The Long Road to Bulungula

My friend Tuuli had visited South Africa for the first time last year, and told me that the highlight of her trip was a visit to Bulungula in the Transkei, in the middle of South Africa's Indian Ocean coast. She said the lodge was integrated into a Xhosa village, and that it was a special setup. I thought I'd make it my next stop after leaving Ixopo.

I'd never actually been into the Transkei before, at least when I was old enough to remember. In Apartheid times, Transkei was one of the densely-populated, nominally independent homelands, kept separate from South Africa and we never thought of it as a holiday destination, although the coast line there, nicknamed the Wild Coast, is some of the most beautiful in South Africa. So for me entering the Transkei felt like I was going into a foreign country.

I called ahead from Kokstad, the last town in Natal, to get directions. The little backpacker guidbook I had said, vaguely, that Bulungula lay 'South of Coffee Bay', so I'd gotten directions from there, which sounded romantic: 'from Coffee Bay go to Hole in the Wall and then follow the signs to the Mission Hospital'. I filled up with fuel and withdrew money and then drove over the 'border', at which the landscape transformed from undulating green hills to undulating green hills with lots of small huts and chaotic towns. Capital of all the chaotic towns was Mtata, which took me about an hour to drive through because of roadworks and Saturday afternoon traffic.

So it was mid-afternoon already, on the otherside of Mtata, that I turned off the national highway onto a badly pot-holed road which took me to my first contact with the ocean at Coffee Bay ... and a scraggly backpacker scene with a lot of begging children. I wasn't sure what exactly I was expecting but this wasn't it. I bid farewell to tarmac and headed downt the dirt road to Hole in the Wall. Transkei doesn't have much in the way of roadsigns, and the directions I had pettered out just beyond there, with the sun was starting to sink in the sky.

Two calls on my cell phone later, and a careful look at the detailed map I was lucky enough to have showed that I was way away from Bulungula and should never have been through Coffee Bay at all. Suddenly I found myself in a race against the last remaining light of day, going through a crazy maze of rutted dirt roads where the only point of orientation was the name of the odd store. Get to the Bulungula Store were the directions over the phone. And we'll send the 4x4 there. Long before I reached the store, it felt like I needed a 4x4 - the road tilted from one side to the other, and the car scraped against ridges of dirt.

I got to the Bulungula Store in the evening, and waited about an hour before a 4x4 lurched up the road from the opposite direction and took me with, alone in the back, into the gathering gloom and a storm which had burst over the darkened landscape. I knew from the map that there was only a short distance - maybe 5km - to go, but the trip in the 4x4 took almost an hour as its lurched through a series of ravines. The blurred white shapes of huts were vaguely distinguishabe through the rain-besmattered windows, but otherwise the experience was one of jolt/jolt/jolt in the pitchy blackness. Then finally it stopped, the door opened and I jumped out ... splosh ... into a giant puddle. Welcome to Bulungula!

The lodge was crowded with a confusing mixture of backpackers and locals, with many children running around. At that stage I was too tired to take it all in, so I set up a tent in the darkness, and fell into a deep sleep. When I woke up the next morning, I was right on the beach, and this is what I saw:









Sometimes, arriving at night and waking up to the surprise is the best way to do it.

Woza Moya

Spent almost the entire day today with computers, sorting out the network and some other issues at Woza Moya. It was almost exactly like being at work, except it started and closed with a Zulu prayer, everytime I looked out the window I could see the verdant valley below, and at the end of the day, as the thunderstorms came up the hillside, I felt like I had done something useful which would directly help people out. Woza Moya is an Aids NGO which helps distribute anti-retrovirals and has food, legal and youuth programs for the people in the valley. Here is the team of people I was working with:

Back on the Road: Ixopo

My shipment from New York arrived, everything is unpacked and I wrangled the IRS paperwork to get my taxes sorted out. What reason to stay in Joburg? None whatsoever. I left there at dawn today, drove past fields of sunflowers backdroped by the giant cooling towers of power stations, endless maize fields, war battlefields and then through the beautiful, rolling green hills of the Natal Midlands. I am helping out with some networking stuff for Woza Moya, an Aids charity near Ixopo in Natal, and spending the night in the nearby bhuddhist retreat. Its beautiful here, and there are a crowd of interesting people. And I'm dead tired, thus the short blog post. Yawn!

