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Another Day with CAS Makes Me Wonder... Will My Critical Ability Be Compromised?

I had another wonderful and busy day today - after staying up until 4:30am writing, J woke me up at 10am to inform me she was picking me up in an hour and that we had a thousand places to go today.  We went to the Phansi Museum, the CAS office, the office of the Deputy Manager of Arts/Culture in the Umlazi district, the Durban Art Space gallery, a fabric warehouse (sadly, I didn't find anything there), and FINALLY we had lunch at 4pm.

The Phansi Museum houses a private collection of Southern African artifacts with an astonishing range of older (or "traditional" as they call them) and contemporary clothing, basketry, beading, pots, drums, dolls, and so much more.  Phumzile Nkosi is the curator of the Phansi and she walked us through the collection, including the amazing "life-size puppet room" where they display different clothing from groups in the KwaZulu-Natal area.  This photo shows women's clothing from the Sotho (or Basotho) ethnic group (who live in both South Africa and Lesotho).  I plan to return to the Phansi to speak with Nkosi about individual pieces in more detail, so I will write more about the Phansi and post more pictures then.  There is so much more detail I have already, but something else has been troubling me for the past few days.

When we stopped in at CAS's Palmer St offices I got to catch up with M to talk about the upcoming Parliamentary Millennium Project Workshop.  I described this project in an earlier post entitled, "What Does Democracy Mean to You?"  but the location for the workshop in March has changed.  Instead of being here in KZN, the PMP coordinators are planning the next one to be held either in the Limpopo or Mpumalanga province (both to the north of KZN).  When J and M said I could travel with them to attend and help coordinate, I suppose some questions I have been thinking through really came to the surface.  In the many hours I have already spent with J, M, and R they have quickly become my friends - in the car, over meals, and at the office we have talked about so much more than just the CAS project - including talking about ourselves, our backgrounds, and exchanging jokes I would likely blush about if I were to type them out (well, others might blush over them).  What happens when I have to start writing critically about the CAS Amaswi project when I recognize the people I'm writing about and will formally interview are also my friends?

Normally the PMP pays for the flight and accommodation of CAS workers during the workshops - when I asked if I would be able to attend and offered to pay for my own way, J insisted that the PMP coordinators would likely cover my expenses since I would be assisting in running the workshop.  Is it ethical for me to let the Parliament cover these expenses?

If anyone has any advice or knows of any readings on the subject of participant observation academic writing that has also been able to remain productive and critical, I would certainly appreciate it.  I suppose I am wondering how my interaction with CAS will be viewed if it also becomes one of the main case studies for my dissertation.

Handicraft Research at the Killie Campbell Archive

I was at the Killie Campbell Collections today from 8:30am to 2:30pm - it's an archive open to the public even though it is a part of the University of KwaZulu-Natal library system.  The archive includes a large collection of manuscripts, photographs, and recordings of oral histories with an emphasis on the history of the KwaZulu Natal region.  I spent most of the day going through a doctoral thesis and associated notes written by J.W. Grossert.  In 1969 he wrote a comprehensive history of art and craft education for "Bantus."  This was the term which replaced "Native" to specify a group of Africans who share similar language systems and that excluded the "Hottentots" (a group now referred to as the Khosian) and Bushmen.  The Bantu education system incorporated craft education from early on reaching back into the 19th century in missionary schools.  Despite the active complaints of parents, the majority of instruction time was spent on arts and crafts over the "European" subjects of English, math, science,etc.  What surprised me today was discovering the educational system commonly sold the crafts at the end of each term to support the school and provide some money/economic incentive to the student producers.  I've posted one of the photographs (no flash photography in the archive, I promise) that I took from the appendix of Grossert's thesis - it shows a schematic of the relationship between educational levels of art instruction, teacher training, and sales.  In some ways learning about this history today challenges the claims of "empowerment" and "self-help" that many handicraft nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) make on behalf of craft groups in terms of achieving economic independence.  I'm still thinking through this history and will continue to research handicrafts within the collection over the next couple months, but already the Grossert papers have helped to provide a context to question whether it is economic activity itself that is "empowering" or rather if it is more important to look at the formation of the craft collectives.  In other words, are NGOs just the new cultural intermediaries in a neoliberal global economy, merely replacing the missionary and colonialist educational system?

