Hello, folks.
Hi, everyone.
I'd like to begin this right in the spirit of South Africa
by greeting you in [INAUDIBLE].
[INAUDIBLE] Hello, everyone.
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] Welcome.
My name is Rebecca Thorne.
I am the office manager customer service specialist
here in the counseling center at Shoreline Community College.
It is not only my pleasure, but my honor
to introduce Dr. Ernest Johnson.
Affectionately known as Doc, or Dr. J to many.
A professor here who teaches multicultural studies
at Shoreline.
Today's discussion regards South Africa
a topic Dr. J knows well, considering
he's lead four study abroad trips there to date.
He is currently planning his fifth,
this trip taking place this coming August through September
as part of a proposed critical analysis
of multicultural movements in South Africa and the United
States.
Dr. Johnson is a professor of, as I've mentioned,
critical and multicultural studies, and the equity
and social justice program at Shoreline Community College.
He is also an adjunct professor in the American Ethnic Studies
at the University of Washington.
Doc earned his PhD from the University
of Washington's Department of Linguistics,
his MA degree from the University of Khartoum,
Institute of African and Asian studies, and his BA a degree
in psychology from the University of [? Hawaii. ?]
As a former participant in the South Africa study
abroad program, I can say with confidence that this experience
changed me, and deeply.
South Africa has and continues to wage
her own wars, concerning race and true equity
among all peoples.
To be physically present there, to be
a witness to the long [? toward ?]
stories of activism, pain, resilience, loss of life,
and hope in the face of brutal white supremacy
is a gift that is beyond words.
I learned how much power I personally
had to affect change, and what it truly
meant to examine the intention versus impact
of my own inner biases.
In today's turbulent times, please
believe me when I say that this is not
an experience to be missed.
Before I turn this program over to Dr. J to speak more,
I've been asked to mention a few housekeeping items.
[INAUDIBLE] the execs are in the back of the room where
you entered, and to my right.
We are recording this event for later viewing,
so please use the microphone that
will be brought to you during the Q&A session if you do
have a question.
Also, before you leave, please take a moment
to give us some feedback on the survey that
is located in your program.
And now please join me without further ado
in giving a warm welcome to Professor Ernest Johnson.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
Thank you for that, thank you.
What a wonderful introduction.
I'd like to meet that person sometime.
That's amazing, amazing.
Yeah, so I'm happy for this turnout.
And we have some slides for you to watch.
Really, the purpose here is a dual purpose.
One is to advertise the program, give you
a little bit of information about what we've covered.
I also want to specifically look at the pedagogy
for this current trip, which will be from August 22
or so until September 22nd, roughly.
So let's get going.
Thank you for turning.
Yeah, so what you're looking at here on the screen--
and I don't know if we need all this light.
Oh, we do for the filming, right--
is the most recent trip I've done for in 2015.
This is a group.
That happiness on their face really
is nothing that's contrived.
They really enjoyed themselves, this group,
and the South Africans enjoyed them.
And this was Becca's group who just introduced me.
She was a large part of that.
But we had a lot of interactions with South Africans
while we were there.
We made it a point to allow the students to go
into elementary schools, to go into high schools,
to go to colleges, universities, and to interact with people.
And what they gained from that was personal stories,
personal interaction.
They also were able to do homestays as well.
And so yeah, come and join the fun.
This is part of a group.
It's half of the students that went
in 2008, which was the trip just previous to that one.
This group is very memorable to me.
Some of you might recognize at least one of the persons there.
Four of them Shoreline students, one a student from you-dub,
all of them gone on to do really wonderful stuff
with their lives.
I'm really so proud to be associated
with these powerful women.
And that was a reunion in December 2015 at my home.
We're still all very close.
This was the group prior to that, which was 2006.
It was a small group of six, all women, all Shoreline students,
and very interesting dynamics in this small group.
But we explored South Africa.
And you can see the beauty of South Africa in the background.
That's Camps Bay.
It's one of the luxury areas just
in the suburbs of Cape Town.
And the map that you're looking at here is just--
that's the Indian Coast.
They call it the Garden Route.
So when we leave Cape Town up towards the southern tip,
we move along the Indian Ocean, and we
stop at various cities along the way.
In 2015, we went to an archaeological dig
along the way.
And so there's a lot of different dimensions
to the program, and there's something
for everybody in these trips.
A little too fast.
And this was the original group in 2003.
We stopped in Brussels that year.
Last year, we went through Dubai.
Prior to that, we went to England, and another time,
to France.
And so it's always been a different stopping point.
