South Africa’s oldest Presbyterian church lies silently with its brother in the hills an hour and a half from Grahamstown. They have been sitting in quiet contemplation for a very, very long time; and will likely contemplate a long time still.
Bodhisatta (n): In the Pali canon, the Bodhissata Siddhartha Gotama is described thus:
Before my awakening, when I was an unawakened Bodhisatta, being subject myself to birth, sought what was likewise subject to birth. Being subject myself to aging… illness… death… sorrow… defilement, I sought happiness in what was likewise subject to illness… death… sorrow… defilement.
There is much that I have come to remember that I missed about university. Like learning – that feeling as though you are actually becoming smarter with each article read. Or that feeling of checking books out of the library as though you were becoming wiser for the exercise. Like the conversations that draw late into the night on the strings of ideas of the world as it could be. I’ve also come to remember exams – that periodic test of otherwise unshakable self-belief.
I don’t so much wake up as have the sleep evaporated from me. Morning in the Sudan drifts warm into the room. My bed sags forlornly, too worn to squeal in protest as I climb out of my sleeping bag; packing it and my toiletries into my backpack in minutes. I’m getting good at moving. I’ve been moving for almost two months now. It’s easier to be efficient today, since today is a moving day. Yesterday was not. It was an exploring day. For fifty mornings, those are the only days I have known. Moving days and exploring days. Traveling fast and light is efficient, but can keep you a permanent stranger – someone around long enough to see, but never to understand.
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Living in the Eastern Cape is living in a graveyard. The bleached bones of stories pierce the landscape in silence, clung to by the sinewy dust roads poking off the tar where life still moves. They relinquish their stories only to those who go looking. Quietly asking passers by to take a detour, explore. There is a treasure down every vein of tarless dirt.
Nostalgia makes a fine mistress in the evenings. I’ve realised recently that finding interesting bits and pieces on travel blogs about Sudan is actually quite difficult. Searching for Sudan away from the South and Darfur, there is actually not a whole lot out there. So, in the interests of adding to the Internet, here is a short video from my Christmas home in December – the town of Atbara in Sudan.
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 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.
