Cape Town to Victoria Falls

By David Gourley

 

This was a holiday that took my wife Cathy and me to five countries in all: South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Botswana and Namibia. The highlight was a five-day trip on the luxury train Pride of Africa (run by Rovos Rail) between Cape Town and Victoria Falls.

We flew out to Cape Town with Air Namibia. We were pleasantly surprised by the high standard of the in-flight service but it did involve a rather circuitous route via Frankfurt, Windhoek (where we changed planes) and the Namibian coastal town of Walvis Bay. On this latter stretch we had splendid views over the Namib Desert.

The bridge across the Zambesi,
connecting Zimbabwe with Zambia

In Cape Town we had a three-night stay, based at the Vineyard Hotel, located fairly close to the SA Cricket ground in the district of Newlands. I felt whacked after our long overnight flight and just wanted to crash out, but Cathy was determined to go straight away to Table Mountain. I do hate saying this - she was right! The rule when visiting Cape Town is: if the cablecar to the top of Table Mountain is running, go for it. For all too often it is closed. This is nothing to do with the cloud - the "Tablecloth" - which frequently covers the Mountain. The authorities don't mind if people go up and don't seeing anything. The problem is the frequent strong winds, the "Southeasters". We got to the top successfully and enjoyed superb views over what is undoubtedly one of the loveliest cities in the world. But a strong wind blew up even while we were up there; they'd closed the cable-car by the time we got down and it didn't run again for the remainder of our stay.

We had a city tour the next morning and in the afternoon took ourselves off to Robben Island, now preserved as a national museum. There were two tours: of the Island itself and of the actual prison, where one is shown inter alia the cell where Nelson Mandela was kept. We were guided round the prison by a former political prisoner and were struck by the conciliatory attitude that he had towards his former political enemies (it is even the case that some ex-warders have joined the former prisoners in working to preserve this monument).

He had been sentenced in 1988 to a 25-year term but said he'd inwardly laughed because he knew the system wouldn't last that long. He was out after four years. Any worries we had that we were being voyeuristic were put to rest when we purchased a book about the Island: it is described as a place of hell, true, but of heaven as well. It is prized in the new South Africa as the place where apartheid was finally defeated.

The next day saw us on an all-day trip to Cape Point, through fine coastal scenery. The following day was the start of our rail trip. First-class meals, and as much South African wine as one wanted, were included - I think I'll have to up my visits to the gym as a result! (As one tour guide said: people always complain about the food in South Africa - they eat too much of it and put on weight!)

We stopped en route at Kimberly, where an ancient electric tram took us to the Big Hole, the world's largest manmade hole, where diamonds were once mined. The next evening saw a break in the train journey, with an overnight stay in Pretoria. This was preceded by tours of Johannesburg and of Pretoria itself, both with the same guide. She was excellent but we were rather thrown when she asked us where we wanted to go in Jo'burg. Surely she knew best where to go, we thought.

Tentatively I enquired about the possibility of going to Soweto, expecting her to say it was too far, or simply that, as a white South African, she didn't want to go there. But she was happy to take us there and it was a fascinating visit. One has an image of Soweto as a place full of miserable shacks and there are indeed plenty of these, but much of the housing is decent and well-maintained, and there is even a local "Beverley Hills", where Winnie Mandela lives in her mansion. There are so many BMWs that they are known as "Soweto bicycles". There is now a university - and somehow we did not expect to see a KFC outlet in Soweto!

The place has, of course, its problems and no sensible visitor strays far from the beaten track. But we felt safe enough and were moved by our visit to the area that has been set aside as a memorial to Hector Pieterson, the first schoolboy to be killed by the security forces in the 1976 uprising, the trigger for which was the protest by black schoolchildren about being taught in Afrikaans, which (unlike English) is regarded as an alien language. This really marks the definitive start of the final struggle against apartheid. We were told that parents were somewhat ashamed that it was their kids who were making the running, when they themselves had been passive. Some estrangement between generations resulted, a cause perhaps of the present degree of lawlessness in Soweto, which local community leaders agree is a problem. We also visited Nelson Mandela's former house, which is now a museum; Archbishop Tutu still lives nearby, when he's in town, making this particular street the only one in the world to have housed two Nobel prizewinners.

