RSA bureaucracy and USA politics

It's been a big, social week. I was planning a detailed entry about it, but today sort of blew everything else into irrelevance. So, a quick recap of the week until today:

On Monday night, we went out for sushi. Yeah, I don't know.

On Tuesday, a group of us went to Moyo, which is a famous restaurant in Johannesburg -- there are actually a number of them all around the country. We went to the one in Melrose Arch, which is a very fancy and wealthy shopping area of Johannesburg. Parking our junky car in the parking garage was sort of a riot... we keep seeing these really nice cars all over Johannesburg, and it felt a little bit like we had found their nest. I set the car alarm off as we were leaving the car, and everyone turned around and stared. I wanted to be like, "Look, if I were going to steal a car in here, it wouldn't be this one!" The food at Moyo was supremely average, which was disappointing. According to some of the people in our group who have been in Joburg for longer than Melissa, Sandeep and I, eating out in Johannesburg is often a disappointing experience. The restaurant itself was very cool though -- we had to go down two flights of stairs to get to our table, and there were giant boulders around, and the bottom floor was clearly trying to 'feel' like a Bedouin tent. We got our faces painted with Xhosa-style decorations, which was a little bit hokey but kind of cute, and it was a nice night -- food notwithstanding.

Being fierce with Jacob, my favorite of the Dukies.

On Wednesday at lunch, we went over to our sister office on the other side of the building to meet the interns at our funding organization. My NGO is its own organization, but we're funded by the Open Society Initiative of Southern Africa (OSISA) and considered part of that organization too, and they have their own fleet of interns. It felt silly not to meet them, especially since they're all young South Africans, and I'm always keen to meet young South Africans who are interested in social justice. I had set things in motion a few weeks ago, and after a few missteps, we finally managed to meet up. There were 5 of them, plus the 3 of us. We ordered food in from Nando's (yum), and it was a really fun hour. They all seem really lovely and nice, and I think we're going to try to get together again as a group.

So, that brings us to today. When I arrived in South Africa, I got a 90-day visitors' visa stamp in my passport. It's the default, it's free, and it requires no paperwork ahead of time. The last time I was here, it was really easy to do something called 'border-jumping' -- crossing an international border for a few days, and then coming back into South Africa to get another full 90 days. I was planning to do that, since I'm actually in South Africa for about 100 days. Apparently, though, South Africa has caught wise to border-jumping, and they no longer let you do it. So I'm in something of a bind: if you leave South Africa on an expired visa, they charge you a fine, and there might be problems if/when I come back again. So my housemate suggested that I go to the Office of Home Affairs and apply to extend my visitors' visa, which is apparently easy to do once, to get an additional 90 days. The only problem is that I cannot for the life of me figure out what I need to apply for the extension.

I decided to just brave it blind, and marched off to Home Affairs this morning. Yeah. When I get there, the first thing that happened was a guy tried to convince me it was okay to park on the street in a handicapped spot. I told him that no, I wasn't going to park there, and he tried to tell me that it only used to be for people who couldn't walk. Then asked me if I was going to Home Affairs and needed photos. It didn't occur to me until I had already opened m mouth to tell him 'no' that he meant passport photos (which I wasn't sure about), but too late. I asked him how to get into the designated parking area next to me, and he very obligingly gave me directions and sent me on my way. It's so weird -- the whole area was full of people who it felt like were setting me up for scams, but they also very helpfully handed me along to the next step of the process without asking me for money or anything when I said 'no thanks.'

Anyway, I parked and walked over to the Home Affairs building. It was a zoo. There were lines of people snaking out of the doors, and not one official employee in sight. I was the only white person around, and I sort of stood there looking lost for a minute. Another guy approached me and slyly pulled out passport photos and asked if I needed photos. I still didn't know if I did, so I told him that I needed to extend my visitors' visa and I didn't know. He told me that no, I don't need photos for that, and to stand in this line over here and wait for a ticket to get into the building. I was like -- oh, okay. I kind of wondered whether it was the right information, but there were three or four other guys just hanging around who confirmed the information, and they seemed to be experts (though definitely not government employees), so I just did as I was told. Again, it was a pleasant surprise: the guy trying to sell passport photos could easily have lied to me and said that yes, I need photos to extend my visa -- but he didn't. For all the terrible reputation South Africa has, South Africans are often such a revelation. I have never been in a situation here when I needed help or advice and couldn't get it with minimal effort on my part. (At least from non-government people.) Often all it takes is standing and looking like a deer in the headlights for a second or two, and before you know it, someone wants to help.

So I stood in line, and a grumpy guy eventually came and handed me a green ticket with a number on it. He screamed at the woman in front of me for being in the wrong line, so I was kind of terrified, but he was okay to me. She had a permit from 2010, and apparently the line I was in was only for people with permits or stamps from 2011 or 2012. How anyone could have known that, I have no idea. I then had to go and stand in another, different, longer line to actually enter the building. It moved pretty quickly though .We went through a metal detector, and then I had to stand in another line to get onto the elevator to get up to the 6th floor. At every opportunity, I told anyone I could that I didn't know if I had what I needed, and could anyone tell me whether I needed a photocopy of my passport or were there any forms, and everyone just kept shunting me forward, so I kept moving.

