Mauritius, we hardly knew ye

March 4

It looks like the most significant casualty of the very rocky seas that we continue to encounter will be our day in Mauritius. News came yesterday that at this point, we are so far behind schedule now--we've been going more slowly than planned, and the captain has also diverted us off course to avoid a tropical storm--that we are not going to have time there to disembark.  We'll refuel, then leave immediately so as not to be late on arrival in Kochi, India, our next stop.

Which is too bad, and apparently there has been some grumbling among the students. Mauritius was a short stop--a single day--but it has lovely beaches, apparently. And everyone is eager already for a day off the ship. But this really does fit into the category of things beyond our control; there's a cyclone to the west and the tropical storm to the east kicking up the waters, and we're threading a needle between them. Last year, the spring voyage had a much larger diversion when they had to scratch Japan off the itinerary due to the earthquake there (they went to Taiwan). Given that history, our slight diversion seems pretty minor.

Cape Town, Day Four

February 27

Vicki:  Today Maeve was showing signs of exhaustion. She was screaming like a maniac when things didn’t go her way, and she was averting her gaze in irritation when people smiled their greetings. If you know her, you know that this kind of thing is highly unusual.

She stayed home – or, rather, on the ship! – with John while Aidan and I ventured out to visit the Iziko South African Museum, which sits on one end of the gorgeous Company’s Gardens in the middle of the city. It’s the nation’s natural history museum, featuring life-sized dioramas of extinct animals and taxidermied tableau of still-existing species. They have a couple of fossilized skeletons, too, including that of a mid-sized Apatosaurus (still massive) and a blue whale. Aidan determined our route, and he was scrupulous that we didn’t get distracted by the shiny exhibits in any other section of the museum before we had finished viewing the section we were in. Kept us on track, he did.

 We each found exhibits we enjoyed:

Aidan: I can’t really decide what my favorite part is between the mammals and water world exhibit. They both had animals, which I really like, and I just got really interested in both of them. In the mammals exhibit, the interesting thing was that you get to see what the animals look like, but it’s not dangerous. The monkeys all had walking sticks, so I think it was kind of funny. I’d always thought that monkeys were things that wouldn’t really have walking sticks. I guess they had walking sticks because people wanted them to look like humans, because they’re our old ancestors. In water world, you get to see the animals without being in danger of drowning. I got interested because I didn’t know that there were so many different kinds of dolphins. It turns out that there are quite a lot. I only though that there were two or three kinds. In the whale part, I stood in a whale jaw. I wasn’t scared of being in the jaw, but I was scared because there was a gigantic whale skeleton right above me, and I was scared it was going to fall down. I saw quite a lot of things. There was a penguin exhibit. The water exhibit was pretty much, “Name a sea creature, and it was there.”

Vicki: I was amazed by the exhibit on the rock paintings of the southernmost part of what is now South Africa. The most ancient examples were mind-boggling by virtue of their sheer and practically incomprehensible antiquity. Recent evidence – genetic, and linguistic, and archaeological – point to southernmost Africa as the probable location where modern humans first developed a little over 100,000 years ago. The piece of evidence I got to see with my own eyes was an archaeological find, made in 2008, of the oldest known painting kit found close to the scene of the oldest known rock paintings. The kit is stunning in it’s completeness. It includes a mollusk shell used to hold the paint, various flints used to grind the pigments, a small stirrer used to mix the pigments with animal fat and blood, and a seal scapula that shows signs of charring on one side and pigments on the other, suggesting that it served as a surface for cooking the ingredients together into a batch of paint. It was also stunning in its age – 100,00 years old. A sandstorm that filled the cave soon after the painting kit was left preserved it almost perfectly.

The cave paintings found near it are the oldest physical evidence of humans rendering ideas or concepts in symbolic form. The practice of rock painting with ochre in this area of the world, though, continued until very recently. The museum had examples from a mere 200 and 300 years ago, one depicting a British soldier pulling a cart. The displays included late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century testimonials explaining rock paintings from some of the Khoisan people (the current name for a diversity of  aboriginal groups of southern Africa), who were shown both ancient and recent paintings. It’s hard to generalize, but a number of testimonials described the paintings as renderings of the visions experienced in shamanic trance states, during which the entranced people caught animals capable of bringing the rains and brought them to places in need of water.

