Always use the word ‘Africa’ or ‘Darkness’ or ‘Safari’ in your title. Also useful are words such as ‘Guerrillas,’ ‘Timeless,’ ‘Primordial’ and ‘Tribal.’
Treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and big red sunsets and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book.
Establish early on that your liberalism is impeccable, and mention near the beginning how much you love Africa, how you fell in love with the place and can’t live without her. Africa is to be pitied, worshipped or dominated.
Taboo subjects: ordinary domestic scenes, love between Africans (unless a death is involved), references to African writers or intellectuals, mention of school-going children who are not suffering from yaws or Ebola fever or female genital mutilation.
Always end your book with Nelson Mandela saying something about rainbows or renaissances. Because you care.
—From “How to Write About Africa,” Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina
Overview
South Africa—some of its many other names are Afrika Borwa in Sotho & Tswana, iNingizimu Afrika in Zulu, uMzantsi Afrika in Xhosa, and Suid Afrika in Afrikaans.
The rest of the world has probably heard a bit more about South Africa than about other African countries, with the anti-apartheid struggle reaching worldwide awareness in the 1980s and Nelson Mandela being inducted into the pantheon of non-violent resistance. More recently, Trevor Noah has helped put South Africa more on the map in pop culture. I’ll do my best here to give some background as to what’s the deal with this country. As with my intro to Palestine and Israel, this in no way is meant to be a complete perfect picture of South Africa’s many identities, history, and current events. I’m writing most of this post-trip from my notes I took from all the people I met and talked to, from museums, and from various sources online and in print that I came across before, during, and after the trip (Britannica online is my go-to source). Again, I’ll try to refrain from including too many specific names and dates, just giving an overall narrative. It’s a lot, but it really helps with understanding the context of the places I saw, and the many complex identities of the people I met. If you’re South African and happen to be reading this, and I seriously misrepresent something about the history or current events, please do reach out so I can correct it.
The people
All African countries south of the Sahara are much more diverse than most outsiders realize, and South Africa is no exception. With a population of almost 60 million, South Africa has 11 official languages, though several more are spoken besides those, including the tongues of the various immigrant groups from other parts of Africa. The most common indigenous African languages are Xhosa and Zulu, as they are the largest ethnicities. White people of Dutch descent as well as “coloured” Africans (the official term there for mixed race people of various backgrounds) in the western Cape areas speak Afrikaans, a Dutch-related language. Whites of British heritage of course speak English, which also still serves as a default language for everyone else across the country. South Africa is also home to the largest Indian population outside of India in the world, forced laborers brought in during British colonialism; most of them speak English, being several generations removed from India. Complicating things even further, some of the coloureds in the west I mentioned also have some Indian descent, brought over by the early Dutch colonists as slaves from the East Indies, along with people from Malaysia, Indonesia, and the east coast of Africa.
It’s a lot to take in. Rewind just twenty-five years, most of the people just mentioned didn’t have any rights or representation under the apartheid system in South Africa. And the roots of that go back another 350 years, to when the Dutch first started colonizing the place, after the Portuguese were the first Europeans to encounter it. And before that, humans had of course lived in the land for thousands of years, as with anywhere else, though we’ve probably been in the area that is today South Africa a bit longer than we’ve been in other places. You know the whole “all humans started in Africa” thing? Some of the caves where the oldest hominin (homo sapien and earlier humans) remains are found are in South Africa, in the Cradle of Humankind near Johannesburg.
Most of the first known ethnic groups and cultures in southern Africa several thousand years ago were Khoe-San peoples, until Bantu peoples migrated in from the north. The San peoples were (some still are) mostly hunter-gatherers, while the Khoe herded their own domesticated livestock. Khoe-San peoples are one of the earliest groups that branched off from early humans that have still maintained a distinct ethnicity, and language(s), while human groups in many other parts of the world have since mixed with each other more over the millennia.
Some Bantu societies were built around smaller tribes, while others were larger and more centralized, and over the centuries various kingdoms formed and broke apart. One of the more prominent ones was the kingdom of Mapungubwe in the northeast, around 900 years ago. Prior to the arrival of Europeans in the 17th century, the main ethnicities in the region were the Xhosa in the south, Tswana in the north, Zulu in the east, and Basotho & Pedi groups across the central and northeastern areas. As with humans all over the world throughout history, these different cultures interacted with each other sometimes peacefully, sometimes violently. I think it’s important to at least give the names of some of these groups and their history because so often, sub-Saharan Africa has its pre-colonial history reduced to just footnotes about nameless tribes leading primitive pastoral lives, painted as either squabbling savages or romanticized as pacifist proto-hippies, when in reality they were (and are) so much more.
The colonizers
From there we’ll jump to the 1650s, when the Dutch started the Cape Town colony, strategically located on the route to India (the Portuguese had been the first Europeans to sail through 150 years before). They gradually expanded their influence across the western cape further inland, bringing in slaves from around the Indian Ocean and brutally subjugating the Khoisan and other indigenous Africans they encountered, resisted as they did. Over the years the Dutch grew a very strong identity as the Boers, believing it was their God-given destiny to rule over and prosper in South Africa (sound familiar?).
In the 1800s the British gained control over the Dutch African colonies out of the mess around Napoleon back in Europe, and continued to colonize the region further. The British did abolish slavery (to the annoyance of the Boers), but started to bring in forced laborers from their own colonies in India. Tensions over minerals like gold and political control rose between the British and the Boers throughout the century, leading to the two Boer Wars in 1880 and 1900, in which the British cracked down on their fellow white Europeans using concentration camps. The other big series of events in this century was instability in the east, partially brought on by refugees fleeing from Portuguese slavers in Mozambique, which led to the Zulus under King Shaka becoming more expansionist, forming a kingdom that displaced other groups and lead to the formation of independent countries Lesotho and Swaziland. The British, with aid from some of the Boers, continued to conquer the rest of the land as part of the European Scramble for Africa, fighting several wars with the Xhosa over the years in the southeast, and facing fierce resistance from the Zulus. By the 1900s, Britain had defeated the Boers, the Xhosa, the Zulus, and the remaining African peoples. Over the course of the 20th century, the Boers would come to identify more as “Afrikaners.”