At 2:30 J showed up at the Killie Campbell with A, the founder of Create Africa South and a pretty well-known artist in South Africa.  He had been in Cape Town the past month working on a commission so I finally got to meet him today.  We all went back to the Palmer Street offices and sat in his downstairs studio with the garage door up - I was reviewing some notes and they were working on some recent work related to two sculpture projects.  It was really warm today but the breeze blew in occasionally and people drifted in and out of the studio to visit with us.  I got to meet N, who formerly worked for the Amazwi project and who now teaches crafts at a special education public school in the area.  J was helping A clean up some polyurethane molds for the Cape Town commission and I was laughing at her doing studio work with little white mules on and a new pedicure.  I wandered upstairs so that M and I could hang out what seemed like hundreds of saris (probably only about 25) that the Umbilo Temple had donated to us (J and I had picked them up on Saturday morning) so that they could dry before we take them to Umlazi for the sewing project I'm starting at the community center tomorrow.

Countdown Until My First Craft Workshop

This morning I just received *official* confirmation that Create Africa South and the South African Parliamentary Millennium Project will be conducting a five-day workshop in Nelspruit, Mpumalanga from 15-20 March.  My flight has been booked for next Saturday morning and I will be working during the workshop as a coordinator for Create Africa South (along with M and Mrs. Gambushe), primarily assisting in embroidery instruction.  I am so happy to know the workshop has been confirmed because the last couple weeks it has become increasingly clear to me that bureaucracy and the particular situation here (especially working with Parliament and communities of informal working women) prevents making long term plans easily. 

It has been humorous to me that these seemingly last-minute arrangements made here come at the same time as the higher education "funding season" in the United States for the following academic year.  During this time of year my department and other campus programs require a fellowship application where I must project my work and dissertation progress for the next year.  On the one hand, the research I want to do with these craft "democracy" workshops seems to fall through one day and then be confirmed the next.  On the other hand, I have to perform (through writing) my expectations of findings for these workshops and what I will be thinking about in a year's time.  I feel generally that I operate somewhere in between these two time parameters, so both tend to frustrate me - especially since my research forces the two together.

The second workshop (25-30 March) remains unsettled:  CAS will either remain in Nelspruit to conduct our own workshop without the support of the Parliament to collect cloths for our archive since we will be in an area that CAS could not afford otherwise to travel to.  However, the Parliament Project is pushing to conduct a workshop in the Limpopo province that following week, as they would like to complete all provinces soon and they have only completed three.  They have even suggested conducting workshops in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng provinces next month, possibly while I am still here.

Being in the Mpumulanga province has an added benefit for me as a tourist - Kruger National Park - as Nelspruit is close to the Southern area of the park.  The park is the largest game reserve in Southern Africa and its biodiversity is amazing.  Over the Easter weekend, I am going to stay in a backpacker's dorm in Hazyview, a small banana plantation town located outside of the park.  Since the bed only costs R80 a night (about $10 US), I can afford to take one or more guided wildlife tours into the park in hopes of seeing duikers (my favorite!), giraffe, rhinoceros, the elusive honey badger, and tons of other animals.

Fabric and Rhetorics of Nationalism

Today was pretty warm (reaching up to 85 degrees Fahrenheit), although I can tell that summer is slowly ending because the mornings and evenings have started to grow slightly cooler.  After a long day of work with M, I returned to my apartment and felt really lucky to have access to my landlady's swimming pool.  By 5pm I was splashing around in the water, staring at the plumeria tree above me and grateful for one of those moments where I wasn't aware of thinking about anything specifically.

M and I spent much of our morning in the Victoria Street Market area of the city buying fabric, beads, and thread for the workshop that we depart for on Saturday.  We hopped a minibus taxi from near the office to get there - within the city it's 3 Rand to get around town and they usually cram as many riders in as they can.  Most of them have brightly colored lettering and sometimes images on the outside with the name or motif of the cab (some names for cabs I have seen include "Jesus Saves," "Durban Poison," "The Arabs," "Tupac Live or Die," and "Tsotsi").  They also blare techno or hip-hop music so that you have to shout loudly when you want to get off - today we were subjected to an extended remix of a Nelly Furtado song. 