Soweto has at least one and a half million, and maybe as many as four million, inhabitants, and by any standards is a city in its own right though it has yet to acquire all the trappings associated with big cities. It is by no means a place without hope and maybe it is not fanciful to suppose that one day Soweto will be the dynamic heart of the metropolis with Jo'burg just a rundown suburb. Downtown Jo'burg is seriously crime-ridden and ranks as the grimmest city we have yet visited; previously we'd given that accolade to Lima, which we've now promoted a notch! Pretoria on the other hand is an attractive city.

We rejoined the train the next day and had another two nights, continuing into Zimbabwe, where we had a tour of Bulawayo, a pleasant city with a very good museum (the best in Africa, we were told by our possibly biased guide - apart, he conceded, from the one in Cairo). In Victoria Falls we stayed at the eponymous Hotel, one of the finest anywhere. From our room we had an excellent view into Zambia and the spray from the Falls can be seen from the gardens. The Falls are every bit as spectacular as we had imagined. We visited them four times in all, once from the Zambian side, and also had two helicopter flights over them.

Tours in Zimbabwe included an elephant trek and a visit to the Hwange National Park. Like the name of the country itself, many towns in the former Rhodesia have different post-independence names. Salisbury to Harare is the most well-known change whilst Essexvale Man is now Esigodoni Man. In the case of Hwange the change is very much for the better - it was formerly known as Wankie.

Our foray into Zambia took us not just to that country's side of the Falls, but also to an authentic African village (which benefits financially from such tours and welcomes visitors), the city of Livingstone (a pleasant city still, though this former capital has known better days) and a game drive. To get from one country to the other, we had to walk across the Bridge over the Zambezi. In the middle, precisely on the boundary, bungee jumps take place and we paused to watch a couple of them. For four days the Zimbabweans do the necessary organizing, then the Zambians take over for the next four, and so on ad infinitum. We decided to forego the pleasure of doing a jump!

A young boy struck up a conversation with us as we walked across; learning we were English he came up with what must be the standard patter: "ah, England - Tony Blair, John Major [John who?], Michael Owen, Alan Shearer". I gave him an old baseball cap of mine and he seemed well pleased with it. It had started its life in Petra, Jordan!

We had six nights in all in Victoria Falls, punctuated by three nights over the border in Botswana in the Cresta Mowana Game Lodge, close to the Chobe National Park. President Clinton had stayed here during his tour of Africa earlier in 1998. The Lodge is on the banks of the Chobe River. On the other side is Namibia and we went across there in a dugout canoe and were shown round the village there by a local lad. For this short excursion, there were four lots of forms to be filled in by both of us - exit from Botswana, entry to Namibia etc. We went on game drives in the Park and on boat trips along the River and saw plenty of game, including lions, elephants and hippos. We had seen giraffes, zebras and wildebeests in Zambia and Zimbabwe, which was as well as we saw none in Botswana.

As well as viewing game, I also ate a fair bit of it, both in Botswana and in an African-style restaurant in Zimbabwe. Warthog is recommended, also zebra. To anyone who objects, I would say that, if one is not vegetarian, there is no difference in principle between eating a sheep, say, and eating game. The killing of game for food is the result of a strict culling process and in no way threatens the eco-system.

Our flight home from Victoria Falls was in two stages, with an overnight stay en route in Windhoek. The first stage constituted just about the strangest flight we have been on. The plane was tiny - even the shortest in our party had to lower their heads as we boarded and, in the absence of any in-flight personnel, snacks were handed to us by the pilot as we boarded. This was hardly a comfortable journey but, not to worry, I thought, the flight will only be an hour or so. We duly flew over a city, which I assumed to be Windhoek. Cathy says my face was a picture when I saw the sign welcoming us to Lusaka International Airport. Unexpectedly we were back in Zambia, having travelled in precisely the opposite direction to the one expected.

