The Plane

(look for what you are interested in in the bold - that way you can skim past some of my rantings... or just enjoy!)

Realization and Developing Rationale

I’ve been flying for a long time now - a very long time. It took us about 9 hours to get to Dakar, Senegal and now another 8 or so to get from their to Cape Town. Most of this trip has been somewhat nerve wracking for the last couple of days, just trying to get things nailed down. As we touched down in Dakar, though, I finally started to feel excited, just purely excited. This is a new continent! There are people, places, wonders here I have only ever heard of, read about and - ironically - taught to teenagers. When I saw the lights of Dakar below us I noticed highways and suburbs and I struggled against my preconceived notions of Africa almost immediately. I wonder if that will continue to happen. To us Africa is so far away - to me it was always otherworldly, formed in my brain by the (often racist) images I was shown in my youth. The Gods Must Be Crazy. When I saw the highways of Senegal below my plane I realized just how narrow my vision of Africa has always been, despite what I think of as a decent education. No one on that highway would think it was miraculous that a coke bottle fell from the sky, it wouldn’t take anyone any epic journeys to discover the curse that coke bottle brought with it. The people below me there live in cities, probably watch television and while they are dealing with extreme poverty in Senegal, they are not ignorant of the world. Yet we are ignorant of them.

We go on with our preconceived notions of what this continent is like (there I go falling into that horribly American habit of referring to the second largest continent on earth as one, coherent whole) which we do very little to combat in schools. We remain ignorant to the current culture and everyday lives of the people here - instead focusing on the destruction of tribal cultures (Things Fall Apart), wars and the fictionalized adventures our imaginations bring with them (Blood Diamond - a particularly white-sainthood adventure), famine (my mother, telling me to eat things from my plate when I was young), genocide, AIDS. One of the reasons I’m on this trip is because I see this as a problem. I see that when we show these things to our kids we are showing them little of what will actually connect them to countries in Africa, We are presenting to them, essentially, a destroyed culture wracked by problems they are helpless to solve and exist so far out of the their daily lives. The misery we present them with is so great, the problems so insurmountable, the distance between these events and their lives so nearly cosmic, that they can dismiss it and therefore further cut off connections with the rest of the world.

Isolation

Lisa told me yesterday morning about a man she had heard speak on the extinction of the dinosaurs. One of the reasons it happened (besides the big-fucking-rock thing) was isolation: populations were isolated and therefor unable to freely move, adapt, migrate and widen their gene pool. This left them susceptible to disaster. Okay friends and family, if this is truly a stretch and a false analogy and you don’t buy it please chime in, but I see a parallel here. We are connected so much economically, many times without even knowing it, but we are still so poorly connected in a human sense. If my kids know that there are other people out there like them and they have seen more than just the popular image of the spear-wielding African (and I knowingly speak in horrible generalizations here of course), they will get more involved, more angry about the lack of available generic retroviral medications, completely free gun sales (by Olympic hosts - tune out and support an economic boycott please - send athletes, not money!) to the Sudan, laws like apartheid, election fraud, civil wars and genocide. Did you hear about the South African longshoremen? The ones who would not let a Chinese ship dock filled with weapons bound for the Sudan? Those are connected people, those are not isolated individuals, those people allowed others to survive.

I just got an idea - I wonder if I could find one of them? Talk to them and see what they were thinking? See why they did it. I can’t imagine our longshoremen doing a similar thing. Perhaps I’m selling them short - and if I am and your know that please tell me, but I just don’t think it would happen. Why not? Who knows. But isolation might be a factor.

The powers of isolation are strong come to think of it. When our media moves from one story to the next without drawing connections, reporting to the fullest extent or seemingly even caring about their reportage, we are being isolated. For a moment we feel close to the cyclone victims in Burma, and then in a matter of weeks we feel passionate only about the Dalai Lama, and then we are on to the world court trying to arrest the president of Sudan. Where next? Do we still remember the cyclone victims being held by a regime that takes guidance from what amounts to an oracle? It’s isolation. I believe this to be true in our own back yards. While trying not to be too conspiracy theorist I’ll just say one thing: our society is, we all know, still a racist one which privileges certain skin colors. However, there are no longer signs above water fountains pointing this out. Instead, there are the insidious moves of various housing departments and developers to isolate the poor together or push them out of areas through gentrification. This is still just an idea - and not a fully formed one at that - but I think Lisa’s scientist may have touched on something more than just dinos.

I know so little about what I’m talking about here it’s almost embarrassing. I went on that spiel all about a series of lights outside an 8x10 window. Still. Holds water.

The Plane, the Rainbow Nation, the Rainbow World

I was just waiting in line for the bathroom with a friendly but frazzled mother of a one year old daughter who is sitting behind me. They have a long story that ends with the fact that they are traveling 29 hours to get to her family’s house in Cape Town. She’s living in Savannah now. Her skin is light brown and she’s tired, but talkative. At first her words are hard to understand because she has a mixed South African and Southern accent. Some of her words angle to the swamps of Georgia, others to the streets of Cape Town. I wonder what it’s like for her to be living so far from home, and in the south.

On this flight I have heard my first Afrikaans from my neighbors. Actually, there are a lot of Afrikaners on the plane (I make an assumption here, having never met any and basically my understanding of whites in South Africa is that they are either British descended and then speak only English or they are Afrikaner and speak both English and Afrikaans). Again I face my preconceived notions. Here are people from a small group of people in this world - they exist in no other country in any large number and they only comprise less than 10% of South Africa’s population - and yet they, or Verwoerd and their leaders, were the architects of apartheid. It’s a strange thing isn’t it? I mean for me it is at least. In the US there was certainly collective guilt on the part of whites (and there still is to some extent), and certain people were essentially the architects of slavery, Jim Crow and segregation - but they were not culturally distinct, they did not have an established, minority national identity. They did not have a separate language.

The language sounds interesting - an amalgamation of dutch, various other european languages and, I just learned, some middle eastern and african languages brought here during the slave trade. It is a unique type of pigeon that became a creole and now there are novels written in it. It’s a pretty rare thing that this happens in the way, and with the speed, that it happened with Afrikaans. Some of that was due to isolation (somewhat contradicting my previous rambling) and being embattled in the country. Afrikaners have for a long time seen themselves as a group that has struggled to survive. I guess they have. It’s hard to feel positive about it though because their years of victory amounted to so much pain for others.

The people sitting next to me did not necessarily do something wrong. They seem nice. They’re middle aged, made some references to children, and the man is slightly larger than me so when we squeeze in here together we try to be kind about sharing the armrest. These two were probably not in the SADF or the death squads. I’m starting to think about what Mandela and Tutu mean when they talk about living side by side. Of course I am not black, or South African, and certainly not free of the guilt of privilege myself. Still, listening to the language, thinking about the history, having looked at some of the images and read some of the stories, it’s amazing that all of these people can live next to each other still. If I were black, if I was from South Africa, I could imagine that each time I heard the sound of Afrikaans (and even English) I would cringe and remember. I am very curious about why that does not happen, or if it does happen - where and how?