Back from Africa

Cape Point, Cape Peninsula National Park and World Heritage Site, South Africa

I'm back from two weeks vacation at Silver Bay and six weeks travelling in Africa, mostly in South Africa but also briefly in Swaziland, Mozambique, and Qatar.

The trip was, above all, thought provoking. The slogan of the South African government tourism promotion board, SATOUR, used to be, "A World In One Country". The intended reference was to the size and geographic diversity of the country. But even more, I think, the issues facing South Africa today, as a country that contains both First World and Third World (but still, so far as I could tell or most people we met seemed to think, little middle ground) are a microcosm of those facing the world at large. Some travellers eschew comparisons, lest they become unfairly judgmental, but it's almost axiomatic that we travel to learn about ourselves and our homelands as much as to learn about the people and places we visit. On this trip, I constantly found analogies -- albeit not the easy answers I might have hoped for -- to issues within the USA, and even more to those between the USA and the rest of the world, the global North and South, and the First and Third Worlds.

I'll be posting updates shortly on what's happened while I'm gone with respect to some of the issues I've been following.