Cape Town Highlights

entrance to Robben Island (where Mandela was jailed)
Mandela's cell
View from Robben Island to Cape Town and Table Top Mountain

Michelle on Robben Island with Table Mountain in distance
View from top of Table Mountain into waterfront
Downtown Cape Town
C

Cape Town Housing

January 30, 2009

all of these dwellings are within a mile of one another. my perspective on race/class has shifted in a profound way with my visit to south africa. you want social disparities? you want racial invisibility? visit beautiful cape town south africa where squatter towns border all white gated communities and all colored communities. millions of blacks live without running water, toilets, unemployment ranges between 60 - 70%, TB rates crest at 45% and 1 out of 4 are HIV+.

pam's cousin, a black american telecomm professional, lives in a mostly-white community. his 3000+ sq ft condo is nestled in a bay with table mountain behind and the indian ocean in the front. we sat by the pool drinking a fabulous pinotage that is produced locally. as we watched the moon settle in the horizon i couldn't help but acknowledge "life is damned good" even as i was sobered by the doom of apartheid's legacy.

in nigeria, my african colleagues told me that i am not black but rather muzengi, that is, foreigner. there are very few mixed race peoples. you're either a dark skinned black or you're a white. i'm not soul sister number one in abuja, i'm vanilla cha (WTF?).

then there's south africa....where the shit gets deep and raw. racial categories: white, coloured, asian, black. i, apparently, am coloured and it comes with privileges! in education, employment and housing. people that pass the paper bag test still mostly marry one another or whites/asians exclusively (you can be outed in the newspaper for going black!). they've created generations of light skinned people who proudly call themselves coloured (WTF?). american blacks don't know disparites. when SCIENTIFIC data are presented, coloured is a racial category. my social standing has improved in cape town. it's fucking scary.

segregation is alive and well in this "post-racial" Mandela society, NOT. thousands upon thousands live in shanty towns with no running water, bootleg electricity and no toilets. unemployment ranges from 60 - 70%. eduation is severely under resourced. there's a raging "tik" (crystal meth) epidemic. there are NO recreational facilities, parks, supermarkets in these communities. these people are dooomed (and it's mostly black people).

more scary is that everyone says shit like "ja, it's a shame but what can you do?" i say burn the mother fucker, BURN IT!

email from reggie:
OMG! Shug, thanks so much for sharing this! I can't imagine what that must feel like. Honestly, I think that's why my research focuses on domestic issues as the international ones seem too insurmountable. Although the domestic issues usually make me angry, the international ones make me feel angry and guilty. There was a student in my doctoral program (Cassandra O.) who usually put all of our African American complaining into perspective too. Whenever we (black students) would be sitting around complaing about how hard we had it growing up..she would chime in..where I grew up in Nigeria we didn't have a roof (game over! none of us had anything else to say after that...). I heard something at a recent conference where someone said that "race is a cohort experience" (that is race is experienced by our parent's cohort very differently from the way our age cohort experiences it) and it appears we should add that it is also a country specific experience as well.

email from carmen

Darling few Americans know the reality of life around the world. Even those who travel, rarely travel to where the indigenous people live or have a clue as to what day-to-day survival really means. We worry about our economy while others worry about having food to eat and clean drinking water. Africa probably is the worse because the contrasts are so great and divided along color lines, but India, China, the Middle East, South America, Central America, it is hardly different except that the divisions aren't based on color. This is the reality as hard as it must be on you to see it so blatantly in action. It takes travel and I don't mean tourist vacations to get an understanding about life and I'm glad you are able to do it. It's not pretty, but in spite of it, people still can smile, be welcoming and loving. It is the life they know, not necessarily the life they want to live and certainly not the life that an American - no matter how poor - could even fathom.

email from joanne
I always find that when I travel extensively as you are doing now I feel more grounded and connected. Outside of the US I've been to Morocco, Spain, Belize, El Salvador, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Panama, St. Lucia, Ecuador, Chile, and a few other countries. There is not one year of my "formal education" that compares to one month in any of these countries. Living in the US we are raised to believe how big we are. We believe everything going on here and now is the center of the universe. I believe it myself most of the time unless I purposefully stop the spiral. Then it takes something major (health/sickness of a loved one, an inspirational trip, some other hippy-dippy self-actualizing moment) for me to be catapulted back to reality and remember what matters. Looking at people as individuals with perspectives that are both deeply rooted and fluid. Realizing that everybody has something to teach.

