Backyard Bushman Healing
Published by: Matador Network I’M STANDING at the door of a quiet Constantia Hills residence — a suburb in Cape Town, South Africa and an unlikely venue for a healing ceremony with a Khomani Bushman. I wonder if the doorbell is working, as I’ve been standing on the stoep for a while now. There’s a […]
Stuck in an Endless Daze
Published by: Koeksisters I’m standing in the middle of a festival campsite feeling out of place. The swelling numbers of festival-goers are the kind of twenty-plus kids you’d find at the Power and the Glory, a small café-bar where Cape Town’s extended hipster family comes to work from their laptops during the day, and where […]
White Rhino: Encounter with an endangered species
Published by: Matador Network THE SUN over the iMfolozi Game Reserve in South Africa burns until heatwaves radiate from the black dashboard. My French aunt is struggling in the backseat. She’s not used to this climate. My little five-year-old cousin, Lémoni, sniffs at the air pouring in through the open windows. “It smells weird.” “That’s […]
3 portraits of death and dying abroad
Published by: Matador Network THE LITTLE GIRL FROM NEXT DOOR slips through the fence and knocks at my parents’ sliding door. She sits herself down at the kitchen table and asks for a biscuit. We’re not really used to having neighbours, but we’re getting better. “Voilà,” my mother says, handing her a chocolate digestive, and […]
Barefoot in Yangon
Published by: Matador Network THE WHITE MARBLE PLATFORM of the Shwedagon Pagoda is warm under my bare feet. Yangon, Myanmar, is already steamy, and it’s only 8am. Up here the hum of engines and sharp bursts of car horns below sound distant, but the humidity is as thick as it is on the root-tangled streets. […]
White South Africa is small
Published by: Matador Network I MUST be giving off bad vibes, because I’m on a Paris to Durban flight full of white Southern Africans and it still takes the woman sitting next to me five gin and tonics before she feels bold enough to talk to me. By the time the captain announces our descent, […]
On how my tongue went dead
Published by: Matador Network THE WET SEASON starts to creep up around us as the jeep rumbles over an ancient cattle grid. We’re in the old Tribal Trust Lands now, where the hyparrhenia grass grows taller than the car and years of splashing rain have left tidemarks of red earth on the walls of lonesome bottle […]