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South Africa After-Action Report
This year Mr. Charlotte and I have had the great good fortune to do some serious ’round-the-world traveling. We have been on the road since the first week of January and will be back stateside just in time for Independence Day. Our destinations so far: Ecuador, Egypt, Fiji, New Zealand, South Korea, South Africa, Lesotho, and eSwatini (Swaziland). We just wrapped up the South Africa leg of the trip and I thought the Rico-verse might be interested in some impressions. If you just want to see some fun photos of animals, dramatic landscapes, etc., please feel free to skip to the end!
We spent nearly five weeks in South Africa, starting with a week in Cape Town, then driving east along the Garden Route (basically following along the southern coast of Africa) for several days, a few days in Addo Elephant Park, a few days in Lesotho and the Drakensberg Mountains, a couple of days in the Blyde River Canyon area (about two hours west of the central part of Kruger National Park), a week in and near Kruger, and then ended with three days in Cullinan/Pretoria/Johannesburg.
The Good
South Africa has a ton going for it. For example, spectacular scenery up the wazoo! Cape Town has a famously beautiful and dramatic setting at the base of Table Mountain. The rest of the Cape is blessed with amazing beaches, dramatic cliffs, and rocky coastlines. The Garden Route along the southern coast was similarly beautiful – we kept thinking we had seen the best beach ever and then we found another one which was even better. The Drakensberg and Blyde River mountain areas really took our breath away. Of course the wildlife is properly legendary too – in addition to the hundreds of amazing animals in the national parks (where you sort of expect to see them), we would often just happen upon various exotic critters in “regular” areas. The roads and related infrastructure (gas stations, signs, etc.) have been superb throughout (the local drivers, perhaps, not so much, but whatever). Food and accommodation, and tourist infrastructure generally, is of good quality and good value for the money. All of our interactions with South Africans, black and white, have been friendly and cordial, and we have been mightily impressed with how multilingual the population is – everyone speaks at least three or four languages (English, Afrikaans, and two or three native/local African languages) and they can switch among them with lightning speed.
The Bad
South Africa seems to be teetering on the brink of a serious national crisis. There have been rolling blackouts for hours a day (locally referred to as “load shedding” – it’s a huge topic of conversation and frustration) nationwide for more than the past two years, causing constant disruptions in people’s lives, businesses to close or scale down, crime to go up (it’s a lot easier to commit crimes at night when there aren’t any lights on), and general uncertainly and mistrust to increase. It’s so sad – everyone is apologetic and embarrassed and feeling helpless about it, trying to find ways to cope (generators, batteries, solar power, etc.). Poverty is widespread and, to our untrained foreign tourist eyes, it seems to be almost entirely concentrated among the black population. We knew the basics of South Africa’s racial history, but it was a jolt to see how wide the divide still is: the whites seem to live in the nice areas and own the businesses and drive the cars, and the blacks seem to live in much poorer areas, work for the whites, and walk or take the bus. Of course we have our own version of this dynamic in the United States, but it’s much more stark in SA; we rarely saw black people and white people interacting with each other at all. Mixed-race social groups and integrated public spaces just don’t seem to exist in the way that they can and do in the US.
The Ugly
South Africa’s largest metro area, Johannesburg, has a reputation as a dangerous city. We were heartbroken to discover that most of the towns and cities have a serious crime problem, not just JNB. I’ve never seen so much razor wire and electric fencing in my life – every house behind a wall with security warnings and barbed wire, every business with bars in the windows, every parking lot with gates and checkpoints and security guards. Although we didn’t experience anything personally, everyone we talked to mentioned worsening crime. We saw tons of local news stories about rising rates, desperate mitigation efforts, protests, etc. For example, we spent the day in a lovely beachy tourist town right at the bottom of Africa called Mossel Bay. While Mr. Charlotte went cage diving with the great white sharks (!), I spent several hours sightseeing and walking around. High walls and barbed wire were basically everywhere – it’s claustrophobic and unsettling and I didn’t feel safe exploring by myself. We encountered this sad state of affairs throughout the country.
This is getting rather long (readers who have made it this far: “YES, WE KNOW”) so I’ll leave it here. I hope there are some Ricos who either live in SA or have recent SA experience/knowledge to share. Also, Mr. Charlotte is the social media point-man for our trip – he has been posting photos a couple of times per week. If you’d like to see more pix, please PM me and I’ll give you his FB and IG handles.
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Thanks for travel report Charlotte. Regarding eSwatini – is that the virtual version of Swaziland?
But what about the braai?
