The Pink Palace. Monday 2/4 and Tuesday 2/5, Somerset West in Cape Town (//Hui !Gaeb)

The overnight bus ride is actually pretty nice. The seats on this two-decker have a lot of room to recline, and there’s a leg rest that folds out from under the seat. It’s more high-end than the minibus I took from Johannesburg, but still pretty affordable. I’m not the only white passenger this time—it’s split about fifty-fifty, and the black passengers here most likely have more money than those who accompanied me on the minibus ride. There’s a very eclectic mix of movies in the evening and the next morning, with occasional Christian TV programs; the company that operates these buses is apparently very Christian. The bus makes a stop at Bloemfontein late evening before continuing southwest towards the Cape into the night. In the morning I wake up to see the glow of the sunrise over the desert-like plains region known as the Karoo in Afrikaans, before hills pop up that give rise to some mountains. The sprawling vineyards of the wine region start to appear in the valleys. I also observe more the town names on signs, noting the mix of names in African languages like Sotho and Xhosa as well as Dutch and English names. The bus passes by another Worcester a couple hours east of Cape Town (Worcester, Massachusetts is where I lived for most of the past six years before the traveling).

We pull into the main Cape Town station mid-morning, but I don’t get to see much of the city yet—I go straight to the nearby train tracks, where I take a little less than an hour’s ride out to a suburb called Somerset West. I’ll be staying with another WWOOF host, Avril, for just a couple days. She texted me that the train will be pretty safe for me as long as I take it in the middle of the day, since there will be some other people in the cabin with me but not as many as during the rush hours, where I’d be more of a target for pickpocketing, and she also warns me that I probably shouldn’t take it alone at night. The trains here are older and more rickety than the new Gautrain back in Joburg, and a lot of the windows are covered in stickers advertising the phone numbers of witch doctors promising to make people more money, bring back lost lovers, cure illnesses, and enlarge certain parts of the body. I’ll end up seeing a lot of these posted on walls in some streets for the many weeks I have left in my trip.

Avril, a woman of English descent in her sixties, picks me up at Somerset West and takes me to her home, which she’s affectionately named the Pink Palace. She only takes WWOOF volunteers for no more than a couple days at a time, as she doesn’t have a large farm, just a network of gardens around her house which she can use help with, though she’s in pretty good shape for her age. Avril’s still managed to fit a lot of plants into her space. I help her out for a few hours each day in the morning and afternoon, with tasks like trimming branches and grinding them up for mulch, digging some foundations for a new fence, and taking horse manure from her neighbor to be used as a fertilizer (there’s always shit involved sooner or later). Avril is without a doubt one of the nicest people I’ve ever met, and she’s absolutely passionate about all things trees and plants even though she really only got into gardening about ten years ago. She shows me some of the vineyards right next to her house, including the region’s invasive eucalyptus trees, and on Tuesday shows me more around Somerset West. It’s a suburb with its wealthier as well as its more middle-class parts, and everywhere, including Avril’s house which isn’t that big and extravagant, still has the same walls and electric fences I saw in areas around Joburg. Not too far from her is an old Dutch colonial estate, Erinvale. To me, it’s a deceptively charming symbol of the early days of the 350-year-long European white supremacist reign over the land. But it does have an undeniably impressive variety of unique flowers and very old trees all over the place that Avril delights in showing me.

As for Avril’s family, her kids have married and moved back to Britain, as many white South Africans have in recent years. She tells me they moved for their own reasons, they weren’t fleeing any of the fears of “white genocide” that I mentioned in the last entry, but that she wanted to stay in South Africa, simply because she likes it; it’s her home, despite all its problems. She loves the people, the mix of cultures, and most of all the land. And she even seems to like the guinea fowls that tear up her garden, even if she won’t admit it. Avril was always against the idea of apartheid, and was hopeful when there was the peaceful transition to a fully democratic government in the ‘90s, as were so many others from all backgrounds. But she too has been let down seeing the same things others have pointed out to me, how for many people across the country things have not changed or even gotten worse, and how the ANC has become more corrupt, especially under leaders like Zuma.

Avril also tells me more about the ongoing Cape Town water crisis. There’s been drought since summer 2015, though last year was when it really got bad. There are restrictions for every household and business on using water, so many have resorted to collecting rainwater and using what they call “gray water”—water that’s already been used for other things, like washing dishes—for watering plants. While some people around the world use gray water just because it’s all around less wasteful, here people have to, just like in Palestine. Avril too has an organic soap for washing dishes, so that the water for her plants doesn’t get chemical soap in it. She also takes me to the town’s beach, and I see that while the Cape hasn’t had enough clean water, there’s another problem looming—too much salt water. Avril points out small concrete walls along the street next to the beach that were built more recently after flooding from the sea during storms. But enough depressing stuff about water crises—it’s a beautiful area, and Avril points out the tip of the Cape Peninsula far out across the bay, where I’ll be visiting later once I’m in Cape Town. And the drought so far isn’t as bad as last year thankfully, so we have a great couple of days using plenty of gray water for the plants of the Pink Palace.

Where the clouds gather. Wednesday 2/6 to Friday 2/8, Cape Town (//Hui !Gaeb)

Wednesday morning my short stay at the Pink Palace ends on a nice note. I help Avril with rehabilitating the dried-up stream behind her yard. The stream was ruined in part by a giant slide of runoff during storms from the neighborhood up the steep hill next to the stream, and for the past few years Avril’s been slowly clearing weeds and putting rocks and planks into place to make it a nice place for things to grow and bloom. She drops me off at the train after lunch and I thank her for everything before heading back to the city, where I take a Taxify to the hostel I’m staying at for the next few nights. I haven’t really spent too much time in hostels so far during my travelling except for a couple in Jordan, staying mostly on the farms or with Couchsurfing hosts. But for much of the next year I’ll be in plenty of them. Usually people in hostels are pleasant, though some hostels have different vibes and cultures, like being more chill or more party, more or less communal activities. A lot of it comes down to the staff. Only occasionally do I ever end up in rooms with loud and inconsiderate people, though I heard some horror stories about some other people’s experiences. Most guests are from North America and Europe, unsurprisingly, though I start to pick up on the pattern that Germans and Australians especially travel a lot, and even though American youth proportionally don’t travel in hostels much, there end up being a lot of Americans in most hostels anyway because we’re such a big country to begin with.

So that Wednesday I grab some groceries for dinner, and get to know some of the other people in the hostel. Some of the other folks have years of travelling experience that’s fun listening to and learning from, especially if they have tips for me and some of planned destinations, in South Africa as well as elsewhere. I also meet a Yemeni named Moataz, who thinks that I look Arab from a distance and comes up to me trying to speak Arabic. Guess my skin got pretty tan from those weeks on the farm near Lesotho. I can only give him a few of the words I picked up in Palestine. Moataz’s English is pretty good, and he says he’s trying to find someone to see Bohemian Rhapsody with at the nearby mall tonight, since he’s really proud that Rami Malek is getting so much praise, being an Arab actor. I don’t have much else to do, so I figure I’ll go along. He guy keeps forgetting the name of the movie (“how do you say it? The Queen movie?”)  and he’s snapchatting some of the big musical montage scenes to send to his friends. Then it gets to halfway through when Freddie Mercury kisses a man for the first time, and Moataz turns to me shocked and asks, “He was gay?” He doesn’t really seem to mind it, and keeps watching the rest of it and recording parts. The guy just had no idea that Freddie Mercury was gay.

Anyway, enough about some of the other travelers, back to my journey. The next day I have to take a quick shower, since there are water restrictions here too, and I go out to start exploring the city. While the townships surrounding Cape Town are notoriously neglected and impoverished, and therefore have more crime, the center of Cape Town is more prosperous and safer compared to those of Joburg and most other cities. During my time here it was safe for me to walk around the main areas and take the buses as a foreigner during the day, though at night I would take a Taxify unless I was walking back to my hostel with other people. Many of the black Africans around here are Xhosa, though their main homeland is further east, in the central-south part of the country. I can definitely hear the distinct clicking sounds as Xhosa speak their language around me on buses (the “xh” in Xhosa is pronounced as a very hard clicking “k” kind of sound).

I start off at the original Dutch Castle of Good Hope from the 17^th century, though I can’t get inside that day because of some parade thing going on. Several years ago, descendants of the indigenous Khoi-San gathered at this spot to celebrate an official second name for the city in their language: //Hui !Gaeb, “Where the Clouds Gather,” as they referred to the area before the Dutch colonized it (the // and ! symbols refer to hard clicking sounds that normal Latin letters can’t represent). I then spend much of the afternoon at the museum in District Six, the area in Cape Town where people of color were most targeted for forced removals to the Cape Flats township during apartheid in the ‘70s. Most original buildings were demolished except houses of worship, like the church now housing the museum, which showcases the lives of the communities before they were evicted. Some of the displaced have been able to return to the district since the end of apartheid, though it’s been a slow process overall.

On Friday I see more traces of Cape Malay culture in the city, first stopping by the Bo Kaap neighborhood. In the uniquely complex ethnic makeup of South Africa, there’s always another subgroup and culture to learn about. For well over a century now Bo Kaap has been the center of the mostly Muslim Southeast Asian community, originally brought as slaves by the Dutch, many from Malaysia, and they have gradually created their own small but unique culture here. The neighborhood is famous among tourists and South Africans alike for its very colorful houses just begging to be put on Instagram, which of course has made it a prime target for gentrification recently. Locals have responded with the Hands Off Bo Kaap campaign to keep themselves from being priced out by developers, who are already in striking distance from the high-end city center which Bo Kaap is very close to. The houses first residents, newly freed slaves almost 200 years ago, were originally painted so colorfully in celebration of their new freedom. The old Dutch slave quarters nearby is now also a museum, showing not only the horrors of the Indian Ocean slave trade but also the more uplifting role of music and art in the anti-apartheid movement across the whole country.

Friday evening I go to another synagogue for Shabbat, this time a Modern Orthodox one, and also the oldest congregation in all South Africa: The Gardens Shul, going back to 1841.* I have to show my passport to security guards and go through a metal detector when I enter, and there’s one guy who asks me some routine questions about me being Jewish, like the name of my congregation and rabbi back home, and I mention the summer camp I worked at too. Another congregation member told me that this is just general security, more because it’s a house of worship in a fancy building with lots of valuables, rather than because it’s a Jewish temple; I saw security outside of churches and some mosques as well throughout my trip (though I don’t imagine they get strict questioning about their religious background if they’re a visiting foreigner). The other guy says there isn’t a big problem with anti-Semitic attacks in South Africa today. The sanctuary is cavernous and beautiful, and the service is a pretty standard Orthodox one, some different melodies for prayers and songs like I noticed at the Reform service in Joburg. They’ve got a really nice (men’s) choir to sing with the chazzan, something that apparently is more common in British and European Modern Orthodox congregations.

