Limpopo

The soil in Ha-Makuya is a rich, fawny reddish-brown, and it's not too long after you arrive there that you realize that it's sticking to your face and hands, turning your skin the color of clay. It's not too long after that that you realize that the dirt is not the only thing here with the power to transform you.

I'm up in the Limpopo province, the northernmost area of South Africa, bordering Zimbabwe, Botswana, and Mozambique. It is easily the most rural area I have ever been to in my life.

No sooner have we passed the sign saying "Ha-Makuya Welcomes You" when the smooth asphalt road gives way to a hinterland of dirt roads completely strewn with large rocks. After five minutes of bouncing over the trail, the uneven terrain plus an excess of sherry the night before threatened to separate me from my breakfast and distribute it quite liberally over the back of the van.

Perhaps out of pity, David remarks offhandedly, "The roads are much better than they were last year." I could only grimace.

With roads these bad, it's no wonder the majority of inhabitants don't use cars, but this is more a result of the extreme poverty in the region. The principle employer in northern Limpopo is a mine which is scheduled to close in five years, and unemployment is as high as 90% in some regions, including the village I will be staying at for the weekend. With no cars, donkey-driven carts are not an unfamiliar sight here.

The dominant language up here is Venda, the least-spoken of all 11 official languages of South Africa. While not as widely spoken in SA, Venda also has a small number of speakers in Zimbabwe. "Venda" refers not only to the language but to the tribe and culture of those who speak it, which I'll cover in a little bit.

Since most people up here do not speak English, David has provided us with a translator for the time we spend here. I have, however, been able to pick up a few basic phrases:

Machaloni - Good morning
Masiari - Good afternoon
Matequana - Good evening
Nda - Hello (men)
Ah - Hello (Women)
Novuwa - How are you?
Dorivuwa -Thank you
Ndione - I'm well

There is one other word of particular importance in my case: Makuwa. It means literally, "white thing" or "white object". Many people living here have never seen white people before, and as I crossed the main road one day I noticed that cars were slowing down to look at me. Even after learning my name, one of the toddlers in the household I was living in greeted me every morning with, "Machaloni, makuwa!"

So, yeah, my strategy of "blending in" is done for. Unless I can contract re-vitiligo and turn 7 shades darker before the end of the week, people are going to stare.

Our host for the weekend is an elderly woman named Masindi, a built-to-last Mama Bear if ever there was one. She has lived in the region all her life, though her children and grandchildren have left to find jobs elsewhere, usually Johannesburg. They are back for the weekend, however.

Life in Ha-Makuya can be a bit difficult. The government-supplied water main has been out of order for months, so water comes from a pump down the trail from Masindi's house. Electricity is also an issue, with just one line (also government-issued) that the entire community plugs into. The *ahem* "facilities" are limited to an open-air latrine about fifty yards form the house.

Food here is a simple affair. Lunch and dinner always consists of "pap", which is boiled cornmeal. It is usually served with several vegetable spreads that you can dip the pap in. Breakfast is bread and butter with tea.

Pap is certainly tasty enough, but not exactly what a growing boy needs. Two days in, and I'm so protein-starved that the stray dogs are looking tasty. As if on cue, Masindi asks us that afternoon if we want chicken for dinner. I reply in the affirmative.

"Good," she says. "You can kill it yourself."

Gulp.

I am handed a knife and a chicken and told to slice the head off, which I do with minimal trouble. Except for the fact that I cut too low, which meant I sawed the poor thing's breast off partially.

Sorry, buddy, but you were delicious.

The neck also sprayed blood over my jeans, which has yet to come out. The body and head (both of which were in my hand) squirmed for a minute until we plucked it and threw it in boiling water.

Anyway, after a scrumptious meal, it's time to make pap. This is done by beating dried corn until your arm falls off, and then straining it through a sieve.

Anyhow, after a tearful farewell on the third day, I returned to camp to discover that in my absence bin Laden had been killed. You leave for five minutes, and all the action happens without you.

Stay tuned for my adventures in Johannesburg!

Kruger

Hurrah for Easter break!

Schools in SA take a week for Easter, but since classes are slow to start back up the week after, many students take an additional week as well (Africa time). We are taking two weeks off, devoting that time to a jaunt through the wilderness of Kruger National Park, a quick homestay in the Limpopo region, and a week in Johannesburg. Hey, when in Rome...

After an uneventful flight from Cape Town to Nelspruit, we are introduced to our guides for the duration of the Kruger leg of the journey. They are experts on the wildlife in the region as well as reliable drivers once we get to the park itself. There is Xolani, a taciturn and gracious driver who speaks all 11 of South Africa's official languages; Jimbo, an affable frat star who shares my love of offensive jokes and recreational sexism, and David.