We had to finish our purchases before 1pm, as most stores in that area are owned or managed by Muslims and at that time each Monday through Thursday (it's at noon on Fridays), nearly all shops close for half an hour for worship at the nearby Juma Masjid Mosque (it's the largest mosque in the Southern hemisphere!).  A few weeks ago M and I passed by the mosque during the midday worship time and I was amazed how Grey Street transformed into a parking lot.  One of the street's major cities shuts down for a half an hour to accommodate the thousands of people and their cars who come to worship.  We walked back to the office even though it was quite a distance so we could stop at a store to add internet time onto the portable modem we use at the office and pick up some takeaway for lunch (my favorite bunny shop hadn't received their bread delivery today because of the electricity shortage so I had to settle for mutton curry on rice).  M and I ate back at the office while we worked on emails and plans for this week.

The first picture I have posted below shows the materials that go into making a finished cloth during our craft workshops.  I'm interested that these materials that may be considered "pre-political" or part of the personal/private/everyday sphere enter a democratic sphere as political participation largely because of the recognition these cloths will receive by the Parliament and during their exhibition in a museum space.  The cloths produced in the workshop materially depict the crafter's conception of what democracy means at this particular moment and their location in South Africa's republic.  The second picture depicts more shweshwe I purchased today for myself - including a meter of De Gama Textile's "Madiba" Print:  an indigo shweshwe with a border print of Nelson Mandela.  This is a really salient (and hugely popular) example of a material expression of national identity produced by a company with the permission of Nelson Mandela but explicitly outside of direct governmental intervention.  It reminded me of the textiles featured in the recent exhibition, Wearing Propaganda, that positioned mass-produced American and Japanese World War II fabrics as examples of "unofficial propaganda" that "reflect commitment to their country's rhetoric of war" (Jacqueline M. Atkins, curator).  The exhibition suggests that a nexus of constrained yet creative relationships exists between the textile, the "Home Front" consumer, the government, and the private textile and clothing manufacturers.  Through the consumption and display of the "war" textiles, the consumer can actively support his or her government and its rhetoric of war - they can display their "good citizenshipness."  I am interested in how the "Madiba" shweshwe print functions here and if I can draw similar connections of its purchase/use to performances of citizenship. 

Off to Mpumulanga (15 March - 30 March)

M, Mrs. G, and I will be in the Mpumalanga Province for the next two weeks to conduct two workshops for Create Africa South's Amazwi Abesifazane project.  The first, held in Nelspruit from 15 - 20 March will be in conjunction with the South Africa Parliamentary Millennium Project and cloth production will focus on contemporary concepts of democracy for women participants.  The second, likely to be held in a rural area outside of Nelspruit from 25-29 March, will only be conducted by the three of us and cloth production will focus on history and experience. 

Over the Easter weekend I will be staying at the Gecko bushpacker's hostel - yay vacation! - just outside of Hazyview near Kruger National Park.  If you need to contact me for any emergency, the location information there is:  SABIE ROAD PLOT S 13; P.O. BOX 753  HAZYVIEW  1242; TEL.: 013 – 737 8140; FAX: 086 – 631 7143; EMAIL: [email protected]

I have decided to leave my laptop here in Durban - I imagine I will be able to find some internet cafes for access in Nelspruit, for at least the first week to check email and maybe quickly update current events.  Otherwise, I'll write about the trip after my return, during my last few weeks here in Durban.

I hope everyone enjoys the seasonal change... whether it is into Spring or Fall, the two seasons I love the most for the way they whisper both of promise and reflection.  I'll be thinking of my family on Easter and missing our egg-cracking championship.

