I’m two months into a half-year sojourn in South Africa. A colleague and I are working at the University of Fort Hare, guest lecturing and conducting workshops for rural secondary school science teachers. My colleague is here on a Fulbright-funded sabbatical leave, and I’m… Well, let’s just say I’m doing some serious telecommuting as I try to stay on top of a big project back home.
Saying South Africa has a crime problem is a bit of an understatement. The World’s Most Dangerous Places (5th edition, 2003) gives SA a danger rating of three stars out of five for having the highest per capita crime rate in the world. Murder, rape, mugging, and car-jacking are rampant. Leaving something in plain sight in your car or yard here is pretty much equivalent to placing it by the road with a big “help yourself” sign, or so I’ve been told.
I’m not a sociologist, but the general causes of this crime epidemic seem obvious enough.
- Start with years of apartheid, resulting in two distinct but symbiotic societies: one affluent and first-world, the other deeply impoverished and third-world. The underclass has been systematically brutalized, marginalized, relocated, and disenfranchised.
- Suddenly change the political system, give political power to the underclass, and dissolve long-standing economic sanctions and boycotts. This results in an explosion of economic growth and consumerism and a new middle class, but with high unemployment and a still-impoverished underclass.
- Open the borders to even more impoverished, desperate people from the rest of sub-Saharan Africa. Then try to shut down the massive inflow, mostly unsuccessfully, resulting in hordes of impoverished, desperate, and now illegal people.
- Mix in an HIV/AIDS epidemic that devastates family structures and creates entire subcultures of orphans raising orphans.
Is it any wonder the social contract breaks down?
(If you read this, Mom, remember that I’m spending most of my time in a small town in the boondocks. Crime, especially the violent types, is much less prevalent here than in the cities. Jo’burg and Cape Town vie for the title of murder capital of the world, and little Alice isn’t even close. However, what what I’m about to say applies here as well.)
One consequence of rampant crime is a proliferation of locks, keys, gates, fences, razor wire, alarms, unfriendly dogs, private guards, and signs that say “24 hour armed response” (usually with a silhouette of a gun, just to make sure you get the point even if you don’t read English so well). I wouldn’t be surprised if a secondary consequence is lower back pain and a tertiary one is boom times for chiropractors, since most people carry around several tangled gobs of keys big enough to anchor an offshore oil rig. The locks in doors and gates tend to be the old-fashioned type (with keyholes that go all the way through, with that stereotypical “keyhole” shape), meaning that many of keys are long, thick, and heavy.
What both amuses and disturbs me is that most doors and gates lock from both sides. A key is required to enter or to exit. Most locks are kept locked all of the time. As a visitor, even a long-term one, I have few keys. (Probably a good thing, from an orthopedic perspective.) All of which, taken together, means that my ability to get out of any building I find myself in is questionable.
The only way out of the university building in which I have my temporary office is to travel the length of a hallway, up a flight of stairs, down a flight, along a short hallway, dog-leg left, along a much longer hallway, through a gate into a kind of entrance hall, and through a final set of doors and gates to the great outdoors. There are several closer doors I could exit through, except that all are locked full-time. From both sides, of course. The closest door to my office is never locked, but the security gate over it is actually welded shut.
I’ve been told this cuts down on theft. I believe it: I couldn’t carry a computer that far, much less do it without being noticed.
The first-floor windows are all barred. My only way out is locked at some unspecified and unpredictable time during the evening, so if I work late, I must telephone the main guard office and request release. And if a fire starts somewhere between my office and that gate, well… Let’s not go there.
So what is “normal”? In the US, it is normal to have egress from any place, any time, unless you’ve had the misfortune to end up on the wrong end of the justice system. In South Africa, it is normal to massively restrict movement to minimize theft. We optimize on convenience and fire safety, they optimize on physical and material security. Each is rational in its context.
More interesting, perhaps, is my reaction to finding my sense of normalcy violated. When I want to exit someplace and am thwarted by a locked door, indignation surges. How dare it! Somewhere, deep in the freedom-loving recesses of a brain raised on the Bill of Rights and the unbridled pursuit of personal convenience, I feel I have an inalienable right to go outside. (Sounds more dignified to call it “freedom of movement”, eh?) Rational or not, it boggles my mind that people voluntarily live like this. The difference between a fortress and a prison, as has oft been observed, is mighty slim.
How many other unconscious expectations, not shared by others on this planet, do I hold? How do people’s unspoken and conflicting models of “the normal” impede communication and understanding? It’s easy for me to learn how someone lives differently than I do, but it’s a whole lot harder to learn how they think differently. You know that old saw about “walking a mile in someone’s shoes”? I may learn a lot about their shoes, but it’s still me doing the walking. How do I walk a mile with someone else’s feet?
I’ve met people who live in conditions of poverty and deprivation that I would find absolutely unbearable. If I were forced to live that way permanently, without hope of escape, I suspect I’d be depressed and bitter until the day I died. And yet these people are not only not depressed, but often quite upbeat. Why?
For them, it’s just normal.
