I have never been told that I should get out of a restaurant or a place of worship, so I did not give much thought to what my South African host was saying.
We were enjoying our meal at an up-market seafood restaurant on the waterfront in Cape Town and our host, a jolly, fast-speaking, enthusiastic, Black businessman looked at us and suddenly said: “You wouldn’t have seen Black people here before.”
I then noticed there were only a few Blacks at the restaurant and that our group from Dubai seemed to be the only brown-skin coloured people here. Shortly afterwards, our photographer made us all stand and pose and smile for a group photo and that caught the attention of the rest of the regulars at the restaurant, many of whom were dressed fashionably in white yacht shoes and shorts.
Two decades passed since apartheid — that turned Blacks into sub-humans — had come to an end, but the memories apparently linger on and people had not easily forgotten the humiliation under the state-sponsored racial segregation policy.
After that remark, nothing else was said about how bad it was for the Blacks before and one of the young men with us proudly said that he was a Master’s in Business Management.
I was reading a commentary by Justice Malala, a political analyst and editor, about how many Black people find Cape Town disconcerting, though it was once the most liberal city of South Africa. He recalled the words of Helen Zille, the premier of Western Cape. (Zille is White). She angered many South Africans by saying her province’s schools were flooded by education ‘refugees’ from Eastern Cape.
Malala points out that it was Eastern Cape that produced Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki, two of South Africa’s post-apartheid presidents. (Education system in that province had collapsed).
He writes that there is a popular belief that Western Cape and Cape Town sees itself as an extension of Europe and the last bastion of White rule in Africa.
It is not easy to understand what discrimination is unless you are subjected to it. Some of my compatriots from India, suffer from discrimination today, even after more than 65 years of independence from the British Raj, because of their caste or ranking in the society.
Mahatma Gandhi, an Indian expatriate lawyer who lived in South Africa for 20 years, tried to change the way Indians were being treated there. As you know, he later came back to India and set the stage for the freedom of his country.
His former home in Johannesburg more than 100 years ago has been turned into a museum called Satyagraha House. Satyagraha loosely translates to “truth force’. The museum is also a guest house and is a “unique way to immerse yourself in the privacy of a man and the history of a country,” said the blurb in my brochure.
You don’t see much of the colour divide in today’s South Africa. On a Jo’burg street, I saw an elderly White woman cooing at a pretty, shy Black girl, who was holding on to her mother’s skirt.
But the years of segregation and discrimination have taken a toll on the society and there is poverty and unemployment in the Black community. Lack of jobs have turned many to the world of crime.
It was alarming to see that many upscale homes in the city had signs that said, “Armed Response” — apparently, the owners would not hesitate to shoot you if you ventured into their homes unannounced.
But as one political commentator said, in this era of ‘After Mandela’, the future of South Africa is bright, but is dependent on the type of leadership it is looking for.
