sciences from Botany to Zoology must be cut back if Astronomy is to get its heavenly dream.

The Director-General for Science & Technology tells the Astronomer: you've made the technical case. Give me the political case. The astronomer negotiates the first-ever deal with a black technikon to get their apprentices' in-service training in the observatory instrumentation workshops. He creates the first-ever post for a full-time public outreach educator, & to fill it lures a physics teacher away from the poshest private school in Cape Town. He even manages to tempt some of the few black post-graduate mathematicians away from accountancy careers into astrophysics.

The 'scope line item survives two cabinet meetings. Its laser tower has just been completed. On completion, first light, it will actually be the largest single standing optical telescope in the world - until overtaken by bigger scopes.

Tourism is booming, as the exchange rate is ten to one in the foreigners' favour. Adverts shout out Big Five game parks in malaria-free provinces. Also touted is surgical tourism. It is cheaper for Canadians to fly business class to our private hospitals for major orthodontic work than pay back home. Americans discover that heart and other organ transplants, and plastic surgery, can all be done at bargain prices for world-class surgery. Plus enjoying a game lodge thrown in for convalescence.

Challenges are clearly vast. A crime rate like NY or south LA two decades ago. Unemployment officially estimated at over thirty per cent. One of the world's worst pandemics of Aids and TB. Rural poverty traps, where malnutrition stunts maybe a quarter of the children in traditional communities, and in our shantytowns. Even before Aids, the fertility rate was plummeting towards zero population growth, but a sluggish economic growth rate of maybe three percent is half of what is required to lower unemployment. And modern economic growth tends to be jobless for the unskilled, save for seasonal Mac-jobs cooking and cleaning and serving tourists. IT is the fastest growing sector in our economy, but its jobs assume a highschool-plus education.

Culture ranges from jam-packed jazz clubs jamming to the colonial cringe. Smoke and substance-filled nightclubs & discos are packed. Poets and writers circles, typically a dozen members, host their monthly house-meetings. Their little lit mags, websites & email forums all exist on the margins of pop culture. The filmmakers and performing arts are always lobbying for public subsidies. The visual artists lobby for public commissions chosen by competition. Choral and gospel music is big. Crossover does better than traditional ethnic.

Most of the entertainment industry is still under white ownership. It shows. It is harder to find CDs or films from the rest of our continent, Africa, than from Hollywood. When Africa's largest shoppertainment precinct opened, sprawling Canal Walk, it came with its theatre and movie complex called Ratanga Junction. Incredibly, its funders ignored the local product, vibrant Creole entertainers and crossover musicians. They scrapped the bottom of the British barrel for aging queens and over-the-hill cabaret dregs. This anachronistic colonial cringe was a loss-maker until these has-been Brits got their pink tickets.

The tip of Africa is also the end of the road for many migratory birds. A few stork pairs have decided to chuck up Europe and nest here as permanent residents. The smartest four pairs, with remarkable prescience about knowing your place in the world, build their huge gawky nests on top of giant aviaries in the Tygerberg zoo, Cape Town. The bird twitchers wallow in the Zeekoevlei sewage farms, which boast more birds than the continent's largest natural lagoons and pans.

South Africa has a state Department of Arts and Culture. Cultural politics means pork barrel politics. No angst debates about the role and place of the arts in uplifting society. Cultural politics is a straight slugfest for public bucks. Apartheid museums were a hegemonic triumphalism of settler conquest over the barbarians. Colonial art galleries were a display of the exoticism of the unspoilt natives. They now decay in financial anorexia.

Budget priorities go to the Robben Island Museum, where the liberation movement leaders were jailed for up to twenty-seven years imprisonment. Next, the minority partner in the coalition Government is the largely Zulu Inkatha Freedom Party. Therefore, next on the culture budget is Zulu dancing, Zulu battle sites and Zulu royal graves. In the art galleries, paintings of unspoilt savages have been replaced by montages of shanties, and bricolages of detainees in solitary confinement and torture. Even in the Police Museum in Pretoria, which formerly had Gestapo-like creepiness, trainee policemen are now shown a human rights exhibit of black power founder Steve Biko being beaten and kicked to death during interrogation. Public assistance to the arts and crafts curio industry is growing. And without public assistance, a variety of Zimbabwean and Congolese street, stall and market vendors display masks and wares of varied provenance. African restaurants will introduce the curious to the tastes and ambience of our spicy continent, from Morocco through Ethiopia and Kenya to South Africa. Malay-Indonesian cuisine is big in Cape Town, the only ex-slave colony where the slave masters abandoned their home food for their slaves' cooking preferences. Indian restaurants jostle alongside Thai, Chinese and Korean.

We read that there is a vocal lobby in California and Florida campaigning to entrench in law that English is and will remain the sole official language of the USA. South Africa's constitution grants eleven languages official status. Our state motto has been changed from a dead white language, Latin, into a dead black language, Bushman or San. Our satellite TV has a "South Asian bouquet" including Bollywood's Hindi and Tamil soapies. The late Rain Queen Modjadji V complained her queendom's schoolchildren were not learning in their Lobedu dialect but in North Sotho language. The Tonga-speakers of Tongaland are in the same position. The remaining three octogenarian speakers of Koranna receive much attention.

So far though, state culture subsidies do not alleviate the financial reality. It is only economic to publish any book in a "historically disvantaged language", as our vernaculars are now called, if it is prescribed as a schoolbook which the Education Departments buy in bulk. While CDs sell in Zulu and the other larger vernaculars, nine-tenths of adspend goes only to English language ads. If you're rich enough to buy our products and services, reckon the marketers, you can speak English.

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