Landing in South Africa

I had only decided to go to South Africa a week before I got there. I had been in West Africa for a month and needed a holiday from the holiday. West Africa had tired me out and frustrated me. I was craving reliable electricity, hot running water and most of all vegetables! In the month that I had spent in Ghana/Togo/Benin I could have counted on my fingers how many vegetables I had eaten.

I got off the plane in Johannesburg at midday, by 2 pm I was sitting at a café, a fresh fruit juice in front of me and a salad of mixed raw vegetables on the way. The menu had described the salad including red capsicum, green beans, boiled eggs, tomatoes, cucumbers, olives, avocado and spanish onion. When it arrived it only had capsicum, tomatoes, lettuce, and spanish onion.  I think this lay the foundations for what my opinion of South Africa would evolve into. On the surface it is developed and Westernised, but underneath is a very complex reality. It’s not about having to eat salad with no avocado and olives, it’s about a veneer of refinement covering up a stained reality. It may be a fairly wealthy and modernised country, but it is still Africa. Of course, it could have just been a poor choice of café, and I often struggle to keep my opinions on a place and people neutral, but South Africa is an interesting country with some really tricky, intricate issues.

I was looking forward to doing the touristy thing, so on that very first day, before I even checked into the backpacker’s hostel I had booked a full day bicycle tour of the infamous township Soweto and a four-day camping safari of Kruger National park to spot the big 5. No tour is usually ‘my thing’ but I couldn’t go all the way to Africa and not go on safari!

The bicycle tour turned out to be surprisingly fun and fascinating. It was led by two young guys who had grown up in Soweto and there was just four of us on the tour – a really cool middle-aged couple from the Alice Springs who were moving to Mozambique to start a tour company aimed at educating and employing some of the poorest locals there and a British woman who complained the whole way – about the heat, the hills, the food.

They estimate anywhere between 1million and 5 million people live in Soweto, of course the majority of the people are black with a minority coloured, and rumour has it there is one white person living there. The guides taught us some of the hand signs used to indicate which part of Soweto you are from, and some of the slang such as “hola seven” which means hello for seven days, the purpose being for the next week you are excused from saying hello to the same people. We stopped at a Shebeen (an illegal drinking spot) which was utterly depressing. The dark, hot tin-shed was full of  dopey drunk men and it was only 10am. These men sat there all day and most of the night drinking potent home-made beer which smelled sour and putrid. At the next stop I really challenged my vegetarianism by trying a local delicacy – the roof of a cow’s mouth. It was slightly rubbery and covered in soft white spikes that resembled an echidna’s back. It’s ironic that once people ate this part of the animal because it was all the scraps they could afford, and now it’s considered a delicacy.

Our final stop was at the site of the Soweto Children’s Uprising. In 1976 thousands of school children gathered in the street for a peaceful protest in opposition to the education system at the time which basically taught black children to become servants (clearly the issue was far more complex, my apologies for my crude lack of explaination). The police showed up and opened fire on the crowd of children who began to flee. In total 700 children were killed from bullet wounds to the back of them, and over 4000 children were injured. The Hector Pieterson memorial gave me chills… how can this have happened only 36 years ago!!

The next day I left for the Kruger National Park, one of Africa’s most famous game reserves after the Serengeti. When I first saw the 8 other girls boarding the bus I thought I was in for a painful 4 days with the sort of people I usually take great efforts to avoid: white heterosexual girls who take themselves too seriously, wear fake tans backpacking and complain about the milk not being low fat. But thank God I was saved by two girls from Newcastle, England who were down-to-earth trash bags with a great sense of humour. Whilst the other six girls barely said a word but demanded to be waited on hand and foot, the three of us had fun sitting up the back of the Jeep and drinking at the bar each night.

On our first night camping, before the safari had really began, I left the two Brits at the bar to catch at least a few hours sleep. I stopped to look up at the stars – few things are more humbling than staring up into a sky blanketed with bright stars.

