Mzoli's Meat

The South African "township". This is a term that triggers in me mixed feelings and images. The home of most black South Africans. The home of matchbox houses and dirt roads. No sanitation, high unemployment, poverty, violence. Yet, the township is also the historical battleground of the freedom fighters; the place where oppression was met with resistance, where hope vanquished the infamous apartheid. Is this a place that I can visit as a citizen of the world, a place where I can feel welcome? Tomorrow, I am going to the "township".

Allen picks me up around three in the afternoon. It is hot and suffocating on this Sunday in Cape Town. I met Allen a couple of days ago. A waiter during the day, business student at night, his energetic naivety is enticing.

We drive for about half an hour to the outskirts of Cape Town. The air here becomes breathable. Allen is naming for me the various townships that we are passing. Some townships still look like those of the apartheid days with the electric poles as the only sign of improvement. Yet, these townships are doomed to disappear entirely according to Allen, and, although the process is slow, there is indeed some progress. Matchbox houses are being replaced by houses with concrete walls. Littering is becoming a thing of the past. Roads are being paved.

We come to a crossroad which is suddenly busy with cars and people. The place is not conspicuous. No tall building to signal it. But the electricity in the air is palpable, which tells me this is the place to be on this Sunday afternoon. Hundreds of people are crowding in a space no more than a hundred feet long. This is multiplied by the dozens of sport cars and motorbikes weaving through the crowd and whose engine rages “I'm here, I'm here”. My first impression is this must be a giant party spread over several blocks. But I am wrong. It is only a single block that vibrates. And it all revolves around "Mzoli's Meat".

Mzoli's Meat is, technically, a butchery. They offer a wide variety of meat. All sorts: beef, chicken, lamb, steaks, ribs, sausages. Because I do not eat meat often and it has been over ten years since I've been to my favourite French butcher, I am a little taking aback. Allen chooses the meat which is put in a large bowl. Seventy rand, about ten dollars. Not too bad. We then walk swiftly into a long and dark corridor, at the end of which we find the heart of the Mzoli's Meat: the barbecue.

The barbecue occupies two rooms of unequal size. Both rooms are dark, hot, full of smoke that barely escapes through small but wide windows located just below the ceiling. The service is a rare example of organized chaos. At first, it looks like it is a complete mess. People are yelling. Bowls of meat are being passed from hands to hands, more out of exasperation than out of any rational decision. A tiny piece of paper with your name on it is left on the side of the bowl. The juice of meat holds it in place. This is the only evidence that this meat is yours. The boss comes in once a while to yell at everybody. At that time, everybody becomes quiet, employees and customers; even the fire stops crackling. Then, quickly, chaos regains control. Watching this scene for some time, I realize the crowd of customers is constant; in the frenzy, bowls of meat are constantly being handed to the sweaty and exhausted customers who can finally leave and enjoy the party. As they leave, new hungry faces enter. Meats are flowing through the building; they enter cold and fresh and exit cooked and juicy. On this day, though, Allen and I are not so lucky. Our meat gets lost, and it takes us two hours before seeing it again. For the record, let's say that we are the exception that confirms the rule.

The real party is outside. There are about thirty tables under a green mezzanine, not enough to accommodate the crowd that spills onto the road. A DJ in the corner keeps the rhythm of the party alive, as if the people's pulses, waves of excitement and drunkenness are not enough. Allen and I succeed to make our way through and find a semi-quiet spot where we can finally enjoy our well deserved food.

We dance, talk, and eat for hours. Even once the sun is set, the butchery closed, the DJ mute, the street keeps rocking. A neighbour restaurant has taken the lead in blasting the music. It is dark now and feels like a nightclub under the stars. It is time for Allen and I to go home.

This Sunday's afternoon, in the township, all of my fears were laid to rest. I was welcome with warmth, smiles and happiness. Another victory of humanity.

(thanks to Anthony Dachille for the editing)

"The shock doctrine" by Naomi Klein

Naomi Klein lays down in "The shock doctrine, the rise of disaster capitalism" a powerful thesis backed up by an impressive list of evidences, quotes and facts. She argues that, contrary to the claims of Milton Friedman and his followers, hard-core globalist capitalism has not been followed by peace and prosperity but rather by violence and the demise of democracies: Chile, Argentina, Russia are examples where that extreme breed of capitalism has lived on undemocratic regime. Using the pressure of the national debt, the pro-american international financial institutions even forced newly democratic governments to comply to their directives, open their markets to international companies, and shred down the existing net of social measures, all against the will and expectations of the people.

The preferred technique, as Klein explains, is that of the shock doctrine: use a shock, either a natural disaster, a coup d'etat or a political revolution, to take benefit of the stress and the weakness of the people to impose the hardship of lawless capitalism:

Believers in the shock doctrine are convinced that only a great rupture -a flood, a war, a terrorist attack- can generate the kind of vast, clean canvases they crave. It is in these malleable moments, when we are psychologically unmoored and physically uprooted, that these artists of the real plunge in their hands and begin their work of remaking the world.

Naomi Klein, The shock doctrine, Introduction.

One of the interesting example is that of South Africa that tries to explain why, several years after the coming in power of the African National Congress (ANC), more (black) people are poor than under apartheid: while negotiations for the share of political power were done in the open, the former president of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, was negotiating in secret with the international institutions and the economic power of the country detained by the white community. The political agreement gave full human rights to the blacks, while the economic agreement was stripping down the socialist chart of the ANC and was assuring that little economical power can be transferable to the rest of the population:

A longtime antiapartheid activist, Rassool Snyman, described the trap to me in stark terms. «They never freed us. They only took the chain from our neck and put it on our ankles.» Yasmin Sooka, a prominent South African human rights activist, told me that the transition «was business saying, 'We'll keep everything and you [the ANC] will rule in name... You can have political power, you can have the façade of governing, but the real governance will take place somewhere else.'»

Naomi Klein, The shock doctrine, Democracy born in chains.

Although the book is convincing, I do not reject the possibility that a selection of the facts has been done to support overwhelmingly the thesis. Is Naomi Klein entirely balanced? Likely no, but nobody could argue against what happened in Chile, Argentina and South Africa and deny the role played by Milton Friedman and his supporters. Those examples, alone, are enough to make Klein's thesis a likely and worrying story.

Naomi Klein finishes positively by assuring that the people has learnt from the damages of the shock doctrine and will be ready next time. We are at the time of a serious financial crisis. Is it part of the hard-core capitalist agenda and is the people ready for a next round of salvaging measures? Or, on the contrary, is that crisis the end of that extremist capitalism and a return to a humbler, fairer and more social view of capitalism?

The universal smile

E. O. Wilson tells us here how smiling is a universal physiological character:

"Within the face the mouth is the principal instrument of visual communication. The smile in particualr is a rich site of secondary epigenetic rules. Psychologists and anthropologists have discovered substantial degrees of similar programmed development in the uses of smiling across cultures. The expression is first displayed by infants between the ages of two and four months. It invariably attracts an abundance of affection from attending adults. Environment has little influence on the maturation of smiling. The infants of the !Kung, a hunter-gatherer people of South Africa's Kalahari desert, are nurtured under vey different conditions from those in America and Europe. [...] Yet their smile is identical in form to that of American and European infants, appears at the same time, and serves the same social function. Smiling also appears on schedule in deaf-blind children and even in thalidomide-deformed children who are not only deaf and blind but also crippled so badly they cannot touch their own faces."

E. O. Wilson, Consilience, From genes to culture.