my priveleged, academic white girl travel thoughts: let me show you them
I finished all my school work yesterday and executed a successful research blitz this afternoon, meaning that with twelve days left in the country, I can no devote all nine hours of daylight in Cape Town to being a tourist...er...Really Seeing and Possibly Understanding a Foreign Place.
Talk about OMGTRAVEL IN OMGAFRICA is the allergen for my reactionary bitchybitteritis.
That said, there are things I've noticed about this particular slice of the country and the continent (or both at once if you're Sarah Palin) as I've gone about my classes and worn a rut through the southern suburbs. I feel obligated to subject you to them.
First: Cape Town is not a mobile city.
There are cars and highways, there are taxis, there are minibuses, there are passenger trains. These will all probably kill you, and only two options are suitable for white people: cars and taxis are fine, minibusses and trains are for adventurous travelers who want to occasionally Discover Africa (daylight only), and Golden Arrow buses are the sole domain of...how do I even say this? Black people? Coloured people? People who live in townships, which is code for black/coloured people who do not work in advertising? The city moves in predetermined trajectories set by class and race. If you are x, you go to y. If you are a white student, you go to Tyger Tyger. If you are a Zimbabwean advertising agent, you go to Zula on Long Street and pick up tourists. If you are coloured, young, and hot, you go to Barmooda. If you are black, you do not leave the township; if you are white, you do not go to the townships unless invited to Mzoli's by someone black. (And even then, going to the townships means volunteering--it never means eating or sleeping there, staying for more than three hours.) Xhosa, Zulu, Shona, and Afrikaans speaking people learn English; English speakers do not under any circumstances learn Xhosa, Zulu, Shona, or Afrikaans. It's not enforced, it's not apartheid. It's the way things are. When you cross the lines, it is an unspoken consensus that you are giving up something that should not be given up.
It's not upwardly mobile: if you're black or coloured and making lots of money, you don't leave the township; if you're white and poor, you do not relocate to a less expensive house near black/coloured people. It's not horizontally mobile: You don't go to Their clubs. There is a small strata of Cape Town that drifts, that is a class of expatriots in their own country. These are the Africans and coloureds that study abroad students and tourists meet, them and only them, wannabe global elite with wannabe global elite on Long Street.
Don't believe me? There are three distinct accents here. There's the white South African accent and dialect, the coloured accent and dialect, and the black accent and dialect. I will find some sort of video or audio sample of this, but I can give examples in the meanwhile. Whites say "hey" like Canadians say "eh" or how some Americans say "right" (e.g., "oh I understand--computers, hey?"). Afrikaans-speaking whites use "ne" almost exactly the way it's used in Japanese (which tripped me the fuck out). And then there are hundreds of expressions in black South African English that I pray will catch on in the rest of the world after the 2010 World Cup, including "haibo!" (an expression used after being startled or shocked) and "eish"(imagine if "alas" were an everyday word). Blacks don't say "hey" like "eh"; whites don't exclaim "haibo!" when the Jammie stops suddenly and throws them off their seat.
These are the everyday remnants of a culture that wanted to transform on paper, but can't transform in everyday life. It's scary, the way it operates on every level, and the way it's just accepted. The whole city is a testament to how society-wide problems of prejudice and poverty aren't motivated by hate, just by the human impulse to do what's known and comfortable.
Talk about OMGTRAVEL IN OMGAFRICA is the allergen for my reactionary bitchybitteritis.
That said, there are things I've noticed about this particular slice of the country and the continent (or both at once if you're Sarah Palin) as I've gone about my classes and worn a rut through the southern suburbs. I feel obligated to subject you to them.
First: Cape Town is not a mobile city.
There are cars and highways, there are taxis, there are minibuses, there are passenger trains. These will all probably kill you, and only two options are suitable for white people: cars and taxis are fine, minibusses and trains are for adventurous travelers who want to occasionally Discover Africa (daylight only), and Golden Arrow buses are the sole domain of...how do I even say this? Black people? Coloured people? People who live in townships, which is code for black/coloured people who do not work in advertising? The city moves in predetermined trajectories set by class and race. If you are x, you go to y. If you are a white student, you go to Tyger Tyger. If you are a Zimbabwean advertising agent, you go to Zula on Long Street and pick up tourists. If you are coloured, young, and hot, you go to Barmooda. If you are black, you do not leave the township; if you are white, you do not go to the townships unless invited to Mzoli's by someone black. (And even then, going to the townships means volunteering--it never means eating or sleeping there, staying for more than three hours.) Xhosa, Zulu, Shona, and Afrikaans speaking people learn English; English speakers do not under any circumstances learn Xhosa, Zulu, Shona, or Afrikaans. It's not enforced, it's not apartheid. It's the way things are. When you cross the lines, it is an unspoken consensus that you are giving up something that should not be given up.
It's not upwardly mobile: if you're black or coloured and making lots of money, you don't leave the township; if you're white and poor, you do not relocate to a less expensive house near black/coloured people. It's not horizontally mobile: You don't go to Their clubs. There is a small strata of Cape Town that drifts, that is a class of expatriots in their own country. These are the Africans and coloureds that study abroad students and tourists meet, them and only them, wannabe global elite with wannabe global elite on Long Street.
Don't believe me? There are three distinct accents here. There's the white South African accent and dialect, the coloured accent and dialect, and the black accent and dialect. I will find some sort of video or audio sample of this, but I can give examples in the meanwhile. Whites say "hey" like Canadians say "eh" or how some Americans say "right" (e.g., "oh I understand--computers, hey?"). Afrikaans-speaking whites use "ne" almost exactly the way it's used in Japanese (which tripped me the fuck out). And then there are hundreds of expressions in black South African English that I pray will catch on in the rest of the world after the 2010 World Cup, including "haibo!" (an expression used after being startled or shocked) and "eish"(imagine if "alas" were an everyday word). Blacks don't say "hey" like "eh"; whites don't exclaim "haibo!" when the Jammie stops suddenly and throws them off their seat.
These are the everyday remnants of a culture that wanted to transform on paper, but can't transform in everyday life. It's scary, the way it operates on every level, and the way it's just accepted. The whole city is a testament to how society-wide problems of prejudice and poverty aren't motivated by hate, just by the human impulse to do what's known and comfortable.