A German chap in front of us got his word in first - yes, the pilot assured him, the plane was going on to Windhoek, but we'd have to get out here whilst the plane was refuelled. We had a second stop in a remote part of Namibia and again we had to get out for refuelling. To round off our day, we landed in Windhoek in a thunderstorm. In all we'd been in this uncomfortable plane some six hours, on and off, but the journey had been so enjoyably bizarre that somehow we didn't feel we had grounds for complaint! Our flight back to London the next day seemed positively tame by comparison.

First published in VISA issue 32 (winter 1998)

Land of Good Hope

by Glen Strachan

Our visit to South Africa started in Johannesburg in the same fashion as many first-time visitors to the Republic and, while this most modern city is of some interest, it has its problems. Our advice is to try to make Cape Town the entry point for your South African trip. While it is not easy to arrange travel this way round, the benefits are such that the effort will be rewarded.

Johannesburg is a huge sprawling modern city with a very ritzy upmarket suburbia and a terrifying crime-soaked city centre downtown area. Murders are routine and muggings commonplace with a range of car-jackings and random shootings adding spice to this cosmopolitan city. The police force is being overwhelmed and the swelling tide of crime shows no sign of abating. Downtown and the old business district are now out of bounds to most locals, who will not even drive through this district in daylight. In general, driving at night is not recommended but, if you are challenged and stopped, the advice given is that you pass the keys of your vehicle to your assailant and then hand over your wallet. A combination of the two may be enough to save your life.

That ends the warning and mostly it ends any negative feelings about this remarkable country. I began with the warning because it is so important that all visitors heed it, when planning their South African visit. It might be a good idea to plan your trip around a flight into Cape Town and out of Durban. This could cost a little more but there is more than enough to see without even passing through Johannesburg or Pretoria, its neighbour.

Leaving Cape Town, the journey along the coast to see the fabulous Garden Route is a real treat. The solitude and the stunning beauty of this coastline make this a journey to be taken very slowly and with as many stops as you can work into your itinerary. The South African Tourist Board in the UK is most helpful in providing the literature that will help you to get the most out of your visit and the local offices of the Board were tremendous with a wide range of helpful and friendly staffers. The stars of our visit were the National Parks administrators and rangers.

The wide range of parks is nearly beyond belief and, since many of the parks carry accommodation, a little careful planning can see you in log cabins inside the parks. Don't worry about being wakened by an elephant or a lion. You might be sharing the park with such animals but you will be well warned that your car must be back within the living quarters before darkness falls. The South African passion for the brai or barbecue, as we know it, means that you will probably get an invitation to join in and, if this is not the food that you like to eat, the National Parks also run excellent restaurants in almost all of the parks.

Most parks have their own distinct characteristics. They should not be confused with either theme parks or the sort of recreational parks that we have in Europe. Firstly, they are enormous - as one incredulous Welshman told me, he had been in two parks which were both bigger than his native Wales - and it is also important to remember that the animals in the parks are left to their own devices. This is not some kind of outdoor zoo and, if the animal has to eat, then it will look for a food source which it can kill.

Carcasses litter the water holes and we were also confronted with the sad spectacle of an elderly lioness, which had been deserted by the rest of the pride. Weak and sick, it was left to fend for itself against the nocturnal attacks of the hyenas which had spotted it by day. The thrill of driving along a road in the early morning light and coming across a family of lions or a leopard or even a group of elephants is one that must be experienced. The video films and camera pictures that we brought home barely capture that sensation. Just remember that the animals are mainly nocturnal and, if you do want to see the scarcer ones, it is important to have your eyes and ears wide open and, above all, speak to the ranger and to your fellow-visitors.

Animals will often stay in one area for a few days and move on. You can drive for a whole day and only see a few springboks and zebras, while on other occasions we were very lucky. Two lions came over to look at our car as we drove down a deserted tar road, while a number of fellow visitors had headed off down dirt roads to search for big game just minutes earlier. Not content with staring into the car for a few minutes and posing for some really sensational pictures, the lions walked alongside us for almost a kilometre.

