BMWs and Donkey Carts

Nowhere I’ve been is more paradoxical than South Africa. Yes, it’s a country of wealth and poverty, a country of freedom and oppression, a country of exuberance and despair. But these extremes exist universally—they characterize nations and local communities and even, you might say, the individual experience. But to me, the contrasts are especially glaring here.

For example, compare these two descriptions of a wedding.

The women sashayed to traditional Tsonga music, rapidly shaking their hips so that their vibrant yarn skirts spun into a dance of their own. The men sat in casual circles, animated with drink—a traditional beer that is opaque and gritty, looking more like porridge than beverage. An animal hide was draped over the bride and groom’s seat; woven, beaded baskets and carved wooden bowls decorated the floor and tables.

Guests of honor snapped pictures of the bride and groom with sleek digital cameras. After the meal, there was a choice of beverage: Fanta, Coke, Sprite, or a variety of bottled and canned beer. Wedding gifts adorned the corner: an ironing board, a microwave, bedding, and other equally large wrapped presents. Rust-colored tulle billowed out from the center of each table, spilling into artsy square plates.

Now put these descriptions together and you have a general idea of the wedding I attended earlier today. I live in a village of 20,000 people in the Mpumalanga province, just north of the capital, Pretoria. Everyday I see elements of Western influence and local relics side-by-side, sometimes remaining quite separate, and other times merging to reach a new compromise on the clashing cultures.

Sometimes I am baffled by the disparities that influence my life here. I can connect to the Internet on my laptop using my cell phone as a modem; this allows me to chat online with friends and family back home and it lets me “google” anything I want at almost anytime. Come evening I may be writing e-mails in my room, but in the morning I wake up early to fetch water with my host sisters. During summer, the only access to water we have is at a community tap about 500 meters away, from approximately 6 AM to 8 AM. Because the taps are few, sometimes we wait for half an hour before it’s our turn to fill up our two buckets, load them on the wheelbarrow, and trudge home. There have been days that I’ve gone without bathing and had to use the same water I cooked with to wash my dishes. It simply amazes me that access to Internet—a contemporary luxury—is not a problem, while access to water—a basic human need—is.

These contradictions seem, in a way, to parallel the situation in which South Africa finds itself today. It’s pulling towards modernization and also towards its roots. I don’t know what lies ahead for this country, emerging from such a complicated past and riddled with confusion. My experience of South Africa suggests that it’s battling an identity crisis, which as my psychology-student sister pointed out to me once, doesn’t mean that you don’t know who you are. It simply means that you know you are many things; what you don’t know is what you are most of all.