Richard Stupart

Away from telling stories for a second, and on to asking questions of travel writing. Stylistically and storytellingly (yes, that is a word now) At Matador, the question occasionally pops up as to what makes for honest, compelling travel writing – the stuff that makes you read to the end, leaves an impression and makes you want to do something, change something, see things differently? In journ. class, particularly the literary style course, there are questions of how to make a story which is more than simply a recounting of events, how to connect a story so that it engages, moves the reader. For what it’s worth, these are my thoughts on what can work.

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The night is a cold place. Empty streets freeze imperceptibly under sodium lights. The warmth of human life dances and slurs elsewhere, its echoes stumbling out into the cold midnight darkness before slowing, stopping. Retreating in nervous uncertainty. Never crossing the gritty line that the cold wind carves between the world of those who revel in the night, who stay warm and safe, and others.
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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.

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The streets are a mess. Vuvuzelas and singing crawl along up ahead. Someone was allegedly beaten up yesterday for getting too close. The local paper showed a pretty serious head injury on a fairly unhappy-looking man. He told the reporter that he had been assaulted for telling a protestor to stop throwing bottles at cars in the street. Brad, one of my journ classmates, is talking to the strike leader about the incident while Thomas and I circle the singing, dancing crowd with cameras, imagining angles, anticipating the dancing crowd’s moves. In South Africa, singing and dancing are as much a part of the protest landscape as violence. Read the rest of this entry »

I love the questions that readers of this blog occasionally ask about travel, life and the big choices we make as we negotiate our paths through it. Not because I have any answers in the maths-exam sense of the word, but because it’s an opportunity to stop, look back and regain some perspective. A reader sent me an email the other day which echoes some themes that have been bouncing around unusually often in conversation with some fellow journalists-to-be and with my online travel friends, so to make the universe happy, I have published the replies here in the hope that it might be useful to others. There may be no answers, but ideas might be the next best thing.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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