One step forward

And so from the scorched valleys of the western Cape, I ended up after Christmas in the lush sub-tropical Transkei Wild Coast, to walk 61-km along the coast of Pondoland, home of the AmaPondo people.

I won’t lie to you, I was nervous. None of the stories I’d heard so far were positive. Two friends who had done the hike had been struck down with coma-inducing tick-bite fever. My brother – who is a confirmed racist – advised I carry a knife in my hiking socks to fend off hungry Xhosas. “They’re not what they used to be,” he said. And a colleague from TIME who spent the last elections reporting from the trading centre of the region, Mthatha, professed it to be one of the worst places in the country, a shame on the nation, and could not fathom why so many people thought this was a nice place to go on holiday. I packed an extra bottle of insect repellent and went anyway.

The journalist turned out to be closest to the truth. Mthatha has become one of the world’s great shit holes. The best business to be in – there are at least two on every street – is funeral parlours, a testament to the HIV/AIDS crisis crippling this country. The second best business is abortions. Peeling off lamposts, shop windows and dustbins are home-printed signs advertising safe same-day services by Dr Mark for just R250. A rival charges R300 for “Womb cleaning & blood detoxification, 100% safe and pain-free”.

But, Mthatha is not Pondoland, nor is it rural South Africa. It might be 1,300km from Cape Town and even further from any decent standard of living, but it is a city. The aim of my research is to get beyond urban voices, so I breathed a sigh of relief when the taxi drove past the last abortion poster and sped off down the R61 towards Port St Johns.