Visiting the museum, it turns out, can tell us at least as much about our own current-day practices of representation as it can about ancient ones. As an anthropologist on our voyage pointed out, rock paintings and artifacts from Khoisan cultures more generally are displayed in the natural history museum, with the stuffed dead animals, while European paintings are displayed in the art and cultural history museums. This was very much the way that indigenous cultures were displayed – as part of “nature” rather than “culture” -- in U.S. museums well into my childhood. I remember clearly the ethnographic exhibits in the Smithsonian Museum of Natural history, featuring mannequins arranged around sample huts with sample artifacts. Those are now gone, and as our anthropologist friend told us, South African museum curators are attempting to find more respectful ways to display indigenous cultures.

Rough seas

March 3

We are still catching up on describing our time in South Africa; more posts will be coming over the next several days. Right now, we're on the Indian Ocean, headed to Mauritius, where we will stop for a day, and then on to Kochi, India, for close to a week.

Most of the rhythms of shipboard life have become familiar. What's been dominating our passage over the last three days, however, have been some of the roughest seas to date. We've been lucky; everyone in the group has stayed free of seasickness, something that cannot be said for many on the ship. But the heavy going still takes its toll in tiredness and a general sense of struggle, as every move needs to be calculated; it's just harder to do anything.

We're also learning, though, that there are a wide variety of ways in which the seas can pose challenges.  And it also matters where you are on the ship. Sometimes, the ship is rocking side-to-side, and you feel that more on the upper decks. Most recently, over the last 48 hours or so, the ship has been heading into fairly big swells (how big I'm not sure--at least 10 feet, probably more sometimes), and the front of the ship has been lifting high up and then crashing down.  Since our cabins are in the front of the ship, we feel that a great deal. It's a lot like riding a roller coaster--a slow ascent up, and then a swift descent, ending in a crash, sending spray up past our windows. And you get the same where-did-my-stomach-go feel as on a roller coaster.  All night long.  Looking forward to calmer seas--or land!

Cape Point

February 26

John: We hired a taxicab and a driver today to take us out of Cape Town so that we could see some of the surrounding countryside. Our destination: Cape Point, the southern tip of South Africa, where the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans meet. From there, there's nothing until you get to Antarctica--we had to see it.

Our driver, Raj, was recommended to us by some other people on the boat who had taken a similar tour as the one we intended on the first day here. And Raj was good; knowledgeable and thoughtful, he took good care of us. Raj was born in the Cape Town neighborhood that was known as District SIx. Past tense is in order here because District Six was destroyed in the late 1960s and early 1970s as part of the apartheid regime's program of moving black and colored people away from white areas. It probably also mattered that District Six is pretty prime real estate, close to the center of the city and the harbor. Raj and his family were moved to a township about 25 kilometers away; once all 60,000 residents had been relocated in 1974, the entire area was razed to the ground, with the exception of the mosque, synagogue, and church.

The presence of those three houses of worship, though, serves as an index to what Raj described as the lively, cosmopolitan air of the place. Raj has a binder of pictures in his cab that he shared with us as he shares, I guess, with many of his rides, a binder filled with pictures of District Six in the old days. And it does look like an interesting place, with a mixed population (Raj himself would count as "colored" by the South African racial taxonomy, descended from people who came here from India). Most of the land is still vacant--the government was unable to do much with it, and only in the last few years have some homes been built, given to old people who were displaced. We asked Raj if he would ever be interested in returning if he could, and he said, no, it would never be the same as it was.

We proceeded. Raj drove us down the coastline on the Indian Ocean side of the peninsula, past some of the beach towns there. We stopped at a place called Boulder's Beach, where is colony of 3,000 or so African penguins is in residence:

Boulders Beach is in Simons Town, a very charming little town that was built up in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the home for the British Navy here; it's now the home for the South African Navy. Which must be a pretty small thing, since Simons Town is teeny--a street along the beach front and a few streets radiating back from it. And, while it's charming, it's also not touristed--it simply is what it is, a small beach-side town with a lot of cute British colonial buildings and a colony of penguins.  It may not stay that way; if you start seeing "Simons Town" tee-shirts and baseball caps, you'll know that its days as a sleepy backwater are over.

