First Impressions of South Africa

Written by Peter Chapman on Sun 30th Nov 2003

The post-apartheid South African flag

Late last year I returned from my first visit to South Africa so please do not imagine that I regard myself as an expert on conditions in that country. However you need be no expert to see for yourself that South Africa is the richest country in Africa - it's obvious from the first class roads and motorways, the powerful luxury cars you see on those roads, the tourist facilities in the national parks, the supermarkets stocked with every kind of produce, and the sophisticated restaurants not only in the cities but in the smaller towns, too, with excellent food and wine and impeccable service.

It's equally obvious that there is massive poverty, too. Ten minutes out of Cape Town's gleaming modern international airport and you are driving on the motorway past a shanty town of wooden shacks with corrugated iron and string and plastic sheeting for their roofs and no electricity or sanitation.

A decade has passed since apartheid was dismantled and much has changed of course. However many things have only changed a little. The wealthy suburbs are still populated overwhelmingly by whites and blacks still live in small houses on the edge of town or out of town altogether. You cannot but feel for the black workers trudging along the road to the town or the white suburbs where they have their jobs. Yet the ones who have jobs are the fortunate ones and in my experience were unfailingly cheerful and courteous. There seems to be no such thing as a self-service petrol station in South Africa. As soon as you stop, smiling attendants not only fill the tank but wash the windows and offer to check the oil, etc. That was a good experience.

What made me feel uncomfortable was looking around in a restaurant and realizing that there was no black face to be seen except when you glimpsed the people working in the kitchen. However that would not be true of a major city such as Cape Town where a prosperous middle-class is clearly forming which can afford to participate in leisure activities such as restaurants, sightseeing and cultural events previously reserved for whites.

We hear that there is a crime wave in South Africa and given the disparity in wealth between the richest and the poorest it would be surprising if there weren't. Yet in the small towns and villages I was told that there was little crime, despite limited employment opportunities. One young man, the fifth generation of his family to run a wine estate, explained that they employed 100 workers, although they could easily mechanize most of the tasks and run the estate with only 10. However if 90 workers lost their jobs, they would not find any alternative employment and those 90 workers along with 300 or 400 dependents would be destitute. This estate owner regarded it as his social responsibility to keep all those workers employed, apart from his own self-interest in not wanting to see petty crime and pilfering soar in his locality.

It is in the big towns where some blacks do have good jobs but others live in primitive and precarious conditions that crime thrives. While I was there a British tourist was abducted and raped and it was headline news for days, including reporting the media reaction in Britain. I never felt anxious or threatened and saw few signs of crime. In the wealthy suburbs around Cape Town you notice that most houses have all the fences and electronically operated gates which are creeping into Britain's suburbs, too. However when you get 50 kilometres out the opposite is the case and most do not. To gain access to a bank you may need to pass through the same sort of double-door security system which is now almost universal at banks in Italy and southern France.

Theft of cash and credit cards from unsuspecting victims while they are using an automatic cash dispenser is as common in South Africa as it is in Europe and the larger banks employ security staff to watch the comings and goings while customers withdraw cash.

From my limited observation of the scene, I think the most likely mishap to befall a tourist in South Africa is not crime but a road traffic accident. There is relatively little traffic on the roads but speed limits are widely ignored and drivers seem oblivious to the dangers of overtaking and following another vehicle too closely. Then there is the number of people walking along the edge of the road, and even running across motorways, day and night, and the obvious overloading of minibuses and pickup trucks with an unsafe number of passengers. However in over 4000kms on South African roads I only saw one incident in which a motorcyclist appeared to have lost control of his bike.

It's fascinating to watch a young country or a liberated country develop. That is as true of South Africa as it is of East Germany, now also more than a decade after the Berlin Wall came down. Change and improvement seems to come infuriatingly slowly for those who are willing it to happen. We need to look back into our own history to realize just how far these countries have come in a mere decade.