Two Hundred Rand in Alexandra

Our dialogue has been as controversial as it has been illuminating. As educational as visiting a country like South Africa has been, there is always a lingering sense that our observations are invasive to locals in both a racial and an economic sense. I constantly feel like I am observing from on high, studying the less fortunate from my position of white privilege, whilst giving nothing back to the community. This sense of otherness made me hyperaware of my position in many of the situations that we found ourselves in during our stay in Johannesburg. However, I found my stress strangely alleviated when we visited Alexandra, one of the poorest townships in the area.

The friendliness with which I was welcomed into Alex was that which I had never seen before. Strangers that I passed on the streets seemed eager to hear my life story, and genuinely wanted to know how I was doing. Everybody seemed to know everybody else, and were eager to allow our motley group into the likes of their neighbors and their friends. Despite the abject poverty that so clearly surrounded me, I was able to relax a bit and allow myself to observe and interact without feeling like an interloper in a different world.

The aspect of the trip that really impressed me,  however, was learning about the efforts that members of the community made to improve Alex and change people’s lives on a small but impactful level. We met a former bodybuilder turned artist who owned a gym and art studio. Although this bizarre combination baffled more than one of us, he explained his hopes that his space would provide an outlet for youths that would otherwise be doing or selling drugs in the street. The two hundred rand that I spent on one of the displayed paintings in his gym was easily the best 200R that I spent on this trip. It was such a contrast to enter a place and not only feel welcome, but to feel that I could finally give something back to a community that I had gained so much from. Something that I have learned studying sociology and anthropology in South Africa, is that knowledge is a give-and-take business, and to be able to give is one of the most important things that I have experienced thus far.

Our visit to Sandton, the most elite area in all of Africa, gave me a much different impression. Located not five kilometers from Alex, Sandton screamed money in every direction and every form. Nobody stopped to chat or to care, and instead focussed on staring straight ahead as their shiny shoes clipped along the paved street. It was like walking along a street in New York City. It was so different than anything that I had seen in Alexandra, and it dawned on me that during South Africa’s colonization and decolonization, it had inherited Western problems as well as parts of their culture: uncontrollable wealth disparities and a tendency to ignore the poor. They hoarded resources to such an extent that they left none for their next door neighbors, a practice that is unacceptable in privileged populations. In oppressed populations, closing ranks is allowed in order to prevent vulnerability and loss of their already existing resources. To my shock, however, the people of Alexandra did not appear to close ranks as I had expected them to, but instead reached out to the fullest extent that they were able, perhaps out of necessity, or perhaps because they simply desired to.

South Africa champions the idea that the right to shelter trumps the right to property; however, the extent to which this value manifests itself was revealed in visiting these two areas. People who were forced to survive in barely livable conditions lived right next to such rampant abundance that property was clearly given precedence. While I appreciated what my 200 rand had done for Alexandra and for my own inhibitions, it was dampened by the fact that so many more resources were right around the corner, just out of reach.

-- Helene Kenney