Onward to the Cape itself. Here again words will fail. First, the entire area is rich with animal life--we saw baboons just sitting by the side of the road (you're warned to close the windows and lock the doors as you approach the area--they can get aggressive, especially if they think you have food). They're everywhere:

A troop of baboons--that's a big male in the middle

The Cape is a long, thin, rocky peninsula, punctuated at the end by a hill that you can reach by a footpath, or, as we did, via cable-car.  The view from the Cape itself is astonishing. The approach is well-manicured for tourists, and are plenty of other people there, but the landscape feels still raw and untouchedThis is where the Atlantic and Indian Oceans meet, and on a day like this, with clear blue skies, it feels like you can see to Antarctica, here at the apostrophe at the bottom of the world.

Cape Town, Day 2

February 25

John: This is the first time that we've been in port on a weekend, so today we got to do a weekend thing--go to the weekly market held at what is called the Old Biscuit Mill in Cape Town. It's an area that used to be industrial, but that, in the manner of such things elsewhere, has now been converted to trendy designer studios and, on Saturdays, an enormous food market. It's clearly a scene, with mobs of people, locals intermixed with tourists, and everyone looking suitably bourgeois. The thing is, the food is really fantastic--we had dim sum, bagels, curry, and ice cream (four major food groups right there!) and everything was delicious. In fact, all the food we've had in Cape Town so far has been incredibly good. Maybe our taste buds are particularly eager after the more-than-adequate-but-pretty-bland food on the ship, which has left us all starving for fresh ingredients, but everything we have eaten here has been extremely flavorful.

The crowd at the Old Biscuit Mill food market. Charlottesville's City Market could be like this!

Speaking of which, this evening, we went out to Emily's, a restaurant with a good recommendation in a couple of guide books. And it, too, was great! We met the chef, who looks like he just came out of a Dutch Master painting, van dyke beard and all. The food was South Afirican--I had a springbok carpaccio appetizer (delicious--springbok is a gazelle that abounds here and is the South African national animal). And the wine, also of course a South African vintage. was terrific. We got Maeve dressed up in a pretty dress we got in Ghana that she had resisted wearing to this point:

Maeve's dress from Ghana--the picture doesn't do it justice.

Astute readers of this blog (that is, all of you) will likely have noticed that to this point we have made no mention of the kinds of things for which South Africa is perhaps best-well known to Americans of our generation, namely its history of racial segregation, apartheid, political conflict, and the events that led to Nelson Mandela becoming President in the 1990s after his dramatic release from captivity after twenty-seven years as a political prisoner. To me, it's sort of astonishing to be here at all; when I was in college, the divestiture movement was in full force, and there were frequent student agitations for Williams to divest itself of its holdings in a big mining company here, for example. All of that is quite ancient history to the college students on the voyage--almost all of whom were born after Mandela was released from prison in 1990!--and South Africa has opened itself up to the world in a way that one could never have imagined back in the 1980s. 

Yet the casual visitor to Cape Town could readily come away from a short visit of a few days with absolutely no awareness of any of this history. Indeed, it would be quite possible to leave here with the impression that South Africa's population was overwhelmingly white and very prosperous. It's almost as if there had been a systematic attempt to divide the races, to make it possible for white South Africans not even to see most of the non-white people who share the land with them, much less to see the conditions in which they lived….  Oh, wait.

Apartheid came to an official end in 1994, but it was so deeply entrenched, socially and economically, that there's a surprising extent to which at least here in Cape Town, it certainly feels as though the system were still in place.  The majority black population overwhelmingly lives in "townships," shantytowns that are out of sight of the central areas of the city, and come into Cape Town only to work, mostly in the lower rungs of the service industry. We'll start pursuing this more fully, starting with the next post.

