Gugulethu, poverty, AIDS and Africa

First off, let me loudly exclaim about SA winning the Rugby World Cup—so fantastic!! I was at a pub near my place with my roommates and assorted friends watching the game, and after we won, the place went nuts! Everyone poured into the streets dancing and waving the flag and hugging people. It was incredible! I really feel that I’ve been having a great sport season ever since I moved here: first India won the World Cup in cricket, and now SA won the rugby cup.

The day after the match, my roommates and I went to Gugulethu, a township in Cape Town, with a colleague of my roommates (Kahelo). We had been promised an experience of how the other half of Cape Town parties, and some real African food, and it was all that and more. I believe Kaleho used to live in Gugulethu (or Gugs, as it is fondly called), and now has moved elsewhere. He was extremely informative on many different aspects of the township experience, and the South African black experience in general.

My other exclamation for the day is reserved for Mzoli’s, the restaurant/club/butchery in Gugs where we spent the major portion of the day. It is famous Cape Townian hangout, it was fantastic! It’s a bit hard to describe the place, now that I think about it. It is an open-air hangout spot (read tables on the footpath and street) that serves only braai meat. You go into their butchery, where there are huge stacks of all kinds of meat. You pick your meat, get some marinade on it, and then carry it inside to the giant clay ovens where they will barbecue it for you. Then you make a mad dash to find a table and hold onto a chair for dear life, because it could be pulled from under you. Buy a few six-packs and you are set for the afternoon. Dressing up and people-watching are a large part of the dining experience. I ate what passes for African vegetarian food, pap (miele-meal) and chakalaka (beans), both of which are tasteless. So basically I just drank, which isn’t such a bad deal. It was a very communal experience, with cars parked everywhere with their stereos on, and people spilling out from their front yards onto the road and into the restaurant area. The Boks victory put a festive feeling in the air. I was stopped a couple of times and asked what colour my heart was (!), the correct answer of course being green and gold, the colours of the team. Randomly, I was also stopped and spoken to in foreign tongues, one which I understood (Bengali) and one that I didn’t (Arabic).

Later in the afternoon, the DJ put on music, and the dancing began. I have not been exposed to a lot of African music (though Lucky Dube’s death has put reggae on soundtracks everywhere), and it was a great introduction. My favourite song of the day, which was hugely popular among the crowd, was “Manawe”. The chorus literally means “I’m going (out) with you”. Oh yes I am. At the time we left (before sunset for safety reasons), the party was still going strong.

Some pics are here.

On our way to Gugs we talked about the firing of the national rugby team’s coach because the team, with only two non-white members, is not “representative of South African demographics”. Ironically, it is also the team that won the World Cup, so I guess the coach wasn’t all that bad. This led us to talk about affirmative action in sports versus in the workplace. Kahelo was of the opinion that the latter is all right, but the former is not. I’m not entirely sure where I stand on this matter, but here is his reasoning. He pointed out that there are no black engineers in SA with, say, 15 years of work experience. This is because Apartheid policies did not allow blacks to study engineering, so only after 1994 could blacks begin to study engineering and gain pertinent work experience. So, according to Kahelo, the government must make special provisions for blacks to be integrated into the workforce until they make up at least 6 of every 10 workers (with 2 whites, 1 coloured and 1 Indian making up the rest, according to relative population strengths).

But sports seems to be a different matter: if you are not good enough then you must not be on the team, goes the reasoning, especially since a good rugby player has only about 5 years of game in him. I’m not sure about this double-standard, but I have to admit I don’t see an easy alternative to building a racially diverse yet internationally competitive team in the short term. Kaleho offered the example of the SA soccer team, which has very good black representation, but frankly, sucks terribly. He thinks that this is because black people of his generation or older (30 something) don’t work very hard after they have a house and a car. He said that it was because they had already come such a long way from where they started that it was enough for them, and they wouldn’t push themselves any more. I’m not sure how much of that I buy, coming from a man that runs three businesses in Gugs in addition to holding down a job.

