Monday part B

Moyo was a fun place to eat.

Everyone there was happy - the servers, the cooks, the singers who came to the table (although they waited awkwardly until Kevin jumped in to tip them) and the face painter. Actors.

South Africa, based on less than 24 experiential hours, is complicated. The drive to Moyo took about a half hour. On the way we saw city from a distance, native plants and natural architecture predominately the ever present Table Mountain. The highway passes through some of the townships that resulted from the forced moves, the years when the government forcibly moved all non-white residents from nieghborhoods that had spanned generations. People were "encouraged" and later forced to relocated to race-based townships. Houses in these townships are obviously cramped inside and out. They are too close together and would benefit from a general face lift but they look like communities. Imagining that these people lived in city neighborhoods that teemed with life and excitement, culture as well as the basics of employment and plumbing only a generation ago reminds me that "community" used to describe the township today is not what these residents and their parents and grandparents enjoyed prior to their relocation. Slightly complicated, right? I was on my way to a tourist dinner and these people, en mass, have been grossly mistreated by their government.

It's more complicated. Poverty now spawns informal settlements. Endless sheets of corrugated tin stacked, propped, leaned to make houses. Houses that can be partially covered, four feet high, rusty, and literally more likely to collapse than the standard house of cards. Apparently on some tragic nights, that is exactly how whole communities catch fire - like a house of cards. The occasional telephone poles look more like circus tents. Every pole without exception is strewn with wires draped down to the homes below. I thought the highway was cutting through the middle of the informal settlement, but it wasn't. The highway, following design of the government's townships, separates the poorest black people from the poorest colored people. The only way to cross is to dash between the rushing traffic of the highway. You'd have to be pretty desperate to do that, thus it happens with dangerous and sometimes tragic regularity.