David could readily be described as the Forrest Gump of South Africa: he has interacted with some of its most famous people and influenced some of its most prominent aspects whilst remaining fairly anonymous. He knew Steve Biko before the latter's death in police custody, was roommates with Zackie Achmat (the crusader for gay rights and AIDS awareness who brought antiretrovirals to South Africa), and was also married to one of South Africa's most well-exposed playwrights. He was in exile for a good period of the 1980s and also studied at Northwestern. He is an expert on everything from animals to languages to poetry.

NB - most of these folks I've just mentioned are commies, but they're lovely people and great conversationalists, and I'm an open-minded person. Don't go thinking Yours Truly has lost his love of free markets.

We enter the park, and as if placed there to give visitors a taste of what's in store, a pair of hippos wade grumpily through the water below us with their eyes above water, shooting us a misanthropic glare.

"Yeah, yeah, welcome to Kruger. Ooh, look at me, I'm a hippo. Sorry, what was that? Am I 'hungry hungry'? Ha, ha, never heard that one before. Now bugger off."

A typical day in Kruger goes as follows: wake up at the crack of dawn (5:00 or earlier) to go on a morning walk or drive (it's easier to see animals before it gets hot in the afternoon), go home for breakfast, grab a nap, eat a late lunch and go to the store for booze and cigarettes supplies, go on an evening walk or drive, grab dinner, enjoy the evening air with a beer or two, and go to sleep quite early.

Having grown accustomed to humans, most animals here don't shy away from the cars, but that doesn't mean that it's safe to be outside. When going on a walk, we are accompanied by two park rangers armed with elephant rifles in the event of getting charged.

The gun is designed to pierce both the flesh and bone of an elephant or rhino, which as you can imagine is quite a chore. It will break your collar bone if you don't hold it snug to your shoulder.

Oh yeah, also, it takes a .458 Magnum round.

To put things in perspective, this is a .44, and no matter how lucky you felt, Clint Eastwood could perforate you with it.

So, yeah, they're not messing around. However, this gun won't work on lions or leopards, as it penetrates without causing enough damage to drop a lesser animal.

Even in the middle of the day, there are plenty of exotic beasts to behold: here's some from my first day in Kruger:

The lovely zebra.

Giraffe. Easy to approach and surprisingly difficult to spot.

Warthog. Find yourself a meerkat and see if they sing "Hakuna Matata" together.

Another fun sight is the baboons, who are surprisingly human in their mannerisms and have apparently developed a master-servant structure, as this picture of one grooming another illustrates:

"Don't ruffle the seams, Jeeves. Then tell Mrs. Claypool to make up the tea, and see Colonel Arbuthnot into the drawing room when he arrives."

Elephant. Seeing these beasts up close makes you realize that there's no better way to cross the Alps and pillage Rome.

On our first morning walk, we learn the difference between white and black rhinoceri: White rhinos are grazers (eating grass) and black rhinos are browsers (eating branches, bushes and shrubs). You can easily tell this by pulling apart a bit of rhino dung, and if contains twigs or thorns, it is a black rhino.

So how do you tell if you don't have time to sift through piles of poo, and if the rhinos you're watching aren't peckish? Well, you can tell by whether or not the baby rhino walks in front of the parent or behind the parent.

Black rhinos are browsers, which means they spend more time around trees. This makes them susceptible to an ambush from in front by some tree-borne predator, such as a leopard or a cheetah. That said, a black rhino parent will always go in front to protect the child. The grass-eating white rhino will more likely experience an attack from behind from a predator avoiding its line of sight, so a white rhino parent will walk behind its calf.

As if on cue, we run into four female rhinos, and against my better judgment, the guides take us to within a hundred yards of them.

Pictures do not convey the author's terror.

Later on, during the same walk, we hear trumpeting in the distance. Less than a minute later, there is the sound of branches being trampled, and the trumpeting is much louder.

"We'd better move on," says our ranger nonchalantly. "It sounds like those elephants are heading this way."

And so we walk briskly in the opposite direction, looking for higher ground to avoid the herd of pissed-off, five-ton quadrupeds racing our way.

We also got a peek at the wildebeast, a scrawny and haggard-looking species of antelope.

In Jimbo's words, wildebeast look like buffalo with HIV.

Oh yeah, and this happening on the evening of the fourth day.

