I tell my friends that if they have the opportunity, and the money, to visit Cape Town and its surroundings, preferably before they die. I reaffirm myself in the proposal because I am here, in the wine area north of the city, the closest to paradise on earth that I know.
It is advisable, I would tell my friends, to look away from the asphalt on the road that leaves the airport. If you look out the window to the right or to the 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 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 business people from the African continent, including a couple of Nobel Prize winners in Literature. What I paint among so many eminences, I don't know, but the organizers did not look thin when choosing my room.
The bathroom, all for me, is the size of a typical Khayelitsha shack, in which entire families must live. There is a remote to control the temperature of the marble floor, two sinks, each the size of a bathtub, a bathtub the size of (well, almost) a swimming pool, ample space for the toilet behind a smoked glass door and an even larger space for the shower, where four of us could easily shower at once.
In the typical Khayelitsha shack there is no running water or heating, of course. Now, as I write, it is cold and rainy outside. I am warm and well. In Khayelitsha, where everything is built on sand, many huts must be collapsing, all must be leaking and people must be freezing.
Where am I going with all this? I'm not too sure. I write what comes to mind. well, yes First of all, so that my dear readers become aware, as I have no other choice to do here, how fortunate they are and how unfortunate is the huge sector of humanity that has had to live in places like Khayelitsha. Second, to raise the question, what was Nelson Mandela for?
The first time I came to Cape Town was in 1988. Mandela was still in prison and apartheid was still imposing "moral genocide", as Mandela himself called it, on the black majority of the South African population . I had almost the same experience this time. When I left the airport, I was assaulted by a sea of shacks and from there I went to another luxury hotel. The difference today – 29 years after the end of apartheid and the start of Mandela's presidency – is that the hotels are even more luxurious and the number of shacks has tripled, the inhabitants of which are almost all immigrants from even poorer parts of the country.
Today, 34.5% of the population, and more than 60% of young people under the age of 30, are unemployed. Power outages, averaging about nine hours a day, 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.
Crime rates are brutal. Every year 25,000 people are murdered, more than in the United States, which has five times the population. The ineffectiveness of the Government and corruption feed back. Jacob Zuma, president of South Africa from 2009 to 2018, stole billions of euros from public coffers with his colleagues.
And the worst, the education system. During 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. Mamphela Ramphele, ex-chancellor of the University of Cape Town and widow of the martyr of the black liberation struggle Steve Biko, has declared this. The data prove him right. In terms of reading, addition and subtraction, black South African children rank among the lowest in the world.
But the right question is not "What was Mandela good for"? but "what has the party to which he dedicated his life, the African National Congress (CNA) served?". Mandela accomplished 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, heart and soul. A lady named Helen Suzman was during the seventies the only woman and the only person in the South African Parliament who opposed apartheid. He had a phrase: "The abysmal selfishness of white South Africa". Today one would lament the abysmal selfishness of black South African leaders.
Many of my South African friends, who almost all made great sacrifices to fight apartheid, are deeply disillusioned. Some have given up and chosen exile. Desperate waste. It is depressing to think about the country's wealth in natural resources and human capital. It reminds me of the phrase that Orwell used to define England in the middle of the last century: "A family in which the wrong members were in control."
Today we can say the same about too many countries today, including democracies. But there are worse cases 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.
