#Africa

Before I start, let me alert you to a guest post I wrote for a blog called “Notes From Africa”: What Your Cat Wants to Know: An American Ex-pat Perspective. It’s a departure from my normal subject matter – please check it out and browse through Lisa’s lovely blog while you’re at it. Thanks again, Lisa!

After a rainy Saturday evening in Magaliesburg, Joe and I decided to go for a hike in Mountain Sanctuary Park. The sun was only listlessly trying to push through the clouds, but we were determined to do something outdoorsy on our country weekend.

Joe and I drove along a bucolic country road in the Cradle of Humankind, a World Heritage Site 45 minutes outside Joburg. It was a sunny afternoon. We weren’t exactly sure where we were going. We’d heard there was a large sculpture park out this way and we wanted to check it out.

Gotcha!

This is not the end of 2Summers the blog. But it is the end of 2Summers the season.

I named my blog 2Summers because I moved here in August, as summer was ending in D.C. and about to begin in Joburg. I’ve essentially lived one 10-month-long summer, although summer here wasn’t really like summer back home. (It was much cooler in Joburg.)

On my recent post about downtown Joburg, I received some questions about Hillbrow – a huge residential community overlooking the city center. I now have some answers.

Hillbrow was a bustling middle-class neighborhood until the end of apartheid rule, when it began to transform. Similar to many 20th-century American inner cities, Hillbrow’s white middle class fled to the suburbs, making way for poor black South Africans (who were previously barred from living in places like Hillbrow) and immigrants from across the continent. The population soared and crime grew rampant; Hillbrow became a “no-go” area for visitors.