Human Rights Day is coming soon to South Africa. It was a fact that our lecturer thought would make a good motivation to get us to try our hand at being real journalists. Instead of the sort who interview our friends for inane opinions on the world and write it as though it was news. So we went to find stories about human rights. Which is how I happened to end up in Glenmore. Hailey knew a guy who knew a guy who… and so on… who knew about Glenmore. Created on the edge of the former Ciskei homeland by misguided white folk with an obsession for forcibly removing people, Glenmore sits almost an hour’s drive from Grahamstown, which is itself in a wide orbit away from any city worth the name.

It was a good day for drying washing.

The town is a baking mix of small government houses in various states of repair and shades of entertaining colour, tin shacks, an occasional car from another era, heat and dust. The original inhabitants came here from Grahamstown, Port Elizabeth and a couple of other major centers back in the late seventies as far as I have been following Hailey’s conversation with Ben. She has all the notes – kept on a furiously scribbled pad of notepaper, rapidly growing stiff in the sun. I am just the photographer and chaser of children, plus the occasional goat.

From what I can tell, the early years here were particularly difficult, with a tornado wiping out houses and killing over a hundred people in the first months of settlement. As a result, the town was resettled perhaps a kilometer away from the original site, where it has sat in the summer heat and winter cold for decades since. Ben Mafane, pointing and proclaiming as we walk, is older than any story here. He was the reason we originally came, having been in the news some years ago for throwing rocks through the court offices in protest at his community having no work or basic facilities. His own way of getting a neglectful state to notice this place once more. He narrowly avoided jail for his efforts, which is more impressive when – according to his account – he went back twice more over the years, rocks in hand, to make his point when he had no other way to get it across.

A small piece of motoring history. Still very much in use.

Glenmore has since received schools, a church and the occasional helping hand from a benevolent corporate. Ben explains that Vodacom will soon be donating computers to one of the schools here. I wonder how on earth corporations even knew here existed.

The school, when we reach it, is littered with young goats who eye us with lazy interest. Hailey and Ben are talking about the buildings somewhere behind me and I wonder if she will ask him where the computers will go, and who will teach the learners how to use them. I’d like to think that clever minds have foreseen this question and made appropriate plans. Yet between playgrounds of goats and bare classrooms, I realise that it may be faith misplaced.

The only kids at school on a Sunday

Further on, near the point that Glenmore slips away into scrubby hills, children are playing football in the street. Smokey grey dust kicks up as the ball leaps and runs through a dozen kicking legs. It’s stuffed red plastic outline is hard to miss, though I can’t help but admire the goalie’s willingness to dive over the gravel time and again to grab a hold of it before both of them risk being kicked backward through the tin can goalposts. I feel sore just watching him doing it.

It’s much later and many meetings and stories have passed before Hailey and I make our way back to Grahamstown. We leave behind a soccer coach, a school teacher, three rappers who have promised to call me when they next have a gig in the area, an old lady with the largest smoking pipe I have ever seen, and goats. At least a few hundred goats. Ahead is a return to comfortable lives that couldn’t be more different to a day in Glenmore if we were astronauts.

Behind are fistfuls of fascinating stories whose owners have only given us the smallest glimpses. There isn’t one story in Glenmore. No economic narrative, tale of the South African dream deferred or colourful embellishment would ever really capture the nature of the place. It is what it is. It has Ben Mafane. Kids that love football and posing for the camera. And goats whose antics fascinate me. They are stories all. Fascinating little fragments that Hailey and I are only beginning to learn to bring back to a world that has never seen them.

Related posts:

1. Karoo politics. And giant pineapple.
2. Johannesburg, Sunday Afternoon
3. To the Karoo

no pressure to provide catchy quotes or fit my verbal cat into a four hundred word box

Perhaps its too much learning? I’d like to believe that there is so much going into my little brain that there just isn’t space to get anything else. But I am not sure it’s really that. God knows I am writing enough other stuff every day. Interviewing this person here, writing a colour piece there, and so on. I’m getting to write Lots. Just not in the style I want, in the space I want to be in.  Which is here, where there are no points, no technical structures, no pressure to provide catchy quotes or fit my verbal cat into a four hundred word box. But writer’s block, unlike a stubborn feline, eventually tires and wanes. And the truth is that, lurking deep inside lectures on story forms and shutter speeds, there are little pieces of why I came here. Things that remind my why I was so glad to turn my life upside down and push in this direction.

