Friday beatings

Cape Town's Bo-Kaap neighborhood, a mostly Muslim ('Cape Malay') neighborhood with distintive architecture.

A former prisoner at Robben Island talks about his years there.

Max McBride, former youth activist with the ANC during the bad old days.

CAPE TOWN, South Africa – Not that I asked, but a disgruntled Cape Towner, who went by the name Little Brother, explained South Africa’s main problem: “We South Africans love violence. We love killing, we love rrrape and we love rrrobery,” he said with that peculiarly South African way of rolling rs for an absurdly long time to punctuate speech.

Little brother was getting drunk while awaiting the start of a comedy show, but he wasn’t kidding. All of the comics at the show that night interspersed stories of crime into their acts.

One comic, whose father is a witch doctor, said he always leaves his dad’s calling card on his seat. “Once, someone smashed my window before seeing the card. When I came back, I found a note on my seat with 500 rand: ‘Please, sir, accept my deepest apologies for breaking your window and please accept this money for repairs.’”

The country’s cities are littered with billboards advertising anti-theft alarms, tracking devices to find your car after the alarms fail, and armed security to kill people trying to steal your car.

Driving into Johannesburg always feels slightly apocalyptic – a sinister haze hangs over the shabby skyline and numerous warnings rattle around in my head: “Don’t take the minibuses,” “Don’t go out at night,” “Don’t carry a camera,” or, simply, “Don’t go.”

And seventeen years after Apartheid there’s still an ugly strain of racism, especially among South Africans of a certain generation, and the unreformed use crime as proof of some Mengela-like racial logic.

“You can take the black out of the bush, but you can’t take the bush out of the black,” a middle-aged Afrikaner, traveling with a black woman, said quite audibly on a bus full of mostly black passengers.

Most Africans I talked to in other countries point to South Africa as the continent’s heart of darkness. Mentioning that I was traveling there elicited looks of terror and concern.

The headlines and statistics bear this out and I don’t know a South African who hasn’t been robbed, in many cases at gunpoint. It’s a country of fortress cities, with streets dominated by high walls, barbed wire, and fear.

“I don’t know if I could live here,” Connie said. “Too many bars on the windows.” For once, I had no retort.

There’s a lot to dislike about South Africa and really, there’s no sugar-coating the ugly crime in the big cities. And yet, there’s a vibrancy, a history unfolding, a culture that draws me back again and again. Sure, half my family lives there, but I’d visit if I knew no one.

Despite the ultra-violence, many South Africans live and thrive in and love their country. They possess the wicked gallows humor required in such a place.

“It’s our National Anthem,” my cousin Julian muses every time we hear police sirens (and that’s often).

And yet, he doesn’t want to live anywhere else.

There's also a living history. You don't have to talk to the elderly or even the middle-aged to hear first-hand accounts of life under apartheid.

"I was beaten every Friday," said Max McBride, a black South African with the white undershirt, flat-brimmed cap, and gold chain of an early '90s gangsta rapper and the quiet, elegant articulation of a philosopher. "The ANC would put the young people up front with the thinking that they (the apartheid government police) wouldn't open fire on the young people."

Max is 32 years old. He witnessed a suspected informer get "necklaced"* when he was just 13, was a veteran activist by 15, and had fled to Namibia with his family by age 16. Now, he says he's had it with politics.

He visits South Africa often and considers it home, but the country's crime makes him hesitant to move his family back and the bad memories are still fresh.

"When you hear the tires screaming, you run (from the cops)," he said. "In Apartheid South Africa we were not afraid of the white cops. We were afraid of the black cops because they knew where we lived."

Amid the bigotry, the violence, and the poverty, there’s a frank discussion about race that’s still years away in the states. The young comedians at the Cape Town bar, black, white, and colored (the South African term for mixed-race people) discussed race easily and naturally and the equally mixed crowd ate it up without so much as a gasp. The District 9 generation makes me hopeful.

The incredible thing about South Africa (other than the pristine landscapes and accessible, scary wildlife that is not to be missed) is that all but the youngest people you talk to have straddled the divide of one of the most dramatic political events in recent history. Even those in their late 20s can remember a school curriculum full of racist ideology or no curriculum at all in the black and coloured ghettos called townships (they still exist and they’re still grim – and you can even tour them, if you’re into that kind of thing – one of the many promises not kept by the majority government).

The country’s history is still being written, in many cases by people who once fought each other, and if you stop five people in the street you’ll probably get five different takes on post-apartheid South Africa.

South Africans are welcoming, honest, and proud of their country, though not afraid to criticize it. And amid all of the politics, violence, and tension, South Africans know when to drop it all in favor of soccer, rugby, grilled meat, and, most especially, beer (go for the Castle Milk Stout). I can get on board with that.

*Necklacing is an execution style whereby a suspected informer - usually a black man suspected of dealing with the apartheid government - has a gasoline-soaked tire put around his neck and is lit on fire. It's well-chronicled in photos and words in the book The Bang Bang Club, if you have the stomach.