Sunday 3 June 2007- Day Two

Today we were invited to the house of a local family for a brei (bar-b-que). The house is located off one of the main streets in an upper class neighborhood. What is interesting about this house (apart from the architecture) is that it is the only house of its kind that I have seen so far with out a four-foot wall and razor wire (as we were leaving I noticed that it is the only house in the neighborhood without these). The back yard offers a wonderful view of the Hillbrow tower and the surrounding areas.

After dinner, the head of the house gave us an informal talk about Joburg. The hosts were excited about the prospects to reshape Joburg. If it is true that they can reshape the country in any way they wish, what will be the outcome? The two races seem to live very separate lives with very little contact. How will this facilitate the future of Joburg? I understand the hesitation (uncertainty of outcome?) to mix the two races, but separate is not equal, especially in Joburg in its current form. Is Affirmative Action a bad thing to try and slowly change the values of a location and build a relationship? If the two never come in contact, I’m not sure that anything will ever change. As for the claim about the American ‘hang up’ on race, I am not sure that I completely believe this. Never have I heard race discussed so much as I have in the past two days. It reminds me of the Parnell article from class. The author suggests that perhaps the racial filter of most articles on South Africa is not entirely accurate and helps to further the division between the races.

It seems that there are areas that the whites go and that there are areas that the blacks go and with very little mixing. Our hosts offered us several suggestions to pass the remainder of the evening and each of them was to the more upscale areas of town. We did settle on the mall at Rosebank. This mall could have been anywhere in the world. There was nothing to demark it from a mall in the United States or Europe or Africa. It seemed to me that this day allowed us a glimpse into white South Africa.