I am sure you have heard on the news about the xenophobic attacks on other African nationals in many parts of South Africa. It has now become a very worrying situation and is no longer isolated to parts of Johannesburg. Capetown’s biggest township has seen some considerable and brutal violence over the past few days and even in sleepy Hout Bay, the situation is tense. JC and I have gone so far as invited and insisted that Calvin, our favourite waiter from the local coffee shop to stay with us. He is from Zimbabwe and lives in IY, the local black township.

In Capetown’s biggest township the foreigners were given till midnight last Friday to get out “or else”. Terribly sad situation. These very countries, especially Zimbabwe, Zambia and Mozambique helped the ANC immensely during the apartheid struggle and now their own nationals are being targeted, beaten and killed by the black South Africans.

So far over 50 people have been killed. Listening to the news it is obvious that this behavior is not popular amongst black South Africans, especially the older ones as they well remember the struggle for liberation. It seems that the problems lay very much with a younger element of thuggery and there have been strong hints that much of it is politically motivated.

So far President Mbeki has not made any comments and the army is not being sent in to diffuse the situation. As far as I can see the government might as well be condoning it as nothing real is being done to quell the violence.

Our friend Max (see link to article about him here) who owns a boat in the marina and is a member of the ANC (one of the white South Africans who fought with the ANC during the struggles) and is on the Western Province’s government was boo’ed off stage yesterday, had his truck’s tyres slashed and was locked in a room and roughed up. This was at an ANC talk. It is rumoured that Zuma’s supporters are behind such scenes.

The ANC is most certainly splitting and there is much internal rivalry and fighting. The church opposite us took in a number of Malawian people and the international school housed many many families, mainly from Zimbabwe.

Even though last night was a quiet night in the township, thanks largely to the obvious police force patrolling the streets, many people are just too frightened to return to their homes. We are insisting that Calvin stays a few nights with us to see what will happen in the coming days. I feel safe here, although JC has decided to fill the engine with diesel and have everything live, incase we do need to make a sudden escape! I don’t see anything bad happening to the non-African foreigners.

It is so sad, thousands of people are being harassed and nothing is being done about it. Imagine what would happen if that were thousands of white Europeans and Americans… Life is just not fair. Nelson Madela must be weeping to see the state of his country.

Over the past few months I had been writing my thoughts on the ever present colour issues in South Africa and I think given what is going on at the moment that it is the right time to put it on the blog.

A social commentary on South Africa.

This title is more than misleading – I am no expert on South Africa - its politics, history or society. These are merely observations that I have made, very subjective and probably a little naïve as I have not spent a great deal of time here. I do, however, try to speak to as many people as possible from different walks of life and parts of South Africa and of course from different racial backgrounds to try and understand things a little better. The other big misnomer in this title is the fact that I have never travelled more than 5 hours north or east of Cape Town, i.e. I have stuck very much to the Western Cape province.

I guess the first thing that strikes me is that the people here are not very comfortable in their own skin, whatever colour that might be. South Africa I have learned is a complicated country of shades of colours and also religions. There are many tribes within the black majority and there are also many refugees in this part of the country, mainly from Angola, Zimbabwe, Congo, Somalia and Malawi. There are Afrikaners and “European” whites and there are “coloureds”, those people who in the Americas would be called “mestizos” – a combination of ancestry that is black and white and there is the sizeable Muslim population.

I will start with the black population. In this region, the Western Cape, they are mainly Xhosa (other parts of South Africa are mainly Zulu) who speak quite good English but all speak their native Xhosa tongue, a beautiful language with lots of guttural plosives and sometimes that lovely soft Welsh sounding “ll”! There are 2 townships in Hout Bay – the black one and the coloured one. The black one called Imizamo Yethu (also known as’IY’) has seen a lot of work done by Niall Mellon and his great Irish campaign to build houses for the poor. This settlement was created by the ANC to increase the black vote in this part of the country a number of years ago, but now it houses thousands of people, mostly illegals living in shacks. 80% of them are refugees, mostly from Namibia, Zimbabwe, Malawi and Angola. Most of those that have work are employed as maids, child minders, manual workers, gardeners and some as check out staff in the supermarkets.