Every so often, interspersed in dry discussions of content and assignment hand-ins, something will happen that reminds me that this place I am traveling through is undeniably closer to the places I ultimately want to be. An offhand comment by a lecturer about press freedom, about being a war correspondent. Discussions on ‘where to next’ with a class of people who all, despite having opportunities to be in richer, commercial places, chose to be here, to do this. I’ve always found the idealism that universities are so steeped in to be invigorating. They are one of the few places in the world where you can regain perspective. On the world, on your own life, on what would really make for a deeply satisfying direction for your energies. My class is filled with and taught by people who not only believe in more, but want to and have gone out and pursued it. In that must surely lie inspiration.

The cheese muffins in the reception office are also quite delicious.

No related posts.

Who I am when I travel and who I am in the quiet times between journeys have a relationship like this. One writes memories, the other tell stories. One leaves messages and the other scours the pages of journals for them. It’s the thread of a game that links the strange and exotic locations to whoever I happen to feel I am on a given day afterwards. I am grateful, from this past adventure, for the tens of thousands of words that I have left myself. The photographs. Even the occasional video clip. When I feel creative, or that I need to explore, I need only open one of my journals and flip through a few pictures before I am all too easily stepping back to days as an overland explorer. Taken from my notes on Christmas day in Atbara, Sudan, this is one such memory.

Sunset in Atbara that day - though admittedly after being given high dynamic range (HDR) treatment.

It’s an ironic memory, given that I hadn’t intended to be in Atbara at all. When I had left Khartoum that morning, it had been to bus north to the Begrawiya pyramids, where I would stay at a nearby town or the pyramids themselves before moving on the next day at my own pace. As it happened, the pyramids were in the middle of the desert, with absolutely nothing nearby. The bus didn’t let me off there, instead taking me north to the town of Atbara. In retrospect, I was luckier than I could possibly have appreciated at the time not to have had the bus leave me where I wanted. It did mean though, that I arrived in Atbara in a foul mood – my best laid plans wholly disrupted and me in a town I knew absolutely nothing about. To further worsen my grumpy mood, nobody spoke any English, forcing me to make the most use of my embarrassingly basic Arabic to try and get by. I felt like a petulant three year old in the hot dust of Atbara that afternoon.

So it came to pass that somewhere past lunchtime on Christmas, I found myself without a place to stay, in a town I didn’t know, where nobody spoke English and Christmas didn’t exist.

A petulant child for whom the final straw came when the only ‘hotel’ I was able to find meant having to deal with a front desk clerk who trebled the list price of my room, giving me the a sharky “what are you going to do about it?” grin. As I recall, I told him to put his overpriced room in a place that no furniture, much less an entire suite, should ever be put. It’s unlikely that he understood what I said, but I am absolutely certain that he correctly read the inflection of it before I stormed back out into the road. So it came to pass that somewhere past lunchtime on Christmas, I found myself without a place to stay, in a town I didn’t know, where nobody spoke English and Christmas didn’t exist. In a word, I felt quite alone.

For some reason, when I travel, these are usually the points at which dumb luck raises her dumb head and helps me out. This time, fortunately, held true to that pattern. After sitting on the side of the road for however long it took me to stop being angry at the universe for messing me around and realise that being angry at the universe would be about as useful as being angry at the stuffed pig in my backpack, only less directly satisfying, I looked around a bit. It didn’t take long, once my inner three year old had departed, to realise that finding accommodation would not be nearly as difficult a challenge as I had imagined. I was, as it turned out, sulking right in front of a hotel. Whose rates were decent, and whose front desk contained a man who looked more wholesome teenager than greasy shark. And so I found a bed. Although still in a town I had not expected to be, with no idea of how to get a bus onward or how long I would be there, the presence of a bed and a room I could lock and lie down in made such thoughts an unnecessary luxury, to be dealt with later.

