In the Western news media, South Africa is often treated as an African success story, with attention focused on its wealthy businessmen, its elegant neighborhoods and its glimmering malls. But the glitz obscures another reality, one of continuing inequality, poverty and injustice, as Danny Schecther observed on a recent visit.
It’s Friday night, and the motorways are packed with cars heading for the mall.
Here in Durban, the Gateway Mall is the destination of choice. It’s huge, the biggest of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere. It’s stuffed with stuff, much of it upscale, calling itself a “theater of shopping.” (It is actually built over what was once a dump.)
The parking lots are packed with late-model cars, many of them high-end.
I have to confess, I was invited there to see America’s latest high culture import, the 3D version of the movie “Transformers 3,” based on a toy and cartoon, in a modern movie complex with 18 theaters and rows and rows of packed gates where you line up for endless popcorn and soft drinks.
Business was booming; the theater was full. Most of the crowd seemed to be whites and Indians, but there were also many blacks now firmly anchored in the consumer life-style.
As I found out a few years ago at this same mall, but in a smaller theater, when I showed my film “In Debt We Trust,” many South Africans are deeply in debt to their credit-card companies with inordinate amounts of money also flowing to their cell-phone suppliers.
On the way out, past the beaches, past the spanking new but underused stadiums built for the World Cup, past the Sun Coast Casino and past the convention center where the International Olympic Committee was still meeting, we drove by what’s called a settlement, a collection of tin shacks where destitute migrants from the countryside and other African states live in squalor.
It was a reminder of the deep poverty that co-exists with the affluence of the mall culture. [...]
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