Richard Stupart

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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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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It was a gentle sort of love affair. Not the wild, passionate, love-at-first-sight sort of thing. More like that feeling that gently creeps up on you when you discover something underneath a friendship, usually far too late to do anything about it. But I digress. These stories have to start at the point where we are still strangers. Me waking up in the nicest, softest, mosquito net-est bed (nod to the word-maker-upper-in-chief) and deciding to visit some fifteenth century Islamic ruins in Bagamoyo. Not, in fact, Dar es Salaam at all.

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Traveling from Cape Town to Cairo is something that I may quite likely only do once in this life. So I’ve been spending no small amount of thought trying to decide how I want to write and record it, what I want to record, and most importantly, what I hope the journey will come to mean in the end. It seems like a futile question to consider at the outset, when the journey has yet to begin and its conclusion cannot possibly be known. Seems like. But isn’t.

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One by one, lots of the little things I own have been frogmarched into a big pile, ready to be identity paraded so that their mugshots will accompany their biographicals online as they are sold off. The last thing to be sold will be my bed. Partly because I need it to sleep on, but even more importantly because of what its loss will represent.

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“Welcome to Rhodes – I hope you enjoy studying here”, said the man at the counter.  I grinned like an idiot. I don’t think even first years grin with such an overpowering glow of stupidity. Yes, in part the glow emanates from the place in me that likes the fact that Rhodes – a tiny little town-university in the Eastern Cape – actually feels like a cosy little university. Like a community, where my alma mater, the University of the Witwatersrand never did.  But the truly stupid part of my glow was coming from somewhere else. From the thrill of taking a tiny, but terribly significant, step in my life.

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To choose forever between following a distant star or trading with the devil for a lesser truth. This, above all else, is the decision with which we must live.

Strange days indeed. But breezily refreshing to the big questions. The ones that matter. A friend who knows where her heart would lead her – half way across the planet to another life. Another who cannot seem to find a place in this world of pursuits, of endless jostling and comparison. And my own most fundamental challenge to, in carefully planned time, begin to live consistently with what I believe of the world. To live in defiance of the order that raised me. Taking what I have become and denying it my obedient payback. Read the rest of this entry »

The great thing about a blog, besides the opportunity to endlessly tweak layout options and being continually surprised at which posts are the most regularly revisited (hint – I should open a help desk for backpackers going to Mozambique) is the freedom of the whole enterprise. I get to put my thoughts out on the interwebs and Darwin takes them in his gentle hands and decides to pulverise or popularise them. It’s a fair trade. I learn to write better or watch things become very quiet all of a sudden (cue tumbleweed). But having an audience is not really a sufficient reason to want to blog – no more than it would be a reason to stand naked in the center of town juggling small animals. Which would likely generate far more attention.

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So we are driving back from a fun-and-fire-filled day yesterday afternoon. Kelly and I, that is. It’s  long drive back, with at least five hours of fields, mountains, small towns, more fields, more mountains and so on. Depending on your company, these trips generally tend to go one of two ways. Either the two of you don’t really engage and will spend much of the trip listening to music of some variety (depending on the company, this notion of variety may stretch quite far) or you end up in the sorts of long and meandering conversations that such trips can often bring about. This was the latter (and my preference by far). I have come to relish those wandering exchanges and am thankful for the friends with whom I can have them. The ones where you talk about this big issues in life, teasing out ideas and perspectives on how you presently answer them and try to follow that forever-fascinating rabbithole together.  Which is how this tale begins.

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The thing about living in a country is that you all too often fail to appreciate (or frequently even see) much of what makes it so interesting to the rest of the world. I think sometimes you just get stuck in the anecdotal rut and forget that there are people who travel halfway across the planet to see the sights that you are missing. Occasionally, when I remember this, it makes for a nice change to step out for a weekend and go and see the things that the travelers to my corner of the world get to see. I can report that it is a wholly satisfying experience.

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