South Africa: Johannesburg, Capetown, Durban, Richard's Bay

Johannesburg: Frenzied traffic and more frenzied traffic. Frantic road construction in anticipation of June 2010 World Cup. Quite realistic steel shaped into dark green pine tree branches to disguise cell towers. Corrugated tin shanties in clusters abutting sections of newer tidy cottages in Soweto. Large parks and playgrounds. Teen-age students thronging the Apartheid Museum. Peeks at homes of Winnie Mandela and Bishop Tutu. Enormous soccer (better known here as football) stadium.

The Hector Pieterson Memorial in Soweto is where high school students met the apartheid police on 16 June 1976 to protesting for better education and against the Department of Education decree that Afrikaans was to become a language of instruction at school. Students objected to being taught in the language of the oppressor. Many teachers themselves could not speak Afrikaans, but were now required to teach their subjects in it. The students decried complicated requirements developed over time that students should return to homelands for high school, condemning them to inferior educations due to lack of funding and facilities. All in all, a volatile situation. Police responded with teargas and live bullets. A screen-printed life-sized enlargement of the famous photograph of Hector Pieterson (taken by Sam Nzima) showing Mbuyisa Makhubo carrying Hector's limp body is central at the memorial. [ CLICK for more details.]

Scarcely starting to recover from the emotions of that site, we go on to the Apartheid Museum. "The building itself has power," says museum director Christopher Till. "It is appropriate that the first apartheid museum in South Africa should open in Johannesburg, where at the turn of the century there was a convergence of people for a range of different reasons [as] black people were displaced from the land through colonial wars and the imposition of poll taxes, and white farmers were displaced through the Anglo Boer War." Tickets for the museum are plastic credit-card size cards indicating either "Non-white" or "White." The graphic and unsettling journey begins with a turnstile into a maze of cages and darkness, nooses dangling from the ceilings, photos, posters, and a police vehicle of type driven through townships to spy on and subdue residents. The eventual release into bright sunshine and an eventual cool drink at a tree-shaded cafe aren't quite enough of an antidote.

Cape Town: The Cape Town airport had section after section of roped-off security areas devoted to crated bicycles, which seemed peculiar until we learned of the Cape Argus Cycle Race held 2nd Sunday of March annually. The race originated from a "big ride" event in 1978 to promote the need for bike paths. In 2010, as we arrived, over 35,000 had just been in town for the 109 kilometer race! Due to our late evening flight arrival and a driver who'd forgotten where he had parked the van in the airport lot and then couldn't find our hotel [we later nicknamed him, out of his hearing, "Inspector Clouseau"] meant near oblivion to the city's bright lights and bustling night life...just too tired. Next day, recovered fully, we were off for a city and coastal tour including cliffside homes with private funiculars, views of the famed Table Rock, beachside markets, an African penguin colony, and a stop where the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic meet... and where everyone is warned not to feed the roaming bands of baboons who have become very aggressive.

Our time in Cape Town also included a visit to an out-of-the-way burial ground for Muslim slaves, with a small museum. Archaeological and restoration efforts were underway for the cemetery, which had largely been forgotten for many decades. We also visited the university area and wound through the city to have pointed out the triangulation of railroad, highway, and industrial towers strategically placed to make the city's very infrastructure assist in geographical separation of blacks, browns, and whites. Pinelands. Athalone. Lange. Ndabeni. Crossroads. Innocuous sounding neighborhood names. Not so benign in intent.

For some of our touring, we were accompanied by Tabo, a representative from the District 6 Action Center. An apartheid fighter from age 12 ... he said he "knew it mattered, but was not yet politically conscious." At age 18 he went for military training to Angola and later to East Germany, becoming a lead fighter by 1985. In 1992, he was granted amnesty in South Africa. With eight others he has founded the Direct Action Center to do a different kind of tourism --letting the world know of the heritage of apartheid yet with the vision of ameliorating wounds and building bridges. He admits he still hasn't worked out how to communicate his background as an anti-apartheid militant adequately to meet the goal of educating citizens and tourists, much less with his own young children. "Is it up to schools? to government? to families?" He wonders. The Afrikans driver with us is obviously uncomfortable with some of what Tabo says but for the most part remains silent.

We visit two memorials. In the first, giant uprights have silhouette shapes cut from them, representing the lost, the spaces left in their communities by those who met violent deaths in the anti-apartheid struggle. We move to a second. In October 1985, in an operation to arrest stone throwers, the Joint Operation Command consisting of the South African Police, South African Railway Police and South African Defence Force, disguised as railway workers, hid in crates on the back of a railway truck and ambushed the communities of Athlone and Crossroads. Five youths were killed and men, women and children were wounded in the operations known as the Trojan Horse Massacres. The ambush was caught on camera and broadcast in South Africa and throughout the rest of the world, resulting in a definite increase of international support for the end of apartheid. The Trojan Horse Massacre memorial--stark and almost rustic--was in sharp contrast to the harborside restaurants, upscale shops, cheerful throngs of tourists, and the peaceful gardens of the vineyard we also visited.

We were prevented due to high winds from going by funicular to the top of Table Mountain and by small ferry out to the offshore prison on Robbins Island where Nelson Mandela was incarcerated. Indeed, much of time it was a fight to stand upright. Those winds extended our time in Cape Town by a day because the tugs could not get enough momentum going for the MV Discovery to get out of harbor and past the breakwaters. Yes, we had finally boarded the ship, settled into our compact cabins, and met the rest of the Elderhostel tour group. [NOTE: Elderhostel tours are now known as "Road Scholar" programs.]

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