Durbs. Tuesday 2/26—Friday 3/1, Durban/eThekwini
Glancing at the map, I had thought the bus would go straight east across the country, passing south of Lesotho, but it actually retraces the same route I took from outside Maseru a few weeks ago, passing through the metro area of Bloemfontein late at night/early morning before going around north of Lesotho, then southeast towards Durban. I’m sleeping on and off during most of this; we roll into Durban Tuesday evening.
After my travels through Palestine and Israel into Jordan, and so far from Joburg to Lesotho to Capetown and now here, I’ve gotten pretty used to this whole backpacking thing, so I’ll take a moment to talk about what it’s like in general. It’s not always as glamorous as it might sound, freely going from place to place by bus, seeing new cities, beautiful lands, and staying on farms, not worrying about possessions besides what’s in my backpack, meeting locals and other travels in hostels, trying new foods. That’s what I show here, but it can be pretty draining in between all that, hauling around my backpack in the heat or rain, budgeting myself on food and hostel dorm rooms, figuring out buses ahead of time and waiting at a lot of bus stations, and having to do research on where to go, how to get there, and how to do it safely, especially in some parts of South Africa.
Thankfully it’s easy to get by with English in most places in South Africa, as it was in the touristy parts of the Middle East. Sometimes a bottle of shampoo or a jar of jam will break open in my backpack, and leak through its plastic bag and get all over my clothes that I just finally washed yesterday. Or I’ll get lost trying to get somewhere in a city, and spend half a day trying to get there, or back to wherever I’m staying. And a lot of the time I’m just plain tired, with how much I’m trying to see in a short time. But hey, most of the time, what I’m doing is amazing, and the little challenges most of the time are a part of the story. Even getting mugged in Joburg.
Anyway, from the bus station in Durban, I take a Taxify to a hostel in a quieter suburb. It’s a smaller hostel than I’ve been in, with a more closely knit community of staff along with guests. It’s run by Catherine, a white woman in her 50s originally from Zimbabwe. She was born there back when it was Rhodesia, another white supremacist state after British colonial rule, not unlike South Africa, and she has some stories about how she and other whites who had black friends were mocked as the “white kaffirs” (kaffir being a slur used by whites against the black native Africans). The hostel’s colorful crew also includes Jessie from Germany, who helps Catherine with the hostel, and the legendary Nacho. Nacho is a crazy Spaniard with dreads in his late 30s now who’s been bouncing all over Africa for the past seven years, all the way up north to Ghana and back south again. A real Don Quixote. He says he’s almost died of malaria twice, and never takes any preventative pills (“I don’t need to take that sheet,” he says defiantly). He’s a nice fellow though, and a good cook. I also meet another American guy who’s been travelling for almost the past 15 years, with only occasional visits back home. It’s pretty much his way of life now. He’s not constantly on the move though, going at a steadier pace in each place, and he supports himself doing photography work.
Getting around Durban for me is more like being in Joburg—you can’t really walk around by yourself as a tourist in the middle of the city like in Cape Town. It would’ve been even more useful here than in Cape Town to have a real local like Steve to guide me. It’s still an interesting place to see—Durban has the biggest population of Indian descent in the world, outside of India itself. I already mentioned when I arrived how the British brought Indian laborers since they were having trouble getting the indigenous Zulu Africans to work plantations for sugar and other cash crops over a hundred years ago. Since the end of apartheid, more recent immigrants have come from India as well as Bangladesh and Pakistan. This can all be seen in the people themselves, the mosques and Hindu mandirs, and especially the food; curry houses dominate entire streets. One of the most iconic dishes they have is called bunny chow—a loaf of white bread hollowed out and filled with any sort of curry stew. It originated among the Indian colonial workers who needed a way to carry their lunch to work, so their wives just started stuffing it in the bread. The “bunny” is short for bania, slang for Indians from the Gujarat region.
