venerdì 1 maggio 2015

Zululand

A couple of days ago I went to uShaka, Durban's marine park. Turists, surfers, families and children visiting the aquarium, a show of trained seals for the entertainment of the visitors. A beer festival on the beachfront. It was an exciting atmosphere for the Freedom Day, the most important South African public holiday, that celebrates the anniversary of the first free elections post-apartheid, in 1994.
It was a cosmopolitan ambient, not really African.
Then I went working in the deep province of KwaZulu-Natal and I saw the other side of the coin: the Zulu common people's villages, quite far from the city.

Ndwedwe is a little village just 60 km north of Durban, laid on the beautiful Valley of a Thousands Hills. Here the luxury of the city is really far away. We went to play in Ndwedwe in order to
accompany choral groups of Zulu students living in the surroundings, taking part in the South African Schools Choral Eisteddfod, that is a festival of youth choirs taking place every year in Durban.
In that village I have seen faces marked by that poise and wisdom belonging to people used to trust only their land, which gives them food and job, well far from the postures of the city people. I watched at them while walking around, and they gave me an impression of down-to-earth and level headed people, friendly but not deceitful or smarmy, and I liked them.
The boys and girls in the choirs, dressing different uniforms depending on the school whom they belonged, looked unpretentious but well-aware and determined, typical features of small-town inhabitants.

This, I thought, is Zululand. But then, I recalled that the symbolic and moral leader of Zulu people is a king who in the last weeks has wished for the foreign African immigrants to go back to their countries, because in his opinion they would steal the job from the Zulus. His words, quoted by the newspapers, instigated xenophobic violence in Durban, violence degenerated in destroyed shops and casualties in the riots.
The fact is that Goodwill Zwelithini kaBhekuzulu, king of the Zulus since half a century ago, holds a role recognized by the South African constitution, as constitutional monarch of the Zulu kingdom within KwaZulu-Natal, as well as head of other Zulu institutions.
So, his declarations must not be taken lightly. At any rate, they have been taken even too seriously by those unemployed and exasperated ones that have attacked the shops run by African immigrants, in one of the poorest areas in the city.
The scandal is that the Zulu king, with six wives and 28 children, wastes money crazily and in a way that is totally disrespectful to his own people, most of them living in poverty. In order to reply to criticism and condemn xenophobia, king Goodwill Zwelithini held a political meeting at the monumental Moses Mabhida Stadium, last week.

I wonder what the quiet working people of Ndwedwe will think about this person.
Anyways, every time I discover new pieces of South African life, a world that never stops to surprise me.