I would love to go into the history of Jews in South Africa here, as its interesting especially to see where they fit in with the larger complex racial relations between different white, black, and Coloured groups over the years, but I’ll restrain myself—mostly. The overall patterns of immigration is pretty similar to the story of Jews in the United States. Like I mentioned briefly back in Joburg, most of the first South African Jews were Ashkenazi, immigrating directly from Eastern Europe, mostly Lithuania, late in the 19^th century around the economic boom during the Gold Rush. So many came that at one point their community in Joburg was referred to as “Jewburg.” Though they weren’t subject to the same harsh early segregation laws like the black Africans and Coloureds, there were still many white leaders who didn’t consider the European Jews to be fully “white,” as we know was also the case in many other countries, and Jews unsurprisingly faced some discrimination early on, especially in public schools. Leading up to World War II many Boers/Afrikaners were pro-Nazi, especially since they still resented the British, and there were cases of Jewish South Africans fighting against Brownshirt rallies in the 1930s. This would foreshadow many Jews would later joining other white South Africans in the anti-apartheid movement and other left-wing causes, though they weren’t a monolith either; like with the rest of the whites, plenty of Jews remained apathetic to or fully supportive of apartheid.

South African Jews peaked at around 120,000, and now about 70,000 remain, as many have moved abroad in the post-apartheid years along with other whites. While self-identity with observance is always a tricky question, most South African Jews seem to identify as some type of Modern Orthodox, with a smaller proportion as some kind of Progressive/Reform, or just plain secular. I get some of this info from a couple people I talk to, but mostly from the very useful museum that the congregation has next door, in the synagogue’s old building. I find the info they have about Zionism later becoming more central to the community sadly ironic, as the state of Israel was one of the last countries, along with the US, that kept selling weapons to the apartheid government while most other countries placed embargoes in the 1980s (yes, I do feel another barb at Israel is relevant here). Still I get to see some great artifacts, as well as old articles documenting Jews combating the pro-Nazi rallies and antisemitism.

My brief first taste of Cape Town ends as I get ready to go to another farm for a week, after which I’ll return to the city to explore more. It’s been cool so far, but I’ve found during my first couple days that it’s hard to get a full reading, and not just because it hasn’t been much time. To really see all sides of life in Cape Town I’d need another local like Steve I had back in Joburg to take me around. Not that the fancy and historic city center is “fake” Cape Town, but it’s only half the story–there’s also the other dozens of neighborhoods and townships beyond. In Joburg, I got to see both some of the wealthier as well as the poorer areas. Here, it’s harder for me to do that. Beyond seeing the sites and museums around the center I can’t really grasp a strong feeling of the culture. I can try some food at restaurants and markets (and it is damn good, from ostrich to Malaysian curry to exotic fruits like baobab to braii barbecue), but the places aren’t the same as the hole-in-the-wall greasy spoons like the Nigerian spot or Paul’s Tavern that Steve showed me in Joburg, though it is amusing to see some self-styled comfort food spots like “New York Pizza Slice” and “New York Bagels.” I can see music performed in some places, sometimes even traditionally-influenced stuff, but it’s more of a neatly packaged experience for tourists, not some impromptu thing with a local audience. There is one night though when I track down some jazz, which has a big scene in South Africa, with an entire genre called Cape jazz.

*I should also mention here that there is another interesting Jewish group (of sorts) in South Africa that’s been around long before the first Lithuanians arrived—the Lemba people. The Lemba are a Bantu African ethnoreligious group in South Africa’s northeastern Limpopo region and Zimbabwe that follow some Jewish as well as Islamic traditions, having lived around there for at least over a thousand years. Their oral tradition teaches that they migrated from ancient Judea, then Yemen before moving down the East African coast over two thousand years ago. There’s a lot of debate between scholars in different fields about their exact history. I was really, really hoping I’d be able to meet some of them toward the end of my trip, but they were too remote for me in Limpopo, finding my own way around there would’ve been tough. Still cool to mention them as a whole other story of Jewish South Africa.

The ranch at Riebeek Kasteel. Saturday 2/9 to Sunday 2/17, Riebeek Kasteel

Saturday morning I take a bus to link up with my next WWOOF host, Greg (white, of British descent). I meet him near the motorcycle shop he runs, not really knowing what to expect. After about ten minutes a guy pulls up on a motorcycle and casually asks, “Ben?” I wonder if I’ll be riding with my backpack on the back of his ride to the farm, but he goes to put it away and picks me up in his car instead, and we drive to his house to pick up his girlfriend, as they’ll spend the weekend at the farm, and Greg picks up some groceries for me on the way. He’s in his late 30s, and started playing around with ag (that’s the hip way of saying agriculture) in the countryside only about six years ago. His mostly makes a living through his motorcycles business. When we get to the farm, a little over an hour from Cape Town, I also see that Greg rents some of the land to a couple of families with country houses. He points out some of the stuff going on around the farm, but I’ll see more tomorrow. For now I meet one of the farmhands working for Greg, a friendly Zimbabwean a couple years younger than me named Blessed, and I settle into his little cabin. There’s Blessed’s room, a bathroom, and the kitchen/main room, where I’ve got a little mattress.

The next day Blessed and Greg show me more of the farm. The surrounding area of Riebeek-Kasteel is beautiful. It’s one of the oldest colonial towns in the country, named after Jan van Riebeek himself, the first leader of the early Dutch colony. 30% of people in the area are black (probably Xhosa) or white, while most are “coloured,” that South African term for mixed race. Most of them speak Afrikaans as well as English. Greg breeds a lot of cattle, and I learn that the brown-white ones are part of the English heifer breed. The herd is currently about fifty strong. During the past couple seasons of drought Greg’s had to run sprinklers for their grazing grass to grow fast enough for them, though of course there are restrictions on how much water he can use. There are some fruit orchards as well, a worm farm for composting fertilizer, and a field where Greg is having Blessed start to plant corn.

I work just four or five hours each day, and I get to help out more with the cattle here than I did near Lesotho. Blessed knows a lot about keeping them healthy, having worked with cattle a lot on his dad’s farm back in Zimbabwe, for which Greg is very thankful. A lot of the time we just keep an eye on them if they’re grazing near gardens, or we herd them out to and back from further fields where they graze during the day. We still haul a huge bale of hay at the end of each afternoon for them all to eat, so they keep fattening up. Blessed takes care of the more complicated stuff like monitoring their nursing behavior and health. Some days we’re joined by Jim and his father Abraham, two locals Greg hires to sometimes help Blessed. They’re both ethnic Coloureds, so they speak Afrikaans as well as English. I get into helping Abraham on his project, repairing the barbed wire fences for the cattle. We scavenge for thin but strong branches to tie to the metal rods hammered into the ground, pulling the wire taut across the whole line of them. Abraham mutters to himself and me as we work, and he takes to calling me “Mister B” whenever he needs me to pull some wire, hold a pole, or pass a tool. “All I can say is, thank God for my life, Mister B,” he’ll say every now and then after lamenting all the suffering around South Africa and the rest of the world.

While I was involved in weeding around large stalks of corn back near Lesotho, here I get to help out with the planting stage. For a couple of afternoons I help Blessed and Jim plough a small field and plant a lot of corn seeds, as well as some gourd. The rest of my time I help Blessed with odd jobs like spreading horse manure fertilizer around the fruit and olive trees (there’s always shit). Blessed does much more than I do since he works full time for Greg, so I become our cabin’s chef for the next week (though Blessed helps me prepare pap once, not too different from boiling rice), using a little hotplate unit to put together meals out of the ingredients and abundant frozen meat that Greg left us. I’m pretty proud of the meatballs I improvise out of ground beef, egg, and onion to go with some pasta. Blessed tries to split the food evenly between us, and I have to go all Jewish mother on him, telling him to take more of it since he’s bigger and has to work more. Sometimes the electricity for the cabin and everyone else in the area cuts out for a few hours though, as the whole country’s power system begins to implement load-shedding in some locations, but I’ll talk more about that towards the end of the trip, as it happens more then.

Blessed and I just chill in our free time, and he shows me a giant cactus tree nearby with the same prickly pear fruits I had at the other farm, and he shows me how to pick them without getting my fingers pricked (in Shona he calls them chinana). He tells me more about how he came Zimbabwe a year ago, to find more work since the Zimbabwean economy is still in the crapper. Just like Ahmed and Ishmael who helped drive me around on my first day in Joburg, Blessed also hopes to go back as soon as things get better back home. He too got mugged by tsotsis (slang for thieves) when he crossed the border on his way to Joburg. He was then accused by police in Joburg of being a tsotsi himself based on his appearance (this part of the story I didn’t fully catch with Blessed’s English; his first language is Shona), but he was able to stay clear. From Joburg he made his way to Cape Town to meet his uncle, who works at Greg’s motorcycle store, before he put his farm skills to work for Greg.

Jim’s English is fluent, and he likes asking me a lot about life back in the US. “And how is it over on your side?” he’ll ask, always referring to the Americas as the “other side” of the ocean. But there’s something I started to realize when I would talk with some of the guys on the farm near Lesotho, and I realize it more and more when I talk to Jim–I don’t actually know how most people in the US live. Sure I know the basics about American society and culture, how the economy overall is doing, but it’s hard for me to answer a lot of Jim’s questions because I’m just one out of over 300 million Americans, with my own particular background and experiences. I can tell him that I grew up in a much more privileged background than most, but there are still lots who have it better than me, and even more who have it harder than me. I can tell him the average costs of living and incomes, but I make sure to say that it’s also very different depending on where someone is living, which state, urban or rural, access to education, and all that. And from now on, whenever I ask anyone in a country I’m visiting about what life is like, I’ll make sure to say that I understand their particular experience doesn’t always apply to everyone else in that country. I do as good of a job as I can, and Jim is still pretty shocked that many Americans can make around $40,000 a year in urban areas, which converts to over half a million South African rands, though I tell him that the rising costs of living in those areas makes it really hard to live securely, especially for raising a family.

All in all there’s not as much for me to report on here like at the farm near Lesotho, but it was a nice productive as well as relaxing week among the flora and the fauna, and that’s actually it for my time on farms for South Africa—I ended up squeezing most of it into the first half of this trip.

Cape Town, take 2. Monday 2/18 to Monday 2/25, Cape Town (//Hui !Gaeb), and Cape Point

Monday I say goodbye to Blessed, and Jim gives me a ride to the Riebeek Kasteel train station, and I head back into the city. For the rest of the day I just get to know people around my new hostel. Tuesday I meet a guy named Bram who’s been doing a cool work exchange thing on a boat for almost five months with a bunch of other volunteers, and they’re currently making port for a few days, taking a break from sleeping below deck. Bram invites me along for a walk to the docks to see the vessel, the Picton Castle, and introduces me to the some of the old timer American sailors in charge of the voyage, and I end up getting shanghaied into helping them stitch together new sails for a couple hours. I’m down for the experience, as long as they don’t give me too much responsibility. I gather around the heavy white material with several other crewmembers, mostly young first-timers like Bram, and help carefully feed it through the heavy-duty sewing machine. I get rewarded with a tour of the boat and some lunch. It was built as a British fishing ship in 1928, and served as a minesweeper in World War II around Norway. These days it’s being used for long distance sail-training voyages like these.