Becoming a Part of My Research and Representing the United States

I was intrigued today by a BBC Headlines feed that read "World views US 'more positively'"so I linked to the article.  Apparently, a BBC world service poll shows that 35% of the "world" says the US has a positive influence, up from 31% from last year.  Apparently now only 47% of the "world" thinks the US has a negative influence, down a whole 5% from last year.  I haven't read through the whole report (downloadable as a pdf) to understand exactly who the "world" is (from what I can tell so far, the sample "world" doesn't include South Africa but does include Egypt and Ghana).  However, the article helps me reflect and frame a phenomenon I experienced over the past two weeks during my research trip as a representative of the United States. 

Entering the environments of the two workshops (each potentially gathering 50-60 "marginalized" women over a period of 5-6 days to create stories, sketches, and cloths documenting their life experience and perceptions of democracy), I certainly knew that I would not function as an invisible observer of events.  I knew that my presence would be noticed by the participants and have to be framed somehow.  However, this particular framing of my presence - as a representative of the United States - was both a surprise to me (it was not the framing I attempted to create for myself) and functioned in a couple of interesting ways.  Although the workshops differed widely in terms of setting and available material resources, my presence was explained at these workshops in the same, two ways:  1)  as a researcher from the United States interested in the project and 2) as a potential contact of United States-based assistance for participants involved in the project.

On the third day of the Parliamentary Millennium Project/Create Africa South Workshop, I approached  Selma Theron, one of the many journalists that visited the workshop, to ask for her contact information in the hope that I would be able to obtain her publication's (Hazyview Herald) coverage of the workshop.  She was instantly interested in my presence and took my name and information and asked to take a photograph of me.  I was surprised that Friday to find that she published the photograph in the article with the caption beneath reading, "Ms Martha Webber, a student at the University of Illinois, was part of the project."  In a moment of almost silly self-reflexivity for me, I found myself a "part" of my research and being reported on in a document that I would be analyzing for research. 

Speakers at both workshops used this first framing - as a researcher from the US interested in the project - to attach importance to the project.  At each closing ceremony (the first on Thursday 20 March and the second on Saturday 29 April), motivational speakers referenced me in their speeches and suggested that the project the women had just participated in possessed importance since I was from the United States and had come to research it.

Perhaps even more fascinating, however, was how in both closing ceremonies, motivational speakers (in the case of the first workshop, a different speaker than the first) framed me as a potential contact of United States-based assistance.  At the first workshop, this was Cathy Dlamini, Chairperson of the Ehlanzani Women's Council, who suggested to the audience that, now that I had met "marginalized" women from the rural areas of the Mpumalanga province, I could serve as a potential resource in identifying NGOs or other groups based in the United States to assist them.  Implicit in this suggestion is an understanding of the distribution of the "wealth" of NGOs that many critics have identified - the majority of NGOs and their economic power tend to be based in the "North" yet look towards the "South" as sites to distribute aid/assistance.   Dlamini's suggestion was set within a speech that thoughtfully criticized the Parliamentary Millennium Program/Create Africa South Workshop as a superficial engagement with the citizens and concerns of the community.

Both of these positions I was given - often by people who had only met me for a moment - fascinated me and in some respects made me uncomfortable (at least in the sense of the amount of responsibility I was given and the inflation of my importance - don't they know I'm just a feeble graduate student?!).  These framings have certainly given me a lot to think about as I slowly transcribe and organize the pictures, audio files, fieldnotes, and video footage I collected over the past couple of weeks. 

I don't know what the "world" really thinks of the US, but I can say that the participants of these two workshops (both facilitators and cloth producers) viewed the US (in which I functioned as a tangible stand-in or synecdoche) as a place that can offer funding, assistance, and opportunity.  In a rural area embedded within a country that generally can offer very little, inconsistent opportunity for economic mobility and access to basic infrastructural needs, then, the US appears positively.   

