Monthly Archives: January 2011

The joy of motion

Ideas

A light breeze drifts past, taking the edge off the summer sunshine as I sit on the station platform. It is a perfect day – enough cool breeze not to be scorching hot but still not so windy that it feels as if the world might blow away. The air is crisp-clear. The Somerset West mountains stand in perfect silhouette outline against the blue sky. A mourning dove calls, supported by a chorus of chirrups from smaller birds. The gentle buzz of traffic on the road nearby provides a sound-backdrop. Along the platform, a security guard wanders, adding his voice to the morning chorus in a rich, chocolaty bass. The train arrives.

I spend so little time on trains these days. In Korea they were a fairly ordinary, everyday thing. In South Africa they are less regular. This trip between Somerset West and Cape Town is the only train trip I really take here. I mull over the possibility of taking the train to Simonstown tomorrow. It’s a beautiful train trip, along the blue, blue sea, but only if it turns out to be a nice day. There are so many touristy things I’d like to do in Cape Town.

I feel the familiar thrill of going – the flicker of excitement to be moving again, on the go, going somewhere, doing things. ‘It’s only Cape Town,’ I hear the cynical little voice in my mind say. But that is the point: what so many people miss, and what makes me sad, is the taking things for granted in a desperate effort to avoid being anything like a tourist. Cape Town is a great place to explore. The aim should be to take the opportunity to be a tourist, to jump at the chance to find joy and excitement right here, still to be able to find the magic in a train-trip from Strand to Cape Town. This is my wonder-filled life: work that is meaningful, challenging and intellectually stimulating and the joy of motion.

The movement of people

Ideas,

I watched a debate recently about colonialism and reparations, specifically Arab colonialism in Africa. Combined with my recent brushes with the colonial history of Namibia, it got me thinking about the movement of people.

Did you know, for example, that the first inhabitants of Madagascar were probably Austronesians who sailed on canoes from South East Asia. The malagasy language apparently shares 90% of its basic vocabulary with the Ma’anyan language from southern Borneo.

Zanzibar fell, in 1698, to the Sultanate of Oman (who displaced the Portugese) and became an important part of the Omani empire, from which several areas of East Africa were controlled. In the 19th century, the then Sultan of Oman decided to make Zanzibar his permanent residence (capital?) and built lavish palaces and gardens there. For a while, Zanzibar was the capital of Oman.

The Andaman Islands between the Indian sub-continent and Thailand/Indonesia are populated in part by the Jarawa tribe who, it turns out (confirmed by DNA testing) are direct descendants of North Kenyan/South Ethiopian early man.

People have always travelled to and settled in new places. It is only in the last century, as our political correctness has shut down the option of conquest (at least for Western nations) and our population growth has driven us to claim whole countries of land as our own, for fear that we will be left with nowhere to go, that this kind of travel and movement has become less acceptable.

But I am still intrigued by nomadic groups, not because their lifestyle is somehow romantic and desirable – as modernity isolates them more and more, they often live in abject poverty – but because they are the antithesis of the sedentary lifestyles so many modern humans live. We have become strangely obsessed with a settled place. “Where are you from?”, “Where do you live?”, “What is your address?” But at least in socio-economically well-off circles, people’s lives exist largely on-line. Sending letters in the post is almost an anachronism but an address remain a crucial part of identity.

I have lived in Korea, I’ve lived in South Africa’s two biggest cities, I’ve lived in small university and farming towns. I’m currently in the Eastern Cape but the office I work for is in Cape Town. It is a little like the time I lived in Cape Town but my office and team were in Joburg. Or those crazy three months I commuted between Stutterheim and Pretoria. And I’d like to do it on a larger scale. I’d like to spend more time travelling across borders, particularly in Southern Africa. I want this whole region, rather than just one country, to become ‘home’.

In the back of my mind a whimsical idea is forming: what would it be like (and would it even be possible) to live without a fixed address for one year?