Gugs is in the Cape Flats, like Khayelitsha, and most other townships of Cape Town. It is predominantly black, though it is very close to a “coloured” township. Kahelo pointed out the train tracks and highway that were built to segregate the two townships during Apartheid. More than a decade later, these man-made structures continue to act as barriers to any real racial integration of the townships. I guess you can be from the wrong side of the tracks all over the world. While telling us about the ways in which shacks are constructed in the townships and how the government tries but fails to provide adequate permanent housing to the township residents, Kaleho said something that really struck me. He said that poverty that was such an insidious beast that it drives all other concerns into the background. To a poor person who doesn’t know where her next meal is coming from, AIDS prevention or free condoms mean nothing. We drove past a cemetery in Gugs that had reached capacity a couple of years ago, because of the high number of AIDS related deaths in the area. Quite literally, the poor have no where to bury their dead.

The sad truth about AIDS prevention and treatment is that it is counterintuitive to distribute free ARVs when people don’t have enough to eat to digest the medication properly. mothers2mothers gets women to attend clinics by giving a free lunch to everyone who comes. But of course, a meal a week is not enough. AIDS strategies need to make economic sense as well. That reminds me of something I once read in an interview of Nadine Gordimer. She was talking about a benefit that she attended where celebrities raised money for mosquito nets for East Africa. She said that it didn’t make any sense to buy and ship mosquito nets to communities that were too poor to afford beds to put them over or blankets to tuck the sides under. That is thoughtless charity, where you give only to feel good about yourself, regardless of whether it actually helps someone or not.

And speaking further of AIDS and poverty: I just finished reading Susan Hunter’s newest book about AIDS in Africa called “Black Death”. Cheery title, that one. Hunter has many years of international development experience, particularly with AIDS in Africa. She writes quite eloquently, with well supported arguments, about how Africa is the epicentre of the pandemic because it was crippled by centuries of “rape by the West”, leaving it impoverished and unable to cope with disease. She has a few chapters tracing the history of human epidemics, and on Darwin’s great theory and how it explains disease and resistance. It is all very good until she comes to her theories about the reasons for the two main pillars of her book: impoverishment of Africa and AIDS. To be fair, she has several theories, and I take issue with only two of them, but those two are rooted in evolution/natural selection/biological bases, and as a (wannabe) biologist, I was offended.

Her first idea is that one way to explain why Africa has been marginalised on the world stage is genetic. Though all humans descended from Africans, genetically speaking, we can be separated into two groups (Africans or not), because of the way human migrations out of Africa worked out all those millennia ago. Of course, this statement needs several qualifiers: genetic diversity amongst populations is highest among Africans, and genetic differences within all human populations tend to be higher than any differences between them. Given all this, Hunter still ventures into the bizarre by saying that a prejudice against Africans may have a genetic basis to it. I mean, someone call Reuters—isn’t this exactly the kind of stuff that got Nobel Laureate Watson kicked out of the school named after him? There is absolutely no scientific evidence to support the claim that we are justified in any bias against Africa because of genetics. Lets not malign science this way. And lets not forget that Africa was not the only continent to be “raped”, though it may have been the only continent where the oppressed survived to tell tales (think Inca and Aztec people).

The second idea that I intensely disliked has to with the emergence of AIDS. Hunter discusses human sexuality in some detail in her book, pointing out that humans are a monogamous species for the most part (most being the operative word there). She gives a few examples of species that are fully monogamous, or fully polygynous (many female partners). There were no examples of polyandry. Her hypothesis is that humans are still evolving into the fully monogamous state, and AIDS, targeting promiscuity as it does, may be evolution’s way of selecting individuals who stick to one partner. This idea troubles me to no end. Natural selection does not work this way!! It is not a teleological machine that calculates: let’s find a reason for people to keep their pants on and soon we will have a monogamous species. This is EXACTLY why intelligent design is a load of crap: there is no big-guy-in-the-sky deciding to tweak things a certain way to get desired results. Evolution has no desired results. The fittest survive, and that is all there is. If that leads us to monogamy, so be it. I am amazed that a woman who spends chapters discussing Darwin does not fully understand his masterpiece. So let me say this again: AIDS is not evolution’s way of getting us to be good girls and boys. HIV is transmitted via sex (among other things) because it’s a damn good route to spread infection, humans having as much sex as they do, and viruses have evolved to do things that are best for their genetic survival.

I’m done ranting. This has somehow turned into a gigantic post. If you are still reading, HUGS!