Richard Stupart

Once a year, like an artistic atom bomb, the National Arts Festival – or Fest to its friends -comes to Grahamstown. Artists of all stripes and skills descend upon what is otherwise a small and difficult to reach settlement in the already-pretty-remote Eastern Cape. Last year was my first experience of Fest in person, working as a photographer on a newspaper that gets produced for the length of the event. Which, last year, meant fifteen days. It was a tough, but rewarding experience. One which unfortunately left  me delirious with some evil flu at the end, the likes of which I have only ever had on one other occasion. This year was wholly different.
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There’s an anecdote that kicks its dusty way through people’s lives at all the right times. The idea that if you don’t know what to do, do anything. The moment you begin to move, the right choice becomes clear. It’s been that way this week, as my life wends its puzzlesome way around some invisible tether.

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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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That’s a fairly well-suited metaphor for the state of my mind right now. Right through the long weekends, public holidays and off-days, I have done little else except read and learn. Once, upon a far-more-ignorant time, I thought that the phrase ‘reading for a Masters” degree was some antiquated turn of the Olde English. Not so. It appears that you actually have to read. A great deal.

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South Africans I have traveled with – and people visiting South Africa from abroad that I have met – often remark on the sheer number of contrasts in the country. On the fact that it really feels like many countries in one. Some of the time, these comments are adressed to our unequal (shamefully the most in the world now), still highly raced, human landscape.  But in happier times, I’ve heard folk say this of the country’s physcial landscape too.

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As many readers may be unaware, I am still a student this year. After finishing the postgrad diploma in journalism at Rhodes University last year, I remained to pursue an MA in Media Studies through a part coursework/part dissertation program. The dissertation is meant to start in the third quarter of this year, but I have been beavering away to try and get a proposal finished in the next month or two so that I can get started early. I think I can work harder and finish faster. So it’s at least worth trying to, and seeing how I go.

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Unplugging the little white earplugs, I’m assaulted by the airport. It beats down on me with announcement, badly covered music and self-important conversations. Airport announcements always given in that ‘this is important’ voice that never comes through clearly. Or perhaps the private-school accented announcer has a mouthful of marbles. Or marshmallows. Or a deformity.
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It’s December 10 and Tom, Saskia and I have come to the half-completed Karin Children’s Clinic to watch a local women’s group hold a weekly meeting to discuss administrative matters. They manage projects from beadmaking to raising livestock on a pay-it-forward scheme amongst various families in the group. A man from the Heifer Foundation – who will confess on the drive home that their project in Gulu has largely been a disaster (more on this in another post) – is busy reporting on the status of the cow breeding program. Nobody seems particularly impressed. I feel hot, having decided to stand outside to take pictures of the proceedings. We have arrived in time for what appears to be the last item on the day’s agenda. The opening of a large cardboard box with a Samaritan’s Purse logo on the side. I sigh.

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Everena Okott (67) finishes speaking in the partial indoor light. Geoffrey translates politely, “She says, as you can see, the small lights here (he points to the ceiling) these were bullets and they were firing… that’s what she says… There is no one to get up there and fix it. And when it starts raining there’s actually no defence… But she is now old, and when she looks at her children, yeah, she doesn’t know what their future is.”

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