Soweto!

So the blog silence has been because I have spent the last four days in Soweto! Soweto, site of the student uprisings of the 1970's and '80s that gave the liberation movement its second wind when most of its leaders had been jailed or exiled; Soweto, synonymous with resistance and struggle; Soweto, slum of the world.

No, no, kidding on that last part. But Soweto is fascinating in its contradictions. Some parts look like fairly well-kept lower middle class neighborhoods: brick houses, cars in the driveways, well-tended lawns, kids playing in the street. Many of the houses were built around World War II when the residents had to rent them from the government--blacks weren't allowed to own property--but they've now become homeowners, and it's a sign of prosperity to have made renovations to your house, like replastering it or replacing the tin roof. Then a block away will be vacant fields where kids scavenge for scrap metal to sell, and at night the sky gets heavy and hazy with smoke as people start their fires because there's no electricity.

There are many things to say about Soweto, and I will touch on some of them in future posts. But here's one that stands out:

I ate kota, also known as bunnychow. Yeah, exactly. It's designed to be heavy, substantial food for very little money--5 rand, or about eighty cents. For that you get about half a loaf of bread filled with mashed potatoes, unidentified meats, chicken feet--the FEET, people, not a drumstick, not attached to a leg, just the feet, complete with little chicken toes and little chicken toenails--and some vegetable stew, all crowned by a piece of American cheese and a slab of bologna. When I ordered it at one of the little roadside stands where it's sold, the lady thought I was mistaken because white people never eat it. She kept trying to redirect me to the sandwiches. But I had been told that my Soweto experience would not be complete without eating kota, so I ate it. I ate it all. I even ate what little meat I could find on the creepy little chicken feet. And here is my conclusion:

Black people are not nearly angry enough.

We all know that in the U.S. we did the same thing: during slavery, whites gave whatever was left over of the animal to blacks. And I have always focused on the creativity and ingenuity of American blacks in taking that meat and making delicacies out of it. But having now eaten some of these inferior cuts of meat, which here was called "boysmeat" (i.e. the meat you would feed to your house boy) I say again: you should be much, much angrier than you are. Really, it should be a rallying point. And while people have done a great job of making it palatable, even tasty, I mean there's no lack of effort here, you can just tell it's not good meat. Taco Bell would reject this meat, is what I am saying. And by the way, you can pile anything you want on top of tripe and it in no way diminishes or disguises the fact that it's sheep intestines. The tough chewiness gives it away every time. Yeah, I've eaten that too.