High Profile Half Marathon

Ran a half marathon today, the Pirates 'King of the Hill (Now Featuring the Queen of the Hill)'. Whoever planned this route was a sadist who chose the steepest hills in all of Johannesburg to make you run up (Northcliff Ridge), and then twisted the route around so you constantly thought you had reached the top, until you turned the corner and more gradient stretched up above. Its was the most extreme profile I have ever run. South Africans love their extreme sports. It did give me a chance to drink a beer at 9am on a Sunday morning (its been a while).

Fake Plastic Oversized Trees

I had forgotten how comic the disguised cell phone towers which dot Joburg look ... they come in 'palm tree' and 'fir tree' variants. Do they have this kind of fake tree anywhere else or is it one more case of Local is Lekker?

Zimbabwean Refugee Meeting at the Methodist Central Mission

The Methodist Bishop, Paul Verryn, has turned the methodist mission in downtown Johannesburg into a refugee centre for displaced Zimbabweans. The mission is constantly in the news, and its become something of a symbol for what has happened to Zimbabweans, and how South Africans react to them (for example, it was raided by the police in January 2008).

Tonight I went to one of the regular volunteer meetings thinking I could do something at the centre. It was an overwhelming experience. Driving through the deserted evening streets of down town Johannesburg, the mission was unmissable: hundreds and hundreds of people were milling outside.

The situation inside the church was chaotic and a little overwhelming: many more people milling around or sleeping on the floor, and that heavy musty smell of too many people in an enclosed space. The church pews were crowded with people watching television there, and laundry had been hung to dry behind the frosted glass to one side of the sanctuary.

The meeting itself had a strange similarity to a chaotic school assembly: Verryn had representatives from many different activities stand up and give a report: sports clubs (soccer, karate, chess), employment opportunities (sewing, beadwork and computer literacy workshops) and internal organization (the security guards). The church was full of people, of all ages, some of them just sleeping on the pews or on the floor, others listening intently and giving input. It struck me how orderly it all was; I can't imagine a similar meeting of South African refugees in some hypothetical future Zimbabwe behaving in this passive manner - they would be a lot more unrully. And by the end of the evening, after two hours, I left - gratefully, I must confess - with an appreciation of what Veryyn is doing. The church was not a pleasant sight, but the atmosphere there was at least very humane, and the people there were being given some form of dignity if they wanted it.

I've Fought Mugabe for 20 Years - And Now I'm Fighting Him Closeup!

Friday was again filled with the specter of Zimbabwe. In the late afternoon, I went to a seminar at the University of Johannesburg (UJ). I was hoping to hear Thendai Biti, the man with the unenviable job of Zimbabwe's new Minister of Finance, but he cancelled at the last minute, replaced by an articulate spokesman. Also present were Arthur Mutambara, Munyaradzi Gwisai, Chair of the Zimbabwe’s Social Forum and Elinor Sisulu, director of the Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition Board.

Arthur Mutambara spoke last, and as the leader of a small faction of the MDC, was the most senior political figure there. He has an impressive pedigree (DPhil from Oxford, lecturer at MIT) and a strong oratory style which got the audience worked up ... but I also found him the least convincing of any of the speakers; he ranted on about the threat of the US and England invading Zimbabwe (what other Zimbabwean has blathered that incessantly for propaganda purposes recently?) and he declared that SADC would be coerced into a better regional organization some time in the future. He also repeatedly held forth on how the Government of National Unity (GNU) was the only way for Zimbabwe to go. A geek like me would point out that stands for 'GNU is Not Unity'. But Mutambara also produced my favourite quote from the evening: I've been fighting Mugabe for 20 years - and now I'm fighting him from close up!

Ikamva Registration

I am doing some volunteer work as a tutor at the Ikamva Youth program in Midrand, which gives young people in their last three years of school supplementary tutoring. I'll be doing Maths and Comp Lit, and hopefully English too. Today was registration day.

The school has an associated computer school, Siyakhula ('We Are Growing'), where I also hope to lend a hand.

Poetic Adventure at the Taxi Rank

Last time I went close to Johannesburg's Joubert Park, I got mugged twice on one day. I've avoided it ever since then, but today, through an accident, I went there again.

