Now What?

I have come to the decision, finally that Africa does not, in fact, look like the central valley, or San Francisco, or the Great Plains, or Santa Paula, or anywhere else. South Africa looks like…like itself, and that’s the only analogy I’m willing to give.

When you first come here, of course, and see brown hills rolling away to the horizon, or acre after acre of avocados, oranges, and mangos, or the very western shop-lined streets in Cape Town, its easy enough to compare this landscape with what you’ve seen before. Hills with cows on them are hills with cows on them, after all, and maybe the biggest geographical distinction the 5* and the N-4 is that on the N-4 you’ll occasionally see a Zebra, while on the 5 you have to roll up your windows as you pass the horrible Harris Ranch slaughterhouse that is the last sight (and smell) that that steak you ate last night probably ever had. I’m happier with the Zebra, personally.

But as I see more and longer, I’ve begun to accept what I’m seeing for what it is, and not for what I bring with me. Hills with cows on them are not just hills with cows on them, the 5 is not the N-4. And as I begin to see that, I begin to wonder how I could ever have thought anything else. The hills here don’t simply go to the horizon, beyond which there is probably another town or another freeway, instead they just keep going. I remember the first time I made that drive from Los Angeles to Sacramento, I was simply shocked that there could be so much land so undeveloped. Where were the houses? The strip malls? The constant movement and drone and mark of people? There were the truck-stops, but where did the people who worked in them *live*? Now of course, I realize that there’s nothing at all undeveloped about the central valley, and that the hum and buzz is always there. There is nothing limitless or unbounded. Its just a little chunk of the state that happens to have a lot of farms instead of a lot of houses, but it is of course surrounded.

Here it’s very different, and that’s why I say now that I can no longer even imagine comparing the rolling hills of Mpumulanga with any others I’ve ever seen. Here there is no limit, there is no boundary. There is not a sense that just over the horizon there are probably towns, and people, and farms, and roads. There’s just a sense that there are…more hills. More Africa.

People talk about the enormity of Africa, and on the whole I think its mostly a cliché that people parrot because….well, that’s one of the things that’s true about Africa, isn’t it? Its very big, and very poor, very corrupt, and the people there all have malaria, or AIDS, or interesting diseases caused by malnutrition that cause swollen bellies or skeletal limbs. That is the vision we bring to Africa, and so that is how we see. But how can you go and really see a place, if you’ve already decided what it looks like?

It’s true, Africa is big. But it is big on its own terms, not on mine. The hills of Mpumulanga are the hills of Mpumulanga, not of Fresno or Ventura. Stellenbosch is Stellenbosch, not Santa Maria. South Africa is always and only itself, and I’m starting to be able to see.


















*That’s right. THE 5. Bring it.