We don't fly straight through, because it's 21 hours.
And so we always cut it in half, stop somewhere in between.
The gentleman here is a Sudanese brother of mine.
I lived in Sudan, got my masters in Sudan,
and I have Sudanese family, most of them
in exile all over the world, and some of them
just happened to be in Brussels, and London, and France,
in Dubai when we arrived there.
And so he showed us around Brussels,
and allowed us to stretch our legs.
These students also have gone on to do
a number of amazing things.
I won't go into all of that.
But that's Cape Town.
That's where we're going.
Indian Ocean on this side, Atlantic Ocean on that side.
This is the city itself proper here.
And we explore this entire, and then we go out along the Garden
Route up into what they call the [? Ciskei ?] and [? Transkei ?]
in local terminology, but Western Cape and Eastern Cape.
So the program, part of it is linguistic.
And as Becca started out with, we
do try to do some rudimentary Xhosa
so that people can communicate.
This goes a long way with our students.
So it seems like many of the students that
go there from different places don't learn the language.
The area that we're talking about here,
this green area, this is a linguistic map of Africa.
There's basically five major language families in Africa.
And the two that were going to be interacting
with in particular is the Bantu here, this brown area, and then
the Xhosan people.
The Xhosan people are fascinating people.
They are identified as possibly being the progenitors of all
of humanity.
They're genetic markers are the only ones that they found
that could actually have produced all of the markers
that you find in the human race.
They're fascinating just at that level,
not to mention that the Xhosa, who we spend a lot of time
with, are a mixture of Khoi and Bantu culturally,
and so it's a hybrid culture.
And it's really fabulous things.
One of the joys of this program is really
being able to interact with the people,
and to also examine some of their rich culture,
and also look at the parallels between US history and South
African history.
And that's what this program's going to do in particular.
So we're going to start back with colonialism.
We're going to do some comparisons
of the early settlements by the Dutch in South Africa,
and look at the early settlements
by the English in Virginia.
We're going to talk about some of the same types
of constructions of indigenous people
in South Africa that occurred also in Virginia.
We're going to talk about the displacement
of indigenous people from their land.
We're also going to talk about the resilience of these peoples
and the survival of those people.
It's very interesting that the indigenous people
of South Africa and the indigenous people of North
America have about the same percentage in their population,
which is just over 1%.
And there is a reason for that.
So we're going to explore those reasons.
Somebody lived in these places before we got there,
and these are San people of the Khoisan here,
and indigenous folks here in America.
These are folks that--
they were the custodians of the land when Europeans arrived.
And it's their cultures that have been displaced,
but it's also their cultures which
inform our understanding of the place that we're in now.
So connecting with those stories and with those cultures
is really important, and that's part
of what we're going to be doing on this journey.
The Khoisan people are the people
who are likely progenitors of not only Africans, but also
Europeans and Asians.
Those are the Khoisan.
That's what we'll go look at.
And their culture is fabulous.
The British call them Bushmen and Hottentots.
They use these derogatory terms and so forth, because they
had to, I suppose, justify their displacement and genocide
against the people, and so you degrade them
by calling them these terms.
But the people have a rich, resilient culture
that withstood all that has been brought to them.
And we will definitely look into it.
The English and then the Dutch placed the indigenous people,
whose different major ethnic groups are indicated here,
into homelands similar to reservations.
They called them independent nations.
They were not independent.
They were not self-sustained.
They were marginalized in areas of the country,
similar to the ways in which Native Americans were
marginalized in this country, where they
couldn't sustain themselves.
Yet, they have survived.
And so we do spend some time in the Ciskei
and in the Transkei area.
I was telling you about the--
what was I telling you about?
Yeah, the Ciskei and the Transkei
is the land of the Xhosa.
And so we do spend quite a bit of time with them.
My coordinator, my on-site coordinator from there,
is a Xhosa person, [? Maaz. ?] He's a high school
teacher in of the townships.
We visit townships in Cape Town.
We do homestays where the students actually shadow
the matron of the house that they're staying with.
And so learn something firsthand of the authentic aspects
of South African culture.
It's a very important aspect of the program.
But it's also the parallel between what
happened to indigenous Africans and what
happened to indigenous Americans has been informative.
And we're going to explore that.
We're going to explore it with our lens.
We're also going to be working with some performance art
groups from Port Elizabeth, who will help us see it
from their perspective as well.
So that's part of what the program entails.
Slow down.
Yeah, and also a misrepresentation
and stereotypes were part of the process of colonization
and displacement.
We're going to be looking at ways in which indigenous
people have been misrepresented in the media and so forth.
