How poor is South Africa?

First, apologies for the absence - caused largely by work - I was in Pretoria for a few days - and also by the arrival of my "heavy baggage" (the stuff that came by sea - it took three months) which meant that my flat was practically inaccessible until I unpacked the boxes; this job isn't finished yet - the spare bedroom is still a warehouse of cardboard - but at least I can move around again. And I got my guitar back - the only thing I own, I find, that I actually missed.

I was in Pretoria to start work on a new project with UNICEF as a partner. This was a very interesting experience, partly because UNICEF have very different working processes and culture, and partly because they are, of course, entirely focused on development issues. Talking to my new colleagues resolved the issue for me about where South Africa falls on the first-to-third-world spectrum; a senior UNICEF person was very clear: "South Africa is a third-world country with small pockets of wealth". The statistics are stark: 12.3 million children - 68% of the total - are classed as impoverished; they live in families (if they have families - AIDS has taken a massive toll) with an income of less than 1,200 rand per month - that's about 80 pounds sterling. 13 million people in South Africa are recipients of welfare benefits; the amounts are very low - the allocation for each child who qualifies is seven rand a day - fifty pence. Access to education is of course an issue, and access to quality education is part of the problem - most of the schools that used to be for white children now charge fees which are beyond the reach of poor families - so the best schools continue to be excellent (there was an newspaper article the other day which noted that rich British families are now sending their kids to boarding schools in SA because it's cheaper than in the UK) but the poor schools continue to be very badly resourced (as an example, there's a charity drive here to collect money for every school in the country to have A FOOTBALL - many of them can't afford any sports equipment at all, while millions are being spent on stadiums, preparing for the World Cup).

UNICEF is working with the 585 most problematic schools in the country - the project I'm helping with will select thirty of them to be hubs for models of activity around the theme of sport (training, games, competitions, physical exercise, sports festivals etc. being a recognised way to distract children from what a UNICEF leader called "unproductive activities" - i.e. gang violence, drugs, teenage pregnancies, absenteeism, dropping out, etc.) - and this will be part, believe it or not, in an admittedly indirect way, of Britain's 2012 Olympic legacy. Let's hope we can do something to help.

(And I do notice the disconnect between my own lifestyle and the facts listed above - how much did it cost to ship my boxes of semi-superfluous stuff half way around the world? The first world /third world gap is a very real one, but here you inevitably live it more personally.)

Art and artefacts

Work has kicked back in with a vengeance, so posts will be less frequent than in the holidays; sometimes I think I'd be quite happy to be on permanent holiday... In the meantime, some photos of objects I've picked up over the past few weeks (tourist shops and stalls tend to undermine any sense of uniqueness of the artefacts they're selling by having hundreds of the same item, even when they're made by hand - but I like some of them anyway; and who says a work of art needs to be unique?) and some of art work at the Constitutional Court - see if you can tell which are which.

Constitution Hill

Constitution Hill is very close to where I work - it used to be the site of the city's most notorious prisons for men and for women, and taxis will still take you to "Number Four" if you ask (the number of the men's prison there) while they probably won't know where the constitutional court is. Under apartheid (I'm told) if a black man disappeared his family would ask for him at the hospitals, the morgues, and Number Four - you could be arrested, among many other things, for being out five minutes after evening curfew. Conditions were... as you can imagine. Overcrowding was normal, physical punishment and abuse were rife, and solitary confinement in a tiny cell a metre wide by two metres long was common.... sometimes for up to a year.

After liberation in the early nineties these prisons were closed down and the new government decided to construct a building for the new Constitutional Court on the site. An international competition was run and was rather luckily won by SA architects, with a modern design which included African elements and lots of space and light - celebrating the transparency of the new order. Now you can visit the old prisons, which are a museum of racism and oppression, and you can also visit the Constitutional Court building and see "the best collection of South African art in the world" which decorates the walls, ceilings and spaces. Yesterday I was lucky enough to be in a group which had Constitutional Court Justice Albie Sachs as its guide to the building - I posted about Albie back in November. Albie was given overall supervision of the art in the building back in 1994 when he began his mandate - he's about to retire, as ConCourt judges only sit for a maximum of 15 years - and in that time he's dedicated a great deal of his free time to developing the collection. He obviously takes an enormous pride in the building, the art work, and its history - so much so that he's happy to spend part of his holidays (the court is still in recess) showing visitors around. The building is indeed very impressive, very attractive, and nothing like what you'd expect from any building used in a justice system; the juxtaposition with the old prison next door illustrates profoundly how much SA has changed - and Albie has I think every right to be proud of his achievement, as a judge, as an art collector, and as a survivor of the violence of the old regime .

