Township visit: Alexandra

Last week I steeled myself for a visit to what is probably Johannesburg’s 2nd grittiest township by reputation. (A township is a neighborhood reserved for blacks under apartheid. Link.) I came out thinking that the poor in Joburg are very well off, relatively speaking.

First, some stats on Alexandra (usually called Alex):
-Estimated ~350,000-450,000 people
-Area of ~8 square km (~3 sq mi)
>Density of ~130,000 per sq mi, or roughly 30x the average population density of Houston
-Approximately 60% unemployment
-Estimated average family income of R3000 (~$425) per year according to the guys I was with

We saw a lot of squalor. Many houses don’t have toilets, so there are port-o-potties on the street for blocks of houses that get emptied every day. Diet staples consist of bread, mealie meal (like cornmeal), tinned meat/fish, and rice. The worst housing is usually inhabited by immigrants. There is some trash in the streets, well-worn laundry hangs everywhere, and there are a lot of people obviously doing nothing.

Alex street.  Note the green/gray port-o-potties on the right side.

However, it looked a lot nicer than a lot of living conditions I had seen in Nigeria and (to a lesser degree) Kenya. Roads were paved. We saw several police patrols driving through. Some houses were corrugated tin shacks, but most were actual buildings on foundations with windows. Some houses had proper fences around them and tiny yards. Except for shacks, everything has running water, and everyone has power (albeit not always legally). Trash existed, but not on the scale I've seen elsewhere. On the edge of the neighborhood is a nice mall catering to the Alexandra inhabitants. Yes, it was crowded, but there was elbow room compared to what I have seen in Lagos.

Now I know why there are so many immigrants there – it is still nicer than what they left behind.

Crime is still a problem there, though we were told it’s not nearly as bad as portrayed (a common theme in Africa from my experience). Separately, I heard an interesting story: criminals used to operate in Alex more successfully because policemen didn’t know the road signs, so never knew where they were to respond to calls/call for backup. They made a deal with advertisers where the advertisers put signs at the corners and the city stuck street signs on there to fix that problem. Unfortunately I forgot to watch for those signs today.

Township food/drink
The recurring themes at little restaurants (usually tables placed on a covered patio) was the “kota” and the “sly,” both of which are from butchered English words. A sly is a sandwich (“slices” became “sly”) and a kota is a special sandwich in a quarter loaf of bread (“quarter” became “kota”).

The fillings are usually processed meats, with a decent sausage being the top-end filling. Polony is a fish that also appeared frequently. I had some breaded polony and seasoned chips (fries) and both were surprisingly good – if I didn’t have to go into Alex to get them, I would order them from time to time for their ~$1.50 cost.

This menu is all of the sly options, and the left menu is all of the kotas.

Look at the picture of the menu and then imagine you have R3000 to spend on your family for the year. Also, a coke costs R4 and a quart beer (beer pretty much only comes in quarts in townships) costs R8.50. Eating out is expensive as a % of income.

A cost of living note: I know that a coke in Sandton (which is separated from Alex only by a freeway) will cost about R14 in a restaurant.

On the right is a kota -- a quarter loaf of bread with the center cut out to make a sandwich.  Yes, Coke's distribution/marketing continues to amaze me.

AIDS effect, part 1

Just how much impact has AIDS had?  You can see one impersonal but stunning result by watching this animation that shows country fertility and average lifespan over time.

The huge bubble that falls rapidly is China.  No surprise due to the one-child policy.  However, let it run to the end (2008) and then hover over the bubbles in the bottom left, which are outliers from the general trend.  You’ll find South Africa, Swaziland, and Lesotho.  Now look them up on the map if you don’t already know where Swaziland/Lesotho are.

Now rewind to about 1990 and watch again in slow motion.  They all follow the general trend, moving right and down, but starting in the late 1990’s they suddenly continue down while moving dramatically to the left – toward decreasing average lifespan.

While I’m sure there are multiple factors at work, I’m willing to bet my bottom dollar that the primary driver of that shift is AIDS.

AIDS really is a pandemic here.  My health insurance company sent me a 60 page booklet on AIDS recently.  Companies have free condom dispensers in bathrooms.  There are lots of AIDS orphanages and even more orphans.  But this animation sort of put it all together for me at a macro level.

HT to Kevin.

SA in the News, Feb 28 - BEE and corporate nepotism

This article has a lot of interesting “flavors of SA” in it.

