Into Africa

For the first time since 1978 I stepped today onto a new continent.

I have never been to Africa before, not even close.  Today after travelling thirty hours from almost exactly half way around the world, I arrived in Johannesburg, on a hazy and warm summer morning.  It is a strange thing to fly over Africa at night.  As we winged south and east from New York a little more than half way into our flight we skirted the west coast of Senegal, The Gambia and Guinea-Bissau.  I looked out the window and could see nothing save a little high cloud in front of the stars.   Our flight path took us back out over the ocean for several hours until we crossed over land again on the northern Namibian coast line just as the light was returning to the sky.  The whole of the Namimbian coast line is protected as park, but it was still too dark to see it.  I kept straining for glances of the continent below as we headed inland over  the Kalahari desert in Botswana and still the land was obscured by low cloud and ground fog.  From time to time I could see snatches of savannah, keenly aware that I was flying 39,000 feet above the spot where my oldest ancestors spent a million years before they decided to move north and east.  It is an indescribable feeling to be flying over the ancient cradle of humanity especially having just left Hawai’i, a place where some of the land itself was younger than I am.  This journey, this experience,  has only been possible in the last few years.

We landed at 8:30am, well into the summer morning, and parked a short bus ride from the terminal, so my first encounter with the South African air was walking down a ramp and on to the tarmac at Johannesburg International Airport.  The air smelled sweet, like it does in Hawai’i and it strongly reminded me of my South African born wife who always invokes the African air when she first inhales a breath in Hawai’i.

Joburg is a big city and one that is just alive on more edges than it can manage.  It would be fair to say that it consists of a jumble of humanity, tumbling together in a unique country in a unique place.  In the airport, there were fundamentalist Muslims arriving from the subcontinent, orthodox Jews coming with me from New York, a huge gang of young black police constables being led around by an older dour white sergeant.  Driving through the city to the middle class neighbourhood where I am staying is a trip through residential areas that consist of a road, a sidewalk and a continuous wall that runs the length of the block, differing by the style that each owner has chosen to build and the type of razor wire/spike combination on the top.  There is a default level of paranoia and private security here that most statesbound rightwing Americans only dream of.   It makes the paranoia of the west seem so trivial in comparison.

I’m staying with my friend Marianne and her family including two older women from Kufunda who are helping Marianne and Paul with their twins.  The REOS office is located in the garden of this old home, and we had some design meetings this afternoon on the deck, with weavers and doves all around, and the sun beating down.  So right here, it’s peaceful and quiet and lovely, and I have no desire to leave this compound today.  This is not a city to wander in, and so it is one that embodies everything one expects of African life: an lovely extended family, a warm bird filled garden, a brooding and dangerous city, and a mixed multicultural landscape that would make even the most liberal Canadian heads spin.