The streets of the exclusive suburb of Sandhurst in Johannesburg are eerily quiet apart from the builders. They're busy extending mansions into mini-palaces, and they're raising the high walls which surround every property by another meter. The quietness of the streets is down to the gates which the residents have -- illegally -- put up to stop the through traffic. But this is South Africa 10 years after apartheid, and when the Jaguar purrs through the double security gates of one sprawling Italianate villa, its occupants are black.
Meanwhile across town, neighborhoods such as Hillbrow and Yeoville have become predominantly black, home to Johannesburg's burgeoning migrant population; 25 percent of the city are from other African countries, an unknown number are migrants from the rural areas of South Africa. Ten years of democracy on, the country is a startling jumble of intense idealism, brash wealth, consumerism and death.
ILLUSTRATION: YU SHA
Every day front-page stories chart the depredations of Aids: Durban is running out of land in its cemeteries; 7 percent of children are infected; and, worst of all, 77 percent of South Africa's HIV positive are women. Once a disease of western gay men, it is now one of poor black women.
Yet, despite that horror, the optimism is tangible. The belief in personal and national improvement, both material and moral, is riding high. Tellingly, the two bestselling books are a guide to teaching your children to become millionaires, and Nelson Mandela's autobiography, first published 10 years ago.
For Gloria Bosman, the balance sheet on 10 years of democracy is heavily in credit. A 30-year-old Yeoville hairdresser with a flourishing singing career on the side, she summed up the government's record as being too slow on Aids, not doing enough to help the poor and not doing enough to manage the growing migrant population who undercut South Africans by taking jobs on less pay.
But she set against that: "The most important thing is that I can vote, I can sit in any restaurant and drink from any tap. I'm stronger now; I can see women in parliament. I can now tell my boyfriend to fuck off. Before there were places where I couldn't speak and places where I couldn't go. Not now."
What was most striking about Gloria's forthright politics was its lack of envy and its patience. Her response to the increasing inequality -- most of the wealth remains firmly in white hands -- was that "rich people have worked hard for their money, it wouldn't be fair to take it away from them." Change takes more than one decade, argues Gloria. "It will take three more generations. We're a patient people."
It's not just Gloria who's been doing some stocktaking, but the whole country as it went to the polls last month and returned the ANC with an increased majority. Last week it was the turn of thinkers at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), South Africa's biggest university, and I listened to them ponder on the country's progress. It made a fitting place for such an exercise: 10 years ago, the campus was almost wholly white, now 60 percent of its students are black.
On the credit side of South Africa's balance sheet goes the 8.4 million people who now have access to clean water, 3.8 million with electricity, and 1.46 million who have new homes. The number of people getting government support such as child benefits has trebled, to 7.7 million, and adult literacy has leapt to 89 percent. Yet the spending has been achieved without increasing taxation or destabilizing the economy, due to a combination of economic growth and increased revenue.
But on the debit side, inequality has got worse: The poorest have got poorer and the rich richer. Racial inequality may be, slightly, blurring -- there is now a wealthy black middle class and there are even some poor whites -- but deepening class divisions within racial groups are veering towards Brazilian levels (the highest in the world). Also on to the debit side goes the government's laggard response to Aids: The constitution, the most progressive in the world, may guarantee a right to life, but by the time South Africa hosts the World Cup in 2010, there will have been between 8 million and 10 million deaths. Similarly, there has been plenty of rhetoric on female empowerment, and half of President Thabo Mbeki's Cabinet are women, but sexual violence has soared and the pay gap jumped. Poverty hits women hardest in South Africa. Also on to the debit side goes South Africa's awkward silence on Zimbabwe.
All told, it is a patchy record of brilliant achievement and shabby compromise, but one of which many South Africans are inordinately proud. The World Cup decision came at the perfect psychological moment in the country's nation-building, bringing global recognition of its extraordinary combination of idealism and pragmatism.
But to the outsider's eye, the self-congratulation sits awkwardly with the realities of Johannesburg life. The degree of racial segregation in neighborhoods, schools, lifestyle -- even taste in music -- still seems shockingly evident. Only in some of the cavernous malls which have mushroomed across the city do the races mingle, united as consumers. It seems a frail basis for the kind of social cohesion which can secure the future.
But Achille Mbembe at Wits's Institute of Social and Economic Research, took a longer view: "The next struggle will be integration. But now, the task for blacks is appropriation -- to become owners of their own country -- while black intellectuals must develop a discourse of ownership in politics, culture, architecture.
"This is the precondition for successful integration. Meanwhile, the task for whites is to resist the temptation to run away or withdraw, and take the decision to belong and to develop practices of belonging."
South Africa's rainbow nation, argues Mbembe, presents an unprecedented historical opportunity to resolve the relationship between black African and white European which has caused such suffering for hundreds of years: "It hasn't been resolved in the US or in Brazil or anywhere." He takes the idea even further: "It's one of the only places where you find such an entanglement of histories -- Europe, Africa, China, India -- the whole world in one place. A successful South Africa could become a model for a world where increasingly peoples forced to share the same place end up killing each other."
Just as apartheid was a global icon of racial injustice, so the idealists now dream that South Africa's democracy could become a global icon of justice and racial coexistence. Mbeki talks of being an idealist without illusions. Much the same could be said of many of his compatriots, and it's the vibrancy of those ideals, despite the compromises, which provides such a sharp contrast with the pessimism and despair which grip other parts of the world.
Here, a lot of people believe human beings can overcome difference and improve their lot; that amounts to a very rare kind of hope. Once again, the hand of history is lying heavily on this tip of the African continent.
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