Traveling Geeks

Maponya Mall

A shot of the astonishing Maponya Mall in Soweto, courtesy of Google Earth. Not hard to find from space. Ground level video of the opening in 2007 here.  Ray Lewis of the Bloggers’  Tour took this video.  Note the motorcyclists in the parking lot. Representative of a trend among upwardly mobile Sowetans.  Body-building also seems in.  And here’s a good pic of the main entrance hall with Xmas tree, from Deshanta Naidoo’s Flickr photostream.

A Fawlty Towers Christmas

I just had a Fawlty Towers Christmas in the middle of South Africa. There’s really no other way to describe it.

I had forgotten how different Christmas is in the southern hemisphere. Not only is December summer in southern Africa but it’s the month that nearly every South Africa retreats to some remote mountain or oceanside cottage for four weeks or more, not unlike the Europeans do during the month of August.

We fell upon a small village in the middle of the mountains in the Eastern Cape called Hogsback, a place lost in time…..English time.

We fell upon a small village in the middle of the mountains in the Eastern Cape called Hogsback, a place lost in time…..English time.

We had just spent numerous days and nights traveling through areas of the country loaded with Afrikaners and Zulus. Suddenly without warning, we discovered a mountain village loaded with English South Africans and British who must have moved here in the 1920s and never left…..or changed.

Hogsback wants to be England’s Cotswolds with views and mountain ranges but it doesn’t quite cut it. First, it’s much too small, so small that there’s no filling station and the tiny two grocers were so bare, it is hard to believe that the South Africans tout this place as a local getaway. It almost felt like a Romanian grocery store in the 1980s.

As you make your way up the mountain road for the first time, you wonder where the village will sprout from as close as five kilometers from its border. Then you see it – the sign with the hog. And then another one, followed by a smattering of guest house signs on the left and right, most of them closed.

A couple of traditional English hotels promise dinners and breakfast although aside from these establishments, there’s not much else.

We learn after a series of hikes to various waterfalls in the area that nothing is open for Christmas dinner except for the Hogsback Inn. Follow the hog it says, so we do. They offer a 6:30 pm buffet and since we have little choice if we want to eat, we arrive early. The English senior bartender who looks more like an Irish priest than a bartender tells us "no, its really 7 pm but the bar is open."

We enter a very English looking pub, the kind that the English must have brought with them some one hundred years ago and decided nothing could be modified for fear of losing their heritage from a country they once knew.

If you didn’t see black South Africans passing through from time to time, you’d be hard pressed to think you were anywhere but Sussex, or even Cornwall once you noticed the rosy red cheeked drunk at the end of the bar.

Of course there’s nothing but South African wine on the wine list yet the youthful looking white South African bartender shrugs his shoulders when I ask the difference between the Fleur Du Cap Shiraz and the Nederberg Cab……he doesn’t drink wine he says. The black South African bartender who is taking orders from the one or two tables lining the walls has no clue either.

He at least has a sense of humor when I ask him to bring us a bottle that will blow our socks off. We laugh together, he because he has no idea what I’m saying and me because I can’t believe how strong the colonial remnants are in this small untouched village. The wood burning fire glows as I look around and hear the voices echoing on this cool Christmas night.

"I had a lot of daytrippers," the owner of Nina’s Restaurant said, who walked in moments after we did. We had Roiboss tea at her establishment earlier in the day, a casual pizza joint with four picnic tables, which they moved from the shade to the sun since the wind had rapidly picked up overnight.

In her mid-thirties, she had a strong English South African accent and wore tiny colorful barrettes that were snipped to every two inches of her hair all the way down to the middle of her back. She wore bright green and blue overalls, funky sneakers and one wild yellow earring which you could clearly tell it was solo on purpose.

She hugged the rosy cheeked drunk in the corner and loudly wished him a Happy Christmas. This was a mere six hours after a very traditional English church service outside under a tree, where some 30 of us or so sat on logs listening to a very humorous 75+ year old minister crack jokes. They somehow managed to get a miniature organ to play even though we couldn’t see a power outlet anywhere.

I won a Hogsback mug for traveling the furthest to his service, followed by a skinny English woman in her forties who wore narrow gouchos, ugly German sandals and a dorky cap, the kind your grandmother used to throw on your head as a toddler to keep the rays off your face.

The humorous minister brought out a manger and asked the four children present to decorate it. Then he called for his technician and made fun of the Scot in the audience who was nudging him to collect money from the congregation.

It was one of those surreal experiences where you had to pinch yourself and say aloud, "it’s 2008 and I’m really here." Yet, the day rewound even further in time after we left the pub with our bottle of the Fleur du Cap Cab.