I got up to the 6th floor. There were information desks, and a door to the left that said "extend visitors' visas." Before I went through the door, I told the guy, "I don't know what I need to extend my visa." He just said to me, "Move inside." So I went inside and waited on a bench until I got called up to talk to someone, and I explained I had no idea what I needed, and he looked at me like I was nuts and told me to go back out to the information desks and ask. I'm positive that he could have just told me, but oh! The joys of third-world bureaucracy. That wasn't his job, you see. There's another desk for that.

So I went back out to the information desks, and I found a group of people sullenly waiting -- and no one behind the information desks giving any information. There was a government employee on the phone ordering pizza, though. Efficiency! I also saw signs saying things like, "We do not provide forms. Please Google the forms you need." Oh, excellent. Even better, they then announced that their system had gone offline, so could everyone please make themselves comfortable. About 10 minutes later, they said the system was still offline and they didn't know when or whether it would come back online. They didn't appear to be willing to speak to anyone while the system was offline. I had been gone from the office for 2 hours already at this point, so I just gave up and left.

So. I accomplished exactly nothing. An extremely typical and unsurprising trip to Home Affairs. I was naively optimistic that it would be easier than I had heard, but South Africa did not let me down. I don't know whether to go back on another day (I still don't know what I need), or pay someone to do it for me, or just leave the country and come back in and hope I can get an extra 7 days, which I've heard is possible and is kind of all I need. I'll have to strategize.

I got back to the office and very quickly distracted myself by finding the decision from 2006 of Jacob Zuma's rape trial. (Jacob Zuma is the President of South Africa). I'm a terribly productive intern.

Around 3:30pm, I started to get anxious about the Supreme Court's health care decision. So I logged on to a site that was live blogging the decision and followed it obsessively for the next hour and a half. All three of us (Melissa, Sandeep and I) were on the same site, and we all were completely shell-shocked when they announced that the individual mandate had been upheld as a tax. I was obviously incredibly relieved, but it was also a little bit hysterical. After all the hard work that the Democrats did to not call this a tax, which would have been so easy to defend and so easy to justify -- but politically untenable -- the only way the Supreme Court was willing, with a majority, to uphold it was as a tax. We all were just like, "Oh my God," and talking about how it was Roberts, not Kennedy, who saved it, and then Caroline had to shush us because Melody was on a conference call and couldn't hear the other people on the call.

At one point, about 10 minutes after the main decision was announced, the director of the NGO slipped out of her office and looked at us and asked, "Are you guys following the --?" and we all go, "YES," as we're hunched over our computer monitors, obsessively trying to follow and understand all the nuances of the decision before the opinion was released electronically.

Then there was, of course, CNN's "Dewey defeats Truman!" moment, where their staff clearly only read to "Supreme Court strikes down individual mandate on Commerce Clause grounds" and stopped reading, and posted the following stupendous blunder:

Wherein Tea Partiers rejoiced (assuming Tea Partiers read anything other than Fox News, whose staff was apparently so stunned it failed to update its headlines at all), and then were heartbroken when CNN was forced to correct itself a few minutes later because yes, in fact, Congress does have a Tax Power as well.

Anyway. Needless to say, we didn't do any work for the last hour of the day. We drove home on a giddy wave of victory, and now we're sitting in a coffee shop near our house that is warm and smells like incense and has rooibos chai tea and free wi-fi.

Despite my utter and complete failure at Home Affairs (which I will count as a cultural experience! I wanted to take pictures, but thought the government might be unhappy about that, so I didn't), I am going to count today as a success. And this week as a good week. Unless something catastrophic happens tomorrow. Knock wood!

On -- one other thing. A friend who I interned with when I was living in New York in 2009 is currently living in Dar es Salaam, the capital of Tanzania, for 6 months as part of her MPH program. I have been trying to make it to Tanzania since 2007, but have failed so far. I decided that I was not going to fail again. It's expensive, but I bought a plane ticket to go up and see her the last weekend of July. Yay!

In closing, I can't help but share this:

 

Overdue update

Clearly it is time for an update. I don't know why it's so hard for me to remember to write here this time around, but I really will try to be better about it.

Last week, some tensions emerged in the house, and it was pretty unpleasant for a few days. As a result, I was forced out of the house to explore on my own a bit over the weekend, which actually ended up being a good thing. Things in the house are back to somewhat normal-ish, or at least appear to be so for everyone's sake, thankfully.

Saturday last week was Youth Day. It's a public holiday that commemorates the Soweto Uprisings in 1976, which was a major turning point in the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. The apartheid government had already set out a 'Bantu' curriculum, specifically geared to under-educated black South Africans to prepare them for menial jobs and prevent them from aspiring to anything better, but in 1976, they imposed a new law requiring the use of the Afrikaans language for half the lessons in Bantu schools. Afrikaans was seen as the 'language of the oppressor,' and perhaps worse, black students didn't speak Afrikaans, so they couldn't understand their lessons. It all erupted on 16 June 1976, when thousands of students in Soweto (the big township/collection of townships outside Johannesburg) attended a peaceful protest against the language policy. The police turned out in full force, some of the students started to throw stones, and the police opened fire.

