I have been traveling to Africa with fair frequency for ten years now. No matter what part of the continent I have visited, I always come away with a mixture of feelings from great amazement to great sorrow. During the time of apartheid, Nelson Mandela's incarceration, the Truth and Reconciliation Hearings, I tried to learn what I could to get my head around what had been happening there. I was raised in a racist atmosphere and like many, have not only a low tolerance for it but a curiosity as to what causes it and why it just can't stop dead in its tracks and vanish.
As well, my travels in Africa opened my eyes to a kind of poverty I had never seen before which overwhelmed me. What I saw made me think differently about food, water, life, existence, America, pretty much everything. IFC gave me a budget which allowed me to go to South Africa with a camera crew and ask some questions to people there. As with the other times I have been to Africa, the experience was eye opening and much more than I am able to describe. Hopefully you will be able to check out the footage we shot and see the people we encountered. They are some of the most courageous, resilient and inspiring people I have ever met. There is no place I have ever been that makes me feel so connected, for better or for worse, to the human experience than Africa and this trip was perhaps the most poignant of them all.
I really liked the way you connecd with the aptly named Africa.
Unike most Westerners who seem to conduct interviews with Natives as if they were holding a used snot-rag at arms length, you really seemed to connect with these guys...
To say this is just racist is a simplification of a complex system. To make a comparison: In US. a kid from Beverly Hills is considered sophisticated and classy over a so-called white t rash of some small Southern town. I think the term "trailer rash' or "white t rash" is as bad as any racist term.
Those of us who actually grew up in South Africa during apartheid know it was far more than the color of one's skin. If history is studied, the appalling violence and hatred was not just white versus black, but largely black versus black.
It is a very complex and interesting country with a phenomenal resilience but a profound understanding of its unique melting pot that visitors and outsiders don't have the experience to grasp.