Township life

I was wondering, during the visit to Kliptown, what it must be like to live without running water and electricity - or with poor "service delivery" as it's described by the media. Yesterday the SA Sunday Times carried a story about Nothemba Fazzie, 81 years old, who lives in "informal housing" in Duncan Village, East London - a collection of some 10,000 shacks and 120,000 people - who has been waiting for twelve years to be relocated to government-supplied housing with proper services. "Mama Fazzie" lives on her pension of seventy pounds a month; she has to walk an hour to get to the settlement's only female toilet block - only women bother to use these facilities, apparently, most men just do what they have to do in the stream that runs through the township - this stream floods Mama Fazzie's shack if there's too much rain. The residents of Duncan Village who are lucky enough to have their own "long-drop" toilet (you can imagine what this is) rent this facility out at two pounds a month per person. Fazzie also has a daily slog to collect water from a standpipe and carry it home in buckets.

The article points out that the particular irony of Mama Fazzie's predicament is that she lost two sons during the struggle against apartheid, sons who worked for the liberation movement - she has plaques on her wall from the ANC to commemorate her sacrifice. Is she disappointed in progress over the past 14 years? Yes she is. She says: "The ANC has given us only pride, but I cannot live only on pride. I need a house."

In the meantime, a group of five supreme court judges today gave the go-ahead for Jacob Zuma, the ANC's candidate for the next President of the country, to be tried for corruption; he's alleged to have taken massive bribes in an arms deal involving a French company. It's pretty unlikely that Zuma has had to carry any water in buckets recently.

Soweto 2

I made a brief visit to Soweto back in November. Yesterday I went again with L and E, to be shown around by Booysie, who has always lived in Soweto and now runs a car hire and tour company. Booysie says that in some ways Soweto is improving - an increasing number of people have the money to improve their accomodation or build new houses, and there doesn't seem to be any problem with these new structures being adjacent to shacks or the old basic two-room houses built to house the service class for Joburg. There's also more community spirit and pride in the area. On the other hand, there are still parts of Soweto - for example Kliptown, which we visited - where there's no running water or electricity, and thousands of people live in corrugated iron shacks, in conditions which must be appalling. Schooling is still inadequate, with the richer Sowetans bussing their kids to the fee-paying schools in the ex-white areas, while the poorer families make do with what's available locally. I asked if there were any white people living in Soweto and Booysie said yes, a few, but only those in mixed-race marriages; there were no white families that he knew of.

We visited SKY, the Soweto Kliptown Youth centre, where 22 orphans live - the community was founded by Bob Nameng, who was orphaned himself at six years old and lived on the streets for two years. The community is supported by the American National Basketball Association (which is rather surreal, as apparently there are only four basketball courts in the whole of Soweto - a town of four million people; the community itself doesn't have one) and other donors, while the kids are also taught arts and crafts in an attempt to make the endeavour more self-sustaining. Another of the leaders there was very critical of the SA government and the local administration for failing to support efforts like theirs - nearly all the support comes from abroad - and when you look at the housing and services in Kliptown you can understand that there must be a very high level of disappointment and frustration that so little has changed since 1994. The government believes in market-led solutions to poverty and lack of opportunity, but there's no evidence that this is working in Kliptown.

Above: a nice new house in Soweto; a standard two-room house (many courtyards are filled with one-room huts to accomodate a growing family or to rent out); a corrugated iron shack (hot in summer, cold in winter); "hostel" housing originally built to accomodate men only, usually mine workers; one of the disused Soweto power station cooling towers - a rare structure above two storeys, now used for bungee jumping - the art work is attractive but paid for by a bank - the other tower is unfortunately a giant advert. Booysie pointed out that all the pylons lead in the direction of Joburg - when the power station was still functioning, Soweto had no electricity at all. He also said that under apartheid the housing immediately around the towers was for white workers at the power station only - while he was growing up he wouldn't have been allowed into the compound, and so he didn't see the towers up close until after 1992.

Flora

Before Timbavati stops resonating in my mind quite so much, a final post on the plants - the summer in SA is also the rainy season, so the reserve was very green, with an amazing richness and variety of plant life which sometimes changed radically from one kilometre to the next, depending on soil type, proximity to water, dominant undergrowth etc. In fact, the density of vegetation made it difficult to spot the animals - apparently in winter it's much easier, and the animals are allso more active during the day as it's cooler and they're hungrier - and winter is the dry season so the smaller watering holes dry up and you can stake out a pond at dusk and watch all the animals coming to drink (so it's well worth visiting at any time of the year, friends and relatives!).