That happened on our last morning in Kruger National Park and the only beast on our whole list that we had not seen was the leopard. We were not too disappointed as they do not enjoy the heat of the sun. As a result, they sleep in the trees well off the road in order not to be disturbed. We could hardly believe our luck but, within minutes of leaving the lions and only a short time before we drove out of the park, there it was before us - a fully-grown leopard. We stayed close to it for almost twenty minutes as it went through a series of stretching exercises that precisely mirrored the waking routine that our beloved family cat performs each morning. There are trips which can be arranged at considerable expense but, if you are willing to do a little work for yourself and avail yourself of the great support offered by the Parks Department, your stay in the world-famous Kruger National Park can be achieved within a reasonable budget. Try not to miss this place. I promise the thrills will stay with you for the rest of your days.

If you choose to drive north from Cape Town towards the Namibian border, there is one park that you must not miss. Just north of the town of Kakamas is Augrabies National Park and while most of the literature highlights the waterfall, drive on and experience something like a lunar landscape. This park might just be the best kept secret in South Africa. Do yourself a favour - visit the park and eat in the restaurant. Be there as the sun goes down and stay in the Park accommodation if you can arrange this in advance. On the Garden Route, Knysna is a great place to stay but, if you are planning a honeymoon or even a second honeymoon, I think we may have found the ultimate destination. The log cabins in Tsitsikamma National Park beside Storms River Mouth are set in one of the most beautiful seascapes that we have seen anywhere and, if the time of year is right, you can even watch the whales performing their courting rituals. We were lucky enough to pick up a cancellation for one of the best-sited cabins on the day but, to avoid disappointment, I would recommend booking in advance.

Mostly, rural South Africa is more rewarding that the rather tense environment of the cities, but we do recommend that you consider landing in Cape Town, hiring a car right away and driving the short distance out to Stellenbosch. Base yourself there and travel the thirty minutes or so into the city each day. Stellenbosch and neighbouring Paarl will be familiar to all who have enjoyed the excellent wines that are now being produced in the Republic and the entire district is known as "the wine route". Once again there are expensive tours of the region available, but we recommend that you arrange your own visits to the wineries - they will all be happy to show you round and give you a little sample of their produce without any charge. A number of the grape-growing farms in the region will provide bed and breakfast and you will quickly become part of the family. Forget the costly hotels and make some new friends - and please your bank manager.

This country has a wide range of problems that grows daily, despite the titanic efforts of the remarkable Nelson Mandela but, if you take the precaution of avoiding the problem areas, you will make a journey that you will never forget. The Cape of Good Hope is an easier travel from Stellenbosch and, if you fly home direct from Cape Town, then a cable-car trip to the top of Table Mountain and a walk around its summit to watch the sun go down will round off your trip in perfect style.

First published in VISA issue 23 (winter 1996)

Paradise, Razor Wire and the of Ghosts of Alex

by John Keeble

It is Freedom Day in the tourist paradise of South Africa and the razor wire is glinting dully under an unusually glowering sky in real life Johannesburg. On the streets, BMWs and Toyotas whish past jobless black men standing on corners hoping for someone, anyone, to give them a day’s work. In the shopping malls, rich whites and blacks are buying electrical goods and considering the latest boutique clothes. In the black townships, there is little freedom from poverty. In the coastal tourist areas in the south, the sophisticated living moves up a holiday notch; in the money-spinning game reserves, hopefuls rubber-neck from crawling cars; and in rural areas, farmers wait for the next murder.

For a country that once defined itself as white and black, South Africa’s complicated life is very tricky for an Africa novice like me to comprehend in a few weeks. It is full of contradictions, yawning social chasms, easy living and desperate poverty, big city violence and small-town leisure.

It would be easy to portray South Africa as guns and razor wire, or breath-taking coastlines, or game parks with the thrill of coming nose to nose with a lion (either side of the car window, hopefully), or social injustices … or dip into the past, taking sides and forgetting the white liberals who helped end apartheid… forgetting, also, that the victors in any social change are always innocent heroes and the vanquished are always fiends from hell. Journeying through the country – from the northern game reserve of Kruger National Park, where the lodge warned guests to beware of the hippos, to the southern tip at Cape Point where the Indian and Atlantic oceans meet – was a fascinating, beautiful and sometimes shocking trip through the nation’s jigsaw of realities.

