After two months traveling just the two of us, spending three weeks on and off of a bus with 38 other Americans, through southern Africa was quite a change. There were a lot of layers to the experience we had with "Making the Road." Moments we loved totally, and moments in which we were totally disappointed, or skeptical, or frustrated.
The best part about being on the Making the Road Trip was that
Prexy Nesbitt introduced us to a number of people involved with freedom struggles historically and social change work in the present tense as well. Many of these connections would have been downright impossible to bring about on our own. And it was good to be pushed to study the history of each of the countries we visited. Prexy clearly has a great love for Africa, and a great desire to see young americans engage positively with the realities they confront there. He also repeatedly demonstrated an amazing degree of patience in dealing with the various backwards habits of group members, and also a courage and care that allowed him to both challenge and protect us in various situations. I don't think anyone was able to go through the three weeks in a purely tourist frame of mind; they had to think about
something.
What difficulties we did have largely had to do with different ideas about how best to manage the group, and how to really provide room for us to process what we were experiencing. We ended up having an absurdly low amount of time to talk as a group with our fellow travelers about the trip, despite repeated mention of such meetings. Further, the higher ideals of the journey were repeatedly sideswiped by unnecessary conflicts around money, which continued, largely because Prexy made a number of errors in communicating to the group around the financial issues that inevitably come up with 40 people traveling for weeks in a foreign country. Had these silly fights been avoided, I feel the time could have gone a lot more smoothly, and a lot less people would have left with a bad or questionable taste in their mouths.
Maybe it was the distinct nature of the trip, or maybe it's the overall political climate right now, but I don't think we succeeded in being a "solidarity" trip. Flat out - no equivocation. We simply did not demonstrate a collective capacity to respond positively to the collective problems facing the people we met in various countries. Perhaps that sounds like a condemnation of us. I'd rather not dwell on condemning ourselves for what we did not do. I'd rather focus on the moments when we did at least try to really engage with the struggles in southern Africa, and maybe even our weaknesses and failures will help us to do better, more, in the future.
Anyway, this post won't be a full-on analysis of all three weeks through five different countries. I'll try just to speak to some highlights.
Windhoek:After a 20 hour bus ride, our trip began in Windhoek, the capital of Namibia. I think of this time as simultaneously some of the best and worst moments of the trip. It's my habit to start with the bad and work our way up.
A group of about 20 of us decided to go out to a dance club on our first night in town. We decided against the grinding, harsh hip-hop club and chose instead the mellower sounding "cubana" place. It turned out to be only occasionally latin-themed, and much more often dominated by USA pop. Anyway, the first hour or two was relatively banal. People in our group were a little tipsy, and so overly friendly with the Africans ("we all like each other so much! We're all so happy to be together!" and so on) but aside from the obvious, that's pretty normal in a crowd of drinkers. Then some of the women (the group was 75% female) started to tip the line of flirtation towards strange and uncomfortable. Serious sexual dancing on the dance floor, taking photos of groups of black men from 12" away, and so forth. To a number of people's credit, a number of folks perked up, and started looking out for their friends, and pulling them out of potentially bad situations.
Around the same time, a group of folks started to say they were ready to go. At first i just wanted to leave also. I wasn't having fun, and the scene was really strange and awkward. But then it hit me that i was one of only a few men, proposing to leave a group of women at a club with dozens of men - many of which were willing to prey on their vulnerability and curiosity with Africa (and Africans). We started talking about getting everyone to agree to leave. Most agreed. A handful wanted to stay on. I spoke with two women in that group individually and checked in about how safe they felt staying on and getting home on their own. Both of them said they'd be fine, and I trusted both of them, so I agreed to most of us leaving, but having fix or six stay on. We started to leave in cab loads. I left in the first cab. By the time I got to the hostel, I had already decided that I had made a mistake, and started to worry. By the time the second cab got to the hostel, my fears were confirmed. "We can't find one person, and someone else lost her wallet," we were told.
Me, prexy and an older couple woke the bus drivers up and went down to the club to try and pick the rest of the folks up. We were too late. While we had been on our way, one woman's camera had been stolen (the one taking the photos from 12" away) and another woman's wallet had been stolen. The bouncers at the club had found the thief, and the camera and wallet were returned (minus $400 in US currency). Once the whites had their things back, the bouncers proceeded to beat the black thief, and our group got in a cab and left.
