The Tough Stuff

This weekend in Robertson all the local wineries opened their cellars for a weekend of free tastings, huge parties, and wacky events (complete with an entire swimming pool full of red wine, equipped with a slide and diving board for those drunken souls who plunged in to stain themselves fuchsia and gulp down the polluted beverage in one of the most bizarrely hilarious and disgusting acts I have ever witnessed). Since our program director happens to be cousins with the winemaker at one of the cellars, we received a VIP tour of Graham Beck, whose most recent claim to fame has been the production of the champagne of choice of the Obama campaign to celebrate on election night (South Africa’s new president, on the other hand, went for some snobby French stuff instead at 10,000 Rand a bottle—meaning each bottle was worth more than it costs to build an entire house in one of the townships here—when a bottle of his own country’s finest goes for less than 80 Rand, which is less than US$10). Although Graham Beck is a model of responsible community engagement, setting aside a large portion of its land for nature reserves and environmental rehabilitation as well as sponsoring schools for farm children and skills centers to help uneducated adults learn English and marketable skills, it’s definitely the exception to the rule, and the entire weekend really just showed the huge racial and socioeconomic divides that exist in this country, which continues to have one of the highest levels of income inequality in the world.
I touched on this in an earlier post, but I’ve personally been shocked by the extent to which racial issues touch every aspect of daily life here, and how difficult it seems to be for this country to move on. There are signs of progress, to be sure—Nelson Mandela is almost deified here, and countless South Africans have told me that he is the reason they no longer hate one another, one even saying that he refuses to leave the country now because he is too scared at the thought of being abroad when Mandela finally passes away—but the generation that fought for equal rights is growing older now and their children are struggling to find their own identity under the new system.
This weekend, it seemed like all the young chic white people in South Africa descended on Robertson to gaudily celebrate their wealth, status, and hideous pseudo-European fashion sense by engaging in socially acceptable alcoholism and idiocy. Maybe they’re trying to cling to what’s left of their superiority after the racial upheaval here, maybe they’re trying to find a new identity and distance themselves from their parents’ generation while hanging on to the socioeconomic success that their parents’ crimes bought them, or maybe they’re just out to get drunk and hook up. Whatever it was, it just made me really angry to see all these white folks being driven around to parties and wine tastings all weekend by colored chauffeurs (and there were definitely no blacks or coloreds at the tastings themselves), and then leave the next day without ever coming into contact with the real community here or dealing with the fact that and I honestly felt like I was just contributing to that dynamic just by being present.
On that note, I have to say that it’s a really tough dynamic to go about changing, especially for someone who just arrived in the country three weeks ago. In fact, most of the time it’s easier to feel like part of the problem: I live in a house outside of town where my meals are cooked for me each day by colored staff, I have to be driven around town in a nice car by another colored man (apparently so I don’t go careening onto the wrong side of the road or mistaking kilometers for miles and other American things like that), I stay at a volunteer shift for half a day where I’m only really able to interact with the white doctors because they speak English (my Afrikaans is coming along nicely though, in my opinion: I can now confidently ask you whether you’d like to help deliver a baby today), and on weekends I head out of town to places that most of the locals can’t afford to go—and I have the audacity to even suggest that I’m actually here to help, to understand the community and its issues, to make a difference? Honest to God, I would rather go live in the slums and walk into town for internet and laundry and eat the same food every day and sleep in a hut every night.
One of my recent reads has been “Into the Wild,” and this makes me want to be Alexander Supertramp and do something independent and rebellious and sacrificial. Maybe I’ll start by trying to grow a beard.