From Soweto to the Southern Suburbs of Beirut

The South African townships (especially Soweto, which is primo inter pares) have, as a result of their place in history, acquired a mythical aura. The word itself, especially in the definite plural “the Townships”, is immediately identifiable as referring to South Africa. It is synonymous with poverty, uprising, and the struggle for justice – all nice, easy, powerful metaphors. Yet, the Townships have layers and subtleties that make them awkward to assimilate: they’re not bite-size like Ellis Island, for example. Succinctly: they are not yet museum pieces; they are living communities that still exist.

The Townships have caught the attention of tourists and backpackers – and tour providers. Visiting the Townships is a chance to see the “real” South Africa (or ease the consciences the day after their wine tour in Stellenbosch). Lonely Planet (I don’t know about the Concierge at the Hilton) will tell you just where to reserve a bus that will take you into the township. There, your guide (a bona fide township resident himself) will show you around. Some tours include visiting a family in the township and having a meal with them. At the end of your day, you climb onboard the bus and ride back to the parts of town where the banks have are two guards with pump-action .12 gauges and german-shepherds at the door and the streets are surveilled by CCTV cameras.

When I was in South Africa, I did not take a township tour. And heaven knows, I did not venture into the townships on my own.

I did not take the tour because it seemed to me like a bizarre form of poverty tourism. It seemed voyeuristic and all too easy. By design, it is a painless moral adventure. At its highest, the experience is merely vicarious. In many cases I suspect the visitors do not experience in any way what is significant about the Townships.

Second, there is always something off-putting about participant observation. What I mean is that it is much tidier to become acquainted with and visit things that are finished, such as Nelson Mandela’s prison, Ellis Island. This is the usual approach; our paradigm of visitation and of study operates in the past tense. We visit pyramids, not construction sites. Visits to living things connote that they are museum pieces. The insult is quite real, in many cases, since we only know one way of observing things, and that is ex post facto.

But there are still people living in the Townships, and their lives suck. Who wants to visit that?

The townships came back to me as a result of a recent conversation with an Oxford M.Phil student in Development (my chosen programme for next year) who is studying Arabic with me here in Cairo.

We were discussing travel to Lebanon at this time of conflict. She came out of the corner swinging at the idea: it’s offensive; it’s insulting; it’s stupidly dangerous; Oxford would call it unethical. She said the last point with particular gravitas. Clearly it should much impress me. Not only did Oxford say so, but I would soon be a student there, either thinking that too, or being told to I should.

In short, to travel with a purpose, such as journalism, might be acceptable, but not to go merely to “check out the war” could never be.

There is, a bit like poverty tourism, a new form of conflict tourism. One could add disaster and protest tourism. How many people at WTO protests are there for tear gas and adrenaline (the soundtrack to their sexy lives courtesy of iPod, which never skips while running from the cops), and how many because they genuinely want to influence the meetings? The banality of urban life is so mind-numbing that young people seek temporary, and (they believe) safe exposure to anarchy, disaster or war just to remind themselves that they are alive.

Last year some students from the Summer Course at the American University in Cairo decided to go to Iraq to “check out the war” after exams. What else is there to do before school starts? Mercifully, they met coalition troops a short time after crossing the border. The soldiers gave them taps on the bum and sent them scurrying back home, undoubtedly giggling to one another about having the coolest story ever. “My summer in Iraq” is about the best material imaginable for picking up in frosh week.

These kids were idiots. Their attitude was wrong. But (as someone with a genetic need to take risks)I began to wonder about what “purpose” one should have in doing dangerous things? What might be the adequate purpose my friend was referring to?

She argued that it was not our place to remain in or enter zones of conflict. Foreign students at the American University in Beirut who wanted to stay as an act of solidarity were offending rather than comforting. Those Lebanese to whom they wished to show their support might not be able to get out because they did not have foreign citizenship or financial means. How would they be happy at some rich American kid giving up their ticket out on a cruise-ship in the name of some naïve form of solidarity?

There is something disquieting about Western countries’ ability to call a time-out on the field of war, obtain certificates of safe-passage, and evacuate their fawn-eyed citizens, trembling like startled woodland creatures, before the killing resumes. I suspect there is a card with this power in the game Magic (e.g. “returns all creatures to hand; can be played at any time”) – but in life?

