Anna on realizations from the excursion

We spent this past week in Johannesburg, touring different museums and making our way to Kruger National Park. Before leaving we were told that Jo'berg had a similar vibe to New  York City, that while Cape Town was laid back and easy going, Johannesburg was fast paced and more industrialized. While all of this is true, the major realization that I had was just how much I have come to rely on Table Mountain and the unease I felt at not being able to pinpoint exactly where I was based upon where I stood in its shadow. In books, articles, and films that we have watched, South Africans have described similar emotions with regards to the mountain and I understand those feelings more now. 

While touring Sharpville, the Hector Peterson museum and the Mandela family home, I was struck by just how recent this “history” that we are studying is. These events, deaths, protests, and shootings didn't happen one hundred years ago, like much of what we would talk about in an American History class. I was born during the final years of the apartheid state, some of these atrocities occurred during my life time. I can't help but parallel my life in Connecticut to what it might have been had I been born in South Africa as a colored, black or even white child, how different my life would have been.  

The experience in Jo'berg that I took the most from, was a play that we went to called Curl up and Dye. After the performance was over we had the opportunity to sit in on a Q and A with the actors. It was here that the freshness of these events and emotions truly hit me. One of my co-educators posed the question “What was your personal experience with apartheid?” Each actor had a difference experience, but all had a first hand one. There was a colored actress, two black actresses and a white actress and actor. The colored and black actresses talked about some of their struggles and feelings about racism, while the white actor and actress admitted to just how ignorant they were of what was going on at the time. It is easy to distance yourself from slavery when reading about it in a history textbook, as something that occurred a long time ago, enforced by people we didn't know and have no connection to. This is real, the extreme poverty, human rights violations, racism, and sexism is present here and now. It continues to boggle my mind that now in 2013, in a supposed modern world, these issues in such extremity still exist.