Jonathan Field - Maker of Random Stuff

After yesterday’s sleep deprivation, I appreciated another day off. I sleep in for a ten hour night, and even after waking I have a dramatically slow start. I enjoy my morning sleepiness for a good hour before switching the invisible weights behind my eyes to naturally pull open instead of naturally pulling shut.

I write, I read, mostly about African politics. In such a dramatic environment there’s so much to criticize, yet I don’t know precisely what I’d do better. Sure, more jobs, less crime… but how?

One thing is that I think revolutionary leaders rarely make good reformation leaders. Mandela seems like a distinct exception to this rule, and he was such a good leader he knew this stepped down. I’ve heard each ethnic group here express approval of his presidential tenure.

But reading about Mugabe in Zimbabwe, and thinking back to my visit to Chile and reading about Pinochet, too often revolutionary leaders are comfortable using violence to oppress dissent. This is none too surprising given that to have a successful revolution you usually have to be willing to use violence. Gandhi notwithstanding.

Think, for a moment, of all the things you would love to change about the government. You may be right about many of them. But those are only the things that stand out: there is so much more to running a government that has to get done aside from the things you see. Imagine now that one day the government stepped aside and said “okay, you do it”.

Would you and all your friends be able to keep the entire machine going? Get funding to all the appropriate organizations without running a deficit? Redistribute wealth enough to eliminate an uprising of the poor, but not so much as to force out the rich and crash the economy? Keep crime in check but avoid a police state? Meanwhile keep the postal service running, the roads paved, the trains on time, and the country secure? And a million other day to day things that I can’t think of because I don’t know a damn thing about the government either. And that’s considering I just watched the first three seasons of The West Wing.

But that handoff, I think, is sort of what happened here in 1994: a lot of smart and passionate people with no real governmental experience to speak of got control of their country for the first time. And by no means do I intend to imply that it was a bad thing: it was a great thing. But it is a steep learning curve to be sure. Sort of like when a son or daughter steps out into the world for the first time — they will make mistakes, they’ll get hurt and hurt others. But few would say they’d be better off having stayed at home.

Thabo Mbeki, the current president, is not so well liked it seems. And I see he has made some terrible mistakes — the largest of which was his denial for many years that HIV causes AIDS, which cost countless lives here. But before I judge my brother too harshly, I like to remind myself of the equally head-in-the-sand moves by the US government. I’m sure you can think of a few. Regardless of experience, leaders can do astonishingly stupid things sometimes.

But here’s my point: I think it could be a lot worse. It really is all relative, and as far as new nations shaking off colonialism and a racially antagonistic history, South Africa has done better than many. I even seem to remember hearing about some dark periods in US history between 1776 and today. Think anyone was shaking their head at us during our civil war?

President Mbeki inherited a precarious situation and has managed not to completely derail the country’s progress. Many people think things are getting worse. Some think they are getting better. I have no idea, but I see good life here, and that’s something. I also find it interesting that he writes a weekly column in the ANC paper, which is also published online:

http://www.anc.org.za/

But enough of politics; I need lunch. So I make myself a tuna sandwich. After that I organize my belongings… I don’t have many here, but my room is small. I use the top bunk as a shelf and it has become a bit disorganized, so I tidy it up. Then I sit down to read some short stories from the New Yorker that Donna has lent me, and I have some coffee, toast and plum jam. While I’m reading, Evan brings by a young couple on vacation.

The fellow is from New Zealand and the girl is a South African from Benoni, the town where I got lost my first day here. They met each other in London and have been living there, but they’re on a several week vacation all around South Africa. He’s never been here before, and she’s not done many of the sights.

They’re here in Dundee to visit the battlefields. That’s really the main tourist attraction in the area, though it’s not something that I’m terribly interested in for some reason. There were some dramatic battles here, where thousands of Brits and Zulus died in a day. I’ve read the Wikipedia pages, but I think that’s all the heed I want to give to those war-torn days.

They’re a very friendly couple, and I talk with them a bit about what I’m doing here. They seem genuinely interested, and she is a teacher, so she asks if there’s any chance she could see one of the schools, having never been to a rural school before. It is vacation week so she’d miss seeing the kids, which is really the best part. But I tell her that I’ll check if we’ll be going anywhere tomorrow, and that she’d be welcome to take a peek.

They tell me about their recent adventures, the most interesting of which to me was their visit to a national park over by St. Lucia. They said they spent an entire day driving amongst the wild animals, sometimes mere meters from the car… Rhinos, Hippos, Elephants, Giraffes. I knew Sophie and I were going to search around that area, but after getting their recommendations I have a much better idea of where the best spots are.

I head over to dinner at the trailer. A friend of Donna & Alan’s is there, a teacher from Durban named Emily. She’s a thirty-something black lady with neatly done dreads, glasses, a pleasing earth toned outfit, and a wonderful smile. She teaches English writing, and has been to the US for writing workshops. She shows me a poem that she wrote on one of her visits, about how much strength she had taken from what she learned there, and how her words would be her sword upon her return home. It was dramatic and heartfelt. She then produces an audio tape, on which she has a song that a friend of hers wrote and recorded, using the words of her poem as lyrics.

We have a nice dinner and even do a little singing, after telling her the story of the singing kitchen help at Spur the other night. Then we take her over to a local principal’s house, where she’ll be staying. Incidentally, the principal’s house is the most American feeling house I’ve been in on my visit. Though the principal is Zulu, he has studied in America, in Cambridge Massachusetts, and in fact sent his children there for school. That is, unfortunately, a little telling.

The principal’s wife talks about a seminar she went to on the employment situation. She says that there are jobs out there if people want them, but when Alan presses her for details she doesn’t seem to have any. After we leave, he tells me that he often has a hard time getting past what amounts to bureaucratic talk with her.

I drop Alan off after we chat a bit about our ideas on helping others — when it works, when it doesn’t. The answer is we don’t exactly know. But we try to treat everyone with common decency at least. What else can you do?

I head back to the backpackers and turn in.