It occurred as one of the not-infrequent outbreaks of racial tension was gripping the nation: the ruling factions were insisting on singing the ANC song that included the words: ‘Kill the farmer, kill the Boer.’ Then former apartheid strong man Eugene Terre’Blanche was hacked and battered to death on his farm. Four days earlier he had given a TV interview, shown after his death, in which he alluded to the widespread horror of farm murders by saying: ‘We are not going to be murdered. We will fight back.’ He was a sad and unconvincing figure, appearing broken from the uncompromising leader of the apartheid years.

I was lucky to have South African friends with the patience to help me catch up, what little I could, on events that have shaped and coloured most or all of their lives. As a tourist, I would have seen just the fabulous sights and read the news in the local papers.

Maybe that is the joy of being a tourist anywhere: you take the beauty and the fun, you leave the ugliness and strife. Maybe the best of being a traveller is trying to make some sense of strange places, though we see them through the lenses of our own cultures and experience… an understanding as far from the reality of the local people as a translation is from a living language and culture.

It was in Johannesburg that I first felt I was touching real life in South Africa, but then I came to realise that the country’s ‘real life’ was everywhere and everywhere it was as different as the patterns in a kaleidoscope. Johannesburg’s streets could be on a different planet to Cape Town’s and neither gelled with the small towns like Colesberg; and the black townships hardly seemed to be in the same universe as the white holiday paradise of Glentana down on the Atlantic coast.

We ate alfresco soon after I arrived in Johannesburg, a warm night, takeaway pizza and dry local wine, discussing the political situation and life in general in South Africa. The quiet garden, Lulu the gentle Rottweiler sitting hopefully nearby… it could have been a peaceful summer evening in southern England apart from the African plants – and, of course, the 8ft walls topped by electric fencing, the security gates and razor wire at the front of the estate, the security gate at the front of the house, and the stark warning to would-be criminals: Armed Response.

Johannesburg is like that. Every house has maximum protection against the threat of violent criminal attacks but the streets, in daytime at least, are safe and cheerful. For the tourist, there are things to see and do but transport can be both difficult and expensive. Many people fly into Johannesburg as the hub from which to visit the game reserves and the coastal areas far to the south.

My favourite ‘Johannesburg’ trips were to the black township of Alexandra [see below] and a bike ride through Soweto, where nationwide fury and protests were sparked by children being killed and injured by police and security forces when they marched in 1976 against a government decree that all teaching would be in Afrikaans. No one is sure of the exact death and injury toll during the second half of 1976 in Soweto – they range from 300 to 600 killed and up to 15,000 injured in six months of bloody protests. Today, there is a memorial area, full of symbolism and so peaceful that ideas of violence and suffering are as foreign as I felt standing on this sacred ground.

From Johannesburg, I took the tourist route to the biggest of the game parks – the Kruger National Park, to see as many of the iconic animals as possible. The park is so popular that you have to book 11 months in advance if you want to stay there overnight. It stretches 380km along the Mozambique border and lures visitors from around the globe to see its animals roaming free.

As we drove through, giraffes were munching on leaves by the track; hippos and crocodiles were idling in the rivers; and dozens of other species were enjoying their habitat enough to ignore us. Other local highlights included what would have been a spectacular vista across the low lands: the high point was called God’s Window but s/he had the curtains drawn on that day with the mist thick and mysterious.

The long trek south – a thousand miles or more – took in eye-catching scenery and places to linger, like the Valley of Desolation (which was quite jolly, really, in a beautifully desolate way) and Vanderkloof dam and reservoir, which was lovely but the real interest, for me, was along a mud track guarded by thorn trees: the site of a Boer War concentration camp and its cemetery, now an overgrown monument to the inhumanity of British forces and the suffering of Boer prisoners. Eight hundred names are listed, more round the sides, many the same family names from a sparsely populated new land.