One of the first victims was 13-year-old Hector Pieterson, who wasn't participating in the march. He happened to be walking through and got hit by a stray bullet. The photo of his body being carried away, with his sister in tears trailing next to him, is one of the best-known images in South Africa and became the symbol of the students' resistance in Soweto.

Photograph by Sam Nzima

There is a similar holiday -- Women's Day -- on 9 August to commemorate when women marched en masse against pass laws under apartheid. Usually we get public holidays off. And if Youth Day had been on a Sunday, we would have had Monday off. But since it was on a Saturday... we got nothing. I thought about going into Soweto, but a group of people, including the one with whom there was tension, were doing that, so I sat it out.

What I ended up doing was going to meet the residence manager at Nkosi's Haven, which is an NGO that offers care to HIV-infected mothers, their children and AIDS orphans. It's named after (and was founded by) Nkosi Johnson, one of the most famous HIV-infected South Africans. He was born HIV-positive in the late 1980s and was separated from his mother because she was too sick to care for him, adopted by a social worker who was taking care of her. He was a fierce little AIDS activist until he died in 2001, at the age of 12. The goal of the organization is to keep infected mothers and their children together, and to provide care for the residents for as long as possible. The woman I met with seemed to think I was a medical student, so I somehow got talked into trying out working in the sick bay and helping to prepare the antiretrovirals for the two kids who are currently ill enough to need to take them, but I don't think that's going to work long-term. I'm going out for the first time tomorrow, so we'll see what happens.

On Sunday, I went to a market on the roof of the Rosebank Mall near my office. That sounds weird, and I was skeptical, but it was actually quite fantastic. It's the whole roof of the mall, and it's sort of like three or four separate markets squished into one. It's got an international food court, and part of it is a typical African curio/craft market, but part of it is also an antiques market. There are also really random things -- one guy was like a walking infomercial, trying to sell me a hanger that would give me more space in my closet. There are also used book stalls, and in one corner there are actual artists (as opposed to the 'artists' who sell you the same manufactured 'African art' that's exactly the same at every market you go to) with really beautiful work. It reminded me quite forcibly of Reading Terminal Market, actually.

I walked in on the end with the food (of course) and walked straight towards the sign that said 'chili fudge.' There were free samples -- hallelujah! -- and I had a fairly educational fudge tasting experience. It was like wine tasting, but with fudge. The guy was like, first you'll taste this, but then this flavor will come out, and then you'll practically smell this, and I was like -- uh huh, sure. But he was right! I never knew fudge could be so complicated. I ended up buying a flavor called 'Kentucky julip,' which he didn't have out to taste, but the combination of lemon, mint and whiskey had me intrigued. Turns out you can't taste the whiskey at all, but it's still really, really good.

Anyway, I wondered around and got Asian food and managed not to really buy anything. But it was really fun and relaxing.

On Monday night, a group of us went to trivia night in Orange Grove. We were mostly Americans on the team, and there were a gazillion rounds, and we managed to win 2 of the rounds and did rather dismally over all. I got yelled at a lot for saying the answers too loudly, although I honestly don't think any of the other tables were listening or could hear me. And/or I think the individuals who were taking me to task for being too loud were maybe taking the trivia night a teensy bit too seriously. BUT it was fun anyway.

Last night, I went with Becki (the English housemate who's getting her PhD in public health) and the two American public health students she's supervising this summer to see a documentary at the Bioscope Independent Cinema in downtown Johannesburg. We got fantastically lost on the way there, because I didn't have the GPS and Becki doesn't know her way around in town, but we did make it -- at least partially thanks to my navigational skills, if you can believe it. I almost screwed it up in the end though, so any help I may have offered in the middle, I basically undid. The world as we know it continues.

I've been to the Bioscope a couple times now. It's really a very cool venue.... I'm going to cheat and use Google images, since I have taken no photos of my own. It's this tiny, hip little place that only ever has maybe 8 or 9 people at its films/documentaries, but it shows really fantastic things. Everything I've seen there has been great.

Last night, we went to see a documentary called Fire in the Blood. It was about the struggle to get affordable, accessible antiretroviral drugs into the hands of the AIDS patients who needed them in the developing world. Basically, the big pharmaceutical companies were selling the drugs for $15,000 a year, which obviously is well beyond the reach of people living even on the average income in a place like South Africa (which is wildly wealthier than most of Africa). And since the vast majority of AIDS patients have always been in Africa, people were just dying. ARVs came on the market in 1996, and millions of people died in the developing world after that simply because pharmaceutical companies (and the US government, which is desperately beholden to them) are greedy and heartless. The documentary went through all the challenges people like my old boss in Cape Town, Zackie Achmat, and other really brave pioneers in Uganda and India went through to break through the patents and the pressures and basically break the laws to get drugs into the hands of people who were dying because they were poor.

