Turning Right on Red: My South African Family

When people heard I was going to Johannesburg, or "Jozie" or "Joburg" as I'll refer to it from here on out, reactions were decidedly mixed. In some cases it felt like people were even mad at me, like "why would you waste your time there?" and "Joburg sucks!" Like somehow I was offending them with my travel choice. But I wasn't going to Joburg just to visit Joburg (and all transit in South Africa seems to stem through the place anyways), I was looking up long lost cousins that I'd always heard about growing up. The truth about the place is that without a car and idea of where to go, it isn't great. And if you compare it to Capetown, the place everybody kept screaming at me to go, I understand the bad rep. But Joburg, the business center of South Africa, is also not a bad place.

There are jacaranda trees everywhere and the flower pedals are everywhere. Along with the artificial hills made with the dirt from the old gold mines, the place is distinct. Johannesburg is very spread out and a lot of the city is pretty boring, just a lot of shopping malls and traffic jams really. The reputation for being dangerous also doesn't help Joburg's cause.

My second cousins, the Zars, are very wealthy and as strange as it is to stay with family you've never met, they made me feel at home. I was interested to meet them, in part, because I am curious about where I come from. I could just as easily have been South African (the majority of the Jews there come frorm Lithuania).

The father of the Zar family started a box and foam materials producing factory which employees like 70 workers, so apparently business is in my blood! Almost all groundworkers were Black and the management White and getting a tour of the place was a bit eerie. On the other hand it was admirable how the business was built from the ground up. When thinking about race and South Africa, knowing it's my own family changed my ability to judge. These people I stayed with are very generous and good people and yet I had a hard time hearing their analysis of Apartheid. It turns out, as most things do, that despite worldwide opposition to Apartheid, the issue was literally and figuratively not Black and White.

In previous times, Communism was a serious threat and my cousin told me if they gave Blacks the vote before Communism had ended they might have lost everything they owned. The Zars came from Lithuania just like my ancestors and worked hard to get businesses and earn money and start new lives. Of course they were part of a system that even as immigrant Jews you had higher status than blacks and enjoyed many advantages; However, even though they had advantages doesn't mean they didn't earn something. Of course, this all came at a great cost and the sacrifice, or oppression, in my opinion was intolerable. My cousin's main point, which I think is very legitimate (especially coming from places of deep conflict historyy like Rwanda and Israel), is if you weren't there you can't know about it. The whole thing makes me question what I would have done in my cousin's shoes faced with the same questions.

I've also grown up in a different time. I definitely recognize privilege and institutional racism in a way that this family here might not identify. Being Jewish meant integration was even harder. The Zars themselves would admit that they live in a Jewish bubble in a majority black population. I mean it's not like I have that many black friends back home but life just doesn't feel so segregated in the US. The Zars looked at me kind of like an anomoly I think. Maybe I shouldn't have told them I was really into the traditional music of Soweto and how I lived in the "bush" in East Africa. It was totally foreign for them.

This visit really got me thinking and wondering about roots, privilege, how we get to be who we are, and parallel universes in which your ancestors made some different decisions and you ended up in a different place as a different person. There's also the possibility that you never come in to existence in the first place.