The overview: a big steelmaker (ArcelorMittal) owned partial mining rights to an iron ore pit. The iron ore miner (Kumba) got those rights in exchange for a promise to sell ore to the Mittal at cost +3%, which is a big discount to the market rate.

Those rights lapsed, and it sounds like someone at Mittal just forgot to re-file. Not sure what happened, but it was a monster mistake. Kumba applied to get the rights for itself. Mittal applied to get the rights again (because it wants the cost+ deal again). A no-name company called ICT, which seems to basically be a shell company with some cash, filed for the rights.

It just so happens that ICT is owned in large part by the son of President Zuma and by a family with close ties to Zuma.

ICT was awarded the rights, and Mittal immediately offered to buy the company for >$100m (with the goal of re-negotiating the contract that previously existed). That’s a very tidy profit for a group of people that, as far as I’m aware, didn’t actually do anything except hire lawyers and apply for a permit.

Oh, and why did ICT get awarded the rights over Kumba? “The [mining/minerals] department judged ICT to have greater black economic empowerment credentials and awarded it a prospecting right, prompting Kumba to cry foul and approach the court last year to set aside the decision.”

And, by the way, the minerals dept will likely force Kumba into the same cost +3% deal with ICT that Kumba had with Mittal. Justification? Kumba played dirty by not reminding Mittal to re-apply: “‘In light of the duty of good faith which Sishen Iron Ore owed ArcelorMittal in terms of the supply agreement, Sishen Iron Ore’s conduct as afore described falls short of the minimum standards of ordinary business ethics which, I submit, apply even in the cutthroat environment of the South African mining industry,’ Mr Nogxina’s affidavit reads.” If Kumba played dirty, wouldn’t it make more sense to… simply give Mittal the rights back? After all, Kumba didn’t do anything to harm ICT.

Oh, and let’s not forget: at the same time ArcelorMittal bought ICT back in August, Mittal made a deal to help its BEE score. “In a separate statement, ArcelorMittal South Africa said it had finalised its black economic empowerment deals with an aggregate value of R9.075bn, transferring 26 percent of its shares to a group of black investors -- including an investment group led by the son of South African President Jacob Zuma -- and employees.” Right… I’m sure that’s completely separate from the deal to buy ICT from Zuma Jr. & Co.

As a disclaimer, I don't know any more than what a few newspaper articles and conversations have told me.  However, there are a lot of signs that things are fishy, even if technically legal.

Commuting and the color divide

Attached is a picture of the bus stop across the street from my apartment during the 5pm commute home. Hard to see, but not a single person waiting for the bus is white. Some blacks/coloreds [for American readers, remember that these are standard terms here] have cars, but you see many more taking mass transit.

Also, only some of them are waiting for a proper bus. Most are waiting on a kombi. Hand signs match commuter and kombi – pointing down means you are going somewhere close, etc.

I live about a 10 min walk from my office, so I walk when possible.  I get a lot of strange looks both from whites watching me from their cars and from blacks that I pass on the sidewalk who are probably wondering what a white guy in biz cas is doing walking around.

News flash: low-quality picnic blanket wreaks havoc on Johannesburg outing

"When you go on Picnics it is important to use the right company and with the correct equipment. There are a variety of different professional packages offering Picnics in Johannesburg. So whether it’s a solo, family or corporate team building activity you should find something that suites you."

It's such a relief to know there are professionals willing to pack my solo lunch basket.  I'm just not sure what to think about finding something that "suites" me.

From a website listing things to do in Joburg.

World traveler vs. "entire world" traveler

I consider myself decently well-traveled for an American my age. I’ve been to approximately 1/6 of the world’s countries, and by the end of my South African assignment I will have spent about a cumulative two years abroad.

There are plenty of people who will put me to shame in this department, but none more so than Andre Brugiroux, whom I had the chance to meet here in South Africa. Andre has been named the “greatest living traveler on earth” and has visited every country. Hearing his stories from Africa from the 80’s make it clear that some things have changed and others have not.

Interestingly, he things world peace is inevitable as ideas travel across borders, people see that they are all fundamentally the same, and economics tie countries together.  I would argue that people are, indeed, fundamentally the same globally -- but that our universal tendencies such as greed and power hunger mean that any temporary universal peace established by mankind will succumb to realpolitik.

Joining the traffic jam

A great WSJ article on buying used cars in Lagos.

