Wednesday, April 14, 2004  

With the spotty Internet access and the way South African Tourism has been kept us running, it's been hard to keep a journal.

Today is Wednesday, our second to last day in SA. We arrived in Johannesburg on Monday afternoon, checked into our hotel Sandton (white) and immediately left for a music festival about an hour outside the city (black). The festival ended up being one of the highlights of our trip---and not so much because of the music, which was a celebration of African divas and it featured by performances by Miriam Makeba, Yvonne Chaka Chaka and, er, Angie Stone. I like Makeba, Chaka is OK (she's SA bubblegum Afropop) and I wasn't familiar with the other artists---SA gospel, pop and a woman I've heard a lot about but never heard: Brenda Fasse, a SA pop star with Whitney Houston-like tendencies ("recreationally," I mean, not her singing).

So if not the music, then what made the festival so special? That's right, Sparky, the people. We met and danced and drank and kibitzed with the South Africans that weren't really on our SA Tourism schedule: everyday black folk. And considering that this country is 90% black, it's a bit of a surprise that SA Tourism didn't try to hook us up with more of the indigenous population. Luckily, Gil, Dan and I don't have a problem asking to do something that's not on our schedule. Gil and I had a great experience in a township outside of Cape Town, where we stopped off in a community art gallery. The diva fest wasn't on our schedule either, but Sean Barlow from Afropop.org knew about it and said we should all go---we did and we were thrilled.

We had a different off-the-beaten path experience yesterday. Thuli, our sparkplug of a guide---you should have seen her downing the Hanza beers and shakin' it down at the diva fest---took Dan, Gil & myself to Soweto yesterday, the enormous township outside of Jo'berg. Soweto was on our schedule, and it has become a common experience for a tourist visiting Jo'burg---after all, it is the former home of Nelson Mandela, still the current home of Bishop Desmond Tutu, and if it wasn't for the political meetings and uprisings in the township, perhaps SA would still be fighting against apartheid. But Thuli grew up in Soweto, she takes tourists there all the time, and she isn't one for simple routine. So after our meal in Soweto restaurant, we bought up the rest of the buffet table of food and delivered it to a woman that Thuli knows who is suffering from AIDS. She has twins, and her husband is long gone. As we were pulling up to her house, however, a whole batch of children across the street started screaming hello and waving to us---they know that Thuli's van means food and/or clothes. So we took out some of the food for them, and then walked over to the woman's house. She wasn't home, but the kids and their buddies were there in the all-dirt backyard, staying out of the tiny three-room shack because it's too crowded and probably because they had left on the burners of the hot plate even as the coal oven was roaring away---it was about 100 degrees in the kitchen, which means it was about 85 in the rest of the house. Mom showed about 10 minutes later, the kids posed for photos (the instant gratification of seeing a digital photo goes over big anywhere), and we went on our way. While we felt good deep down about what we did, it also felt like a drop of water in the ocean. As we drove out of Soweto all you could see were thousands of more kids and adults just like the folks we visited.

Today we are going to Thuli mom's house to eat traditional Zulu dishes such as Ox tongue---wait, did I just hear MR dry-heaving across the Atlantic?

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