Reciprocality in Research

Today was one of the most beautiful days in Durban since I have been here.  Fall has really arrived, which means mild days that reach up to 80 degrees Fahrenheit but mostly stay breezy and in the 70s.  The nights cool down so I no longer need to run the air conditioner in the evening at all.  It felt great to be outside so instead of taking the Mynah bus between a few of my errand stops, I ended up walking quite a bit today.  I spent most of my day completing tasks I would consider part of the relationships I have established with my research subjects (many of them who have become my friends).  These small acts of reciprocality are an important aspect of these relationships - throughout the trip many of the participants, M, Mrs. Gambushe, and I engaged in little ways to express appreciation and affinity with one another.  These could take the shape of helping or completing a task for someone who is feeling tired or overwhelmed, getting someone tea or a snack, and even sharing my cache of chocolate.  There were several things, however, I wanted to do when I returned from the trip to show my appreciation as well.

After organizing my digital photos at home, I created several photo CDs so that Create Africa South and M can have photo records of the two workshops we completed.  By the time I leave I will also give them data DVDs that contain footage of CAS activities during the ceremonies and workshops.  I went down to Davenport Centre to a photo store and printed out about 80 photos.  The first 5 were for Maureen, a woman I interviewed and became friends with at the first PMP/CAS workshop in Hazyview.  We spoke several times before I asked if I could record an interview with her and during one of our conversations she asked if we could exchange addresses.  I agreed and offered to send her some photos I had taken of her and of us during the week.  I also mailed her a copy of the newspaper article about the event and a copy of a speech given during the closing ceremony (she had requested it from the councillor, but he had already given it to me, so I offered to copy it and mail it to her).  I hope to keep in touch with her - in part to do follow-up next year to understand if or how the workshop affected her life in any way, but also to ask after her and her family that she told me about.  The rest of the photos were for two photo albums I created for M and Mrs. G:  the albums humorously document the ups and downs of our trip together.  After reading for a while outside, I spent the late afternoon assembling them so that I can present them either when I go into the office tomorrow (at least to give M hers) or when we are all together in Umlazi working on our sewing project again next week.

Thinking About Bilocation

As you may have been able to tell from my uncharacteristically laconic posts, I spent most of the weekend happily away from my laptop and research.  At one point on Saturday M, her sister, their friend, and I flagged down a minibus taxi on West Street near Aliwal and piled in the back as it boomed with Tupac Shakur's "It Ain't Easy."  I couldn't help but smile - it's a song whose pleasing melody and tone challenges its lyrics that speak of difficulty - in that moment the melody of my day was also pleasing, despite my own challenging thoughts about my research and my scramble to reach conclusion here before I depart at the end of the month.  I have noticed those pleasing moments more and more in this past week since M, Mrs. Gambushe, and I returned from the Mpumalanga province; although Durban remains an often unknown city to me, I finally feel as though I've mastered the smaller things (like taking a minibus taxi - which has a language of communication completely unto itself) that make me feel settled here. 

I know that over the next couple of weeks, however, my feeling of bilocation (that experience of being in two different places at once) will swell as I make more plans for what I need to do "once I'm back."  I've never been entirely comfortable with the feeling - I know before I left Urbana in January it was nearly overwhelming, in part I suspect because one of the two places I felt as though I was occupying was entirely unknown to me except through writing and photographs.  I have been thinking about this idea of bilocation in relation to my own experience, but also for a composition course I will be teaching in the fall (besides the Writing With Video course I have written about previously).  For the first time I will be teaching Rhetoric 243, an intermediate expository writing course, and I have chosen the topic of "Travel Writing and the Construction of Difference" for its topic.  The class will focus less on general interest travel writing that may classify itself more as "informative" (such as those found in Lonely Planet guides or magazines such as Budget Traveler), although it will certainly consider the function of and desire for those genres of travel writing within US culture.  Instead I hope we will critically examine a selected history of travel writing (including maps and travel-photography) and criticism that identifies its functions to construct differences, to psychologize the self, and its complicity with or challenge to imperialist projects.   I certainly welcome any recommendations for readings for the class.