January 31, 2009

i'm trying not to be judgmental because in spite of this system i recognize ours is quite imperfect. america after all has doomed its indigenous people to reservations -- which are hardly better than these shanty towns.

the good news is that there are many people, influential powerful people, who understand their responsibility and obligation to change and not in the remote sense. we had breakfast today with the rector of stellenbosch university (i think this is equivalent to the president of the university -- the role larry somers played and that drew faust is now playing at harvard, impressive). he was hired in 2007 and has increased the enrollment of blacks at the university from less than 20% to just under 40% (and has a goal to increase it to 50% by 2011). they purposefully seek rural and urban poor blacks to cultivate (and fund their entire education as well as providing other aggressive support. this is due in no small measure to the fact that the stellenbosch is housed on land that the blacks were ousted from).

good work is being done. it's just stunning to see the disparity. especially when ignorance lulled me into thinking Mandela's freedom liberated the blacks.

like Obama's election, we've still got serious work to do.

Where we went and why we were there

Powerpoint presentation created by Dr. Michelle Holmes.

Tanzania (Excursion to Rufiji)

Heading to Rufiji district, David, Shona, Michelle and school boy (first leg on a ferry leaving Dar es Salaam)Heading to Rufiji district (first leg on a ferry leaving Dar es Salaam)

Rural Tanzania, Rufiji district

Town of Ikewiriri, Rufiji district Tanzania

Ikewiriri dwelling

Leaving the rest stop facilities

The rest stop facilities (this was actually taken at the health center we visited. The rest stop facilities were adorned with hornet nests, lizards and many cobwebs. Charming!)

January 27, 2009
Notes on Tanzania
email message from sister Monique to mother, Carmen, describing our telephone conversation.

"I just hung up from Miss Shelly!

She is in Tanzania where the life expectancy is 47. The locals call her a "Muzenge" which means foreigner. She stands out like a sore thumb; because the locals either look African or European, but the blended folk come from somewhere else. They are working her from morning to night. Meetings begin at 8 in the morning, proceed non-stop throughout the day. She has no alone time as the entire group regroups for dinner. It was after 11pm when I spoke to her. They are 8 hours ahead and she was just getting ready for bed. She called me b/c she couldn't reach Pam. I am so glad to have to receive her call!

She described her experience of using the bathroom at a state of the art hospital. The toilet facilities are separate from the main structure; it was an outhouse covered in cob webs and populated by lizards and spiders and flies. They have been coached to carry their own toilet paper. Inside the outhouse, there was a hole in the floor. That was it. A hole, where she had to squat and aim. There was no running water, not to flush, or wash so she had to get it right the first time or she would be wearing it to the rest of her meetings throughout the day. I won't describe the process of trying to make it go down, you can use your imagination. We remarked how lucky she is to be traveling for work rather than born into those circumstances.

She sounded like she was in good spirits. She is flying to her third country tomorrow. Not sure where to; At $2.40 a minute on her global phone, I am sure that we will find out by email."

Abuja: The National Mosque

January 24, 2009

To learn more see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigerian_National_Mosque

Friday night and the mosque is jumping!

View from the National Christian Center

Women must be veiled in order to enter mosque grounds.

The exterior of the Nigerian National Mosque.

We visited the National Mosque during our last morning in Abuja. It was an amazing sight -- best described through pictures. The women in our group had to veil themselves to enter the grounds of the mosque. It was a hot dusty day. My polyester scarf soon began to feel like a plastic bag entombing my head. I do not mind dressing modestly but veiling is too much. How chauvanistic! How oppressive!

There's a traveler's advisory warning travelers to show extreme caution when traveling in Nigeria (the Delta region is the worst. It's where oil is produced). Lagos has a reputation too for street crime. In my less than 24 hours experiene Lagos is notorious indeed, for its traffic. If Obama thinks we suffer from infrastructure deficiency -- he ain't seen nothing yet! Highways are woefully unsuitable for this bustling urban center. Our host told us that the capital was relocated to Abuja because of the bad traffic. The city is in constant gridlock.

