Be the Cause

Seventeen Travelers will visit the HIV/AIDS rampant country of South Africa to engage in a “Service Vacation”.

This is for Joanne-about Howick Falls

We were all blessed with seeing Howick Falls and being with Jenny’s kids the day before we flew back to Atlanta, then LA. What a day!! Not so long after we arrived, the boys all performed for us and sang and danced…really beautiful and so much talent! Us talented be the cause singers then performed a rendition of Rudolf the Rednose Reindeer to stun critics and audiences everywhere (this said as pinocchio’s nose grows :) ) I will remain steady in my viewpoint though of how our singing did improve from sitting around on the beanbags at our stay in Durban, to the hospice to our final performance at Howick.
After the performance, we were assigned a buddy(one of the boys)…I shared a buddy with Shaheda and I remember his name was similar to the name, Maya. These boys all were similar in dress. Baseball caps with polo shirts, pants-all in grey, beige colors. Something I couldn’t wait for was for them to open their xmas presents because we brought them brand new tennis shoes for their uniforms for choir.
So back to after the performance…the boys led us down an amazing trail to the waterfall…we got to see the waterfall from above…a scenic viewpoint and took the obligatory group pic,etc…but to see the falls after hiking a trek and basically falling into them-something quite extraordinary and breathtaking!
What I was personally touched by—I had fallen on an earlier hike in our service vacation—at Table Rock-this wasn’t major and my scrapes quickly healed…but let’s just say I was a little trepidatious…even when we hiked at Cape Point before leaving for Durban, I paced myself and I could kick myself because I didn’t hike far enuff to see where the Indian Ocean/Atlantic Oceans meet…pics later will have to fill that missed opp for me. So anyway, we hiked all the way down to a stream with rocks that would lead us closer to the gorgeous waterfall. Being still a bit cautious, I sat down on a big rock while other volunteers crossed with their little buddies. Mahsa passed me and said something to the effect of…are you not crossing, Gianna?…with concern in her voice-she was one of the sixteen very helpful after the slip sliding away at Table Rock (and just to note-table rock hike-very accessible and safe to hike at—just my own athletic tearing down the hill that got me in some trouble).
So let’s just say I couldn’t resist the opportunity to get closer to the falls…again, what touched me entirely was the boys…they helped us across!! They took some of our hands and led us across the rocks! At one point, one boy had one of my hands and another held my other hand. They were the sweetest and it felt like they were the Howick Falls’ angels—not to get too corny or anything. I don’t know if I’ll ever get over that experience and the quiet, determined selflessness of these boys…to see us across so they could share the beauty and play with us. When we got across, I could see that photos taken from every angle would flatter every face, every scene. Needless to say I chickened out and walked through the water straight away on the way back instead of risking slipping…what can I say?
After we made it to the top by the gift store and the boys’ living quarters, it was almost time for lunch…yes, out of breath…I still went to play soccer with the boys and Mike, Katie, Manveer and Liza. Playing soccer for me was the right choice…I was laughing the whole time and it was an awesome example of staying in the moment. Later on, the boys got their shoes and it was another tough goodbye as we gave them hi-fives out of van windows with a quiet drive home to Durban to reflect on the day’s amazing events and interactions.

25 Classic South African Reads

25 classic South African reads
Shaun de Waal

Looking for deeper insight into South Africa? Here are snap reviews of 25 classic South African reads – and where you can get them – covering non-fiction, fiction and poetry and featuring a range of the country’s greatest novelists, poets, journalists and historians.

Shaun de Waal, twice-winner of the Pringle Award for best movie critic in South Africa and former arts and books editor of the Mail & Guardian, is the author of several books and a graphic novel.

NON-FICTION

The World That Made Mandela
By Luli Callinicos
Bringing history and geography together, this is a large coffee-table-sized book filled with archival and contemporary images, telling the story of Nelson Mandela and his struggle for SA’s freedom through the many places associated with his life. From his birthplace in Qunu to the Old Fort in Johannesburg, where he was held prisoner (and which is now the site of the Constitutional Court), from Soweto to Mpumalanga, the images provide a wonderful historical context for SA today, combining to form a unique “heritage trail”.

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Long Walk to Freedom

By Nelson Mandela
The towering figure of South Africa’s liberation struggle began this autobiography in prison, having pages in tiny writing smuggled out by comrades. When he came out of jail in 1990, and went on to become SA’s first black president in 1994, he continued the work, and it is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand Mandela, the times he has lived through and the war he waged for freedom. He also authorised a biography by Anthony Sampson (see box right), which provides much useful extra information and differing perspectives.

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Read excerpts from the book
Tomorrow Is Another Country

By Allister Sparks
Sparks is a veteran South African journalist and author of The Mind of South Africa. His account of the transition from apartheid to democracy is one of several, but undoubtedly the best. It describes, from behind the scenes, the process that began with tentative contact between the sworn enemies, moving through the unbanning of the liberation movements and the complex negotiations that led to SA’s first fully democratic election in 1994.