We're going to be looking at how religion was misused to justify
colonialism, both in South Africa
and here using things like the Hamitic curse, the idea
that Noah cursed his three sons, and magically one of his sons
became an African, the progenitor of the Africans,
that was Ham.
And they were supposed to be, according to that narrative,
cursed to be slaves of his other sons.
Well, that's a theory that we will not
pursue in any great depth, but it's
interesting to look at the fact that that type of ideology
is found both to justify the treatment of Africans
during slavery and the displacement of Africans
in their home homeland in South Africa.
Yeah, and so there was religious misuse of religion
to, say, justify and encourage people to come in
to settle in Jamestown.
[INAUDIBLE]
Yeah.
So we have here Robert Johnson telling people
that if they go to Jamestown, that they
will receive both spiritual and financial rewards.
What he's trying to do is to get poor downtrodden English
persons to hop on a ship, and go and settle the Americas, right?
And yeah, the outcome of that is here we are.
It turned out pretty good for Americans,
not so good for the English overall,
but that's another story.
All right.
But using, again-- misusing, I would say, the Bible,
to justify colonization.
Here you have [INAUDIBLE] an indication of a Boer.
He's a Dutch person who fled the oppression of the British
in the Western Cape, and went on treks into the Eastern Cape
and northern parts of the countries.
And one of the things that they did
is to justify their displacement of Africans,
and taking their land, and so forth
was that these people were in fact constructed by God to be
our servants and slaves.
So that was part of the thing.
And that's that again, going back
to the Hamitic curse of Noah's sons.
And that's [? Sham, ?] Ham, and [? Jeffert. ?] And Ham is,
of course, supposed to be the progenitor of the Africans.
I called it magical because it's really interesting
that Noah would have this variety of sons.
So I suppose it is possible.
So you also have this great trek that happened in America
and also happened in South Africa.
So you've got the chance to look at the Dutch running,
really, from English oppression and moving
into other areas of the country so that they
can be free and independent.
In the process of doing that, they're
going into an area that's already
inhabited by Africans, by the Xhosa, by the Zulu, and others.
And then you have conflict and warfare between them.
You find similar things.
How many of you are familiar with the movies of the cowboys
and Indians, and the covered wagon?
Well, that's what this is here.
That's people going on the Oregon Trail, many times
leaving out of Missouri, and heading towards the West,
and going through Indian country,
and the Indians taking exception with people coming
through their country and settling the land
in their country, which they should
have a right and title to.
So this idea that indigenous people didn't have a full title
to their land, and that they could be displaced,
and that treaties and agreements could be made with them
and then broken, that's part of the process.
It happened in South Africa, it happened in here.
It's part of the colonial method.
We're going to examine it, and look
at some of the modern repercussions of that, which
will take us to looking at the US, and looking at the fact
that Jamestown here in 1607 by about 1720,
all of the indigenous people have been displaced
from the coast.
That type of displacement also happens in South Africa.
I won't go into all the details, but this idea of displacement,
we can look at.
And then the justification of displacement
is another aspect of it.
How do we justify coming into an area, and displacing people?
We're going to be able to look at white supremacy head
on, how whiteness was constructed in South Africa
to justify the settlement and displacement that went on
in and around Cape Town, and then
as the Boers moved out of Cape Town
into other parts of Africa.
Also, that construct as applied to displacing
indigenous people from their land, particularly
the five tribes, which were forcibly
moved to Oklahoma in the Indian Removal Policy,
and also which justifies the attempts to exclude Africans
in South Africa.
Notice their flag.
Compare it to the Nazi flag.
We're going to look at some of that symbolism.
It also has resulted in attempts to exclude--
this one is the anti-Muslim rally in the states.
And this is a scene taken from, I believe, the protest
around trying to remove the monuments to these Confederates
who fought really to uphold the right to hold people
in bondage and degradation.
And so the fact that we can make parallels between that,
also in South Africa-- they have still a lot of monuments
to the English and to the Africans in downtown--
I mean to the English and the Dutch in downtown Cape Town,
and so we can look at that.
We can look at the absence of monuments to black people.
Until Mandela, until the 1990s, there were essentially
none, a really small marker where
there used to be a slave market, you'd find in Cape Town.
So we're going to do things like that.
Explore, and do that comparison and contrast,
look at symbolism.
We're going to have a chance to explore
the support of the South African Nationalist Party, which
introduced separatism and their support for Hitler
in the 1930s, and then them coming into power
in South Africa in 1948, and instituting white supremacy
practices.
They called them apartheid.
