I don’t remember exactly what convinced me to go to South Africa. Maybe simple curiosity or maybe the love I feel for those distant lands still somewhat uncontaminated, but it was a true revelation. Though my heart has always belonged to this land, I had no idea what would be waiting for me this time.
Glowing cities full of night life and infrastructures that you could find in any industrialized city of the western world coexisting with the townships, immense stretches of land, heirloom of the Apartheid, where a lot of south Africans are haunted by the specter of hunger, poverty, and by the highest rate of HIV infection in the world.
Experiencing this land, if even for a small period, I saw its heart. Visiting the less touristic areas, I dig the glowing exterior and I found the other face of South Africa.
It’s an ancient land, with a past marked by wars, struggles and oppression but also by richness and hope.
In Europe, like in the rest of the western world, we are not used to deal with this type of heritage. Africa tends to be seen as a tinderbox ready to explode at any moment, a backward continent that is incapable of self-sufficiency, and not accustomed to the rules of democracy and of civil cohabitation. Not wanting to believe in this fixed ideas or prejudices, I decided to retrace two thousand years of South African history: from the arrival of the Bantu to the coming of the Portuguese, and the conquest of the Dutch and the British. From Shaka, “the black Napoleon” who created the world’s most feared army, to the ferocious battle between the British and the Boers; from the Apartheid to Nelson Mandela’s “Rainbow Nation”.
Today, South Africa is a land where different ethnic groups and languages coexist despite all the contradictions. It is not only the richest and most powerful country in Africa, but also a testing ground for the future: what happens here will determine if the humankind will be able to overcome the overwhelming social, economic, and environmental challenges to come.
Besides the incredible natural beauties, this Country - scarred and tried by the past wars, but full of hope - is the witness to one of the biggest experiments of racial harmony in the world, which intensity you can perceive wherever you go. In fact this is one of the most interesting aspects of the trip, and there couldn’t be a better time to visit this incredible Country than now, when the colors of the Rainbow Nations are finally blending into one.
Fifteen years after the official abolition of the Apartheid, South Africa is going on its way to rewrite the history of the Country.
Which will be the next step? Although most South Africans agree that the situation is much better than before, a lot of different opinions have surfaced on how that diversity could be better balanced out; this is the Country’s biggest heritage and its major challenge to overcome.
South Africa is the most powerful African Nation and a gleam of hope for the whole planet. It has the largest GDP in the continent and its Stock Exchange is the most important one. In 2010, for the first time in history, the World Football Championship took place in an African Country, and this was considered the biggest media event (besides being a sporting event) of the year.
Everybody knows Nelson Mandela’s heroic fight against Apartheid, or Soweto revolution, or Steve Biko’s assassination. Everyone remembers Mandela and the last white President, Frederick de Klerk, raising their arms together in sign of triumph, in 1994.
Few people, though, remember the events, sometimes wonderful, sometimes reprehensible but always extraordinary, that came before Nelson Mandela’s birth and Steve Biko’s death, the infamy of Apartheid and the courage of Soweto students. It’s a distressing and intense plot, full of hope and humanity. It’s the history of a proud but defeated Nation, the tragic story of segregation, of those who developed it, and especially of those who suffered from it. It’s the exceptional story of a remote land that was industrialized and wanted the atomic bomb but not television. It is the story of a society that is one of the richest and one of the poorest of the world at the same time. The story of many centuries of oppression and tyranny, struggle and hope, nightmares and dreams.
The only way to know South Africa is through its long and turbulent history. The South African history is all this and much more. I, naturally, don’t have the pretension to have written the history of South Africa. It would be ridiculous and arrogant, besides false. I’d rather preferred to talk about this topic, to stimulate “my readers” and prompt them to learn more about this land, and its extraordinary past.
