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.