Life in Mthatha
Posted: 2/20/2005 11:30 PM (Permalink)
From the 16th through the 19th of January, we spent our time in Mthatha. I’m going to cram a bunch of stuff relating to our week there into one long post.
General Impressions
Brian & Lynell live in a fairly quiet neighborhood about a five minutes drive to the central business district. One thing that stood out to me, not just in Mthatha but pretty much everywhere we went in South Africa is that all the houses are barricaded behind large fences. Iron gates and gratings on the windows, barbed/razor wire are standard. An ever-present reminder of the high crime rate.
When I lived on the southwest side of Chicago, we had our share of crime and we had the barred windows and such, but I still felt ok walking outside at night. The guidebooks and the locals advised us that it would not be wise to do so in South Africa. That could have just been over-cautiousness, but I was not there long enough to know.
The weather while we were there was quite hot with occasional thunderstorms in the evening and at night. It was very similar to Kansas summers. We don’t get thunder and lighting in Seattle (just rain) so it was nice to experience that again. The frequency of lightning brings with it the threat of power outages and we experienced that. It is quite common for the electricity to go out, sometimes for days at a time. While we were there, the power went out one night for about 12 hours. The traffic lights are often down for long periods of time.
Tech
Cell phones are ubiquitous. The land lines are unreliable so everyone uses mobile phones instead. You can get good reception just about anywhere. Like most places outside North America, people communicate via SMS extensively (flat rate pricing). Internet access is primarily dial-up. Brian and Lynell had and ISDN setup (there’s a blast from the past!) and I got the impression that not many people have that. I saw one Internet cafe in Mthatha, but I didn't venture in to see what type of setup it had. I didn’t have my laptop along, but I got the impression that there wasn’t much wifi access to be found. Mthatha wasn’t the kind of place where laptop computers are common.
Mandela Museum
The main tourist attraction in Mthatha is the Mandela museum. The museum in Mthatha is actually one of three Mandela related sites. The other two are Mandela’s birthplace in Mvezo and his boyhood home in Qunu. They were very strict about photography so no pictures.
The museum is housed in the old parliament building (Mthatha was the capital of the Apartheid era Transkei homeland). It houses a multi-media presentation of Mandela’s autobiography “ A Long Walk to Freedom.” . The release of Mandela from prison in 1990 is one of those Great Moments in History that happened during my life, so it was nice to be reminded of it.
The remainder of the museum is dedicated to housing and displaying some of the stuff that Mandela has received from all over the world over the years since his release and after he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993. Again, it was all very inspiring. It was well worth the visit.
Tipini
On the 17th, Lynell took us to the shanty town on the edge of Mthatha. These are a common sight around the larger towns.
In this case, the town is literally built on top of the city dump, presumably because it is the best place to get materials to build these houses. In the midst of the town is a school which is maintained by I believe the Catholic church. It was called Tipini. In addition to school facilities, there are some rooms dedicated to housing those who are dying of AIDS. A place for them to spend their last few weeks or months of life.
I haven’t really talked about HIV/AIDS in South Africa yet, but it certainly deserves some mention. The rates of HIV infection are still quite high though they are down from the 20% I was hearing about a few years ago. I talked with someone at Brian’s office. She lives with a minister who goes to funerals almost every day. An entire generation is being wiped out by the disease. The problem is made worse by the intense poverty. Few people, of course can afford the expensive treatment regimen, but even with all the public education measures, many young people live their lives without hope of ever making it out of poverty so there is little incentive for them to take appropriate precautions.
Another related issue is the orphans problem. Since so many of the people dying are in their child-rearing years, they are leaving behind large numbers of children. There are something like a million orphans in a country of about 40 million. Think about that for a second... 1 in 40! The lucky ones are raised by extended family or get put into orphanages. We visited one orphanage in Mthatha that, on the day we were there, had 16 babies, including one barely a week old. That doesn’t include the toddlers and the older children that were there either. It’s a gigantic and long term problem.
Home Life
Outside of the crime, the poverty and HIV, life is remarkably like it is here in the US, and I’m not trying to be funny by saying that. You adjust to the negative realities and everything else; the grocery stores, traffic, restaurants, the stuff on tv is mostly like home. I spent a lot of time playing Legos with my younger nephew. We both share the gene that makes you want to acquire electronics stuff so there was much to discuss such as the relative merits of Windows CE versus PalmOS. Here’s his take on the issue.
The older nephew is very interested in politics; South African, African, North American, it doesn’t matter. He reads the Amnesty International Annual Report every year (we’re talking an 11 year old here) so of course he had much to discuss with Laura.
While in Mthatha, I was also passed the South African rite of manhood. I’m speaking, of course, of the braai. I managed to cook up some hamburgers and some sausage without incident.
All in all, we had a wonderful week in Mthatha. Thanks again to Brian, Lynell and the boys for hosting us. Since we left, they moved into different house further away from the center of town. We got to see it when they were looking at it for the first time. It was really nice.