Day 5-Cape Town, Race Relations in Modern South Africa

Today's blog was written by Nelson, Bryan, and Myles

“Hey buddy, hey buddy. Come over here. You looking for something?” said the street vendor to the Marist Student.

Nelson, looking at a traditional African painting under the vendor’s tent, replied “No, no I’m just looking around.”

The vendor answered “Help me open my shop, be my first customer. You’ll bring me good luck. We can negotiate; name your price for that tapestry.”

“I’m not trying to spend much money. I’ll give you a 100R.” said Nelson.
“100R? Are you kidding me man, I can only give you this for 160R no less.” The vendor countered.

Standing his ground, Nelson did not budge from his offer and began to walk away. When he had gotten almost 10 feet, the vendor crumbled and yelled “Okay man just take it. 100R you have a deal.”

That is just a brief example of the bartering experience we had at Green Market Square late this morning in Cape Town. As you can see from our photo, Marist students bought goods from vendors ranging from a traditional Zulu Tribe war mask to a large African tapestry. This was the first time that many members of the group had ever haggled for goods, and everyone was very happy to bargain for some authentic African merchandise to bring home.

Earlier in the morning, the group had taken a ride on the cable car to the top of Table Mountain. After only a 3 ½ minute ride to the top, we had an amazing view of all of Cape Town, Robben Island, and the Twelve Apostle mountain range all the way down to the Cape of Good Hope. We spent about an hour on top of the mountain snapping photos from different viewpoints before we headed back down the mountain and made our way to Green Market Square.

After our experience bartering at Green Market Square, we boarded our bus and made our way to The University of Cape Town for lunch, which was followed by a lecture on race relations in South Africa by a UCT lecturer. The lecture was interesting and eye-opening for many of us because it discussed not only xenophobia and inter/intra-group racism in South Africa, but also the racial baggage and covert racism that many of us in the United States have even today. Although the lecture and our day ended early (about 4pm), it left us with ample time to reflect, work through and resolve racial issues in our own lives. Like yesterday, our experiences thus far have forced us to grow as people, and we embrace the opportunity to give back to the South African community tomorrow as part of our community service projects.