The wind tumbles uncoordinatedly down the side roads. It’s the fastest thing in the quiet streets – not quite refreshing, but blowing hard enough to lift the heat from my skin, to make me believe that it’s not really as hot as it is. Dust crunches softly underfoot, leaping up in angry puffs as Yusuf, Katherine and I approach the community hall.
Journalism is nothing if not the beautiful license to find stories. Beautiful ones, tragic ones, ones that make you think. Sniffing them out like some sort of literary bloodhound and bringing them back, tail wagging. What happens to afterwards at the hands of the editor doesn’t bear thinking. But the hunt is good fun. In between snuffling for stories in Grahamstown’s surrounds, I have been making headway on typing up the full account of Cape to Cairo travels. Twenty thousand words later and I am only in Zambia, with a world of places and people that are a delight to revisit again. My eyes wonder about my hands as they wrote the notes the fingers now gleefully tapdance into the world. Taken from the pages that saw Ethiopia, scrawled somewhere between Bahir Dar and Gonder, this is a piece I have yet to reach in my transcription. It’s one that has returned to my mind often since coming back.
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.
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.