Some of you may be familiar with that.
They introduced signs of whites only,
segregating the society, similar to the signs that you found
in places like Selma, Alabama, where
you would have white only signs, and you
would have signs like this-- no dogs, Negroes, Mexicans,
sometimes Indians allowed.
So the parallels are really there to be explored.
We really haven't spent enough time on my previous four
programs doing this, so we're going to devote my time to it
this time, just to do something a little bit different.
So yeah, come on board.
We're going to be looking at that.
Few more, and then I'll try to leave some time for talk.
Yes, so there's then, again, a resistance to apartheid
that really is instituted in 1948.
And the movement was originally a nonviolent movement
organized by the African National Congress,
first under Luthuli, and then under Mandela.
And this is Tambo, Oliver Tambo, who was one of his deputies.
And they are men who really had the vision of how
to resist apartheid in a way that was going to eventually
be effective.
They didn't always agree with each other.
Were going to do some parallels between them
and some of what happened in the states.
So there was a strong student movement in South Africa.
Maybe some of you heard about the Sharpeville massacre
in 1960.
Anybody heard of that?
Those were students were shot down and killed.
Some of the numbers are like 67 people killed.
The numbers are around three times
that number injured, shot down essentially
by security forces and police.
And you had also protests at a similar time in the 1960s--
'50s and '60s in the US.
Students were at the forefront of that, as well.
So we're going to look at the student movement, how
students participated.
And I'm talking about students from the grade school
level right up through college and university
participated in movement, both in South Africa and here.
And I think that's going to make for a very fruitful comparison.
When we talk about movement, though, we're
going to be talking about the reaction to movement.
These are coffins from the students at Sharpeville here.
And so the South Africans were very
intent upon maintaining their system,
maintaining their supremacy, maintaining the apartheid
policy that they had in place.
And if it meant shooting students down,
then they did that.
Of course, there's a reaction to this.
When you kill children, then people
become more outraged and more determined,
and so there's that dialectic process
that happened both in South Africa
and happened in the states.
When people saw water cannons on children here and dogs
sicked on children here in Alabama, in Mississippi,
and other places in the South, that changed their mind,
changed their level of intensity in the struggle,
and also changed the nature of the struggle.
Some people became less nonviolent,
that means violence.
Yeah.
So also, you have a series of laws
that were introduced to uphold apartheid,
similar to the miscegenation laws that we have in the South
here.
You had the Immorality Act in South Africa,
you had the prohibition against mixed marriages
in South Africa.
We had that in America as well.
Some of these prohibitions were in place until very recently
in some southern states.
[INAUDIBLE]
Loving case, yeah.
The movie Loving is something that you should see
in Virginia, the case there.
We're going to have a chance to look
at some really amazing leaders on both sides of the pond.
And so you know of Dr. King's story.
One of the interesting things is that they were
contemporary in their struggle.
Dr. King is the president of SCLC from '57 to '68,
and Albert Luthuli is the president
of the ANC before Mandela between '52 and '67.
They both were nonviolent men.
They believed in struggle without violence.
They had that in common as well.
And they both also were Nobel Peace Prize Laureates,
and deserved to be so.
Two of the four laureates that came from South Africa,
it has had a disproportionate number of laureates
in the world, actually.
Yeah.
So what else?
Yeah, so we're going to explain these comparisons.
We're going to look at these folks.
We're going to look at Malcolm X,
we're going to look at Steve Biko.
Steve Biko is the father of black consciousness
in South Africa.
He has a complete center in Port Elizabeth.
No, King William's Town, actually,
isn't it King William?
Yeah, I think so.
Yeah, I think it's King William's Town.
We usually get to it through Port Elizabeth.
But we've done some things with them,
and we're really excited about it.
We want to go back there and explore that.
Of course, there's similarities in the fact
that leaders were killed on both sides.
We had the murder of Dr. King, of Malcolm X, of Steve Biko.
One of the things we do in South Africa
is we visit the jail cell of Steve Biko in Port Elizabeth.
We visit the jail cell of Nelson Mandela on Robben Island.
And we look at the trajectory of the two men
from their early lives, through their politicization period,
through their early movement, and how they continued
to evolve in their thinking and their strategies
during that time.
I'm real big on that evolutionary aspect of folks.
So we're going to do some of that.
And then people get frustrated with the nonviolent approach.
That happened in South Africa, that happened here as well.
The South Africans, they were the majority by far.
Black South Africans are over 75% of the population
in South Africa.
The whites now, I think, the statistics--
they're just a little over 10% of the population.
