Vagabonds

Travel

“A man who leaves home to mend himself an others is a philosopher, but he who goes from country to country guided by blind impulses of curiosity is only a vagabond” Oliver Goldsmith, quoted by James A Michener in The Drifters

One of the things I love about Michener is that he uses his novels as a space – in between narrative and prose – to steal a few moments of the reader’s time and give voice (or pen) to some of the beautiful places in the world. This particular book is propvol of descriptions like that. The reader is swept along on his voyage through Spain and Portugal, Mozambique and Morocco. At one point, he stops to describe increadibly evocatively a beautiful bridge and two ancient red towers that stand like sentinels on the approach to the white spires of Pamplona. He is the only writer who has ever raised in me any interest in witnessing the running of the bulls. Although I imagine I’d have to find new travel companions for that – I can’t see any of my current collection of fabulous travel-hungry friends being keen.

People leave home and visit new places for different reasons. During my recent foray into the wonderful world of the tourism industry, I found myself sitting in an SA tourism seminar where they talked about research suggesting that the primary driver for South Africans to get off their assess, to break out of their comfort zones and head for new places, is the strong recommendation of friends and family. In some countries in the world they decide to go on holiday, then go online or visit a travel agent to find a place they like the look of to visit. South Africans tend to work the other way around. Once someone tells us about an amazing place they think we should go, we’ll start looking into getting time off work and planning the possibility of taking a holiday and going there. By the time we got to the internet and the travel agent we’ve already decided and are ready to book.

In both cases, however, people tend to travel because they like the sound of the destination based on referrals, brochures or the word of someone who has been there. There are not that many people who will pack up and set off – with just a backpack and a guidebook – simply because they’re curious about a new place. I know a few of them – and they’re the most fantastic and sometimes the most frustrating travel companions. I’d travel anywhere with them and often be reasonably happy to set off on a whim at a moments notice.

For myself, when I travel by myself – and partly because  I come from a country where it’s really not that safe for a woman to go anywhere by herself – I’m unlikely to embark on such an adventure. Which is perhaps a bad thing. I generally prefer to have a few specific goals in mind – things and places I’m determined to do and see – and to build the rest of the trip around these as I go along.

Predictably with me, they tend to be historical. I’m drawn to places that I’ve read and learnt about. I had difficulty explaining this when I was applying for work in Russia last year. “Why do you want to come to Russia?” “The reason I’m keen to come to Russia in particular is because you have a fascinating, long history but particularly with respect to the 20th century history of the country and the manner in which the Bolshevik period has been overlaid on the Tsarist era – especially in big cities and very rural areas – and how the transition to a managed democracy has affected this as well as how that transition differs from South Africa’s transition to democracy.” No. People are not generally that overjoyed to hear that you’d like to visit their country because you think they’d make fascinating subjects of historical and socio-political research.

It was The Drifters that first sparked my interest in Mozambique. Some of Michener’s descriptions are exquisite and he particularly aroused a longing to see – and which I still plan to return and see – Ilha de Mozambique. But it also excited in my an interest in Mozambique (and quite a lot of the rest of South Eastern Africa) as the site of conflict but also of mingling and integration of three of the world’s great modern cultural forces – Western, African and Arab. It was in the back of my mind, something I spent hours thinking about, the whole time I was in Mozambique. I’d love to return to Mozambique and explore that theme in context and produce research and writing which would add to the world’s store of knowledge and ideas.

But for now my trips are not journeys of intellectual discovery except in a very limited and very personal sense. For now I’m just another vagabond, soaking up the wonder and joy of new places and new experiences without giving anything back or contributing anything of much significance as a result of my travels. Perhaps that’s not really the point. Perhaps my longing to contribute is really more symptomatic of my desperate desire to return to the warm embrace, the challenges and hardships and the welcome distance of analysis that make academia so appealing. Perhaps one day I will find a way to combine the two.

Being South African

Ideas, Travel

Dis ‘n bitterbessie dagbreek, dis ‘n uitroep komma-punt
Mabalel is huistoe, want sy mis haar eie kind
Ek wens ek kon jou teken met ‘n koukie of ‘n kwas
Ek wens ek kon onthou hoekom ek so bewerig was
Ek wens ek kon jou oopskryf, met my balpunt pen behaag
Ek wens ons kon saam wakker word in ‘n youth hostel in Praag

Liefde uit die Oudedoos, Koos Kombuis

Ek lewe
Gemaak om na liefde te strewe
Op vlerke van vriendskap to swewe
Sonder vra, sonder sorge
Dag vir dag dreun ritme om my heen
Voel die ure vol, en tog alleen
Maar jou blik verslaan my vrese
Son, saffier, lag in jou wese
Bring geluk wat lank verlore was

Ek lewe, Karen Zoid

South Africa is a beautiful country. A kaleidescope of different beauties.

Like frost on the veld on a winter morning, icy-white on the dry, pale grass, in a valley surrounded by sweeping mountains dotted with trees and blood-red aloes.

