I’ve put off writing a blog post this week because I couldn’t think of a central idea that tied the experiences of my week together, which is the way I usually brainstorm my blog posts. I don’t have a central take-home message this week or even a central focal point. Instead, this week’s post is more of a conglomeration of disconnected experiences that will hopefully at least be a decent read.
June 27
Last Monday, I helped finalize the Women’s Legal Centre’s submission to the South African Law Reform Commission’s issue paper on family dispute resolution. The submission was basically several paragraphs of comments on the Commission’s draft of the issue paper, trying to bring to light problems within the draft. Jodie (another intern who did more work on this project than I did since she has a legal background) and I realized that the task was much harder than it sounded because while we could read 300 or so pages of policy suggestions within the issue paper, it would take a lot more effort for us to learn the ins and outs of the cultural context that the issue paper is meant for. It was an odd and frustrating task to be given, because neither of us knew the fine details of family life in South Africa. For example, Jodie told me about how she spent hours formulating a critique of a large gap regarding child policy in the issue paper, only to be told by a someone in the office that the situation Jodie was trying to prevent simply did not happen in South African society. Our initial thoughts when we read the policy were the result of us assuming that what happens in our home countries also happens here. While at least we weren’t exotifying South Africa by assuming that there are no connections between here and where we were raised, it’s also problematic to assume that every aspect of a place and a people have an easily translatable equivalent somewhere else.
June 28
The next day, Simon Epple came to speak to us about his work at SACTWU, the South African clothing and textile workers union. Along with Mandy’s talk from this week, the past few speakers have made me think more about how we are (or aren’t) taught economics. On the one hand, I don’t have much formal knowledge of economics. I took AP Macroeconomics as a senior in high school, so I vaguely remember supply and demand curves. I also remember that I was very disengaged from the class because at that level it was taught as if economics occur in a vacuum, with no humanizing aspect to what seemed to be a very dry pseudo-science. The way economics was taught made me feel like nothing was open to questioning, but at the same time I internally questioned all the assumptions that my economics teacher encouraged us to make. Today, my critique of how economics are taught goes in a slightly different direction. From my interactions with people who have endured Duke economics classes, I get the impression that economics is taught as something that is an objective science, in a way that encourages maximizing profits. I also remember the “maximize profits, minimize costs” idea from high school economics. But from what I’ve seen, prioritizing individual gain is necessarily to the detriment of widespread equality and communal wellbeing because not everyone wins. From what I’ve seen, it’s impossible to maximize profits without increasing inequality. And yet this capitalist conceptualization of how an economy works is taught as the only way an economy works successfully. Our current system makes the poor majority invisible and exploitable. How can a system that relies on its ability to create an increasingly rich minority and struggling majority be considered a success? But like Wilmot James said in his talk several weeks ago, it’s much easier to point out what’s problematic in our current system than it is to actually create a new system. This thinking exercise becomes even more complicated when as far as I know no one is given the tools to think about alternate systems that can actually be implemented.
June 29
On Wednesday the WLC interns attended the consultative conference for the National Action Plan to Combat Racism, Xenophobia, and other forms of intolerance. I didn’t think the consultation was very productive. For one thing, it was the day before the original cut off date for submissions (they announced that they had decided to push back the date later that day), so with that in mind you’d expect the consultation to be more analytical than introductory, but that didn’t seem to be the case. The conference consisted mainly of officials essentially just reading the headings of each section without talking about the policies, and finding others ways to talk for hours with saying much of any substance. The Q & A session ended up being mainly comments rather than questions, but several good points were made. One man stood up and questioned why this plan received a line-up of expensive conferences in fancy venues in the various provinces when South Africa had many other urgent problems that government officials and civil society should be working to address. Another man stood up and said something that resonated with me, and that is that the Plan combats “racism” in a largely unproductive way. Limiting the use of racially demeaning language does not stop racist ideology. As we talked about in the seminar on Wednesday and the reflection session last night, race is socially constructed and always in relation to systems of oppression. If we actually want to tackle racism, we can’t just prevent people from talking in racial terms. For one thing, it can stifle dialogue if people are so worried about political correctness that they don’t air their thoughts and allow people to question them. If we want to tackle racism, we need to tackle inequalities that fall along racial lines – like the fact that the white minority in this country holds the vast majority of economic power while the black majority holds next to none. What good is banning racial slurs without changing the system that produces lived realities that are dependent upon the racial category to which each person is assigned? It’s attacking a symptom and missing the disease.
