Ok so I left off in Pretoria. If you looked through the pictures the last album had a bunch from Pretoria. We only spent one day in Pretoria. We got there in the afternoon on Monday and then spent Tuesday exploring. On Tuesday morning, we woke up and went to the Voortrekker Monument. The Voortrekker Monument is a monument to the Boer (Afrikaner) people who fled into South Africa from the British and attempted to make a life for themselves. Their story is very similar to that of the American pilgrims. The British persecuted the Boers and didn’t allow them into society so they went on a long pilgrimage into the undeveloped or un-colonized part of South Africa. The problem was, different African tribes, mainly the Zulus were already living there, much in the same way that the Native Americans were already living in the US.
The monument depicts the struggle of the Boers against the British and then the Zulus. It is like, all history; one-sided in the sense that it depicts Zulus killing Boer women and children, and the Boers as being kind peaceful settlers who merely wanted to share Zulu land. That is in actual fact not what happened. Zulus killed Boers who tried to take over their lands, but when given the chance Boers also killed many Zulus, women and children included, although our guide of the museum claimed that no Zulu woman or child was ever killed by a Boer. The monument depicts Zulus as savage, and Boers as heroes. Although one could say any monument we have depicting any part of the American pilgrimage west, is the exact same thing. In fact American history and Boer history are disturbingly similar. Both Boers and American colonists were attempting to rid “their” countries of British rule. Before they could take over that country they had to either wipe out huge parts of the already existing population (Native American or Black African) or colonize/ enslave the rest. Once they did gain that freedom, they set in place segregation policies ensuring that both Native and Black populations would be kept separate and unequal. The only difference is that our country is a bit older and law did not outline our segregation as clearly. This similarity is something we were kindly reminded of by our older Afrikaner tour guide, when we started to insinuate the racist and horrifying history that was depicted in the monument.
On another note, an interesting black mark on British history that I never learned about until now, was that during the Boer-British war in the early 20th century, the British put Boers mostly women and children, in concentration camps, and tons of Boers died or were killed in those camps. It’s not talked about here in the same way we don’t really talk about the Japanese Internment camps we put people in as well.
Anyways after the Voortrekker Monument, we went to Freedom Park, which is a park dedicated to freedom struggles all through out history and all over the world. It includes a dedication to all different faiths and a wall of all the recorded names of people who died in different struggles in Southern Africa. Including different massacres, the Boer-British war, the slave trade in Southern Africa of Indians and people who are now referred to as coloreds. It is a really beautiful park. At its highest point it has a direct view of the Voortrekker Monument and Parliament, which a law mandates, cannot be blocked.
After lunch we went to the US Embassy in Pretoria to learn about the different policies the US is involved in South Africa. A lot of the policy is geared towards education and HIV/AIDS although other top policy issues included the alarmingly high rate of gender based violence and the lack of resources for rape victims, the high unemployment rate, corruption and lack of resources for a large percentage of the country. It was interesting to hear the policies from an outside perspective, meaning what the US and other countries do for these problems as outsiders unable to actually make policy but more required to work within the policy barriers that exist. It seemed as if this left them very limited, which is understandable, it isn’t the US’s job or place to create policy about South Africa, only the South African people can do that. Even so, I believe that the emotional tie people have to the ANC allows the ANC to get away with a lot more than they should and no be accountable on issues that matter. The country has a 40% unemployment rate- that’s almost 20 million people who are unemployed and thus at risk or already living in abject poverty.
The rest of the day was left to pack and get ready to leave for Namibia in the morning. We all went out to dinner as a group. It was a really fun night, even though the next morning we got up at 4 to leave for the airport. After making it through to Namibia we spent about an hour driving to Windhoek. On the way we saw a giraffe and some baboons. Namibia or at least the Windhoek area is much more undeveloped and mountainy and filled with wildlife. Mountains surround all of Windhoek and it is one of the most beautiful cities I have ever seen. Namibia as a population is very small; it is 2.2 million (so by comparison, the entire population of Namibia could fit in Soweto). Namibia is the least densely populated country outside of Mongolia, and the country is enormous. Windhoek is so different from Johannesburg, for the obvious reason that it has a much smaller population, but it doesn’t necessarily seem smaller in size. The downtown in comparable to the downtown of Evanston, maybe slightly larger but not by much, but the actual city of Windhoek spans very far, with many different neighborhoods and townships.
When we finally got to the house we were able to unpack before a brief safety meeting and then dinner. After dinner a bunch of us walked up to the Tom Thumb to get some snacks and explore. Windhoek has lots of very steep hills and is very high up in elevation, so walking is nice but can wear you out a lot more than you would imagine. The house is really nice, we have five bedrooms, three of which have six girls each and two which house the three boys and two other girls. My roommates are Laura, Amanda, Yvette, Katie Matmiller (we have two Katies, and three Catherines including myself), and Tamara. Laura and Amanda are both from Clark University, Yvette goes to Harvard, Katie is from Valparaiso University and Tamara goes to Pacific Lutheran in Seattle. They are all so nice. Katie is one of the sweetest people I have ever met, she is so bubbly and nice and Laura and Amanda remind me a lot of friends from home, Yvette is so dedicated and hardworking, she has to do all this extra work for Harvard to get credit for any of her classes here so she gets up almost every morning at like 5:30 or 6 to start working on all the stuff she has to do.