The dining room was a Fawlty Towers cut-out, except that it had hogs on the walls, a stringy looking Christmas tree with a half manger of four hogs trotting past it on a little tiled cliff overhang. Just beyond it was a massive oil painting of a cheetah, the only indication aside from the hogs that you were indeed in Africa.

The wait staff was a mishmash of white English South Africans and black South Africans, all of them wearing a hotel uniform that came out of the 1930s.

The senior English bartender who was dressed like a priest doubled as the play-by-play announcer at the God awful buffet.

Enter Fawlty Towers at its worst. We were politely told we could make our way to the buffet, as a very drab version of Away in the Manger played in the background. I asked one or more of them what was in each dish and damned if they knew since I received different answers from each of them.

We could at least make out the mushroom soup which had as much starch as the last shirt you picked up from the cleaners. After a few mouthfuls, my stomach began to ache. Where are the vegetables and salad you ask?

This is a serious meat-eating nation. You start your travels with such a question and as time marches you, it changes to "I wonder if there’s fried bacon in my potato, melted cheese on my steak or deep fried anything on any dish that sounds remotely healthy. You learn to ask about how everything is cooked, early and often.

The pork was as tough as that starched shirt you last got from the cleaners and the potatoes were like leather if you can imagine such a thing from a potato. Ah, lettuce and onions I see out of the corner of my eye. I ask. Pickled fish of course, although it looked more like potstickers that had just eaten a lemon.

Cold turkey borders what we were told is meatloaf but it’s a cold week old stiff stuffing instead. Gammon was not far from the stuffing and six jars of sickly sweet jellies circled the vast amounts of meat, all of which was covered in fat.

Lastly, the healthy bit – pork and lamb pies. With vegetables the waiter says with a smile. What this means is one lamb and one vegetable, an orphan green bean soaked with gravy that tasted like it had flour, sugar and bacon as its base.

We kept trying more certain that something had to be better than the last and of course nothing was. The staff as friendly as they were and as white as their teeth glistened (a rarity in these parts) pop by from time to time unable to answer whatever question you threw their way. It was as if it was the first time they worked in a restaurant and most certainly the first time their chef ever cooked a meal.

We smiled at the painted cheetah who smiled back knowing what we were going through. Sad sods you are he says with a grin. The black South African waiter walked over to check on us, my favorite of the lot. "You can have seconds, it’s unlimited, just pack it in," he reminds us. His smile was far and wide.

And we did pack it in because we couldn’t believe the food could be as bad as our last taste. The results continued to be painful and our stomaches began to sour. It got worse when we dove into chocolate malt balls as a way to cover up the taste. We suddenly remembered the four kilometers of potholes we had to cross to get to our cottage on the edge of the hill.

A woman walked into the dining room with her barking dog and swung around behind my chair. He sat on my feet wagging his tail, barking and licking my leg. He was on a leash but she let it go clearly oblivious and unconcerned that she was in a dining room on Christmas day. As she began to wander around the restaurant, he stepped into my purse sitting beside my feet on the floor.

They eventually left when Away in the Manger played for the fourth time. A gold candle shimmered on our table with an inch to go before it would burn out. Would this be before our stomaches did?

Our friend came around again for the last time to alert us to dessert. When we asked what it was, he said he didn’t know but he’d quickly find out. There is no quickly in Africa and so I start laughing out loud and so suddenly that he doesn’t know what to do so joined in.

He came back with his quickly rehearsed list: pavlava, that God awful English Christmas bread, Genoa cake, and vanilla ice cream (which we see upon passing has some kind of yellow oil through it). When we asked what pavlava and genoa was, he didn’t know and started laughing again.

I thought to myself, "he must think we’re either just happy people or drunk on our Fleur Du Cap." Yet, I was in a different world by this point. A Fawlty Towers world, as if we were really in one of their episodes and nothing happened to indicate we were not.

How did the Africans let the English bring this cuisine with them at the turn of the century and still serve it a century later? And so it came to pass, the end of our long Fawlty Towers Christmas in the middle of an English colonial village only a few hours from where the world began, some say. Hogsback South Africa and no I’m not making it up.

San Language

An hour’s drive up the west coast from Cape Town, not far from Darling, is the !Khwa ttu San Culture and Education Centre. The San are among the most ancient peoples in the world. As David Sasaki reports in an excellent blog post, the centre is well worth a visit.  After a great lunch — the restaurant is first rate — we learnt about the language of the San and its distinctive clicks.

