Inequality in the land of plenty

I see her every Saturday or any other day that I visit home in the townships. I know more than just her name as they have been our neighbours for more than 40 years that we have stayed in the townships.

Honey, as she is popular known, has told me countless times that I am not like her and the others who have remained in the townships. Although I like to believe that I have not changed, she likes to remind me that I am different. I know what she means.

She is like many other fast-ageing men and women I grew up with in my community. They are poor, unemployed, troubled and hopeless. Perhaps this is what makes her think that I am different, that draws her to me whenever I park my posh car on our street.

On every occasion, this petite little figure will come out darting towards me, her battered face and disfigured soul beaming with joy at my sight. Her imposing eyes and outstretched hand stretched out like a gun demanding and expecting some money from me to buy something or the other. Since the dawning of democracy in 1994, the townships seem to have groomed men, women and children with an uncanny ability to make perceived outsiders pay some form of tax for being privileged and advantaged. It is called the township e-toll. If it were not for the focus, self-discipline, hard work and, above all, the grace of God, I could easily have turned out to be exactly like Honey in the New South Africa. I can see and recognise the traces of my own growth and development in how she has turned out to be. Perhaps this is what makes me have this intuitive connection with her condition but, in any small way, reach out to embrace her as a fellow human being and equal.

It is always difficult and painful to witness and experience the brutality of economic inequality on men and women who are permanently trapped in the township poverty and unemployment. On every occasion, I try to give not just a R20 note but smiles, hugs and spread love.

On every Saturday or holiday visit I am treated like a mobile ATM. It does not matter whether I am accompanied by strangers, friends or offspring, Honey will track me down to pay my dues to those I have allegedly left behind to be a better person. We will have driven through the township streets to casually observe what easily passes for signs of urban decay: masses of people loitering in the streets, groups hurdled in street corners waiting for nothing, teenage couples holding hands or kissing and those seated on some stoep drinking beer and doing other things.

For most people who grew up in the townships, this abnormality is normal. This legacy of apartheid and the failure of freedom and democracy to transform the lives of the underclass is what happens in life. After all, the houses with broken fences, untended gardens, potholed streets and empty-eyed people over-flowing into the streets is what we grew up with and were conditioned to accept as what it is. In fact, far too many people in the townships neither see nor recognise the devastating impact of economic inequality that shatters millions of lives throughout the country. Instead, they are blinded by love for what they consider symbols of home and community that gives them their identity, history, purpose and meaning in life.

My visits to my home in the township are always deliberate and purposeful, methinks. I come to my parents’ house to capture and inhale the spirit that gave me my resilience that has made me who I am, if anything. But this place has changed for the worst in the 15 years that I have left to relocate to the suburbs. It is not the same place when I walked the streets as a young ambitious student. Perhaps it is in my mind, but poverty, unemployment and crime is strangling my people to death, reducing them to beggars.

The township folk, those who are simple and carefree like Honey, reveal the deep seriousness of the evil of failure to grow the economy or to find ways to redistribute the wealth of this country to benefit the poor and marginalised. The triple problems of economic inequality, poverty and unemployment wreak havoc on millions of lives in the townships and rural areas. Thousands of Honeys — idle, hopeless and self-resigned — have accepted the reality that they are condemned to living death. Here, self-respect and dignity has no place. Begging too often has become a daily occurrence.

I am a product of township life and experience and that alone makes it easy for people like Honey to focus on me to pay what I consider to be reparations. I suspect that the fact that I live in the suburbs with and like white folks is their way of underscoring the irony of being a privileged black. In their eyes, not only do they see me as ngamla — a rich white person — but I have become part of the corporate economic super-structure that continues to exploit and dominate them beyond 18 years of freedom and democracy. There is no doubt that the mortgaged house, the designer clothes on my back, money in the back pocket and, above all, the posh car qualify me to be one of those dismissed as fat-cats and sell-outs who have forgotten where they come from. In the eyes of people like Honey and others who have no voice around this country, I am part of the professional elites who run this country but have dismally failed to transform the economic system in a way that makes direct improvement in the quality of life of the many. Almost like living zombies, Honey and others will always move quickly to approach those who have made it, whatever that means, to collect their little share of the wealth that is in our wallets and purses.

I do not believe you need a third eye on your forehead to see the increasing levels of poverty, unemployment, hopelessness and crime in what Alan Paton called “the beautiful country that no man can enjoy”.

The people that I grew up with in the townships think that I am part of the problem and not the solution. They probably see me — a privileged black — as a buffer zone between economic inequality and black oppression and exploitation. The fact that they see me this way sends shudders down my spine.

Thus every Saturday I am reminded by people like Honey that in the eyes of those I have left behind in the name of self-advancement and black progress, I have become part of the system that we fought against. Only a few blacks in the last 18 years have been able to fight and win against the odds. We live in an economic system that no only promotes greed, selfishness and corruption but will brutally punish those who do not obey its standards of success. Every time I meet with Honey and those like her, I yearn to set the record straight, to let them know that it is not my wish or intention to keep black people permanently oppressed and exploited in the land of their forefathers. But I am one of those privileged few who live relatively well while my contemporaries are forced to beg for a R20 note to buy a bread loaf or bottle of beer.

What is to be done with this economic inequality that is a threat to social cohesion and everything that we have fought for?