Cape Town, Day 1

Feburary 24

John:  Our arrival in South Africa was anticipated in a way the day earlier with our roughest seas to date on this voyage--ten- to twelve-foot swells that sent the ship rolling side-to-side in a very dramatic fashion, with the occasional truly remarkable jolt that would send chairs tipping over, people crashing into each other in the halls (with the sound of a collective "Whoooooa!"), stuff falling off shelves. We heard the terrible, terrible news that some of the liquor and a lot of the stemware in the Faculty Lounge bar was destroyed when it fell to the floor in a particularly big swell. Fortunately, no one in our group got seriously sea-sick, and we simply battened down the hatches and stuck together while stuff went flying all around us. Apparently rough seas are pretty typical as you approach the southern tip of Africa, where the Atlantic and Indian Oceans meet; a couple of years ago, the ship was delayed for two days by winds so high that they made the final approach to the docks impossibly risky. 

But we woke up to a view that made it immediately clear that the ride was worth it. Out on the ship's observation deck, we could see the amazing sight that distinguishes Cape Town, the view of the beautiful Table Mountain, the backdrop to the city and the entire Cape.

Cape Town is a beautiful city, with the mountain in the background and the ocean at its front door. We're not the first people to make the comparison to the Bay Area in the US--you get the same combination of ocean, cliffs, and urbanity that you can get there. If anything, it looks and feels a little nicer, since it's less crowded and the infrastructure is therefore less strained. The waterfront, named for Queen Victoria and her son Alfred, who did the initial development of the port as early as the 1860s, is reminiscent of the Inner Harbor in Baltimore, with shops, restaurants, and entertainers--though again nicer, with a mix of Victorian and modern architecture, and, again, Table Mountain as the backdrop. We had lunch at an outdoor cafe on a street turned into a pedestrian mall that felt a lot like Charlottesville. The contrast with Ghana, where we were last week, could hardly be greater. 

Aidan:  Well, Cape Town is a magnificent place. It has tons of fun stuff to do.  It's a very big place, so it takes a long time to walk from place to place. And the sidewalks are made out of bricks so it kind of hurts your feet. I'd recommend the company gardens. It's a big garden, which is really beautiful. 

There was a Castle, the Castle of Good Hope. It's  a really awesome thing. It's the shape of a star, so if somebody is at a corner, they can see different ways. There are tons of cannons, and there's this military museum, which has a lot of really awesome things in it. It has actual rifles! it has pistols and swords and shields. We saw an actual cannon fire--except that it didn't have a cannon ball in it.  Because if it did, it would blow up some of the Castle--they didn't want to harm the Castle.

The signal cannon being fired at the Castle of Good Hope

John: Aidan is describing the sites of our first-day's sortie.  First, we went to the Castle of Good Hope, built by the Dutch when they arrived here in the middle of the seventeenth century, and then expanded and refurbished by the British when they took over the place. We explored the ramparts, and let the kids--we had gone out with our friends Victor and Elizabeth and their son Josiah, and with Lori and Ridge and their sons Charlie and Sam--run around in the castle grounds. 

Outside the castle is the city hall. The area in front of it was a green space and parade grounds when the Dutch were here, and is also the space where the crowd gathered to hear Nelson Mandela give his first address after being released from prison in 1990.  May be someday it won't be a won't be a parking lot, but that's what it is now.

In the afternoon, we walked around the town, and once again let kids run around, this time in the "Company Gardens," a lovely botanical garden on the site of the first farmland that the Dutch used when they founded Cape Town. The idea at first was that Cape Town would be a supply post for Dutch ships traveling to India and China. 

After our day of rough seas, I had to wonder about what it was like to be sailing for months in those small wooden vessels, with no idea, really, where you were, and no good idea about when if ever you might get to where you were hoping to go, and what you might find there. Add in scurvy, rats, storms, sharks, and so on, and it must really have been quite an experience. We retired to our ship, a virtual luxury hotel, now calmly moored at the dock near the V & A Waterfront.