Haha, yes!! That must be it. 🤣
Not to worry, @arahant, we had it covered.
Beautiful pictures. Thanks.
The mountain scenes look like they could be in Arizona. Not the desert parts of Arizona, obviously, but the higher elevations in the northern part of the states.
About the cultural and political issues: I’ve never been to South Africa, nor to any part of Africa.
I have heard reports from friends who were missionaries in other parts of Africa, and they reported the same issue about crime being rampant and people essentially living in compounds. This fits with reports that I’ve heard online from others in Africa, particularly Voddie Baucham (an American pastor now living in Zambia).
I’m not sure why you’d find the stark income divide to be surprising, Charlotte. The sub-Saharan African countries are generally Third-World nations living in dire poverty, and are poorly governed. The popular narrative is to blame Colonialism, but they were poor before Colonialism, and even the parts with little or no colonial influence, such as Ethiopia, were and remain poor.
South Africa strikes me as a black African Third-World nation, with a small white European First-World minority. In the absence of the whites, there’s no reason to expect that South Africa would somehow be full of wealthy blacks. It seems much more likely that it would be full of poor blacks, like the rest of sub-Saharan Africa.
I do suspect that things will get worse politically, and that the bulk of the remaining whites will eventually leave.
Great report, but who is that screaming woman in the pink hat?
South Africa had a good government/administrative structure in place (for whites, anyway) when apartheid ended, and to Mandela’s and DeKlerk’s credit it was not entirely dismantled. SA has since enacted a thicket of post-apartheid laws and regulations giving blacks preferences in hiring, university placement, economic incentives, etc. (sound familiar?). To the extent I thought about it at all, I assumed that there would be a small but visible black middle class in SA (I never said anything about expecting to find it “full of wealthy blacks”).
Wonderful pix! Thanks.
**raises hand**
Looks like a great trip!
??
How do we know that?
A. Frickin. Mazing. I can only imagine all that happened between the pictures, what you remember about those days.
Because everyone was poor back then. Nobody anywhere had a TV or an automobile before colonialism. They had to get around by foot or horse or horse and carriage, and they had to get their news through papers, if they could read.
It’s relative, right?
(Horse and carriage? Fancy!)
Indeed, it was fancy at the time, and one would not have found such a rig in pre-colonial South Africa. I’m not even sure they had horses down there. It was more of an Asian and European thing. India? Yes, plenty of horses and carriages, and even elephants to ride. But South Africa before Europeans went down there? No.
Being more serious, yes, it is all relative, but the tribes that were there when the Portuguese or Dutch started there were not rich by world standards of the time. Just as similar pastoral groups are not rich today.
North Africa was far different. Getting between the Carthaginians and the Numidians was important for Rome’s victories in the Punic Wars.
Thanks for posting these. What did it smell like?
Video Blogger Winston Sterzel (SerpentZA) is from South Africa. I think he lived in Communist China for about a decade. He left during the COVID mess when China was really cracking down on foreigners.
He would often say two things about South Africa:
1. About the only thing that is better in South Africa than Communist China were things off which the South African government bureaucracy could make money such as food safety regulations. Apparently you never know quite what you might be eating in China.
2. About 58 people are murdered every day in South Africa.
I also didn’t know this: “Only 8% of South Africans speak English at home”
https://www.timeslive.co.za/news/south-africa/2019-06-05-only-8-of-south-africans-speak-english-at-home-report/
Always the best first question to ask about any foreign place.
My own second question would be: didn’t Ecuador have as much razor-wirelike defenses as South Africa? The OP’s descriptions of criminality – or let us say a criminal atmosphere – sound Latin American.
Oh no, India would be so busted.
It didn’t smell like anything in particular, most places. Anywhere there are bats and/or baboons, it didn’t smell great.
Interesting. I’ll have to check him out.
I believe it. English is everyone’s second language. Most school instruction is in English, but black South Africans always speak native languages among themselves and most white South Africans speak Afrikaans.
Yup.
Although the Ecuadorians appeared to favor a layer of broken glass on top of the high walls, whereas South Africans use more pointy metal spikes.
The murder rate has always been high and is currently on the rise. The number 70 per day is googling up lately. I sum it up like this, because it’s easy to remember:
The ANC has run the country for 30 years (a couple of years longer than Nelson Mandela spent in prison). Just glancing over some charts and graphs on the ‘net, there have probably been more than 50 murders/day for 30 years. That’s more than 500,000 murders since the end of apartheid.
Love the photos though.
It’s terribly sad.
Thanks for the comment.
Kind of like a holiday weekend in Chicago?
Great pix!