The Rift: A New Africa Breaks Free by Alex Perry

Author:Alex Perry [Perry, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2015-09-10T04:00:00+00:00

ANC politicians confronting the difficulties of the present tended to reach back to the black-and-white certainties of the past. There the ANC was for ever the party of glorious and righteous revolution, the party of Nelson Mandela that freed South Africa and inspired the world. It was this past party that was still winning the present one its crushing election majorities.

This electoral trump card made the ANC fond of anniversaries and the biggest was 18 July, Mandela’s birthday. It was as good an occasion as any to visit Qunu, the small village where Mandela was raised and now lived again, a few hours south-west of Durban, on a bluff overlooking the rolling prairies of South Africa’s Eastern Cape.

Under apartheid, the Eastern Cape was where South Africa’s racial engineers had created two autonomous black homelands, the ‘Bantustans’ of Transkei and Ciskei. The disingenuous injustice of that marginalization, making a pale mockery of black freedom by confining it to two small half-states of chilly, thin-soiled and treeless hills, fuelled a wave of righteous rebellion from which many black leaders emerged: Mandela, Oliver Tambo, Walter and Albertina Sisulu, Chris Hani, Govan and Thabo Mbeki, and Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko.

Despite the region’s ties to the ANC, two decades after the party took power life in the Eastern Cape remained as desperate as ever. The statistics described true deprivation: the HIV/AIDS rate was 33 per cent; unemployment was 70 per cent; 78.3 per cent of the population had no running water; 88 per cent of people were below the poverty line; 93.3 per cent had no sewers, prompting intermittent outbreaks of cholera; and murder was three times the national average. The rape rate, that prime integer of social collapse, was jaw-dropping. In 2008, surveys of the rural Eastern Cape found 26.7 per cent of men admitted to being rapists. Of the victims, close to half were under 16, nearly a quarter under 11 and 9.4 per cent under six.

The morning of Mandela’s 94th birthday I drove into Mthatha, the regional centre. I’d visited two years before and found every lamp post plastered with flyers advertising the mobile phone numbers of surgeons offering same-day back-street abortions. Parents were keeping their children out of school for fear they would be raped as they walked to class. Two years on, the place hadn’t improved. At one set of traffic lights, a young beggar with filthy clothes and a dirty face knocked on my window, distracting me so his two companions could open a rear door and rifle my bag. At another junction, a boy of perhaps 14 stood in the road, stared at me through unseeing red eyes and urinated through his hands onto his ripped trousers and bare feet. When I pulled over to ask for directions to Laura Mpahlwa’s house, a woman said she would take me and got in. ‘You shouldn’t be out here alone,’ she said. ‘Tsotsis [gangsters] are everywhere.’

I’d arranged to meet Laura because I wanted to hear how life had changed for Mandela’s home-town contemporaries.

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