I tell my friends that if they have the opportunity, and the money, to visit Cape Town and surrounding areas preferably before they die. I reaffirm the proposal because I am here now, in the wine area north of the city, the closest thing to paradise on earth that I know.
It is advisable, I would tell my friends, to look away from the asphalt on the road leaving the airport. If you look out the window to the right or left, you will have no choice but to see kilometers and kilometers of shacks stuck together, cities made of tin, plastic and wood. The largest of them is called Khayelitsha, where half a million people live, or survive. I did several stories there when I was a correspondent in South Africa in the 1990s. Khayelitsha is for me the image of poverty in the world, the closest thing to hell on earth that I know.
Half an hour from Khayelitsha is the beautiful and historic university town of Stellenbosch. I am writing to you from a hotel here. I was invited to participate in an event that brings together politicians, academics and businessmen from the African continent, including a couple of Nobel Prize winners in Literature. What do I do among so many eminences, I don't know very well, but the organizers did not hesitate when it came to choosing my room.
The bathroom, everything for me, is the size of the typical Khayelitsha shanty, in which entire families will live. There's a knob to control the temperature of the marble floor, two sinks each the size of a bathtub, a bathtub the size (well, almost) of a swimming pool, a large toilet space behind a smoked glass door, and a even larger space for the shower, where four people could easily shower at the same time. In the typical Khayelitsha shanty there is no running water or heating, of course. Now, as I write, it is cold outside and raining. I am warm and well. In Khayelitsha, where everything is built on sand, many shanties will be falling apart, they will all leak and people will be freezing.
Where am I going with all this? I'm not so sure. I write what comes to mind. Okay, yes. First of all, so that my dear readers become aware, as I have no choice but to do here, of how lucky they are and how unfortunate is the enormous sector of humanity that had to inhabit places like Khayelitsha. Second, to raise the question, what was Nelson Mandela's use?
The first time I came to Cape Town was in 1988. Mandela was still in prison and apartheid was still imposing its “moral genocide”, as Mandela himself called it, on the black majority of the South African population. I had almost the same experience as this time. Upon exiting the airport, a sea of shanties assaulted me and from there I went to another luxury hotel. The difference today – 29 years after the end of apartheid and the beginning of Mandela's presidency – is that the hotels are even more luxurious and the number of shanties, whose inhabitants are almost all immigrants from even poorer parts of the country, has tripled. .
Today 34.5% of the population, and more than 60% of young people under 30 years old, do not have a job. Power outages, about nine hours a day on average, have been a normal part of life in South Africa for years, which has had a devastating impact on the economy, one of the most unequal in the world. Many, including black people, today, 29 years after the end of apartheid, live in houses as luxurious, sometimes as big as my hotel.
The crime rates are brutal. Every year 25,000 people are murdered, more than in the United States, which has five times the population. Government inefficiency and corruption feed off each other. Jacob Zuma, president of South Africa from 2009 to 2018, stole billions of euros from public coffers together with his cronies.
And the worst, the education system. In times of apartheid, the State imposed a deliberately inferior education on black children, so that they could not compete with whites in the labor market. Today black schools are even worse. This has been stated by none other than Mamphela Ramphele, former chancellor of the University of Cape Town and widow of black liberation martyr Steve Biko. Her data supports her. When it comes to reading, addition and subtraction, black South African children rank some of the lowest in the world.
But the right question is not “what purpose did Mandela serve”? but “what purpose has the party to which he dedicated his life, the African National Congress (ANC) served?” Mandela fulfilled his mission. He ended apartheid and laid the foundations of a democracy in which the judicial system remains independent, electoral results are respected and – this is not Russia – the press is free. On top of that, he stopped a civil war.
The problem, and the reason why Mandela's democratic legacy is in serious danger, comes from the fact that the ANC has been in power for almost three decades. Yes, the old story. Power corrupts the head, the heart and the soul. A lady called Helen Suzman was during the seventies the only woman and the only person in the South African Parliament who opposed apartheid. She had a phrase: “The abysmal selfishness of white South Africa.” Today she would lament the abysmal selfishness of the black South African leaders.
Many of my South African friends, and almost all of them made great sacrifices to fight apartheid, are deeply disillusioned. Several have surrendered and chosen exile. Waste is desperate. It is desperate to think about how rich the country is in natural resources and human capital.
It reminds me of the phrase Orwell used to define England in the middle of the last century: “A family in which the wrong members had control.”
The same can be said of too many countries today, democracies included. But there are cases worse than others. Returning to South Africa, now that I live in prosperous Europe, reminds me to distinguish between real problems and optional problems, between things that require urgent solutions and timeless whims, products of boredom like Brexit or Catalan independence.
