In South Africa, a violent divide

Grahamstown township is desperately poor, with hundreds of shacks made from sheets of corrugated iron. Residents often don’t have running water or electricity. (Photos by Elizabeth O’Killea Haney)

Elizabeth O’Killea Haney, a Boston College junior, is living in Grahamstown, South Africa, where she is studying history at Rhodes University.

By Elizabeth O’Killea Haney

GRAHAMSTOWN, South Africa -- Since I’m studying abroad here for a semester, South Africans will often ask me what I expected when I got to Africa. Lions? Tribal huts with no electricity? People riding elephants? My reply is generally that no, I knew South Africa was a developed country. After one of these ridiculous questionings, I turned the question upon the South Africans -- what would they expect to see in America? I was shocked that the first exclamation was, “I heard that, in America, people leave their cars and front doors unlocked!”

This sounded ridiculous to South African ears. While my situation is not entirely common in the States, I come from the little town of Westminster, Mass., population 8000, where people can and do leave their doors unlocked. In South Africa, nothing is left unlocked. In fact, everything is locked -- then covered with a few more locks, some barbed wire, possibly an electric fence, and plenty of security signs. Many of the South Africans I’ve met are also burdened by a thorny fear and suspicion about theft, violence, and life in general.

For example, three of my white European friends walked into the Yellow House restaurant here in Grahamstown with two black African friends from the township, expecting to have a nice meal and cocktails. But they were promptly met by the manager, who asked them to leave his establishment. His reason?

“Your friend’s type of people steal from my customers.” Presumably, that “type of people” was black, African, and poor, and it was too much of a risk to even have them sit at a table as paying customers.

Fear manifests itself in every facet of my daily life. We’re advised to not let delivery men into our residence building. Guests to our residences have to be walked to the door or else face being reported to our wardens as “unescorted strangers.” Female students are not to walk alone after dark, even on campus. The one time I did, my friend insisted that I carry her knife and bulk up my 5-foot-3-inch frame in a sweatshirt to look more masculine. In July, during a cafeteria worker strike, the library was put on lockdown and my music class was locked inside our classroom to “ensure our safety.”

On the other side of these outrageous racist-classist suspicions is a reality containing massive amounts of violence and crime. My latest history assignment asks us to answer why South Africa is one of the most violent countries (that is not in a state of war) in the world. It has one of highest murder rates in the world. One out of five women here has been raped and one out of five men has committed rape. You hear and see proof of the violence every day. On vacation in Cape Town, three of my friends were followed by men begging, who then threatened them with a pickax if they did not give them money. On vacation, one of my South African friends luckily slept through a break-in where the glass cutters used on the windows would have been used on her if she had awoken. Other friends’ home in Johannesburg was burglarized so thoroughly that the thieves escaped with literally everything in the house -- cars, clothes, curtains.

With knowledge of all this crime and violence, I find myself returning to the question of why exactly is South Africa one of the most violent countries in the world. In Grahamstown, I’ve seen firsthand how much the wealth of this beautiful country is skewed. The gap between rich and poor is the highest in the world, a gap reinforced by electric fences and thick walls. I have no pretensions that I’m in a position to pass judgment since I live in one of the wealthiest countries in the world, with its own ugly disparities. Nevertheless, while I study at a university named for the diamond magnate Cecil Rhodes, I can’t help but notice that this land of incredible richness, of diamonds and animals and gold, seems to have left no trace of that wealth upon the vast majority of people here.

What I do see is a desperately poor township, with hundreds of shacks made from sheets of corrugated iron, where people have to use rocks to keep their roofs from blowing off and often don’t have running water or electricity. On my side of town I find the comfortable minority. The area where I study, shop, and go out with my friends holds homes that could be like any in suburban America. That’s except for the iron gates and barbed wire fences surrounding the front yard, and the certainty that the front door is indeed locked.

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