Tuesday Jan 27

On Tuesday morning we headed out for our trips. The first of these was the US Embassy. Here we met a nice lady who explained all about what the embassy did, how it worked and about some contemporary South African issues. One of the things that I liked which she said about South Africa/Namibia is that their main staples can be summed up as Beef, Beer and Bread. All three sound good to me, except for maybe the beef but Ill deal. After the Embassy we went to the Voortrekker monument. This edifice, adorned with statues of German colonist holding guns and standing resolutely proud, is a “testament to the journey the Afrikaners took from Cape Town to Pretoria”. The fact that the inside of it is plastered with images of Afrikaners slaughtering the natives to make their journey, much like Europeans did to Native Americans, is not really mentioned. There are some who like to see it torn down but arguably it is piece of history and the history is undeniably important. I personally believe however that is should not be such a source of pride however for Afrikaners.
After the monument and museum we had a speaker come to us who was supposed to talk to us about Afrikaner nationalism. He was a nice guy but I believe there was a language barrier because I was lost very quickly. I tried to pay as much attention as possible but I couldn’t follow. I know he was very religious and made broad claims about good fighting evil without out giving what I would call sufficient definitions of either. Oh well.
Once he was finished we headed to the parliament gardens where we had some very intense discussions about racism in SA and USA, poverty and redistribution, European influence on SA, Apathetic Students, and whether or not the Voortrekker monument should be torn down. We disagreed about some things which was the point but I feel like we did a good job at having constructive argument.