Richard Stupart

I finally finished transcribing the last days of my journal from Uganda somewhere around half past one this morning. One last push to get the last precious, straggling words off their handwritten pages. Loving each one, keystroke by keystroke – trying to remember when I wrote it. How I felt. In light of how the post that came after this diary blew up on Matador, here are the last three days of the diary. A prologue of sorts for the curious.

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Travel has, for some time now, been a sacred practice with me. Not necessarily escapist backpacking, but the willful breaking of ties to the places, people and rules-of-the world in which I am enmeshed. It is, I suppose, pilgrimage of a kind. Traveling has meant testing myself. In heart, in mind, in spirit. That’s why the stuff I write about is often not all that physically far from where I sleep at night, but always a thousand miles from the world of the familiar, the safe, and the known. I think I’ve grown a little from pushing each year, and I’ve not died yet. Which brings me to May.

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Last year I missed the One in Nine march. Rhodes University does it every year, as a protest against the truly medievil levels of rape and violence directed at South African women. The name derives from the estimate that up to one in every nine rapes in the country goes unreported. The activist fringe even claims that a woman in South Africa is more likely to be raped than she is likely to learn to read. This year, I was around. So I signed up and went along to take photographs and try to be useful.

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