I took the news really hard. I felt responsible (admittedly, in small part) for the mess that was made. And i felt as if my principal mistake was to not fully abandon basic principles that I would like to live by. I'd like to believe that if women I trust say that they'll be fine on their own, they will be. I'd like to believe that a club full of black men won't take advantage of a group of white women. Both "ideals" seemed totally false that night. I should have stayed, I told myself. I should have made sure that the drunkest, most vulnerable women left in the first cab, not me. I should have insisted that everyone leave, and not consent to a small group staying behind.
In short, I felt more alienated from Black people than I had in years and years. The whole climate we were in felt dominated by the massive gulf between us - financially, socially, nation, history and power carrying on. When we returned to the club, a black beggar tried to "show us" where our bus was parked, and then receive a tip for his "kindness." He followed after us the whole block walk, silently pleading, looking pitiful. When a couple of other blacks decided to try the same trick, he became vicious, screaming at them to back off. He was the only one going to get a little hand out. We loaded into the bus, with him staring at the open door. "Let's go," Prexy told the driver, and the door slammed in the man's face.
Were moments like that the only ones we were able to have with black people in Africa?
***
Fortunately, we also made a number of amazing folks in Windhoek. We went to the office of the National Union of Namibian Workers:
There we heard a presentation from the Vice President of the Namibian Mineworkers Union about the history of Union organizing in Namibia and recent struggles amongst mineworkers.
With the help of Herbert (a Namibian of German descent) from the National Teachers Union, the story of union struggles was connected to a history of the independence struggle in Namibia. The story was intense, and both speakers were really animated in telling it. First colonized by the Germans, "Southwest Africa" was under South African control (though not a strict colony) after WWI (when Germany lost all of its colonies) until independence in 1990. Carrying on the brutal colonial policy of only allowing Africans to live above a certain line, the South African Defense Forces carried out a type of permanent martial law system of exploiting Native labor. As most workers were officially "migrants" living in all-male company housing, separated from their families, not only was unionizing forbidden, but so was every other form of potentially political gatherings. Still, they succeeded in organizing a general strike in 1971, without any sanctioned organizations to coordinate it. The next twenty years of guerrilla and labor struggles against South African control were extremely fierce.
Trying to describe the violence faced in the struggle, Herbert says, "You can't imagine it; it was so terrible. Soldiers were given orders to shoot people off their bicycles as they rode, meetings of 3 or more were violently broken up. You can't imagine how bloody it was." Needless to say, they were both quite proud of having achieved independence and of continuing to struggle for further social and economic gains (Herbert was working on a project to draft a full proposal for economic development that is a clear counter to IMF-backed systems of "development," that bring neo-colonial poverty and oppression everywhere they're used). It was also refreshing to have Prexy with us, and to hear his stories of being in Namibia back in 1990, when the mood was ecstatically celebratory, and everyone felt connected to the independence fights throughout the region.
To thank Herbert for his talk, I gave him a copy of my book:
At the Union hall, we also met with
Lucy Edwards, a feminist-Marxist professor from the University of Namibia, who told us about the current AIDS situation, and the effect of patriarchy on the problem. She was an amazing speaker as well - clear-headed, forceful, quick thinking, and radical. She says that the AIDS crisis is made worse by "traditional values" (she says, "men don't seem to care about 'tradition' when it comes to cell phones and ipods, but when it comes to sex, they start clamoring about how important their 'culture' is") of men sleeping with multiple women on a regular basis (despite being married), wife swapping and offering of wives to guests, beating women who do not consent to have sex at a given time (described as "marital rape" by the constitution, which bans it) and "transactional sex" (women, having limited means of employment, offering themselves sexually to migrant workers, in exchange for food and housing). She also made it clear that her proposals call for a radical transformation of social and economic structures in the society, and so haven't been much welcomed by many Namibians.
Johannesburg:
Johannesburg sucks. Of all the places we went, I couldn't ever see living in Johannesburg, or even liking visiting. With more than 50% of the Black population unemployed, and virtually no social welfare system in South Africa, the violent crime in Johannesburg is out of control. Of course, the violent rage of the poor and oppressed wouldn't be severe if there weren't pockets of Johannesburg that are nuts wealthy from mining and over forms of exploiting the Black majority; and those whites with some money (and clogging the streets with their commuter traffic and burning themselves out on 60-80 hour work weeks) wall themselves off in the sea of shopping malls that litter the landscape of Johannesburg. Violent crime + malls = gross.