Later, as it turned out, came after a nap. There are few situations that cannot be put into their appropriate perspective after a decent nap. This one was no exception. A short exploration of the neighbouring blocks and some more conversations in ciminally-bad Arabic later, I had learned that I would have all of the next day in Atbara, as the bus to the only onward destination, a town called Abu Hamed, would only be leaving the day after. With the evening starting to settle in, I stocked up on christmas goodies and spend the evening squirreled in my room, celebrating with the stuffed pig and imagining what family and friends would be doing for Christmas in their respective homes.

Boxing Day in the town with no Boxing Day

There was a market on in Atbara that day, which meant that the streets were transformed. Turkish coffee pots, farming implements, every kind and colour of schwarma, bean fuul and vegetable. Somehow, someone was even selling watermelons. Another had a stall full of thick anoraks and jerseys, which struck me as a little odd, given that we were in the middle of the desert. It would only be a few days later that I would appreciate how cold the nights in the desert can be. Anoraks are a lot smarter to bring along to the desert than you might immediately have thought. I  must have wandered around those stalls for a good three or four hours, exploring block after block of clothes shops, butcher shops, tea shops and shisha shops amidst a traffic of tuk tuks, donkeys and hundreds of men in their distinctive white gowns. I had forgotten completely that this was not somewhere I wanted to be, flowing with the whirl of morning shopping and the smell of beans and goat on the air.

Looking around for a landmark to get back to my hotel later, I found none that I recognised. Block after under-construction block stared blankly back at me as I walked up and down Atbara, to the train station and back, trying to find anything that looked familiar. I remembered that there was a donkey tethered to a pole only one street away from my hotel. Then I realised that this was a terrible landmark to have remembered, as donkey after tethered donkey would look at me patronisingly from each street corner. I was unexpectedly lost again, though this time not nearly as petulant about it. I had nowhere to be and much of the day left before I needed to worry about being anywhere – such as in my bed. So I stopped rushing and started exploring again. Atbara is only so big, having only so many blocks that I could wander through before I would find my hotel again.

So it was that I ended up walking a good part of the town flat. I found a dozen more donkeys, mostly tethered, a canteen that made the first really good bean fuul I had found in my trip so far (and never managed to again) and even a church. It was a mud-brick building hidden away near the railway tracks, with crucifixes on its roof and walls. A small flyer pinned to the front gate appeared to have been recently written, possibly having something to do with Christmas, but I couldn’t read the Arabic since my reading ability only extended as far as the words for ‘Coke’ and ‘Hotel’. I am reasonably sure that neither word appeared in the flyer. The church did appear to be closed though and remained so for the rest of the day, despite me returning to check on it at least a half-dozen times, hoping to find the gate unlocked. I’m not a terribly religious sort, but I am a firm believer in pursuing mysteries. That church was such a thing.

One more before she disappears behind the horizon. Click the shutter and slap on some high dynamic range.

I ultimately found my hotel again. A tethered donkey, looking much like any other of the dozen I had passed (or had I passed this one a dozen times?) was one street down. He looked at me patronisingly. I looked at him with joy, then ascended the steps to the hotel and sat on the roof and watched the sun set across the town. Tomorrow would be another bus onward to Abu Hamed, then Wadi Halfa and the crossing to Egypt. I realised at last that whether I originally wanted to be in this place or not, I would quite possibly never find myself back here again in my lifetime and would do well to appreciate it. It’s a little game that I play in my head every time I move onward. I try to imagine my future, the places I might still see, and wonder whether I might ever stand back in this same place again. Older, wiser, certainly more interesting, changed in every respect except that my feet would be planted squarely where the me I am now is standing. There is never an answer, since I have never ended up anywhere I expected even as little as year ago. But the exercise is tantalising. The point, I guess, as I said a quiet farewell to the Atbaran sun, is not to plan to know where I will be, but to imagine the fantastical loop of adventure, experience and change that could ever lead to me returning here. Then to remember that by standing here, contemplating it, I have already managed to do it at least once. Nothing gives me a greater excitement when I travel.

Not even encounering well-made bean fuul.

Related posts:

1. Not Getting Left in the Desert. A Christmas Tale.
2. It’s the Night Before Christmas
3. Oh The Mice I Have Seen

I’d never given the smallest thought to the idea that a sequence of events that would change so much in my life was about to begin.

