Journey into the "other" South Africa

The setting is a large rural settlement in South Africa's Mpumalanga Province. The background to this region's development is of course intricately linked to its past: a homeland outside Pretoria created by the Apartheid Government in the name of 'separate development'. The environment is rural: cattle, goats, donkeys and chickens roam freely, while members of this community carry on with their daily lives, far removed from the hustle and bustle of the "other South Africa" - the one characterised by Western civilisation's pillars: individualism, private property & title deeds, credit and mortgages, money, commercialisation, consumerism and personal wealth accumulation. They are all at odds with an idealised Africa.

Here in Siyabuswa, the R578 carries traffic, goods, and passengers past rural dwellers for whom time has a different meaning. It is safe to assume that the principles outlined in "The Fifth Discipline" are unknown to the locals, as it addresses problems and a world that are not relevant to this part of the globe. Or is it?

My journey into this new world continues - the world which Castells describes, and the insights of Malcolm Gladwell are not known here, at least I don't think so. The changed and changing world of work that Charles Handy predicted so eloquently must still reach these shores - for even the Internet is either absent or slower here, or has hardly 'penetrated' the community! Here, people still talk to each other without the need for apps and digital devices. The massive store of information on the WWW is yet to be tapped - and enriched by the contributions of the indigenous knowledge nurtured by the local community. Fake news is still to be discovered. At least the cellphone has made a change, but instead of using it in classrooms for teaching, the teachers use it merely to socialise and communicate with friends and family. Data and airtime are excessively expensive. Thus, cellphones are used when necessary, only for important matters.

Work for some here remains in the realm of what I have come to call "the wheelbarrow approach to work" - I often come across groups of workers who merely sit and look at the tasks at hand, or lie in wheelbarrows on a hot day, waiting for the day to pass. Perhaps their tasks are menial and meaningless - why would one, in fact, sweep a dusty road if it is more or less dusty everywhere? Why would one collect plastic garbage strewn along the walkways if there is nowhere to recycle it, or merely pile it onto the even bigger pile of garbage next to the roads? Tomorrow there will be garbage again. No need to rush.

I don't know what's below the surface - I'm merely a respectful traveller, observant to the effects of the past on the present... and a future that will be hardly different from the past.