It’d be cool to join the crew of the Picton Castle then and there and just sail away with them, but I’ve still got a lot of South Africa to see, and all my other trips planned after this one. Maybe one day I’ll get to do an adventure by sea. Bram and I hang around the port a bit more before heading back to the hostel. I continue to listen to other experienced travelers around the hostel. There’s one guy from Oregon who had been to Mozambique, where I had wanted to go for a week at the end of my trip here, but I soon learn it’s probably not worth it—while he says he had an interesting time in Maputo, the capital, there’s really not much to do, and there’s not much transportation for tourists to easily get to the more remote places worth seeing. He also tells me how the police are very corrupt, especially at the border, and regularly take travelers’ passports for no good reason and refuse to give them back until given a bribe.

A few other guests share their own stories about getting robbed; one tells me how some guys took his bag in a remote part of town, but they tried to tell him to calm down as they did it, that they weren’t going to hurt him. I guess Curly, who gave me my hat back after robbing me last month, wasn’t the only polite one. I also hear some nice stories about locals helping travelers before disaster strikes. Some other travelers who wandered into downtown Joburg like I did were actually stopped by locals who told them that it wasn’t a good idea for them to go there by themselves, and the local would then actually guide them to a safer street, sometimes even take them for a meal with their family (of course in my case, locals helped me after the fact). I also kind of experienced this once too–when a man came up to me in Cape Town pretty aggressively asking for money, two other (black African) men passing by asked me if I needed their help. The beggar disappeared quickly, and I thanked them.

I also meet Alex at this hostel, another member of the tribe from the US, and we hit it off. He and Katrien, a Belgian working in the hostel, are looking for people to climb Table Mountain with the next day. Wednesday morning we’re joined by a guy from Chicago and a French girl, and we head to the foot of the huge mesa. It’s a pretty steep climb up due to the mountain’s shape, with chain ladders in some higher parts. We get progressively more impressive views the higher we get, and after we reach the top the clouds soon clear and we take in the grand look around Cape Town, the different beach areas, the townships stretching far out, the other hills rising up from the mostly flat land, and even Robben Island through the fog out in the distance. Once you’re up top you realize it’s not actually all that flat. The climb back down is more dangerous, as it’s easy to slip on the smooth stone steps and tumble, but we all make it back down in the afternoon unharmed and get lunch.

I was able to find another Couchsurfing host, Bob, for the next few days, so that night I take a Taxify to some (walled) apartment complexes) further out of the city center. Bob’s originally from Uganda, now working here as a programmer. He’s very welcoming, though as we get to talking about our respective countries and cultures, he starts saying some interesting stuff that’s a bit odd for me to hear, especially about South African women. He goes off about how they have no respect, that you can’t trust them, and I just listen with interest. As Bob winds down his rant, he then nonchalantly asks me if I want him to help find me an African girlfriend. Not really sure what he’s going for, I just politely say that with me travelling and all that and not looking to move here right now, it sounds nice but probably isn’t the best idea. He continues his ranting about women from other parts of the world, and it doesn’t seem to really be racial as much as it is cultural and based on very anecdotal personal experiences—he says that you can’t trust European girls either, since he once met a couple of them from France or Germany while travelling, got their numbers and texted them later but they never responded, even though he said with outrage that they had been getting along. But Bob says he’s had more success with the few American girls he’s met, that they were more responsive. He then gets around to asking me if I know any women back home who’d want to marry an African husband, and I just say I’m sure they’d be open to it but they’d want to meet him first and everything, date, get to know each other and all that. I vaguely try to say that I’m sure there are European women out there too who aren’t flakey, that he only met two, and that not all American women are perfect, but I just met this guy and he’s hosting me and everything, so I don’t push too hard. He’s probably not a fan of the Guess Who song. Well, other than that though he’s a good host, and his place is nice.

Thursday I take a bus into town during the day and hit up a couple of the art museums with the crew from the hostel again, before going back in the evening to catch up with Bob at his place and watching some soccer (football, as they call it literally everywhere else in the world). Friday I go on a tour to see what the Cape Peninsula has to offer beyond the city. The guide/driver is Wilson, a very experienced tour guide who speaks at least six languages from what I remember; he’s originally from Zimbabwe. There are 8 of us in the kombi, mostly Americans and some Brits. We drive through some beach towns along the many cliffs and bays, mostly old colonial British sites, though Wilson also takes us past one of the impoverished townships on the outskirts of the city. He points out a cluster of beachfront mansions just a couple miles away, some of the most expensive in the whole country. We also stop off at an isolated artists’ studio with a huge outdoor gallery of Shona springstone sculptures, like the Zimbabwean ones I saw displayed in the Atlanta airport. The main attraction though is the tip of the peninsula, the scenic Cape Point and the more famous Cape of Good Hope, though it’s the higher Cape Point that actually marks the point furthest southwest on the whole African continent. It was here that Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias rounded 500 years ago as Europeans searched for a route to trade in India, though there’s some evidence that ancient Greeks and Phoenicians did it over 2,000 years ago. Wilson tells us that this is also not the point where the Atlantic and Indian oceans meet—that’s actually at another cape over a hundred miles further east.

We also have to be careful not to have any food out while walking around here, as the baboons have no chill and are known to grab people’s food and bags right out of their hands, sometimes injuring people in the process. It’s fun to watch them strut around though like they own the place. The less dangerous wildlife we see around the rest of the peninsula includes farmed ostriches, gangs of seals & sea lions basking on rocks, and of course the Boulders Beach penguin colony—yes, apparently some penguins don’t need to be in cold regions. There are over two thousand of these little guys living the life here, and in one part you can just lie on the beach next to them. Though the African penguin species (also known as jackass penguins for their donkey-like sound) is endangered, this colony was booming so much in the 90s that they were running around onto people’s lawns in the nearby town and tearing up plants, so they had to be sectioned off here. I’m not one to brag about being in tropical places while my friends and family are back home in the winter, but it is nice thinking I’m here and not in the middle of a New England winter, or worse the polar vortex in the Midwest where a friend posted a video of throwing water up in the air outside and watching it instantly turn to ice before hitting the ground. Our last stop of the day is the town of Muizenberg, with rows of multicolored shacks along the beach, almost as if the designers knew years ago that Instagram was going to be a thing one day. The south Atlantic water here is pretty cold though.

Saturday I finally get ready to head out to Robben Island, the prison where Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners were held, and where Joe Biden claims he was trying to visit before getting arrested in Soweto, over 800 miles away. OK, Joe. I also get to reunite and have lunch with Rachel, the French woman who was on the Nassers’ farm in Palestine! She’s spent the last couple months going down through Kenya and Rwanda continuing to meet with people involved in situations of conflict resolutions, meeting people involved in the reconciliation process after the Rwandan genocide. She just came to South Africa, since there’s obviously plenty to throw herself into down here; she just met with Gandhi’s granddaughter in Durban (of course).

I take a large boat filled with over a hundred other tourists out to the island. The prison was one of the main centers for holding anti-apartheid leaders like Mandela starting in the 1960s. It had been used in the British and Dutch colonial days for political prisoners resisting colonization as well. The tours are led by former political prisoners from the apartheid days, which adds a sense of poetic justice. My group’s guide, Ntando Mbatha, was imprisoned for five years in the late ’80s after protesting apartheid’s education policies as a student. He tells us that the prison guards became slightly less repressive over those years, as beyond the prison the regime had begun to gradually move towards ending apartheid. Still it was hard of course, and Ntando joined a hunger strike at one point; he shows where he slept on the floor some nights when he didn’t have the energy to get into his bed. He and the younger inmates also took inspiration from the older ones more experienced at surviving on the island. Ntando takes us through the complex’s main areas, including the cell Mandela was in for 18 years, and the garden that he and other prisoners tended to in the courtyard.

Saturday night I thank and say goodbye to Bob, planning to head back to the hostel for my final couple days in the city, but the good old one is full, so I stay one night in a different one in the more lively Sea Point district. It’s a weird hostel, almost laid out like a nice hotel in the lobby and the hallways, except the rooms have several bunk beds. There’s two Germans in my room, getting ready for a night out, one around my age and the other older in his 50s, I get the impression they’re a father and son. I’m minding my own business going through my bag and getting settled when the son calls over and introduces himself, I forgot his name, wasn’t really paying attention. He had this wild look on his face, his eyes darting all over the place. “I’m Ben,” I say briskly, not trying to keep any conversation over. He goes on to tell me that the two of them are getting ready to go out with some local girls downstairs. “Prostitutes,” his father puts in a thick German accent, rather matter-of-factly, from behind him. “Yeah…they’re white, of course,” the son adds. “Oh,” I say blankly, nodding slowly at them for a moment before returning to my business. They spray on deodorant and rush out. I go to grab some dinner and chill out on the roof, and when I come back two hours later, the Germans are back in bed and asleep. Guess they didn’t last too long.

In the morning I’m relieved to get out of this odd room, and I go back to the Backpackers hostel. I take most of Sunday easy, catching up with some of the folks still there, and planning some of my next few days in Durban. Later I take a small hike up Signal Hill, a popular spot for sunset, and for good reason—it’s packed with people picnicking, some playing instruments. I befriend a nice older German couple next to me, and they share some of their wine as well as an Uber back down into the center. They didn’t mention anything about meeting prostitutes later, though. Anyway, the next day I get a hearty lunch from the steamy Eastern Food Bazaar, say goodbye to the hostel, say farewell to Cape Town, and go to the bus station.

There’s an older white man in line who notices me with my giant backpack, and we chat a bit, and he learns I’m a foreigner. “But how do you travel around here?” he asks me. I mention that I’ve just been taking buses between cities, sometimes trains. He looks around at the other people waiting, mostly black or Coloured, and he mutters, “No, I mean with all the black people, it is very dangerous….” I could tell him about getting mugged my first day. Of course it’s a fact that it’s more dangerous here than in other African countries. I could also tell him about the people who have welcomed and helped me since I arrived, Ahmed and Ishmael, Steve, the guys on the farm near Lesotho, the Mashologus, Blessed, all the helpful taxify drivers I’ve had. I just vaguely tell him that I’ve managed, and that I’ve found more people to be friendly to me, and turn away. We all get on the double-decker and begin the twenty-two hour ride to Durban.

South to Clocolan. Saturday 1/12, Joburg and Clocolan

-I’ll try to give as clear of a picture as possible of what I learned about Lesotho from my time with the workers on this farm and with the Mashologu family, but a lot of it will come in jagged bits and pieces, not an entirely linear narrative. It’s kind of like Pulp Fiction in that way, but not in any other way–no bloody cars, heroin overdoses, cheeseburgers, gimps, or diner robberies…so it’s actually really not like Pulp Fiction at all, sorry if I got your hopes up. Just be patient and enjoy learning about Lesotho, and where it fits into the broader story of southern Africa, at the same pace I did.

