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It's hard not to sympathize with the blacks' frustration at this point.
It's not just the past abuse they have a grievance about, though some
of what's coming out of the Truth & Reconciliation Commission hearings
is pretty shocking - police admitting to torture, etc. But even after
4 years of black rule, in my opinion the status of blacks here is about
what it was 30 years ago in the deep South of the USA. (Susan - lived
in the deep south 30 years ago!) The whites still own most of all businesses
and land, and basically the blacks are servants.
Of course, South Africa was a democracy for whites all along, meaning
the whites had a vote. If they had wanted to end apartheid they could
have done it. So the whites who stayed here were pretty happy with the
system as it was, (other than their status as an international pariah).
Many of the whites here have had little contact with blacks except as
servants. As one of the white people we met said in reference to blacks,
"I really don't know these people at all". And now "they"
are in charge. The whites can only hope that the blacks will be more wise,
generous and forgiving than the whites were when they were in charge.
Pretty scary.
A harbinger of possible future events is Zimbabwe, where Robert Mugabe
has announced the government is going to be expropriating farmland owned
by whites, without compensation. Nonetheless, foreign buyers, especially
Europeans, are making up a very large proportion of the house buyers in
Cape Town, so obviously some people consider it a good investment.
If all South Africans can learn Mandela's tolerance, there is hope for
a great country.
As for us, we're ready for our next continent! After a hard couple of
days work, the bike is in its crate at the airport already, and tomorrow
morning we get on a flight from Cape Town to Buenos Aires. Grant built
most of the crate on Thursday, then the owner of the bike shop where he'd
been doing the work drove the crate pieces in his trailer to the airport,
and we followed him on the bike. At the cargo area, Grant finished putting
the crate together and the bike in it, while I did the paperwork. Unlike
Cairo, here women are allowed to deal with government authorities! The
customs official was amazingly casual about it all, strolled over and
looked at the bike before the box was finished, then stamped the carnet.
In Egypt, they didn't want to stamp the carnet even after the box was
closed up and in the cargo area, just in case it didn't actually get loaded
on the plane!
Afterwards, we walked over to the passenger terminal to get a taxi
home, then decided it made more sense to rent a car for a couple of days.
So, there we are, in our shorts with just a backpack between us, and Grant
is carrying a saw (which he was using to cut the wood for the box). The
car rental people thought we had just gotten off a plane, but we didn't
have any luggage - except for the saw! We told them we had just come for
the weekend, so we didn't have any luggage. "Long way from Canada
for a weekend", they probably thought. "And what was the saw
for, anyway?" However, if you have an American Express gold card
people overlook idiosyncracies. The car did help for running around today
getting parcels organized to send to Canada.
Current plan is to drive from Buenos Aires south to Ushuaia in Tierra
del Fuego, then up through Chile, Peru, Ecuador and possibly Colombia.
This will give us a sense of completion, as we will have done a full circle
from north to south and back, and completed the continent which we were
aiming for when we drove from Vancouver down to Panama in 1987.
Route: Malmesbury -->Cape
Agulhas --> Hermanus --> Cape Town.
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