When we left Rawdons the fog was thick, and the trees were dripping. A short drive brought us to the Mandela capture site and museum and the iconic silhouette sculpture installed there. The serious atmosphere of the place was dispelled by a horde of garrulous school children, scrubbed and uniformed, skipping and babbling through the place. I have never waved to and greeted so many people in such a short time. I had seen pictures of the sculpture memorial though it has a lot more impact in the flesh. It is set away from the current temporary museum, a good 200 yards walk, so you have time to think as you approach it. The silhouette is a profile of Mandela, about 30ft by 25ft, that can only be seen from just one particular marked spot, and you have to get your position just right. The museum itself was informative and very moving in parts.
An afternoon's drive brought us up into the Drakensberg mountains to the Giants Castle lodge set in a world heritage site wildlife reserve. We spent all our time in a single valley which perhaps can be described as a large Scottish glen with baboons. Rounded hills covered in course grass, occasional groves of indigenous trees, a small babbling river running along a wide valley floor, cloud on the the higher hilltops. At 4,500ft elevation it was cool and a pleasure to walk through. The park is known for eland, though they eluded us, and vultures which were numerous and easy to spot. The lodge, like Hluhlwe, was a main building surrounded by numerous thatched cottages. I was taken aback to find we had a wood burning stove whose metal flue went up through the thatch.
The attraction here, other than the scenery, are cave paintings done by the Khoi San Bushmen, a tribe of diminutive stone age hunter gatherers who lived in the area until the end of 19th century. Their descendants now live in the Kalahari and Namibia. A park ranger gave a thorough talk on the paintings and the current thinking about their meaning plus a tongue knotting demonstration of the Clicks and Tsks of a Khoi San dialect. A British regiment was stationed in the valley in the late 19th century to stop the bushmen taking domestic cattle and their bullet marks are easily seen on the painting walls. The bushmen included a depiction of this event in the paintings and I have to wonder if this is the only place in the world where modern men, English soldiers, are shown in a stone age man's paintings.
Back on the road we headed out of the hills down to visit the Ardmore Ceramics centre. Now I am no particular aficionado of the arts and wasn't relishing the prospect of an afternoon with derivative renderings of mugs, bowls animals and human figurines. I was stopped cold to find work that is dazzling in its vibrant creativity, execution and finish. It was started in the middle 80's by Fee Halstead to foster the work of Zulu artists and has since grown to an extent that must wildly exceed what she hoped for. Dozens of artists have worked here, most starting from nothing and coming from deeply impoverished backgrounds. The Aids/HIV epidemic has claimed the lives of many of the artists and their work has been used to raise awareness of the disease and new work has addressed it directly. One piece, that I was unable to get a decent photograph of, presents a nightmarish depiction of the disease. Ardmore has of course been discovered by the art world and has a world wide reputation. Their website does a fairly poor job of presenting the breadth of their work. You will find some here http://www.ardmoreceramics.co.za/buy/ardmore-ceramic-art, with other examples scattered across the site. A Google search yields a generous result, select the "images" results. I've added my few pictures to the web folder including picture of the "Aids Monster" lifted from the web. The unpainted pieces were works in progress.
Late afternoon found us back at the marina in Durban and me in dire need of a pot of tea. In the last eight days we have driven over 1,000 miles and have mingled with people from the poorest townships to wealthy enclaves and there is one overarching impression that I have to write large, particularly given this country's woeful history, remarkable transition, poor reputation and undoubtedly grave problems. Everywhere, without a single exception, we have all been welcomed with disarming friendliness, freely offered. From the gritty city streets of Durban, to the rude hovels surrounding Gandhi's home site, to our rural stops for lunch, to the staff and guides of the lodges, to the downtown hotel in the coal town of Dundee, to the unlikely country house that is Rawdon's to the rarified atmosphere at Ardmore. The reception has been the same from the Zulu Africans to the Indian Hindu's, to the Muslims, to the descendants of British, Dutch and German colonials. It is sobering and stands in stark contrast to what I find the US and Britain.
No comments:
Post a Comment