Early in the morning, I thank Vin for everything before going to meet Steve. Steve leads us in a quick prayer one more time before I order a Taxify to take us straight to the minibus station we found yesterday, and I hand Steve my cash ahead of time to get my ticket. Our driver, Victor (black), is originally from Limpopo in the northeast of the country and tells me he’s been grateful for the opportunity he now has in Joburg. He curses the minibus taxis, which I can now see from being in a car on the road with them how crazy their driving really is. Steve and I jump out, I haul my backpack on and we hurry into the alleyway to the ticket window, where some other people are waiting too. Steve sorts out my ticket, and I feel a huge sense of relief and gratitude once more for my friend as the driver loads my backpack into the minibus-taxi-van-whatever vehicle thing. I get one of the front seats that will give me a solid view of the open road.

“I’m happy you have a good seat,” Steve says. “I’m just happy to have any seat,” I remark as I get in. I thank him again half a dozen times for all his help, but we’ll see each other in two months when I come back before flying back home. These longer distance minibus things work on a loose schedule, so they don’t get going until all seats are full; I wait for another fifteen minutes for the last couple seats to fill, and of course Steve waits with me. As the engine finally fires up, Steve gives me a double fist-bump through the passenger window, and the minibus pulls out and accelerates into Joburg traffic, acting as if pedestrians, who scatter out of the way like pigeons, don’t exist at all. Soon enough we’re on the highway, speeding south across gentle plains towards Lesotho.

At one point the minibus gets pulled over by some police for some kind of routine ID check. The two cops (black African) chat casually with the driver, and they’re surprised to see a white guy among the dozen passengers. “Benjamin…Sumner…Victor…” he reads amusedly from my passport. He asks what my business is, less interrogating me and more asking out of his own personal interest. I tell him I’m going to work on a farm for a couple weeks. “You’re a farmer?” he asks, looking me up and down. I think back to Daher dubbing me a farmer two months ago, in the hills above Nahallin, south of Bethlehem. “Yep,” I grin back. I guess I am. That’s good enough for the cop. He remarks that my English sounds very different before he and his partner let us keep going, and the rest of the ride is pretty uneventful. The driver is friendly but keeps the windows open most of the time, so I can’t hear him talk much over the roar of the blowing air. The bus makes stops in some towns, and also passes by some less formal shanty-town like settlements here and there. After four hours the landscape starts to get a bit more jagged as we get closer to Clocolan, the mountains of Lesotho faintly rising in the far distance. Vuyo texted me earlier the gas station he would meet me at; I have the driver drop me off there. Some of the other passengers pass my backpack up to me, smiling, and as the minibus continues on to Lesotho, Vuyo Mashologu pulls in and calls over to me through his window.

Vuyo is almost 40, and his English is very good. He briefs me on the farm, though some of the information I learn from him and his father when he picks me up three weeks later. His parents bought the farm from a white family back in 2002, though his family doesn’t work it themselves; they hire a bunch of full-time workers. Recently the family decided to start hosting volunteers through WWOOF on the internet, more for the benefit of the wwoofers, as they have enough workers to keep the farm running. Vuyo works most of the time in Maseru, the capital city of Lesotho less than an hour away across the border, where he and his family live. One of the full-time workers, Makatsang (pronounced more like “Magazang”), is with us in the car, though his English isn’t as good. We pick up some groceries from a supermarket in Clocolan, but other than that I don’t get to see much of the town. Vuyo mentions that that town has been growing more in recent years as people move off their farmland.

I say a bit more about WWOOF (Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms) back in the long-winded introduction to the blog. Obviously my time on the farm near Bethlehem was through the Tent of Nations initiative, but the other farms I’ll be working on throughout this year I’m arranging through WWOOF. What’s worth noting about the WWOOF website for South Africa is that of the 75 farms available across the country, only 2 of them look like they’re run by black Africans based on their names and languages listed, even though they’re the overwhelming majority of the population. This alone shows the larger reality of land ownership in the country still being in mostly white hands.

The topic of farm attacks—black Africans attacking white farmers—as part of South Africa’s overall crime has recently been making rounds in international media. When I was buying my backpack back home in October, the guy at the counter straight up said to me, “be careful there man, I hear they’re killing white people down there” when I told him which countries I was going to. One episode of that Dark Tourist show on Netflix that I mentioned has the host travel in South Africa and meet a right-wing white supremacist militia dedicated to defending their people from the threat of “white genocide.” And of course, Donald Trump brought the most attention to the issue with some of his tweets, probably after seeing it covered on Fox.

But the counterpoint is that of course, if whites still own most of the land, then any farm that gets robbed will most likely be owned by white people. And Vuyo himself points out that some of the few black-owned farms have been attacked as well. He thinks that, rather than being part of some larger racially charged campaign, farm attacks are mostly just motivated by poverty like other crime, and sometimes more of a personal issue; someone robbing a farm in the dark at night has to know where everything is, the barbed wire fences, the alarms, the dogs, the animals, the valuables. Therefore a thief has to have some inside knowledge of the farm’s layout, so Vuyo and others think that in many cases the thieves used to work at the target farm, didn’t like their bosses and got fired, and came back to attack the farm as revenge. Anyway, I will thankfully be quite safe from becoming a victim of white genocide over the next couple weeks. Vuyo says that this area has been pretty safe, and the farm is quite small, while it’s the bigger, more profitable farms that probably tend to be more of a target. Most importantly, Vuyo seems like a nice guy, so I don’t think there are many vengeful ex-employees out there who’d want to do his farm any harm.

The farm is just a ten-minute drive further down the main road, then onto a dirt path towards a nice stretch of land at the foot a big rock mesa. I get to meet four other workers, some of whom are fixing up the plumbing for my bathroom in my own little cabin. In addition to Makatsang, there’s Mpho (pronounced mm-Po, the ph doesn’t make a “f” sound here), Ka Moho, and two guys named Tapero. They’re all about my age, except Ka Moho’s approaching forty. A lot of Basotho (the main ethnicity around here) cross the border from Lesotho to work jobs in South Africa, though more Basotho actually live in South Africa than in Lesotho, which is only populated by less than 2 million. I’m also fascinated to learn that all of these guys on the farm, except one of the Taperos, are of the Baha’i Faith. Vuyo and his family are as well, so they’ve hired several members of the local community in Lesotho. More on all that later. Also, very important: Lesotho (along with Basotho, and Sesotho, their language) is pronounced “Leh-SOOT-hoo.” The t and h don’t combine, and for some reason it’s spelled with o’s and not u’s.

Vuyo briefly points out the different areas of the farm to me, but he leaves most of that to the other guys for tomorrow, and he drives back to Maseru. I settle in to my cabin and see a bit more of the farm before sunset. There are a couple fenced patches with bountiful crops inside, including a little forest of grapevines. Chickens and ducks get free range in the main yard during the day, living at peace alongside a couple of farm dogs. An expanse of cornfields stretches further out alongside the mesa, surrounded by grazing pastures for a flock of almost fifty sheep. I then hear the heavy footsteps and lowing of a bunch of cows, and am delighted to see Mpho and some of the others herding almost forty majestic brown and black cattle up from pastures back by the main road and back into the farm. A flock of thirty geese also returns after a day out for their dinner in their enclosure, along with the chickens and ducks.

Makatsang mostly takes charge of preparing dinner tonight, while a couple of the others haul out a frozen sheep carcass from a freezer and saw off part of it for him to cook. They’ve got an open fire with an old bicycle wheel on top as the stove, where Makatsang boils the chewy mutton and some mashed beets, and he also gets a big pot of pap going, which I now know how to eat with my hands from the place with Steve back in Joburg. I get to know the guys a bit, and they’re curious to know more about my story and what brings me here. Whenever asking about life back at home, they always refer to the US as “your side,” as in the other side of the Atlantic. They have varying levels of English; Ka Moho has the best, and is the most talkative in either language. Over dinner they all mostly chat in Sesotho together, and even though I can’t understand them I can tell Ka Moho is the clown of the group, always saying something that brings a chorus of chuckles from the others, imitating other peoples’ voices and gestures with his body.  I also begin to get friendly with the bigger dogs, giving them scraps, as well as Dalvi, a littler but very pregnant one.

On the frontlines of “white genocide?” Sunday 1/13 to Sunday 1/20, Clocolan

Sunday the farmhands usually rest, so there’s not much to do just yet. They only take care of the essentials, mostly feeding the animals and letting them out to roam. Two other guys come by the farm though, Abel and Simon (not Baha’i), and they don’t live on the farm like the others. They’re a bit older, and seem to have more farming experience; usually one of them is the leader by default for what has to get done on any given day. Abel’s English is pretty good, and he invites me to join him and Tapero as they go for a hike up the mesa to gather some herbs. The brother dogs follow us, and even little Dalvi drags her prego doggo body up the steep and wooded cliffside. Abel points out the streams flowing a spring that feed the farm. After seeing all the besieged and parched farms in Palestine, I don’t take water access for granted anymore. The top of the mesa gives a magnificent view of all the surrounding farmland and other mesas. Abel and Tapero pick some herbs that Abel says can help with pimples and flu symptoms, as well as with “pleasing a woman,” he smirks. I didn’t find out though which part of the equation that herb affects–with a male’s performance or with a female’s enjoyment.

The next day I get to work. Of course one of the things I help out with right away is cleaning up poop again—though this time, for almost fifty sheep, a much bigger task than the poop from the chickens and one single donkey I did back near Bethlehem. Thankfully I’m not alone; I work alongside a couple of the others in scraping and sweeping the entire sheep pen. I find that all the shed wool that mixes with the sheep shit actually makes it a bit denser and dryer, easier to clean up. For the next few days after that, the main project I help with is clearing the old soil in patches filled with old crops and weeds so new things can be planted. A lot of unharvested onions, potatoes, and beets fly up into the air as we turn the soil with shovels and pitchforks, and the old bushels get thrown over the fence for the sheep to eat. The work is pretty similar to how I would prepare the land for planting with Daher, except that was in late autumn up in the chilly hills of the West Bank, while down here I’m working in the brutal summer sun. Some days I just keep my showers cold, even though there is hot water.

Later in the week I also get out into the cornfields, first onboard a tractor with Abel and Simon while they use the plough to turn the soil between the rows for the water to get in better. I keep an eye on the claws in the back to make sure they stay in line between the rows without ripping up any of the crops. Later in the week I join them in hacking away at weeds between the cornstalks with hoes so they don’t sap all the soil’s nutrients and water for themselves, which we keep doing into next week. I also start helping feed the fowl when they gather for their evening meal, the geese honking loudly as they approach. I usually work no more than 5 hours a day (the standard time for most farms through WWOOF), as this farm isn’t in the same desperate situation as the Nassers’ farm. I don’t have as much responsibility as I did with the Nassers either, which I actually miss a bit.

