Coming home to a rather normal country

I arrived in Cape Town last Friday after spending 14 years abroad. Setting aside larger socio-economic matters (without minimising any of them) I have been pleasantly surprised over the past few days by some of the minor infrastructural changes and improvements in this majestic city. I have been especially impressed by the efficacy of banking, communications and transportation systems. These observations are of course not representative or even definitive. It is, to be sure, almost impossible to reach definitive conclusions about a city within a few days, however much it is has been part of what has been my “home” intermittently over decades.

Nonetheless, based on social media feeds the impression I developed from abroad over the past several years is of a city — and country for that matter — that was creeping towards the edge of utter chaos and physical breakdown. Some of the memes about South Africa were rather foreboding as I made my decision to return to the country.

One former political correspondent who once worked on a large daily newspaper insisted recently that South Africa was a fascist country. He provided no actual evidence of this. The term fascism tends to be thrown about too easily — invariably to describe or vilify a political opponent — which makes it difficult to take the charge seriously without any firm evidence. There are, of course, several specific processes and states of affairs that may appropriately be described as fascistic. In this respect, other than a mild influence by private corporations in matters of state decisions — levels which are considered permissible by European (by which I mean Europe and its offshoots in North America and Oceania) standards — South Africa has a liberal constitution, and a quite vibrant media — two of the scourges of fascism.

Another journalist’s social media stream was a litany of little horrors, each one resembling a flea-bite on the body of South African society that would — at least according to him — inevitably, lead to the country succumbing to large scale collapse. This person was dissatisfied with everything in post-apartheid South Africa; from hemorrhoidal treatment to finance policy. Yet in the first week have been here I found buses that ran (albeit like buses in almost every city in the world, they were erratic), phones that worked, roads that were being repaired, paved footpaths where once there were grassy trails, a proliferation of locally owned and operated small businesses (at least one with a uniquely Cape Town name — Kwaai Lappies), and a minibus system that seems to have matured quite significantly over the past two decades. Indeed, anyone who drove or walked along Klipfontein Road in Athlone in the 1980s and 1990s may remember the virtual insanity of the minibuses. Along with many of the main tributaries of the road system on the Cape Flats, Klipfontein Road itself has been refurbished. Rows of trees run along the centre and on both sides of the road.

The minibus taxis themselves appear to have been brought into a type of formal system. They appear to be clearly marked with designated routes and seem to obey the rules of the road more than they used to. Of course there may well be a driver that is running a red light somewhere hurling abuse at someone as I write but that’s typical of most taxi drivers in any major city of the world. Taxis almost universally tend to operate in a world of their own — worlds that rarely match or even satisfy some of the sensibilities of passengers and pedestrians.

But perhaps the most impressed I have been over the past week was with the efficacy of the banking system. My old bank account had been dormant for more than 10 years. A re-activation, new debit card and a cash transaction were all completed within 15 minutes of setting foot into the Adderley Street branch. The bank tellers and information-desk staff were courteous, knowledgeable and expeditious.

The high-levels of security — steel bars and padlocks — were marginally more ubiquitous than they were 15 years ago, when I owned a flat in Johannesburg. I shan’t complain about that. While crime is a serious problem the security measures tend to be more of an annoyance than anything else. Besides, when I visited friends in Brooklyn, New York last May I had to pass through two steel doors before I could enter their block of flats. A couple of hundred of metres from their flat stood an imposing police tower with facial recognition technology.

It is too soon to make a definitive statement (as Mao said about the French Revolution), but as far as I can tell, there is no post-apocalyptic fascist order in South Africa. Perhaps pride, or confirmation biases may prevent some people from accepting that South Africa has actually become a very normal society, one that has all the pathologies of most countries in the late capitalist period. In this sense, the anger that characterises the social media streams, updates and statuses about South Africa appears to be a case of what my mother used to refer to as skaam-kwaad.