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A History of South Africa

By Frank Welsh
The revised and updated edition of this comprehensive one-volume history of South Africa goes beyond the achievement of democracy to look at the problems facing the new society in the period since Nelson Mandela ended his term as SA’s first black president. The book also goes back into SA history, and explains the country’s ethnic mix – though it has also been criticised for pro-Afrikaner attitudes. Judge for yourself.

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The South African War 1899-1902
By Fransjohan Pretorius
By the end of the 19th century, South Africa was partly a British colony and partly a pair of independent Afrikaner republics. British imperialism and capitalist expansionism meant that the independence of the republic (particularly the gold-rich Transvaal) would come under threat. In 1899, the second Ango-Boer War, which made the earlier conflict seem negligible, broke out. In some ways, it was the first modern war, one that saw the invention of trench warfare, concentration camps and guerrilla fighting, as the highly organised British army squared up against the motley band of farmer-hunter-soldiers that made up the loose-knit Boer army. It was also a conflict that defined the political future of a united South Africa. Pretorius gives the best outline of the war, focusing on aspects (such as the participation of large numbers of black people) that were hitherto ignored.

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The Country of My Skull
By Antjie Krog
A deeply personal and utterly compelling account of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which investigated the horrors of apartheid repression, written by one of the most acclaimed poets in the Afrikaans language. Here she writes in English, from the perspective of a radical Afrikaner, of the searing process of confessing apartheid’s sins. A bestseller in SA and successful abroad, the book has been reissued with additional material.

More on Country of My Skull
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My Traitor’s Heart
By Rian Malan
Subtitled “Blood and Bad Dreams: A South African Explores the Madness in His Country, His Tribe and Himself”, this book was a bestseller in SA and elsewhere when it came out in 1990. By a member of one of Afrikanerdom’s leading apartheid families, it goes into the heart of darkness of a country in turmoil. It’s not a pretty picture, but it makes for compelling, sobering reading.

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Portraits of Power
By Mark Gevisser
A collection of Gevisser’s acclaimed columns for the Mail & Guardian, in which he wrote detailed, elegant and psychologically acute profiles of all the key players in the new South Africa, from controversial academic Malegapuru Makgoba to musician-director Mbongeni Ngema, from Chief Rabbi Cyril Harris to filmmaker Anant Singh, from politicians such as Sam (Mbhazima) Shilowa and Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi to soccer star Mark Fish.

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New Babylon / New Nineveh
By Charles van Onselen
Subtitled “Everyday Life on the Witwatersrand 1886-1914”, this essential pair of historical studies are now republished in one volume. They examine the era of Johannesburg’s establishment and early growth through social, political and economic lenses to provide a picture of how this great city developed, and what that story has to tell us about South Africa today.

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Cape Town: The Making of a City

By Nigel Worden, Elizabeth van Heyningen and Vivian Bickford-Smith
Cape Town was South Africa’s first city – some still regard it so. It has certainly always been the great melting pot of the country, with an extraordinary ethnic diversity from the start. Now one of the world’s favourite tourist destinations, the city has a complex history, which is told in this beautiful and engrossing book. It looks at Cape Town in colonial times, under Dutch and then British rule, from the earliest small settlement founded to grow vegetables for passing ships to the brink of the 20th century. A plethora of paintings, maps, drawings and photographs illustrate the book and make it very accessible. (A companion volume, by the same authors, looking at the city today in the same format, is Cape Town in the Twentieth Century: An Illustrated Social History.)

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FICTION

Disgrace

By JM Coetzee
The crowning achievement of a distinguished literary career, Disgrace won Coetzee the Booker Prize for the second time, making him the first writer to achieve that distinction – and occasioned much debate within South Africa. It is a bleak but always compelling story of the new South Africa struggling to come to terms with itself, addressing issues of guilt, responsibility, meaning and survival, written in prose of crystalline sharpness. A surprise bestseller in SA as well as abroad.

JM Coetzee wins Nobel Prize
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Cry, The Beloved Country

By Alan Paton
Perhaps the most famous novel to come out of South Africa, Paton’s 1948 work brought to the notice of the world the dilemmas of ordinary South Africans living under an oppressive system, one which threatened to destroy their very humanity. Informed by Paton’s Christian and liberal beliefs, the novel tells of a rural Zulu parson’s heart-breaking search for his son, who has been drawn into the criminal underworld of the city. Cry, The Beloved Country has sold millions of copies around the world.

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Selected StoriesBy Nadine Gordimer
Winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize for Literature, Gordimer was for decades SA’s literary conscience. Her stories are perhaps the best introduction to her work: they span the 1950s to the 1990s in this volume (British edition), moving from the city to the countryside and from the highest ranks of society to the lowest. With delicacy and power, they cast a bright light on the extraordinary lives led by South Africans of all races, and the nature of their interactions across colour lines and within them.

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The Heart of Redness
By Zakes Mda
Mda came to prominence as a dramatist in the 1970s; now he has flourished as a novelist. This, his second novel, won the 2001 Sunday Times Fiction Prize, and has become a school setwork. Weaving together two strands of storytelling, the novel moves between the past and the present. In the past is the narrative of Nongqawuse, the 19th century prophetess whose visions brought a message from the ancestors and took her people to the brink of extermination. In the present time, 150 years later, a feud that dates back to the days of Nongqawuse still simmers in the village of Qolorha as it faces the demands of modernity.