Hout Bay is a very affluent area, full of big houses, owned by rich white people, menial and service labor would be the main income for these people. I have learned that the average salary is Rand 100 a day for a working man. That is equivalent to about Euro 9 a day. Yes it is cheap to live here but not that cheap… I am told that under the new regime of equality there are now many rich black people in South Africa. I have not seen any in IY and I have never seen a black person in the more expensive restaurants that we occasionally eat in.

The black township on the whole is a nice place, thanks largely to Niall Mellon and his initiative to build houses for the communities around Capetown. 450 houses were built by the Irish and these houses are pretty colours and seem really well taken care of. There was a controversy over who was allocated them, some people a little bitter that not all that received them deserved them. Others seem to have been sold or rented out at profits to the owners. I was told that of the 450 built, 425 have built shacks in the gardens and are renting out the house for profit. Can’t blame them really.

The masses still live in the corrugated roof and tin shacks that one sees on TV. There seems to be a great community spirit here and the communal facilities are not bad (all built and paid for by charities of course). I guess compared to other South African townships, these people are lucky as the landscape around here really is beautiful and the beach is within walking distance, plus there are so many wealthy people here that it seems like it is easy enough to get work. What I have now learned, is that it is getting harder and harder for the Xhosa men to get work as other African workers are preferred, especially those from Malawi. We have been told by many people that Xhosas are “lazy and drink their wages away”. We were also told by several people that there are many guns and weapons in the townships (owned mainly by the Xhosas) and that retaliations or robberies on white employers are not uncommon. Sounds like a sweeping statement but we have been told this by both whites and other black Africans.

I have become quite friendly with a number of waiters and our Malawian house cleaner Blessing and they all tell me how violent the townships are and how many guns there are there. The foreigners main aim is to send money home to their families so they keep their heads down, work hard and simply don’t have the money for drink, thus they are favoured by the whites over the local male population. This of course leads to other social problems within the township, which is now evident in the many xenophobic attacks as some of the native blacks feel their jobs are being taken away from them by these foreigners who are willing to work for less pay just to have a job to send money home to their own families.

The Somalians tend to be the shopkeepers in the townships and we were told they had the funds to do so because of the UN hand outs which enabled them to start small businesses. These Africans over the years have become targets for the disenfranchised young South Africans and much of the current attacks are about looting shops.

Blessing’s story:
As part of our rental contract we get the house cleaned once a week. I have now come to know Blessing very well. He is 32 and is from Malawi. He has a sister who has a 3 month old girl and I have given him clothes for her that Saoirse has grown out of. I found out last week that his wife and son still live in Malawi as they can not afford to buy her a passport (costs Rand 1,000 about Euro 90) and the transport fare is another Rand 1,000. He has not seen his wife or little 2 year old since January and when I asked him he said he hoped to have the money saved by next November and send for them then. He makes Rand 120 (Euro 10) a day but has to pay for transport costs and food himself. He is very lonely here and tells me he is quite afraid of the Xhosas in his township as they are violent and drink a lot. Blessing is a devout Christian and a hard worker. What an incredibly tough life.

The Coloureds
The “coloureds” (which is an official name by the way) are a hard one to figure out. For a start as a naïve white Irish girl I find it hard to figure out at times if someone is “black” or “coloured” as sometimes there is very little physically different in their appearance. Coloureds also have their own township but it seems to be better somehow. Less corrugated and tin and more brick, although I gather that there is a huge amount of poverty there too. They seem to be mainly employed as front staff in the shops. They all speak perfect English and Afrikaans, but as a rule they do not speak Xhosa. From what I can gather, many of them feel a little hard done by the new ANC regime.

