waiting

Thabo Mbeki resigned his leadership of the dominant ANC (African National Congress) party and his presidency of South Africa on 21 September. Ehud Olmert resigned his leadership of Kadima and his position as Prime Minister of Israel the same day. Many of us in South Africa hoped President Bush would follow suit, but I guess you can't ask for everything.

We can wait. The world has been sitting on its hands for the last eight years, willing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to end and oil prices to fall and jobs to reappear and for Americans to get a clue. The spiral keeps tunneling deeper. But if we can learn anything from Africans, it is the refined art of waiting. And I am not only talking about how Africans will stand in a grocery queue for twenty minutes waiting for check out, or sit on the curb for an hour with the rain pelting their head waiting for the bus, or sit in their market stall in silence for an entire day waiting for one customer to glance at wooden elephant statues on display. I am also talking about how Africans will forgive, almost to a fault, everything that has been inflicted upon them, and continue to wait for an improvement in circumstances that may never come. They wait in Khayelitscha and wait for the day their children will live somewhere other than a corrugated tin and wood plank shack that floods during the winter and spring, and they wait for they day when a black woman's ambitions will soar higher than the position of a cleaner. But many black South Africans, at least those with whom I am friends and with whom I have shared conversations, do not seek revenge on the roots of the problem, on apartheid and white Western exploitation. Revenge does not solve anything. They forgive and they progress when they can and wait when they cannot.

And so our country too, the United States, is learning to sit for hours in the rain, waiting for it to evaporate off our skulls and constricted chests. We are not waiting alone, though. That hope and waiting is shared by the world, and especially by Africans. Calm, silhouetted images of Barack Obama are tattooed on street signs, on garbage cans, and on walls. His myth and his symbols stretch out in a network around America. I do not believe in myths; I am too jaded and realistic for that. But I believe in policy, both hard political and economic plans and strategies and soft cultural permeations. The latter is already making headway domestically and globally through visuals and discourse, and the significance and applicability of the former is becoming all too relevant in the last few weeks alone in America. So we can wait. And we can forgive. And we will eventually move forward.