July 4
Fast-forward to Monday of this week. After work, Karla and I had dinner with our boss and her family in her apartment in Seapoint. On the way to Seapoint, we took a detour through Bo-Kaap, a predominantly Muslim area mainly inhabited by the descendants of slaves from Malaysia and Indonesia. It is a short walk from where we work, and we learned that it is slowly losing its battle against gentrification as white foreigners and new businesses and hotels continue to buy up the land. The dinner at our boss’s home in Seapoint was technically Iftar, the fast-breaking meal eaten every evening during Ramadan. We first ate soup and fried finger foods, then chicken curry and pasta, and we drank falooda, which I’d never heard of before but it tasted like strawberry milk with rose water. It was a really interesting evening, and it was nice to be in a space that felt so much like home after a month of staying in B&Bs.
a few of the colorful houses of Bo-kaap (not my picture)
We talked a lot with our boss’s husband about a variety of topics. He works in film-making, has worked on South Africa’s Sesame Street, and made a programme for children that aimed to teach the central values of the world religions. Throughout the dinner, he talked to us about history. We discussed how South Africa was colonized (and how colonialism is not even taught in British schools today), as well as how Muslims arrived in South Africa and established the country’s oldest mosque, which is still standing in Bo-Kaap. Throughout our discussion of history, we also talked about human rights. I think the best question Karla and I were asked that night was how we would reconcile being human rights lawyers in a country that is guilty of so many human rights violations. We couldn’t even formulate a quick answer to the question, and it’s related to a dilemma that I’ve thought about when considering my career options. I want to be a lawyer, so I’ll be operating within the existing legal framework, unless I do impact litigation like the WLC, in which case maybe I could shift the current laws a little, but for the most part regardless of what I do I’ll still be reinforcing the validity of the law. On one hand, law is probably beneficial to humans. But on the other hand, who wrote these laws? Who do they benefit? Who actually is held accountable under the law? Who even gets to make it to the trial rather than being extra-judicially killed by “law-enforcement”? I feel the same tension with human rights as I do with The Law. Who is actually held responsible for the actualization of the human rights that we keep holding up as a beacon of human progress? Last week, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau marched in the Toronto Pride March, which is a great thing, but he also sold $15 billion worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia, which is not so great if you check their record on just about every human right including LGBT+ issues, but they’re “a strategic ally” of several Western powers so they’re actions go unchecked, in the same way that the US is able to keep Guantanamo open because ‘murica or #freedom or “terrorism” or some other buzzword that circumvents the conversation away from the real issues.
July 6
Wednesday was Eid, so I took the day off work and tried to make the day festive somehow. It was strange celebrating Eid away from home, not that it was ever really a big deal in my household, but Eid in my house was at least somewhat different from a normal day. At home, the night before Eid I would cook something for the potluck brunch that would be happening at the local mosque in the morning (yes, even in my tiny Southern town, there’s a mosque). Then on the morning of Eid we would go to pray at the mosque and eat with the entire Muslim community of 100 or so people who drove in from the surrounding rural areas to celebrate. By 11 AM, we’d be back home and the day would carry on as usual, with people dropping by the house throughout the day to exchange gifts.
My Eid here was a break from the activities my family has gradually found itself repeating. I took advantage of my day off to go grocery shopping, and then I explored downtown and treated myself to a fancy coffee and a late lunch at an Italian restaurant in Greenmarket Square. After that I got a smoothie on my way back home (I’m taking full advantage of this whole eating-food-during-the-day thing), and then tried to facetime my friends and family for some semblance of togetherness on this holiday. Unsurprisingly, at all three places I tried, I couldn’t get fast or consistent enough wifi to facetime, so I ended up resorting to calling my mom by phone and having her pass the phone around to whoever was in the house. In the run-up to the call, think I played up how nice it would be to hear from everyone. The call was rushed and uncomfortable. My dad wasn’t even there because it takes too much maneuvering to get a whole day off work for Eid, and my mom had to leave soon to pick up my brother who wasn’t home at the time, so I couldn’t really talk to any of them. My siblings didn’t have much to say since we text or snapchat any major updates we have, and my grandparents weren’t even sure why I was here in South Africa – the concept of a university-sponsored unpaid internship in a foreign country is a bit difficult to explain across cultural and language barriers. But overall, while the day was a change from how I’d normally spend Eid, I got to see more of Cape Town than I otherwise would have, and I’m glad I had a day for myself in the middle of the work week.
So, that’s essentially the past two weeks in summary. Looking back I think a few of the issues I talked about could have been full blog posts of their own, but there were so many issues that I thought a sampler post of all of them would at least prevent me from leaving any out for the sake of cohesion and readability. I think the fact that I gave up on trying to narrow down my experiences into one topic shows many topics this trip is making me think about constantly.