This thing pictured below walked right up to the car and crossed the street like it owned the place. You could see the disdain in the laid-back, confident swagger, and the wide stance of the hips and shoulders as it sauntered along was pure John Wayne.

"Sorry, pilgrim, I was distracted by how awesome I am."

Surprisingly, the lion is not the most dangerous hunter out here; in fact, its hunting success rate is lower than 40%. Far more dangerous is the leopard (60%-70%) or the elusive wild dog (as high as 80%, nearly hunted to extinction because of its ability to decimate prey populations). But still...it's a freaking lion. We'd seen a couple females before this one, but that mane is a head trip to see up close.

Kruger is not without its problems. Poaching is still a huge issue: the rhino's horn is still believed by many to be an aphrodisiac and can fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars for just one horn, and elephant tusks are still highly prized despite the international ban on the ivory trade. Kruger rangers have met this threat with harsh measures: poachers may be shot on sight. An the afternoon of day three, while in Jimbo's car, we notice a truck full of rangers headed the other way. They are armed not with the elephant rifles, but with automatic Heckler & Koch 5.56mm assault rifles. While useless against animals, they are extremely good against people.

Seems a bit excessive, huh? Not at all. The poachers crossing into Kruger are armed with Kalashnikov rifles, and are more willing to be killed than captured.

Another debacle facing the park is the elephants.

Elephants have no natural predators. They have impermeable hides, tough tusks that can pierce almost anything (including other elephants), and dexterous trunks that allow them to manipulate objects in their environments. They are immune to most diseases in the bush. In short, even though elephants give birth less than any other animal, they can quickly deplete the available resources in an area (especially since they travel in groups).

Culling elephants is problematic, however. Previously, only adult elephants were killed. Sounds OK so far, right?

It isn't. Elephants are extremely intelligent with a complicated and intricate family structure. It was observed - after several years of shooting only adults - that orphaned elephant babies grew up with problems we would associate with human children who had witnessed their parents' death in front of them.

Zoologists observed that elephants who had lost family members were antisocial and vengeful, with penchants for physical violence against humans, often lethal.

This, basically.

This is not even a joke. Elephants have excellent memories, and there have been reports of elephants attacking hunters, even waiting years and traveling hundreds of miles a la Vito Corleone.

Mio padre era Dumbo, e questo è per lui.

Eventually, since the administration did not want the elephant equivalent of Charles Bronson stalking the veld, this policy was changed to an even harsher one: kill every elephant in a herd: babies, matriarchs, parents...the lot.

While this did wonders to prevent a generation of elephant sociopaths, herds of elephants communicate with one another, and when one herd vanishes without a trace, the other herds will avoid the area they were in.

Also, it is hard to kill elephants. Jimbo has told the following story from his time taking disabled children into the bush. An elephant came up to the car to play with the humans inside, running its trunk over all the people inside, except for the crippled child. With this one, the elephant knew intuitively to be gentle, and didn't prod the child as forcefully with its trunk. Elephants are soulful animals, and killing them has been described by all as traumatic.

As of 1994, all culling against elephants has stopped, but it remains to be seen whether or not Kruger can sustain them, as no viable method of fairly controlling the population exists yet.

I'm ending on a depressing note again, so here's a picture of a kudu (400 lbs. of raw muscle) running in front of a car.

Gorgeous.

A Bit on Politics

...because it's my specialty.

So anyway, as I mentioned before, the ANC has held power since 1994. Lovely stuff. Until Mandela stepped down.

Mandela's successor was Thabo Mbeki, who had been living in exile during apartheid and had been in contact with the underground movement only by radio. That said, Mbeki's presidency was seen as a bit aloof and out of touch with the people, as he relied not on contact with popular opinion but on a close circle of advisers.

That's all well and good, as long as the advisers are willing to criticize you. Not the case with Mbeki.

South Africa uses a parliamentary system with proportional representation, which means that voters vote for parties, not individuals, and the amount of votes a party receives determines the number of seats that party will have. Also being parliamentary, the dominant party selects the president.

In broad strokes, this means that political parties wield much more power than they would back home. As both the president of South Africa and the leader of the ANC, Mbeki had the power to destroy people's political careers overnight. This meant that his aides were usually too afraid to disagree with him.

I'm sure he never looked this friendly in private.

Mbeki was an AIDS denialist: he questioned the link between the HIV virus and AIDS. Furthermore, he refused to distribute antiretroviral drugs as part of national healthcare, which, it is estimated, led to the premature deaths of 200,000 HIV-positive South Africans. His health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, suggested that HIV-positive patients treat their illnesses with herbal remedies rather than take prescription drugs, which was the subject of international ridicule.