Sometime around 2007, this blog was born. I was traveling to Thailand with some friends in search of adventure and mischief and a blog was going to be a simple tool for recording some of what we managed to get up to overseas. I’d never considered writing properly. I’d never given the smallest thought to the idea that a sequence of events that would change so much in my life was about to begin. So I went, explored, found mischief. Returned. Became nostalgic.

Traveling, I was starting to realise, is something that gets under your skin. The more you see of other ways of living, the more you begin to question in your own life. You look at things differently. Perhaps you become a little more principled. Perhaps you realise that there are things bigger than you out there in the world. Things that are wrong. That must be fought. Like the proverbial Pandora’s Box, these are thoughts that you learn cannot be undone. Things realised cannot be unrealised. Increasingly, thoughts came home to roost out of the cold air of the vaguely possible, demanding to be seen as the things that could be if I only did.

Thoughts on how we change for all we have seen. The people, met in fleeting moments, who stay with us so much longer. People no longer around, whose thoughts have since passed on to others. A small, but no less indestructible immortality. All coming home to be confronted, fashioned into a life that means something. Coming home to demand of me a resolution, a way of doing as I felt. So I began to write. And I haven’t stopped since. A growing storm of words that I grew to love. It’s now two hundred posts later and I couldn’t be happier to stand out here if I tried.

So thank you all for coming with. To the deserts and the beaches, the happy pizza bars and the hospitals, sitting on the trucks and sleeping on the trains. For coming with me into my head and a thousand crazier places that I discovered existed outside of it.

Let’s see where the next two hundred leads.

No related posts.

So yeah, I had a bit of a crush on the quirky, heartfelt, occasionally hippie travel site.

As this blog grew, and with it the blogging bug, I would return to that site with increasing frequency over the months. In retrospect, what I enjoyed most in the writing was what I enjoy most in the blogs I follow as well. It’s that feeling of heart. More than the polished gloss of the exotic travel mags, Matador was about people for whom travel was but one core part of a larger idea of the world and where they belong in it. One where being matters, where exploring is as much about inner discovery as it is about learning about things outside yourself. For an admitted travel romantic, it was easy to become hooked.

So yeah, I had a bit of a crush on the quirky, heartfelt, occasionally hippie travel site.

So when an email appeared out of the blue in my inbox from one of the Matador editors, titled simply ‘Matador internship?’, my little heart missed a beat. Unlike many stories in Real Life^tm, this one actually had a warm and fuzzy ending.After an excited-but-trying-so-hard-not-to-show-it reply on my part and a few subsequent emails, I am now an intern at Matador. Sort of the travel equivalent of the kid who found the gold ticket in his Wonka bar.

Not even a month ago, waiting to board my homeward flight in Cairo, I had found myself wondering about the year ahead. If you had asked me last January if I would have traveled East Africa with only a bum and a backpack, I would have laughed. If you had asked me the January before whether I would have spent the end of that year throwing fire poi for kids in Inhambane, I would have laughed only slightly less. Looking back, further and further, the years have only become stranger and stranger. And for it, better and better. This one is barely a month old and I can’t imagine it getting much better.

No related posts.

Cockroaches seen in hotel rooms:

On at least four different occasions. Once occasion provided at least three individuals.

Mice seen in hotel rooms:

One. Who even posed briefly for a photograph.

Number of places which called themselves hotels (but really weren’t):

Almost every one I stayed at. Except possibly in Khartoum.

Trains taken: Four

Trucks sat on top of: One

Trucks sat inside of: One

Buses taken: Fourteen

Horse carts ridden in: One

Feluccas lain in: One

Times I was asked for “One Birr Please”: (infinity symbol)

Number of times the local price of a sandwich that I paid in Aswan: Ten

Photos taken: 4,524

Photos which involve mice: Three

Journals brought along: Five

Journals filled with stories: 4

Journals given away to people who needed: One

Words written in the four filled journals: Somewhere around 60,000

Times I read Siddhartha by Herman Hesse: Two and a half

Times I read Development as Freedom by Amartya Sen: One

Museums visited: Nine

Pharmacies visited: Three

Number of occasions that there were school groups in visited museums: Seven

Number of times that there were school groups in visited pharmacies: None

Most days in a hotel with no water: Three

Number of stuffed toys taken with: One

Number of knives returned with: Three

Most consecutive days without a shower: Three

Number of times a country matched my expectations: None

Time taken: Fifty nine days

Time it felt like: An entire life.