Anna sent me a sunny SMS, inviting me to a poetry slam in Newtown, the 'cultural precinct' in the west part of downtown Joburg. She was going with a group of kids from her church. Sure, I said. I had nothing else planned, knew the area well and was comfortable going there. At the agreed time, I was in Newtown, which has a wide sunny grass park and a lazy feel about it - but there was no sign of Anna. I phoned her, and one of the people she was with - Fifi - said they would come to where I was and pick me up. I waited about 15 minutes, but there was no sign of Fifi. I phoned again, only to be told that Fifi had just gotten into a taxi to come to me.

Wait a minute - a taxi??? But aren't we both in Newtown? "I'm not sure", said Anna. "I'm in the Drill Hall. By the taxi rank."

Half an hour later, I was about to give up and go home when Fifi and her friend Thandi found me. They were black kids, from Midrand, in their last year of school. We got into my car. "Can you show me where we are going on a map?" I asked. No, they said, they couldn't. But they would guide me there. That was the real start of the adventure.

We set off down Bree Street. Suddenly the road ahead was blocked with minibus taxis. "Turn left!" commanded Fifi. Feeling a little like a Duke of Hazard, I did. More taxis, lots of hooting horns. "Turn right!" said Fifi. "The taxis will let you through". I turned rights, and was instantly walled in by a group of taxis, none of them moving. "How about locking those doors?", I said.

The taxis cleared slowly, a right turn and a left turn and then "That's it!" said Fifi, "that's the Drill Hall ... where the rastafarian is!". A prominent red, yellow and green hat was bobbing on a balcony on the other side of one final intersection, like a beckoning flag marking our destination. As we inched forward, Anna's directions proved accurate: the Noord Street taxi rank opened to our left. But the intersection ahead was clogged with stationary taxis going through a red light. Gridlock!

Joubert Park, the site of my muggings, lay just ahead. Any minute, my paranoid mind though. Any minute, they are going to see that I am the only white person in the whole damn taxi rank, and they are going to hijack me and rob me of this beautifully aged Ford Escort! Panicked and angry at the same time, I began to drive like they do in Kenya: blared the horn relentlessly and pushed my way through the taxis blocking the intersection, waiving my hands zestfully at the taxi drivers. Miraculously, it worked: I forced my way around the corner, into a decrepit enclosure, parked the car and put on every alarm, immobilizer and crook lock I had at my disposal. Then suddenly, with Fifi and Thandi, I was in the calm of the drill hall, where Anna was waiting for me. "Anna!" I hissed at her in greeting. "This is not Newtown!"

The drill hall is a converted factory: a room with floor-to-ceiling windows on three sides, facing the taxi rank. There is more information on it here. About 50 people were gathered there; mostly young rastafarian men or creatively dressed women. The sun shone hot through the windows, taxi horns blared, an alarm went off, at one stage ... was that a gunshot or a taxi backfiring? But somehow the space itself was an oasis of calm creativity and peaceful people. And the poetry? It was excellent.

Registering to Vote

I registered to vote this morning. The first and only time I have been able to vote up to now has been in the 1994 South African elections that brought in the ANC government and ended white rule; since then I have experienced many elections (in Germany, the Netherlands, the US) but never been able to vote. The date of the election in South Africa has still not been set but will probably be sometime in April.

I walked around to the polling station. Walking by choice in Joburg is one of those activities which marks you out as an eccentric, but there were several other eccentrics out there, with eccentric dogs or eccentric fitness goals. You also get a street-level view of what is going on: here are a couple of young men setting up plasticware for sale on the side of the road.

A Little Lengana?

One of the best things about being back in South Africa is the opportunity to hang out with old friends again. Better yet is the chance to do this around a South African braai on a lazy Sunday afternoon, which happened today with Steph. He is an ex-neighbor of my family's; we got to know each other when his bees swarmed across the dividing wall and stung my father. Steph manages his own business, Bioafrica, which produces organic 'essential oils' and cosmetics based on them. Today he brought over some samples to show us, and a bunch of his crazy stories from the farm (heard the one about the tractor hijacking? how about those crazy male lesbians?). But wait: that's not all! He also brought around the first version of a CD he is producing of advertising jingles for his products. The tracks are performed by his workers in various styles: pop, kwaito, gospel. Here for example is Ozone with Lengana is the Best

Don't Panic, Don't Panic
Lengana is Highly Aromatic...

Lengana is the Sotho word for a plant which is a traditional medicine (muti) for any one of a long list of ailments. Got an ailment? Try it out ... or at least, take a listen to the song, its fun, and also has curative powers!