Return to Yeoville

Back when I was a student, Yeoville was one of the best parts of Joburg to live in - Rocky Street was full of cafes, bars and bookshops, and the flats in the streets around, with pressed ceilings and parquet floors, were occupied by artists and students. My first flat, Glenton Court, was just around the corner from Rocky Street, and my 18 months there have to count as one the happiest phases of my life. But already when I was living there in 1995, urban decay had set in. Drug dealers killed someone just around the corner, and I was mugged just outside Glenton Court, and never felt secure there again.

Today I rode through Yeoville again. Glenton Court is boarded up, and the book shops and cafes are long gone, although the legendary House of Tandoor is still there. The library seemed closed. There are a lot of spaza shops (people selling sweets and other small items of groceries from a garage) and fried fast food joints now dominate Rockey Street. There's a combination taxi rank and open-air market which has been built by the city. Congolese hairdressers and money transfer offices ply their trade. In New York, what has happened to Yeoville would be called something like degentrifaction.

Joburg is notorious for changing again and again and again and not preserving the past, but for me the city has lost something precious with Yeoville.

Crocodile Views at Ngwenya

Spent 4 days in a house on the banks of the Crocodile River on the edge of the Kruger National Park with my parents. The house had a view over a section of the rushing river with basking crocodiles and wading buffalo. The Kruger Park with its teeming wildlife was a short drive away.




Slept and read a lot, and suffered a mysterious express bout of flu which allowed my mother to mother me and left me feeling like I was 8 years old again.

Castle Gorge

Took my old friend David, his wife Kedi and their three great kids, Leroto, Tshepiso and Tiamo hiking in Castle Gorge in the Magaliesberg today. Its was great fun for the kids - they went swimming in the winter-cold water pools, 'discovered' the waterfall, kept on saying "Where's the steep part?", saw monkeys and buck, and loved being up in the hills for the day.

Me, at the end of the day, I was exhausted!

Trad Climbing at Grootkloof

Went Trad Climbing for the first time in the Magaliesberg (Grootkloof) with the Mountain Club of South Africa. I didn't lead, but it was a great experience to be high up on the dizzying cliffs with just a couple of tricams keeping me up there. Abseiling down was also huge fun, but on the last section, I got attacked by wasps.

Afternoon in Tembisa

Today I spent an hour driving around Tembisa, a sprawling township of about a million people to the north east of Joburg (and so not far from where I'm living). My friend Steph is spending a lot of his time there currently, selling his BioAfrica cosmetics range, recently pepped up by the addition of the high-performance satisfaction-guaranteed menthol-oil based erection enhancer.

The tutoring I'm doing on Saturday mornings is on the outskirts of Ebony Park, which is part of Tembisa, but this was the first time I'd been into the township itself. It was a crazy experience: wealthier areas with small but neat houses, shacks with pit toilets marked by whirling methane extractors, outside markets with vegetables and clothes and live chickens stacked in cages alongside the erection enhancers, shebeens (informal bars) with men of all ages haging around drinking, the familia Pick n Pay chain supermarket, kids fixing their bides on the streets or flying kites made out of converted garbage bags, and everywhere colour and movement and people.

Steph hires pretty school girls to run his stalls. "Sex sells, Will!", Steph exclaims; he dresses the girls in high-class low-neckline t-shirts. Penny, who sat in the back of the car as we drove around, was 20 years old, from Zimbabwe, and in Grade 11, her second-to-last year of school. His products adorn the mirrors of hair dressers like Rebecca's Hair Salon in the photo. Like Penny, many of the people working for him, both the hairdressers and the school girls, are foreigners from Zimbabwe or Mozambique, or further afield.

I can count the number of visits I've made into townships like this ... they're few and far between, and I think that that's typical of white South Africans. Most have an idea of townships as being places of poverty and crime; there is no reason to go there. And there is certainly plenty of both in the townships, I don't want to paint a pretty picture of township chic. But after leaving, I drove through the suburbs which are familiar to me, the "white burbs", and thought about the obvious contrasts. In South Africa I have always disliked the suburban blandness that I grew up in: the little gardens and sameness and empty streets and people behind high walls and electric fences. They look like suburbs in other parts of the world, give or take 2 metres of wall and a couple of thousand volts. But Tembisa had something rich and vibrant about it which had me itching (like a tourist?) to take photographs and see more.

Will 1, Inefficient SA Parastatal 0

My first ever court experience went well - I took SA Airways to the small claims court, after a load of camera equipment and data on CD's was stolen while my luggage was at their mercy, and they paid me back for only a bottle of rum. It was a small victory - the money for the flash I'd bought for my sister's wedding - but it was a victory. And I found the experience of going through the courts really interesting. My sue threshold has been lowered; it's the American Way.