Corruption and privilege also increased under Mbeki:a recent court case decided that political parties in South Africa are private organizations and do not need to publicly disclose their funding sources. As you can expect, the amount of rent-seeking is out of control. Big businesses invest hundreds of millions of rand a year to gain favorable benefits from the South African government, or to avoid harmful measures against businesses. Although well-exposed in the US, this problem is a bit of a recent phenomenon in South Africa and has not been properly analyzed yet. If you're interested in rent-seeking, there's plenty of good literature published in America on the subject.

I'm pretty sure this stuff is genetic.

Much in the Russian tradition, a few entrepreneurial individuals with good connections can get unbelievably wealthy fast, and enjoy protective relations from the national government as well. I wrote about this phenomenon a couple months ago: http://groups.northwestern.edu/njia/?p=636

Corruption is also a problem with the ANC: under Mbeki, party loyalty was much better rewarded than qualifications or honesty. When Andrew Feinstein, the chairman of the public accounts committee in South Africa, called for an inquest into the misuse of state funds in the notorious South African Arms Deal, he was removed from his position and replaced. Organ transplants are costly here, with the waiting list sometimes overwhelmed with a 6-month backlog. Nevertheless, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang (the health minister) was able to bump herself to the top of the list for not one but two liver transplants, having drank her way through the one she was born with. Incidentally, she died two years ago from complications of chronic alcoholism.

Thabo Mbeki was eventually replaced by Jacob Zuma, who, despite being a bit more of a populist than his predecessor, still has done nothing to address the levels of corruption (he himself has been the subject of a corruption trial that has been delayed more than 30 times). Furthermore, during his rape trial in 2005, Zuma certified that he had known that the alleged victim was HIV-positive, but that he had taken a shower afterwards to reduce the risk of infection. In a country in which people are only just starting to believe that condoms are the only reliable way to prevent HIV, this was not particularly well-received.

I'm concentrating on the negative again. The positives of Mbeki's precidency are that the man was much more economically neoliberal than either his predecessor or his successor, and that thanks to his fairly laissez-faire policies South Africa's economy grew at 5% annually until 2008; Mbeki's term also oversaw the birth of the black middle class. Austerity measures put in place by Mbeki have also insulated the country quite well against the global credit crisis.

So yeah, here we are. Zuma is president, unemployment is 45% (as and high as 90% in some areas I've already been to), and economic relations are deepening between China and South Africa. But hey, it could be so much worse (as it is in some parts of the world).

Hey, remember that bailout that was going to save us all?

Cool it, Baby...I'm on Africa Time.

It has come to pass multiple times that shuttles are late to take us somewhere, that only 3 of the available 8 checkout registers are open, or that people are just not moving fast enough. If I were from New York, I would have gone insane by now.

We are told this is "Africa Time". Just let it go, stop hurrying so much and enjoy life.

All well and good, until it came time to take the train into Cape Town.

On one bright and glorious autumn day, Yours Truly decided to join some friends at a concert. The transit seemed simple enough: Take the train to Cape Town, fart about for two hours, and then take the train to Kirstenbosch for the concert.

The train got about halfway to Cape Town before a voice "informed" us over the loudspeaker (as in, "had to be interpreted by someone next to us") that the train would be stopping halfway to Cape Town, and that we would have to transfer to another train.

No problem. I've spent more than enough time at Howard waiting for the Purple Line to know the drill. Or so I thought.

The station in question had about six or seven different tracks to accomodate the different lines. We arrived on Track 3 and were told to go to Track 5 to wait for the next train.

30 minutes later, the train had still not come. While another voice had come on the loadspeaker apologizing for the inconvenience, no estimated time of arrival was given. Still, no reason to lose your cool, right?

Not pictured: Author's seething fury.

When, another 15 minutes later, all seemed lost, the train finally arrived...on Track 2.

As it arrived (yes, quite literally as the train rolled into Track 2), the same voice on the loudspeaker notified us that the next train to Cape Town would be arriving shortly on Track 2.

Despondently, I realized that there was no way I could get back down the stairs, run over to Track 2, and get back up the stairs before the train left. I gave up hope.

The South Africans around me, however, weren't such defeatists. They immediately jumped onto the track.

I am not making this up. They jumped onto Track 5 and scrambled across to Track 4. They jumped off of Track 4 and ran over to Track 3. They vaulted Track 3 altogether and lept onto the train on Track 2.

And I...I followed. It was the first great adrenaline rush that South Africa would give me (and not the last). We did not get to fart about in Cape Town as I had hoped and only barely made the concert.