It was a very well-done documentary, and it reminded me of a conversation I had last year with an American AIDS activist about one possible nexus between the law and public health I can pursue -- because it's not as though this issue has gone away. The Indian companies are making generics for the drugs on the market now, but TRIPS was forced through by pharma companies specifically to stop something like this happening again. So when new TB drugs (which are desperately needed), or new ARVs come along, this whole battle is going to start over again, but with the international law much more firmly on the side of big pharma. So I'm now desperately thinking about how I can learn everything I need to know about patents and international intellectual property law in one year of law school. Yikes.

Anyway. Driving in Joburg CBD (Central Business District) is not fun, but coming back into Rosebank is lovely, because we cross the Nelson Mandela Bridge at night. The bridge is beautiful anyway, but at night it lights up. I can't really find pictures to do it justice, but here are some that might give you an idea --

Sandeep and Melissa have gone to Durban for the weekend, so I'm left to entertain myself again. But I am going to Nkosi's Haven tomorrow, so that should take up at least part of my time. I really hope it goes well, and that no one is mad at me that I can't stay in the sick bay permanently. I just want to play with some kids!

High praise indeed

Just a quick note that I just met with the program lawyer for international criminal justice, after submitting a research memo yesterday that I had worked really hard on. He told me that it is one of the best memos he's ever gotten, everything he could have asked for, and is going to make the advocates 'very, very happy.'

:-D!!!!

I will post a real update soon about what I did this weekend, with pictures and everything.

Viva Joyce Banda

So, there is a sea change happening in Africa right now. It doesn't really have to do with my work (not really), or even South Africa -- but my NGO is very interested in the events, and it's exciting, so I thought I'd write about it. Maybe it's only exciting to me, but I still want to put it down for posterity.

First, a little background. Many of you will know this, but for those of you who don't: in 2002, the Rome Statute established the International Criminal Court, which has jurisdiction to try individuals for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. However, because big important countries (read: the United States) didn't want their politicians to be hauled in front of an international court, the ICC doesn't have universal jurisdiction -- it can't try anyone. It only has jurisdiction over crimes committed either a) on the territory of a country that has signed and ratified the Rome Statute, or b) by a national of a country that has signed and ratified the Rome Statute. It can also act if a situation is referred to it by the United Nations Security Council, because the Security Council is all-powerful.

All of the ICC's investigations and arrests have taken place in Africa (Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Central African Republic, Sudan/Darfur, Kenya, Libya, and the Ivory Coast). There is a huge amount of resentment among African leaders about this fact -- a lot of Africans feel like the ICC is just another tool of neo-colonialism that the West is using to selectively enforce human rights against African leaders while ignoring atrocities in Afghanistan and Iraq, etc. There is likely some merit in that argument, but there's also no denying that bad, bad stuff has gone on in the places the ICC has chosen to get involved.

Anyway, Sudan is not a party to the Rome Statute. (Incidentally, for those of you playing along at home, neither is the United States.) However, the Security Council referred the situation in Darfur to the ICC, and in March of 2009, the Prosecutor of the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Omar al-Bashir, the president of Sudan. He's charged with individual criminal responsibility for genocide and crimes against humanity in Darfur. However, one of the fatal weaknesses of the ICC is that it doesn't have its own police force; it relies on the police of the states to execute its arrests. Bashir's police force is not going to arrest their own president -- especially when Sudan isn't even a party to the Rome Statute, and Bashir immediately brushed off the legitimacy of the ICC's power to issue a warrant for his arrest.

However, most African countries are parties to the Rome Statute. This means that, if Bashir sets foot in their territory, they are legally obligated to arrest him and deliver him to the ICC. Well, no one has done it. Bashir has continued to jet-set around the world with impunity, especially within Africa. All the other African 'big men' (long-term leaders/dictators) have closed rank around him, defending him against the ICC and refusing to fulfill their obligations under international law.

Enter Joyce Banda. About six weeks ago, the increasingly tyrannical president of Malawi died of a heart attack. Despite his party's best efforts, his vice president, Joyce Banda, replaced him -- as the Malawi Constitution said she should. Since she took office, she has implemented a whirlwind of reforms aimed at bringing donor money back into Malawi and has generally been doing awesome things. She sold off the presidential jet and the fleet of cars the Parliamentarians were using, claiming it was a waste of money Malawi couldn't afford. She has promised to overturn Malawi's ban on homosexuality and appears to have the support in Parliament to do it. She is generally kicking ass and taking names.

But perhaps most importantly, Malawi was set to host the African Union summit next month -- where all the heads of state in Africa get together and accomplish pretty much nothing. Joyce Banda announced that if Bashir attended the AU summit, Malawi would arrest him and deliver him to the ICC. Zambia had previously made a similar announcement, and South Africa has reluctantly promised to do the same -- but Malawi came out with guns blazing. The AU told Malawi that they did not have the right to bar Bashir from attending the AU summit, since he is the head of an African state, and they demanded that Malawi let him attend. Malawi refused to back down, at which point the AU threatened that if they didn't allow Bashir to attend, the AU would hold its summit somewhere else. Malawi told them that they could have their summit elsewhere: it would not choose between fulfilling its international legal obligations to the ICC and to the AU. The summit will be held in Addis Ababa instead.

