South Africa diary: Day Five

BBC Africa correspondent Barnaby Phillips spends a week testing the mood in South Africa a decade after the end of apartheid and ahead of elections on 14 April. On his fifth day he heads for the remote village of Mgwali in the Eastern Cape, to see if ordinary people have benefited from democratic change.

The last day of our tour. We take off from Durban at dawn, and fly in a south-westerly direction, along the coast.

It is a clear morning, and I can see the beautiful mountains and valleys of the Eastern Cape.

This is one of the poorest and most remote parts of South Africa; much of it was incorporated into the self-governing "homelands" in the old apartheid days.

Today the "homelands" have been abolished, but in economic terms this area still lags a long way behind most of South Africa.

Proud history

We land at East London, and drive into the interior. We are heading to Mgwali, up in the hills. We branch off the main road, and drive for about 20km along a dirt road, until we come to the top of a beautiful green valley.

Mgwali is spread below us. It is a village with a proud history. The old apartheid government tried to make the people of Mgwali abandon their beautiful valley, and move to the Ciskei homeland, some 50km away.

But the land they were allocated was, (and I quote from the official village history) "hot and dusty, yellow and dry, with not much water for the mealies [maize] to grow big".

There is such poverty here - my school children are so hungry, they cannot concentrate Dukashe Madikane School headmistress

So the people of Mgwali refused to go, and although the village elders were imprisoned, the apartheid authorities eventually gave up.

So how has democracy treated Mgwali? Well, there are still no tarred roads, nor is there running water in the houses.

But there is one substantial change - Mgwali has electricity. Mandisa Ntame, a stout lady in traditional Xhosa dress, has opened a clothes shop, and has an electric sewing machine.

In the old days she says, "We only had manual machines, and now our houses are so bright at night".

Scope for improvement

But Dukashe Madikane, the headmistress of the village primary school, is not so impressed.

Barnaby Phillips will be reporting from the above locations throughout the week

She says her school is still waiting to receive electricity, although all the cabling has been in place for two years.

"And there is such poverty here - my school children are so hungry, they cannot concentrate."

There is a helpful woman from Eskom, the national power company, who is accompanying us. She is also in traditional Xhosa dress.

She says it won't be until 2014 when all the villages in this area are connected to the national grid. That will be a whole 20 years after the end of apartheid.

"The distances are so big, and the roads are so bad, that it is extremely expensive to connect every settlement."

Journey's end

Now we have to rush back to East London.

We are packing up to leave when a kind woman, unsolicited, brings me a cup of cold Fanta orange, and some Lemon Cream biscuits.

Revived, I feel I ought to reach some concluding thoughts on the state of South Africa.

We've seen a fair bit of it this last week, and met an extraordinary variety of people. Many - perhaps most - do seem to believe their lives are improving, albeit slowly.

Others are bitterly disappointed. But only a very few have expressed anything like nostalgia for the bad old days. The new South Africa is here to stay.

Day One from the gold-mining town of Welkom.

Day Two from Cape Town.

Day Three from Motherwell township

Day Four from Richmond, KwaZulu-Natal