The Flag Representing the “Rainbow Nation”

While South Africa put its best foot forward to embody the “Rainbow Nation”  mantra that Nelson Mandela was heavily responsible for brilliantly engineering while it hosted the World Cup in 2010, it is virtually impossible to touch down in this country for the first time and not think about the fact that apartheid, and all its injustices and horrors, was right here less than 20 years ago.  The “coloured” (mixed race) gate agent greeting you off the jet bridge lived through it.  The white immigration officer who stamped your passport lived through it.  The black taxi driver who whisks you off to your hotel lived through it.  And not as a distant childhood memory, either.  These men and women who you are interacting with ever so casually today actually lived a high percentage of their adult lives under apartheid. 

As excited as I was to be landing in South Africa for the first time and as anxious as I was to lay eyes on Cape Town, I had a really difficult time wrapping my head around this.  I wanted with every fiber of my being to ask the mixed woman what she felt of her ethnicity today, and if she still had any bitterness to either the blacks or whites, neither of which would have accepted her 20 years ago.  I wanted to ask the white man if he himself was racist before, or merely a pawn in a political game he had no clout in.  Or, for that matter, if he held any strong prejudices against blacks even today.  I wanted to ask the black man his take on the current “equality”, and whether it was truly possible for anyone not named Mandela to endure racial oppression for so long and be willing to wipe the slate against your oppressors clean.

Such a gruesome and fascinating, albeit sensitive, topic, I will use this space in the future to dig into these questions.

A Tribute to Equality on Robben Island

If some of the Netherlands’ more conservative civic leaders had their say, marijuana would no longer be available to visitors in this country. Tired of Amsterdam’s longstanding brand association with marijuana since it was decriminalized in the 1970s, last year, the government introduced a mandatory membership card which would be required to purchase the drug—a card that would only be available to Dutch citizens.

Fortunately for those of you saddened by this news, cooler heads have prevailed, as the law was repealed just before its scheduled introduction on January 1^st. Instead, each city in the Netherlands will be able to regulate marijuana as they choose.

Credit people like Amsterdam mayor Eberhard van der Laan for letting common sense and foresight trump conservative politics:

“It’s not like tourists are going to say ‘OK, there’s no cannabis here anymore,” and accept it, van der Laan said. “Instead, they’re just goingt o try to find it on the streets, leading to a larger black market, more disputes with dealers, no control over its quality and all of the other problems we used to have.”

Of course there is an economic play as well. According to Amsterdam’s Bureau for Tourism, about 25 percent of the city’s 6 million annual foreign visitors visit one of the country’s 750 coffeeshops (220 in Amsterdam alone) to experiment. They estimated that the law would have deterred about 1 million of these from even including Amsterdam in their travel plans.

Whatever the ultimate motivation behind the repeal—be it common sense or euro stacks—it is great to see Amsterdam’s cannabis tradition remain alive and well.

Being from a developed Western country, HIV and AIDS has generated enough buzz over the past two decades—for me, since Magic Johnson revealed his infection—to become a reality we are well aware of.  Still, it is understandably an extremely uncomfortable topic for most of us, and fortunately because of the education and preventive measures widely available, it has never exploded to the point where every one of us is close with someone who is infected.

Maybe that’s why I was shocked to learn that more than 10 percent of the South African population is HIV positive.

I had heard before about the problems that many African nations have had with AIDS.  But my clouded vision imagined an epidemic that was only running through uneducated, disconnected rural tribes, lacking modern means of communication and modern societal infrastructures.  But when you land in Johannesburg, it feels no different from landing in any populated and expansive city in America—with modern glass buildings, bustling expressways and neat housing sub-divisions all around.  I guess it is this contrast from what I expected that really made me take notice.

Ten percent.  Imagine that proportion in your workplace, or on your athletic teams.  Imagine it in your apartment complex, or in your own extended family.  And South Africa is a modern, middle-income, industrial society, with parts that don’t feel any different from Kansas or California.  With the mere mention of HIV or AIDS being such a jaw-dropping conversation-stopper in America, it really makes you think.  How does that impact a typical night of alcohol-enhanced fun for an immature university student?  Or even the trust level of committed couples?

I was even more shocked to learn that as recently as 2008, the country had a Minister of Health that that endorsed lemon, garlic and beetroot as the cure for AIDS, and even attempted to stop the distribution of antiretroviral medicines in the country.  As recently as two-thousand-and-eight!  Fortunately, South Africa’s leadership has finally recognized the reality of AIDS prevention and offered some genuine leadership in providing education to contain the epidemic, but the whole situation in general is something that really makes you think, especially if you’ve been to South Africa and experienced the present-day culture.

A night out in Cape Town