Pondering in Pondoland

I’m back again in Pondoland, this time checked into a seaside tourist lodge in the village of Mbotyi. To get here you drive 26km down a paved-then-dirt road from Lusikisiki. Three quarters of the way a road signs instructs you to engage your lowest gear as the road cuts daringly down the side of a mountain. You wonder who built this road - and why? They must have really wanted a swim.

At the end of the road I meet the Irish. There are 60 of them. The receptionist had already "warned" me about them over the phone. I expected a mad adventure holiday gang, and was inwardly marvelling at ability of the Irish to organise a piss up in a brewery at the end of the world. Turns out that wasn't why they were here at all - well, not officially.

The Irish are a collection of builders, electricians, teachers, nutritionists, and 16-year-olds in their “transition year” – the Irish version of the gap year that they take while still at school – who are here with the charity Friends in Ireland to build what the local municipality haven’t bothered to.

I met them at the bar at the end of a long day. They were exhausted, covered in dirt and sweat from another day of building, but their eyes sparkled with what they’d achieved. For some of them, this was their fourth “patrol” in South Africa. Previously they’d built feeding stations for orphans in Franklin, Bizana, Flagstaff and Lusikisiki. This time round they were building a security office for one of the feeding stations, building a crèche in Mboyti, teaching musical skills and planting a garden at one of the schools to show the children how to grow vegetables.

I found this a bit odd. The people in this area are subsistence farmers. They live on the most fertile soil in South Africa and are famed in history for having homed and fed Europeans shipwrecked along this Wild Coast (which is why so many Pondo people have pale skins). Why do they need someone from Europe to teach them how to farm the land? I can believe children who live in a multi-story flat in Ireland might need to be taught that vegetables come from the ground and not a plastic bag, but out here?

It sounds like the owner of the Mbotyi shebeen was also a bit perplexed. He asked one of the Irish what they get out of this? Exactly why are they here? I think it’s a question worth pondering.

On the one hand you've got municipal councillors who are paid to bring key services to the rural poor, but don't, and on the other you've got Irish people who are donating their free time to raise money back home and then build services with that money. Why do they do it?

Brian, one of the Irish guys, told the shebeen owner that they can learn a lot from people out here. That people in Ireland have lost the run of themselves, that they've lost the values despite having everything. The same came be said for many people living in the West, but does that really explain why some people crave a front-row seat in the theatre of poverty? I asked him again: Why are you here? He shrugged and said: "You feel good when you go home."

That got me thinking about the feel-good feeling. Western society is so slammed for being individualistic, for being motivated by the pleasure principle and only doing things that make us feel good. We collect shiny baubles because they reflect back to our ego just how clever and successful we are. But is not perhaps that same ego, hungry to feel nice, that motivates us to do charity work? Do we perhaps care because it gives us pleasure?

The day before I'd interviewed the Queen of Pondoland (more on this later). The discussion had turned to the chronic corruption in the local Lusikisiki/Flagstaff municipality. I remarked that I found it incomprehensible that so much corruption was tolerated, especially since to my eyes, African people seem to have a greater duty of care for each other than people living in Western society. If your sister dies in African society, you must care for her children. In Western society, we'd only do it if it made us feel good.

The Queen remarked that this duty of care could be one of the explanations of the corruption." It comes exactly from African families taking care of their extended families. You get nepotism. It has riddled all these municipalities right now. Nepotism I think does have some traditional roots. Except of course now, politics also counts. But generally it comes from my feeling responsible to help my uncle’s brother-in-law, you just go back forever. And that’s why this corruption is in the tender system, because someone wants to take care of their brothers, their uncles, and with that comes kickbacks, bribes."

As I drove those winding Transkei roads, I pondered whether there's a misfit between the African duty of care and the western sense of Democracy. Democracy gives everyone ego a chance to stand up for their bit of the pie. But it works – perhaps – just as long as everyone is only fighting for enough of the pie to satiate themselves, to make their ego feel good. Democracy works because we are inherently selfish. As soon as I start fighting for enough of the pie to satiate everyone else, then it falls flat on its face.

There's my bit of bakkie philosophy. It's like armchair philosophy, just with a few more bumps and holes.