One cannot but see life in black and white when stepping in South Africa.
I came in with mixed optimistic expectations, that vapored as I was finding my way out of the airport. Huge roads, big signs, extravagant advertisements, large shops …. and slums on the shoulders of the streets that nothing can hide them.
Maybe coming from a place that lives apartheid as an ordinary act of living, makes my sensations towards similar realities high. But god… what a difference. Here you don’t need to hide apartheid in a wall or lock it behind a checkpoint. You don’t need soldiers to oppress or a system to militarize your very existence.
Something is embedded deep in the roots, genetic must be. After all, how can one rid himself of decades or centuries of slavery? No more resistance… perfect coexistence …. you are either black or white. Yes, you can have a colored president and representatives in a parliament.
You can enjoy the civilizations the westerners have exported to you. But you know where your spot is. What your position is. A black driver, a black Laborer, a black cook, a black maid, a black receptionist, but a white owner.
A land that can be a reflection of heaven, where white is the master and black remains a natural part of serving the luxury of the white.
Slums overwhelmingly ruling over a spacious space of emptiness.
A driver remains with me … to insist on reflecting on what must have been torture over his not yet aging body but exhausted with a lifetime of slavery in an unsuccessful attempt to experiment with freedom … a shaking hand that maybe partly paralyzed, q body that can with difficulty put itself in a sitting position… but yet drives us quietly and obediently through a thousand miles of our luxury.
On another ideal outcome of capitalism and colonialism, a mall must be part of the perfect scene of modern slavery. Brands merging from Burberry to Luis Vuitton were existing severe stores in the Luxurious Victoria Mall. A whole new perspective, where black becomes more of milk mixed chocolate, and white continues to be the natural outcome for what we witness.
Poverty continues to be what overwhelms the eyes… a bad experience with a taxi driver, or getting robbed by some hundred dollars or a mobile remains yet a distracting part where you need to be focused…. this does never mean that it is okay to divide our lives between masters and slaves….
a final idea that keeps taking me to Nietzsche’s view on the genetic part of slavery and mastery…. was it ever this he meant when he distinguished between the creation by its cores between slaves and masters by nature?