#History

Six years ago, during a wild road trip in a van full of bloggers, I spent a night at the Royal Hotel in Bethulie. I was enchanted: Bethulie is a charming, tiny South African town and the Royal Hotel was one of the quirkiest guesthouses I’d ever stayed in. I vowed to go back someday and spend a little more time.

I recently went with my friends Manuela and Gail to Diagonal Street, a historic Joburg shopping street. Diagonal Street – known for its fabric, blanket, and muti (traditional medicine) shops – is so named because it runs on a diagonal for three blocks between Albertina Sisulu Road and Kerk Street. Manuela wanted to shop for fabric; Gail and I came along for an excuse to get out of the house.

Second in my Roadhouses of Gauteng series.  Browse all of my roadhouse posts or view a map of the roadhouses I’ve visited.

In my first roadhouse post, I mentioned I’d been meaning to do a roadhouse series for years but never got around to it. One of the reasons it took so long is because documenting roadhouses – at least in the way I want to document them – is not easy to do alone. I needed to find a roadhouse partner.

Two days ago, on December 16th, I went with Thorsten of Dagwood sandwich fame to visit the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria.

I’ve been thinking hard over the past 48 hours about how to frame this post. The Voortrekker Monument is controversial, to put it mildly, and it’s more controversial on December 16th than on any other day. December 16th is the Day of Reconciliation, a public holiday that used to be called “The Day of the Vow” during the apartheid era. On this day in 1838, the Voortrekkers (white Afrikaans settlers who migrated from the Cape Colony to South Africa’s interior during the Great Trek) defeated the Zulus at the Battle of Blood River.

Last Wednesday I headed down the M1 highway with my pink-haired friend Gail Wilson and my purple-clad friend Faarooq Gardee-Minty Mangera, a.k.a. the Purple Pimpernel. Our destination was Lenasia, a historically Indian township 30 minutes south of central Joburg.

Last weekend I attended my second #SpazaShopTour of Katlehong and Thokoza (see my post about the first tour), and visited the Thokoza Memorial for the first time. The Thokoza Memorial, opened in 1999, honors the people who died in this area during the violent political conflict in the years leading up to South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994.