Last week of class in Cape Town, or, opinions of the South African government

We're almost to the end of our South Africa classes, which is crazy. Cape Town flew by. I'm off next week. My plans still aren't locked down, but it looks like I'll being staying in a house with some other IHPers near the beach in town for the beginning of the week, then traveling north for a few days with a smaller subset. It should be fun, and rather relaxing.

These last few days have been full, though not all that taxing. Yesterday I was with a small group walking around Khayalitsha, an enormous township (the second largest in the country, after Soweto. Or for another comparison, Khayalitsha has around a million residents vs. 55,000 residents in downtown Cape Town.) We were with locals who showed us where they live, where their friends live, and service upgrades--the entire area was a self-built, informal settlement, and since apartheid the city has been slowly formalizing--paving roads, adding power and water, and building houses. Some say they're doing a good job, some have been rioting in the street, as part of nation-wide 'service delivery protests' against the governments failu fulfill its promises.

On Tuesday, a group of us got to see that government in action: we got to sit in on a pretty big-deal session of Parliament: the president and all the cabinet ministers were there to hear the finance minister present the three-year budget, covering the first recession the current country has faced since 1994. We also (through an IHP student's connection),met with representatives of the Democratic Alliance (DA) party, the 'official' opposition party to the ever-ruling ANC. Between Khayalitsha residents and DA members, I got quite a range of perspectives on the ANC.