And so you had 10% of the population [? ruling. ?]
So there was real frustration, and also
a greater capacity for struggle for black South Africans,
and say, for African-Americans here, a violent struggle.
But there were people that took up arms for self-defense here,
like the Panthers.
One of the interesting things that happened
is I met some of the members of the MK.
That's the military wing of the African National Congress.
And they were doing work in their communities
where they were providing health care, and education,
and nutrition to children.
And I asked them, I said, did you get this from the Panthers?
And they said, the who?
They hadn't heard of the Panthers.
But they both had similar types of programs.
Their programs primarily were to outreach,
to uplift their community.
And in the process of that, they were politicizing the community
as well, teaching them to resist.
And you found that on both sides.
You found that in South Africa, you
find it amongst the Panthers here,
and so the comparisons are very interesting.
And to some degree, they are spontaneous.
One is not informed by the other, which
I find really interesting.
Just a few more, just to give you
an idea of the other aspects of the program.
Not all of it is political.
Well, everything's political at some level,
but this is what they called the colored
quarter in Cape Town, Bo Kaap.
And it was the one area that didn't experience,
let's call it, urban removal.
So in South Africa, you had basically whites, coloreds,
Asians, and blacks, right?
There's a lot of complexity between those four categories.
And the so-called colors, or Malay, lived in this region,
just in a section of Cape Town.
And all the other areas, there was urban removal where people
were taken outside, many of them had
to go back to the homelands, and displaced.
Some went into townships, but this one retained.
And so we go in and look at what it could have been.
And then we go to the areas where there's
only these overgrown streets where people were removed,
and let students do a comparison between what was
and what could've been.
And so this is a fascinating, very colorful,
and a very exciting area of town,
too, very diverse area of town.
It's right next to downtown.
We do that.
This is Mandela's cell.
One of the interesting things about Madiba,
his affectionate named cell, is that the docents
in the museum--
it's now a museum, Robben Island.
And the docents are former prisoners.
And so it's just mind boggling to go in and listen
to these men say, well, yeah, this is where I used to sleep.
And Madiba used to stay in this cell,
but we used to have this and this going on over there.
So it's unlike any museum I've ever been in before.
It's really mind boggling and life changing just
to travel out there by ferry, and then
to experience the stories of these docents,
and to actually see this place where Mandela
stayed for a good portion of the 27 years he was incarcerated.
And of course, we have to look at some animals, right?
It's Africa.
What would Africa be if you didn't look at animals.
So I minimized that because there's an over representation
of animal life in Africa in the sense
that Africa is often represented by animals
and people's imaginations, and we do try to resist that.
So when we do go to game resorts-- and we do one--
we also look at the impact of the resort on human beings.
So we're as interested in the elephants
as we are-- it's the largest elephant park in the world.
It's just mind boggling.
And there's all kinds of other stuff
there-- rhinoceros, and zebras, and stuff,
but we've been surrounded by elephants.
I think that was your group in 2008 where
the elephants surrounded the vehicles,
and they were going to water.
Yeah, I still get chills just thinking about that.
So that's a long story.
[INAUDIBLE]
Yeah, so we looked at the impact of the game resorts
on the humans in the area as well,
and that becomes interesting.
We get a lecture from the warden, or something, on that.
And then we do a lot of outreach in this area.
For instance, the orphanage that we have a connection with
is also in Addo, where this park is.
And we go and visit the children.
We do some exchanges, and get to see
some of the beautiful work that's
being done by South Africans to reach out
to communities that are more disadvantaged than our own
to uplift them.
A lot of that good stuff going on.
And lastly, take some questions.
No, there.
Yeah, that's the 2015 group again.
This fella here, his name is literally Prince,
and you would have believed it.
I mean, he had a lot of attention when he was there.
[LAUGHTER]
Yeah.
And so the students get that opportunity
to go into the high schools and so forth.
And they're just excited to have these Americans there.
And then I usually have a really diverse group,
international students as well.
This is [INAUDIBLE].
Yeah, and a wide spectrum.
There's Becca up there who introduced me.
This is her group here.
And you see that's the group up there.
Quite diverse, and it's a great experience for everyone.
So I'll open it up for questions.
I think that's all I had to present.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
If you would just raise your hand if you have a question,
we'll bring a mic to you.
There's someone over there.
Thank you very much, Dr. J. We used to be part of your throng.
Thank you for coming.
Good to be here.
I was a Fulbright lecturer in Zimbabwe
for six months in 1989, so got a picture of Zimbabwe looking
down their nose of what was happening
in South Africa at the time.
