I am home! I have actually been home a week but have just been trying to get my life back in order after 2.5 weeks overseas. I am now playing catch up with my blog posts. These posts will just be photos from my phone. I usually like to let the dust settle in my head a bit before going through my good camera. I will do that soon and post my favorites then.
First off, it is a LONG way to travel to South Africa. We flew from Montana to Denver to LaGuardia. That took up most of the day. Then is was a 15.5 hour flight to South Africa. It is just a long time to be sitting and trying to sleep in tight spots on a plane. Would I do it again? Yes…but like childbirth….give me some time to forget the travel part! We landed in Johannesburg (affectionately called “Joburg” or “Jozi”). We had an entire day there prior to our land tour starting, so we went on a tour based out of our hotel around the city. We had been told that we were under no circumstances to be traveling the streets of Johannesburg alone. We spent 8 hours with Chris, our driver, guiding us around the sites and sounds of Johannesburg. He was a young man who was willing to talk to us candidly about his country and his city and answer our many questions.
First, a little history on the Republic of South Africa (RSA). It is the southernmost country on the continent of Africa and is made up of 9 provinces. The population is about 63,020,000 people. (Making it the 6th most populated country on the African continent.) The currency used is the South African Rand (ZAR). One U.S. dollar = 16.35 ZAR. The paper money has Nelson Mandela on one side and a wild African animal on the other.There are three capital cities: Pretoria (administrative capital), Cape Town (seat of Parliament), and Bloemfontein (judicial capital). The country of South Africa touches the south Atlantic Ocean and the Indian Ocean. The neighboring border countries are Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and Eswatini. There is also a country entirely enclosed by RSA called Lesotho. There are 11 official languages in South Africa with English, Afrikaans, Khosa, and Zulu are most commonly spoken amongst other tribal languages. South Africa is eight hours ahead of Montana in their time zone while we were there. We were there during their wintertime and I was in long sleeves, long pants and mostly jackets during our time there. RSA has 19 national parks. We spent time in Pilanesberg National Park, which I will post on separately. RSA is mostly Christian, with more than 85% of the population identifying as Christian. Ethnically, about 81% of the country’s population is black, 8% colored, 7% white and almost 3% Asian or Indian. Here is where it gets a little tricky. In South Africa, a person can be black or colored. Colored is not derogatory term, simply a term to designate if someone is of mixed race. Years ago, they looked at the color of your skin and they used to do a “pencil” test to determine if a person was black or colored. You had to put a pencil in your hair and either shake your head three times or jump three times. If the pencil fell out (if your hair was straighter and softer) you were labeled as colored. If the pencil stuck, you were considered black. Unfortunately, simply due to genetics, some families were torn apart due to this kind of testing. Learning about this kind of thing was absolutely abhorrent.
Kids go to school from age 6 to 18/19 years old. They have a winter break in June for 3 weeks (which was happening while we were there) and then for 6 weeks in December/January for the “festive season”.
Johannesburg is the largest city in South Africa. It is located in the northeastern part of the country and sits at 5751 feet – higher than Denver. Zulu is a popular language spoken there. The city is nicknamed “the city of gold” due to lots of gold mining in the area. It is the largest city in the world that is not built on a river, lake, or coastline. The CBD (central business district) was busy, worn down, and very dirty. Our driver stated that there were a lot of drugs and homeless people in this area. He also stated that the police were easily bribed, which frustrated him. While we were in South Africa, there was a huge strike and uprising about immigrants, especially those from Zimbabwe, which are about 6 million people. About 70% are there illegally. About 5 million cross the borders into RSA each day and bribe the police at the border. The crime rate is very high in Johannesburg. South Africa’s unemployment rate is about 34% and a lot of them are younger people who just can’t find work. There were pockets of areas that were mainly from other African countries like Nigeria, which were considered unsafe and full of drug addicts and dealers. Our driver stated that most young Africans are not disciplined to get things done and to take pride in their country anymore, which was disheartening to hear.
Apartheid started in RSA in 1948 and was abolished in the early 1990’s. That wasn’t that long ago, people. Apartheid separated humans into four race groups: white, black, colored, and Indian. The government was white and the other races were pushed out of cities into their own neighborhoods in less desirable places. There were special laws in effect for each of the four race groups and there was very little intermingling of the races. Afrikaans was the language forced upon the people, and children in school had to learn in this language instead of their tribal languages. Afrikaans is mixture of Dutch, German, French, and English.
We spent time at the Apartheid Museum where we learned in quite a lot of detail about how awful it was to live in South Africa during the reign of Apartheid. We learned about Nelson Mandela and his 27 years of incarceration…then his rise to RSA’s first black president. We learned about Archbishop Desmond Tutu and his struggle for equality as well. The two of them lived in a black township outside of Johannesburg called Soweto, which houses about 2 million people. It is a completely black town to this day. As a white person, everyone knows you are a tourist. We toured Nelson Mandela’s family home, and down the street was Bishop Tutu’s family home – Vilakazi Street is the only street in the world where two Nobel Peace Prize winners have their homes. We also learned in great detail about the uprising in Johannesburg where students were shot at and killed in the melee. We visited the Hector Pieterson Memorial where a 12-year-old boy was killed in the 1976 anti-Apartheid uprisings. We actually arrived just a few days after the 50th year anniversary of that uprising. The Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto is the largest acute care hospital in the world with 3,400 beds on 173 acres. That being said, Soweto had trash everywhere. There were herds of goats who milled along the side of the road, eating the trash.
Munro Drive goes on a hill above the city of Johannesburg, and you can oversee the entire city. The smog was very thick everywhere. Johannesburg has the largest urban manmade forest in the world. It is very hard to get permission to cut down trees here. The house on the right was where Nelson and Winnie Mandela lived during his presidency.
This two photos of us are at Nelson Mandela’s family home in Soweto. The photo on the left – the tree was planted by Nelson Mandela. The umbilical cords of each of his children are buried under this Australian melaleuca tree.
These photos were taken at the Hector Pieterson Memorial and Museum where a 12-year-old boy was shot during the student uprisings in June 1976.
We ended our day with a long walk through the Johannesburg botanical gardens. It really didn’t have many plants or trees there. It was a huge part with a lot of rolling hills and trails. It was like a giant dog park. There had to have been 50 dogs running around with their owners while we were walking around. The goose is an Egyptian goose and they are like the Canadian geese of Africa. They are everywhere and a nuisance. They are pretty though. The colorful towers are the Soweto towers. They are two decommissioned cooling towers with colorful murals on them. The area around the towers has extreme sports like bungee jumping and base jumping. I had to laugh because the fences surrounding this area had ads for burial tombstones.
O.R. Tambo International Airport – Johannesburg…the biggest and busiest airport in Africa.
Messina Musings 