And there were little towns, quiet and quaint. Forget the big city razor wire, chat with the small town residents who welcomed travellers like us as sources of income and interest. Many had Afrikaans as their first language and even those with English had difficulty with my southern England accent but humour and determination got me vegan breakfasts and lunches... even if one restaurant owner had to pop out to get the strange ingredients and another breathed ‘straf’, the Afrikaans word for ‘punishment’, to describe my diet.

On the south coast, the Eastern Cape where the waves crashed and the mist hung in the air even as the sunlight pierced it, we stayed at a borrowed house in the incredibly beautiful Glentana. The house was owned by generous friends who could visit it only a couple of times a year – a gleaming white structure that looked like it had materialised from a fashionable living magazine.

There, life is so casual that the gates have no more than a small bolt for convenience and hidden away, just for those who know them, are nice little places to eat when you tire of the endless, incredible beaches.

A few miles away, in Mossel Bay, commercial development meets leisure with everything anyone could want… for us, it included a climb to the clifftops overlooking the town and the lighthouse. After a little further on, beyond what most tourists wanted to climb, there were just us and the wildlife, including overgrown rabbit-like creatures called Dassies that live among the rocks.

In the other direction the town of George must have the largest population in the world. Not in numbers. In size. All those ancestors who had dragged wagons across the Karoo with hawsers clamped in their teeth have an echo today in the queue for coffee at Mugg & Bean – men who look like 7ft mounds of bone and muscle and their women matching them. ‘We have a lot of very large people in South Africa,’ understated one of my friends, a 5ft 10in midget, as we hiked round the mountains to peer in for empty tables. Near the coffee queue, in a big shopping complex, a guard stood out of the way of passers-by. He had a smart outfit, an efficient look and enough firepower to conquer a small nation or fight a deadly battle with armed robbers in a crowded shopping mall.

A fast, interesting road put Cape Town a comfortable five hours away but we had other plans: a look at Cape Point, with the historic lighthouse sharing its highpoint with hordes of tourists snapping down at opposite coves where the Atlantic and the Indian oceans can be crammed into one frame.

Cape Town is a tourist joy – it must be great to live there, too – with its interesting hilly streets, shops and restaurants. And its location puts visitors on easy routes to follow the coast, stopping at spectacular views or cosy resorts … and, just behind the town, the obvious must: Table Mountain.

It is not cheap to take the ride to the top, 1134 metres above sea level, but the experience is beyond price. On the top, we walked in the light breeze and easy sun, for once free to indulge our need for an adrenaline hit by tap dancing along the edge of sheer drops to the next world. We sat on the edge and watched a pair of birds, eagles we thought, but compromised on a technical term: big black birds with white on them. We were not skilled enough to really tap dance but the birds put on an amazing aerial dance, swooping and soaring, rocketing towards the rock faces and sheering away. We clumsy humans sighed with envy and plodded on to the next thrill.

On a good, breezy day you can see Table Mountain from above. Local paragliding firms will take you for a 30 or 40 minute flight for about £100. We booked, climbed the Lion’s Head mountain by Table Mountain to reach the launch site but the weather changed. The wind dropped and we watched one paraglider plummet to the bay beneath in five minutes – which works out at £20 a minute and no real excitement – so we told the company it did not look worth it and they cancelled flying for the day.

There are a number of places from which you can see Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned, and you can get tours there too. From a distance, it looks flat and unimpressive… the geographic image not living up to its role in the formation of modern-day South Africa.

The geography in the wine region around Stellenbosch certainly lived up to expectations and our efforts were rewarded with a little sun and dramatic skies, several times slashed with colour as rainbows formed and melted. Nearer Cape Town, the old British naval base of Freetown tracked time with a museum - it had the story of Just Nuisance, a Great Dane which became the friend of British naval ratings (though he did not like officers, women or anyone not wearing the square rig of ordinary seamen). He used the railway with the seamen to get into Cape Town in the late 1930s and rail officials threatened to shoot him as a freerider – so the Navy signed him up as able seaman Just Nuisance, put him on the base staff and gave him a free rail pass just like any other seaman. Ho hum, those were the days.