Beyond exploring the food and a couple museums, I don’t really have the time to fully immerse myself in Durban, but I do get to see a slice of it. Most of the time, even during the day, I take a Taxify to get around anywhere. I should give a proper shoutout to all the drivers I had, not just in Durban but throughout my time in the other cities as well. It’s one of the ways I was able to interact with locals more. Most of them were black African, and probably of a similar social class to rideshare drivers in the US—middle class guys who could own a car, and a few of them were university students. Some of them drove both for Uber (used more by tourists) as well as Taxify. As with anywhere, some drivers were more talkative, some more silent.
I tried not to go full Thomas Friedman and constantly interrogate them about current events and South African politics, but when it did come up, they usually had the same pessimism I heard from others. They were sometimes interested to hear about what it was like for me traveling around, and if I mentioned getting mugged, they’d openly share some of their own stories. “Eish,” they’ll say, a common expression of shock or despair, pretty much the South African “oy vey.” One driver named Manlord had his car stolen at gunpoint after being set up by a “passenger” ordering a ride, only to be attacked by the customer’s friends. I hear more of those odd stories of the occasional “polite” mugger; one guy tells me how a thief, after mugging him, actually asked him how much money he needed for the bus to get home, and gave him a few rands back. The drivers would sometimes give me advice on places to see (and where to stay away from) too.
Some of them would use the chance to ask me about politics back in my own country, the US; some of the students had copies of books on Obama, the war on terror, or the 2016 election. I continue to realize that I only have limited experience as one person living in the US, and tell them this whenever I answer any questions. One driver I had later in Pretoria also really wanted to ask me about the whole situation with R. Kelly, and I was sorry to tell him that I probably knew less than he did. I also had an Egyptian driver in Cape Town, currently a student getting his piloting license, so we talked a bit about my time in Palestine, and how all the governments around the Middle East suck. And one of my Zulu drivers in Durban, Sabelo, tells me that he was a cousin of Lucky Dube, a huge South African reggae/hip hop artist, killed over ten years ago by muggers in Joburg.
I get to go with a few people from the hostel to take my first dip ever in the warm Indian Ocean. A Brazilian guy, Francisco, and I explore more around the coastal area. He sees a bunch of local guys playing soccer, and being a soccer-obsessed Brazilian has no reservation in having us randomly go up to them and ask if we can join, and they let us in. Soccer is a universal language, but one that I don’t speak well, at all—I roundly get my ass kicked and contribute very little to my team. My foot probably makes contact with the ball twice. Besides that, my time in Durban is relaxing after my busy weeks around the Cape; I just walk among some of the old ships at the port, and watch the antics of some little monkeys as they jump all over each other and dig through trashcans in a park near the hostel. We’ve got squirrels in our parks, they’ve got monkey in theirs. There’s a lot to potentially see in the areas further from the city, like Gandhi’s old headquarters, but without knowing my way around the transportation it’s tricky. Friday evening I stock up on groceries for the next few days in the Drakensberg (what I’m starting to call my mobile kitchen), and hang out with people at the hostel one more night before moving on.
The dragon mountains. Saturday 3/2—Thursday 3/7, the Drakensberg/uKhahlamba Mountains, Joburg/Egoli, and Pretoria/Tshwane
I get up early Saturday morning in the quiet little hostel and say goodbye to the dogs before heading out. There are no main bus companies running from Durban to the Drakensberg Mountains (there are always minibus taxis, but I would need a local to figure out the routes like in Joburg), so I walk to a nearby rendezvous with a BazBus, a hop on/hop off service that runs tourist routes across the country. We pass through the lush green hills of the Zulu lands for three hours as the peaks of the Drakensberg (uKhahlamba, in Zulu) start to rise up, and we get dropped off at one of the only hostels in the area. The hostel is surrounded by the Ampitheatre, literally an amphitheater of mountains in the distance, the main starting point for any trip into the mountains. We’re just northeast of the border with eastern Lesotho actually, where the Drakensberg meets with the Lesotho Highlands. I book one of the main guided day hikes the hostel offers for Monday, since I have no transportation of my own to get to the main destinations. Sunday I a German and Dutch trio in the car they’ve rented for some hiking in a nearby gorge. We pass by some local towns on the way, even more spread out and calm than places like Clocolan, a different world to me. I also meet up with Maria and Karsten here, two Germans I contacted online when I saw they were renting a car next week to Kruger Park.
