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| Sunset over the Atlantic |
We've been roots-finding in South Africa these past two weeks. It was 21 years ago that I was last there, having quality time with my terminally-ill father. My parents left in the 1950s and my father had always refused to go back until apartheid fell. After Mandela came to power, Dad spent his last several winters in Cape Town; it was only when I saw him there, in 1996, happy and smiling despite his illness, that I realised he had missed it all his life. Since then I'd had no wish to return, given the painful nature of the associated memories. This time, though, we had incentive as my husband has discovered family to visit too.
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| Another South African cousin...of Ricki and Cosi. |
The place has changed enormously in those two decades. The problems of today are all too evident, in forms including destitution, smog and anxiety about the future. But in 1996 the end of apartheid was relatively recent and evidence of change was slow.
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| Moving forward...in Addo Elephant Park |
Today, though, you can walk around the seaside Garden Route towns of Knysna and Hermanus, explore the Addo Elephant Park, eat out in Port Elizabeth or Cape Town and sense a basic openness and contentment with the multicultural society that has emerged.
As a tourist it's hard to know how deep this goes, but the feeling that everyone is out enjoying the sunshine, the local fruit and seafood and the beauty of the landscapes side by side is something new to me in that country - immeasurably so, compared to my early experiences on childhood visits to family there, which shocked me profoundly when I was a six-year-old in a car passing Soweto.
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| Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens, Cape Town |
Today a whole generation has grown up without apartheid. And even if my positive impressions are still perhaps more superficial than we starry-eyed visitors would like it to be, even if the future remains uncertain, the politics in upheaval and the dangers no doubt present, it has changed for the better in so many ways that I felt this trip offered a heartening note.
We remember, seeing South Africa, that countries
can change for the better. Many others are changing for the worse at the moment, and it's easy to succumb to despair. We shouldn't. Transformation, a positive opening out,
is possible, given will, action and enough time.
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| Melkbosstrand, north of Cape Town |
As for the matter of never taking pictures into the sun, I don't buy that. Why not? Why do things the same way all the time? Let's flood the place with light.
