Complex systems

This week's award for wasted effort goes to Pick'n'Pay (the South African supermarket chain whose name had my sister in stitches after she was subjected to it and those of the toy shops Tinka Tonka Toys and Plinka Plonka Play in the space of ten seconds when she arrived last October) and it's "organic" range of fruit and vegetables. After painstakingly unwrapping the cling film that swaddled the styrofoam plate that held my organic avocado in bundles of four on the supermarket shelf, I felt about as environmentally friendly as Halliburton on a cold day.

Wrapping with avocado

Wrapping without avocado

It's a funny old country. And not so old, come to think of it. But what it lacks in age it makes up for in complexity.

There are many stories worth listening to about South Africa. One of the most worthwhile is of course that about the struggle led by Mandela and others to free the country from its Apartheid opressors. Another is the tale of the HIV/Aids epidemic and its victims. A third is about the disenfranchisement of the white South Africans and their loss of identity. There is the story of the growing upwardly mobile black middle class. And there is the crime.

What still confounds me after over a year down here is how all these stories fit together. Mandela would have us think of new South Africa as a weave, where many strands make one strong whole. Some days, I think that sounds feasible - as long as it's liberally strewn with the social glue that is money and wellbeing. Others, I'm determined it's not.

Maybe it's just me. But I have a growing feeling that this disjointedness that I feel is not superficial, that it goes right to the core of new South Africa.

If it does, that would mean the new South Africa is inherently unstable, just like the chaotic systems we studied in the final year of my maths degree in London. In those systems, prediction was inherently impossible because uniform small events could have arbitrarily small or large effects - in the same way that when a small tremor occurs along a faultline in the Earth's crust, you can't say how big the earthquake will be because the earthquake itself doesn't know yet.

Take the new South African consitution. It's one of the most progressive in the world, making all men and women equal regardless of race, gender, creed etc. But, watching television on a rainy Wednesday you will realise that the VAST majority of South Africans are almost militantly set against the constitution on at least one - often several - points. People from rightwing christians to traditional tribal healers come out all bleary eyed and wonder what all this is about... "Gay marriage? I didn't know that buggery was legal, even!" and so on.

Rocks rolling down a hillside. *Plod Plod* South Africa wins the 2010 World Cup. *Plod* Zuma, despite everything he's been accused of, soars on the Zulu vote. *Plod* The government introduces a HIV/Aids plan. *Plod* A white middle-aged couple is murdered in bed, causing all their closest friends to think about moving to Australia. *Plod*

Some of the events seem positive, some negative. All seem too small to cause cataclysm. But they are all the same in a critical system, perpetually poised on the verge of a rock slide. And so predicting the future of this country, at this time, is about as futile as me trying to rid the loan-cat of fleas. It sounds like a cop out, but isn't really. Because like with the fleas, the fact that it's impossible isn't discouraging me, or anyone else for that matter, from trying.