South Africa
White South Africans may complain about the crime rate and the economy, but for African-Americans working here, this is a land of opportunity, writes Emeka Nwandiko
`This is our last chance,” declares African-American James Prevost in his office in Sandton City. In a muffled southern drawl he intones: “If we don’t get our act together here, no one else will do it for us, we will have no more chances to look after each other, our families, our kids, our future.”
Prevost boarded a jet over two years ago to a continent where over three centuries ago his forebears were forcibly removed from along the West African coastal plains and transported as slaves to the colonies of America. Today, Prevost and other black Americans have returned, but not to provide free labour. Rather they have arrived as employees of corporate and non-governmental organisations with a mission.
Allison Brown, project manager for McDonald’s South Africa, believes that the reason his fellow black Americans are in the rainbow nation is because it is an “historic moment to contribute to the social and economic development of our own people”.
Brown arrived with his spouse and children in 1993 to what to them has become the new land of opportunity. Brown, a native of Morristown, New Jersey, explains: “I think South Africa has a tremendous opportunity to develop. It is a country which saw its people subjugated, very much like what happened in the United States. But back home you have a white government, which pays lip service to its efforts to afford rights for all. There is no urgency to make things better for black people.”
Unlike the United States, where blacks do not have the numbers to muster the political clout to continue the pace of the political reforms of the 1960s, Brown and other black Americans pin their hopes on the inversion of numbers in South Africa to bring about a free and just black-run country. “One hopes that a black-run government will see things a little more clearly because it can relate to the suffering of its people,” says an optimistic Brown.
Emerging from yet another day of hearings into the role of the judiciary at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Johannesburg, civil rights lawyer Alice Brown is in agreement with her namesake. “Looking at the South African Constitution there is now a better opportunity, and the potential, to address the issue of civil, social and economic rights of people here than in the US.”
Disillusioned with the halt of any tangible signs of change in the social conditions, she quit the US and is now a programme officer with the Ford Foundation, monitoring the progress of human rights in South Africa.
What Brown and others have left behind in the US is a community in crisis. Recently a million women marched in Philadelphia to address the plight of black women, often young mothers struggling to bring up children without their fathers. Two years earlier, hundreds of thousands of men took part in the Million Man March in Washington. The stark reality for a black man is staring at the walls of a prison for offences such as murder and drug dealing. For those outside the wire mesh, life consists of drug addiction, unemployment and being fathers of children they seldom see.
Alice Brown says the reasons for this despair is “the lack of any economic opportunity”, a necessary prerequisite for raising the living standards of any person. “A large proportion of African-Americans live in poverty. They are either unemployed or under-employed.If you are poor you tend to live in a poor neighbourhood, which is not very well policed. This often means that drugs will infest these communities, violence ensues as people fight to keep control of their source of income, kids drop out of school as the environment is not safe and they are recruited as gangsters. With all these attendant problems the cycle of degradation continues, exacerbating the crisis.”
For black Americans living in South Africa little has changed from the time they were toddlers during the civil rights marches in the Sixties, then heralded as a period of hope. Prevost, who grew up near projects in a neighbourhood in San Francisco, recalls: “I never met my father. My mother had to work her butt off to put food on the table and send me to school.”
Conditions were equally as bad for Allison Brown, who was fortunate to have both parents to raise him. Despite his mother working as a nurse, his father, a caretaker, had two jobs to earn enough money to put his three sons through university.
In the so-called land of opportunity, black families with three earners have about the same income as white families with two bread-winners. Prevost is under no illusion as to what has brought the lives of millions of black Americans to near wretchedness in the inner cities. “It’s no accident that a lot of black women have no husbands. It was all part of the plan to break up the black family. If you don’t have a head of a household, how can a family be a cohesive social unit?”
He continues: “They then introduced drugs, first dagga, and when that didn’t work, they introduced crack, and this has led to the disintegration of the black family.”