Bonus! Mouse.

Related posts:

1. Parting Underneath the Flame Trees
2. Things Remembered. Things Not.
3. The Beginning of the End

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.

Some want to be war correspondents. Others want to write fiction. One guy wants to do lifestyle pieces in the newspaper.

It’s a short walk to class in the February sun that I have no doubt I will come to miss dearly when Grahamstown’s winter arrives at some distant point. There is a coffee shop two doors up from me. The proper kind, where they grind the beans and draw the espresso in front of you. Realising I can leave my front gate and have a brand new coffee in my paws in less than five minutes, I can see habit that will be quick to learn and impossible to defeat. Such glee.

Five minutes to coffee. Fifteen to the journalism building. Exactly enough time to finish drinking without burning myself. Everything fits like it was meant to.

One by one, my classmates and I claim our seats randomly in the seminar room. Little fiefdoms from which we smile and try to learn a little more about each other. Stories are slow to be exchanged. Nerves and wondering – trying to fit little boxes onto each other, I guess. It’s the easiest first move in any room full of strangers. But it doesn’t last as the course coordinator pushes each of us for our stories in turn. Who are you? What has your journey to this room over the years entailed?

On an initial telling, each of our stories are nothing like the others; nothing like I had imagined. Some seem to have traveled half the world. Some not at all. Some want to be war correspondents. Others want to write fiction. One guy wants to do lifestyle pieces in newspapers.

It’s what is not explicitly said in the many stories of the journeys to this room, to wanting to learn what each of us thinks it is we will learn here, that is really interesting. Almost everyone has made a commitment to pursuing something different to the life they knew before. To realise some unquantifiable desire to do something that means something. It’s a particular energy lacking in undergraduate courses. In places where people are moving in a direction that they have not wholly chosen for themselves.

In this room, everyone has explicitly wanted this. Has sacrificed something to be here. Some narrate long and fascinating paths. Others say more in the details they leave out. I can see already that there may be an energy to this year that only a room full of conviction might create. When paths that people have chosen, that they believe in intersect, really interesting things can happen.

Never seen the sun shine brighter. And it feels like me on a good day.

Related posts:

1. As Good a Reason to Write

It’s been an adjustment – barely five days’  space between arriving back from Cairo to carrying a car’s worth of life into my little cottage.  While the swiftly changing scenery – and life – has meant that I have thus far successfully avoided post-adventure depression, my new life and environment at Rhodes University is quite different from anything I left in November last year.

In a way, moving here and enrolling was the simplest thing in the world. Just a car trip, some paperwork and a bit of organising away from the space I occupied before. In other respects, it’s one of the scariest things I’ve ever done.

I am sure that I will stop doing it in time, but it is hard not to articulate the inevitable comparisons between Rhodes and my previous experiences of undergrad at the University of the Witwatersrand. Where Wits was a disorganised behemoth, Rhodes is a nimble rogue. Where Wits sprawled with its tens of thousands of students across four or five campuses, Rhodes has but one, sprinkled liberally (pun intended) with Arts majors and a few Science, Journ. and Law folk thrown in for seasoning. Most striking, however, is that where Wits is forever associated in my head with the purple flowers of the Jacaranda tree, Rhodes appears to have not a one. In their place, mixed in with the gravel of pavements, the grass of sidewalks and so many local gardens are tiny little red seeds.

Growing up, I was taught that they were called ‘lucky beans’. It was never clear why they were lucky, except that it was definitely not if you ate them. Oh the useful things I learned as a child. It is only many years and an Internet later that I have learned that they come from the Coral Tree, were used as lucky charms in the past and are sometimes planted on the graves of chiefs.

It’s funny how, of all the things to fixate on and associate this place with, it is the lucky bean that has become stuck in my mind. Not the occasional donkeys in the street. Not the people swearing in Afrikaans the way it was meant to be sworn in. Not even the skies of the Eastern Cape that seem somehow to stretch further, to cover more than their brethren elsewhere. All of these things are here, making life outside the front door as entertaining as it will be educational (from tomorrow, when lectures start). It is the tiny little lucky bean, though, that is this place for me.