Anyways, I really love all of the people in my group. I have made a ton of friends and there are people here who I instantly connected with. Everyone comes from very different backgrounds (religious, economic, social, where we live in the states) and that is a really great learning experience. So that was day one in Namibia. The next day we did a tour of Windhoek. We started by driving around the downtown area and then over to Eros and Klein Windhoek. These areas are mostly white and extremely wealthy. Namibia like South Africa is still very divided racially and the wealth of the country is extremely skewed. Five percent of the people hole 95% of the country’s wealth. After seeing those areas we drove by Hochland Park and into Katatura. Katatura and Khomasdal are sort of comparable to Soweto in the sense that during Apartheid, the Blacks and Coloreds were forced to move into Katatura and Khomasdal and not allowed to live or be in the city area and certainly not in the wealthier areas unless it was for work. To be colored means an entirely different thing in Windhoek than it does in Jo-burg. It generally means people of mixed race, here or people who were of more Asian descent, like Indians. There is still some hostility as well between Coloreds and Blacks because during apartheid, Coloreds were viewed as above Blacks and some of them are still fighting for that distinction now. Hochland Park is supposed to be were many middle class Blacks and Coloreds live and where the poorer whites live.
Recently I drove through Hochland Park and it is interesting what is considered poor for whites in Namibia versus what is considered poor for blacks and coloreds. In Khomasdal and Katatura, the houses are very small and scrunched together. It looks very similar to many of the pictures of Soweto. These areas include people with a range of different incomes, from extremely poor to middle class and some select upper class. But the houses for the poor in Katatura are shanty like or one-room houses. In Hochland Park there are many houses, which would rival what would be considered middle to upper middle class houses in the US, and certainly many that would rival houses on the North Shore. The poor whites in Windhoek live a very different lifestyle from the poor Blacks and Coloreds in Windhoek, and while it wasn’t the lower class whites living in the large houses, the neighborhoods and the houses they lived were of a much different standard. I would imagine that is due to the forced overcrowding in townships and purposeful disadvantaging of all non-whites under apartheid regime that caused the racial caste system to develop in the way it did here.
At the end part of the tour we drove through the informal settlements. The informal settlements start at the end of Katatura and are just miles of hill and mountainsides covered with shacks and shanties set up by people trying to find work in Windhoek. There is no sanitation, there are water pumps that the government has set up and schools, but it is overwhelming to see how far the informal settlement stretches and it is literally right on the outskirts of Windhoek. I have some pictures that I will put up later that show very small parts of the settlement. My internship is actually right on the outskirts of the settlement and several of the girls are working in orphanages in the settlement. It is government sanctioned and there are street signs and other random formal government signs and items but the settlement itself is extremely dangerous and unsanitary, as well as inaccessible to relief in many places if it were to flood or a fire were to occur.
After our tour of Windhoek, I had to spend the rest of the day in bed because of dehydration, the sun is so intense here combined with the increase in altitude, makes it really hard to judge how much water to drink and everyone in our group has had a sick day at least once so far. The second day in Windhoek, we went to the US embassy for a safety briefing about the dangers in Windhoek and Namibia. They were generally the same as in all major cities. Don’t walk by yourself at night and try not to be easy targets in terms of pick pocketing. Everyone will be happy to know that the terrorist threat in Namibia is very low, duh. However, I was briefed on how to not look like an easy terrorist target as well, should the problem arise.
After the meeting at the embassy, we did what was called a Katatura quest, where three group members and then a member of the University of Namibia get a taxi on our own and go to visit different places in Katatura, find lunch by ourselves and then take another taxi home. It sounds very easy, but there were points during our walking around Katatura, where it was very clear that if we had not been with our UNam student who was from Katatura, we would not have left there with any of the belongings we started our quest with. I believe white person wandering around Katatura with a map, is the exact definition of easy target. At various points in the walk, Mami, our “guide” would say, yeah those guys want to rob you, they know my brother so they wont mess with you while you are with me, but don’t come here alone. It sounds like she was saying it jokingly, but she didn’t mean it to scare us, she just really was concerned about our safety at different points. I don’t mean to give the impression that all people in Katatura steal, more so that there are some who are in complete and desperate poverty, as in many places in the US, and those people in Katatura go looking for people who look lost, or misplaced or have their hands too full, solely to steal from them, and being that Katatura is almost 100% black or colored, being white in Katatura makes you look lost or confused, and thus an easy target. The people who rob or steal would do the same to someone from Katatura; they just tend to be smarter about not getting robbed because they live in those areas.