Now, this has set off a complete firestorm of commentary and controversy. News stories are saying things like 'Why did big South Africa remain silent while little Malawi fought a losing, but very significant, battle for criminal justice on the continent last week?'The Government of Botswana today put out a press release condemning the pressure from the AU on Malawi as 'inconsistent with the very fundamental principles of democracy, human rights and good governance espoused by the AU, and which Malawi upholds.'

It's just sort of an incredible moment. It's very likely that Banda stuck to her guns because Western donors would have frowned and closed their wallets if she had hosted Bashir (she said as much recently), but it almost doesn't matter -- she's started a conversation and drawn attention to the fact that a genocidal dictator is waltzing around the continent, free because African big men are afraid they'll be next. I wish Malawi had said, 'Sure, let Bashir come!' and then slapped handcuffs on him when he landed at the airport in Lilongwe (although then they would have been in violation of their AU obligations -- ugh, lawyers!).

In any case, Bashir probably isn't going to The Hague any time soon. But this is still a significant, fascinating moment in African international criminal justice. Viva Joyce Banda, viva!

Weekend happenings

Finally, I've done exciting things outside of work that are worth writing about!

Yesterday, Sandeep and I left work at about 3:30pm. Sandeep had met a South African LLM at UCLA who clerked for the now-Chief Justice of the Constitutional Court, Mogoeng Mogoeng. The Con Court was having an 'alumni' event for all past clerks in honor of the Chief Justice, and Nomonde invited Sandeep, who RSVPed for both of us. So we headed over to the Court for the 4pm event. We got there a little bit early, and the head of the alumni group greeted us warmly, assuming we were past law clerks on the Court. We chatted a bit with current law clerks and pretty immediately had to admit that no, we were just guests of someone who hadn't arrived yet. That seemed okay though. We talked to a South African clerk for a while, but she inevitably called over the American clerk and left us with him. Sigh. Almost impossible to have conversations with South Africans if there are Americans around, I swear.

We talked to the American guy for a while. He had graduated from a Louisiana law school and seemed intent on convincing us that a) the Louisiana bar is the most difficult bar exam in the country, and b) the bar exam isn't all that difficult, don't worry about it. I wasn't a huge fan of his, but he did suggest that Fulbright funding might be a way to get money to work in South Africa post-law school. I didn't know that Fulbright funded legal work, but now it's something I'm going to look into. The more you know!

We did chat to a guy named Dave, a white South African clerk who was very nice, but then he wandered off and we were sort of left on our own. We panicked a little bit about what to do, but the room had filled up a lot by then, and we spotted to people on their own across the room and decided to go introduce ourselves. Turns out neither of them were clerks either -- a South African guy and an American law student interning at another law NGO in Johannesburg. And of course the American goes to Duke Law (although he went to UNC for undergrad!), so he and Sandeep were off in their Duke bubble almost immediately. I don't know what it is about Duke, but I cannot escape it this summer.

Sandeep's friend, Nomonde, showed up shortly before the proceedings began. She is absolutely lovely, though I didn't get to talk with her very much.

The Chief Justice spoke for a while -- it was very informal, everyone was just standing around and he wasn't at a podium or anything. We were in the staff room. I honestly almost didn't pay attention to Mogoeng, because the first thing he did was acknowledge his 'colleague, Judge Cameron,' and I realized that the very tall gentleman in the room who I had vaguely recognized when he walked in was Judge Edwin Cameron, who is one of my personal idols. He is on the Constitutional Court, but he was also the first senior South African official to publicly disclose that he was infected with HIV. He was the first director of the AIDS Law Project (now SECTION27, one of my favorite South African legal NGOs), and I've read a great deal of his legal scholarship on HIV, including most recently lots of his articles against the criminalization of HIV. So I was in awe by his mere presence, and Justice Mogoeng's comments on the Judicial something-or-other Act didn't really capture me.

On the other hand, while Mogoeng was clearly talking about something controversial happening in South African judiciary, it was interesting to hear the head of the South African judiciary (that would be Mogoeng) openly acknowledge that the public is frustrated by perceived inefficiencies and in competencies of South African judges, and that the judiciary needs to do better. Mogoeng is incredibly conservative and has some opinions that are, quite frankly, disgusting (for example, he thinks the penalties should be lessened in child rape trials, because they tend to be less violent that rapes of adults -- UGH), so I didn't put much stock into the substance of what he was saying. But it was an interesting perspective on the integrity of the judiciary nonetheless.

After Mogoeng finished speaking, Nomonde took Sandeep and me over to meet him. He was very friendly, and he agreed to take pictures with us. I couldn't believe it -- can you imagine asking a US Supreme Court justice for a quick photo op? He seemed slightly confused about how he should pose, but he let us take the photos anyway. Nomonde is working now for Sonke, which is a gender justice NGO, and he seemed pleased that she was doing that work. We chatted alone with him a bit about where in the US we study law, and I mentioned that I was interested in working somehow in South Africa and threw in that maybe I would apply to clerk for the Con Court (why not? couldn't hurt to mention it). I could see him rolling his eyes internally, but he still said I should go ahead because, "You never know who might be appointed." Words of encouragement indeed!