In my recent reading, I purchased a collection of writings about the "new South Africa" entitled At Risk: Writing On and Over the Edge of South Africa.  Unfortunately, it is not easily available to US readers, although it contains several outstanding essays from writers who are, as editors McGregor and Nutall argue, writing after the traumatic histories that emerged in the wake of 1994 and are now writing in a wave that draws "into the open the idea that freedom is not what they thought it would be; that it has brought unanticipated challenges" (10).  One essay in particular, "Why Am I Here?", written by Achille Mbembe and translated by Maureen Anderson, stands out.  Finding himself an outsider in South Africa, but identifying himself as an African (Cameroonian to be specific) who too had to watch the disappointing post-colonial transition of his country into independence, Mbembe's description of South Africa speaks of the implications of the past in our present that extends into our futures.  In a section of his essay, he writes,

“Here, in effect, is what distinguishes South Africa from other African nations – the fact that from an empirical point of view, this nation is, strictly speaking, a diasporic nation, a meeting of nations, accidental and brutal to be sure, but a meeting nevertheless.  The country’s successive regimes long tried to efface that Africanness.  At times they dreamed of making South Africa an English county and, at other times, the Holy Land for a particular ethnic group foolish enough to believe in its election by God and, in so doing, willing to wear the mask of death and to set in motion an incalculable violence – a force for harm, carelessness and neglect.  Indeed, the concept of racial supremacy, long dominant in South African life, was not just the very antithesis of liberty.  It was the manifestation of a malady of the mind – racism.  As was to be expected, this denial of liberty and rights for the majority, all in the name of the survival of a single race, fed its social struggles.  These social struggles were modern from start to finish because their central stake was freedom” (167-8).

In his description of SA as a "diasporic nation," I start to see connections between the individual phenomena of bilocation and how it could figure as a national phenomena, at least during English colonialist period and apartheid when some officials in SA would try to view it as existing at once in Africa and in Europe. 

Material Differences

Now that it has been a week from the two workshops I completed, I have enough distance from them to start analyzing and thinking about them again.  Fieldwork, and all that entails, was more than I expected - particularly this kind of research, where I couldn't leave for the day or even have much time alone at all, as M and I shared a room at both locations (though I have already started missing laughing right before falling asleep). 

I mean "more" as in the demands it asked of me and how each moment seemed like an event I had to experience and record for future consideration.  At one point during the second workshop our host D said to me, "Martha, you're always writing," making me aware that my constant note-taking was quite conspicuous.  A month before the trip I was reading through some articles on fieldwork practice to remind myself of good practices to take with me.  I was shocked when I came across a reference to Bronislaw Malinowski's fieldnotes where he wrote angrily about his research subjects.  A few days into our first workshop, however, I began to understand how frustration can arise in a research situation.  The particular situation I placed myself in - two workshops that threw a new group of participants, organizers, facilitators in two different locations with access to two dramatically different levels of material resources for a five day period in which "something" had to be made - was really frustrating at points.  I confess to having a sentence or two in my notebook complaining about the conditions of "x" or how "y" spoke to me in a certain way that I did not appreciate. 

In terms of the material differences between the workshops - these two pictures stand in for the larger sense of material inequality that existed.  I took the first picture of the table setup for the final tea and closing ceremony for the Parliament/Create Africa South workshop, paid for by the Parliamentary Millennium Programme.  I took the second picture after M, a group of participants, and I arranged the chairs in the creche (preschool/daycare facility) for our closing ceremony.  In both instances, the rooms had been used for the workshop activity and then transformed physically for the concluding remarks.  The differences stand out enough for me not to have to say much about them - I can add that the location for our second workshop didn't have any electricity and that our access to bathroom facilities consisted of a drop toilet (outhouse) in the front of the creche - a much different arrangement than the well-lit and air-conditioned workspace with easy access to a multi-user plumbing bathroom during the first week.  That the same "product" - a woman's story and her cloth interpretation of that story - can come out of these two different spaces and material arrangements continues to amaze me.  However these material differences certainly affect the meaning the participants and local community attach to the activities that occur during and after the workshop.