Monday morning I get into one of the hostel’s kombis with a dozen other guests, Maria and Karsten among them, and we take an hour-long ride flat and then up to the start of the trail to Sentinel Peak. The pavement gives way to very rocky dirt road toward the end of the road. We all gather around our guide Adrien, white, in his 40s. He’s a pretty wild guy, always singing and quipping weird stuff as we go along. Karsten and especially Maria aren’t huge fans of him; I personally love his style, though I could see how going on a multi-day hike with him could definitely get to be a bit much. Our pack is surrounded by fog as we start, sometimes only seeing the path a few meters in front of us, and everyone’s hair (including my beard) gets wet from the mist within minutes. It adds to the mystery though as we move forward. After a couple of hours of gradually rising paths, we come to the foot of a giant crevasse ascending 70 degrees up. Adrien rouses us with a pep talk, and we start up. It’s way steeper than say Table Mountain, but after an hour of pacing myself I make it, and slowly everyone else arrives and we catch our breath. We can see further up here, and there’s plenty of space to walk around. Adrien leads us to the edge, and we look out at the valley that’s still very cloudy. We can partially see a couple other nearby slopes behind the mist.
Then, as if on cue, all the clouds clear and we can see the huge sweeping green and rocky valley, with the rest of our mountain’s cliffs stretching further out to join the Ampitheatre Ridge before plunging sharply into the valley. It really is one of the best sights I’ve ever had from high up. We all take it in for a while before continuing with a more leisurely walk along the flat top of the mountain to the Tugela River, which feeds the Tugela Falls, not very wide but over 3,000 feet high. It’s debated whether this or Angel Falls in Venezuela is the highest in the world. Whichever it is, it’s still an awesome sight, and since the water’s completely clean we can drink it and swim in its small pools. We start walking away from the valley along the river past a flock of hundreds of shaggy sheep, and we come to the other edge of the mountaintop, the side we climbed up.
This time though where at a spot where we have to climb a bunch of chain ladders some 100 feet straight down the side of the cliff. I love it, though some others don’t. Two local men (probably Zulu or Basotho, and presumably the shepherds), watch with mild amusement as we all slowly go down from rung to rung, while they effortlessly hop down the steep rocks next to the ladders. We walk the trail back to where we started on this morning, and now we can see everything around us that had been hidden. We head back on the kombis, though ours gets a part snagged on the bottom by the terrible road, and Nklankleh, the driver, has to stop and fix the piece. Not much the rest of us can do beside give moral support, but we soon get going again. Back at the hostel we thank Adrien and Nklankleh, and I get ready to continue north the next morning; Maria and Karsten are staying a couple more days, and I’ll meet them on Friday in Joburg for the road trip to Kruger.
Tuesday at noon it’s back on the BazBus, and after another four hours I find myself pulling into Johannesburg again—but I’m not at the end yet. I’m going to be staying in Pretoria for the next few nights with a Couchsurfing host, and I’ll get to see Joburg (and Steve) again next week. Pretoria is the executive capital city less than an hour north of Joburg. I get dropped off near the good old Gautrain and take it to the Pretoria station, and I call up a Taxify. My driver, Karabo, is extremely helpful—rideshare drivers aren’t allowed to pull up directly next to the station, it’s only for regular taxi drivers, who Karabo says sometimes throw rocks at Taxify and Uber drivers because they’re angry about the competition. So Karabo parks a couple streets over, and he actually walks to the station to escort me back to his car and carries my side-bag, since he says it’s not safe for a foreigner to walk by themselves here. He’s delightedly surprised to hear about my traveling, especially that there’s a thing called Couchsurfing. I thank him as he drops me off at the condo of my host, Tshepo, who gives me a very warm welcome, though we don’t have much time to talk just yet.