That, however, is a problem of nationalities and wealth. To refuse to leave when given this chance is in fact a resounding rebuke of that injustice – as long as the consequences are accepted. What is more offensive is the expectation that the Embassy can and always will play the “get out jail free” card. It’s like relying on the existence of the Coast Guard or Search & Rescue as an excuse to be unprepared while boating; on doctors and technology as an excuse for bad health. The Coast Guard and hospitals are indispensable – but it is always preferable to take responsibility for one’s self and rely upon one’s own resources first. The nonchalance and sense of entitlement flowing from nationality and wealth are worse than nationality and wealth themselves, because they are easier to abolish. Indeed, they can be eliminated immediately by fiat of will alone.

That I think deals with the foreigners who choose to stay in contrast with Lebanese who choose to stay. What about when those who possess the means choose not leave while many who wish to go lack them? It is a simple matter of personal freedom of choice. A less loaded example, I think, makes the point more clearly.

Say I am traveling on budget of 25 USD a day. This budget obliges me to stay in very modest, shared lodging. In reality, I want very much to stay in the fanciest hotels. In my dorm room I meet another traveler who tells me that she just sold her business for 200 million USD and is backpacking around the world to find herself. I am enraged: she has the means to stay in all the hotels I dream about, but chooses the same roach-motel that I am forced to stay in. Can I blame her for this choice, and ask reproachingly: “why do you stay here when you don’t have to? It is not your place.”

Just as every person has a different tolerance of discomfort and uncleanliness in their accommodation, so too does every person have a different tolerance of risk. What seems suicidally dangerous to one, may be quite normal to another (e.g. mountaineering). The coexistence of the fact of differential means and the principle of autonomy or freedom of choice compel me to accept the roach-motel millionaire and the willing refusenik backpackers who are in Beirut as of today.

If that result is repugnant, then one must seek an equilibrium of means, not an elimination of choice. The choice of a person who can leave to stay will not inherently or always be offensive or reprehensible in my view.

However, I don’t think it is a contradiction to then say that there can be enquiry into the basis for that choice to stay in a zone of conflict. The simple statement “yes, you can, but I don’t think you should” expresses how I believe this second, softer line analysis can be accommodated within the first more categorical point that people have a right to stay. The judgement is esthetic, however. One person’s reason may be distasteful, and another’s honourable, but there is no basis there for stopping the former.

My friend from the United States, as I have said, sought to base her judgment on whether there was a “purpose” to being in a conflict zone. Her concept of purpose was essentially articulated around an ethic of altruism: Self-sacrifice (i.e. putting one’s self in the line of fire) is justifiable when it serves others (for example, by educating them about the situation through journalistic writing). Acts of solidarity, the mere desire to bear witness, and (worst of all) any personal sense of excitement could not justify remaining in or traveling to a war zone.

I found this idea of purpose puzzling. Defined in this way, purpose seemed to me a measure of the extent to which an act benefits others (society), but not the self. From the perspective of each person, “society” was humanity minus one – one’s self. But to every person other than me whose view of society is constructed in this way, I am a part of society. Unless I am a solipsist, and without making the argument “6 billion people minus one can’t be wrong”, it seems to me more plausible that I am a part of society, than to say that I am not.

Now, tracing the line of purpose around the sphere of the self makes less sense. Even if the goal is benefiting “society”, I can do so by benefiting myself. For example, my friend would be acting “purposefully” if she did something for me. It seems clear, then, that if I were to do for myself what she would otherwise do for me, from her perspective it must be good. How then, by changing point of view and adopting my perspective could it be bad?

Unwilling to accept that an action could be good or bad merely based on this shift in perspective, I see only one alternative for defending this view of “purpose”. The question become one of impact: If one could do more good when labouring for others than for one’s self, it might be wrong to serve one’s self. Because although in absolute terms a person doing something for himself would do good, he would do less good than if he worked for others. Thus, he would be underperforming, so to speak, relative to the good he could do for the world.

Amusingly, if the same were true of others, then it would also be in everyone’s self-interest to work for the benefit of others since if they did the same, each person would benefit more than if he worked for himself. However, every so-called altruistic act could potentially be rationalized as self-interest. The normative argument is not advanced and the question is transformed to be what is the basic nature of human beings?

Even accepting the utilitarian premise – that good to “society”, where society includes one’s self, should be maximized – there are two stumbling blocks to the “others” orientation.

