A later speaker, Frankie Jenkins, Director of the Human Rights Committee, brought up some of the same topics as Saldahn.  Both speakers dealt with the case of K.K. Mohamed, the convicted bomber of the US Embassy in Tanzania who as a refugee in South Africa was deported to the US.  Even though Mohamed went to America voluntarily, to defend and present his point of view, human rights groups sued the government complaining that since he would face the death penalty in the USA, this amounted to an injustice for Mohamed.  The South African government viewed Mohamed as an illegal alien and allowed him to be sent to the States before all his legal procedures had been completed.  The Constitutional Court said the deportation was a disguised extradition and found that the state did not do enough to protect Mohamed's rights.  In its decision it criticized the state by citing the American jurist Brandeis who wrote in a US decision that the state has to lead by example.

    On 10 July 2001, the US jury sentenced Mohamed to life in prison, sparing him the death penalty.  This does not make the human rights issue moot, and it still stands as an illegal extradition, but in a cursory glance of some of the news stories on the case, both from the States and South Africa, I could not find mention of the South African court's ruling about the extradition.  For human rights advocates, the case seems to be as prominent as the Southern Cross but it is  not even on the horizon in the public opinion. This may be an expression of the idealism of a new nation versus pragmatic diplomacy.  The speakers seemed to have doubts about the path of South Africa as a nation bound by the rule of law, but as an American who has passed through quite a few "gates" in the past few years, I do not always expect the best behavior on the government's part. Of course, the South Africans' views have been informed by their knowledge of history and their visceral awareness of the the apartheid government's ability to govern without adherence to law, so it is certainly reasonable to expect the best governmental behavior and to start at the apex when one realizes how near the nadir might be.

    When in Cape Town, we visited Parliament and sat in on a debate in the National Assembly.  I enjoy the give-and-take of these question and answer, or accusation and evasion, sessions and they seem to be a positive indicator of a healthy democracy.  In the gallery there were about 30 new soldiers, probably trainees since they did not have any rank insignia.  I imagine that part of their training included this visit, and I hope that it would instill a respect for democratic institutions in the military.  All the soldiers were black except for one blond male, and all were male except for one black female.

    Our visit to a rally in Orlando Stadium in Soweto on 16 June, the national holiday, Youth Day, honoring the 25th anniversary of the shooting of Hector Peterson, the student whose death sparked months of student unrest, also had hints of democracy in action, although my impressions, those of a visitor, may not be the most accurate.  We did not get inside the stadium, where politicians were giving speeches and where later in the day the president knocked off Winnie Madikizela-Mandela's baseball cap when she arrived late and tried to greet everyone on the podium, but we did wander through the crowd outside the stadium. 

In the upper left, the Inkatha Freedom Party members are gathering in an open space off the parking area. Then they rushed by.
All of a sudden the crowd parted as people looked back over our shoulders at something approaching from behind us.  We got out of the way as a cluster of Inkatha Freedom Party members, carrying sticks and shields, trotted through the crowd.  Since this is one of the opposition parties and since the ANC and IFP fought some very brutal battles in the '90s, it was encouraging that they could show up at and demonstrate at the event.  Later, a short distance from the stadium, we passed an outside meeting of the Pan Africanist Congress, another opposition group.

        Before going to South Africa, I had read the Winter 2001 issue of Daedalus which had an article co-authored by Jeremy Seekings, one of our lecturers.  The division of South Africa into two nations, one small, rich and white and the other large, black and poor, has been a portrait of the nation used by politicians. Seekings questioned this division by segmenting society into classes based on income rather than not races.  According to him, there seems to be a growing middle class of teachers, nurses, white collar workers, and supervisory personnel who make up about 43% of society and control about 41% of income, but still the lower class comprises about 41% of society only controls about 10% of income.  He mentioned how the make-up of his classes at University of Cape Town has become more homogeneous, composed of upper-class students, mainly white, as the working class students who used to attend have dropped out or not applied for admission, perhaps due to increased fees and costs.

    In a lecture hall, sociologists and political scientists may be blurring and smudging the picture of South Africa as two nations, but our visits to the townships accentuated the lines which divide the urban populations. The tour of the townships altered my preconception of them as unending slums.  We visited a number of institutions, such as Golden Girls in Cape Town where I met this beautiful child (photo by Mark Drumbl) and Wandie's Place in Soweto where we tried some sorghum beer, and I was struck by the energy devoted to improving one's lot and looking out for others.   But the layout of the townships, on the flats east of the beautiful Cape Town with Table Mountain in the far distance and the open, high plains of Johannesburg, as well as their size just retraced the lines dividing South Africa into two nations. The peaks which seem to protect Cape Town do not shelter and seem unreachable from the Cape Town townships.

    Another speaker, Bruce Gatto, professor at University of Pretoria, gave a lecture which deviated from the usual pattern of talks in that it was more personal and not an analytic discussion of societal structures and political systems.  Gatto explained how a small Baptist congregation, of which he is a member,  grew to attract hundreds of families dedicated to improving society by stressing individual responsibility.  This emphasis on individual responsibility, which might have much in common with the Afrikaner vortrekker's independence, seemed to be at odds with the African spirit of "ubuntu" which was a founding principle of the new South Africa.   In looking over my notes, I noted the term "individual accountability" surface a number of times, but often I had heard comments about group effort. The most striking, and demoralizing reference to group effort was the comment Brian O'Connell, an educational administrator, made about a slogan of the '80s, "Pass one, pass all." Some students advised him to use this as his standard in the classroom since it would camouflage the lack of effort and achievement of students dedicated to the political struggle, but it debased the importance of individual effort and the process of acquiring knowledge. However, in the townships, I was impressed wiht the ubuntu shown by people who have little other than good will to share.