_______________SOWETO ONLINE BY ANDREW LEONARD (11/16/98)

Thanks to Andrew Leonard for another interesting piece. I lived in South Africa from 1994-95, and Web mania was incipient even then, in the same impoverished communities Leonard mentions in his piece. In fact, the penetration of almost every new technology -- cell phones, DVD players, whatever -- has happened faster in South Africa than anywhere else. I am not going to speculate as to why that's the case. I'm sure some complicated constellation of sociological reasons is at work. I do take issue with Leonard's view that widespread access to the Web and to e-mail would be at all useful to Sowetans. Despite the fact that they want it, building the support infrastructure for that access would be a tremendous waste of public resources. As he mentions in his article, basic facilities such as toilets, water, security and waterproof housing are sorely lacking in Soweto. I find it hard to believe that Web access, no matter how much "access to information" it provides, should be a higher priority than basic human needs. Don't get me wrong -- I'm no Luddite, and I enjoyed Leonard's article as I always do. And I have a passion for South Africa, the rights of its black majority and the Web as well. It's just that I think "access to information," the nub of his seeming conversion to Mad Max's point of view, seems unimportant to me in the face of substantially larger, more brutal challenges. (It should be noted that Max's income from his immensely popular tours probably places him somewhere in the top 2 to 3 percent of Sowetans.) -- Ravi Desai Thank you for Andrew Leonard's article. It's always enlightening to see one's country afresh though a visitor's eyes. The greatest potential value of the Internet in South Africa has to be education. With unemployment running at around 35 to 40 percent, we need all the skills we can lay our hands on. But one could argue that books and classrooms should be the first step. It's a complicated problem though. For many pupils, a matric certificate (the equivalent of your high school diploma) is obtained with great difficulty and duress, and provides little guarantee that you'll find a job. Tertiary education is essential, but mostly unobtainable. Perhaps that's where the Net can come into play. Self study for further education. -- Neil Harrison I just finished Andrew Leonard's piece on Soweto. A single sentence on the second page encapsulates what troubles me about the article's basic premise: "I stare at my beer, thinking that I've never seen a country where first and third world squeeze up next to each other so intimately." I've seen such a country, and I didn't have to take an airplane to reach it. It's called the United States of America. If you drive up Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, past the museums of the Upper East Side, you reach Mount Sinai Hospital at 101st Street. South of the hospital lies 10021, the ZIP code with the highest per capita income in the nation. North of it lies East Harlem, a neighborhood close to 100 percent Latino and black in its population. The average life expectancy of a man who happens to be born north of 101st Street is the same as a man who grows up in Bangladesh. In "Giovanni's Room," James Baldwin's narrator moves to France to escape from a metaphoric bulldog in his backyard. But when he gets there he finds that his "backyard had only grown smaller and the bulldog larger." If Salon had sent you to East Harlem or South Central L.A. instead of Soweto you could have produced an article identical in every respect but the proper names. But perhaps we're all a little afraid of confronting that bulldog in our own backyard, eh? --Bryan Williams I am an ex-South African living in Los Angeles. Andrew Leonard's article was wonderful. It is so rare to find articles that accurately describe South Africa. He did a fantastic job of making me nostalgic for a Sowetan beer and jacaranda trees. -- Tali Levy N E X T+P A G E+| Michael Kinsley tries again