The next day I have a little family reunion. I take the train down towards the wealthy neighborhoods northwest of Joburg and go to meet a very distant cousin on my mom’s side, Barbara. My mom let me know of the connection, as some of her cousins had visited Barbara some years ago too, so I figured I might as well say hi if I was around. She’s a widow, about 70, and practically lives in a palace with art and sculptures filling the place. The art collection alone could be worth more than the mansion itself. She’s welcoming though, and drives me around and takes me out to lunch. We talk about our respective families, and how her branch of the family ended up in South Africa. She teaches me “yawk,” a term for non-Jews in South Africa, though she doesn’t know its origins. I also briefly meet one of her kids and grandchildren. After saying goodbye, I spend the afternoon at Liliesleaf Farm, the secret headquarters of top ANC leaders organizing against apartheid in the early 1960s before they were raided and arrested.
Thursday I take the day off, resting before the safari trip starting tomorrow. In the end I don’t end up seeing much of Pretoria, not that there’s much to see besides some government buildings and museums. I take advantage of my host Tshepo’s library with lots of books on African history and politics during the day, and in the evening I hang out and have dinner with him. Tshepo’s originally from the northern province close to Botswana (he’s an ethnic Tswana), though he moved here for work. He grew up in a more rural area; his family had many sheep, but a few years ago much of his mother’s flock was stolen, and she died some time after in distress. It again shows that those who suffer the most in the violence in the country’s farmlands aren’t just the rich white landowners, but black African farmers as well. Tshepo also has another apartment in Joburg he rents out, and someone broke into it recently.
“This country could have been something great,” he says after a while, referring to the post-apartheid era. He didn’t give a certain answer on the likelihood of the country still becoming something great; I didn’t get a certain answer from most people on that question. Can anyone really have a certain answer about anything regarding the future, if things will get better or worse anywhere? And still I can tell from the fondness he speaks of his culture, and the real joy I’ve heard in the voices and seen on the faces of many people I’ve met over my past two months here, that there still are plenty of great things about South Africa, despite all the continuing challenges.
The safari of the Barba Rosa. Friday 3/8 to Wednesday 3/13, Joburg/Egoli, Blyde River/Motlatse River, Kruger Park, and Mbabane (Eswatini/Swaziland)
I’m now off on my last adventure of this trip: to see one the wonder of South Africa’its wildlife. I start taking one anti-malaria pill each day as prescribed, since there’s a small risk of malaria in the northeastern part of the country and around Swaziland. Hopefully I don’t get any of the bad side effects. Tshepo generously drops me off at the Pretoria station in the morning, I thank him for everything, and I speed off towards the airport outside of Joburg—not for a plane yet, but for a car. I meet Maria and Karsten at the rentals area, where they being my heroes have taken care of everything; all I have to do is chip in for the costs, made cheaper by our two other companions: Paola, a Spanish friend of Karsten’s from when they traveled together around the Cape a few weeks before, and William, another German who also found the crew over Facebook. Maria and Karsten first became friends renting a car together in Namibia a month ago, so they’re thankfully pretty experienced with this whole thing. We name our car the Barba Rosa (I proposed Barbarossa in honor of the medieval Germanic emperor, since we had so many Germans, and the others jazzed it up to Barba Rosa).
We start out on Friday driving almost five hours northeast towards the Blyde River Canyon (indigenous name Motlatse River), and we stop off at the cliffs of God’s Window on the way to get our first view of the valleys around here. The whole area is still part of the Drakensberg Range, though not as high. For the night we stay at a nice outdoors guesthouse in the village of Moremela close to the canyon, and we put together a barbecue dinner on the large grill outside. Most people in this region are ethnically Pedi (or Northern Sotho, as opposed to the Southern Sotho/Basotho). Saturday morning we start at Bourke’s Luck Potholes, named for a hapless prospector who thought he’d find gold here but failed. Water erosion has made some cool really deep potholes, kinda hard to describe, you have to see the pictures to really see how unique they look. Like if you stuck your fingers down a big wad of playdough or something, and then they filled with water. From there we go to the canyon, one of the largest in the world. The already impressive canyon is made more beautiful by the wide Motlatse River sweeping around the bottom, and the three huge peaks shaped like rondavels (traditional-style homes) rising up in the center of it all, sitting like a royal family in the middle of their majestic court. We do some hiking down into the canyon, and swim in one of its natural pools.