Africa Time, man. It's a killer. Before you know it, you're running across electrified rails just to catch a train.

Khayamandi

Outside the warm, European vibe of Stellenbosch - beyond the shimmering, white buildings and slim blondes sipping dry white wine at street cafes - there is another section of the area. It is called Khayamandi and it is where I am spending my Friday mornings.

I'll be blunt: On a typical day, we're the only white people in the town. The language here is mostly Xhosa rather than Afrikaans (an indigenous African language that uses clicks to communicate; if you've seen The Gods Must Be Crazy, you know the kind of clicks I'm talking about). While it's wonderful to listen to, it's spoken out of necessity: many people here do not speak English.

Khayamandi is one of the "townships" I alluded to earlier, and as townships go, it's doing better than some of its counterparts, such as Khayalitsha in Cape Town and Soweto in Johannesburg. Nonetheless, it is populated by much of the scenery one typically thinks of when "poverty in Africa" is mentioned: Mangy dogs lying in the shade, ramshackle houses built of aluminum sheets and plywood, debris blowing through the streets, etc.

Khayamandi is a Xhosa word meaning "nice place", a bit of bitter irony by the blacks who were forced to settle there in the 1950s with the entrenchment of apartheid policies. It is the poorest region of Stellenbosch.

Most housing is "unofficial", meaning that it is made out of whatever is available, such as shipping containers, tin sheets, and so on.

 

Yet Khayamandi's poverty, as explained to us by our guide on the first day, is a little paradoxical: the housing is the only thing poor about it. Clean, glistening Volkswagens are parked in front of dilapidated plaster houses. A burned-out, makeshift store built out of a shipping container advertises that cell phone airtime can be found here. A four-star restaurant is situated next to a brick bunker-like community center.

The impression one gets is that of a tough, school-of-hard-knocks community that has always done what it can with what it has, and has started to do very well.

After a scrumptious lunch at that restaurant I mentioned (at which you may find Afrikaner food as well as African staples such as chakalaka and pumpkin pastries), it's off to meet our service group.

The NGO for which I will be working is called Prochorus, and it offers community support to the township: daycare for children, counseling for rape victims, career services and a plethora of other services. I will be working in computer literacy, hopefully teaching basic skills to adults from the area.

My supervisor is a short, fiery Xhosa twentysomething named Anga Bonene, or as he introduced himself to us, "Bonez". I am working under Bonez with two others guys from Northwestern. Here is the transcript of our initial conversation with Bonez:

Bonez: So you are all from the same group from your university?
Us: That's right.
Bonez: Is it all boys?
Us: No, there's ten girls and four guys.
Bonez (irate): Ten girls? Ten girls?!?! And they give me all guys? Only four guys and I get all but one? And no girls? I can't believe it. Ten girls, and they can't give me one?!?!

I think that's all I'll say about Khayamandi for now, but more to come soon.

Cape Town

First off, allow me to be smug one last time:

Sorry about that. Had to be done. That's me on the top of Tafelberg (Table Mountain), which was a bit of effort to climb. Anyway, here's the changing of the guard at the Castle of Good Hope:

French, Dutch, British, you name it. They've all called this fort their own.

I'm in Cape Town for the day, and Tafelberg and the Castle of Good Hope are just a few items on the agenda.

Cape Town itself is a sprawling metropolis set on rolling hills that lead up to the mountains and then down to the bay, which is occupied by a hive of docks, complete with a network of cranes, barges, and waterways:

Cape Town's swankiest neighborhood by far is the waterfront, which boats a gigantic mall, a casino, and my personal favorite; and Aston Martin dealership.

Some day, baby...some day.

It's not all chic and glam in Cape Town though: beggars camp out in the rocks on the shore, and emerge pitifully like moles at the prospect of tourists, with cries of "God will bless you" abundant at the sign of prospective aid.

The best, however, is not the waterfront. It's Bo-Kaap.

I mentioned in one of my previous posts that Islam has been around since Indians and black slaves from further north in Africa mad it here in the 1600s. Consequently, Bo-Kaap (known in less politically-correct circles as "Malay Quarter") feels less like a part of Cape Town and more like a North African city like Tunis or Casablanca: dusty, sand-colored buildings decked out with vibrant, colorful murals:

Beautiful.

Bo-Kaap is also, as I said, very Muslim-affiliated, having had religious institutions and leadership since the 1700s. Stores advertise signs in Arabic, and restaurants' signs boast that the food is halaal.