But now the story is reversed, as you know.
But I'm curious, you mentioned the largest elephant park--
I realize this is not maybe central to your emphasis,
but what is the name of that [INAUDIBLE]
It's called Addo, A-D-D-O.
A-D-D-O, thank you.
Mhm.
And it's just outside of Port Elizabeth.
Thank you.
You're welcome.
Hi, Dr. J.
Hi.
[CLEARS THROAT] Excuse me.
I recall after the apartheid was overturned
and the land was retained, a lot of the [INAUDIBLE]
reconciliation thing, and everything.
But I recall a few years after that,
they were interviewing some young white students,
and they were talking about affirmative action,
and they were complaining about how these black students were
getting [INAUDIBLE].
And that's very similar to what happened here.
And I'm just curious, do you know what it's like now?
Is it still the resources not as distributed?
Yes.
That's still a problem.
South Africa went on a course that
is different from many African countries
and many colonized countries.
And what they did is that Mandela and part
of his inner group decided that instead
of forcing the whites out or fighting a bloody war that
was going to kill nearly everybody,
they would try to live together in a multicultural society
with protections under a constitution that protected
the rights of all people.
And the South African constitution,
for instance, protects the rights of the LGBT community
constitutionally, protects the rights
of women constitutionally.
Not to say that it's practiced perfectly,
but just to have it as constitutional law takes
them a long ways towards the actual implementation of it.
So the question about the current climate,
I can tell you a story.
I met with Rotary Clubs when I went to South Africa.
And the Rotary Clubs we met with, the one
we met with in [INAUDIBLE],, it's a very upper middle class,
upper class Rotary Club.
And they were nice enough to take us on a tour
all around the Southern Cape.
They fed us, and then we had a chance to interact.
And I was sitting with different members of the clubs.
And I had conversations with them.
And they're older gentleman.
And their conception of South Africa shocked me,
because I expected them to have more of a multicultural
appreciation of things, but they didn't.
And they were very frustrated with the Xhosa in power.
They felt that they were incompetent.
They had all of these stereotypes and tropes.
And when I would try to explore it with them,
they got frustrated with me.
And oh, you're an American.
What do you know about what's going on in our country?
They became a little-- well, one of them
became rude, not all of them.
They were generally really quite gracious and not rude.
So that was a little bit of feedback.
And then we went with the son of one of them.
This guy was English, he was cool.
The other guy who was really rude was also English.
But he was cool.
And he said that my son plays in a band, and he's playing.
Would you like to go to his set?
So all of us, the group after we had dinner--
they fed us dinner-- we went with the son to the place
where he was going to play.
And we wanted to walk through the area we lived
in to the area that he was in.
And he was very hesitant to do that.
So basically, what his position was
is that it's unsafe to be on the streets in this neighborhood,
because there's too many black and brown people
in this neighborhood.
That was his thing.
He lived in the white suburbs.
And the way that that story turned out
is that he saw somebody coming down the street,
and he wanted all of us to cross the other side of the street
because he was sure that that guy was up to no good.
Come to find out, that was one of his college classmates
who was walking down the street.
So there are still a lot of stereotypical ideas that exist,
and you would expect to find them.
Younger people, I believe, are much more
able to change quicker than some of the older generations,
right?
That's just time on task, time on task.
And so there's hopefulness.
At the same time, there's--
I don't know, there's really folks
that are locked into the past at the same time.
And if you talk to young African men from the township--
and I was also instructed that whites are also
Africans in South Africa.
That was another lesson that I had, and I accept that.
But black Africans from the townships, the young men,
highly frustrated.
Some of them have prof tech degrees or college degrees.
They can't find work.
They're still living in a shanty with no electricity
and no running water, with a degree.
And then you have people that are living in the suburbs,
and they think things are moving way too fast.
So it depends on your positionality in the society.
But South Africans [? experimented ?]
reconciliation is another one that gets a lot of criticism,
where they decided that if people
who were part of the apartheid regime
would confess what they had done and asked
for understanding, if not forgiveness, for what they have
done, it would be granted to them
and they could live together.
But that process was very uneven.
The majority of the people who sought reconciliation
were the Africans.
Only 20% of the people who sought reconciliation
were whites.
And so it didn't work as it was imagined to work.
But just, I think, it was the right idea
to try to attempt it.
But I think that gives a metaphor for what's
still going on there.
There's an inability for folks to want to take responsibility
for what happened.
That's part of the issue.
And we have that here as well.
So I think here.
She was next.
Sorry if I went long winded on that.
Did I answer your question at all in the process?
OK.