I was wringing my hands over whether I should go over and introduce myself to Judge Cameron, but he was always talking to someone else. At one point, he headed over to the food table, and Sandeep and I happened to be standing right next to it. He stopped and shook our hands, and we introduced ourselves. He said, 'I'm Edwin.' Without thinking about it, I blurted out, 'I know!' Foot, meet mouth. He then continued on his way to get food. I never did get up the courage to have a proper conversation with him. I was so star-struck.

When we left, we offered to give a ride to the American law student from Duke. He had mentioned where he lives, and it's close to us, so we thought it would be nice. His name is Graham. I only mention this because he seems to have become our new friend, as we spent most of today with him as well.

This morning (Saturday), Sandeep and I went to pick up Graham, and then we headed out to the Apartheid Museum. This meant that I got to drive on the highways for the first time (on purpose)! It wasn't all that exciting, really -- I think I've gotten the hang of driving, at least during the daytime. I still do stupid things when it's dark and I can't quite see where I'm going. But we got to the museum without incident. It is, strangely enough, right next to an amusement park/casino. Something about that seems wrong...

Anyway, we got our tickets and our audio guides and headed in. I had heard amazing things about this museum, and it did not disappoint. It's probably the best museum I've ever been to -- ever. The very first thing that happens is you see this:

You realize you've been given a ticket that classifies you as either "white" or "non-white," and you have to scan your ticket to go through only one side. You can't get in the other side. You only stay segregated that way for a few minutes, but it's a really stark way to start the museum experience.

The museum is incredibly thorough, and it has amazing footage from the apartheid era that packs a punch unlike anything else. Obviously I know a good deal about the mechanics of apartheid -- I've studied it, I've done a number of apartheid-related tours in Cape Town, I've talked to people about it, I've read books, I've written papers and a thesis on it, etc. And it's horrible even in the abstract. But as you walk through the museum, you not only see signs and posters from the apartheid era, but especially beginning in the 1970s, you see live video footage of what was actually happening. Not just interviews with people who were there (and video footage of apartheid government officials selling their policies as 'good neighborliness' which, if you don't think too hard, could have actually sounded convincing), but media coverage of the Soweto uprisings and people getting beaten by police, and people lying in pools of their own blood, and dead bodies in the streets, and hundreds of thousands of black bodies protesting and singing and marching and running from the apartheid police.

There were these incredible interviews with people whose names I know, whose life stories I know, but who I've never seen as young people. The first televised interview Nelson Mandela ever gave, when he was already in hiding, where he first admitted that the ANC would have to use force and abandon peaceful methods of resistance. Steve Biko earnestly explaining Black Consciousness, followed by footage of the Minister of Justice claiming Biko died from a hunger strike and then backpedaling and asserting he had claimed no such thing and 'didn't know Mr Biko's cause of death' (the apartheid police viciously beat him in the back of a police truck, then drove him hundreds of miles and left him in a jail cell with no medical attention), followed by footage of Biko's funeral.

There was more. I could go on and on -- it was just a stunning museum. My favorite part was in the section on transition to democracy; they had huge screens set up with footage of the violence taking place in the townships and being perpetrated by the right-wing Afrikaner movement, and in the next room, they had smaller screens set up showing interviews with the chief negotiators of CODESA who produced the new constitution. As you're listening to the negotiators speak about what happened between the two sides (the apartheid government and the ANC, led by Mandela), you see through glass panes the footage of the ongoing violence and chaos that was still occurring at street level. That to me is one of the greatest miracles of the South African transition -- that despite the fact that the vast majority of South Africa was preparing for civil was, the fact that some of them even wanted civil war, that more South Africans were killed between 1990 and 1994 than during the previous decades of apartheid, these two opposing forces sat down and talked to each other. They didn't trust each other, and they didn't like each other, but they had all had enough of the violence, and they knew the writing was on the wall -- so they made it happen. And their diplomacy, and the fact that F.W. de Klerk was willing to recognize defeat, and the fact that Nelson Mandela emerged from 27 years in prison and didn't want to seek vengeance, saved South Africa.

I left the museum with my head full of all the reasons I love this completely fucked-up country. I'm sorry, I sat here for a few minutes trying to think of a better adjective for it, and I just couldn't. 18 years after the official end of apartheid, South Africa is still struggling with so many things -- with its identity in Africa, with crime and corruption, with women's rights and extreme poverty and inequality and racism and a million other nasty things. And none of it is easy, because of the twisted past that everyone is so aware of. But there is this pervasive sense among most South Africans who I've met that they are all in it together. That apartheid almost broke them apart, but it didn't, and none of these other things will either. There is a huge sense of pride evident everywhere in South Africa of what was achieved, not just in the 1990s, but by the African resistance in the 1970s and 1980s. There is this unconquerable South African spirit that infuses every interaction here; sometimes it makes things uncomfortable, and sometimes it makes things downright unpleasant, but it's always buzzing just beneath the surface, and I've never experienced anything like it anywhere else. It's that, I think, that got me so hooked on this country in the first place, and that keeps bringing me back.

