We got the chance to visit representatives from the two dominant political parties in South Africa.  Really, there is only one—The African National Congress—which grew out of the liberation struggle and who Nelson Mandela represented.  The only significant opposition is the Democratic alliance.  Though the ANC has been in power for 18 years it isn’t clear if this is because people actually agree with their policies and have seen affect from their implementation or if they are simply scared that the Democratic Alliance will reinstate the apartheid.  Most people have resigned to not voting at all, so though the ANC may win the percentage every year by a large amount, the actual number of votes is decreasing.

I won’t go into large detail about the platform of each group, mostly because it didn’t interest me.  I wanted a real view of these parties, not their propaganda   You can see that there is a large amount of corruption in both parties and that neither is really putting people at the forefront of their goals.  However, the ANC is a very interesting group.  It is a democracy within itself and is made up of several groups including communist and capitalist.  This presents some concerns about how quickly and efficiently they are able to get things done with such diverse debates.

We asked each group about prevalent issues we had seen in their communities, but I felt like both representatives danced around the answers or root causes (one of the many similarities between here in South Africa and the United States).  The ANC claims to be the voice of the people, but I worry that with their lack of competition that they could (or have) become complacent.  And the DA seems to think it is acceptable to exploit workers who have no choice but to accept extremely low wages when left unemployed.  They worry that demanding fair treatment of workers will discourage investors from coming to South Africa.  Overall, they gave us a refined and politically correct overview of their parties beliefs

Later on in the day, we went to Nando’s again (the South African chain that sells portugese food).  This place is apparently going to be one of our favorites.  It beats KFC, which is extremely popular (though slightly more upscale than in the US) and a place called Chicken Lickin which is comparable to the KFC that we know.  There are countless other chicken restaurants—meat is extremely popular here, particularly poultry. These restaurants are all located in malls that we have been visiting (there are a lot of them).  I’ve noticed that their grocery stores are connected here, unlike home where malls are mostly clothing, electronics, and food courts.  It’s like Wal-Mart (or here Pick ‘n Pay) is a department store.

We also visited a migrant workers museum and saw a South African play in the evening at a place called Market Theatre.  The play was really interesting with funky tribal music and dancing, but many of us struggled with figuring out the symbolism.  I think our brains had checked out at that point—we were cramming a lot of information into them.