Grossest of all was our "Soweto tour." Visiting Soweto (the "Southwest Townships," where 3.5 of the cities 6 million inhabitants live, virtually all Black) on a paid tour is strange enough. Worse, it felt like the only way in. But most of this could be stomached (and we were reassured that we were on a trustworthy tour, with local, knowledgeable guides, etc.) until we reached the "informal settlement" portion of the tour.
Here, 20,000 people had been living in self-made shacks for more than a dozen years, many of them on government waiting lists for state-built standardized concrete houses (which most people wouldn't prefer to live in, anyway). We were to spend a whopping 15 minutes (yup -
fifteen) with a tour guide, to "get a sense of how we really live here." He told us some about the community, and then asked if we were willing to visit a home. When we agreed he told us that, while we were with the family, "as the heart moves you," we could give them money, "again, as the heart moves you; it's not required." How much? "50, 100 rand, as you wish." ($7-15). We proceeded to file in to this old woman's one room house, and ask her a dozen questions about living in a leaky space with a twin bed and propane cooker, given that she shared the space with her three kids. She played her part, and we handed her somewhere between 500R and 1000R ($50-150). Two minutes, and we were out in the streets of the community again. Running out of time, our guide showed us the water tap that the government had installed (thus symbolizing their commitment to leave the community be, but not help in any substantial way). That was it, the end of the tour.
Oh, but wait. "If your heart moves you," we could pay our tour guide something, as well. This money, we were told, would all be spent on supplies for the settlement, such as food and lamp oil (well, all but his 20% cut). He told us that 28 people had agreed to play this role of tour guide and shopper for the community. Feeling totally sick of the whole thing, I rushed to the van, pushing right past the dozen vendors waiting to sell us crafts and such at the end of our tour.
Others felt good about that visit, like they had contributed significantly to a community that had made a determined decision to help themselves and to turn tourism into economic gain for themselves. I couldn't see anything positive in what we had done. It felt humiliating, anti-human, disgusting. We were just white skinned wallets moving through a community that didn't welcome us for any reason other than our substantial wallets, and even with our wallets, we had to leave as soon as the formalities of emptying the wallets had been performed. Further, it didn't feel like a group of people really fighting to improve their lives and seeking allies, it felt like a community that had resigned itself to helplessness and sought to profit off of pity. Nothing will change till both sides of such dynamics totally and completely reject their roles in the game and craft new - peer - roles.
The upside of the Soweto tour was that it took us to the
Hector Pieterson museum (the first child to be murdered by police during the '76 Soweto uprising) and the
Constitutional Court (and museum of the old apartheid prison. The same place andrew wegerif's mother told us, in tears, to visit, because the transformation of a place that had abused so many of her friends into a museum was so moving to her.)
***
Despite the museum being built by and on the grounds of a casino, the Marxist-leaning Apartheid museum was interesting and informative. With over two hours there, I still had tons more I would have liked to see, and Prexy said that after nine visits he was still finding new interesting sections.
The museum gave a great basic break down of the history of creating a racialist society, including explaining the ever fascinating "racial classification board" that the Apartheid government created out of necessity:
There was an excellent section of photographs taken during the 1976 Soweto student uprisings. Not wanting to "steal" any of these images, we did photograph one particularly moving caption:
The realities of Apartheid and the rebellion against it are so startlingly contrasted against the opinions of those who orchestrated and carried out the oppression. Check out the difference between Desmond Tutu's opinion and a government official's :
This photo didn't come out well, but the map is a very important document. It outlines exactly where all the different Black "Homelands" were, and what the "migration" routes in and out of "South Africa" were. In other words, attempting to call South Africa a "white nation," a dozen or so "Black Nations" were created by the White racist government to slowly force all of the blacks out of the country, stripping them of any claims to citizenship (and thus suffrage, rights, etc.) totally, while still exploiting their labor.
Overall, the museum was quite inspiring. Tons of posters, photos and videos made for quite an engaging experience. I have to say, though, that it noticeably lacked information about dissident and radical whites and their participation in the struggle against apartheid. I found this be a general weakness in most presentations of history in South Africa. Perhaps more damning, the museum seemed to present the Zulu-Nationalist Inkatha Freedom Party (an explicit creation of the Apatheid state, and known to be
responsible for thousands of murders of freedom fighters) as a legitimate party within the body politic.
***
Another good thing about Johannesburg...
We went to a poetry night commemorating the 30th anniversary of the death (at the hands of the security forces of the Apartheid state, who claimed he "fell" out a window) of Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko. I am very inspired by Biko's writing and efforts, and was glad to be part of an event honoring his legacy.
For example, some words to remember Biko by:
"The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed."
