Richard Stupart

Camera in hand, I follow Hailey through the roads of Glenmore as the Sunday afternoon beats down on us. She, in turn, is following Ben Mafane, the township patriarch whose athletic frame understates his age. It’s easy to understand why he is dubbed the ‘Mandela of Glenmore’, having been a former boxer who now teaches the sport to many of the local youths. Some of them are with us, forming his entourage as we go from house to house. Hailey interviews a teacher here, the owner of the community creche there. For my part, I chase laughing children down a side street as they pose with daft expressions in the hot dust. Then laugh madly at their faces on the back screen afterwards. Read the rest of this entry »

The irony of being on a journalism course and at the same time suffering a bad case of blogger’s block is painful. Which of course, doesn’t make it any easier to force thoughts into the words I want. Imagine trying to fit a cat into a box with a narrow opening, when the cat has other ideas. It’s a lot like that inside my head at the moment. Read the rest of this entry »

The stories from good travels never really end. There is always a new one, a new gloss on an old one, or simply a retelling to someone who has never heard it before. Sometimes it’s a connected event that triggers a memory. Other times its a photo, a scrawl left on the pages of a journal by an earlier self in the hopes that a later one would come across those pages and be able to remember not simply the facts of an event, but to feel again what it was like to be that person, to be there, then.

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This marks the two hundredth post on WhereTheRoadGoes. It’s been a long journey over the last two and a bit years. Sometimes it really is often only on looking back that it becomes clear how truly far we have come.

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I have liked Matador Network for some time now. I found the site a little over a year ago, looking for more bloggy, personal viewpoint-type stuff ahead of a trip to Southeast Asia. Lonely Planet was, and remains, my authoritative reference for places to sleep and transport links, but I was looking for something else at the time. Beyond the technical details of how to travel to where I was going, I wanted to get that sense of travel before actually getting on the plane. The sense of wonderment at being a tiny little part of a decidedly large and interesting planet. So that was how I ended up, wide-eyed, reading through dozens of pieces of writing from what I came to realise were a whole bunch more people out there in the world driven by the same fundamental desire. Read the rest of this entry »

For your entertainment and at least partly for my nostalgia, I kept a list traveling from Cape Town to Cairo of various interesting statistics. It makes for a colourful two minute retelling of the course of events.

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Been talking to myself forever. And how I wish I knew me better

The lyrics had been bouncing around my head for the last two days. Some songs come and go, others stick in your brain when they happen to strike the right note and refuse to leave. This is one of those this morning. Intellectual house guests with no shame in overstaying their welcome. Hanging on until you find the right person to pass them onto. Waking up for my first lecture as a journ student, they were still kicking around, terrible at taking a hint.

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My plan on returning home was always to pass right through and into something new. Not to turn my back on the people I know and the work I do in that place they call the Real World, but to augment it. To do more. More of the things that excite me. More of the things that fill not just a day, but a life with purpose. It’s that plan that has drawn me to the beautiful but oh-so-tiny town of Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape of South Africa for the remainder of this year. To study photojournalism.

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One of the most rewarding aspects of travel for me is that it is a learning experience, serving to correct my own misconceptions as much as it gives me the opportunity to try and communicate something of what my own life and country is like to those I meet. On more than one occasion in Sudan, I would have to give lengthy explanations to customs officials, bus drivers and other interesting people as to how it is possible for me to be white and South African. Many refused to believe that such a thing was possible. I’d like to hope that in a good humoured way, my white face and South African passport will leave behind some new views of my country – ones fractionally closer to an understanding of what my life is like, in exchange for the same incremental understandings of others’ worlds. But while it may be understandable that a customs official on the Ethiopia/Sudan border may still think that I live in some alternate African reality, I find it less amusing for an educated Chicago editor to have similar views.

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A few weeks on and returned and adjusting to life in the small microtropolis of Grahamstown. Of which there is so much to write, so many places I want to go and play with my camera, and so many big discussions to be had in the Rat & Parrot tavern. Those self-important discussions about challenges – about life, direction and meaning – that  universities seem to burst with, fading beyond their walls as responsibilities run screaming into your days like an insistent toddler.

But while these stories brew and strengthen like a fine ale waiting to be tapped, here is an interview on wanderingeducators.com, who caught me even before my flight had returned from Cairo and interrogated me thoroughly on my last two months.