Anyway, enough ruminating. Here are some photos from the museum, including some nice skylines of Joburg.

And then walk away free.

Bit of a weird week

So, this was my second week at work. It was a bit unusual. But before I get into that -- after I wrote my last post, I finally pulled out my camera and took pictures of the house. Granted, now that Becs (the girls who owns the house) has moved out, a lot of the furniture is gone/rearranged, but the essentials are the same.

This is part of the living area. The kitchen is off to the left, as well as one of the bedrooms.

The kitchen and one of the doors to the outdoor areas.

Front door and main living room area.

My room!

Our piece of crap car, which I have grown quite fond of. 

So, that's our living space. There are three other bedrooms, including a rather large one upstairs with its own bathroom.

Last weekend was a flurry of activity. Sandeep arrived on Saturday, and a French guy that Becs and Becki had met on their trip to Mozambique in early May also came in to get his visa renewed at the Mozambican embassy. Johan, the former manager of the Rebeccas' local bar and their good friend, is still staying at the house, and he was still around, so we had a REALLY full house. Unbeknownst to me, Saturday night we ended up sort of having a party. With so many people in the house, that really just meant that two other people showed up and Becki made dinner and we all drank a fair bit of wine. We ended up playing a board game called 30 Seconds, which is a bit like the American game Taboo -- you're in teams, and you pull a card with a list of places or things or people on it, and you have to describe what they are and have your teammates guess what the things are, but you can't use any of the words in the name of the thing itself. The twist with 30 Seconds is that about half of the things are very South African, so some of us in the group were at a unique disadvantage. I knew some of the South African stuff, but there were rugby players and stuff on there who I just had no idea. But it was really fun!

On Sunday, there was a showing of the house, so we all had to clear out for the afternoon. Becs was going out of town to Nelspruit, where she's moving for her PhD research, so the rest of us (Becki, the French guy [Flo], Sandeep and I) separately headed to Melville to entertain ourselves. Melville is a nearby suburb that has a high concentration of bars and restaurants and is one of the hip "going-out" places. We actually got out of the house quite late, so Sandeep and I went and got lunch on 7th Street at like, 2pm at a place that promised Portuguese food and failed miserably to deliver. In doing so, I had to parallel park for the very first time in my life, which required a LOT of help from Sandeep, but I did it!

Sandeep knows a bunch of people from his undergrad who are in Joburg for one reason or another, and one of them was going to be on 7th Street later, so we arranged to meet up with him. We ended up at a place called the Melville Cafe with Sandeep's friend, Jacob, and someone Jacob met at his backpacker's named Jesse. We had just eaten, but Jacob and Jesse got food and everyone got drinks (although I got tea, because I was driving and I am responsible), and we sat around chatting for a few hours. There were two guys doing professional karaoke in the cafe -- I'm not sure karaoke is the right term, but they were covering well-known songs, and they were doing a really good job. After a while, everyone inside the cafe got up and started dancing, which was adorable. We were sitting at a table outside (and the only white people at the cafe, I think?), and didn't join, although the waitress encouraged us to do so. Maybe next time! Jacob and Jesse, who are staying in Melville, walked us up and down 7th Street a bit and pointed out the especially nice places to go, and then I gave them a ride back to their hostel and we went home.

Monday was work. Nothing fancy. I continued to work on the disability rights stuff. I didn't realize when I first got involved that it was going to be a summer-long commitment, which is I think what it's turning into. I don't especially mind, but I don't know anything about it and it's not the program I most want to focus on. But it's interesting to be in at the round floor of setting up a new program for the NGO and seeing what kind of work that involves. I found out later in the week that our disability rights organization partner in Lesotho, who we were relying on to liaise with the potential plaintiff in our first case, is trying to get us to pay their staff costs, which we can't do. There's some confusing over where litigation fits in their budget -- they're getting a grant that kicks in next year to cover litigation, but they're resisting doing any networking/setting up partnerships with us now.

Tuesday was the day of the big march to the art gallery near our office. The road closures didn't cause any problems getting to the office, and the turnout at the march was significantly smaller than what the ANC was claiming it would be. Media was reporting it would be a march of 15,000 people, and afterwards reported that about 2,000 people showed up. I didn't hear it at all from the office, so I wonder if it was even that big. The gallery and the ANC ended up compromising -- the gallery took down the painting, and the ANC dropped the lawsuit. I guess that's a compromise, although it mostly sounds like an ANC victory to me. There was a German buyer of the painting who still wanted it, even though it had been defaced, so it's been sent to him.