We go to stay in some tents at the edge of the park that night, and Sunday we finally get to the main event—the animals. Maria, Karsten, Paola, William, and I wake up very early in the dark, as many of the creatures are most active in the early morning and at night. We drive into the park and start off in the Barba Rosa, not sure of what we’ll see and when, and all of a sudden in the still quiet of the dawn a full-grown African elephant just casually walks out of the bush and crosses the road in front of us. They’re of course not afraid of the car, as they’re used to seeing them all the time. We keep going as the sun begins to rise, and we start seeing giraffes’ heads pop up in the distance from the road, and soon find some closer to the road near some trees. It really is something incredible to see these animals roaming around their natural habitat and not in a zoo. A couple hyenas trot on the road alongside the cars, and there are plenty of families of impalas skipping in the fields too.
Later in the day we go on one of the official park tours on the safari vans, and get to see bigger groups of giraffes and elephants bathing, huge herds of African buffalo with their powdered wig-like horns, and the rare treat of a couple of rhinoceroses. We join a cluster of a dozen other parked cars and trucks starting at clump of trees some twenty feet off the road at one point, where someone had spotted a leopard, but can’t get a look. Seeing one during the day is extremely rare. At night we take another ride to try spotting some predators on the hunt, but just see some of the usual suspects out and about. There are also some warthogs strutting around outside our lodge.
The total area of Kruger Park is huge, over 7,000 square miles, and part of a larger transnational conservation area with Mozambique and Zimbabwe. It was first set up in 1898 as a game reserve to control overhunting, not open to tourists until thirty years later. The government started to forcibly relocate Tsonga tribes living on the land, their last village being displaced in the 1960s. The post-apartheid restitution process gave them back title to their land in the ‘90s, though how they’ve fared in their relationship with the national parks service since then I don’t know. Even so, it is always good to see societies trying to conserve environments with the animals and plants living in them, despite all the harm our industrialized world does.
Still there are those who try to kill just for a profit; the guide for our van points out that some of the rhinos have bullet holes in their hide, having escaped attacks by poachers after their horns. The elephants thankfully aren’t targeted as much these days (there’s actually an overpopulation of them in the park right now). Our guide tells us that poachers these days aren’t just some random bandits sneaking into the enclosed park’s land—some actually enter pretending to just be tourists, smuggling in their weapons. The financial reward is huge for men who don’t have many other opportunities in the region.
Things get ugly, with park staff sometimes getting intimidated or bribed by poachers, and gunfights can break out between park police and poachers working at night. The national parks have in recent years been applying chemicals to rhino horns and elephant tusks, harmless to the animals but toxic to poachers handling them, and ruining the black market value of the trophies. One of the best groups combatting poaching in the area is the Black Mambas, a mostly women force of locals. Besides tracking and apprehending poachers, they also lead conservation education in nearby communities to try discouraging people from becoming poachers in the first place. You can donate to them at https://www.blackmambas.org/donate.html
Monday morning we go for one more round, and are lucky to find a thickly-maned lion casually strolling along the road next to our van, like he’s on his way to work, and we also see our first herd of zebras up close. On our way out of the park we’re given the parting shot of some hippos’ heads poking out of a lake, and we say goodbye to a few more of the elephants and giraffes before heading south, making our way to explore some of Swaziland. Maria and Carsten drive the Barba Rosa over 5 hours throughout the day, and after we go through the border we get some great views of the mountains as the sun sets. The roads get very twisty here, which I’m normally fine with, but I find myself starting to get nauseous. Thankfully we soon get to our hostel in Mbabane, the capital, and I rest a bit. We go to grab some dinner nearby, and my body gets worse even before we start eating. I start getting chills and actually go into semi-shock with my hands freezing up and shaking. It’s definitely side effects from the malaria pills. Carsten helps me out, and when I’m good enough to walk again after a while I go back to the hostel.