Teaching an Entry-Level Photo Course

Took 3 hours off work today to teach a beginner's class in photography at the Ikamva Winter School. The kids have never touched a camera before. We went over the basics of a camera and some composition tips. It was huge fun, I'm hoping some good stuff will come out of it.

Climbing in Bronkies

For the first time in about 9 months, I went climbing today near the Bronkhorstspruit Dam with the Mountain Club of SA. Great people, beautiful location, superb climbing and many, many sore muscles. Man, I'm out of shape!

The photograph is of Andrew Porter, from Manchester, who led the meet and belayed with me. He's really good - all the climbs at my level, he just did in his sneakers.

Becoming a Globalized God Father

This is Meo, the son of my friend Nils in Hamburg, and my god son. I flew to Hamburg for the christening, for one weekend. It was crazy but worth it. I also got to celebrate Nil's birthday with him on the summer solstice, then rounded off the visit with an 18 hour commute straight back to work.

Young Soloists Competition

My mother is a trombone player; currently she's active both in the administration and as a musician of the Johannesburg Symphony Orchestra, which is an amateur orchestra with a lot of young people of all races. I'd been to a rehearsal before, which was a lot of fun, but today I got to see the orchestra live for the 2009 Young Soloists Competition. The concert had gotten a lot of media attention, including a feature on Radio 702, so there was a really strong turn out; at one stage both my parents, my brother and I were all working alongside each other at the ticket desk together, desperately trying to keep up with the constant stream of people coming through the doors. Many of them brought their children with.

The concert was really enjoyable for me, not just for the great music and the sight of the children competing being so nervous and then composed and performing really well (some of them were about 8 years old) but also as an opportunity to take a lot of photos in challenging, low-light conditions.

South African Lingo

There are entire books of South African slang, but here are some words which I've heard since coming back which are new to me, or I liked.

A zebra is a mixed-race child, so you can have a zebra.

If you see a sign saying troeteldier kos in a supermarket, it's the pet food isle. And a papbroek is an Afrikaans saying for someone who is spineless.

Veld Fire Season

The cool, dry winters in Jo'burg lead to regular veld (or grass) fires. They're not really dangerous, but produce a lot of smoke. Today there was a big veld fire on the ridge above Giloolys Farm (the Harvey Nature Reserve), close to where I'm living. I saw it from the freeway, went home to get my camera and went back to take these photographs. The Erukhuleni Fire Brigade arrived at some stage and waged war on it with a garden-hose mounted on a big red bakkie.

Kayking to a Giant Bhuddhist Temple

Okay, the headline is better-sounding than its accurate.

Its like this: on the weekend I went on a kayaking trip on the Wilge River near the town of Bronkhorstspruit, about 2 hour's drive from Jozi, with the Dabulamanzi Kayak Club. I rode a Wild Water kayak (pictured left) for the first time. The location was beautiful, and on the first day I did an eskimo roll, and then made it all the way down the series of rapids only coming out when I intended to.

Then that evening I drank a couple of beers and had a glass of wine and the next day: good bye kayak skills, hello cold water.

Beautiful campsite and a long grassy meadow with the background sound of running water for doing hours of sunny reading provided one of those still sessions I need after months in big bad joburg.

Funny side story: I took a dry bag down with me, and forgot to put my cell phone in it ... fished it sopping out of my pocket on the other end after having been swimming for minutes in the water, dried it out in the sun, put it back together and .... Sim-Card fried, but the phone worked first time. Its an ancient Nokia 6230i with a couple of lives its already shedded. Impressive!

And the buddhist temple? It is called the Nan Hua Temple, and it is a vast but beautifully-built construction in Bronkhorstspruit which I visited on my way back home. It felt as authentic as anything I've seen in China or Nepal, although a little more out of place. It was built by the Fo Guang Shan Buddhist Order as their main temple in Africa, and its new - it was only completed in 2005. The sight of black men in traditional Buddhist monks' robes was a refreshing one.

Work Kills Blogging!

My longish absence from blogging can be directly attributed to my having started work. Since the beginning of April I have been helping out at Qualica, a company run by a group of friends of mine, people that I met when I last worked in South Africa for Internet Solutions. Qualica is involved in a variety of different projects; amongst other things they developed and support the IT systems behind the 1Time Airline, support data exchange under tough conditions in remote parts of Africa for Bayport Financial Services and provide networking solutions for South Africa's Old Mutual. The common link between all of these is Linux operating system; Qualica is a Linux specialist house.

Working again with people I know as friends and respect as professionals is an amazing experience. But I am not only working with them, I am in the same building as in the days at Internet Solutions, and working with some of the same systems, so sometimes the air at work feels like it's thick with ghosts from a past which was a personal golden age; and the fact that I have travelled so far and done so much since then and still come back to the same environment makes me restless. And that feeling is not a new one; its something I've had to deal with a lot in coming back to South Africa.