As I'm walking down the street, I notice a minaret rising slightly above the surrounding houses. As if on cue, a melodic, echoing call to prayer starts, and feeling a bit adventurous, I walk over and step inside the mosque.

I was joined on this endeavor by Nadia, who is Muslim, and I would have hoped that she would show me around. Unfortunately, as we step inside, Nadia informs me that women pray separately from men, and then abandons me on the ground floor with a small group of strangers.

Fortunately, I was able to exchange a few pleasantries in Arabic with one of the men, who was curious about me and where I came from:

Enta min feen?
Aish feen fii Ganuub-Afriqya?
Fii Stellenbosch! Ahsan jamiyah, ahsan jamiyah. Walidi seken bi Stellenbosch.

Shukran gazilan, Ragi and Fatima, I couldn't have done it without you.

The mosque itself is a nice, quiet place to pray, so I take my shoes off and find a place on the mat.

Who says the world is too Americanized?

Special NO THANKS to Nadia for ditching me.

Stellenbosch

22 hours of flight time later, and here I am, Stellenbosch, South Africa, where it never gets colder than 50 degrees.

A few initial observations about the place:

1: Stellenbosch is beautiful.

I walk out of my dorm every morning and look at this:

Stellenbosch Mountain

That majestic silhouette in the background is the breathtaking Stellenbosch mountain, which I climbed (well, mostly) my first week here.

A view of the Cape Mountains, from the top of Stellenbosch Mountain

The entire Cape Town area is surrounded by mountains like this one, including the unbelievably challenging Tafelberg (which I'll describe later).

A lot more sun here than you'd get in Evanston - it doesn't take long to get a tan.

Oh yeah, Stellenbosch is also in the heart of wine country. Really, really good wine country.

It's hard not to look smug when tasting Beyerskloof.

Shiraz and Pinotage are the big ones here, but also some Chardonnay and Sauvignon as well. Also quite a bit of bubbly. All delicious.

Buildings here are mostly in the Dutch colonial style, which means gorgeous white facades and simple, stylish trim. This pic isn't mine, but it gives you a good idea of what I mean:

Everything is so lush, so green, with the occasional palm tree to remind you that you have officially left the gloomy cold of Evanston 22,000 miles behind you.

2: Stellenbosch is really Afrikaner.

I had been told that "everybody in Stellenbosch speaks English", but you could have fooled me: the lingua franca in these parts is Afrikaans, stranger.

Afrikaans itself is a bit bizarre as languages go. It is less than 150 years old as a standardized, written language. It derives from old Dutch with influences of French, German and indigenous African languages. When written, it looks like English with every letter rearranged to confuse the reader, and when spoken, it sounds like someone trying to speak Dutch with a cigarette wedged between their lips.

Afrikaans is still the most spoken language in South Africa, as it is spoken by both whites and "coloureds" (The word "coloured" means mixed-race and is not at all offensive here. Don't take this out of context, I might run for public office one day). However, it still has a somewhat bitter legacy as the "language of the oppressor", which goes back to the 1970s when it was required in schools.

That said, Afrikaner culture and language is integral to Stellenbosch and is fiercely defended by both the people and the university: an anecdote told to one of my colleagues goes as follows. A Stellenbosch professor began the first day of class by asking how many students spoke Afrikaans. When about half the class didn't raise their hands, he told them that he would instead teach in English. He was later reprimanded by the administration and told to teach in Afrikaans.

Fortunately, the Afrikaners do not mind speaking to us Americans in English, but it sometimes feels like listening to a foreign language: heavily accented and with a bit of laboring vocabulary.

That said, here's a crash course in Afrikaans.

Hoe gaan dit? (huh khahn dut) - How are you?
Goed, baie dankie. En met jou? (khood donkie, en met yo) - Good, thank you. And you?
Ek van die Verenigte State kom. (Uk fun dee furunikhduh stotuh kum) - I come from the United States.
Ons kan en Engels sprekken, asseblief? (uns kun en Enguls spreken ussubleef) - Can we speak in English, please?
Ek klas gaan toe. (Uk klus khahn too) - I'm going to class.
Jy's welkom. (Yees velkum) - you're welcome.
Van wat praat jou? (Fun vut praht yo) - What are you talking about?
Voertsek (foortsik) - Piss off
Jou ma se poes (yo ma suh poos) - I'm not going to translate this one. Suffice to say it has to do with somebody's mother and that if anyone ever says it to you, fight them.

Most of the signs here will be in Afrikaans first and English second, or just Afrikaans. The food is visibly Dutch, including the succulent "Vetkoek" (bread fried with butter) or "Boerewors" (literally "farmers' sausage"). On top of it all, most of the places here are named after Afrikaners: Neethling Building, du Plessis Library, Banghoek road, etc. etc. etc.