Even though the farmhands often cook outside on the old bike wheel over the fire, they don’t live in squalor on the farm. There is an actual stove in the kitchen, which is in a nice one-floor building with a comfy lounge, and the cabins are pretty nice. We eat pretty well, with all the mutton available along with the pap, homegrown beets and spinach often on the side, and plenty of eggs for breakfast. People take turns cooking, though I don’t have experience cooking mutton. We also forage for a prickly pear that grows on cacti in the area, which they call droveli, and lots of wild green peaches and blackberries. I’m a pretty happy farmer. During free time the guys watch a lot of movies from the 80s through the 2000s recorded on VHS tapes in the lounge. They’ve clearly seen Gladiator, Johnny English, and Beverly Hills Cop many times. There’s also some more obscure ones, like Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt’s Seven; some random kung-fu movies; Little Nikita, an 80s Cold War thriller about an American boy who finds out his parents are Soviet sleeper agents; a dramatization of the 1989 United Airlines Flight 232 crash and rescue; a documentary about the descendants of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson; and of course the Steven Seagal B-movie crime flick Out for Justice, one of their favorites. It certainly is an interesting range of western cinema.

In addition to the movies, some of the guys (Ka Moho especially) put on tapes of old recorded news reels, mostly of events in South Africa. They watch the footage of Mandela’s inauguration and the festivities around the end of apartheid in 1994, as well as some coverage of the Oslo Accords between the state of Israel and Palestinian leaders. They also watch some footage of events from the 1990s in Lesotho, especially around meetings between politicians, financiers, journalists, and UNESCO people planning the Lesotho Highlands Water Project, designed to export water to Johannesburg and the rest of nearby South Africa. Ka Moho though says he and many other Basotho aren’t fans, knowing that the money just circles back to politicians and businesses involved, not doing much to help out the average citizen.

“Look at them, they’re not even paying to attention to what the person speaking is saying,” Ka Moho says casually, pointing at the attendees of a conference. “They’re all just there to clap, eat, and get paid.” He ties it back to the corruption across all of Africa. There were some protests this past year in Lesotho, mostly in Maseru (being the only real city), and some benefits and pay increases were given, but Ka Moho says it’s still not enough to meet living costs. “There are five rich people in the country who alone have more money than the government does,” he adds. It should also be noted that foreign corporations involved in the economy here have done their fair share of adding fuel to the fire of corruption; some 18 American and European companies were charged with bribing Lesotho officials for contracts in the LHWP back in the ’90s.

Ka Moho often decompresses too by watching videos about the Baha’i faith, and he gives me some pamphlets to learn more about he faith, though he puts no pressure on having me join–Baha’is are prohibited from proselytizing. He’s a cool guy in general, starting to do beekeeping on the farm, and he also DJ’s back in Lesotho and remixes music. Unfortunately I never get to see the bees, as he soon goes on vacation back to visit family in Lesotho.

The Basotho Baha’i. Monday 1/21 to Thursday 1/31

I continue helping out with the weeds in the cornfields into the next week, as well as feeding the fowls and cleaning their enclosures, which I have enough experience with. I don’t work much with the bigger livestock, though I do help them corner an untamed horse for Mpho to jump on and tame. I also get to go along once with some of them to herd back the cattle one afternoon. On our way we open a gate for another farm’s pickup truck, and they give us a lift in the back. The cattle are familiar with them, and respond well as we surround them, gently whistling. They’re pretty docile on the half hour walk back from the pasture, though one of the bulls tries to mount a female while crossing the road, and I have to take care not to step in any of their piles of poop they leave behind them on the trail.

As for the sheep, one of them dies suddenly in their field one day, and a couple of the guys have to haul its carcass onto the roof of a shed for the night so no other animals come to start scavenging it. Thankfully I don’t have to help with that; some green bile leaking out of the sheep’s mouth drips onto Makatsang’s arms while they lift the body. Vuyo stops by the next day to check out the sheep and bring some more groceries. Towards the end of my second week, I also go on a small adventure with Abel and Taper to get some corn feed for all the birds. We drive the tractor to a neighboring estate with a huge warehouse full of corn and grains that we fill into sacks to take back on the tractor. That farm and its warehouse looks like it’s run, and most likely owned, by white people.

In my free time, besides watching old movies on VHS with the others and taking in the scenery outside, I get to read a bunch of the stuff that Vuyo’s family has left in the lounge. There are some magazines about Lesotho’s history and heritage, old editions of magazines talking about current events and politics across Africa, and most notably a lot of pamphlets and books about the Baha’i faith. I had only heard a little about the Baha’i before, but it really is fascinating, and I’ll talk about it here more than I thought I would because it’s relevant to many of the people I met during these few weeks. In short, Baha’i believe that most major religions come from the same divine source, but that they took on different forms for the cultures in different places, and times, around the world. They believe that Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and even Hinduism, Buddhism, and Shinto are all true, with all their prophets being different messengers from the same ultimate God, but that the time has come for humans to move beyond their different religions and unite in one faith.

This whole thing started over 150 years ago in Persia with the Prophet Baha’u’llah, and spread further under his son, Abdu’l Baha. Over the decades the faith has grown to 8 million followers in a huge range of countries, which is pretty impressive for a new religion in the modern age, especially since they don’t actively proselytize people to join. They don’t have many strict rules besides abstaining from drinking and fornication (though they don’t say you should be severely punished if you break those rules), since those things in short lead to more drama and regretted decisions. Because of their theology of unity, the faith and its followers make a very big deal about countering racism and other types of prejudice, actually ending poverty and not just charity, and breaking down nationalism and uniting cultures, including gradually building a better global government (Alex Jones would have a cow, or perhaps a frog, at that last one). One of my favorite ideas I come across relating to this is “unity, not uniformity” between all peoples.

The Baha’i emphasis on genuine altruism and real community projects dedicated to uniting people and fighting bigotry shows in the stuff I read, and it really shows in the character of the faith’s followers, including the ones who I meet. Ka Moho, Makatsang, Mpho, and one of the Taperos, with their differing English levels, all say how much they want to see humans unite and rise above their differences and fears of one another. Unfortunately I didn’t get to talk with them too much about their paths to the faith (it does seem that most of them didn’t have Baha’i parents, but heard about it themselves and chose to join), as most of them go on vacation during my last week to their hometowns hours away in the mountains to the east in Lesotho, which also would have been cool to hear about, but they don’t return until after I finish my time on the farm. They also all express a desire to visit the Baha’i world center in Haifa, Israel/Palestine, and do a year of service there, though getting there is very expensive for them. Ntsiki, Vuyo’s father, visits one morning and leads a small discussion for the four of them about one of the Baha’i world organization’s latest pamphlets, about world peace in the context of the 100-year anniversary of World War I ending. Ntsiki and I talk for a bit too, but I’ll talk about him when I get to know him a bit more when I stay with Vuyo’s family after I leave the farm.

Other than that, there’s not too much that goes on during the last week as most of the guys go to visit their hometowns in Lesotho. Simon and Abel come sometimes to take care of some things, I help them whack some prickly weeds in the sheep field, and the other Tapero (not Bahai) is still here too but doesn’t speak much English. Dalvi gives birth to half a dozen puppies, which she nurses in a little nest under a bunch of tree roots. I continue helping with the ducks, chickens, and bloody loud geese. Thankfully I’ve got plenty to read, and my phone also came downloaded with a Spider-Man game and Asphalt Nitro, an intense 3D racing game, to keep me busy. I also get to meet Themba, Vuyo’s uncle, when he visits one night. He’s interestingly a convert to Islam, while his several brothers (except Ntsiki) are still Christian. He’s pretty well traveled himself, and likes to talk a lot about African and global politics, but he’s not all serious, grinning a lot of the time and joking around. As a kid Themba also had experience with traditional and more organic farming methods with his family, and he tells me about how they didn’t even need enclosures for a lot of the crops and livestock, who knew which plants they were supposed to eat and which they weren’t. They also had different sounds for fowls and beasts, who knew to respond to the calls. While traditional pastoral life is never easy, Themba laments the loss of these kinds of skills with the rise of big farms and agribusiness.

The Mashologus of Maseru. Friday 2/1 to Sunday 2/3, Clocolan, Maseru area, and Ladybrand

Friday morning Vuyo Mashologu comes to pick me up. It’s been an enriching and rejuvenating few weeks, and I’m ready to see some of Lesotho for a couple days before heading west to Cape Town. Vuyo was just on a business trip out around Cape Town (he works managing gambling over sports and racing), and he gives me some tips for traveling around there next. He also talks to me about his personal experience with the Baha’i faith, and says that right now his 14-year-old son isn’t that enthusiastic about it, but it’s for him decide. As I said it’s less than an hour’s drive to Maseru just over the border, Lesotho’s capital. Unfortunately the really high mountains for which the Mountain Kingdom gets its name are further east in the country, but I still get nice views of some rocky peaks rising up around the small city.

The Mashologus host me for another night night. They’ve got a nice place, not too surprising with Vuyo’s work as well as Ntsiki’s (engineering), and of course they’re able to own a farm. Most of the next couple days I spend with Ntsiki, Vuyo’s dad, though I also get to briefly meet Vuyo’s wife, as well his mother. When I politely ask how long she’s been Baha’i for, she tells me that she’s actually Christian—Anglican—not Baha’i like her husband. Ntsiki takes me out for a late lunch at a mall, and while it’s pretty modern with some fancier fashion and electronics stores, I notice that Ntsiki stops by a tailor’s shop, where plenty of people have their regular clothes mended–you’d never find a tailor in a mall back in the US, unless it was for fancier clothes like suits and dresses. Ntsiki fills me in a bit more on agriculture in Lesotho, how British colonial taxes and other pressures caused many Basotho men to leave Lesotho to work jobs in South Africa, especially in the gold mines around Joburg, for more money. This of course disrupted traditional rural life. Communities of farmers used to graze their animals together on the same land, but now everything is all fenced off and constrained, not just the big corporate farms but many small family ones as well. And of course Ntsiki has noticed the effects climate change here, summers getting hotter.

Saturday Ntsiki takes me for a really great day of sightseeing in the areas surrounding Maseru, and Vuyo’s son Ponzo comes along. Maseru itself is more like a large town, informal with just some office building, though there’s a pretty big manufacturing district that I’ll see on Sunday. Even close to the city center some herdsmen cross the roads with their cattle, and vendors sell fruit and roasted corn at intersections. As we escape the city though the countryside quickly opens up, and there are even more cattle herds. While in the city most people wear jeans and t-shirts with writing printed on them, the further we get from the city the more traditional clothing we see, robes and tunics with different colors (not too bright) and pointed straw hats, though there are still some people wearing more western stuff. Some clusters of traditional huts with thatched roofs also appear among the more modern little houses.

