A Few Closing Thoughts on Time, Tide, and Race

I had a conversation on my third night in South Africa that has been quite thought-provoking for me and that has stayed with me since.

I stayed up one night to watch the U.S. Open with our B&B host. He was a big golfer and a fan of the sport. It's a pretty big sport among South Africans and you may remember that there was a touching national moment when a white South African golfer won the British Open and hugged his black South African caddy in the celebration. The round didn't start until very late in SA so we watched highlights and had some tea.

I tried at first to keep the conversation lighter: I brought up sports and animals (Kruger NP, if you remember, was only an hour away), but as conversations do, we started asking the getting to know you questions. From our end: how long have you had this B&B, have you always run a B&B, how did you meet your wife, etc. As it turned out, our host originally hailed from Rhodesia / Zimbabwe. He had left home for London at a young age, and had worked his way to owning several grocery stores. He then sold his grocery stores and invested the profits in a ranch back home in Rhodesia / Zimbabwe. Then the revolution came. He lost everything. His ranch was burned to the ground. The war was decided by a peace accord, a power-sharing one. Within a year Robert Mugabe was in charge. Depending on your point of view or your source Mugabe is somewhere between a failure as a leader of a country and a cruel strongman (he has been accused of many bad things, including killing journalists).

Whatever your stance, some things that can give you an idea of where the country is now: the economy of R/Z has plummeted since Mugabe took power (by 40% - some blame Mugabe, some blame international sanctions, my guess is the truth lies in a combination thereof) and the principals on which he came to power (land reform, improved quality of life for the black majority) have largely stalled and / or failed (whites still own much of the arable land; land reform can't quite happen as the economy depends on their output; the Catholic Church has, rightly or wrongly, accused the government of destroying what was once the best education system on the continent, life expectancy has fallen dramatically in recent years). I state all of this only to try to paint a picture of what it must be like to see a country that you loved (love) change so dramatically and so dramatically for the worse. No matter whose fault, if that can even be ascertained, a series of events have occurred to harm R/Z.

I think about two things, mostly, when it comes to this situation. (1) How hard it must be to see this happen. To lose everything. To see the land that you love so harmed. To have to live with that pain. (2) As a lesson for South Africa.

I am very much in favor of one person one vote. I think that generally Democracy is a good thing. Certainly I think it's the best thing after a regime (such as in R/Z and in SA) in which many people were disenfranchised and discriminated against. But there is a danger in this rush for equality. If the process does not slow down and take the time to do things right, you end up destroying everyone instead of creating equality over time. It's a hard thing to do in the immediate. When you see so much suffering, so much that was and remains unfair.

I don't pretend to have a perfect answer. I just hate to see a great country like SA hurt itself by rushing into decisions. Maybe the better road is to rush in, to correct the racial inequality, deal with the consequences and then build the country anew. I was never the victim of something so horrible. Maybe from that situation you can only want immediate equality. But I look at R/Z and I see that equality never happened. That the country was ruined economically but white landowners still own most of the land and produce most of the revenue. The politicians have gotten fat, it appears. Certainly they are in SA. The new president was once charged with several hundred charges of corruption. All dropped.

Anyway, I found it hard not to feel for this man. To have built a life with his own two hands only to watch it all torn away and burned. We all have our acts of omission, if not of commission. Every act, every decision in these circumstances is going to hurt someone.

How do you build a country out of such cruel circumstances? How do you build a country which doesn't try to tear down and destroy the past? How do you build up a previously disadvantaged people without harming the people who were advantaged before? South Africans seem to have the right attitude. They want to forgive and move forward. They seem to want to build a better future together. I just hope the politicians don't ruin it.