South Africa: in no man's land fucking
I already counted here the end of the trip, that llegada to Cape Agulhas. The emotions of an ending, of so much done and seen, but i didn't count south africa. And of the tourist I will make a brief summary: the west coast, Western y Northern Cape, I have always found the two most beautiful provinces in the country. The one in the north is an immense desert that has two secrets for the global village: Augrabies Falls and Kgalagadi National Park. Two wonders for that, for secret, by gaps compared to other places in this country.
The southernmost, Western, boasts the near perfection of Cape Town and its wild coastline, one of the most beautiful I saw on the planet. Leaving the big city on the way to Camps Bay and from there heading to Hout Bay and Chapman's Peak and then reaching Cape Point was almost a drug the times I lived there (2010 and 2011). And although I do not like Cape of Good Hope for being always full of people and having over-tamed a place that was previously called Cape of Storms, the entire Cape Peninsula and especially Cape Agulhas, the southernmost point of the continent, they are a canvas of the sea splitting earth and stones without compassion.
South Africa takes everyone's milk for being in no man's land
But today I want to say something that I repeat on some occasions as a relief, for justice. Whenever I enter South Africa I think it must be screwed to be from this place. And it is, I know it is. Because South Africa takes everyone's milk for being in no man's land. It is not a rich country when it rubs shoulders with the already developed countries, not even has a gap between the select club of emerging in which is the poor brother.
And for the tourist, however, South Africa is highly developed, too much for his photos with friends to show that he has a moral commitment to misery and yesterday. There are no tribes, no mud roads on which to boast that the car stopped, no reed huts in which lives are accumulated without water or light. And there is poverty, much, but that is in cities that tourists have heard are dangerous and it is horrendous poverty, dirty and ugly that looks fatal in the living room frames. And then you hear that South Africa is not Africa because Africa is primitive and rural. And so South Africa has no place to settle.
It is the least racist country in Africa
And me, that I ended a trip here that crossed Africa from north to south, I think I hope South Africa is the way. Because despite what is said and his terrible past, is the least racist country in Africa. Here live, with many problems and tensions, but they live, black, mestizos and whites. Only in South Africa, and in those percentages, this is a possible experiment. Here a message was launched by the incomparable Mandela of coexistence that is unique and non-transferable and that it is convenient to go to the place of origin to hear it. Here's a certain middle class growing, slow, but it grows, in which little by little the colors are fading. Slow, very slow, but the movement is positive and constant even though there is so much corruption and so much injustice to fix.
And I was going through the N2, on the outskirts of Cape Town and it made me sad to see the township of Khayelitsha, Guguletu y Langa. Thousands of miserable shacks piled up on top of each other like then. "Fuck, nothing changed in these almost three years ", he said to me just when I discovered rows of new houses, large, cement and with solar panels. Few, must be more, and at the same time also many, because before there was none.
South Africa is my country in Africa, the one I love the most. I think it is partly because the contempt of travelers to this place as an example of the continent bothers me. I was never interested in the message that Africa should be mud and mopane no matter how much mopane and mud drive me crazy. South Africa is an example, my example, and a perfect ending for whoever crossed in four months 25 countries. It is because South Africa is more yesterday, today and tomorrow that nobody.
