Robots in South Africa

Johannesburg is a strange city; half English and half African. Much of the countryside looks like English countryside, and I was seeing the countryside whilst driving up the M1 Motorway here to Pretoria! In the nice suburbs of Johannesburg you could be any nice part of London – with very good quality street infrastructure (driving on the left of course), very nice houses and Western food. There is a slight difference with the many electric fences on top of the spiked fences around many of the houses and compounds! I spent 5 days working in these areas with lots of meetings in our office and in fancy office buildings around town. And not much walking, as South Africa seems really to be a country for driving, if you can afford it.

Then of course there is the poorer parts of Johannesburg; I spent this morning on a bike tour of SOWETO, the famous part of Johannesburg which was the hub of the anti-apartheid protests and where Mandela lived (for a while, though he spent much of his time undercover or in prison or living in a nicer place as President!) It is a strange area, with some real slum parts but also some areas that are very posh. What is strange is that most of the poorer people don’t live in the slums but in areas that looks like middle class housing – not big, mostly bungalows, but decent condition, made of brick and with gardens. Now they might not have many jobs, but it is I suppose a difference between South Africa and other parts of Africa: there has been some progress. On the tour we saw some memorial sites from apartheid-era protests as well as Mandela’s former house.

It is a strange city/country though. The local food is less “African” than in Kenya, though they have bap (similar to ugali in Kenya) and some stews, but they tend to prefer eating lots of BBQ meat. Some of the public transport is very nice but much of it is pretty poor and not safe. Of course since last year the country has been stuck in a massive power crisis; with regular “load shedding” (i.e. planned power cuts affecting different areas to manage the limited capacity). In our office we had part of a day without power (and internet, shock horror), though one of our buildings has a power generator so everyone can pile in there to work.

I don’t know how dangerous the city is, but it does feel dangerous: a combination of the high security fences around the nice areas; the reputation of the city; and probably just being white in a country of black people (that has high ethnic tensions). In the afternoon I went to the Apartheid Museum that is very well done with an incredible amount of information well delivered in various forms. If anything there is just too much information and sometimes it is hard to see the real themes, or see the bigger picture. But it is highly recommended, and I ended up spending more than 2 hours there. It does drive home the incredible efforts that were made to segregate the blacks from the whites; but it also showed how much violence there was to keep it that way and it was depressing how violent the four-year period was after Mandela was released and whilst the various parties sorted out a constitution and prepared for an election.

At the end of the afternoon I spent an hour walking around downtown Johannesburg. There are some old colonial buildings and a business district, but most of the companies have their shiny buildings out in the suburbs not down town. So downtown is fairly run down, though it is lively with markets and street sellers, whereas the suburbs are fairly barren and just like London suburbs with high streets and shopping malls, but not a lot of life on the streets. Pretoria, as a newer city, seemed less variable: less fancy areas but also less run-down areas. Though it still had some fancy shopping malls, of course.

And the robots? That's what South Africa's call traffic lights. As strange as the many local African languages and the strange accents of the white south Africans too!