I am curious about the severe water shortages and water
restrictions in Cape Town I've been reading about it.
And it sounds quite bad.
And I'm curious if you anticipate
that it will have an effect on your trip this August.
I do anticipate if the rains don't come,
it will have an effect.
We'll probably have to purchase bottled water, which is readily
available in good times.
I'm sure it's going to be very expensive, right?
So we're depending on the rains.
The rainy season has not yet come.
And we're hoping that after two bad years,
they'll get a good year of rain.
We'll see.
But if they don't, then yeah, we're
going to have to adjust to it.
I think the adjustment can be made
in South Africa because of the infrastructure that's there.
99% of the people in Cape Town have
running water in their homes and that type of thing.
So they have water, and they have the infrastructure
to get water to these areas that don't have it.
That's possible.
But it will possibly add additional cost,
and it's also going to maybe limit our water usage.
We've had that experience already.
Even during normal times when I take students there,
they don't understand that when you wash dishes,
you just don't cut on the spigot and let the water run.
So we were staying at the house of a middle class
family in a township.
And water is very valuable in the good times.
And so they went in the kitchen to help the matron at the house
wash dishes, but they did it the American style, right?
They wanted to rinse the dishes with a running tap.
And so she got really frustrated with them,
but she couldn't tell them she's frustrated,
because that would be impolite, because they're her guests.
But they noticed she's frustrated, so they came to me.
And then I went to her son, and he then came back laughing.
And he said, yeah, my mom says you Americans waste water.
She couldn't imagine.
So what they do is they have two basins, right?
They wash in one, they rinse in the other.
Yeah.
Hi, I'm [? Dia. ?] The land in South Africa,
there's 10% white, but own 90% of the land.
Almost, yeah.
And so the new president, which is a member of ANC,
is talking now about expropriation of land
for agriculture without compensation.
And I wanted to know what you--
could you elaborate?
And I do think the Boers should be giving up that land,
just like European settlers should be giving up the land
here in the United States.
And that's going to be a delicate issue.
But just at the level of social justice,
you would expect that the resources of the country
should be shared amongst the people of a country
if it's a multicultural country.
With that said, the route that South Africa went on
was one that allowed whites to have a disproportionate share
because they've always had a disproportionate share
in these towns and cities, right?
And then to move towards a gradual transition.
The gradual transition is too gradual.
It's not working fast enough.
And part of that has to do with, I think, human fear,
fear amongst people that if they give up, they're going to lose.
It's a zero-sum type of mentality.
And that's held by some of the farmers in South Africa
right now.
That's not a sustainable attitude,
because you have too many young frustrated males, but people
in the society who expect more at this particular time how
many years after independence since '94.
Yeah.
So my thought about it is is that it's going
to be a bone of contention.
It's going to have to still be done intelligently
if they're going to accelerate the process,
because the underlying reason that they have the process
is because the matter of just kicking whites out and taking
the land did not work well for most African countries.
In fact, it's hard to find one where it did.
This is one of the contradictions of colonialism.
The longer the Europeans stayed in general,
the more infrastructure that was developed in the country.
Take Kenya, take South Africa, take Zimbabwe as examples.
And so when you're talking about kicking people out,
you have more to lose.
I mean, South Africa, for instance, their airport
is as nice as SeaTac.
Their highways are better than our highways, fewer potholes.
I'm talking about traveling between cities and stuff,
right?
If you're talking about a city that
has tremendous infrastructure and also mineral wealth.
And so how to transition it so that the process is
accelerated, I think, is the question,
because I think the either/or thing is
there's not a lot of good examples
that that works for the people when you just replace
the people with the expertise who haven't taught anybody
else to step in their place.
This is the thing about South Africa where
you saw the black on black violence,
if I call it that, where South Africans were then turning
against other immigrants who had come
from other places in Africa, because they
were worse off than the black South Africans and townships.
They were moving in the black African townships
and living in the periphery of a township,
because that was a better condition than what
they had at home.
Imagine.
There was a violent reaction to that
by some people in the townships, right?
Not the majority, but some of the workers in the townships.
And I think that's an indication of the type of frustration
that is there.
And if the government is not careful at modulating that,
you could have some real problems around people striking
out, and I think, setting them back from the progress
that they'd make.
Thank you [INAUDIBLE] I would like
to ask you about the homestay in South Africa,
and I would like to know the process of recruitment
of those families, and also in terms of the food,
if you require some kind of food,
or it's up to the families.
And how long the duration of this homestay?
Thank you for that question.
And also if you can talk about the impact of the homestay.