"The basic tenet of black consciousness is that the black man must reject all value systems that seek to make him a foreigner in the country of his birth and reduce his basic human dignity."
"As a prelude whites must be made to realize that they are only human, not superior. Same with Blacks. They must be made to realize that they are also human, not inferior."Mozambique:It was great to be in Mozambique. As Prexy has his background in the Liberation struggle in Mozambique, working closely with FRELIMO (the front for the liberation of Mozambique, the principal political party before and since independence in 1974) he was excited to share a great deal of stories of the history of this country. And despite the various setbacks brought about by a vicious anti-communist backlash from old white-rule Rhodesia, South Africa and white ruled USA (i.e. CIA) and the IMF and World Bank, he wanted us to experience some of the beautiful qualities of life in a country that has tried to be in opposition to capitalism and racialism.
To get us acquainted with some of the history, he took us to the Museo de Revolucao. On its own, this FRELIMO dominated museum wouldn't have been spectacular, but with Prexy there to fill in the pictures and quotes with stories, it was a real joy. Check out this nice mural that you see soon after entering:
Believe it or not, this poem full of bold declarations against the ruling classes of the world such as:
- Fighting against the bourgeoisie,
- Our Native land will be the tomb
- Of capitalism and exploitation.
is the national anthem of mozambique:
The museum was full of charts and quotes that attempted to educate visitors about the history and economics of colonialism, and just exactly why FRELIMO fought against it. This, for example, is a map of Africa which shows the pre-colonial and colonized national borders:
But when looking at the images of the revolutionaries themselves, Prexy really came alive, sharing stories of these close friends of his who fought so bravely and against such terrible odds to drive the Portuguese from the country. Most moving, was Prexy describing how Eduardo Mondlane, first head of FRELIMO, was scheduled to have breakfast with Prexy on the morning that he was assassinated. As a graduate of Oberlin College in Ohio, the university has created a
memorial to his life.
Here, then, is Samora Machel, Mondlane's successor, and first president of Mozambique. Incidentally, and rather disgustingly, Samora Machel was also assassinated, though there has been no accountability on the part of the
Apartheid operatives responsible for his plane crashing (killing him and 34 others, much of the upper leadership of the Mozambiquan government).
FRELIMO-led Mozambique took such serious heat from international racist and capitalist forces because of their fierce commitment ending colonialism throughout Africa. To try and topple the Rhodesian white-minority government, FRELIMO cut off all freight train traffic from Rhodesia to the Mozambique coast, thus unleashing a wrathful white fury. RENAMO (the "National Mozambique Resistance") sprung up as a white-led (but carried out by blacks from Mozambique)
terror army of "counter-insurgency," to "destabilize" the economy and social life of Mozambique. We met with a photographer who had taken a number of photos of RENAMO assaults on buses, in which the group would burn alive whole bus-loads of civilians. More than
100,000 were killed by RENAMO, and a million more made refugees. These sick bastards have now forced themselves into a situation where they can run in elections, and serve on parliament as Mozambique is now supposedly a "multi-party democracy." Continuing the anti-communist onslaught even after this bloody racist nonsense, the USA is now pushing Mozambique to remove Marxist street names and the gun from their flag, or face economic backlash from them.
***
We had the great fortune to meet Samora's wife, Graca, who gave a
moving speech, and the National Youth Council that she supports.
The National Youth Council runs an amazing crafts space, for young people to create and sell all variety of crafts. They gave us a tour of their space, and we bought some of there products (though we were bizarrely rushed out early, and many people didn't get what they wanted. I guess we were intended to shop only from malls, not from amazing projects such as this. I'm not just trying to be bitter, this is an important point to consider. Why were we not told to buy only from groups such as this? Why were we even taken to shop at a mall on a so-called "solidarity" trip?)
Here's the sewing room. They work with sorts of materials, fabrics (some of which they make themselves before sewing, as in batiks) and recycled materials such as plastic bags:
They also do ceramics:
and wood work and metal work, including sculptures made from old guns bent into new shapes.
It was a wonderful space to visit. It felt like it was very empowering to the young people involved.
***
I gave this young Mozambiquan writer a copy of my book. He was very enthusiastic to connect:
Swaziland:The beautiful mountainous kingdom of Swaziland (allowed independence much sooner than the rest of South Africa because the King agreed to collaborate with the British) was a nice place to relax. We had a wonderful evening up on the mountainside with some friends, watching the sun go down.
Above: waiting at one of the borders for our Mexican friends to be let through
