Sunday, July 3

As far as I can tell there are NO Starbucks in the Joburg metro area.

I got to go on a shopping trip with the white half of the ownership of this hostel. He has a black partner, Anthony, who I met first but the white guy seems to be the lead man probably because he supplied the capital. My guess is that Anthony had the experience and, more importantly, the connections to drivers and vendors.

We drove through the white suburbs. Every home (including this hostel) has a fence topped by barbed wire, razor wire or something equivalent. No doubt the owners fear crime but the effect is to give the finger to black empowerment.

We first went to a home improvement place comparable to Lowe's. Virtually every customer was white and every employee black. I assume that is because home ownership hereabouts is almost exclusively a white privelege. {I asked the hostel owners if they'd had any flack from the surrounding white home owners and they said only one caused problems: 'He just don't like anybody making money,' the white guy told me.}

The woman who supervised the cash registers was young and black with that look of severe efficiency you see in such people everywhere. I wondered if she had an opportunity to move up in the business or were all the top management positions reserved for whites. I should have asked her.

We then went to a vast mall that any American suburbanite would recognize. Here the crowd was a cross section of South African society with whites speaking Afrikaans, Asian immigrant families, blacks speaking african languages. Everyone was neatly attired. I saw no unsupervised teens dressed like ruffians as you would in most American malls. There is the suggestion that blacks are still proving themselves and wouldn't dare offend white sensibilities.

The tension between whites and blacks is palpable. I got to speak to many of the black employees of the hostel and was impressed with their balanced take on the society. The white guy was still poisoned by the habit of superiority. He couldn't resist occasional swipes. 'Blacks can do anything they like in this country,' he told me with a shrug of disgust. He related a confrontation he'd had with a black man the day before. 'Wait till Mandela dies,' the guy yelled at him, 'the blacks are going to take over.' Only out of respect for the old man had they foreborn to trample the resident whites underfoot.

South Africa seems, to this rampant capitalist, as if it is in a race. Can the black middle class grow fast enough to forestall nationalization or some sort of Venezuelan takeover? Will the white afrikaan speakers fight to preserve the system now in place or will they simply flee to Australia or Botswana or Holland? Will black home ownership grow fast enough to provide a mass of people with a stake in the system? I found it ominous that the government was turning a big chunk of Soweto into public housing instead of encouraging integrated home ownership. But that's my right wing take on things.

I've got to go pack. I hope to be on the train today but I don't have a ticket so maybe Ill end up stranded at the train station. We shall see.