3: Try though it might, Stellenbosch is pretty English, too.
Sticky toffee pudding, Marmite, chip shops, bangers and mash...you can find it all here. They drive on the left side of the road, too. Most notably, the primary and secondary school system in South Africa is modeled on the English system.

This is Bishop School, a boy's boarding and day school in Cape Town. The school uniform is coats and ties with shorts, and students are separated into houses. (*sigh* Yes, like Hogwarts.)


4: Stellenbosch is a bit behind the times racially and socially.
 On the way in from the airport in Cape Town, while admiring the beautiful countryside, our eyes were drawn to a huge encampment of ramshackle houses stretching from the edge of Stellenbosch outwards to the north.

"What's that?" we asked.

"Oh," our guide replied evasively, "that's Khayamandi. It's one of the townships."

Hmm. Something tells me that this "township" is not going to rank up there with Kenilworth.

Like any good fellow, I decided to kick off my stay in Stellenbosch with a visit to the local watering hole, a dingy, poorly-lit hellhole charmingly rustic pub called Springbok. When we all got there, I ordered a shot of whiskey, and the barman asked, "You're not from around here, are you?"

"What tipped you off?" I replied.

"Two things. One, nobody orders whiskey by the shot. Two, I don't usually see whites hanging out with blacks and coloureds around here."

I look back at the other Americans and realize that by South African standards, only five of us are white, with one black girl and a few of what I suppose are "coloureds" here. I look around and realize that of the other sloppy, loud, incontinent drunks cheerful, merry clientele, we are the only group with any diversity at all. Whites talk with whites, coloureds drink with other coloureds, etc.

Wow. I try to blend in whenever I go abroad, but if the thing to do here is just hang out with Whitey, count me out.

Also, it has not escaped me that most buildings here (including my own), round off the quaint, cononial look with a high fence lined with razor wire.
5: I'm really happy here.
That last section seemed a bit grim, so I just wanted to add that there's too much to do to be bored, too much good food to complain and too many kind, hospitable strangers to get bitter. I'm already in love.

A Brief History of South Africa

Well, we might as well get this part out of the way. I'll try not to be boring.

South Africa was initially settled by the KhoiSan nomads, who brought methods of farming and livestock herding with them to the temperate area. Bantu tribes from sub-Saharan Africa eventually migrated to the region, which caused a cultural and linguistic blend (lots of these languages are still spoken today)

Lots and lots of stuff happened after that, but since these events didn't include white people, historians only started caring about them within the last 15 years.

Seriously, if we'd stopped talking about Thomas Jefferson for 15 minutes, I might have learned about this in school.

A few thousand years later, interaction with Muslim traders from India, South Africa turned the place into a center for ivory exploitation, and the Cape came to be an early trading post for the Far East countries.

Aaaanywho, in the mid-17th century the Dutch showed up. Not the laid-back, marijuana-and-french-fries-with-mayonnaise Dutch we know today, but the Calvinists (that fun-loving bunch who believed that the Catholic Church in the 17th Century wasn't strict enough).

Gold and diamonds hadn't been discovered yet, so European settlements were mostly limited to farms and trading posts on the coast. These outposts were maintained by the Dutch East India Company, who brought with them slaves from farther north/east, which is how Islam initially came to South Africa.

So by the 1800s, the Netherlands had declined as a global power, and the British seized South Africa in 1795 to prevent it from falling to Napoleon. As one might predict, relations between the British and the Dutch settlers were not particularly good. Religion was an issue (the Dutch Reformist Church outlawed divorce, the Anglican Church was started for the sake of a divorce), and when the Brits abolished slavery in 1834 it was seen as demonic by the Dutch (who were also called "Boers"). The Brits also began to heavily import labor, which is how you get a significant Indian population in South Africa today.

The word is "Boer". It will be important later.

So anyway, to escape British rule the Boers headed north, where they were constantly fighting the Zulus (the strongest indigenous tribe in South Africa at the time). Eventually, the Zulus fought the British as well, and  increasing amounts of military outposts were established by the British Army, bringing Welsh, Scottish, Irish and lower-class English to the country.

And Michael Caine. Not a lot of people know that.

With the Zulus pacified, problems emerged between the Boers and the British, culminating in two particularly gruesome wars. The Boers, not having the technology or the strength in numbers the Brits had, adopted a campaign of guerrilla warfare and hit-and-run tactics. Not to be outdone in un-gentlemanly warfare, the Brits resorted to a scorched-earth campaign, and also interned Boer civilians in concentration camps, where nearly 30,000 of them died.

