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!

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.