The Travel Diva

Assignment: South Africa

The ultimate purpose of my trip to South Africa is to find words to the final chapter in my novel, but more importantly I want to see what television documentaries don’t show. I want to experience the country by not just driving through it but living in it and meeting the permanently disillusioned and hear endless white noise of promises that can’t be kept and statistics that mean nothing. I'll find a a place where optimism had been abandoned and hope is considered a dirty word; a semi-dark desert of forsaken dreams, where the downtrodden, cheated, beaten and enslaved are always the majority. I expect to meet liberal whites wobbling on the political fence, ready to fly off in whatever direction the wind blows; and look into the faces of people that seem displaced by their own homes, like refugees who are trying to flee their shelters; where everyone looks like migrant workers; sweat-stained, malarial, hung over, tragic, recently assaulted, scared from the accidents of life... but that was twelve years ago.

I don’t want to go back to the past to see if it still hurts, but I feel the need to revisit my roots just this once, to see the land that grew me; a land I recall of almost breathless beauty and of savage poverty; of screaming ghosts and sun-flung possibilities; of inviting warmth and desperate drought. Essentially though, it’s the dense smells I need to see again. The smell of Africans – soil on the skin, wood smoke, the tinny smell of fresh sweat, home brewed beer, burned chicken feathers and kicked-up dust. But who knows...

Labels: African roots, apartheid, malaria, poverty, rainbow nation, refugees, society, south africa, television documentaries

posted by Cindy-Lou Dale @ Friday, April 04, 2008