#Photography

For more than half a century, the Hong family ran a corner shop at 166 Caroline Street in Brixton, one of Joburg’s oldest residential suburbs. Immigrant-owned corner shops, much like spaza shops, are an iconic part of South African history and culture.

Today is Election Day in the United States. I had been thinking I could be sort of normal – write a blog post, go about my day, etc. My vote has already been cast, after all. I’m a hemisphere away from America and there’s nothing more I can do. Plus it’s probably going to be a few days before we even know the outcome, and fretting seems fruitless.

Kaapsehoop is the (long belated) third stop in my #10SouthAfricanTowns project, for which I’m visiting ten small towns across South Africa. Read about my first stop in Val and my second stop in Kameel.

On Saturday I participated in the first-ever #SpazaShopTour, starting and ending at African Accent Spaza Shop in Katlehong.

The weather was miraculously perfect for a six-kilometer walk. We wound through Katlehong and Thokoza, visiting spaza shops and street-side cafés and historical sites, chatting with each other and those we met along the way. Bongani, our host, walked us past his family home and explained what it was like to grow up in Katlehong in the early 1990s, when a deadly war broke out as the apartheid regime came to an end.

Zoo Lake, a popular public park in Parkview across Jan Smuts Avenue from the Johannesburg Zoo, is one of the most popular parks in Joburg and less than a ten-minute drive from my house. Yet I have not blogged about Zoo Lake for nearly a decade. (Here’s my post about it from January 2011.) How is this possible?