The joys of Afrikaner folk songs

Right, hi-ho, hi-ho, it's off to Pretoria we go...

Sorry, I'm slightly spaced-out by lack of sleep as I write this, so it may be even more random than is usual for me.

I left the Blog when last I wrote on my final Tuesday in South Africa, about to depart the Amphitheatre. Only this is where my stubborn attempts to avoid the Baz backfired on me somewhat, as I failed to take into account the extra time, money and hassle involved in getting dropped in the next town, connecting with the coach, then having to get a cab to the hostel at the far end. So my bus ticket may have been cheaper, but the door-to-door cost certainly wasn't. And I didn't have the company of other backpackers to amuse me on my way. Though the coaches are still a fair bit comfier than the Baz minibuses. At any rate, it meant I said my goodbyes to Grant (and Betta) before leaving the hostel. After about a week and a half in his company, it was going to be decidedly strange to be back to travelling really properly on my own again. Though I wasn't totally on my own in Pretoria, as Kulraj was also staying there that night so, after a day spent interminably on various buses, including the crawl up the motorway which runs through the ever-shrinking band of countryside between Jo'burg and Pretoria, we ended up going out for Chinese food and a few beers.

Hadn't had proper Chinese food in ages, so that was quite cool. It being winter, the weather was pretty cool as well (as in frigid), so we popped into the heated beer-tent like awning behind the wonderfully-named Herr Gunther's bar. After a couple of beers, Kulraj headed home, pleading plans for the morrow. Having espied some instruments over on a stage, I hung around to catch some music. And, to start with, it was all good - the usual pub-rock covers of pretty familiar songs, done fairly well. But, as the evening wore on, the band were playing quite a few crowd-pleasers that I was totally unfamiliar with. The reason being, they were folk songs, sung in Afrikaans.

Both that night and the following night, I ended up listening to pub bands playing these folk tunes, and it's weird to say, but that probably felt at least as foreign to me as going and seeing a bloody sangoma. We English don't tend to do folk all that often, and what patriotic songs we have generally seem to be mostly sports-related. The Afrikaners, though, appear to have always had something of a tradition of this type, and it's just been getting stronger since multi-racial democracy kicked in. Faced with policies such as Black Empowerment and Affirmative Action, many Afrikaners are going back to their roots and circling the wagons at times, even if it's only in small ways like this revived determination to keep their ancestral musical traditions alive.

From my point of view, though, it was basically just baffling, and I derived almost as much amusement from watching the crowds (or at least some members of them) and their reactions as I did pleasure at the actual music. And, to be honest, I didn't do a lot more whilst in Pretoria. A bit of internet time, a wander through downtown, taking in the phenomenally curmudgeonly looking statue of Paul Kruger (the first President of the 19th Century Boer Zuidafrikaansche Republiek or ZAR), complete with big top hat, a wander over to see the imposing Union Buildings, the home to the South African civil service built by the British after the Boer Wars, and that was about it. By Thursday, it was time to make another logistically irritating transfer, this time down from Pretoria to Jo'burg, and finally spend at least a day or two in Johannesburg, Jo'burg, Johanna, Jozi, JHB, or whichever of the myriad other names for the place you prefer.

I negotiated the fabled horrors of Jo'burg's Central Station (for both buses and trains), though the simple expedient of having rung up my hostel and asked them to come and collect me. "What a wuss!" I hear some of you cry. The thing being, you hadn't heard the story from one of your travelling companions of how he got held up at gun-point just outside the said station. So was I nervous, sitting around in a Wimpy and looking out for my prospective lift? You bet your arse I was. Luckily, I encountered nothing more threatening than a burger, before a big, smiling black guy called Eric turned up to collect me and whisk me off through the NE suburbs to Gemini backpackers.

Now, Gemini is another one of the interesting places I've stayed, as it's another one that's basically been created from converting a rich family home. So, if you choose to have some of the home cooking (whether a nice steak for dinner, or a big greasy brekkie) done by Elsie, their oh-so-stereotypical little-old-black-lady housekeeper (an absolute sweetie), you can have it in their main living room, complete with full-size snooker table (a real shock after playing pool for months - it was bloody massive!), marauding kittens (a matched set, one small black one called Shadow and one small white one whose name escapes me), and a TV with Playstation, which I proceeded to spend much of my first evening in Jo'burg playing against one of the lads of the family who run the place. The dorms are in an outbuilding to one side, the internet is free (woohoo!), and they're building a pizza kitchen, of all things. There's apparently also a small gym in another one of the sheds, though I didn't find it.