He says earnestly: “If you look at the majority of black deaths, it is often at the hands of another black man. This was all part of the plan to annihilate the black race in America.” Far-fetched as it might seem, much of Prevost’s comments are in line with what a majority of black Americans believe – that the Central Intelligence Agency had a part to play in the crack epidemic ravaging their neighbourhoods. Moreover, the suspicion that the white-led government or the white population as a whole cares precious little for its black folk is never far from their minds.
“Racism is very subtle in the US,” says Eric Wright, who, in South African parlance, would be called a “coloured”. “It is difficult to prove that you have been discriminated against on a personal level, it is not black and white,” he says somewhat ironically. “Racism operates on an institutional level. If you look at some of the top universities you will find a small proportion of black students. This is not representative of the population as a whole. In certain industries and sectors of the economy you will not find non-white individuals.”
It is easy to assume that black Americans in South Africa have reached the glass ceiling of corporate success back home and are here to further their careers. This notion is quickly refuted by Wright, an investment banker, who volunteered to work in South Africa. He says: “I have been impressed by the calibre of my peers here. Many attended Ivy League institutions in the US.”
The 33-year-old investment banker, who works for a large international US merchant bank, adds: “African-Americans here are in positions of responsibility which they would have attained, if not as quickly, at some point in the not too distant future back home.”
Today, the African-Americans in South Africa work for American corporations eager to fulfil their quest for global domination in new and emerging markets. But, unlike their British predecessors, the agents are neither racist nor deem the natives inferior, at least not openly. Rather, there is a sense of a benevolence: spreading the gospel of democracy, opportunity and freedom of the individual to their cousins. But such rights have not been fully conferred to them in the Land of the Free.
And their reward? Well, according to Wright, “a dollar here goes a lot further than it would do back home”. African- Americans love South Africa and see it as home away from home, with cities abounding with tree-lined boulevards and smart shopping malls. “You can dig up the infrastructure here and place it anywhere in the US and it would be like any other American city. There would not be a slightest bit of difference,” says Shelton Tucker, financial controller at Coca-Cola. He even goes as far as describing Soweto as a sort of Chicago Westside in terms of its degradation, and Orlando West as a poor relation of Beverly Hills.
But a difference there certainly is, as Prevost reveals: “I feel more comfortable here in [South] Africa than in America where I am a minority. Here, with the population majority being black, I can blend in Soweto, Eldorado Park, anywhere.”
So comfortable are African-Americans here that the perceived spiralling crime rate is scoffed at. When asked by white South Africans why they have chosen to visit their country, a look of absolute incredulity is often the response when the recent arrivals say they are working here. “I think the crime situation is grossly over-reported in the media,” says Allison Brown.
But, says Alice Brown, some of the American culture should never have be imported into South Africa. “How can a society which has a gang problem allow gangsta rap to be played on its airwaves?” Brown, whose hair is in neat braids, says she is further amazed that parents of two-year-old kids apply corrosive chemicals to the scalp of their young ones to straighten their hair (one of the ploys used by black Americans to pass off as white was to relax their hair so it would appear straight. Another was to use skin lighteners.) Wright says: “I think South Africans should do everything they can to preserve and maintain their culture.”
But Prevost, a former nightclub owner, does not believe that South African culture is being eroded. “The average South African might be in a suit and tie while in the office here in Sandton, but when it comes to performing lobola, they will dress in their traditional attire.”
Prevost manages South African-based artists who include jazz, kwaito and hip-hop performers. He says confidently that, even if there was erosion of South African culture, it would take place over a long period of time.
Tucker cautions: “No society can exist in total isolation. There are benefits to be had from commercialisation as well as the bad. What is needed is for a right balance to be struck. It is just like parenting a child, you have to make sure that they are not exposed to bad influences, as hard as that might sound.” By and large, African- Americans are optimistic that South Africa will not go the way of the rest of the continent. Wright confidently predicts: “There is too much committed here in terms of international capital for the government and people to mess up.”
Alice Brown says: “During the dark days of apartheid, the rule of law was still used to carry out the unjust deeds. Looking at the new Constitution, there is a commitment to ensure that the rights of individuals are not infringed.”
If the unthinkable does happen, the last chance to exonerate the black race would wilfully have been squandered.