2nd half of the trip activities + Reconciliation

To start, in the past couple weeks, we have had a couple of trips that have blown my mind. We took a cable car up to the top of table mountain which is like a 5 minute trip but puts you atop the highest mountain in Cape Town. The views are unreal. The landscape is flat everywhere else but the mountains create many different coastal communities and it is impossible to really understand with out being atop Table mountain and being able to look to every side and see ocean and urban development. There is a lot of beautiful vineyard land, strong coastal ports, and a lot of beautiful geographic terrain, but for every developed beautiful community there is a township next door. These areas are the poorest of poor and are not really getting better. The ailments of poverty and the lack of adequate education hamper their development, which makes South Africa the most unequal country in the world. For example we watched a beautiful sunset in Camp’s Bay which was the best I have ever seen. But while John Travolta and other famous celebrities have houses here, there is a township 20 mins away where the children have never even left their communities.

It is very recent since Apartheid, only 17 years. Nelson Mandela led the movement of Reconciliation vs. Reparation. This means that instead of repaying all of the black and coloured people whose lives were destroyed by Apartheid and centuries of oppression, do not get repaid for their losses, but are supposed to reconcile with the white people and attempt to forgive them. In case the doubt is not evident in my writing, I am still yet to really conceptualize this process. There have been efforts that we have learned about such as Black Economic Empowerment and affirmative action, but it seems that reconciliation has not done enough to undo the oppression that plagued this country. Okay enough of the depressing stuff, we also went to Robben Island where Nelson Mandela spent a majority of his imprisoned years. It was interesting that it started out as a leper colony and then strictly housed the most dangerous of criminals at the time (political criminals) and separated people based on race to keep people competitive and deter unity. Our tour was led by a former inmate one of the last people to get released. It still didn’t seem real, it felt more like a museum that a place of atrocity and oppression.

Another activity we did was go to a Rugby game. It was the equivalent of the ALCS or AFC championship game. The two teams were the stormers and the reds. The Stormers were the last South African team. It was tough to watch as the Stormer’s got owned and I couldn’t really understand everything. Also, it is like football with out passing so its just a run and grind offense with not a lot of action. But it was fun to eat biltong and drink a lot of SAB. Plus there some pretty raw hits: some dude got taken out from underneath and it looked like he broke his neck. After that we wen’t home and fell right asleep at 8 pm. It had been a long day.