The fact that my stay here is temporary makes it easier to deal with. But I also think that you can't show how much you have changed until you go back into an old environment.

Buying Me Some Sound

While living in the Netherlands I bought myself a really good amp and CD-player (the X-Ray and X-150 from Musical Fidelity), but I was playing them through borrowed speakers. During the entire two and a half years in New York, the components lay in storage and I was listening to music through headphones or tinny IPod speakers. Gak!

Today I put the May Day holiday to good use and added high fidelity audio back into my life. I went through a series of sound rooms with my friend Kezia and eventually bought a pair of B&W CM5 speakers. It cost me a considerable part of my first salary check, but it was worth every cent. Listening to the fabulous PJ Harvey as I blog...

Saturday Tutoring

I have been spending Saturday Mornings tutoring at the Ikamva Youth project in the Ivory Park township since my return from Cape Town. Most of the tutoring so far has been maths, which school and university gave me a rock-solid foundation in, and physics and chemistry. Especially the latter can be challenging for me, since its been a while since I have had to separate my cations from my anions, and its something I've never looked at since. But I am managing to stay 15 minutes ahead of the kids.

I've been asked to take photos of the sessions, here are a selection from today's.

My Second Vote

Today was South Africa's 4th democratic election, and my second (the last time I voted was in 1994, and since then I have not been in the country). I got up really early and rode to the school around the corner which was my polling station. I got there 10 minutes after the polls opened, but still had to wait for almost 45 minutes in the queue (and I had it lucky ... there were news reports of people having to queue for 7 hours).


I had only made up my mind who I was going to vote for the night before. I wish I had given it some more time and read up more on policies rather than personalities. I used an online system hosted by the Mail and Guardian which matches your opinions against political parties and got told to vote for the Independent Democrats or the Inkatha Freedom Party. I ignored the recommendation.

Here's a sweet cartoon by Jeremy Neil about the extremely profession way in which the elections were conducted by the Independent Electoral Committee.

New South African Experience

Had an interesting experience today which gave me some insight into my own prejudices and fears, and that of the country. I had been at my parents and was driving to visit friends across a freeway bridge when in the darkness out of the corner of my eye I saw what looked like a puppy scavenging in rubbish on the side of the road. I stopped the car without thinking, put on the hazard lights and walked the 100m or so back down the bridge to see what if I could do something.

It turned out to be a dog, not a puppy, and as soon as I got near, it ran away. There was not much to do, so I returned to the car. But by then, another car had stopped just in front of mine, and a dark figure stood on the side of the road between me and my car. The hair on the back of my neck stood up; this was the classic start to the kind of hijacking stories which make all too frequent appearances in South Africa's newspapers. That it was a black man made the situation seem more dangerous for me. Would I have been as alarmed if it had been a white man? To be honest with myself, probably not: crime in South Africa often has a racial twist to it, even though there are many many black victims of crime.

"Hey" said the man.

The options flashed through my mind: run away, leaving the unlocked car on the side of the road. Or skirt him and try and get into the car as quickly as possible. I opted for the latter.

"I just wanted to know if you need help", he said, and as I walked past, I realized that he was driving some kind of expensive sedan and was alone. This wasn't a hijacker, it was someone who thought I was in trouble and wanted to lend a hand.

"I thought I saw I puppy", I said, sounding foolish to my own ears. "But thanks". And without waiting for him to respond, I jumped in the car and drove off, still feeling shaken.

How much of this fear was justified and how much was in my head? The stories you get here from the media give the lessons: Don't get involved with people on the side of the road. Don't stop to help others. Don't trust. Don't be a good Samaritan. The man who had pulled over hadn't listened to those lessons, he had genuinely wanted to help. I had ... and had immediately assumed that him stopping was a bad sign, and the situation was dangerous. I think I reacted out of a mixture of perceived wisdom and racial fear. Did I react stupidly? Given the crime situation here, probably not. Would I do the same thing under the same circumstances again? Maybe, although I like to think I'd try and gauge the situation more.

Wiring Siyakhula

Spent some time on Easter Monday with Andrew, connecting one of the computer labs at the Siyakhula School into a network and the Internet.

Hiking Castle Gorge

I've been joining the Jo'burg Hiking Club. The joining is a slow process in which you have to do a series of hikes with them, for me on a Sunday. Today's hike was at Castle Gorge in the Magaliesburg, a chain of hills which runs between Pretoria and Jo'burg. This was an unexpectedly beautiful walk along twisted stone formations, through wooded valleys and past clear pools of water for swimming. And all this just over an hour from the sprawling city.