Talking About Race

I've been absent for a few days for several reasons - a few "load shedding" evenings that cut into my preferred writing time and several long days outside filled with sunshine where I've been too busy living here for my last week so I haven't had as much interest in posting.  But there is also another reason - I knew that I wanted to write a post about race, how I've encountered attitudes towards it and how its conception or enactment has manifested in my experiences here, but it's not really something that is easy to write about because it should be attended with care and it is something that is very important to write about.  In individual emails and chats, I've told some of my friends and colleagues the encounters I have witnessed or been (often unwillingly) implicated in, but I have been reticent to write about it more broadly because I can admit - I'm not qualified to say what race relations are like in all of South Africa.  I can only speak to instances I have noticed, that have led me to make incomplete deductions and assumptions about how some people talk about race here and how race is enacted as part of the everyday here.

Another reason I was reticent to write about it is that the difference between where I have situated myself isn't simply that I went from the United States to South Africa.  It is more particular than that - I moved from a Midwestern, academic environment where I primarily lived near and associated with people connected to a large, tertiary institution to the largest urban environment in the KwaZulu-Natal province where I associated with a wider range of people (including those connected to NGOs, the local university, people living in townships, people living in affluent suburbs, and so on).  This distinction is important because what I want to say is - I have encountered and been asked to listen to more overt and linguistically explicit racism - but this is not merely because I am in South Africa.  It is also because I'm outside of a university environment where, at least outwardly - respect of race, culture, and gender - has become a norm or expectation, at least in public discourse. 

Situating my statements in that way, I can say that I have been asked to listen to racist speech here that has absolutely shocked me and is unlike anything I have encountered living in the United States (whether it was in a lower-middle class neighborhood in Hampton, VA, in Los Angeles, or in a smaller Midwest university town).  Perhaps what has been most shocking is the way those who expressed their racist beliefs did not let my presence, often with knowing me for only a few moments, mitigate or impede their expressions of hatred in any way.  I was offended in those moments because it made me wonder if the person actually suspected I would be the type of person to identify with or even want to listen to the sentiments they expressed. 

I don't want to relate each moment in explicit detail, but there is one that is representative of how a white, paternalistic, colonialist attitude still exists in some South Africans (this particular person is an older woman in her 80s who has lived in Durban all her life).   In my first encounter with her when I told her what I had been researching in terms of NGOs that organize craft production with "marginalized" groups her response was simply, "Oh, they're good with their hands, aren't they?"  I sputtered through a response about how wide varieties of people enjoy craft production, both as an activity or as a potential means for economic advancement, but I really held back what I wanted to say about her problematic comment.

During my next encounter with her, however, I couldn't ignore the explicit hatred she expressed.  When the subject of crime arose, she described the indigenous Africans in South Africa as "savages" who had "ruined the country."  I was genuinely surprised that a word that figured so much in 18th and 19th century British colonialist texts actually remained in circulation.  I tried to remain calm and suggest that she consider where the construction of an idea of "savage" came from and reminded her about what kind of country, in terms of universal human rights, she was positing as ideal or "unruined."  Finally I excused myself and told her I did not want to listen to her hate.

As much as I have encountered far more explicit racist and stereotypical generalizations about groups of people in Durban and South Africa (these large groups being referred to as "the Blacks", "the Coloureds," "the Whites," "the Nigerians," "the Indians," and so on), I can say that overall, I have encountered more discussion about race and its relationship to the nation.  As much as this discussion has sounded problematic to me - in terms of my issues with its typification, racist assumptions, and so on - at the same time I have to say:  people are talking about race.  People talk here about what it means and what race relations are like here.  They express anxieties about the predominance of the African National Congress while applauding its past efforts towards universal rights, including suffrage.  They worry about the transition of power from Mbeki to Zuma.  In nearly every conversation and encounter I have had, however problematically a person has expressed it, people nearly always reference and talk about what is going on, what has changed, what remains a problem, and what the future looks like.  It's even in the South African "soapies" that play each day, where issues about crime, HIV/AIDS, poverty, housing, and so on, become active parts of these dramas (in contrast to the, in my opinion, vacuous, self-obsessed, whitewashed American soap operas they play in syndication here that largely deal with personal problems over broad social issues).

So to try to sum up what I have been trying to say - I have been shocked to hear that explicit racist and colonialist beliefs are alive and well, but I have also been so impressed that an active concern with the country (its development, its relations between people, and its role both regionally and globally) is so widely shared and discussed.