Under Apartheid they suffered as much as the blacks did, even though they have some sort of white blood in them. They would be categorized by having their noses and lips measured. Now that the ANC is in power, there is an emphasis on black power, but this seems to be for blacks only, not too much is conceded to the coloureds so from what I have gleaned they feel quite embittered about this.

Hout Bay originally had a very small black population and a much bigger Coloured one. After apartheid ended, the ANC shipped in Blacks by the bus load to gain black votes thus creating the black township and the Coloureds were in fact forced out of their township and put onto land on the side of the cliff which suffers from mud slides whenever there is heavy rain. No wonder they are bitter…

Tanya’s story:
I have gotten to know the girl who works at the children’s boutique in one of the shopping centres here. Tanya is a Coloured. She explained to me that her grandmother was white and her grandfather black. She speaks Afrikaans and English but no Xhosa. I was curious about her grandmother as back in those days it must have been very difficult being white with a black partner. She told me about the time her grandmother was at the bus stop with her at-the-time black boyfriend. The bus came and saw they were talking together and drove on without stopping. The next day the same thing happened. On the third day she told her boyfriend to hide behind the bus shelter. She got onto the bus with the turpentine she was carrying (they had been painting someone’s house) and suddenly the black boyfriend hops out of the bushes and gets on the bus too. She demands to know why the bus driver had not stopped the previous 2 days and he replies because she was white and he was black and they had been talking together and that the only way he would let them both on was if he sat at the back of the bus with the blacks and she sat at the front with the whites. She proceeded to pour the turpentine all over him and threatened to light a match to him if he did not stop again for them. She then sat down beside the boyfriend!!! Go Sister!

The whites
White people are roughly divided into two, although I should mention there is a sizeable number of tourists who reside here for a few months a year to escape the European and American winters. I am not counting them. These tourists are mainly British, German, Dutch and Irish, based on the accents I am hearing.

The whites who have been living here for decades and even centuries are the original Dutch farmers called Afrikaners and the British who came afterwards, called the “European whites” (I guess Holland is suddenly not part of Europe!). In Hout Bay it is nearly exclusively English speaking but other parts of Capetown would have large majorities of Afrikaans speaking whites.

I have to be honest here and say that at first I found the whites to be very arrogant and rude. I have now come to know a number of white people well and they are all spot on, but I guess the past is still very much ingrained into this society, whether they accept it or not, and it is hard not to pick up on a certain amount of weirdness (for lack of a better word) with many of them. Especially amongst the older people who would have grown up solely with apartheid for most of their lives.

Without justifying it, it must be very hard for them to change their ways. Many of them were taught from birth to be racist, so that can not just disappear overnight. I have seen it several times in the eyes and actions of whites here – an older woman demanding that her bags are packed a certain way at the check out and giving out to the young black helper about how clueless he is. It is even reflected in their driving which is very forceful, rude and arrogant.

I have had drinks with many white people now and with some of them after a few too many there are stories told and some rather disturbing sentiments creep out. You realize just what their real feelings are with regard to black people and how they are forced to repress these thoughts as it is now an “equal” society. Comments about how dirty and stupid black people are, were shocking to me to hear from people I thought were good and fair people. Then again I can not understand these sentiments fully as I did not grow up in this society, so am not trying to blame or justify either side, merely writing what I have seen and felt.

I think the most shocking one we heard was the 30 something white guy who told JC that the biggest pity in the war was that they (the Blacks) weren’t all killed. I have one guy who tells me every time I meet him how I do not understand the situation, Africa will always be poor and backwards because of the black mentality, Blacks being stupid, dirty, lazy etc. Needless to say we always end up in big arguments…

With the ANC in power, there is also a slight reverse discrimination in play. Our lovely neighbours Rod and Mary in the marina told us they had to sell their small business as the ANC government stipulates that at least one of the directors must be black and as they were the only 2 directors and are both white and too small to employ anyone else they were forced to sell up. There is still so much inequality here that it shocks me sometimes. We have splashed out a couple of times and gone to nice restaurants and the only black people in sight are washing dishes and preparing the food in the kitchens.