Whether they are lucky or not, they are most definitely colourful.

In a way, moving here and enrolling was the simplest thing in the world. Just a car trip, some paperwork and a bit of organising away from the space I occupied before. In other respects, it’s one of the scariest things I’ve ever done. People are not supposed to pursue seriously divergent ways of thinking and being. We create our own pressures to be armies of specialists, not adventurous generalists. So I worried. Worried whether the people from my life in Johannesburg would understand and stay close, or chalk me up as a reckless dreamer and drift.

With every day that passes, I see more beans. And I realise that people, deep down, feel similar pulls in their own lives. Wanting to do the things that matter to them the most, I am realising that I shouldn’t be surprised that people understand. Everyone is, after all, looking for their own lucky beans – that chance to squeeze fate until it yields. I am thankful that this place has buried me in them.

Related posts:

1. Rhodes Redux

I came across the piece, titled “Could the 2010 World Cup Cause a Food Shortage” on the Matador Network’s sports section and can’t let it go unchallenged. In particular, I have two objections to this piece. The first, and most easily dealt with, is that I feel it is wholly incorrect.

It suggests that there may be severe food shortage in the country, caused by food price inflation as price gouging of tourists in the country for the world cup causes basic staples to become unaffordable to the average South African.

Read the piece if you are feeling temeritous, and if you still think there is merit to the claims, I shall wager you a beer they will not come to pass.

The first rebuttal to this claim is that there is no plausible evidence for it. The economists quoted in the piece only claim a 1.1% – 1.2% likely rise in the cost of food. This is then paired with a link to an alarmist post in a blog on food gardening to hyperbolise the estimate to between 200% and 500%. I am not going to justify the facile views on supply and demand economics and supply chains in Living Seeds with a full rebuttal. Read the piece if you are feeling temeritous, and if you still think there is merit to the claims, I shall wager you a beer they will not come to pass.

So we are unlikely to see pentupled food prices across the economy simply because there is a world cup on. Even if we were to entertain this notion, tying it to child abandonment and causing a borderline famine is misleading in the extreme. While it is true that poorer South African households are struggling with issues of food security, this has less to do with food price inflation putting previously affordable food out of reach as it does with rampant HIV mortality destroying household incomes altogether.

Where malnutrition exists – and it does – it is disingenuine to tie it to some briefly correlating event like a world cup. It is also more than a little simplistically offensive to the large body of academic work on the problem to draw such conclusions, not to mention wholly unhelpful in mobilising support for what is an important issue (HIV) instead of some fad du jour.

Ok. That’s my spleen vented towards the logical substance of the post. These points could all be supported with further arguments, but if you really take issue with any of my conclusions, and honestly think that food prices will inflate to the point that orphan abandonment and famine will come knocking, then make your case in the comments and I will deal with you.

And so we come to Mr Kurtz and Heart of Darkness.

It’s understandable, even slightly funny on occasion, when people believe that South Africans keep elephants in their back yards, or that schools close in the event of lions nearby. If you couldn’t be expected to know better. And if you are not a participant in reinforcing such views.

It’s understandable, even slightly funny on occasion, when people believe that South Africans keep elephants in their back yards, or that schools close in the event of lions nearby.

It gets more than a little under my skin for a writer – nay, an editor – of a publication such as Matador to propagate such stereotypes. South Africa is not Ethiopia of the 1980s. Hell, not even Ethiopia is Ethiopia of the 1980s. While turning out interesting copy is important, and world cup-related writing is relevant, those considerations should not outweigh trying to avoid reinforcing the worst of the world’s one-dimensional stereotypes of Africa. Particularly when the story is untrue. And more so when it can be shown so by the most rudimentary fact checking.

Flame me if you want, but I am going to stick up for my corner of the world. I love Matador as a publication generally, but don’t feel inclined to let this slide. South Africa isn’t perfect – god knows we have enough problems to go around – but making up new ones and shouting them from a position of media privilege does nobody any favours.

No related posts.

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.

Related posts:

1. An Interview with Sihle Khumalo
2. Five Weeks and a Phone Call
3. 48 Hours. Interview With Jonathan Haenen