I hadn’t been showing any of these signs the past few days, but maybe the windy mountain roads set it off. So I take another pill the next morning—that’s what you’re supposed to do even if you have bad side effects. I’m fine for a bit, and we head off to a nearby museum after breakfast, but there I start getting nauseous again, and have to rest. My companions drop me off at the hostel where I rest for the rest of the day while they go on a hike. I don’t throw up, which I’ve heard happens to some people. Overall it’s not as bad as last night, but it’s more drawn out, and I’m just lying in a malaise, a torpor. At least I’m in a relaxing place, but whoever put the playlist on in the hostel’s common area just has the same five dumb pop songs on repeat, including that stupid “dancing in the dark” Ed Sheeran song. I already hated Ed Sheeran’s music before this, and sitting there in a miserable daze under the malaria pills hearing his shitty songs play again every eighteen minutes makes me hate it even more, and now whenever I hear that song I think back to when I was dying from malaria pills in a hostel in Swaziland.
So unfortunately, I can’t tell you much of what I learned about Swaziland (though I do learn it was renamed “Eswatini” last year) during my already short time there, as most of my time there I was being tortured by the effects of atovaquone/proguanil pills and Ed Sheeran music. I stop taking the damn pills on Wednesday—my companions (half-jokingly) threaten to leave me behind if I take them again, since we’ve got a long drive back to Joburg. It’s not likely many of the mosquitos here carry malaria anyway, I’ve got bugspray, and I can always use the pills again if I do get sick (the others have pills with them too for that scenario; they opted out of taking them ahead of time, and they have my suffering as validation that they made the right decision).
On our way back to the border with South Africa we stop at some more trails, and I’m feeling good again so I join William for one more short hike down some hills to find a waterfall while the others rest at the entrance café, tired from yesterday. Down in this valley we race past some warthogs and zebras prancing in the fields, and as we climb some rocky paths we can see a stream further down which is probably near the waterfall, but after over an hour we realize we’re running low on time and have to climb back up the steep slopes. We reunite with the crew and take off west back through the border and on to Joburg, just another 4 hours, and return the Barba Rosa that night. We say goodbye to William, who’s already got a place to stay and is continuing his journey to Durban soon, and the rest of us take a cab to a hostel in the Maboneng district. Our driver gets a bit pissed that we’re driving through a dangerous area, but we make it. I get to reunite with good old Alex from Cape Town at this hostel, too. I’ve come full circle (though the shape of my trip from Joburg to Lesotho, Cape Town, Durban, and back to Joburg has been really more like a distorted triangle).
Reunion and return. Thursday 3/14 to Monday 3/18, Johannesburg, Cradle of Humankind, Atlanta, New York City, and Mahwah
The next morning Alex and I catch up more. He made his own way across the scenic southern coast to Durban and the Drakensberg, and he stayed with the folks in the Aweh hostel in Durban too. We make plans to visit the Cradle of Humankind today, an hour outside of the city. There are no buses, so we find a Greek guy, Angelo, to split a cab with us. I take all my stuff with me, since Steve called me and insisted I stay with him my last few days. I say goodbye and thanks to Maria and Carsten for putting the whole safari together (Paola already left early morning for a plane), and I head out with Alex and Angelo. We first see the actual fossils from the Cradle of Humankind area, removed from their resting places in the caves, in their museum. The Sterkfontein Cave site is a few miles away, so we get a lift from a tour van with some guests from the Maboneng hostel outside the museum, but I leave my food bag and cowboy hat on the seat next to me, and only realize as it drives away. Alex says he’ll find my hat for me when he gets back to the hostel so I can go pick it up this weekend before I fly home. It’s an important hat—that’s THE hat that one of the guys mugging me picked up and gave back to me two months ago.
