Black, White, Green, and Purple.

South Africa is a crash course in racism. Not that everyone here is racist, but it's a place where you're quickly forced to sort out how just you feel about other races, your own in particular.

I cannot explain to you how surreal it is being in such an ethnically diverse country where people are still wrestling so much with the basic issue of skin colour. You fit into 3 people groups here - whites, blacks, and coloureds (mixed race, Indian, Asian, etc.), and areas are actually described as a "coloured area" or "black area", the level of safety being highest in white areas. The apartheid may have ended 20 years ago, but things like park benches with WHITES ONLY written on them have been removed only within the last 10 years, if that tells you anything. I guess the most surprising thing to me is how positively many people really believe the 'white invasion' and consequent apartheid was for South Africa. It's startling to be in a posh, affluent part of the city and realize the street you're walking down is named after a well-known apartheid instigator. Cape Town feels so European in many ways, but in a lot of others it feels like it could be the American South about 10 years before slavery was abolished. There are enormous, sprawling white mansions with black maids working in them who either live in the servant's quarters, or go home to their family in the slums each day. Cape Town has 2 major slums, Khayelitsha and Gugulethu; both next to the main highway (meaning most whites drive by them at least a few times a week). I can only describe them as hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of tiny shacks, as far as you can see, all leaning precariously on each other. Some are on top of each other. Entire families live in one of these shacks.

If you stay in the right parts of town, it's easy to ignore the history of the country. Unfortunately, I'm reading a particularly graphic book (incidentally called "Kaffir Boy", which I just learned is an Arabic slang term for blacks, essentially the equivalent of the N word. I've since quit taking the book out in public to read..) by a native South African who grew up during apartheid. The amount of suffering, oppression, and completely inhumane treatment the blacks suffered at the hands of the whites is absolutely shocking. While things are definitely improving, there's still a long way to go, as Khayelitsha and Gugulethu show.

Ina and I have heard, from various older sources, comments like, "There are SOME nice black people..." and "Isn't South Africa lovely? It's not all backwards like the rest of Africa!"

Seeing the slums the first day here in contrast with the wealthy white neighborhoods really angered me. I wrote a blog basically chewing out all white South Africans for being such selfish, racist power-trippers, and then I realized, who am I to talk? My ancestors did something disturbingly similar to a bunch of unsuspecting and innocent Indians just a few centuries back, and we weren't treating black people much better only 50 years ago. One would hope we'd all learned our lesson by now, but it takes some longer than others.