The week really went by without anything of note happening. The HIV program last year put out a litigation manual for attorneys in the region dealing with HIV discrimination cases, and they're working on a new one dealing with mandatory HIV testing cases. I spent a good chunk of time going through the first draft of that manual and making substantive comments, which I sent off to the head of the program. When I edit, I tend to be a little bit harsh, so I had to go back and make sure that the comments I made sounded duly deferential for an intern -- but confident enough for a competent second-year law student. It's an interesting sort of balance I need to strike, and very different from being an intern when I was in college; I feel like I'm old enough and educated enough at this point that my insights are actually worth something (especially in the field of HIV, where I do think I'm on my way to becoming an expert), but obviously I'm not in a position of authority or even equality, so I have to figure out what tone to use when I'm interacting with the attorneys here. I guess I got it right, because the feedback I got from the program attorney was really positive. She's going to go through the manual in more detail next week and said she might ask me to do additional research, etc., which I would absolutely love.

On Friday, I literally ran out of work to do. Alan, the intern coordinator and one of the attorneys on the international criminal justice program, had recently gotten back to the country from Italy, but he hadn't had time yet to sit down with Sandeep and myself to really put us to work. I decided to email him anyway to see if he could give me anything to do, and I struck gold. He sent me documents to acquaint myself with about the case of a foreign national who has been granted asylum in South Africa, despite the fact that he is heavily implicated in war crimes and crimes against humanity elsewhere in Africa. In fact, there are indictments and extradition requests from France and Spain related to the alleged crimes.

There's something called the "exclusion clause" in pretty much every Refugees Act ever that says that even if someone qualifies for refugee status otherwise (which this guy does, because he's made himself very unpopular in his home country and there was even an assassination attempt against him in South Africa that possibly was ordered by his home government), you aren't allowed to grant asylum to anyone who you have "reason to believe" has committed war crimes or crimes against humanity. On the other hand, you also aren't legally allowed to deport a person back to a country where there's a substantial likelihood they will face torture or a threat to their lives -- so simply revoking his refugee status and deporting him back to his home country isn't really an option (since his own government hates him now, and possibly has already tried to assassinated him).

So, the options South Africa government has are basically to 1) prosecution him themselves (which obviously they don't want to do); or 2) hand him over to either France or Spain and let them prosecute him. All the lawsuit is about, though, is forcing the government to rescind his refugee status, which it has refused to do. So I spent the afternoon reading the original brief and founding affidavit from the NGOs, and then the government's replying affidavit, and the responding affidavit to that. The nerve of the South African government is just unbelievable, and the sauciness in the affidavits going back and forth is sometimes downright hysterical. In part of their paragraph-by-paragraph response where they were either admitting or denying allegations, the government's replying affidavit literally said: "To the extent that the contents hereof correctly reflect the law, I admit them. To the extent that they do not, I deny them." OH OKAY, THAT CLEARS THINGS RIGHT UP. The NGO's response to that sentence was something along the lines of, "This paragraph is nonsensical and embarrassing, and I cannot respond to it." Zing.


So, that was the work week. Friday night was low-key because Becs was packing up and preparing to move to Nelspruit. Saturday morning, Becs left (although I managed to sleep through it -- oops?), and when I woke up, all the furniture was different and there was an empty bedroom upstairs. Johan had apparently also moved out very quietly at some point, so the house is down to just Sandeep, Becki and myself. Sandeep and I went to get gas for the car for the first time, and then hung around until one of his friends from Duke came to pick us up to go see an independent movie as this totally hipster theater called the Bioscope. We also picked up Jacob, another Duke student who I met last weekend. I find myself inexplicably surrounded by Duke students -- it's an invasion!


The movie, called Otelo Burning, took place in the late 1980s in a Durban township. It mostly focused on young black kids learning how to surf as a way of experiencing freedom and escaping township life, but it also had this back story of the ANC vs. Inkatha rivalry in the townships that the apartheid government fueled. The main character's younger (12-year-old) brother ends up getting falsely accused of being a government informer and necklaced, which sends the protagonist over the edge. (Necklacing was this really brutal thing ANC supporters did to suspected government collaborators, where they fill a car tire with gasoline, put it around the victim's neck, and set it on fire.) When Otelo finds out the real informer was one of his surfing buddies, and that he was the one who pointed the ANC towards his brother, he goes and kills the real informer. It was pretty heavy, but also beautifully made -- and always nice to see South African films.


After the movie, we went to an Ethiopian restaurant two doors down. Then we headed back to Melville (good old 7th Street) and went to a bar called Six, which has an absolutely massive and overwhelming menu of cocktails. Jacob has somehow become bosom friends with a group of theater students at Wits (the big university in Joburg), and a group of them showed up at the bar as well. Jacob ended up leaving to meet some other people, but we stuck with the Wits students for the rest of the night. We migrated after a while to another bar on 7th Street called Ratz, which was overwhelmingly a "white" venue (almost everyone at Six had been black). Melville is, or at least was, one of Joburg's happening gay areas, so while neither bar is technically a gay bar, the crowds were heavily gay-influenced. At least, that's what I was told. It was kind of hard to tell.


Anyway, I know that's a huge update, but I guess that's what I get for not writing for a week. I will try to write more often so that I don't end up with these massive entries!