Why I Chose To Come To South Africa
A Bird In A Cage Moment
It’s been about a week since I arrived in Cape Town so I’ve been able to settle into my dorm and rest up a bit since I left the states with a cold. The flight into Cape Town from Amsterdam was really pleasant. I ended up sitting by a white South African who had been working and studying in the UK for the past 3+ years.
He told me about growing up in South Africa and fun things to do around the city, and then we had a really nice talk about where we’ve been in the world and exchanged travel recommendations. He really liked surfing and hiking, so we agreed to go together before he heads back to the UK. I did ask him about apartheid and safety in Cape Town but he didn’t really have much to say.
South Africa as a whole country is rated at a Level 2 travel warning from the US Department of State ( https://travel.state.gov — be sure to enroll in this for safety updates whenever you go abroad). This is mainly due to issues of crime, violence, and drought. Currently, there is no longer a drought problem in South Africa. This year they had their rainiest winter so there aren’t any rations on water usage anymore. However, crime and violence are still issues at large, especially in Cape Town.
Tourists who come to Cape Town love it, they see the V&M Waterfront, Stellenbosch Wine Tours, and fancy restaurants. The country is beautiful! One look at the shoreline and Table Mountain and I was instantly blown away. However, something you don’t really get told before you come to Cape Town is just how split the city is between wealthy tourist spots and slums. Cape Flats a district in Cape Town suffers from a majority of the violence and crime in the city, with gang violence being all around that area.
However, even outside of Cape Flats or any township (areas where black South Africans were forced to live during the apartheid), there are issues of petty crime, rape, and mugging. Just last month, August 2019, a female student at the University of Cape Town was kidnapped, raped, and killed. She had gone to the post office alone in the middle of the day to pick up a package, something that you shouldn’t fear for your life to go do. Rape lists have been popping up from neighboring universities and protests against gender-based violence have become more frequent in the past month.
Because of this, not only are we advised to not go anywhere in the city by ourselves at any time of the day, but if we travel in the day we should always be with a group, never alone.
This is the first country I’ve been to where I’m not even comfortable walking the streets outside my dorm completely alone. Anywhere we go not walking distance, we must Uber and if you want to take public transportation you shouldn’t use it after 5 pm.
One of my friends here, a black South African who has spent her whole life in Cape Town, told me she is even scared to go anywhere alone. Besides her, I really didn’t have any friends in Cape Town for the first few days so everything was a struggle. If I needed to get anything I couldn’t just whip out my maps and go, I always had to ask her to join me and it felt so bothersome. I’m the only student here doing just an internship and without a roommate, so I didn’t even have an opportunity to meet other people for the first few days. After around day 3, I had such bad cabin fever that I ran up to the roof just for a change in scenery.
Luckily when I was there I found another student studying abroad and was able to become friends, she talked to me about the recent news in Cape Town regarding gender violence and then added me to an all-girls group chat with other students in our dorm. Since then, I’ve been able to make more friends and find people to go do fun things around the city. However, if I hadn’t gone to the roof at that time and met that girl I probably would still be really isolated. Shopping for groceries, running errands, sightseeing would all be 5x harder.
After she left I just stayed on the roof and looked out over the city for a bit. I honestly felt pretty trapped, like a bird in a cage for a moment. I’ve always been concerned about safety whenever I travel alone, but never to the extent where I couldn’t travel alone or explore freely even in the day.
There are of course women who travel alone during the day in Cape Town and continue to go out at night and have fun, mostly because girls shouldn’t have to live in fear and they don’t want to.
I’ve actually dreamt about coming to South Africa since I was 17 years old. Growing up and facing racism in the states, I was always interested in social justice and cultural awareness. South Africa has a long history of apartheid, which was the legalization of segregation between the black majority and the white minority, where the whites had all the power. Apartheid wasn’t lifted until 1994 and it was only after years of protesting from Anti-apartheid activists as well as apartheid reaching the media and external countries putting pressure on South Africa to end apartheid, was there finally any reform.
Naturally, after any long term practice of racism takes place, there are always lasting effects and residing racism that lives on. For such a recent end to a horrific time period, there are lots of issues the country is still working through. For me, coming here is an opportunity to see the effects of apartheid and understand what the country is doing currently to address those issues. Also, as a computer science major, I’m particularly interested in the way the country has or hasn’t used technology to address those issues.
For the next two months, I’m going to be working for People Against Suffering Oppression and Poverty (also called PASSOP — an Afrikaans word that means beware) which is a non-profit paralegal organization that works with and assists asylum seekers and refugees immigrating to South Africa. I personally have very little knowledge of the refugee crisis around the world, all I know is from one or two articles I read in China which were both completely in Mandarin and also over my head. So this is really a unique opportunity for me to expand my awareness on a global issue that affects all countries.
Keeping all of this in mind and the overall reason as to why I came to Cape Town in the first place will probably keep me level headed throughout my time. Of course, I’m disappointed about safety and having to depend on other people whenever I want to go around, but when you run into challenges anywhere in the world, it helps to change and check your perspective. You can’t expect the same things out of every country you visit, and a “real” in-country experience isn’t always as glamorous as travel shows and magazines display.
Originally published at https://jacquroman.wixsite.com on September 17, 2019.