In Autumn, the winelands of the Western Cape are spashed with colour: the yellow and orange and brown of the Autumn vines, darker evergreens on the slopes, the blues and browns of dams thirsting for the rainy season, empty blue skies and changing-colour oaks.

The moon rising over the Cape Town city bowl, the mountain rising from a haze of pinks and purples and blues, from where we sit on a gently swaying boat in the bay, the chilly breeze off the atlantic, the spray salty, the bubbly sweet

So many beauties. Grahamstown sunsets and cold beer. Highveld storms. The empty freedom of the Karoo. Evenings in De Akker and Springbok. The soaring Drakensberg. Mangroves in KZN. Long stretches of untouched Wild Coast beach.

Last week, the ANC presidential candidate said that Afrikaaners are the only whites who are truly South African. At the time, I didn’t pay too much attention; just another outlandish comment from someone who will say anything to please the audience to whom he is speaking. Today, reflecting on the NPA decision, I found myself retreating into music that I realised how angry his comment made me.

My comfort-music, the music that makes me feel whole again, is Koos Kombuis (with the fading echoes of ‘n SoutPaddy), Chris Chameleon, Klopjag, Karen Zoid, etc., etc. It’s ironic: the only subject I have ever failed was Afrikaans (in Std 2). My soul is Afrikaans. Die ‘taal van my hart’ is Afrikaans. But I’m not Afrikaans. I’m an English-speaking white South African.

I am angry, offended, impotently raging at the idea that anyone, anyone, questions my identity as a South African. When white South Africans go overseas they are often asked how they can be white and still come from Africa. We put up with it and laugh it off because they’re foreigners. It stops being funny when it happens at home. People joke and laugh about it but so many of us who were born here and who lived through the the transition and were part of the emergence of this new democracy remain fiercely attached to this country. No matter where we go, and many of my generation, many of my friends, are scattered across the globe, we remain fiercely, devotedly South African. And none of us is comfortably with anyone questioning that identity. I suppose heightened by the recent happenings just across the border in Zim with the strong suggestion that white Zimbabweans are not welcome.

It is not okay to me – and to many others I know – for anyone to question or throw doubt on my identity as a South African. I don’t care whose parents’ parents’ parents’ came from somewhere else (and everyone’s did), this is home –

There is a saying in Zulu: ‘If you were in my flesh, I could tear you out, But you are in my blood, which cannot be divided.’ Recessional for Grace, Margeurite Poland

I am an African. I am a South African. Wherever I happen to wander, on the earth and intellectually, I carry with me the red soil of the karoo, the soaring Drakensberg, the snow on the mountains around Worcester, the winelands in Autumn, Table Mountain from the bay at sunset, bright red aloes in winter-white grass and a million other moments that are my anchor. My identity is complex and multiple and complicated and no-one, particularly not someone who purports to be a leader of all South Africans, has a right to question the South African-ness of it. I’m not much of a fan of fighting but I would fight for this.

An afternoon in the forest and worlds half-forgotten

Friends,

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.

Anais Nin

I spent the afternoon and evening with two old friends. Two friends who I know differently, separately but who have subsequently found each other. It was a special afternoon, I suppose party because it’s really the first time I’ve been out with friends for that long in over a month. It was also fun. Just sitting and chatting and walking up to the waterfalls and just sharing the moments, the laughter. I realised how much I’ve missed it.

These two friends are also particularly special. I first knew each of them a long time ago. Our paths have diverged significantly in the intervening years, occasionally crossing from time to time. I didn’t even really know them at the same time. So much has happened in between. In all our lives. In many ways these are people I shouldn’t really even know anymore. Yet we can sit and share moments and have real conversations, annihilating space and time.

That possibility of connecting in some way, despite the everyday differences, built on common history, was a gift today. I don’t think I expected it. I forget that common history can do that. Shared memories of people and moments and times make things easier. And there is something secure and comfortable about spending time with people who knew you before you were cynical and grown-up and jaded.

Friendships differ. There are some friends I see very seldom with whom I must become acquainted all over again every time I see them (although that is entirely worth it with some people). With others there is some desultory conversation continuing all the time – no matter how far apart or how different our lives, the common people and situations mean that we are somehow part of a shared conversation all the time, so meetings are simply picking up the thread and updating each other on the latest shared knowledge.

With old friends, or perhaps just with particular people there is a sense that all we have experienced in the intervening years, in the time since we last talked, is just another part of us; that somehow the selves we bring to the conversation, though richer and wiser and sometimes sadder and more cynical, are the same people as before. With those friends, there is no need to get reacquainted – to tell every little story and share each detail. It isn’t necessary.

Just a few days ago, a friend was talking about how she wished for all her friends the love of someone who can be completely supportive and who can make you a better person. I ask only friendship of people like that. I sometimes forget that I have it. Sometimes from those I don’t see for years at a time. Sometimes even from those I have almost forgotten are friends since the last time our paths have crossed.

It’s terribly easy to withdraw into yourself when you spend to much time alone. It was really good to reconnect and to be reminded of worlds within and between us that I’d almost, half forgotten.