Wow, thank you, thank you multiple times
for that question.
Yes, so the homestay is a two-day process.
It is always in the same township.
It's called Langa township.
And that's where my on-site coordinator is from.
He personally knows the families where the students are staying,
and he personally contracts with the matron
of the house for our stay, and compensates her generously
for our stay.
He also, and myself, are in proximity walking distance
of all the houses that the students stay at,
and we visit those houses.
So students are in a really safe zone.
The houses are middle class homes
in the context of a township.
So townships are not what we might imagine.
There are the folks on the periphery who are really
just squatting, and then there's maybe hundreds of thousands
of really poor people.
It's literally, right?
Without electricity and running water.
And then at the core of it are the teachers, and the nurses,
and the business people, and so forth.
They have homes there that live still in the townships.
And those are the people we stay with.
And so they have refrigeration, they have electricity,
they have the capacity to ask people if they have allergies,
and to modulate the meals that they're giving people.
And so that's part of what happens there.
So the students are eating foods that they're typically
very familiar with when they're in the homestays,
and the host families are doing that intentionally.
We do go out and eat some local foods and so forth, but not so
much in the homestays.
The value of the homestays is tremendous,
because one of the things that happens
is the students are able to shadow the matrons,
and to do what they do during the day.
And I mean, some of them are hospice workers
for AIDS patients, and that type of thing.
And they get to see that, right?
Some of them are nurses, and they go around
to the community, and just attending to people
and that type of thing.
They get to see that.
In addition to that, they get to interact with South Africans
in their element.
So there's families in those homes.
And those families have friends.
And so we go out at night, and we go to a [? shabeen, ?]
which is like a local bar.
It's somebody's living room that's been turned into a bar,
is what it is.
There's a refrigerator.
That's all there is.
There's a refrigerator with some beer in it.
We go over there, and people are just having
a good time on Friday night.
And students then will get invited from there
to go to a party in the township,
and they'll be escorted to the party, and that type of thing.
And so the value of it is tremendous from the standpoint
of authentic interactions.
We've gone to see a local shaman when we were
in one of the townships, right?
They had the opportunity to do things like that.
So the authentic experiences are tremendous.
And then we have gone and eaten outside of the homes
in the townships.
We also have lectures.
While we're doing the homestay, the way that I've set it up,
I think all but one time, we have an activist
from the struggle, [? Fatma ?] [INAUDIBLE]..
You remember [? Fatma ?] from your tour?
Yeah, and she comes and gives a political lecture
to us about the history of that township in the struggle
against apartheid.
We get that from people.
So yeah, that aspect of the program is powerful,
but it's also quite safe.
We've had situations where we assume that the matron was
going to be home, something came up with her family,
and she left.
And when we circulated, we realized that she wasn't there,
and we moved the student to-- because two women were
staying with her, we moved them to another house.
So we really pay attention to where the students are,
and safety is the first issue.
We don't allow students to walk from here to the library
by themselves, literally.
If they're moving, they move in a group.
And that's just for--
and it's over-security.
Some students feel a little bit frustrated by that.
They say, these people are so nice, they're so friendly.
You're treating them as if they're unsafe.
But it's always that small element.
It's not the people in general, it's that small element.
So we walk.
And South African culture is such that--
I was told by [? Maaz ?] one time,
we were going to go to lunch, and all we had to do
was walk maybe from here to the grade school over there.
That's how close it was.
There's a little grade school across the street.
And I said, [? Maaz, ?] we can see it.
Why can't we just walk there?
He said, no, no, I've got to send someone with you.
And I said, OK, OK, send someone.
So we got a sixth grader.
[LAUGHTER]
And he walked us.
And I was going, [? Maaz, ?] what would
he have done if something happened?
He said, it wasn't for if something happened.
Nothing is going to happen to you.
He said, but what you need to be is
identified with us as a guest, and that's what that does.
All people need to know is that you are a guest of someone
in the township.
And as a guest, you're [INAUDIBLE]..
People will not think of looking at you cross, let alone harming
you.
And that's part of their culture.
You've seen that in some areas of the world,
where people can be at war with one another,
you come into their village, and they stop, and they
feed you, and serve you tea, and then soon as you leave,
they shooting at you, right?
OK, so this is the same type of thing without the shooting.
[LAUGHTER]
OK.
This could go on forever, but I was
asked to make sure we clear the room by 1:30.
So we need to stop.
So let's begin by giving this gentleman
a great round of applause.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you all.
Thank you for coming.
Thank you very much.
Thank you so much for coming.
Thank you, sir.
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