Cars are status symbols everywhere, but in Nigeria and other African countries they are particularly "aspirational" status symbols -- people will buy above their means to show not what they have but what they hope to have.

Apartheid's effects, part 1

Just before I left for the holiday break I was again slapped in the face by something that I intellectually know but that is still hard to comprehend: the South Africans I work with, both black and white, grew up under apartheid. Race discussions do not revolve around the legacy of wrongs done to ancestors, but rather on wrongs done to the present individuals.

Having a maid is the standard here. When we were checking out our current place, the landlord spend most of her time worrying about two things: 1) trying to get the satellite TV fixed and 2) figuring out whether the apartment complex supplied the maids or we had to get our own. I was just shaking my head.

We had a maid come because we moved in early and the landlord didn’t get a chance to seriously clean, so she offered to pay the first time we had a maid. I picked up "Jane" at the appointed time/place and had ~30 min to chat with her during the drive to and fro.

Jane is probably about 30, married with two kids, and lives in Germiston with them and her husband. She works during the week at a guest house, where she makes R1750 a month. Less the R7.50 each way for the 1.5-hr kombi ride (the ubiquitous 16-passenger minibuses), this is about US$200 per month. That means her commute adds ~50% of her working hours daily, and her transportation takes 20% of her gross income. She also has to pay extra for after-school care for her kids, since school only runs from 8-4:30. No wonder she supplements by cleaning private houses on the weekends. What I consider a steal – R150, or ~$20, to clean, do dishes, and do all our laundry – is good money to her.

It was difficult to explain to Jane where my roommate and I are from because she hadn’t heard of either Boston or Houston (she originally thought Boston was the name our company) and she didn’t know where Texas was (tragic, I know). She has never driven a car, so her sense of direction and distance are completely different: when I asked whether Germiston was east or west of Sandton and how far, she had no idea of the direction and answered the distance by saying it’s an “R7.50 ride.”

Later that day I went with my roommate to the apartheid museum. Perhaps the best part of the museum was the entrance: your ticket had a barcode and “white” or “non-white” stamped on it, and you could only enter through the corresponding door; the two paths were separated through the first exhibit.

Apartheid was a bit of a cross between slavery, 1800’s American Indian policy, and Nazi Germany. While there was technically no ownership of people, the power and money disparities made it essentially so. Blacks were resettled several times, at one point to “homelands” that were made “independent” so that it wouldn’t look so bad on the white SA government. Pass books and language of racial superiority were both parts of apartheid. When you are faced with the extend of apartheid and realize that the most violent period (including SA raids in adjacent countries, not just within SA) was right about 1990, the peaceful transition to power after the 1994 elections is that much more amazing.

Bringing this full circle, I walk into our multi-racial office and normally don’t think much of it. However, I should marvel at the fact that people working together on a project, or a partner and their assistant, would not have been able to even associate when they were born.

Coming up to speed: some SA reading for the new year

A few things worth reading.

In big news, South Africa has formally been asked to join the BRIC countries (which will now be the BRICS).  What difference will it make, though, if SA views its membership the wrong way -- as a way to band against Western countries rather than an opportunity to expand trade with them?

South Africa's economic policy is always a bit muddled, and in part it seems like it's because the government doesn't need to have and communicate to the people a clear plan, since the ruling ANC will dominate elections no matter what.  Look no further than Julius Malema, leader of the influential ANC Youth League and huge demagogue (and potential next in line to be President), to see what scares companies considering business in South Africa.

On a very different note, I found this article on art and inspiration to be a very interesting read, though I think the author's rejection of "devotion to God" as a possible motivator means he misses a possible solution.

...and MULLETS!

This is an addendum to my previous post about what I'm looking forward to on both sides of the Atlantic.  There is one thing I forgot to add that I am looking forward to back in South Africa:

Mullets.

Certain segments of white South Africans still rock the mullet, though toned down a bit vs. its cousin from decades gone by.  It gets gelled up in front, tapers to a bit of a ponytail in back, and is close on the sides in case you want a cross-sectional view.

I'm not sure how I left this off my initial list, because it's one reason I enjoy running errands.  I've seen it for weeks, but I still laugh to myself each time.  I wonder how long it would take my hair to reach mullet-worthy length...

World traveler x4

During my first five months in Africa (July-December) I logged ~102,000 flying miles (actual, not frequent flyer) on 76 flying legs.  That's enough to have flown around the world 4 times in the 5 months.

Cool?  Yes.  Do I recommend it?  No.