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Mafeking Road and Other Stories

By Herman Charles Bosman
In a new edition to celebrate the 50th anniversary of its first publication, this collection is a South African classic. In the voice of the sly old bushveld storyteller Oom Schalk Laurens, Bosman tells tales of a rural Afrikaner South Africa that has long since vanished – yet the unique flavour and wry humour of the stories remains undiminished.

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Herman Charles Bosman Literary Society
Welcome to Our Hillbrow

By Phaswane Mpe
Phaswane Mpe’s first novel (shortlisted for the 2002 Sunday Times Fiction Prize) is a new variation on what was known as the “Jim Comes to Jo’burg” theme in South African literature. A man leaves his rural home in the Northern Province and comes to the big city to find a new life. What he finds is a dangerous but vital inner city, epitomised by Hillbrow, the flatland in the centre of Johannesburg where the well-heeled no longer set foot – the “city of gold, milk, honey and bile”. This is the land of drug deals, xenophobia, violence, sex and Aids, and this novel is an uncompromising look at the reality of the new South Africa as it affects the poorest of the urban population. It is also a story of love, survival and hope.

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Fools and Other Stories

By Njabulo Ndebele
Ndebele is a noted academic and critic as well as a writer of fiction. In this work, he carries out the brief argued in his essay “Rediscovery of the Ordinary”, returning the gaze of the reader to the very human lives of township people and forgoing the rhetoric of political struggle, though that background is not ignored. His characters deal with the generation gap and the formative experiences of childhood in these warmly perceptive stories.

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A Place Called Vatmaar
By AHM Scholtz
The author came to literature late in life, but was hailed as the “Steinbeck of the coloured South African platteland” – and produced a bestseller that has now been translated all over the world. His novel, which is very close to actual history, tells the story of a village inhabited mostly by “coloureds”, the mixed-race people of the Cape, from its earliest beginnings. The various characters of the village’s history speak, telling their stories from their own perspectives to create a portrait of a whole community.

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Ancestral Voices

By Etienne van Heerden
In its original Afrikaans, titled Toorberg, Van Heerden’s novel won all the prizes going in South Africa that year. It draws on the tradition of the plaasroman (farm novel), and transforms it at the same time, to tell the riveting transgenerational story of a family entangled with its ghosts – both living and dead. An utterly compelling read.

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A Dry White SeasonBy Andre Brink
This novel by one of South Africa’s most prolific authors, set in the 1970s, brought the issue of deaths in detention to the notice of many who would rather have not known about it. When a white South African investigates the death of a black friend in police custody, he uncovers the brutal truth about apartheid South Africa. An interesting companion volume would be Cry Freedom, Donald Woods’ non-fiction account of his friendship with Bantu Steve Biko, the Black Consciousness leader murdered in custody by police.

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POETRY

The New Century of South African Poetry
Edited by Michael Chapman
This new anthology is the ultimate overview of South African poetry, reaching from its earliest manifestations in the oral culture of the land’s indigenous inhabitants to the complexities of post-apartheid verse. It includes translations from the country’s many languages, discovering hitherto hidden voices as well as placing in context the best-known names of our rich poetic heritage.

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Come and Hope with Me
By Mongane Wally Serote
Though the position does not officially exist, Wally Serote is perhaps SA’s poet laureate, a veteran of the liberation struggle and now a member of Parliament. His work goes back to the 1970s, with his coruscating portraits of life as a black person in South Africa in those days. The newest volume from this winner of the Noma Award for Publishing in Africa is a single long poem, driven forward by incantatory rhythms, addressed to a people just emerging from the horrors of oppression and now awakening to a new dawn.

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Inside and OutBy Jeremy Cronin
Bringing together the work from Cronin’s two collections, Inside and Even the Dead, this volume is a comprehensive view of one of South Africa’s most popular poets. Now a member of Parliament and an SA Communist Party leader, Cronin’s first poems were the result of his incarceration by the apartheid regime, and Inside became possibly South Africa’s best-selling work of poetry. With irony, compassion, honesty and a firm commitment to justice for all, Cronin’s accessible poems speak about a wide range of South African experience.

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TransferBy Ingrid de Kok
This second volume by the acclaimed Cape Town poet registers the sea-changes that have taken place in our society, but through the sensitive and exact lyric voice of one dealing with memory, grief, love and motherhood: “the ladder of light / sent down from land above / where hands write words / to work the winch / to plumb the shaft below”.

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If I Could Sing: Selected PoemsBy Keorapetse Kgositsile
An African National Congress stalwart who spent many years in exile, Keorapetse Kgositsile is the author of the famous lines: “Need I remind /anyone again that /armed struggle /is an act of love”. His work over many years, collected in this volume from several books, brings together the historical imperatives of the struggle against apartheid with related personal concerns in free-flowing, imaginative verse.

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