Imilongi KaNtu Choral Society

Today I went to Soweto to see the end of year concert by Imilongi KaNtu Choral Society - a choir that's been going for 25 years and has performed all over the world. It was a marathon event, lasting over three hours and covering an eclectic range of music from Handel and Mozart to local composer S.J. Khosa and traditional chants and dances. The audience joined in and encouraged the performers with whistles, shouts, ululations, applause and hand-waving - and a bit of dancing in the aisles too. Some of the ladies in the audience had also put on their best traditional costumes, so there was a wash of glorious colours across the hall. Great music and a great atmosphere - especially down in the mosh pit.

Joburg Art Deco

Last night at eleven o'clock I was wandering around Johannesburg's notorious CBD - Central Business District - on foot - an area that most of Joburg's northern suburban population would never dream of entering even in broad daylight (and some areas of which even the police don't go into at night). I felt perfectly safe, though - partly because I was in a group of about eighty people, partly because we had security guards escorting us, and partly because the city centre was absolutely deserted - we saw perhaps half a dozen other pedestrians, a handful of cars (the drivers slowing down to take a look at us) and a couple of rubbish trucks.

The occasion was a workshop for architects that I'm slightly involved in - the French Institute organised a bus tour of the CBD for the workshop participants and any interested members of the public; it was then decided that getting on and off the buses was too complicated, so we ended up taking a ninety-minute walking tour. I've driven through the CBD a number of times during rush hour, which in itself is quite an experience - the roads are snarling gridlock and there are people everywhere - so the night-time tour was an astonishing contrast - I was able to walk down the middle of a major four-lane artery without a vehicle in sight, just a long panorama of traffic lights quietly changing colour to themselves in both directions (and no cars parked in the streets, either - cars are generally not left outside overnight in Joburg...)

We saw a lot of wonderful buildings, some sadly derelict and fenced off behind sheets of corrugated metal, others very well maintained with neat golf-course lawns in front of them (vandalism seems to be nearly unknown here; even tagging, that bane of European cities, is pretty rare). I learned that Johannesburg has the third highest number of Art Deco buildings in the world (after, I think, New York and Miami) - although these buildings are "derivative", mere adaptations of American and European models rather than original - but they still look amazing. All the more extraordinary that most people don't know they're there (I'd never heard anyone talking about CBD architecture before and it's not mentioned in any tourist guide that I've seen) and most people probably wouldn't risk getting out of their cars to take a proper look at them even if they knew. I thoroughly recommend checking them out late at night, just take along a group of 79 friends if you can.

I forgot to take my camera, so to get an idea of what I'm talking about check here to see Lucille Davie's photos (mouse over the thumbnails to see the images). My pathetic mobile phone image is above, over a few Google findings.

Swazi flora

Personally, I find photographs of flowers boring - and not much of a challenge for the photographer either, the subject is hardly going to run away or object to having its image stolen. On the other hand, the vegetation generally in southern Africa (as I think I've said before) is spectacular - so I can't resist...

(I have no idea what any of these are called - my interest in flowers doesn't run as far as asking about names - the weird tree however was thoughtfully labeled "knobwood" although I think this raises more questions than answers.)

Swaziland fauna

Swaziland was a British protectorate from 1906 to 1968 and so, like Lesotho, was never part of the mad South African experiment in social engineering. Swaziland is an absolute monarchy, and the tourist posters and souvenir shops make much of the Umhlanga festival, when twenty thousand young women parade in front of King Mswati III so he can pick one of them out as new wife - to be fair, Mswati doesn't always insist on this perk, and has only chosen thirteen wives so far. His predecessor got to seventy. I noticed in the literature that King Mswati III was educated at Sherbourne College in Dorset, UK, just down the road from where I went to school - I have to wonder what his fellow schoolboys thought of his amorous future.

The north-west part of Swaziland, where we went, is over 1,200 metres. On Saturday the temperature was 25 degrees and extremely humid - walking was a sweaty effort - but when we woke up on Sunday morning it was 12 degrees and very misty - so misty in fact that the staff at Malolotja Nature Reserve, which we were planning to visit, advised us not to bother. Driving down from the hills in the fog, with ranks of fir trees barely visible along the side of the road, felt more like coming away from a European ski resort than leaving an African kingdom in the summer (the only difference was the stray cows in the middle of the road). Is Africa hot? Well southern Africa, at least, is nothing like Calabria in the middle of August, in my experience.

Above: orange millipede; zebra millipede; UFO spider (I'm making these names up - a cousin of this UFO spider hitched a ride on the back of my car all the way to Joburg - he's still there, spinning webs around the rear number plate); large moth (four inches across); female Cape Weaver busy destroying a nest just patiently built by a male (this is part of the mating process - males build nests, a female comes along and rips up the ones she doesn't like and accepts the male who built a good nest in which she'll feel confident about laying her eggs. This seems wasteful, but on the other hand you don't want your eggs falling out when there's a bit of wind); and few feathers on a good old classic peacock - yes there are African peacocks too.

Phophonyane

I went to Swaziland for the weekend (I'm amazed that I can say this). The Swazi border is about four hours' drive from Joburg on the usual excellent roads - but the border crossing took far longer than it should, partly because there are NO signs to explain the process, so you have to ask random people to find out that you need to park first, go here, go there, get a piece of paper, get it stamped somewhere else, hand it to an immigration officer who crumples it up without looking at it and throws it in a bin, etc (then start again at the Swazi border which was frankly better organised).

However we got to our destination in the end - the Phophonyane Falls "Ecolodge and Nature Reserve" in the northwest corner of the country - a mountainous, heavily forested logging area. The lodge is a few kilometres down a dirt track in an already remote area - and it's a fantastic place; the various cottages and tents (I stayed in a tent) are dotted around in lush sub-tropical vegetation and are connected by paths and footbridges which cross streams of red-brown water heading down to the Phophonyane river - my tent was so close to this river that I slept wonderfully, all background noise (insects, birds, rain) drowned out by the roar of the water. This isn't a game reserve as such (no hungry lions, myopic rhino, etc) so it's safe to walk around - there are well-marked paths that take you over the river, up to viewpoints of the falls, through the trees and back again, with lots of millipedes, spiders, giant snails, flowers, exotic plants and the occasional spider monkey troupe to look at.

(Above: my tent; the path from my tent back up the hill; a black'n'red millipede about five inches long; the biggest snail I've ever seen in my life - about four inches long; a mummy monkey; the falls.)

Wild dogs

I didn't realise, back in January, how lucky we were to see a pack of wild dogs in the Kruger Park. I've since met South Africans who've been going to game parks all their lives and have never seen a wild dog. They're an endangered species, with less than six thousand estimated to still be alive in the wild - they need to hunt over large territories, because they catch their prey by chasing them to exhaustion - so small parks can't sustain them, and farmers have poisoned most of the packs attempting to live outside of conservation areas.

Are wild dogs (also known as Painted Dogs) attractive or ugly? I thought at first they were a bit repulsive, with their big heavy heads (they have the fiercest bite of any carnivore, related to body size) - but the more I see of them the more I like them - there are a couple in Joburg zoo - and now I think that their markings are wonderful, really very much like various cans of paint have been thrown at them. My friend Rod Burn was showing me some of his excellent wildlife photos today and gave me permission to post some of his pix of wild dogs in the wild - they're much better than the blurry ones I took.