We go down into the cave with a guide. The caves around here contain some of the oldest hominin fossils found in the world, some dated as far back as three and a half million years, evolutionary links between primates and early humans (sorry to offend any anti-evolution creationists reading this). The scientists don’t know the exact spot in Africa where the first modern humans evolved, but walking around in the earth here, where the remains of people related to my (to our) great-great-great x100 grandparents lay for hundreds of thousands of years, it’s almost kind of homecoming. After all, Zionism says that Israel is my home after my ancestors were there two thousand years ago; is it that much of a stretch for me to claim that this place is my home after my ancestors were here three million years ago?
Alex, Angelo, and I order another cab back into Joburg, and I say goodbye once more to Alex as I get dropped off once again in good old Melville, and after reunions with Alex and my ancient ancestors, I’m reunited with Steve Appiah, the god-fearing kente-weaving shoe doctor, and his kids. We put together some dinner and catch up; he’s been doing the same the past few couple months, working and weaving. We walk across town to his weaving studio, where he’s got a couple guests rooms and a spare room for himself.
It’s a great way to spend my last few days here, though short power outages become common throughout this week, rotating through different neighborhoods. There was some of this “load-shedding” of the country’s power grid for a few days when I was around Cape Town, but it wasn’t as severe then. Over the past decade there’s been an on-and-off energy crisis in South Africa (no pun intended). It’s a long complex story, but the most recent shortage is definitely tied to corruption involving deals between ESKOM (the main power company) and the notorious Gupta family, who were very connected to Zuma, the previous president; this has caused debt and cost spikes, and delays in construction of new power plants. There have also been growing issues with obtaining good quality coal. So now load-shedding is used to spread the energy supply from district to district throughout the day, and ESKOM is also scheduled to be broken up into three smaller companies, each new one to manage different aspects of the supply chain.
Still it’s great to be back where I started for my last short few days before going home. The next couple days go quick. Steve and I hit up familiar spots like Paul’s Tavern and the Nigerian food joint, hang out with his friends Philip and Gary again, and go to the all-encompassing Apartheid Museum. We also visit the Victoria Yards community center again, where I see more renovation has been done. Steve has found an ideal space where he hopes to open another studio there, more in the center of things than Melville. My last day he picks up a bunch of severed pineapple tops from a fruit vendor on the street before we head home, and he has the idea of planting them next to his studio building. Saturday night we have a farewell feast, and in the morning before I leave I help dig up the old plants in the garden, and we plant the pineapple tops in hopes that they’ll soon take root and give new fruit. As of now (publishing this in September 2020), I am organizing a fundraiser for Steve’s project, as a way of giving back for how he and others in Joburg welcomed me, to help him reach more people in the community. You can donate to it here: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/appiah-s-kente-weaving–2#/
I pack and get ready to order one more Taxify in the afternoon for the airport, but Steve will have none of it—he insists that we go together in his neighbor Louis’s car, so he can see me off. I pay for the gas. It’s a pickup truck though, so Steve squeezes in to the front seat with me with his son Blessed on his lap. On the way we stop off at the hostel in Maboneng, where Alex had tracked down my hat from Thursday and labeled it before he left, and like Indiana Jones I grab my hat at the last second before my escape. At the airport though some low-level security guys stop us—they tell off Louis for driving with three people in the passenger seat. He has to bribe them to not get penalized, so I take care of it with some of my last rands. Steve and company hang out with me a bit as I’ve still got time before going to the gate. The time comes for me to get going, and we say our final goodbyes and thank yous.
Steve of course calls me a couple hours later while I’m waiting at the gate. The sun has set by the time we board, and as we take off I can see some dark blocks down in the city without power from the load-shedding. In the seats next to me are yet another Malawian businessman and a young white South African woman who’s on her way to Tennessee, to work in a circus or something. “Dodgy place, isn’t it?” she remarks when I tell her this was my first time visiting. I just slightly nod and smile back. Overnight as I sleep, I cross once more over the equator into the northern hemisphere, from late summer into late winter. I land in the Atlanta airport the next morning, and pass the Zimbabwean sculptures again as I transfer in the tunnels. I take off for New York, and in the afternoon am blessed with some of the best aerial views I’ve ever had of the city. Then it’s the subway to Port Authority, the bus out to Mahwah, and the tired but triumphant walk up the hill to my parents’ house.
