South africa

Wednesday

Amy Rose Everett

Cape Town after Covid: business buzzes despite power outages

Blazing sunshine. Endless traffic. Horns honking. Wine bars heaving. Trance music blasting. Street hawkers calling. Coastal wind (called the "Cape Doctor" by locals) whistling. Grit in one eye, the other looking over my shoulder. Hair flying in every direction. To explore central Cape Town is to be gut-punched: by an evolving backdrop of sublime nature and the complexity of the human condition. To visit the city’s world-class restaurants, concept stores and co-working sites is to share a street with the sick, hungry and homeless. Look up, and you’re hypnotized by the monolithic mountains beyond; a brief distraction from the painfully obvious disparity. From some angles it feels like the Mother City is being wrapped in a tight hug.

casa del sonder cape town michelle fredman

Thursday

Amy Rose Everett

Zululand, not Disneyland

I’d heard that KwaZulu-Natal province in South Africa delivers life-changing memories. Roaming Shaka Zulu’s hunting ground. The Big Five. Bushveld soil on your shoes. Falling asleep to the music of the night, curtains open in anticipation of a burning sunrise. I flew there for a thrilling, once-in-a-lifetime safari experience. And I got it. While sitting on the toilet. It’s a unique frustration, hearing the phone ring out, from the bathroom. My first morning at Thanda Safari transports me back to my teenage years in the 2000s; the last time I had a house phone. “I’m coming!” I shout to no one in particular, having quickly dashed to my digs, post-crack of dawn game drive. “Miss Everett! Oh, thank goodness! You ARE there! You must not leave your room!

safari

Wednesday

Amy Rose Everett

Cape Town, the epicenter for African arts

In January of this year, I joined the yearly flight of "swallows" who descend on Cape Town. Thousands of pasty Europeans swap their own chilly hemisphere for a few weeks in technicolor paradise. A day in, I was sold. Mountains to climb, waves to surf, open-toe shoes, a completely unworn jacket. Everyone I met seemed to make this a yearly thing, and I could see why. I spent a few days gaping at the sublime natural beauty before something else caught my eye: the art scene. Cape Town is the epicenter for African arts. Boutique hotels and restaurants are beautifully appointed with painstakingly handmade creations everywhere you look. Museums and commercial galleries abound with exhibitions spanning the whimsical and politically charged.

cape town african arts

Wednesday

John Pietro

Why South Africa is cozying up to Russia and China

Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine opened the most dramatic divide between East and West since the Cold War. Most of these divisions were clear beforehand — Hungary and Turkey were longtime thorns in the side of NATO, for example. Yet South Africa’s warming ties with Russia and China seemed to come out of nowhere. South Africa's initial reaction to the invasion was the same as much of the Western world, demanding that Russia leave Ukraine. That did not last, however. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said on March 17 that “The war could have been avoided if NATO had heeded the warnings from amongst its own leaders and officials over the years that its eastward expansion would lead to greater, not less, instability in the region.

Monday

Heather Mac Donald

Inside the Omicron fear factory

In March 2020, a profile of the typical Covid victim emerged from Italy. The average decedent was eighty years old, with approximately three comorbidities such as heart disease, obesity or diabetes. The young had little to worry about; the survival rate for the vast majority of the population was well over 99 percent. That portrait never significantly changed. The early assessments of Covid out of Italy have remained valid through today. And so it will prove with the Omicron variant. The data out of South Africa, after five weeks of Omicron spread, suggest that Omicron should be a cause for celebration, not fear.

omicron fear

Tuesday

Nathan Edmondson

The hidden victims of the South African shutdown

I sit in a National Park in South Africa, looking at an empty restaurant in which a robust staff, hired on for the peak international travel season, stand idle and bored. Many will likely be let go next week as the tourism declines yet again. Many were out of work for a year and only just hired back. The ripple effect of the latest travel shutdown is felt immediately here. Many parks in Southern Africa lost 80 percent of funding through the last shutdown, which in South Africa was one of the most severe. We work here with the Rangers, tasked with protecting the last great population of rhino and elephant, and they cannot afford boots, let alone salaries to pay the staff who work without pause.

south africa shutdown

Thursday

Lewis M. Andrews

Escaping from South Africa during the Omicron panic

One of the most gripping scenes in the classic film Casablanca is at the very beginning, when many of the characters who would feature in the story are seen together in a busy city plaza. Suddenly silent as a small Lisbon-bound plane passes overhead, they all look up, and the audience can see in their faces the cumulating stress of not knowing when, or even if, they would get out of wartime Morocco and fly to America. I never imagined I would experience anything remotely like that until just a few days ago when my twenty-eight-year-old son Zachary and I were wrapping up a long-planned and, due to the coronavirus, frequently postponed vacation to South Africa.

omicron

Tuesday

Cockburn

Comparing Fauci to Josef Mengele seems ill-advised

Cockburn always thought Thanksgiving was the holiday designated for sharing madcap political views that one day you'll regret saying aloud. So kudos to Fox Nation's Lara Logan for extending the tradition into advent, by offering a comparison between Anthony Fauci and Nazi doctor Josef Mengele on Monday's edition of Fox News Primetime. Logan, a former war correspondent, was invited on to discuss the Omicron variant. Presumably the logic behind the booking was that the variant emerged from her home country, South Africa. Here's the expertise she chose to provide: On Dr. Fauci, this is what people say to me. He doesn't represent science to them, he represents Josef Mengele. Dr. Josef-the Nazi doctor who did experiments on Jews in the second world war and in the concentration camps.

lara logan

Tuesday

Bridget Phetasy

How to overcome the new fear of flying

Back in another lifetime when I was getting certified to become a yoga instructor, my teacher always asked us, ‘Is this a fear that’s keeping you alive or a fear that’s keeping you from living?’ She would pose this question as we hesitated to try a headstand or a handstand. It was a hard question to answer then. It’s even harder now, in the middle of a global pandemic when your most irrational fears could be justified. In early January of this year I was going insane. We were approaching almost a full year of lockdown here in California, the state with arguably the most stringent lockdown measures in the nation. At the time, all the restaurants were closed. You couldn’t get a haircut. Again.

flying

Sunday

Fr Terry Tastard

Trekking towards the future

The Voortrekker Monument sits on a hill on the outskirts of Pretoria, South Africa’s administrative capital. During apartheid (‘apartness’) this brooding tower symbolized the Afrikaners’ belief in their manifest destiny and journey to self-empowerment. The place, whose name means ‘Great Trekker’, was popular with school groups, politicians and the armed services. Today it is well maintained but feels forlorn. It is an embarrassing reminder of the past. To get there is a short drive along the highway from Sandton, the northern suburban city which has largely replaced Johannesburg’s decaying central business district.

voortrekker

Saturday

Slavoj Zizek

How to boil a frog

Back in the early 1990s Cyril Ramaphosa, South Africa’s president, outlined the new ANC government’s strategy to deal with the whites: 'it would be like boiling a frog alive, which is done by raising the temperature very slowly. Being cold-blooded, the frog does not notice the slow temperature increase, but if the temperature is raised suddenly, the frog will jump out of the water.' As Dr Oriani-Ambrosini put it, 'He meant that the black majority would pass laws transferring wealth, land, and economic power from white to black slowly and incrementally, until the whites lost all they had gained in South Africa, but without taking too much from them at any given time to cause them to rebel or fight.

frog