Upstairs, Downstairs

In all the restaurants I have been to, the kitchen personnel is black and the customers and the waiters are white. For my South-African friends these observations sometimes are getting a bore, but I can't help it. The traces of apartheid are still everywhere. There is no way getting around it. Black means poor and white means rich (besides a few exceptions). Blacks work for shitty wages in the kitchen (150 euro a month) and whites consume.
It's not just the money that's causing the gap, it's the whole lifestyle. The other day I was in a black township and suddenly there was a neighbourhood of really nice houses. " That's the middle class area", my (black) companian explained. And I realised that a lot of black people don't necessarily aim to live in white neighbourhoods, but that they wanna live in the better parts of the townships. These areas are so big, that they are cities on their own with poor, middleclass and rich parts. Deep down I've always believed that black people wanna live in the white and better parts of the cities (this often goes hand in hand). It's part of my ideal image of South-Africa, where in years to come white and black will be living next door to each other, children of all colours playing in the streets together, black guys borrowing a drill from their white neighbour and actually returning it. I guess I have a dream. But the more time I spend in this country the more I start to believe that that will never happen, that there will always be a " white" and a "black" South-Africa. I just hope that in the years to come black doesn't automatically mean poor.