Ntsiki first takes me by the town near where he grew up, Morija. He shows me where one of the first French missionary schools started almost 200 years ago, as well as the first major printing press. There’s also a small museum, even though I had heard that there’s not a single museum yet in the whole country, with artifacts going back to the colonial period and the Mfecane, the “scattering” from when the Basotho and other groups fled from Zulu expansion further east. and it talks about some of Lesotho’s unique history as separate from South Africa. Interestingly, as the Dutch Boers encroached on Basotho land, King Moshoeshoe actually enlisted the British to protect them against the Dutch. So that’s one time the British can say they were actually asked by a colonized people to intervene. He also converted to Christianity, as many leaders around the rest of Africa and other continents did when met with Europeans. Ntsiki shows me the old missionary school of Morija he went to, as well as the country’s first printing press nearby.

Next Ntsiki takes us to Thaba Bosiu, the site of King Moshoeshoe’s mountain fort that he defended successfully against the Boers in 1865. His descendant Moshoeshoe II, with his supporters, also occupied the place a hundred years later in protest against the legitimacy of the country’s then-government. I climb up the small mountain with Ponzo while Ntsiki hangs out in a café at the bottom. Ponzo hasn’t been very talkative, even though his English is pretty good, but he seems to enjoy this adventure. Up at the top there are still some stone ruins from the fort, as well as the grave of the first King Moshoehoe himself. On the way back home, we drive past the palace of the current king, Letsie III. Vuyo then brings me to Maseru’s Baha’i house of worship in the evening, where I’ll get to stay for the next night in one of their guestrooms, and I get to see Makatsang again there too. I thank Vuyo for everything before he heads off.

I briefly meet Makatsang’s wife, also a Baha’i. It’s mostly a quiet night, though Makatsang and I go out to grab some groceries to prepare for dinner, and I get to see some of the foods stalls and vendors that have popped up around the nearby factories. The next morning I get to join a Baha’i devotional gathering, a nice and informal setting where people share different prayers, some specifically from Baha’i writings but a lot from scriptures of the other religions that Baha’is recognize as legitimate. About a dozen people congregate, including Ntsiki, and a couple of them are white (expats, though there are a few white people in Lesotho who were actually born here). One of them, an older American guy named Cal, takes me out for brunch. I say farewell to Ntsiki and thank him again before joining Cal, who tells me about about his travels working with different Baha’i communities around the US before coming to support the Baha’i presence and work here in Maseru. I tried to make a little donation to the house of worship at the devotional, but they politely rejected my money–they only accept donations from actual Baha’i followers. I myself would strongly consider joining the faith if I were part of a larger religion, like Hinduism or Islam, but I have a tight connection to still being Jewish because of how few of us there are in the world.

Back at the Baha’i house, Makatsang takes me for a little stroll around the factory district nearby. It’s not the most charming place, but it’s interesting to see especially because of all the factories with Chinese characters on them. Chinese companies are of course getting more involved across the whole continent, as my new Huawei phone shows. I did see what looked like a a couple Chinese businessmen around town yesterday with Ntsiki, and Makatsang tells me most of these are Chinese-owned textile factories. We now see by daylight the villages of stalls which we walked through last night. It isn’t news that China has been building its presence in sub-Saharan Africa for some years now. Makatsang says that many Basotho in Maseru are thankful for the jobs they’ve gotten from the new factories. But many of them have been striking for the past few years for better conditions and pay. Lesotho is also probably taking loans from China, just like many other African countries are, and Chinese companies have gained much influence to those that get trapped in debt, in some cases seizing control of ports like in Djibouti, just like how American and Europeans companies did when they were first imperializing the world last century. Lesotho being landlocked doesn’t have any ports to seize, but when will the Chinese debt collector come knocking at the door of Maseru’s commerce?

Anyway, that’s enough of my Thomas Friedman op-ed-like speculation (hopefully I wasn’t as incoherent as him). I have a bus ticket to Cape Town from Ladybrand, a town on the South African side, tonight. Makatsang helps me flag down a shared taxi that will take me back to the border, and I quickly say thanks (kea leboha, sadly one of the only Sesotho phrases I picked up) and goodbye to him as I jump in. The shared taxi here is just a regular-sized car, with other passengers going on other trips. I get to the border and wait in line for a while, going through customs on each side of the bridge as it starts to rain. There are plenty of vendors setting up shop next to the lines on each side, selling food as well as umbrellas and SIM cards, and I do as the Romans do and have some roasted corn while I wait. At the other side I get into a good old minibus taxi, which drops me off at a gas station to wait for the bus heading west to Cape Town.

I was not able to get anywhere close to a full understanding of Lesotho, politically separate from surrounding South Africa, its past or its future. But I have seen some of the general in the particular, the overall patterns of postcolonial Africa here in one little country—corruption, fueled by western companies, as Ka Moho pointed out with the water and dam project; and a new chapter of exploitation by Chinese companies, as Makatsang showed me with the factories. And caught in the middle of it all, the traditional rural way of life in decline, as the Mashologu family showed me with their own modest farm in Clocolan surrounded by the growing behemoth of agribusiness, that blessing and curse that makes our food cheaper but strangles small farmers and ruins ecosystems.

South of the equator. Sunday 1/6 and Monday 1/7–Mahwah, NYC, Atlanta, Johannesburg/Egoli

Dad and I wake somewhat early for him to take me to the airport. I pack up my toiletries and mom puts together some snacks and a PB&J sandwich, heavy on the PB. Joe Berman navigates the complex exits and overpasses across Manhattan and the Bronx before dropping me off at LaGuardia in Queens. I make sure to thank the TSA workers who are still working without pay, now two weeks into the shutdown since I flew back from Jordan, and I take a 2 hour flight to my layover in Atlanta. They say that if you die in the South, your soul has to go through Hartsfield-Jackson Airport before it moves on to heaven or hell. The place is indeed huge, with underground trains and tunnels connecting all the terminals. There’s also a nice little art exhibit of Zimbabwean sculpture in between the terminals. One 15 hour flight later, I’m at Oliver Tambo Airport in Johannesburg. After getting through security and reuniting with my backpack I go to the Gautrain, the main rail system for the Johannesburg & Pretoria area. I take it to the suburb of Rosebank, home of my Couchsurfing host for that night, Samad. Even though I’ve just jumped from northeastern US winter to South Africa’s summer, the weather is pretty mild. What stands out most is the walls around the suburban houses, with big gates for cars, and electric fences and even security guards stationed in booths at some of them. It’s not too hard to tell from my first few minutes walking around that the wealthier, still mostly white people live in almost militarized neighborhoods.

I get to Samad’s place, and he offers me a refreshing beer after my trek across Rosebank. Samad is of Indian descent, originally from Durban, but has lived in Joburg most of his life. Although the British were oppressive colonialists (as colonialists tend to be) in initially uprooting people from India to work in South Africa, he says he’s grateful for the opportunity he’s had in South Africa, or else he might’ve just grown up as a beggar on the streets of Calcutta. Samad’s had various jobs over the years, some all over the continent, including Katanga in the Congo. He’s currently working with an organization that does research on human rights and environmental policy in the country. He gives me a bit of a primer on my arrival to the country, saying that most of the rampant crime in the country is economic, due to poverty, though plenty of black Africans from all backgrounds still resent the whites after apartheid. We don’t have much time together, as it’s getting late and he has to leave early tomorrow morning for a trip to Argentina; Samad plans to soon move out of South Africa altogether, and he’s checking out other countries he might want to move to.

Mo, Larry, and Curly. Tuesday 1/8, Joburg/Egoli

Early next morning, Samad’s friend Richard (white, and Afrikaner from his accent) picks him up to take him to the airport. They both warn me to stay safe, which is appreciated, but Richard says some weird stuff too, which I feel is relevant to record. He feels that much of the crime, especially the farm attacks (which I’ll get into more next entry), is based on race, not just poverty, and Samad does push back against this a bit. It’s also interesting because Richard works at the same organization as Samad. I imagine plenty of white South Africans say stuff like this, it’s probably not all that weird sadly, but the really odd thing he then warns me about is the promiscuity of black African women, that I should be careful because they dress more scantily and a lot of them have AIDS. I want to say that I’ve seen plenty of risque white women in my day too (cue Jerry Seinfeld “not that there’s anything wrong with that,” people get to choose how they dress), but with Samad being my host and all and me having just met both of them, I kinda just silently listen to Richard and feign interest. I don’t recall Samad saying much either. Richard does make it clear that he by no means supports apartheid, but as we know all too well in the US and elsewhere, you can still be racist without fully supporting legal segregation.

Samad and I wish each other well on our respective trips, and I’m a bit relieved to set off with my backpack as they drive away. I grab breakfast on my way to the main mall in Rosebank, where I have a rough couple hours trying to sort out phone stuff. I’m able to get a SIM card, but have issues getting it to activate with my phone. Eventually I decide to deal with it later, and use Wifi to download a map of where I plan to go in Joburg for the day, not knowing what I’m in for. I take the Gautrain again a little past noon and walk about a half hour down towards the Carlton Centre, the tallest building in South Africa, where I’ll be able to get a good view of the city and surrounding area. On the way it’s impossible to not notice how impoverished the place is. Most people are just going about their daily business, but there are a lot of men living on the street and begging, and trash strewn everywhere, especially the side streets. As a couple of them call out to me, the man walking next to me (also black African—I’m the only white guy around for blocks) tells me not to stop for them, that they’ll steal from me. I take his word for it, though he also says that many of them are foreigners from other parts of Africa. I don’t catch his name, but he’s on his way to a job interview, something to do with advertising for a shop. At one point we come across an abandoned jacket on the ground, and he picks it up, examines it, and deciding it’s in good enough condition takes it with him. He wishes me luck as he turns the corner a few blocks later after walking together.

After getting directions from a couple other people, I reach the Carlton and take the elevator to the top. The building was once a hotel, though for the past 20 years the giant lobby has served a mall. I take the elevator to the top and take in the sprawling view of the city and beyond—it was worth it. Soweto is to the southwest, and I can see some of the ridges in the distance where the original gold mines were over a hundred years ago, though most of the land is flat. Most notable is that there is no major body of water around, like in most major cities around the world—Joburg started and grew from here because of a huge colonial gold rush over a hundred years ago. I can also see some of the iconic buildings of Joburg’s skyline, like the round Vodacom tower. Some posters on the wall talk about how the building was built with the labor of black African workers in the 1960s, who were then denied entry as guests once it was complete, but other than that the place isn’t too well maintained. I head back down to the mall and walk back up one of the main streets, Rissik Street, to get back to the train for some more historic parts of the city.

I’m a couple blocks away from the station when one guy taps me on the shoulder. I look around trying to shrug him off, and before I know it I’m surrounded by two more, one of them with a knife out pointing at my gut. It’s 2 o’clock in the afternoon. Ah, the wonders of living in the twenty-first century—one day you’re 30,000 feet in the air above the Atlantic Ocean, having a drink and watching The Incredibles 2; the next you’re getting mugged at knifepoint in Johannesburg. Mo (the one with the knife) tells me to give them my phone and money. I of course do the smart thing and start to get them out, but am a bit slow on the draw, and Mo starts rushing me as he looks around quickly, urging me to “come on, come on,” and makes to search my back pocket as I manage to pull the phone out. Mo and Larry immediately run off back down the street with the phone, not waiting around for the wallet. They all clearly didn’t coordinate much of a plan with each other. Curly stays behind for my wallet. As I start fishing it out, my cowboy hat falls from my hand. The guy then bends down and picks it up, and I think “shit, he’s gonna steal my hat too,” but he then nonchalantly hands the hat back to me as I present him with the wallet, and Curly runs back down after his friends. I thought later that I could have booted him in the face while he was bending down, but it really wouldn’t have been worth the risk.

