Preliminary plan for research project into transitional justice and reconciliation.

Inspiration:

Sitting waiting for the train today made me realise something important about South Africa and life after apartheid. ‘Apartheid’ means ‘separateness’ or being apart. Between 1948 and 1994, apartheid meant, for South Africa, that there was a separation of the people depending on the colour of their skin: whether they were white, black, or coloured. Since 1994, when Nelson Mandela was released and apartheid abolished people have been, in theory, free to go where they choose and mix with others with no formal legal barrier. But in that moment at the train station, however, I had to seriously ask myself: is apartheid really something that we have seen the back of? Do we really have ‘integration’ and togetherness?

The metro rail system here is divided by two different classes-the first and third class. We have been advised, as white volunteers from all over the world, that we should ALWAYS use the first class carriages because being present in the last four carriages would subject us to all kinds of danger…and all at the small price of an extra few pence. There have even been stories around the office of foreign students being dragged from a carriage for being in the 3^rd class compartment by mistake-given the strict warning ‘never sit here-you have no idea of the danger!’

So what is the ethnic breakdown of these two classes of carriage? Need you ask? That’s right, the third class carriage tends to be coloured or black travellers-whilst the first class has several more white faces. So now it appears that there is division between citizens based on their economic circumstance-something our project leader Theodore Kimwimbi has also pointed out to me during the first few days of our induction into the program. I’m interested to know what others think about this theory and to get some different points of view on the correlation between economic segregation and race segregation. I hope that this is the start of some in-depth research whilst I’m over here-or at the very least to spark debate enough to fuel others’ enthusiasm for such a project.