The British eventually won, and British control remained until 1960.

After the war, it became apparent to the Boers (who by now self-identified as "Afrikaners") that not only would they have the British to worry about, but there were rather a lot of black people all of a sudden. To ensure that whites would maintain land, the Natives' Land Act was passed in 1913 to restrict blacks from owning land, and instead allotted them less than 15% of all total land in South Africa.

South Africa supported the Allies in World War II, much to the disappointment of the Afrikaners, who thought that they should have supported the Nazis.

"You know, guys, nationalizing industry and agriculture to protect white people sounds like a pretty good idea."

Eventually, South Africa left the British Commonwealth and became a republic under Henrik Verwoerd, who staunchly defended the apartheid measures that had existed since 1948. Incidentally, Verwoerd was stabbed to death, and not by a white person.

Under apartheid, non-whites were restricted from living in urban centers, holding high-income jobs, and subject to eviction from the few places they were allowed to live. Politically dissident bodies were outlawed (including the African National Congress, Nelson Mandela's party) and many went underground or into exile.

Conditions worsened in the 1970s with a number of violent uprisings, and by the early 1980s the government granted certain amendments to the apartheid system, including giving parliamentary representation to Indians and "Coloureds" (mixed race) - but not to Blacks. This did nothing to stem the amount of violence and civil chaos in the 1980s, which culminated in a state of emergency in 1986.

In the midst of political turmoil, the new President, FW de Klerk announced that all political parties that had been banned would be legalized, Nelson Mandela would be released, and that negotiations to end apartheid would take place. They successfully concluded in 1994. Since then, Nelson Mandela's party, the ANC, has ruled. However, the party has suffered serious internal turmoil, due to nepotism, authoritarianism and AIDS denialism under Mandela's successor, Thabo Mbeki. Mbeki was recalled by the ANC three years ago and replaced by Jacob Zuma, the current President (who has himself been the subject of a rape trial, as well as corruption charges).

See? That wasn't so bad.

Why South Africa?

Let's begin with a bit of an introduction. My name is Will, and I am a political science student at Northwestern University. Being in need of a slight change of pace (having tired of the *ahem ahem* exiting and dynamic culture one finds in Evanston, IL), I decided to enroll in two separate Study Abroad programs, the first of which is taking me to Stellenbosch, South Africa.

Did that surprise you a little bit?

Let's face it, when you first heard I was going on "Study Abroad", you assumed it was somewhere kind of familiar. Maybe London, or France, or maybe even Germany. Somewhere relatively safe, peaceful and culturally close to home. But not South Africa. Surely not.

To be honest, when I first considered the program a year ago, the very name of the place brought about a wealth of unpleasant thoughts. Apartheid. AIDS. Dire poverty. Not to mention that my cultural knowledge of South Africa at the time extended to Nelson Mandela and the bad guys from Lethal Weapon 2.

Pictured: Contemporary South Africa.

Furthermore, I'm sure that bleak thoughts of racism, disease and violence were not just on my own mind. Mentioning that I was going to South Africa to some of my friends back home tended to create a brief, awkward lull in the conversation as my friends imagined me contracting some life-threatening illness or being beaten to death by disenfranchised xenophobes:

Friend: So what are your plans for spring quarter? Any fun classes? Will you still be living on-campus?
Will: Actually, I'll be studying abroad. 
Friend: Really?!?! My roommate just got back from Barcelona. She said it was so much fun! And, like, she's really tan and lost a lot of weight. Are you going somewhere cool?
Will: South Africa.
Friend: Oh. (long awkward pause) I hear the wine is really nice.

 So yeah, South Africa was never really something I was geared for. And yet there is a bit of a chip on my shoulder: despite being well-traveled, I've never visited a country that hadn't been visited my one of my parents. The breadth of my youthful wanderings has only ever extended to Western and Central Europe (and a particularly boozy weekend in Canada, but that doesn't count).

So even though I have sailed the world and seen its wonders (at least the ones between Innsbruck and Inverness), I really haven't delved into Africa at all. And since most political science majors like to talk about "Africa" at great length, it would be nice to come home with something to contribute to the conversation.

Plus, the country itself is fascinating. It has had democracy for less time than I've been alive, it recognizes 11 different languages, and it has the most comprehensive bill of rights of any written constitution. Furthermore, the blend of Asian, African and European culture is bound to be a head trip

Oh yeah, and they have rugby. I think I'm going to like it here.