As I stood there a loud clomping sound snapped me out of my trance and a heavy mass of a shadow grunting fiercely bucked past me less than three metres away: a wildebeest. It scarred the wits out of me and I stood frozen and amazed. The next two nights at the campsite I was confronted by warthogs, one who began to charge at me for getting too close with my camera. But that wasn’t nearly as frightening as the lion footprints I found circled around my tent on the second morning. One of the staff confirmed that yes they were lion prints, and in fact a couple had been spotted just on the edge on the camping grounds. Needless to say it took me a few hours to get to sleep that night as I was convinced that every sound I heard was a hungry lion.

On the first day of the safari, within five minutes of entering the park we saw two leopards – apparently one of the hardest animals to spot. And we didn’t just spot them off in the distance, they slank around the car, staring at us with as much interest as we were staring at them.

We spotted everything I wanted to see and more, most of them in the first day. Elephants, giraffes, zebras, bushbucks, nyalas, wildebeest, buffalo, jackals, eagles, monkeys, tortoises, impalas, kudus, waterbucks, wild dogs (also one of the hardest to spot), hyenas, warthogs, hippos both in and out of the water, six lioness’ (though quite a distance away), two cheetahs playing under a tree, baboons, and even a white rhino and her baby. We saw the rhinos on a night tour which was one of the most exhilarating experiences of my life. The majestic looking mother with her almost cuddly baby calf who you could hear suckling. Standing between us and her baby for protection she graciously stood still so we could all get a good look. In a wall-less, roof-less 4x4 we bounced around the blackened wild, a plethora of animals hidden in the shadows. At one stage a heard of a hundred or more buffalo swarmed around the car making it impossible to move.  I couldn’t make out their shape but was swamped by the grunting sounds and their smell and yelped when a few of them butted into the side of the car.Of course, my camera died after snapping the first shot of the night!

I thought a safari would be ‘see over there? Off in the distance! That blob of brown! It is either a cheetah or a rock…’ But it was not like that at all. The animals were often right beside the car, I could see their eyelashes, hear their breath, smell them (especially the elephants!) it was incredible! By lunch the first day I had seen so many elephants, giraffes and zebras that I barely bothered to turn my head to look at them.

The one image that really struck me was the vastness of the sky, starting from a white stripe across the horizon then blending every shade of blue to become a deep royal blue overhead. It calmed me and made me feel inferior.

On the last morning I got up at the dark hour of 5am as usual and assumed I was the first one up until off in the distance I could see that the light was still on in the bar. I went over to discover Lisa, one of the British girls, was still up drinking with a few of the male staff. I decided to join them and ended up having a very interesting conversation with two of them who were in charge of anti-poaching security. Their job is to set up cameras, follow tracks and leads and set traps to catch poachers.

“What do you do if you catch them?” I asked

“We shoot their dogs first then we tie their hands and feet together, shove their head in a warthog hole and shoot them three times in the arse” the head of security replied.

I was sceptical, but all of the staff assured me that they are shot and killed one way or another. I asked the guys what the law says about them shooting poachers and they said the law states you can protect yourself with equal force and if caught a poacher will shoot at them, therefore shooting him back is considered self defence.  This I find believable. Plus the bonus for them is that they have public support – the South African majority does not support poaching.

When one of the guys said “the kaffirs deserve to be shot” I nearly choked on my own tongue. South Africa’s battle with racism is a well known issue, but on the surface it seemed to be a lot less lawless than the rest of Africa, so the image I had of these white guys trekking the safari to shoot at black guys was totally surreal. I hate poachers, but I am not sure how I feel about shooting them. I do think that anyone who trades in illegal ivory should be shot, and anyone who buys illegal ivory too, but unfortunately the ones doing the poaching are very poor, and thus black, locals with not too many choices, and the ones out there trying to shoot them are the white guys with the regular income.

The race based inequalities in South Africa are striking and it didn’t take me long to feel horribly uncomfortable. My table was always cleared by a black person, my bed was always made by a black person, the toilets were always cleaned by a black person. The road works were done by black people, utes were always filled with black workers. I paid a lot of attention to the people around me, I noticed that sometimes the expensive cars were driven by black people not just white people, and that men in suits were sometimes black as well as white. It seemed to me that it is possible for black people in South Africa to be well off, but I never once saw an example of a white person living in a town ship or doing menial labour.