Ghana: National Museum and roadside shopping

Vicki: While John visited the slave dungeons on the coast, I went into Accra with Aidan, Maeve, and our friends Josiah and his mom Elizabeth. We visited the National Museum, which has artifacts and displays providing a window in the long history of human life in this part of Africa. We saw prehistoric stone tools, tribal carvings both ancient and recent, and displays about encounters with the Europeans. Portuguese sailors first landed here in 1471. They brought home reports about the apparent abundance of gold possessed by the elites of the coastal kingdoms, prompting Portugal to establish a trading operation intended to put gold into their cash-strapped coffers. One of my favorite displays was of the bronze weights used in Ashanti territory to measure gold and gold dust. They were crafted into whimsical shapes – laughing people, animals, warriors, and dancers. I wish I had taken a picture, but chasing Maeve kept me busy. She thought of the space less as a museum than as a race track.

As John’s post on the slave dungeons shows, however, this early trade paved the way for one of history’s greatest catastrophes, the slave trade. When the gold ran thin on the coast, Europeans starting purchasing slaves to use as forced labor in the New World. Enslaved people brought to the Americas had an average life-span of less than 7 years, if they made it there at all after their dangerous trek to the coast, brutal imprisonment while waiting for the slave ships, and the trip across the Atlantic in conditions that can only be described as murderous. The European demand for slaves turned slave-raiding, which had been a historically brutal but also occasional practice connected to war, into a regular business serving a seemingly bottomless demand for slaves. People from the inland areas were captured in mind-boggling numbers – 12 million or more. At the museum, we saw displays about the slave trade, including the irons used to confine small children and the documents passed among Europeans showing their means of accounting. The museum had a model of the Cape Coast slave castle that John and later I visited, but miniaturizing the slave castle had had the clear disadvantage of making it look very cute and fun to play with. The kids loved it.

After the museum, our gang went to a store called Global Mamas that sells goods made by local women according to fair trade principles. Ghana is a cash-strapped nation were people work very hard but on average earn less than $2.00 a day. As a friend on the ship who taught a unit about fair trade in Ghana explained to me, many of the women of Ghana are skilled seamstresses without a market for their goods. They make for themselves the beautiful clothes crafted from gorgeous textiles that we could see everywhere we went. But since so many women can sew and so very few people have enough money to buy ready-made goods, there’s not much of a local market for their skills. Global Mamas employs them at a decent wage to make clothes for the western market. The organization provides the dress patterns suited to western. The women decorate and dye the fabric and sew it into dresses, shirts, backpacks, all kinds of bags, table linens, and more things than I can name. The women also make beads from clay, glass, and stone, which they string into jewelry. Women working for Global Mamas can make as much as 1000% of their usual salary, which sounds like a lot until you realize that it amounts to about $60 a week and that they use the money to support their extended families. The operation does, though, help lift people out of poverty. I purchased largely, even though I can’t pretend that doing so gives any evidence of my virtue any more than it does of my pleasure in buying pretty things.

Global Mamas is a pretty cushy shopping experience for Ghana – it’s enclosed, air-conditioned, and the fixed prices relieved us of the (for us) burden of extended bargaining that typically characterizes commercial exchanges here. By contrast, great deal of shopping in Ghana occurs alongside and even on the roads, which are lined with stores from one end of Accra to the other. A colleague on the ship, who’s spent a good deal of time in Ghana, told us beforehand that you can buy anything you want from your car in Ghana, and she wasn’t exaggerating. The stop-and-go traffic is threaded with merchants selling their goods from car to car, always from containers balanced on their heads, according the local custom. You can reach out from your window and buy not only the water and snacks intended for hungry commuters, but also jumper cables, fan belts, sunglasses, underwear, kitchen goods, and cell-phone cases. Most of the stores along the road are housed in decaying cement buildings and shacks that were probably constructed by their operators. For a westerner, it’s odd to see refrigerators, couches, office chairs, and glass coffee tables sold by the road, block after block and mile after mile. I found the mismatch between many of the goods and the spaces in which they’re sold jarring:  flat-screened televisions, for instance, are stacked up in a dusty, ramshackle stands without electricity or running water. I took pictures, often at random, from the bus, but none of them captures the impression made by miles and miles of stores.