Apartheid
Up until this point, there had been no clear standard laws across the land discriminating against non-white peoples (indigenous Africans, coloureds, Indians); racist laws varied between the different British and Boer/Afrikaner colonies and cities. Though tensions continued between the British and Afrikaners, the new white South African government was united in passing more country-wide laws on racial segregation. These laws provided the foundation for the National Party’s white supremacist apartheid system, officially started in 1948.
Brutal white leaders like Hendrik Verwoerd tried very much to portray it as a benevolent “good-neighborliness,” that it was for the better of all the racial groups to have their own separate areas and lives. It certainly rhymed with the “separate but equal” idea over in Jim Crow America, and of course it was anything but that. Non-white people could not vote, mixed marriages were outlawed, schools and facilities were segregated, and they could only live and move in restricted areas while working as laborers during the day in white areas. The regime forcibly relocated hundreds of thousands of non-whites out of their homes into these new designated areas, bantustans, from the 1950s into the 1970s.
Resistance
Non-violent action against segregation had been carried out by various groups since the earlier pre-apartheid laws, especially from the Indian population led by a younger Mahatma Gandhi, but with the rise of apartheid, anti-apartheid movements soon formed across the country in the 1950s, with the ANC (African National Congress), trade unions, and other groups leading the charge. Many white citizens joined the protest movements as well. Resistance was at first non-violent, but the South African state became more of a total police state. With the 1960 massacre of unarmed protesters in Sharpeville by troops, more of the anti-apartheid groups turned to armed struggle, mostly sabotaging government and military buildings but also killing soldiers and police officers, as well as some civilians. Things were further complicated as South Africa became a Cold War battle, with the United States supporting the capitalist apartheid regime and the Soviet Union supporting the more socialist anti-apartheid groups (each country in it for their own selfish reasons of power). Within a few years most anti-apartheid leaders were arrested, including Nelson Mandela, while others escaped, went into exile, and continued organizing resistance from abroad.
In 1976 the movement reignited with the mass student-led Soweto Uprising. Strikes and nonviolent protests by victims of apartheid intensified in the 80s, along with some violent attacks from militant groups, as the government army and police became ever more brutal. The international community and the UN began to isolate the South African government; civil society groups around the world boycotted the country and any institutions connected to apartheid, and governments began trade and arms sanctions (the US government was one of the last ones to enact embargos). It was clear that while the South African military was too strong for the movement to defeat, the government could not fully crush resistance, both at home and abroad; over the course of years-long negotiations between leaders from each side, prisoners like Mandela were released, and militants lay down their arms. The dismantling of apartheid began in the 1990s under president F.W. de Klerk, leading to the first election in which everyone could vote in 1994, with Mandela winning the presidency, after 46 years of apartheid and more than a few hundred years of white supremacist rule.
Present and future
Many things have changed for the better in the rainbow nation since the 1990s. South Africans from any background can now vote and move freely, choose where they work, marry who they want. But many things have not changed, or they’ve even gotten worse. Decades of systemic oppression tend to leave strong legacies. Some black and coloured Africans have been able to get better jobs and earn more, but most wealth and especially land is still owned by whites; poverty and inequality are rampant, leading to one of the biggest crime rates in the world. It is no secret that the ANC has become corrupt, and many South Africans are very disillusioned with their political leaders. There is still tension between different black ethnic groups, as well as xenophobia against the many immigrants who have come from other parts of Africa for better opportunity, especially Zimbabweans. The government did very little to address the early AIDS crisis too, though it has done more in recent years.
You may be saying, “damn, Ben, you’re coming down hard on these people, you think you could do better if you were in charge of South Africa?”, but again, I’m editing this after my trip—this is just a taste of the grievances the South African people themselves have, from all backgrounds. Still, holding true to my principles I set out with back in October, I will try to not just focus on apartheid and these big issues while I am there and writing about it. There is still the beautiful mountains and wildlife and coasts to explore, the less tragic parts of the history, the culture, the language, and of course farming, the crops and the animals and the land. Now that I’ve shed some light on the tough stuff, let’s get to it—next stop, South Africa.
Note: I will be mentioning people’s race in most encounters I have throughout South Africa. It is not always so pressingly relevant to do this for countries outside of South Africa, though race, ethnicity, and nationality do play a huge role in most places around the world. But in South Africa especially race, and the divisions between (and within) races, are a major fact of its social fabric. Pretending otherwise, that we should be “colorblind” to race, is no less counterproductive here than in the US or elsewhere. I think it is very relevant in showing where the country and its people are at, where they’ve been, and where they’re going—how people from different backgrounds interact with each other, what kinds of jobs and stations in life they tend to occupy.
As far as more specific ethnicity goes, which is also very relevant as there are tensions between different ethnic groups within the country, as an outsider I unfortunately won’t be able to tell in most cases whether a black person is Sotho or Zulu, or if they’re an immigrant from someplace else entirely—though it is safe to assume that most black people in Lesotho are Sotho, most around Durban are Zulu, etc. Yet around Cape Town I won’t be able to always tell if a black person is coloured or full Xhosa. I also won’t be able to always tell which white people are Afrikaner, British descent, or other. If I don’t mention race, it can be presumed the person is black African, though if I am in a hostel it can be presumed most people are white travelers from Europe, North America, or Australia.
Foreign Fields 