After Cape Town, it was back north to see lions. But the weather got bad and the lions were saved from yet another rubber-neck photo party… My friends offered to take me to the zoo. But vegans do not like zoos. So we went for some Bunny Chow instead – half a loaf with the centre scooped out and filled with curry. Wonderful.

**

Lingo chancing:

Eish! (‘aish’) Exclamation, like wow! but used more widely
Lekker Nice. ‘South Africa is a lekker place.’
Robot Traffic lights
Woema (‘woma’ like woman without the ‘n’) energy, get up and go
Biltong doggie chews for people
Shalawala my goodness!
Spaza shop home or street shop
Mielies (like ‘millys’) corn cob
Vet Koek (‘fet cook’) aka Fat Cake … doughnuts without the egg or milk
Pap (‘pahp’) dry porridge from maize meal
Madala term of respect for old people
Boerewors (‘buravors’) farm sausage

**

‘Alex was very different then,’ said apartheid protest veteran Pam as we drove to the black township of Alexandra near Johannesburg. There was an edge of interest and excitement to this trip: it was her first visit since those violent times.

Pam was one of the white South Africans who rejected apartheid – despite being able to trace her ancestors back to the original settlers – and she was ready to put her own life on the line to visit fellow Christians in no-go Alex.

‘My church had been collecting clothes and other items to help the people there in the worst of the trouble in the mid-1980s,’ she said. ‘We used to visit a house in Second Avenue and the people used to come to us there.

‘I remember driving in at night, when murders and bombings were everyday horrors. We were not banned from entering the townships but, being white, the security forces did not like it.

‘Even the black residents we went to see were shocked that we would drive in. But I had my Ford Escort and I was determined. The security forces tried to insist on giving us an escort but we told them to keep away from us with their big vehicles and guns – if we had been seen to have their protection, we would have been even less safe.

‘Many of the houses were good. They had been part of a government project. But in other ways it was a terrible place then. The “roads” were just dirt, running with water and everything you can imagine, and there were animals everywhere.’

In Alex, we searched for the house she visited but could not find it. In the 1980s, the houses had open areas at the front but in the intervening decades, thousands of shacks have been squeezed on to every available space to provide income for the owners and homes for the incoming population.. We walked the street where the house stood, chatted to the locals… but the past had gone.

So we rode round the colourful and vibrant area, walked through the market… we were greeted by friendly people surprised to see us and wanting to know why I was shooting them (the current way to say ‘photographing’).

The era of real shooting died with apartheid. We were just looking for ghosts.

**

The shebeen, the one-time secret drinking shack of the black population, was dark, very dark with the only light coming from the entry gap in the corrugated metal sheets that were perched uneasily on uneven ground on the edge of the apartheid-era men’s lodging rooms in the township of Soweto.

We sat opposite a dozen or so locals, all of us crowded in on wooden benches trying to make conversation with people whose difference made it as difficult as if they spoke an entirely different language. We exchanged names, told them where we were from, tried to get individual conversations going.

This was today’s poor Soweto, or at least part of it because the township is huge with a population put at more than three million. We were there on a cycling tour, led through the byways of yesterday’s disasters and today’s slums and comparative mansions.

Sepo, our guide, eased himself into the 3m x 3m shack which had maybe 20 people in it. He was carrying the specialities of the house … home-brewed beer in a kalabash, a communal drinking bowl so much part of the culture that a huge new World Cup stadium was being built in the same shape a few kilometres away. Plus some other alcohol drinks, one flavoured with banana and one based on milk… we sipped, passed on, sipped, passed on. Our new friends drank deeply: a friend in need of a drink is a friend indeed.

For something more solid, we stopped half an hour later. There the brave ate cow’s face and pap (a maize staple of the black population).

Then we rode off again, on our mountain bikes, through the sites and sights of Soweto, where the apartheid battle scars – apart from the big memorial and a re-faced Mandela house – have been overwhelmed by the poverty.


First published in VISA 91 (Jun 2010)