Petrol is cheap. Car dealerships are on every corner (Purchases are on a cash and carry basis. ATMs were introduced less than 3 years ago but the economy is largely based on cash. Hence, we settled our hotel bills in cash). The roads can not acommodate the number of drivers. Corruption has left many roads unfinished and in some cases unstarted. But the industrious Nigerian has developed an entire thriving economy based on stopped traffic.

You can literally set-up house just sitting in traffic. There's the usual fare: gum (orbits), sacks of fruit, bags of water, bootleg CDs and phone cards. More unusual: bathroom accessories, sandals, sunglasses, clothing, live pheasants bound at the feet and mouse glue traps (?). And there are squegee boys too.

Driving, as usual in Africa, is risky business. The road rule: Survival of the fittest. You must wear your seatbelt at all times even as a taxi passenger. Cars are riddled with dings and dents from frequent fender benders. Settlements are negotiated quickly. No one waits for the police because it will only result in both parties being "shaken down". Whatever it costs fo repair damages is settled on the spot. $10,000 naira? $50,000 naira? Bam, cash is rendered on the spot. (1 U.S. dollar = $140 naira)

Adabo for now.

Abuja: The Nigerian National Christian Center

January 24, 2009

To learn more see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigerian_National_Christian_Centre

The HSPH African Cohort team, from left to right: Michelle Holmes, Hans-Olov Adami, Clemente Adebemowo (Nigeria lead scientist and host) Michelle Coleman, Doug Dockery, Shona Dalal, David Havelick, Juan Jose Buerza, Adejumo (IHV Nigeria colleague)


A little video of the exterior (sorry I don't know how to orient this correctly).

A video of the interior.

Abuja, Nigeria Third Day

Wusi market butchers.

Foreground: dried shrimp.

Curlicues: dried cow skin

Black rings are dried fish (a wire is run thru the fish and its dried in a circle so that the fish looks like its swallowing its own tail (first imported from Iceland during the Biafran conflict to provide much needed protein supplementation in the local diets. Now it's a delicacy)

Live chickens with proprietor taking a break on top of cages.

January 24, 2009
Today, our last day in Abuja (day three), we visited the Wusi market. The scientific justification I think was to get a sense of local customs, diet and culture. And did we ever. I'm sort of starting at the end of my Abuja experience but it was pretty fascinating.

Imagine a market packed with stalls with bags filled to overflowing with snow white millet, sunshine yellow ground cassava, black eyed peas, red orange and yellow scotch bonnets, ripe plum tomatoes, tiny dried caramel colored shrimp so strongly scented they made your mouth water, periwinkle colored snails the size of your thumb pad, huge grey/brown snails the size of a small foot, canned goods stacked 10 feet high, cages packed with live auburn feathered chickens with bright red combs, cages of rabbits and guinea pigs and pheasants, bunches of spinach, bottled water, pineapple, plums, green and red grapes, tiny apples, fruits with the skin of papaya but the size of a lime, drums of palm oil (a red very viscous oil that's used in abundance in local food preparation), canola oil, tubs filled with live catfish the size of carnival baseball bats and very little water and more! Not to mention the people...brown faces everywhere!

Everything was in close proximity to everything else -- only enough room for two adults to pass one another. Children followed us as if we were the pied pipers. Some watching the mysterious whites, other trying to sell us stuff and some just asking us to "snap" them (take my picture).

I "accidently" wandered into the slaughter house section of the market where I was met with headless skinned goats and piles of blood and entrails and other recently hacked animal parts. It was revolting but I couldn't turn away. The air was thick with the sweet metallic smell of blood and rotting meat. I had to sip the air to breath. There was no mistaking this was local at it's truest and purest. It's permanently changed my perception of the farmer's market.

The vendors, as you can imagine, were an enterprising bunch. When they realized we weren't there to buy but to watch and snap. They angrily said "no buy, no snap!" I couldn't blame them. I have so much more to say about the day but there is a queue for the one computer in this hotel (I am now in boogie down Lagos -- it has a well deserved reputation but that's another story). I'll write soon to tell you about my first time veiling , visiting the national mosque, the Lagos highways and more!

Did you know that Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa boasting 14M? One in every black in the world is of Nigerian descent?

E'che. Yoruba for thank you, for reading my story.