Notes from Mamata

On the last weekend of August, Irini and I had the fortune of going with Tamara, who runs the house we're all living in, to her home village in the Eastern Cape.

Mamata is 15+ hours away by bus, and Tamara assured us we would be the only white people in the village, and the only ones to have visited in a long time. She did not lie. We were definitely a novelty. More than that. Some people were clearly shocked when they first saw us. But they were also, almost immediately so friendly and almost universally delighted that we were there -- Tamara was lucky, they said, to have friends who would visit their poor, remote village. Of course the truth is that we were lucky to be invited.

The village sits on top of a hill of coarse scrub and yellow grass, and its simple houses cluster along a dry, very bumpy road. Most of the people there (and apparently most of the people in the entire Eastern Cape) are unemployed. A handful of the hundred or more homes have running water (the rest have access to taps along the road). There is no garbage collection; plastic bags collect on the barbed wire fences that define the perimeter of each yard, and blackened ground in some places indicates where trash has been burned. People toss litter into their yards or on the roads or in ravines.

In spite of the poverty (extreme in the cases of many villagers), the people there are pretty happy. They're far more resilient than your average upper-middle-class, city-living hipster, and their sense of family and community is much stronger than you find in urban locales. But I also got a sense that many of them are resigned to being left behind and forgotten. I heard dozens of stories that shared common themes: long distances traveled to find work, long periods of unemployment, minimal government assistance that hardly gave them enough for a week, let alone a month -- and that's if the government hadn't suspended the money in order for them to re-prove their eligibility, which requires journeying to another city multiple times, queuing at offices and waiting for a reply...

My amateur view is that there aren't many signs that Mamata's situation is improving. True, there is a new primary school, and the running water and electricity are apparently recently arrived luxuries. But there is also HIV and AIDS and the ignorance and fear that often accompanies it. There are drugs and a general erosion of cultural traditions that have together yielded a new generation of kids who could all too easily become the subjects of new tragedies.

When various people told me their stories, I realized that they were telling them partially in the hope that I -- a random Canadian dude who had been in South Africa for three weeks -- would be able to do something. If my presence there was cause for hope, I have to assume that nobody else has showed up there or offered any other kind of hope for a long time.

From Mamata's hilltop a vista unfolds, and in that vista are more villages on their own hilltops, full of more people with similar stories. And, actually, that describes pretty much all of Africa. It's a vastly, crushingly different place from Cape Town's hills of fancy homes with fancy views, where much of South Africa's power and wealth is concentrated. Shortly after I arrived I told someone I met at a cafe that this was my first time in Africa. "Hey man, Cape Town isn't Africa," he replied. I now know this to be true.

Posted by John