Sowetan Prophecy & Poetry

We hear from Prophet at the Credo Mutwa Cultural Village, an outdoor museum tucked in a hillside park in the Jabavu section of Soweto.  The village is named after its creator, an artist, author and healer who began building the structures and sculptures in 1974.

Below is his narration. Watch and listen to his energy and passion.

The sculpture garden, also called Khayalendaba, or "Place of Stories," was empty when we arrived, but suddenly Prophet appeared to lead us on an oral journey.  He provided mythical and religious meanings for the sculptures and symbols while weaving a tale of history and consequences, fables told and dreams interpreted, lessons learned, an amusing section on masculine and feminine energy, all delivered with passion and often with poetic energy, meter and heat. 

The space is surrounded by a park with a landscaped garden and, at the top of the hill, the Oppenheimer Tower, which gives a full view of Soweto and beyond. The tower is named after a mining magnate who donated money for the construction of houses to replace shacks in the township.

We are reminded by Prophet countless times that the space is a sacred one.

Credo Mutwa is one of the many recent success stories of Soweto, rescued from disrepair in the last few years and restored with the help of some of the original builders.

Photos by Renee Blodgett

Simon Barber Sings Rikiti Tikiti Tin

South African International Marketing Council’s (Brand South Africa) Simon Barber sings Rikiti Tikiti Tin on a blogger bus through South Africa.

Nama Land Sovereignty in the Northern Cape Province

For thousands and thousands of years the Nama people of Southern Africa maintained a nomadic pastoral way of life, tending their flocks of goats and sheep, gathering firewood, and collecting wild honey. Driving along the dirt roads surrounding Richtersveld National park you can still see the same lifestyle, supplemented by some modern conveniences like butane lanterns and plastic tarps.

Nama Iharu oms (huts) in the Richtersveld.

Land sovereignty has been a historic struggle for the Nama people. When Namibia – where the majority of Nama people then lived – was colonized by Germany, the Nama joined forces with the Herero and took up arms against their invaders from 1904 to 1907. This resulted in what today is called the Herero and Namaqua Genocide.

Herero people chained in 1904 by German troops.

According to the 1985 Whitaker Report on Genocide, an estimated 50 – 70% of all Herero people and 50% of all Nama people were killed. On the South African side of the border the Nama people were mostly left to their own as British and Afrikaner explorers searched for diamonds in the Northern Cape province. They continued their nomadic pastoral life with a policy of communal land ownership. Says Wikipedia: “Nama women still dress in Victorian traditional fashion. This style of dress was introduced by missionaries in the 1800s and their influence is still a part of the Nama culture today.”

You can see the influence in a video shot by Ray of a group of Nama youth performing an initiation dance, which marks young girls’ transition to adulthood.

Simon recorded a brilliant piece of audio of Cecilia, the mother of two of the young female dancers, singing a hymn in Nama.

Cecilia

Those British and Afrikaner explorers did in fact find their diamonds. Lots of them. In the 1920’s the South African state-owned mining company Alexkor evicted Nama residents from their diamond-rich land and began operations that would yield hundreds of millions of dollars to help support the country’s Apartheid regime. Since the end of Apartheid in 1994, however, new legislation allows communities to seek compensation for lost land and mineral wealth. The 3,700-strong Nama community launched their claim in 1998. Alexkor spent over a million dollars on legal costs, but in October 2003 the constitutional court ruled that the community was entitled to restitution, as well as to mineral rights. The court rejected their demand for a 90 percent equity stake in Alexkor, however, instead offering a 49% stake and a trust to benefit the Namaqualand community.

The Namaqua community now has more than $40 million coming its way. That is a big chunk of change for a group of 3,700 individuals. We had an opportunity to talk to local community leaders. I asked Leon Ambrosini, mayor of the Richtersveld municipality, how the money would be used, but he only answered in general terms.

My fear is that even with $40 million coming its way and a 49% stake in Alexkor, the quality of life and opportunities for those 3,700 Nama people will not improve much over the next ten years.

“We don’t want to get rich quick. We are solely thinking about the long term future for us and the children who will come after us,” said Floors Strauss, secretary of the Richtersveld Community Property Association, which will manage the $40 million. But I saw little evidence that the right investments are being made for sustainable development.

Nama girl from Port Nolloth.

I asked if there were any plans to build a college or university in the area, but there are none. (The entire province is without tertiary education.) The only specific expense we heard about was a $300 handout to each of the 3,700 represented in the court case. Which brings up some interesting questions: what if the money gets squandered? What if Alexkor becomes less profitable, jobs are lost, and the Nama people are actually worse off ten years from now than they are today? Land restitution in Zimbabwe, for example, is largely responsible for today’s shortage of food there as fleeing White farmers took off without transferring their agricultural skills.