Ah, so that’s what all those gates and electric fences I saw around the houses in Rosebank are for. I had heard about the country’s crime ahead of time, and Samad had warned me a bit, but with my inexperience I figured I’d be fine if it was during the day. Being mugged while abroad is pretty much like being mugged back home, except you need to find a phone that will make an international call to sort everything out. Very luckily for me, Mo Larry and Curly must have figured my backpack was too heavy to carry away quickly, and probably didn’t have valuables in it. I also still have my passport, and a backup credit and debit card in my money belt under by shirt. And most of my cash is in my shoes, as well as my pockets. I hadn’t been a total idiot. The phone with all my unsaved photos from November into December on it is really the biggest loss. Now what I need to do is get to a phone I can make a call to the US with to cancel the old credit card so they can’t take any money off it–I don’t expect the police to retrieve my phone with all the other stuff they’re probably dealing with. I walk up towards the mall outside the train station and just start asking a couple shopkeepers to use their phones, but realize they probably won’t be able to make international calls.

I figure a police station’s phones might be able to, and a security guard points me to the one around the corner. It’s in an older stone building, and when I first enter I think I have the wrong building; all the lights are off, and there’s a large puddle of water on the floor. An officer then steps out from a dark doorway with a couple other people, telling us that the power is out and we’ll have to go to a different station. She points me in the direction down Rissik Street where I just got mugged. No thank you. I start looking around the road outside the mall for a taxi to safely take me to another station, to no avail. Another guard asks me where I’m looking to go, and I tell him, only half paying attention as I keep trying to find a taxi. He walks away and comes up to me again a minute later, telling me that these two friends of his with a car will be able to take me if I pay them a bit, and they’ll be cheaper than a taxi. I don’t really know the context of this guy’s friends happening to be available; maybe they had just been chatting with him while he was on duty, or maybe he just said “friends” informally referring to them and had only just spoken with them telling them about my situation.

I get into the back and throw them some of my cash, and they introduce themselves—Ahmed and Ishmael. Their English is pretty good, and one of them tells me that he also got mugged when he first came to Joburg last year (they both came from Zimbabwe, though Ishmael’s originally from Malawi), and that makes me feel a bit better. They left for South Africa, as so many Zimbabweans have, due to the crumbling economy at home over the past decade, and hope that things will be better soon enough for them to go back. They also tell me that for all of Zimbabwe’s problems, they don’t have this kind of endemic crime back at home. I would hear this several times over the next couple months, that most other countries across Africa—while many (not all) struggle with common postcolonial cycles of poverty, civil wars, and corruption—don’t have the same issue with crime (Nigeria was an exception, I heard, among a couple others). For whatever reasons, historical and current factors here have led to the crime being bad particularly in South Africa.

Ahmed and Ishmael drive me about 10 minutes over to another police station, in Hillbrow. Ishmael actually gets out of the car and escorts me across the street into the station, not wanting me to get attacked by anyone else again. There are just a couple overworked officers (black) dealing with a long queue of people waiting on benches. A naive tourist with a stolen phone and wallet are the last things for them to be worrying about, but Ishmael tells one of the officers that all I need is to use a phone to make a call to the US to cancel my card–I don’t plan on filing any report or getting my stuff back. I go behind the counter to a side room and dial my home phone number, not knowing my bank’s number. It doesn’t go through. I then ask Ishmael to look up the US Embassy, thinking one of their phones could make an international call. The call isn’t strong, and they redirect me back and forth between a couple different extensions before it cuts, but all I need to know is that they’re open—we can just go to the embassy and I’ll speak to them in person.

We get back into the car with Ahmed and head over. They start asking around where it is when we get close, as we can’t spot it (I believe they were speaking Shona or Ndebele, which as a Bantu language has enough in common with South Africa’s main languages, they tell me—think Romance languages in Europe). No one seems to know where it is, so we call the embassy again asking them where in hell they are. Turns out they moved their offices several years ago to Sandton, a suburb outside the city; the address on Google wasn’t updated. I start laughing. I’ve come to find some entertainment in these kinds of situations—getting to the Nassers’ farm from Bethlehem, crossing the Jordanian border, the failed hitchhiking attempt to Petra with Gottfried. A sick kind of masochistic humor. Except this time my checking account is at stake. Ahmed and Ishmael then drive me back to Park Station, where I’ll take the Gautrain out to Sandton. I give them the last of my cash, thanking them again and again, and they wish me luck. This time Ahmed is my bodyguard as I walk into the station.

I jump back on the train, and soon see that Sandton has become the new business district for the Joburg area, as the main city became more neglected after apartheid ended in the ‘90s. I get to the entrance of the embassy. I’ve never been this relieved in my life to see the stars and stripes unfurling. I fill in the South African folks (all of them black) at the desk in on what happened. They tell me they can’t let me use their office phones to make a personal call, even though they genuinely express their sympathy and want to help me, but they have a man guide me to another part of the embassy where they’ll help me out. “The country is getting more dangerous,” he tells me on our walk. “Even around here it’s not safe anymore.” Whether that’s true or not, as I’ve seen competing stats on the crime each year, he definitely feels it. I wait for an American staffer to come out and help me, and it starts to rain. I’m so preoccupied by the whole ordeal that I don’t even think to make a mental Toto reference to being able to “bless the rains down in Africa” for the first time.

The American, Andrew, comes out. Again I can’t use his office phone, but he lets me use his personal phone to send any messages I need to over the internet. I pretty much came all this way just to use the internet on someone’s smartphone. I email Joe Berman back at ground control, giving him the info to get onto my account and cancel the credit card. Not sure how soon my dad will see it, I Facebook message a couple friends with my parents’ home number to call and tell him to check his email. I also log in to the Couchsurfing website and get the number for my host for the night, Vinicius, and call him to get his address again. Andrew tells me that even around Sandton he drives his car or takes a taxi if he’s alone, especially at night. He tells me I can get some cash at an ATM nearby, get back on the train to Park Station, and grab a cab to Vin’s place. I thank him again, and do just that. At the station I run out into the rain and show a driver the address, and he takes me to Melville, a safer neighborhood some 15 minutes’ drive away. He’s not too talkative, but he lets me use his phone to message Vinicius. I graciously accept some of a Brazilian stew Vin just made and a cup of tea as I tell him the full story, and we talk for a bit longer getting to know each other before going to sleep.

Steve the weaver. Wednesday 1/9, Joburg/Egoli

The next morning Vin lets me out so I can go get a new phone. He tells me that though walking around Melville is much safer, especially during the day, I should just keep my wits about me and I’ll be fine. I put my backup credit and debit cards into my shoes along with most of my cash, a habit I get into for the rest of the trip. As I walk into Melville I can now see in the daylight that all these houses have walls and electric fences too—not as many security guards as the wealthier first neighborhood I walked through to get to Samad, but still mini-fortresses. I get to the mall’s phone kiosk, and look through their catalog of phones. Looks like one of my cheaper options is Huawei—Chinese companies really are making their dent in Africa. As I browse I tell the women working there (black) the story from yesterday, and they welcome me and insist that there’s more to South Africa than that. One of them says that she just drives everywhere whenever possible. There’s a Zimbabwean student there too who tells me that it’s a type of initiation for anyone newcomer into the country. He only just came last week to start school, and has yet to undergo this rite of passage himself.

I start the process of buying the phone, though it takes a while because you need not only an ID but also proof of residence for buying one, but they help me out and make an exception because of my situation. There’s also a guy from Ghana in his forties buying something for his phone too, Steve Appiah, who overhears my story. He shows me the documentation he has with him, and also gives me his business card, eager to prove that he’s legit and trustworthy, and says that later in the afternoon he can show me around. He goes off on more errands. I go through another half hour of buying the phone, slowed due to me having a foreign credit card but one of the women helps me work around that too. She also has me download Taxify, a rideshare app cheaper than Uber that many South Africans use, and she suggests I use it whenever I need to get around cities alone, especially at night.

I call up Steve Appiah, and he comes back and starts showing me around Melville, and just like that this guy becomes my tour guide for the next couple days. We walk back to his place, not too far from Vin’s. On the way we meet his two kids, Blessed, 4, and Abigail, 9, a very bright fourth grader, on their way back from school. Steve came from Ghana 12 years ago for more opportunity, and has worked as a teacher in schools as well as odd jobs on the side, like repairing shoes. Most of all though he has been a weaver of kente, traditional Ashante Ghanaian clothing, which he learned from his father. Next he takes me to “Uncle” Paul’s Tavern. Paul came to South Africa in the early 90s, also from Ghana. When Steve tells him what happened to me yesterday, Paul tells me how when he first came to the country he had a chicken he was bringing home to cook for dinner grabbed right out of his hands on the street. Since then, Paul seems to have done pretty well for himself with his bar. Most of the patrons are black, though there’s a tall older white man who surprisingly has military medals on his jacket from when he was in the airforce during the days of apartheid. Steve knows him, gets up on a chair to hug him.  A lot of the people here are immigrants too, some from Malawi and others as far away as Nigeria. There’s also one older toothless guy in sunglasses bouncing around the place screwing with people, who just laugh and push him away, whipping out the occasional kung fu move on them. That’s Mahopeh—Steve explains that he’s an anti-apartheid veteran, and has him show me his ID card for his pension. Now Mahopeh spends his victorious retirement just good-naturedly trolling patrons here. Steve tells me that most of the buildings around here, as in most of the country, are still owned by white people, including the people Paul rents the space for his tavern from. He and many others don’t have animosity for all the whites, but it shows even further how a lot hasn’t changed all that much since the 90s.

As night falls, Steve and I stop by the store so he can pick up some supplies for Abigail, and I get some cake to share with Vin. He then takes me by his friend Sonny’s guesthouse. There’s a blackout as we approach, and Sonny calls out “Who the hell is that?” through the dark before realizing it’s Steve, and we hang out for an hour or so, talking more about life in South Africa, and the rest of Africa as a whole. Sonny and the few Africans I’ve spoken with so far all seem to agree that if they’re ever to overcome the problems they face, the many peoples across the region have to unite—even after many years of defeat, pan-Africanism definitely still has its appeal. While many westerners and people outside the continent are told not to lump all Africans and African countries together despite wide ethnic diversity, many Africans do speak of themselves as being part of a common experience for the past century and a half, of European colonialism, independence, and now continued exploitation by foreign interests, corrupt leaders, and ethnic division. It plays out differently in different countries, and in different places within those countries, but no conversation about what’s wrong in South Africa in particular seems to go long before it’s tied to what’s wrong in Africa in general, especially since, as I’ve seen, so many people in South Africa are immigrants from other African countries. There also is a lot of admiration for China, being a non-western country that’s grown very quickly. We say goodnight to Sonny, and Steve insists on walking me back to Vin’s place, a few blocks away. Steve says he’ll be my guide to the rest of Joburg tomorrow.