The only downside to this is that, like most of white, or in fact middle-class of any colour, Jo'burg, it's behind razor-wire security fencing, and guests are very strongly discouraged from walking anywhere, especially at night, relying instead on taxis or Eric to get around. Unless you go to one or two of the western suburbs, you're very unlikely to spend much time out and about on your own, and that kind of takes away a lot of the magic of cities in my book. At any rate, I had a quiet night at Gemini (thankfully free of folk music), leaving me a total of a day and a half in South Africa.

With only one full day in Jo'burg, there was only really one option (and only one thing I particularly wanted to see) - Soweto. Probably the world's most famous township, and the heartbeat of the anti-apartheid movements, it was one of South Africa's "must-sees" that I'd missed out on in my previous trip. The origins of the South West Townships (which became SoWeTo) go back to the early years of Jo'burg, and the attempts to get cheap black labour to help with the explosive economic growth arising from the discovery of gold in the Witwatersrand. Not wanting, even at that stage, much mingling between the races, the blacks were set up in some separate districts within Jo'burg, and in the cluster of out-of-town dormitory settlements, centred around Orlando, south-west of the emerging city.

Soweto isn't really part of Jo'burg, being geographically separate (albeit growing ever less so) and having its own city council etc. It's also, despite the initial thoughts many tourists might have, not one big indistinguishable slum. Some parts of Soweto are positively affluent, other bits "middle-class" as we'd reckon it in the UK, and other bits are still very poor indeed. I went on a locally-guided tour, which meant we got driven round various different parts of it, and went for a walk in one of the true shanty-town sections. This is where I got a bit uncomfortable, as my travelling companions for the day included two British girls (who, spookily, went to school with a mate from work I had been playing football with up in Leeds) and a Taiwanese guy, Din.

Now, most people of about my age grew up with certain stereotypes about Asian tourists, particularly Japanese, involving their fanatical use of cameras. And I had some degree of basis in fact for this, having seen them in the flesh in Cambridge. But I have never, ever met someone as obsessive about photographing everything as this guy. He took photos of everything. And, when he'd taken his photo of it, he would get his photo taken with it. This was dodgy enough in some instances, but when he was getting his photo taken in front of the shack of this girl we'd just been talking to, and hearing how tough life was for her and her kid, then it just got embarrassing. In some places, particularly when we came back through Jo'burg on the way home, we had to tell him to stop pointing his camera out of the van, as he was liable to get stuff thrown at him.

Still, as well as the shanty-town walk, we went to Soweto's cathedral, which was used as a meeting-place by some of the anti-apartheid students and raided by the police (the bullet holes in the church are still visible). There we got shown around by a guy who was all serene and love-thy-neighbour Christian until he got onto the topic of how the young were behaving these days, and AIDS, at which point he sounded scarily like some members of the American Religious Right. After that, we went on to the Hector Pietersen Museum, commemorating one of the first and youngest victims of the Soweto student riots of (I think) 1976. This was a really fascinating place, which we unfortunately didn't have time to really thoroughly look through. From there, we went on to look around Nelson Mandela's house, where he lived both when he worked there and again for a short while after leaving jail - before it became obvious that the place could not cope with the number of people who would want to visit him.

After the Mandela house, we went for lunch at a Soweto restaurant (albeit one catering for tourists, but the food was pretty authentic meaning, yes, more mielie amongst it, but with much nicer accompaniments), and then headed back through Jo'burg, where we took in another museum or so, and were driven through neighbourhoods like Hillbrow which were historically fairly liberal, mixed areas but have now become seriously dangerous, largely because many of the middle-class blacks have fled the inner-city areas, which have been taken over by immigrants from other African countries. Hearing some South Africans (of whatever colour) talk about Nigerians sounds very similar to the rantings of the Daily Mail about asylum-seekers back in the UK. Some, less pleasant, aspects of humanity appear to be universal... (sighs)

At any rate, after all of this it was back to Gemini, where I ended up spending the rest of the evening chatting and watching DVDs with a bunch of 5 English girls who'd been volunteering over in SA, and were back in Jo'burg just for a weekend. All very pleasant, only interrupted by the horror of realising the bass rumbling we were hearing in the TV room was Din (Taiwanese guy) snoring in our dorm. He eventually went quiet (several hours later) but not before we'd started discussing various methods (non-lethal or otherwise...) for shutting him up.

And the next day, I flew to Australia. That's it, my time in Africa has actually finally been covered. Woohoo!

I'll pick up the story in Perth in my next posting, but for now, farewell!

Pat