Ava's busy weeks

With three weeks left, we’ve just arrived home from the greatest adventure yet: excursion. We started off flying to Johannesburg and there, we went to several museusm and visited Soweto. Then on Friday morning, we left (very early, I might add) for Kruger National Park to see the Big Five. Johannesburg is quite a city, very much like New York around Central Park. This is the dream city, the place of opportunity and gold and I have seen now lived to see a large part of it. We visited the Hector Peiterson Museum, the Apartheid Museum, Constiution Hill, and the Sharpville Memorial Museum. While all of the museums were amazing, my favorites were the Apartheid Museum, which is absolutely stunning, and a must-see before you die, and the Hector Peiterson Museum. Since the Apartheid Museum is essentially self-explanatory in the name, I should explain the Hector Peiterson Museum. 

In late 1976, with apartheid in full swing, a new law had passed mandating that subjects in school were to be taught in Afrikaans. Afrikaans was not only restricted to white, but to classified coloured as well as native language. This law, under the Bantu Education Acts, would mainly effect black students who speak Xhosa, English, Zulu, Sutu, etc, but not Afrikaans. In Soweto, students were outraged. They came together to protest this law, where if it went through any longer they would fail school subjects and matric. On June 16th, between 10,000 and 20,000 black students gathered together to march in protest to Orlando Stadium in Soweto. By the end of the day, the death toll neared 150 and the wounded amounted to over a thousand. The apartheid police had open fired on the crowds of unarmed students and the first of those students to die was a 14-year-old boy named Hector Peiterson. There is the iconic picture showing Mbuyisa Makhubo holding Hector’s body while his sister cries besides them. On that day, hundreds of families were shattered in a barbaric manner with no reason from the police. After that day, hundreds more died in uprisings all over South Africa, where police would enter townships and open fire at random. This museum told the story of that day and of apartheid during those years. I found this museum to be so impactful because of the pictures, the stories and the videos of the Soweto Uprising of 1979. The videos play loudly as you watch and read the testimonies of that day from the police and of the students. It paints a horrifyingly real picture that screams, “Yes, this actually happened and we were never the same”. When you walk out of the museum, there is a fountain with rocks and on of those rocks, a little ways away from the fountain, is a quote from Mbuyisa Makhubo’s mother (the boy pictured with Hector Peiterson). She says her son, who disappeared after that day and has not been seen or heard from since, is not a hero. She explains that as a brother, it was his duty to carry Hector out of there. He could not have lived knowing he was left alone to die.  It’s amazing to see the range of ages and types of people who gave up their lives in the struggle for freedom.

           

Kruger National Park was another experience all together. I have been to zoos before and seen the Big Five in real life before (the Bronx Zoo has had all of them at different points in the past 20 years), but this was something completely different. It is one thing to see an elephant behind glass and another to see a mother elephant and her babies crossing the road less than 15 ft in front of you. The park does not look like the scenery set up in the “Lion King”, unfortunately there was no pride rock, but we did see a mother lion and her cubs relaxing in the grass on a night game drive. While I am not entirely into animals as I am into exhibits about people, it was well worth the 8-hour drive from Johannesburg to mPumalanga.

           

This past weekend, a small group and I went to Plettenberg Bay for a weekend vacation. After a7 hour drive for which we left at 2:45 AM for, we arrived at Cango Wildlife Ranch. There, I got to pet some cheetahs named Mia and Mini. The next day, I had an incredible experience playing with elephants at Knysna Elephant Park. Elephants are the largest land mammal and also one of the smartest. They are highly emotional and cognitively sound creatures. 

At Knysna, the elephants were hurt at one point and taken there to recover, being fed and cared for by humans. The elephants eventually remembered the feeders and the place felt they could open it up to the public to have close encounters with these large and magnificent creatures. There are currently 9 elephants and they have a huge acre of land to roam free and breed on as they please. The Park serves as preservation center for elephants in the area. The ones there are the only ones native to Knysna. You can walk with elephants, feed them and interact with them and you also have the option to ride them. I unfortunately did not ride, as my other co-educators did, but being able to hug, kiss, feed, and walk with the elephants was more than enough for me. I had a long interaction with one of them, Sally, the largest female. I looked into her large, bight brown eyes and you can actually see someone staring back at you. I understood her and she understood me. She stared for a bit and let me pet her, nudging me softly from time to time. The elephants of South Africa were poached ferociously when the English-speakers arrived. The Knysna heard was nearly extinct (out of thousands, only 3 remained at the start of Knysna Elephant Park in 1994). They were killed off, sold, forced to move as a means of “being saved” and stood by while their homes were destroyed. Their story reminds me of the people of South Africa. Why does it seem that humans destroy everything they touch? If not to look at other human beings who have had their basic human rights stripped from them by other people, look to nature. We come and conquer. There is no stone that is to remain unturned, no life unscathed. We cage and abuse animals because they do not have the voice to protest or the rights to protect them the ay humans are protected. And yet, humans become objects to also be mistreated. As I look at the vast expanse of land ahead of me on the way back to Loch from Plettenberg, I think about the race of humanity. We are all racing against time and each other but in the end we all come back to the same place. We all come back to where it all started: in Africa’s old and wise soil.