A More Perfect Union

Last Sunday, 20 February 2011, I walked the 5km from my house in Brooklyn, Pretoria to the Union Buildings downtown. The roads and sidestreets leading to the Union Buildings are littered with embassies and consulates, including but not limited to: Nigeria High Commission, Singapore High Commission, High Commission of Malaysia, and of course the concrete Pentagonesque structure that the American diplomats call home, which ominously sits adjacent to the faux Ming architecture of the Chinese embassy. I’ve been told that Pretoria has the highest concentration of embassies and consulates in the world.

The first thing that you notice about the Union Buildings is their depth, as if they are absorbed into the hillside. Approaching the buildings head on, walking up past the expansive lawn, I make my way to the terraced gardens at the base of “the buildings.” The manicured lawn and pruned bushes of the terraced garden brings me back to the gardens of Suzhou, in an Afrikaner sort of way. Yet it is the color of the buildings – reddish-brown sandstone – that holds the city still. The buildings are the color of the Highveld earth, which can be seen all around the hilltops sheltering Pretoria. I take a seat and watch.

The “new” South Africa stands before me. Scattered throughout the grounds I see an Afrikaner family picnicking with their white wine; there is an Asian family, most likely immigrants from Vietnam (best guess from the language I heard), celebrating a wedding in their Sunday bests; a group of Nigerian and Ethiopian tourists are busily snapping pictures and joking with each other; and the black South African families and couples are taking it all in on their lawn chairs. Crime, Aids, immigration policy, poverty and inequality dominate the debate in South Africa, but for one Sunday afternoon in February I saw a country forming a more perfect union.