The white clientele are straight from a Hollywood film, all beautiful and plastic fantastic, with expensive cars and designer clothes. It is beyond me how someone can drive an expensive convertible car and not seem to notice the barefoot starving children begging at every street traffic lights. Most of the volunteers that I have met doing charitable work here are foreigners and it makes you wonder why the wealthier whites are not more involved. I think many of them are very paranoid. We have heard again and again how unsafe the country has become since apartheid was lifted and all the houses have barbed wire (some electrified) and everyone has a large growling dog especially trained to bark at black people. That paranoia is almost tangible, but then again, is easy enough for me to say, but nearly every day on the news you hear of someone else who was shot dead for a mobile phone.

In Constantia, one suburb away from us, a woman dropped her sick husband into the hospital. She drove back to her home at 10pm that night and as she waited for her gates to open she was shot through the head. I read the interview with her husband in the local paper. It was heartbreaking as they were both active anti-apartheid people and never thought anything bad could happen to them. I guess what I am saying is that if enough negative things/experiences happen to you as a white person, I can not judge them for being paranoid, I might well be just as bad if I lived here…

Many of the “English” South Africans, i.e. those who came over years ago for a better life style, are stuck here now. They sold up in the UK and moved down here in the good old days and with their Sterling could afford large houses and maids and gardeners, but now they realize that the country is very unstable and that they can not sell their large house and if they did, what they would get would not be enough to buy a place in the UK and live off the difference for the rest of their lives… They do not seem to realize that there is violence and crime in the UK and Europe too, although granted it is a lot more vicious here than at home. It is hardly surprising though given the extreme poverty most of the black community still live in.

Muslim
The other major group of people is the Muslim one. These again can be roughly divided into the Indian and Malaysian Muslims, although there are black, coloured and white Muslims too! Their looks are typical of India or Malaysia, even though they are 2nd and 3rd generation or longer. They tend to marry amongst themselves and carry on many of the same traditions. Amongst the Indian Muslims there are different groupings again, mainly broken down by regions in India. The majority seem to dress in western gear, although you do see some women with their hair covered and most of the women wear conservative clothing with no cleavage showing. The Muslim community seems prosperous and mainly be in retail or other professional areas. According to some people I spoke with, during apartheid they were not considered white and fell somewhere between the Coloured and White communities.

I shared a house with a Capetonian a few years back. Zuben now lives in London and is making more money I am sure than he would in 10 years here. His father is Buddhist and mother Muslim. Pretty cool combination. Like many professional and talented young South Africans, he is working in Europe. The wages here are much lower than at home and one of the challenges facing this government is the big brain drain. Sadly, the stunning beauty and family ties are simply not enough to keep most of them here.

This part of South Africa is breathtakingly beautiful and it has the climate to make it an amazing place to live, but I see so many social problems that I could never see myself spending a long time here. I see hatred in some of the black people’s eyes towards me – I assume because I am white. It is hard to blame them for feeling like that, after all, I do not know what they personally went through at the hands of random white people. Nelson Mandela is a Great Man as he has the capacity to forgive, a rare gift and something that the majority of people lack. I feel sad that I am lumped into the “white category” because of the colour of my skin. Sometimes I feel like putting a tattoo on my forehead saying that I am Irish (great respect towards the Irish here because of the Niall Mellon project). I do have to add here that most of the blacks greet me or smile at me on the street. I am not sure if it is because of the baby but they are always courteous and smiley and often comment on Saoirse or Nonkululeko as she is called in Xhosa by some of the shop staff I know. I pray that Saoirse will grow up not caring if people are black, white or coloured, Christian, Muslim or pagan, but that she will respect all people, their cultures and ways. I hope she sticks to her own beliefs and is not swayed by the mob mentality that is often found with such prejudices.