11/24/06

Thoughts \ Developed Thoughts \ Rants \ Raves \ Writing

06/17/2005 23:16 +0200 GMT

Structural Violence

Camp's Bay was the highlight; watching the sun set over the Atlantic fed my hungry soul. I am reminded of the only other time I have seen the sun set, as opposed to rise over the Atlantic. It was at Juhu Beach in Bombay, India, when it was still called Bombay, and not Mumbai. Before I sound too much like the Seinfeld character, I'll move on...

I've just returned from checking email at an internet cafe on a seedy strip of Main Street in Sea Point. The place is run by a smallish, bespectacled Asian young man, I think Korean, with a thick Afrikaans Brogue. He was very helpful and reasonable. I got no sense of opportunism in my interactions with him. He had a grey parrot named Sky on his shoulder. I purchased 4 hours of internet time for R35. So that's about $6 for four hours. I had 203 new messages, of which only about 10 were important.

It's hard to recap the last 72 hours, but let's try. A too-brief goodbye to Maggie and to Estelle, then on to Atlanta. Then waiting for a full flight, I sat next to a teenage boy, his orthopedic surgeon father hovering nearby. I learned that they were traveling to Zim and to Mozambique to hunt and to do some extreme sports. I found it obnoxious to see the influence of affluence on the boy, who was thinking about how cool it would be to play with his remote-controlled cars in Africa...again. He remarked that if it broke, he would just get parts for it. At that point I wondered twenty things in a flash too fast to record.

Among them was whether an African child the same age as my new friend would have the same opportunity to imagine having a remote control vehicle. Is that within the imaginable for a child in Zambia? Are there ads? The disparity of concerns this boy next to me has, as opposed to what say Boniface has, who was just recently struck by car, rendered unconscious, and swindled by the driver who fled the scene. Has this physician who's taking his boy to Africa again really seen the same Africa that I have seen? Has he shown it to his boy?

It's a long-ass flight to Jo'burg. I watched a basketball movie with Samuel Jackson, a boxing movie with Morgan freeman, and a romantic comedy with Will Smith. I napped on my fallen-asleep arm. I ate the food, despite any drive to do so. I was lucky to have a sedate man sitting in the window seat to my left. I had the aisle, and was more comfortable than I anticipated. Landing on Sal Island and knowing we were still 8 hours away was difficult, but movies and naps helped. It was lovely to fly over the Cape in the daytime, but I'm getting ahead of myself, missing a few steps.

Jo'burg was a small battle that I won. The classic rude American complained openly about the service and the flight as we all waited in the queue for passport control. She would never use the airline again. Good, I thought. Jo'burg airport has many young men willing to assist with luggage from here to there. Three refusals, polite but firm, were enough to get rid of them, time and again. I changed some money ($50) so I'd have enough Rand to get a taxi from the airport to my hotel. A young man in front of me was claiming that he was shorted on a transaction that had happened the previous Friday. The Thomas Cook manager handled it very well. I think the youth learned a lesson about exchange rates and the expense of a wire transfer from England.

Yes and the Cape is a beautiful flyover. It's ironic that the shantytowns are the most visually appealing sight from the air, their multi-colored pastel structures filling out a beautiful mosaic from the air.

The Cape Town airport gives an immediate feel of a beach town, though that may be my prejudice showing. Taxi to the hotel in Sea Point was about 200R, <$40. The room is small with modern fixtures reminding me of a four-star in Seattle. Pity that all the remotes for the flat screen TVs on my floor were without batteries due to theft.

The safe in my room was large enough for my laptop and sundries, and the safe was secure after I returned from my day's journey's today.

I read some on the plane to the Republic of South Africa. A few months ago, when I had no time for pleasure reading, I set aside a short stack of books for my Summer reading, and I started Pathologies of Power by Paul Farmer somewhere over the Atlantic. The one idea that sticks with me from this book thus far is that of Structural Violence, and I've made my own metaphor for it.

As I've walked the streets of Cape Town and its surrounding areas...for there's no better way to learn a city than by walking through it's crevices and passages, looking 'round one's surroundings, and wearing one's legs out in the process...as I walked in Cape Town, I was most struck with the walls that are built up. The razor wires, the double rows of spikes, with smaller spikes on them in case the larger ones aren't disincentive enough, the electric fences - all of these are meant to deter the poor from successfully fulfilling insanely imbalanced survival drives within them. Structural violence is all around Cape Town, trapping those within, and strangely, providing freedom in a very clear aura of fear.

I'm reminded of similar walks around other large cities - Johannesburg, Cairo, Paris, Prague, London, Rome, Seattle, DC, Delhi - and I've never felt the constant threat there is here in South Africa. Cape Town's not much different from Jo'burg in that regard, and when I first arrived, settled my bags and wandered, I wished it were more like Paris. I'm searching for a point here, and missing, but that's the way it goes sometimes...