South Africa trip report, continued

[lethargic_man]

Johannesburg started life a century ago after gold was discovered there. Today, around the city you can see slag heaps from the mining, like this:

What's not obvious from this photo is that the soil in Johannesburg is actually red. The yellow colour of the slag heap actually derives from gold. A century ago it was unprofitable to extract the gold that's present in low concentrations in such slag heaps; today, with the benefit of newer technology, the mining companies are returning to them to get the gold out.

As it attracted workers from around the country, you can hear all eleven of South Africa's languages spoken in Johannesburg. I was intrigued in particular to hear the distinctive click sounds of the Khoi-San languages, and of Xhosa and Zulu, which borrowed the sounds from them: Indeed the first letter of "Xhosa" is a click. (I can't pronounce the name very well; I can't get from making a click with my tongue to the more normal sounds of the rest of the word without a gap whilst I rearrange my mouthparts, something native speakers manage to do without.)

When I went on safari in the northwest, however (see my next post), the difference in demographics became readily apparent: all the native people there were Tswana, the people who gave their name to the neighbouring country of Botswana. (There were also a number of Afrikaners there.)

And when I went to Cape Town it was also immediately apparent things were different there: In the north—constituting the former Boer republics—with perhaps one exception all the black people spoke with accents reflecting native languages, and all the white people with Afrikaner accents. However, when I exited from Cape Town airport (at the heart of the former British Cape Colony), I was met by a driver of Indian ancestry, who spoke with an Afrikaner accent.

It turns out, as I learned from the museum in the Slave House in Cape Town, that there used to be a slave trade between South Africa and the east, quite distinct from the slave trade between west Africa and the Americas that is better known in the UK (and US). (It was the abolition of slavery by the British and the, as they saw it, inadequate recompense of the slaveholders by the government, that led to the Boers leaving the Cape Colony on the Great Trek in the 1830s.)

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One thing which was noticeable as I flew from Gauteng (the capital region containing Johannesburg and Pretoria) to Madikwe was the degree to which vegetation grew down below in straight lines. It turns out that much of what I had taken as completely wild veld was old abandoned farmland.

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In other countries, as one is walking around a flea market, the sellers will generally wait for you to approach them before speaking. In South Africa it's different; every time you approach a stall, its owner will greet you with "How are you?" And being polite, I always replied, and often ended up getting drawn into conversation. It was a bit wearying when there were lots of stalls, and you had no intention of buying anything from most of them, but I have no idea what the correct protocol for handling the situation actually was.

One thing that all these stalls sold in copious quantities was beadwork figurines like these ones. I immediately fell in love with them, and had to restrain myself from buying more of them than I could carry home (given that I was flying hand-luggage only once I had got rid of my laptop). I thought if I got lots, I'd end up regretting it afterwards, but I now wish I'd got a few more. In the end I got a giraffe, which I gave (not without a bit of difficulty—think Bilbo and the One Ring) to aviva_m and a chameleon which is now climbing on the wall of my living room. (I did look for rabbits for her, but there were none—and indeed, rabbits are not found in this part of the world, though there are hares, I think.)

Comments

[liv]

Ooh, this is really interesting. I really like how you notice linguistic stuff when you travel.

And it's cool that you found some souvenirs you were actually really drawn to, so they won't just be clutter but a pleasant reminder of the trip. Chameleon was a really good choice. Weird to think of an ecosystem without rabbits, though!