I was expecting more open space - and in fact other areas of the Kruger apparently have more savannah (and vast herds of ruminants), while Timbavati has lots of trees. Walking through the bush can be painful - many of these plants have very sharp thorns. Many trees are in flower, and if you look closely at the ground there are hundreds of species of small plants also in flower, some of them with spectacular colours, in miniature. I asked the ranger if he ever had botanists visiting the lodge - anyone who was more interested in the flora than the fauna - he said yes, once, he'd had a couple who only wanted to look at plants - and he "learned an awful lot from them"; but most people just want drive around until they see all the Big Five (elephant, rhino, leopard, buffalo, lion) - and miss the more rooted stuff all around them.

A few examples of plants above.

Up close

Apart from seeing herbivores and their predators, one of the great aspects of being in Timbavati was to get a close view of insects, reptiles etc. We were encouraged to pick these up when safe to do so (I learned for the first time that chameleons can bite, if they're in the mood - and they lock their jaws and hang on for grim death when they do so - local lore says that a chameleon bite bleeds forever, so the trackers refuse to touch them). Above: elegant grasshopper (that's its name; although it's gaudy or harlequin-like rather than elegant); chameleon (this one was nonchalantly crossing the road); Golden Orb spider (if you look closely you can see the multiple strands of web it puts out); millipede; tiger snake - and that same snake trying to eat a bird: it was hiding in the roof of the lodge next to a hanging nest (hundreds of these) and zapped the poor owner - in the photo you can see the bird's head in its mouth, the body dangling. The snake dropped the bird after a while, perhaps because we were distracting it from swallowing its dinner - then the ranger grabbed it. "Is it poisonous?" we asked. "Yes, but only species specific, if it bites me I'll only be ill for a few days. Who wants to touch it?" Oddly enough we all touched it....

Timbavati

L, E and I spent four days in the very wonderful Timbavati reserve - part of Kruger National Park - and had a superlatively great time. The formula for staying in a game lodge is very simple and very effective - a ranger wakes you up at five a.m. every day and you spend four hours cruising around the park (which is huge - over 400 kilometres north-south) on an open high-backed Land Rover looking for animals; the ranger (driving) and the tracker (scanning) can read tracks and spot things that us ordinary urban mortals would never notice (the tracker actually saw a well-camouflaged chameleon in a tree AT NIGHT from a moving jeep - very impressive). Part of the fun is that the guests are encouraged to look for animals too, and sometimes we spot them when the professionals don't (or at least they let us think so). Sometimes you drive for half an hour without seeing anything at all, then you round a corner and find a group of zebra, giraffe and impala all grazing together. Few of these animals run away - there's been no hunting in this reserve for decades and they've got used to these strange animals with ten heads on four wheels which don't do any harm except occasionally use a flash on the camera.

You go back to the lodge for breakfast at 9.30, then if conditions are right (i.e. the wind steady in one direction - to be able to anticipate which direction predators could come from) you go out for a "bush walk" with the ranger carrying a rifle and warning you not to lag behind (lions prefer stragglers). Then you get a bit of time to yourself (swimming pool available though sometimes you have to throw some frogs out) until lunch at two thirty - then it's back on the vehicle for another three or four hours driving around, stopping for a sundowner at sunset, then another hour in the dark heading back to camp. Dinner is at eight thirty and then you go to bed, knackered. There's no mobile phone coverage or telephone TV or internet or newspapers in the lodge (the only communication is by radio) - and there's nowhere else to go (the last twenty kilometres to get to the lodge are inside the park, half of them on a dirt road), so there are no distractions.

I'll probably come back to our wilderness experience, and I'll try not to post too many amateur photos of animals, but just to give you an idea of how amazing the Kruger is, in four days we saw: kudu, impala, elephants, giraffes (including two having a fight, swinging their heads at each other like conkers), leopards (including a female stalking some impala), scorpions, dung beetles, buffalo, eagles, kingfishers, warthogs, giant millipedes (which curl up when touched into a shiny coil much like a dog turd), lions, stag beetles, steenbok, giant spiders (and football sized nests holding a thousand spiders), hippos, zebras, mongeese, jackals, vultures, civets, hyenas, water buck, tortoises, baboons, wildebeest, gnu, hares, various snakes (including the deadly black mamba, the fastest snake on land - we chased it in the land rover), and the rare and endangered wild dog... and dozens of birds whose names I couldn't keep track of... and hundreds of flowers whose names I didn't bother to ask about. You get very close to all of these things - the ranger parked virtually in the path of the leopard that was hunting and it walked right past us, ignoring us after the first glance - and a leopard's glance, when you're twenty feet away in an open jeep, is electrifying - and during many of these experiences you realise how our deep instincts are still geared for reacting to and surviving in this environment; you catch your breath, you're totally focused on the moment; sometimes you fight your fear. I don't think the hair has stood up on the back of my neck so many times ever before in my life. The four days were wonderful, exciting, totally engrossing, thrilling. I want to go back and do it again soon.