It's Official

It seems that my obsession with blogging is under threat. We have decided to go to South Africa in January to visit Sugar Daddy's family and introduce them to Swee'pea. So this means a new online obsession: searching for accommodation (although Sugar Daddy's dad has very kindly invited us to stay with them, we may feel more comfortable stretching our baby clutter out in a space of our own), figuring out when and what we want to do, how to travel from Cape Town to Joburg and back again to visit the aunts and uncles in that thriving metropolis, and more. Oh yeah - and I still need to figure out daycare; I'm due to return to work in February.

Yesterday, I started searching for advice on how to survive a crazy long flight (20 hours of flying plus at least a few hours' stopover in Europe) with a baby. This search led me to a forum at bootsnall, specifically for travellers with children. And sure enough someone was even posting for advice about a trip to South Africa. But the resulting posts were disappointing. People said it was a bad idea to go to Johannesburg with children. Now, I know that Sugar Daddy and I are rather sheltered travellers in SA because we have so much family to provide a roof, rides and information about things to see and do. But I don't believe a trip to South Africa would be complete without a visit to Johannesburg. For one thing, much of the struggle for freedom from apartheid was fought in and around Johannesburg. And the history lessons available there are essential. The Apartheid Museum is a must-see, as is a tour of Soweto with a stop at the Hector Pieterson Memorial. We also had the good fortune to see an exhibit of Dumile Feni's haunting artwork at the Johannesburg Art Gallery.

These images are pen and ink drawings on different sides of the same paper, which are exhibited permanently at the Constitutional Court.

Thinking about this has reminded me that I never wrote about our last day in South Africa. On our last day, Sugar Daddy's cousin, the Rhodes Scholar, took us to the Johannesburg Art Gallery to see a fabulous exhibition of Dumile Feni. Dumile's life is pretty tragic: he lived in exile until he died, impoverished in New York, in 1991, and never got to return to the new South Africa. The Dumile Feni Foundation has a beautiful website and great information about the artist. I can't link to specific pages, like Dumile's bio, because the site uses frames and doesn't have discreet url's. I definitely want to try to get some prints of his work. The gallery is in a pretty dangerous part of the city; I think it's next to Hillbrow, but totally worth going to. The parking lot and gallery itself were totally safe.

This is the other side of the paper, from the same website.

Dumile's artwork is arresting and disturbing. I'm no art critic, but I love the way he uses lines. So back to our last day in Jozi.

After the art gallery, we went to the Apartheid Museum, which I seem to remember is bizarrely juxtaposed next to an amusement park. The museum itself is a sombre, grey building, which has pretty much no facade, if that makes any sense. I don't remember seeing any windows or architectural details, just grey concrete. If you aren't planning a trip to SA any time soon, the museum's website provides a great virtual experience. We were given a token or something, which represented the old apartheid passbooks and dictated through which door we were to enter the musuem. Once inside, thousands of passbooks filled the walls. Apparently there were thousands of racial designations under apartheid, and one person's race could change from year to year depending on who was filling out the paperwork. Obviously, one's race is a tricky thing to identify and define. The rest of the museum is filled with photos and video footage of the struggle for freedom and all things apartheid.

I find I get information overloaded at museums and galleries; I can only take in so much. At the Apartheid Museum, my threshold was even lower because of the horrible emotional content. But it is a necessary visit. Learning about apartheid enhanced my trip immensely.

I fell in love with South Africa for many reasons: because Sugar Daddy's family was so warm and intelligent, after my worries that I wouldn't like them; because the landscapes, the few that I saw anyways, are absolutely, take your breath away, stunning; but mostly because I never once experienced any kind of bitterness from the people. Being a white traveller, I expected to be received rudely at least once. But it never happened. It is truly amazing that people can survive such tremendous oppression and poverty and come through with their capacity for joy intact.