My hope, obviously, is that in Richtersveld the right skills will be transferred to the Nama community so that they can manage their own development as they see fit. But to do so, I believe, will require an investment in education that community leaders don’t seem too concerned about. I’ll be keeping my eye on how things develop.

Extra bonus: Check out Lova’s summary of a fascinating conversation about land sovereignty and economic development in the Malagasy blogosphere. (The deal was later rejected.)

Montana Meets Tuscany: South African Sky

Soweto: Hector Pieterson, Holiday Inn, Nambisa and Kliptown

Over the past ten days I cannot express to you effectively the magnitude of incredible things that I have done. But the trend that I seem to have been following on my excursions is to be dumbstruck and in awe of the smaller things, the details that make me African and not the grand gestures […]

Diamond Mining Ship aka Peace in Africa

Elizly Steyn on the deck photo by Simon Barber, Brand South Africa Blog

[South Africa Blogging Tour 2008] On Wednesday, we flew to this amazing diamond mining ship 10 miles off the Northern Cape coast of South Africa. Elizly Steyn, the metallurgist, one of the 3 women on board, gave us a tour of this huge “gadget” that costed 1.1 billion rands ($110 million) to De Beers.

Gravel filtering process, photo By Simon Barber, Brand South Africa Blog

After a complex six steps process that separates them from shells and clay, the diamonds end up in cans without having been touched by a single human.

Data imaging, monitors in the crawler control room, photo by Simon Barber, Brand South Africa Blog

Prior to start mining an area, an AUV (Autonomous Underwater Vehicle) explores the sea bed 15 meters by 15 meters, collects the data and generates a 3D image of the underground, so diamond trails are detected.

Click on the photo to watch the Crawler Launch gallery

Photo: the crawler launch in front of the ship, photo by Elizly Steyn, De Beers

The mining is operated by a giant crawler in front of the ship, the process is controlled by the metallurgist and the crawler team, using the data and the imaging generated from the exploration. The crawler is composed of a winch, a boom and a nozzle that mines 120 meters below the surface and scrape the floor 1 to 12 meters deep (avg 5 m).

Four anchors maintain the ship’s stability, on average 400 tons of gravels and 10 000 cubic meters of water are processed per hour to produce an average of 57 carats of diamonds. No chemicals are involved, everything except the precious gems is spitted back to the ocean, and the AUV monitors the ocean floor after the operation to analyze the impact on the environment. According to the crew, fishes are rarely caught in the machinery because they are afraid of the noise. The ship name is Peace in Africa, 65 people stay on board simultaneously, and each crew member works for 28 days and takes a 28 days break afterwards.

SA bloggers are thriving in cyberspace. They just aren’t nearly diverse enough.

An article in this morning’s Times, cleverly positioned next to a marketing blurb about an increase in traffic to their website, says that South African bloggers are thriving in cyberspace. A new study released this week by World Wide Worx claims that 4.5 million South Africans are now online and that over 5,000 are consistently blogging. (According to Rick Joubert of Vodafone, another 9.5 million connect to the internet with their mobile phones.)

The Times article claims that 1,000 of these 5,000 bloggers took part in a survey to learn more about the social demographics and motivations behind South Africa’s blogosphere. Some interesting findings:

• Cape Town is the epicentre of blogging in the country with more than 75% of bloggers living in the city;
• 58% of local bloggers are aged 25 to 44
• 95% of them speak English or Afrikaans
• 42% earn more than $2,000
• 46% of them have children and 55% are married
• 88% describe their blogs as online hobbies rather than income-generating tools
• 65% spend more than 10 hours a week blogging

What I want to know is where is the raw data? In the open spirit of the web, will it be made publicly available? The survey says that 95% of South African bloggers speak English or Afrikaans (I assume they mean “write in English of Afrikaans”.) What are the other languages represented and where are their blogs? (I have a hunch there are probably more Urdu blogs than Sotho despite the fact that there are way more Sotho speakers.) Also, I was amazed that 42% of the bloggers participating in the survey earn more than $2,000 a month. But what were the average and mean salaries?

On the second night of our Bloggers Roadshow of South Africa, we joined our South African blogging colleagues at Asoka Bar and Restaurant in Cape Town for a few rounds of drinks. With lounge techno in the background we clinked glasses and exchanged business cards. I finally got to meet some bloggers that I had been reading for years like Rafiq Phillips, Matthew Buckland, and Chris Rawlinson.

