Cape of Good Hope Delivers Ferocious Winds

[continued]...and clouds of the Cape before me lay the dream and beauty of South Africa. The hooded view of the Cape’s rocky range invoked this nation’s struggle to realize its own dreams now that apartheid has been dismantled. I found this theme often illustrated when my classmates and I visited South Africa as part of Professor Joy Carew’s “Shaping Identity: Lessons from Post-Apartheid South Africa” Honors Seminar: An exciting and inspirited future lies behind the haze that might otherwise obscure the potential of South Africa.

Up the coast from Cape Point and only miles away from Cape Town’s luxurious waterfront quarters, we visited the township of Khayelitsha, where housing built from aluminum siding and automobile doorframes provides warm homes to affable residents. Down the street, in an orphanage where more than forty children and infants overcrowd into two residencies not big enough to house one family, the toddlers joyously ran around us in a dusty backyard, while a two-year-old child flipped one student’s sunglasses on and off.

In Soweto, a township outside Johannesburg and the most populated black urban residential area in the country, the attitude of the community is similarly optimistic. The people we met were genuinely excited to now have electricity, while neighborhoods are so tightly united that crime is minimal and Africans young and old alike crowd the streets to talk about their days. As we drove by, one student remarked that she had never seen so many people in front of their houses, “just shooting the breeze.”

While in Soweto, we visited a humble but extraordinary little house in the Orlando West neighborhood. The home where Nelson Mandela raised his children before he was imprisoned for twenty-seven years is no larger than an American living room, making it all the more remarkable that in such a small house lived such a large man. I walked into the family quarters, and found a framed Mandela proclamation vowing never to give up in the struggle against apartheid. A week later, I stood in front of Mandela’s next home, cell number five in Robben Island Prison. The room was hardly large enough to lie down in, the walls empty and barren. But far from representing the horrific delineations of apartheid, the lonely cell embodied the dream of what South Africa could be.