First, I suspect that people’s efforts on behalf of others are not greater than those on behalf of themselves. On the contrary, I fear that when people are shamed by this ethic of purpose into not doing things for themselves any longer, the result is lethargy. It is a hope – more than a belief – of mine that the positive emotions motivate more than the negative ones.

I could be wrong in my assessment of human nature. I just finished a book about Dr. Paul Farmer called Mountains Behind Mountains, subtitled “A man who would cure the world”. Farmer’s energy exceeds that of any living human being of whom I am aware, with one possible exception in Jim Palardy. He says, about what makes him tick, that “if you’re making sacrifices…you’re trying to lessen some psychic discomfort.” Most of my nuits blanches have been spent with the sword of Damocles hanging over me…

Second, especially when thinking societally, it is difficult to estimate effects. For example, my friend said that in this moment she could have more impact in southern Lebanon by writing her Congressman than by being there. I don’t know, but there might have been better examples: this didn’t seem like an example where a letter would have much effect.

The statement impressed me, however, with its exceeding humility. A young, energetic, driven and intelligent American woman focusing on the Middle East in her studies believed that her biggest impact is through a letter writing campaign to her Congressman. I would have expected her to consider at least possible the prospect of one day becoming a policy-maker, a professor, the next Robert Fisk, or a Congresswoman. Then, remembering the horrors she would have seen with her own eyes in Lebanon, she could act accordingly.

“We know what we are, but we know not what we may be”. It would be an error to excuse one’s self from the present in the name of the future, but, a person’s full impact will not be made in a day. Most powerfully of all, they may reverberate after their death along the walls of the deep canyon of the centuries.

So I am compelled to provide my standard. I have already suggested that there may be good and bad attitudes in making the choice, the good being self-reliance, and the bad being expectation of rescue and sense of entitlement. I would be content – amazed, even – if people simply took responsibility for their actions.

Responsibility requires assumption of risk. Assumption of risk requires understanding and information about the risk one is assuming, lest obliviousness be taken for courage. Laika, the first dog in space was not courageous; Yuri Gargarin, the first man, was. I hasten to add that assuming great risks is not prima facie evidence of not understanding or appreciating them. It may be madness (of a sort), but it is not ignorance or stupidity, although those are very soothing lies.

It is on the basis of that principle that I couldn’t bring myself to respect the students who went to Iraq. It seemed clear to me that they neither understood the risks nor were prepared to assume the consequences for their actions.

In fact, I wondered if one of the reasons they did not take responsibility for themselves wasn’t precisely because they assumed others exist to serve them. Like children at a movie theater who leave the drink and half-finished popcorn on the floor when they would be so easy to carry to the bin, saying “the janitor is paid to clean that up after me”, I wondered if they didn’t go saying “it’s alright, my government exists to take after me”.

There comes a point where it no longer suffices to live vicariously through books, museums or the internet, letting others take care of our education – or lives. When this point comes, many think: now others will live vicariously through me, as I live through others. They become teachers, writers, parents – whatever they wish – and lead meaningful lives because they are depended upon. For them, the progression is from dependence to being depended upon, and not to independence. It’s no wonder, if that is all they knew, as slaves will own slaves if given the chance.

I am indebted to all the teachers I have had – both in and out of the classroom. When I know something that others do not (this experience is infrequent, but has occurred) I have always tried to teach them. But learning, I think, has its own finality distinct from teaching. Learning precedes teaching, and may be justified without it.

This left me asking: who among us is living? How many are in contact with the raw materials of human existence, and how many are devoted to its infinite refinement and recycling? Have you seen a river, a tree, a mountain, or a knife with blood on it? Have you walked or paddled or pulled a trigger? Have you carried a corpse, smelled burning rubber or heard 200 black boots on hot black tarmac?

As Robert Service asks in his poem The Call of the Wild “Have you … ‘Done things’ just for the doing, letting the babblers tell the story”? There is a purpose to things that begin – and end – within the self.

My mind returned to the example of the townships. I still thought it was crass in most cases. But it was the attitude, not the act, which made it crass. Even so, I would, I think, rather see people in Soweto than at the BMV pavilion on the Cape Town waterfront. Maybe one or two them will be moved – even if only by their own preposterousness.

Rather that than what my friend from Oxford would have me do – stick to the places where I belong, where the prices are high and the tourists abound, typing letters to my congressman from my laptop before dinner.