Here’s an example: In Zimbabwe in the small town of Victoria Falls (one street and an intersection) we drove through one morning on our way to a game drive safari in Botswana.  Our guide pointed to a dozen brown balls about the size of cantaloupe, spread across the main street.  Elephant droppings.  That meant elephants had browsed along the street during the previous night in spite of banks, markets, and cash machines lining the streets.

At my suburban home, we saw deer (or their droppings) occasionally but elephants??  The wild game in Africa live close to humans in the rural areas particularly.  We use fences in the U.S. to keep our cattle in; they use fences to keep big game—rhinos, elephants, and leopards—out of their yards.

On our game drives we saw hundreds of animals.  They were majestic—not only because of their size, but also their pride, freedom, and gracefulness.  With the exception of a few fences, they move among humans more than I expected.  What does this do to the humans?

1.  It creates an immediate awareness of how intertwined humans and Nature/big game are.  The people certainly have shopping centers and suburbs, but only a short distance away is Nature and big game.  These always remind people of our shared existence.
2. Many Africans are poor.  As a result, big game represents only meat and food for them.  To us in the West, we want to preserve the big game.  But to many Africans, people and animals are really similar—they both need food to live and will kill without regret in order to eat. The line between humans and Nature is very narrow.
3. The extreme weather of South Africa makes survival of both humans and big game difficult.  To Western eyes, the fact they both thrive beside each other with pride and independence hints to me of ancient dependency and cooperation between humans and Nature.  It even hints at the existence of God to some of us—

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1.  In South Africa the majority of people are black or colored (mixed racial background) in contrast to the U.S.  As a result, whites interacted with blacks in official situations although the apartheid laws prevented “after hours” friendships and socializing.  In the U.S. many whites still don’t have much contact with blacks.  Race relations in South Africa were already more advanced with more understanding between the two groups before apartheid ended.  One of our white guides (a cinematographer)  told us a delightful story.  During apartheid, he had a black assistant who was forced to stay in bad hotels while the white person got a nice hotel.  To get around the law, the white guide had the assistant carry the camera case up to the white’s room.  The case contained the black person’s clothing and he was able to share the room overnight.  If anyone came to the room to check if the law was followed, the black man simply hid in the bathroom.
2. Apartheid was a system of laws that created separation and oppression.  Both blacks and whites emphasized the struggle was against the system, not blacks against whites.  That meant all races could work together to over-turn a system.  In contrast in the U.S. we, unfortunately, often pit whites against blacks—which makes cooperation and understanding more difficult in our race relations.
3. The townships were the poor areas, shantytowns, where the apartheid laws forced blacks to live.  They were really suburbs of Cape Town—which was starkly different.  What surprised me was the variety of poor and wealthy who still live in these suburbs.  In Langa, for instance, there was an area called “Beverly Hills.”  It contained larger houses, cars, and yards where the doctors, lawyers, teachers, and engineers lived.  Although these residents could afford to leave—they didn’t.
4. In our country, many people who have been surveyed think our race relations are getting worse.  In South America, I sensed optimism.  Everyone referred to the “new” South Africa (after apartheid) and how good the future was going to be.  Maybe the best example was our middle-aged black guide who complained his college-aged kids were so integrated with whites and colored people they couldn’t understand the oppression and struggle their parents had experienced.  They thought dad was nuts!  That’s progress and hope for race relations in South Africa.

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