Mandatory Viewing

Rent the documentary "Sierra Leone's Refugee All Stars." It is heartbreaking and inspiring and a tribute to the importance of musicians and artists and the power of music. This group survived the worst of humanity and came back offering the best. (Be sure to watch the bonus clips, in particular the explanation of "Soda Soap" and the Featurette).

To The Mountains

From the porch, 6:30 a.m.

We finally rented a car (the ol' VW would probably triple the trip length) this weekend and got out of Pretoria to see some of the country. We drove east into the Mpumulunga province to a cottage I tracked down and rented between the towns of Dullstroom and Lydenburg. We were shocked by how beautiful it is. Rolling grasslands in the highveld with powerful spring storms passing through at great speed. The road to the cottage wound up the side of a mountain and then along a lower ridge. On the way we saw a secretary bird stalking in the high grass. The last time we saw one was in the pans in Botswana so it was surprising to find one in such a different climate. Japhta met us there and is the caretaker of the farm and lives nearby with his wife Lena. He is chocolate brown with smiling eyes and spoke little English (but does speak Afrikaans and probably several African languages like Zulu and Sotho) so we largely mimed our way through his explanations. He is a sweet man who showed us where everything was: "Yes, knives and forks. She is there. Firewood - she's here." We only saw him once again that weekend - a distant figure in blue coveralls waving an arm at us and then at the cattle he herded through the field. The cottage had no electricity but a gas oven, refrigerator and hot water. Kerosene lanterns with the roll-up wicks were mounted on the walls and scattered on the tables and there was a great fireplace. The tin roof signified rain both nights and, once, an alarming hail storm that jerked us from sleep with the sound of rocks clattering in a giant can. We arrived on Saturday and walked for hours and caught enormous rainbow trout from the stocked dam on the property. On Sunday, we walked much further, scurrying under fences, throwing the dog into creeks and M saw the tail of a bright green snake slide away into the thick grass on the edge of a pasture. Not good. One possibility is that it was a green mamba. So we beat feet through the marshy area we tried to avoid and breathed easier from a good distance away. M found a cow skull; a duiker sprung out of the grass near a creek and bounced away over the hill like a rubber ball. We decided to catch a trout for dinner but a huge storm intruded first and dropped the temperature and golf-ball hail until dusk. So there was a desperation to catching a fish. It got darker. No fish. Darker. Nothing. A fish struck and took my fly. They weren't hitting anything we tied on. Then I hooked one and it was off to the races. Wine flowed. Anticipation grew. Lemon juice, garlic, cracked pepper and diced onions coated the fish. The very hot oven cooked it perfectly. More wine flowed. We each took a bite and found that no amount of delicious seasoning could mask an important fact: The fish tasted like pond scum, like we had just hobbled in beside the cattle for a long drink from the algae-ridden water. A crushing culinary defeat but important lesson. Avoid trout that mingle socially with cattle. An hour later, M erupted in such a wailing scream from the kitchen that I was sure we were on the verge of some type of death. "THERE'S A SNAKE IN HERE!" she hyperventilated. I saw the brown end of something heading underneath a cabinet. I grabbed a box of candles and whacked it and then it emerged heading toward my bare feet. Then I noticed it was sort of blindly thrashing and that it didn't have a very discernable head, nor did it seem to have any idea where it was going. I haven't found the name for it yet but there are these giant centipede thingys that look and move like foot-long snakes but are not. Thankfully that's what we had but it took awhile for our heart rates to drop and suddenly the lack of bright electric light wasn't as great. We drove back roads on Sunday for a bit more exploring before speeding back to Pretoria where it rained so much that the pool nearly drowned.

Book Review

Here's a book review o' mine about a very good collection of travel stories.

The Name Game

I was gratified to get a little more perspective from this NYT article about the unusual names coming out of Zimbabwe. I knew a Zimbabwean man named Gift in Botswana and he knew another Zimbabwean named Spoon. One night I went to a party where Gift's cousin was hired to watch over the parked cars. He was a slim man in a windbreaker and he carried a long silver flashlight that he never turned on. I had to ask him to repeat his response to my introduction. His name was Hard Life.

Here's more.

Conservation Agriculture

Another article. While global warming is going to have some terrible impacts in southern Africa, there is some hope in conservation agriculture.

Finally

I'm finally back at journalism again with the first of what will hopefully be many articles for IRIN, an independent news service under the UN's financial umbrella that focuses on humanitarian issues. There's no glorious byline because it's a wire service designed for redistribution anywhere (Reuters, among others, distributes stories). The article is here.

Mike and Morris

On Wednesday night, we were walking on a trail off Johan Rissik Drive which runs along a high ridge above Pretoria and has great views of the city and is relatively empty and peaceful. It's a good place for walking the pooch because we can let him off the leash and he can harass the guinea fowl that live on the grassy hillsides. When we were almost back to the car, we walked across a small pullout - think "Scenic View" stop in U.S. - and there sat a South African police car with two white officers looking over the city. One of them greeted us in Afrikaans and I replied hello in English and then officer Mike started talking. He is a voluble man who was excited to see the city, his favorite, from this perspective again since he and his partner Morris were transferred to a different district. He said he and Morris were on special assignment, "We're not your regular policemen", but that the day's work was done and they wanted to revisit this view. He compared it to the other city people mention incessantly here for its beauty, Cape Town, and how he was assigned to working the "Flats Wars" in the northern townships there during the late '90s but that his favorite place was still Pretoria. One of his first assignments was in Pretoria during the '80s and he clearly relished those days as did Morris whose rounded ears and tired eyes gave him a generally circular appearance. Morris was very tan. Mike was tall and mustachioed with hound-dog eyes and a certain vigor. They both wore navy blue cargo pants tucked into combat boots and bullet-proof vests with 9mm pistols holstered on the front. He said he left his Pretoria duty for an assignment in Soweto during the wars there in the early '90s when he said it really seemed like the country would fall apart. I've read a book about that time in Soweto and it seems like it nothing short of a brutal hell. He said, despite it all, he still loves the country and won't leave. "Someone has to stay," he said in reference to the two million Afrikaaners who left, many for Australia, when Mandela was elected in 1994. Morris smiled and nodded along. I offered to take their picture because they were holding a camera and they said a friend of theirs was making a scrapbook for them so they wanted a picture from one of their favorite views and cities. They welcomed us effusively to the country and hoped we enjoyed it. M said that it was the best interaction she's ever had with a policeman and I agreed. Earlier in the day they had blown a tire at high speed so Morris decided to turn the car around to the side that still had two hubcaps and then I took their picture with Pretoria's lights behind them and dusk falling.