A less sharp, but still shiny welcome. Thursday 1/10 and Friday 1/11, Joburg/Egoli

I whip up some eggs I got for breakfast the day before and head back to Steve’s. We hang out for a bit as he takes care of some stuff around his house, blasting reggae like Burning Spear and Bob Marley. Steve also gives me a kente shirt and hat he’s handwoven, and gets a kick out of taking pictures of me in it. He tells me that I’ll be safer walking with him, a local, but still suggests I just get some cash now so I don’t have to take out my card again, and I split my cash between my shoes and pockets. I also leave my phone this time, just taking my small camera with me, which Steve holds onto most of the time. Even so, I walk with Steve around downtown Joburg for almost six hours each of the next two days, and am completely fine—no one else tries to rob me, most of the people Steve and I pass are just going about their own business. Steve does tell me though to not speak too much whenever we run into people he knows on most streets, as my American accent would confirm that I’m a foreigner, not a white South African, potentially making me more of a target to any would-be muggers (of which Steve says there definitely are some around).  And he makes sure to not take me through some of the more dangerous parts, like Hillbrow, and many of the townships.

Steve has us pray together for safety before we journey into the city. He drops off some shoes he’s repaired for a man at a church, then shows me his weaving studio (still in Melville). He’s built about a dozen looms with spare wood he gathers from all over. Steve has been able to teach the craft to some at-risk local youth, the same stock, he says, which the guys who mugged me come from. The building also has a bunch of rooms in which some of his protégés have sometimes stayed. Steve hasn’t been able to reach as many students since the original organization he was partnered with closed down a couple years ago, but he’s still found fulfillment in teaching some. He says that here, like everywhere else, crime comes from desperation and poverty, and helping people develop a craft gives them purpose and resources to support themselves.

We catch one of the cheap minibus taxis at a nearby corner into the city. These ones aren’t unlike the ones in Palestine and Jordan, where you pass up your money to a guy next to the driver who then passes your change back. I make sure to pay for Steve’s fare and any food we have throughout the day, as he’s taken so much time to show a stranger around. He also takes care of the transactions, and knows all the minibus routes. Sometimes you get out of a minibus in the middle of the street at one stop and run out through the sliding door into another waiting in the middle of traffic just one lane over, and there are different hand signals you put up while you’re waiting at a corner letting a driver know your destination. When it looks like there’s no room on one Steve still pulls me in and has me pinned between a woman and a door, and in a minute my leg falls asleep. Later in the day as it’s starting to rain a man with a wrapped TV screen in one arm and his toddler in the other squeezes in next to me by the door. The drivers are an absolute menace to other cars and each other, cutting each other off without mercy and not slowing down for pedestrians, who are fully expected to run across the street to the rhythm of the minibuses. Traffic lights (“robots” as they’re called down here) are more of a suggestion than a rule on these roads. It’s like the Knight Bus in Harry Potter, except things don’t magically jump out of the way for them. While it’s fun and new for me to experience the endearing South African minibus, and to write about it, there is definitely a darker side to it. I learn later that drivers from rival companies sometimes get into physical fights with each other over routes (this escalated to the point of an actual “taxi wars” back in the 80s), and it’s clear that much of it is from the pressure to profit.

Radios in vehicles and in shops blast songs in English, Zulu, Xhosa, a little Afrikaans (the Dutch tongue), and other African languages I don’t know the names of yet. As Steve steers me through the streets, he points out that many of the marketplaces are run by immigrants from somewhere—Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Ghana, Malawi, Ethiopia, the Congo, Mozambique, and as far away as Pakistan and southern Asia too. Yes, it is the same Joburg I got mugged in two days ago, there is still trash on a lot of side streets, there is still the desperation of many inner cities, but walking with my new friend, a local, occasionally meeting people he knows, I see more of the life and color amidst the grit than I did when I first arrived. We go to a local Nigerian-run spot for lunch. Some of the patrons playing pool are a bit surprised and amused at seeing a white guy enter, though they really care. Steve has us partake in some alomo, a very bitter west African liquor in a little plastic pouch, which is supposed to help clear the system before eating, and he orders us some kind of stew served with pap. Pap is this hot, soft, corn-based kind of cake, almost like grits, that you use with your hands to scoop up the other food. While the main dishes vary widely across the continent, pap is a common staple you’ll find on most plates (or Styrofoam trays in this case). The main dish is something else—I’m not great at describing what new foods taste like, but I’d say it comes closest to seasoning used in Indian food. The stew is an explosive, mildly spicy mix of meat, vegetables including okra, and some type of fish. Add that with the pap and I’m completely stuffed for the rest of the day. We also meet and chat with Steve’s friend Philip, who works at a tailor’s place around the corner, who echoes some of what Sonny said the night before.

In the afternoon we head towards the Maboneng district, a more hip and artsy kind of spot with political graffiti covering doorframes and walls. Steve introduces me to his friend Gary, a guy of South Asian (probably Indian) descent in his 30s. Gary has a display of radical t-shirts he prints with faces of prominent South African figures like Oliver Tambo, Steve Biko, and of course Mandela and his first wife Winnie, as well as some international faces like Castro, Malcolm X, and the ever-present Che. Steve enlists Gary as our guide to Soweto tomorrow, as Steve knows that Gary has more friends around there. We continue down the street past a bunch of higher-end cafes, eateries, shops, art galleries, and it’s hard for me to comprehend that this is only a couple blocks away from the rougher rest of downtown. There are more white people here, mostly younger, especially bolstered by the presence of a hostel, though there are still plenty of more middle- and upper-class black Africans. In the moment of my whirlwind day with Steve, I don’t fully process it; it’s only a few days later as I’m reflecting on my notes and photos that I realize I was looking gentrification in the face. Maboneng is of course a charmingly nice spot, especially as this is probably the only area downtown where I can walk around by myself without Steve, without a repeat of the incident two days ago. But there’s no way it can be accessible to most people of Joburg, with the prices of its cups of coffee and art prints. And although gentrification over here is probably not the exact same as gentrification in cities back in the US, I imagine that sooner or later residents will start being priced out of nearby buildings as this little Williamsburg spreads its tentacles of rising property value into surrounding streets.

Steve is hoping to get in on the opportunities that seem to be arising in this area of Joburg. We go further east down a long stretch of road to Victoria Yards, another gentrifying area. It’s a sprawling old complex that used to be some sort of industrial laundromat 100 years ago, before declining and being taken over by chop shops and some other illegal entrepreneurial ventures. Now various groups and developers have started a project to turn it into a space for artists and creative businesses—again, sounds cute but most likely not accessible to most denizens of Joburg. The place is abuzz with construction and landscaping work. Steve talks to a couple of people around about getting one of the spaces to set up another studio where he could teach more people kente weaving. As the afternoon winds down, we head back to the minibuses out to Melville. We hang out for a bit longer at his place with Abigail and Blessed before I head out. I also get to know Vin a bit more in the evenings between my adventures with Steve. Vin’s a journalist in his 30s, stationed here since last summer, and I even get to watch to him do a live broadcast back to his news station in Brazil.

The next day Steve and I pray together again before taking a minibus to meet Gary, his friend from Maboneng who’s coming with us to Soweto. Soweto is simply short for “Southwest Township.” Thousands of black Africans were forcibly moved here by the apartheid government. The township is huge, practically its own city, so we switch to another minibus that just takes us to Vilakazi Street, and I pay for our fare. The area is pretty touristy now, with the same souvenirs lining the street and guys dressed in traditional tribal costumes for photo ops, but it has some of the main attractions from the anti-apartheid movement, especially Mandela’s house. He lived here in the 1950s, before he was imprisoned; you can still see the bullet marks and the burned bricks from when the police tried to kill him. There is also a memorial to Hector Pieterson, the boy killed by the police during the massive student-led Soweto Uprising in 1976. Steve holds onto my camera again just like yesterday, and he insists on getting pictures of me in front of everything, so I can have proof I was there. I feel a bit weird posing in front of the memorial, but hey, Steve’s the cameraman. I’m very much up for the picture with Mandela’s house, though. Gary also gets the chance to catch up with some of his older friends he hasn’t seen in a while.

Back in downtown Joburg we say goodbye to Gary, and I talk to Steve about my plan for getting to a farm tomorrow down south in Clocolan, a small town near the Lesotho border. Vuyo, the owner of the farm, says there are some minibus taxis from Joburg that go directly through the town, but I have no idea how to find them, especially since most of the minibuses leave from downtown and it’s probably not a good idea for me to wander around there alone with my backpack trying to find the right one. But Steve Appiah is there to save the day again, and says that we can find the right one today so we know where to go tomorrow—yes, we. For the next half hour he takes us around the different parking lots filled with taxi stations, with drivers telling us to go to this or that street. Eventually we find a ticket office in a clearing in an alley, and Steve finds out from them that there is indeed a minibus every morning that goes to Lesotho through Clocolan. We head back to Melville for the evening and make a plan to take a Taxify cab straight to this alley tomorrow morning together, so Steve can make sure I’m safe and get the ticket for me.

I thank my hero once again, and go back to Vin’s, but my last day in Joburg’s not done yet—I go to a nearby synagogue for Shabbat services before meeting Vin and some of his friends for dinner later. I’ll go more into detail on South Africa’s Jewish community when I explore it more in Cape Town, as I don’t learn too much yet on this night. I get there with the Taxify app, as most people advise me I shouldn’t try taking public transportation by myself. There’s one security guard at the gate, though I don’t have to show any kind of ID. It’s pretty much an average Reform movement service (though their movement goes by the term “Progressive” here, as in some other countries), though a few of the prayers and songs have different melodies. There are a little over 50 people gathered, mostly white, though not of Dutch or British descent, but mostly eastern European; most of their ancestors came here directly fleeing the antisemitism there in the early 20^th century. They’re all very welcoming to me when they hear there’s an American visiting, and there’s a dinner after t’fillah that they invite me to join.

A nice older guy named Irwin who’s actually putting a book together on South African Jewish history gives me a lift to the place where Vin is, as I don’t have data working on my phone yet to get another Taxify. Most of Vin’s friends are Indian South African, a little older than me, and they give me more advice on places to see around the country during my next two months. They also tell me a bit about Indian culture in South Africa—there’s still some of it there, with the celebration of festivals and especially food, but less so with each generation being less tied to tradition. Vin and I head back, where I pack and get some rest for my plan with Steve tomorrow morning. It’s been a pretty wild week, but I made a lot of new friends along the way, and I’m ready to get back into the earth at a farm again!