Among the dozens of bloggers packed into the bar, however, only two or three were black. And, as I learned from Rafiq, they were Rwandan, not South African. When I asked Rafiq about the lack of non-White bloggers at the meet-up he said there were two explanations. First, more Indian and Pakistani bloggers would have showed up if the event were not held at a bar serving alcohol, as the majority of Indian- and Pakistani-South Africans are Muslim. (Rafiq makes a point of noting that he was drinking orange juice at the bar, which I dutifully confirm.)

Second, South African bloggers of different ethnicities tend to stick to their own spheres, as I’ve written about in the past. This was quantified in a study by Annie Kryzanek of the Berkman Center’s Internet and Democracy project. She selected 30 blogs from AMATOMU’s life section, categorized them as English-speaking white bloggers, black bloggers, and Afrikaner bloggers, and then examined their linking patterns. 30 blogs is a very small sample size, but the results are provocative: South African online society is nearly as segregated as it is offline.

There is an obvious history behind all of this. Like in most other countries, South Africa’s bloggers started out as a community of tech-centric geeks. They had the computers, internet access, and time on their hands to figure out the new tools and develop their voice. They were nearly all White males in their 20’s and 30’s. Once the community was defined, it unknowingly became an exclusive clique. Mario Olckers, looking at South African social media through the framework of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, argues that the South African blogosphere’s exclusive start already spells out its impending failure.

Any kind of Social Media Strategy is therefore little more than inside baseball amongst an incestuous clique of privileged practitioners who retain and guard the old money and benefits of the old apartheid regime. Whatever Social Media campaign is launched online will necessarily only be seen by a handful of regular old faces who continually regurgitate each other’s utterings and bounce around any newsworthy items or movements within the local South African Web 2.0 zoo.

I think that he’s right-on in his diagnosis, but I tend to be more optimistic about the future. South Africa has centuries of ugly race relations history. The only way that things are going to improve is with dialogue. And social media – be it forums, twitter, blogs, or social networks – are ideal for that. But it’s going to get ugly, emotional, and difficult as it did a couple years ago at the Digital Citizen Indaba. Those are exactly the kinds of conversations that need to take place and we need leaders like Ndesanjo and Ory who can summarize them so well, step back, and offer some clarity and perspective.

The first step for any White South African bloggers reading this post (or anyone else for that matter) is to subscribe to the feeds of all the bloggers featured by Ramon Thomas in “Who’s who in the non-white Web 2.0 South African Zoo“.

Over the past five years the vast majority of South Africans have been excluded from the new public spehere that is the social web. Ridiculously expensive internet connections ($20 an hour at the hotel where I am writing at this very moment) and a lack of new media training programs means that only the wealthy are able to participate. Furthermore, English and Afrikaans have centuries-long histories as written languages. You’ll find that many bloggers – and writers in general – are more comfortable expressing themselves in writing than in person. South Africa’s other 9 official languages, however, have, comparably, only recently existed in written form. Unlike in Tanzania, where written Swahili was a significant and symbolic part of their independence movement, formal education in written indigenous South African languages has never really taken off.

I don’t want to discount the up-and-coming movements of Zulu and Xhosa literature, but it has to be said that most South African languages are still 99% oral and are rarely put down on paper. Which I believe is why the bloggers in Kwa Mashu tend to be unenthusiastic about updating their blogs with text, but become instantly excited when there is an opportunity to communicate with video, audio, performing arts, and music. For them, those are simply the best ways to communicate. Unfortunately, South Africa’s bandwidth constraints means that participating online is still restricted to text-based communication. But in the next few years a number of international and domestic projects are going to vastly improve connectivity in South Africa. Once video becomes the major medium of South African cyberspace, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if it’s the old guard of White tech bloggers who are clamoring to keep up.

On a final note, it is increasingly difficult to define what is and isn’t South African. This country has always been cosmopolitan. The majority of its people, languages, and culture actually came central-Western Africa when Bantu-speaking farmers migrated south. Yesterday, walking around Soweto’s Freedom Square, the majority of merchants were not South African, but rather from Zimbabwe and Mozambique.

Today two of the most highly regarded bloggers living in South Africa are probably completely unknown to the majority of South African bloggers. Manal and Alaa are hugely popular Egyptian bloggers currently living in South Africa, as is Ory Okolloh, a Kenyan who is one of Sub-Saharan Africa’s most authoritative voices internationally. Meanwhile, there are plenty of influential South African bloggers living abroad, like Mohamed Nanabhay. It is becoming increasingly difficult to categorize bloggers by nationality or location. Soon enough we’ll just have to treat each other as people.

And for an extra bonus, I recommend Théophile Kouamouo’s “Why I blog about Africa.”