A quick note
I don’t run any ads on this blog, or do anything to make money off it for myself; I just try as best as I can to share my travels and photos for anyone interested. If you’re getting some enjoyment out of following me along here (though I am writing most of this now in the year of the pandemic, way after my trips have ended), consider donating a little to some of the funds and charities I include that are connected to the people in the places I’ve been to. I know that right now during the lockdowns and the pandemic money is even tighter than usual for most of us–no pressure. Obviously I didn’t encounter lots of social organizations on this trip like I did with the delegation in Palestine, but there are still a few relevant groups to put here again:
Abalimi Bezekhaya, “Farmers of the Home,” a network that supports micro-farming and community gardening run by residents of the impoverished townships around Cape Town
The Black Mambas, an anti-poaching and environmental education campaign led by local women around Kruger Park:
https://www.blackmambas.org/donate.html
And of course, the fundraiser I’ve put together for Steve’s activities teaching kente weaving to youth and unemployed around Johannesburg:
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/appiah-s-kente-weaving–2#/
Final thoughts
I can’t say enough how hard it is in general to write about foreign countries in a way that’s accurate, and that doesn’t either cheerfully ignore a country’s problems or focuses too much on a country’s problems, making the country and its people into a spectacle. That’s even truer for talking about travel in many African countries, with me being a relatively privileged white outsider, and especially for South Africa (and nearby Lesotho & Swaziland) in particular. My traveling in South Africa was of course less personal than my traveling in say Palestine & Israel, since there I had the connection of being a Jew and an American citizen, but I’ll still add a little something about how I felt looking back on my almost ten weeks here. Most of what I say here has probably been expressed far more articulately and personally by South Africans themselves; this is just in my own words as an outsider.
It is easy to go to parts of South Africa–especially around Cape Town, with its seductively prosperous and cosmopolitan center, the beaches, the vineyards, and the scenic areas of the peninsula–and come away with a sense that things are a paradise here in the rainbow nation. Throw in a token visit to Soweto and Robben Island to believe that the fall of apartheid was a total victory. You can see some people from different backgrounds fraternizing with each other—Xhosa, white, South Asian, Coloured.
But while I got this sense myself several times, we know it’s not that simple. No place can be expected to become perfect; especially in a place like South Africa, after hundreds of years of racial oppression, positive change to a truly united and equal society unfortunately takes time. Anywhere in the world you can see division and inequality if you look closer, but here the line is just so stark–the racial divide and the economic divide reinforce each other very strongly.
It’s also easy to look at the worst aspects of South Africa and come away thinking it’s an unsalvageable wreck, that all Africa is criminal-infested, and that Africans are incapable of running their own countries. But as I mentioned, plenty of South Africans as well as other tourists I met said from experience that while many other sub-Saharan African countries do have their own poverty, civil wars, and other problems, some of them are run very well, without corruption, high crime, or energy crises. And interestingly, even the other countries that do have extreme poverty with desperate populations don’t have the same major crime problem as South Africa. From what I’ve heard, it’s not really clear why this is, but one of the common answers is just the particular legacy of systemic violence in South Africa. After decades of the brutal everyday racial subjugation of apartheid, that was all that most South Africans had ever known, so a culture of resentment led to that violence they had learned being socially reproduced in the form of crime.
So South Africa is not inevitably doomed; that people of other countries have overcome similar difficulties from colonialism shows there is hope. I’ll reiterate that South Africans, like people anywhere, don’t passively resign themselves to their hardships–every day many of them do what they can to support their families and communities, and demand accountability for their leaders so they’ll finally have a country that works for all of them. But while I point this all out, it’s not for me to say here how likely or unlikely that hope is of being fulfilled. I didn’t get any certain answers from the few South Africans I did ask about it. For now, they’ll just keep doing what they can, hope or not.
Foreign Fields 