Things I will miss about South Africa, part II

Continued from part I.

1. Public transport. I know, I said I was looking forward to leaving taxis and buses behind. Yet zooming out a little bit, the public transport system here is remarkably extensive and convenient. One can get fairly reliable and cheap rides to even the smallest villages out in the hinterlands, and it's really a remarkable feat of logistics. The bus companies, in particular, make for my money the best-organized, best-run, most efficient and most reliable system in South Africa. I'm sure the options are better in Sweden, but they sure as hell aren't in America.

2. Long runs and walks alone. My plan when I get back to America is to live for at least the next few years in Washington, DC, and while I'm sure there will be a lot of things to like about that, one of my favorite things to do here is wander around the bush alone. I grew up in remote rural towns, and when I moved to New York, the crush of people definitely took some getting used to. In my village, I can be walking alone in the riverbed inside of ten minutes, and the solitude in the wilderness is something I'm going to miss.

3. The countryside. All irritations aside, South Africa is really a staggeringly beautiful country. We've got plains, weird Utah-style desert (my personal favorite), developed world-quality cities, wetlands, imposing mountains, and a gazillion others. Though I bitch about the climate all the time, if you could build a half-decent house, it would be totally livable. Not really that hot or cold. Plus, where I live at least, it's dry. I find both dry heat and cold far, far more tolerable than the wet alternative.

Comments

Why Did Reality Winner Leak to the Intercept?

So Reality Winner, former NSA contractor, is in federal prison for leaking classified information — for five years and three months, the longest sentence of any whistleblower in history. She gave documents on how Russia had attempted to hack vendors of election machinery and software to The Intercept , which completely bungled basic security procedures (according to a recent New York Times piece from Ben Smith, the main fault lay with Matthew Cole and Richard Esposito ), leading to her capture within hours. Winner recently contracted COVID-19 in prison, and is reportedly suffering some lingering aftereffects. Glenn Greenwald has been furiously denying that he had anything at all to do with the Winner clusterfuck, and I recently got in an argument with him about it on Twitter. I read a New York story about Winner, which clearly implies that she was listening to the Intercepted podcast of March 22, 2017 , where Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill expressed skepticism about Russia actually b

The Basic Instinct of Socialism

This year I finally decided to stop beating around the bush and start calling myself a democratic socialist. I think the reason for the long hesitation is the very long record of horrifying atrocities carried out by self-described socialist countries. Of course, there is no social system that doesn't have a long, bloody rap sheet, capitalism very much included . But I've never described myself as a capitalist either, and the whole point of socialism is that it's supposed to be better than that. So of course I cannot be a tankie — Stalin and Mao were evil, terrible butchers, some of the worst people who ever lived. There are two basic lessons to be learned from the failures of Soviet and Chinese Communism, I think. One is that Marxism-Leninism is not a just or workable system. One cannot simply skip over capitalist development, and any socialist project must be democratic and preserve basic liberal freedoms. The second, perhaps more profound lesson, is that there is no s

Varanus albigularis albigularis

That is the Latin name for the white-throated monitor lizard , a large reptile native to southern Africa that can grow up to two meters long (see pictures of one at the Oakland Zoo here ). In Setswana, it's called a "gopane." I saw one of these in my village yesterday on the way back from my run. Some kids from school found it in the riverbed and tortured it to death, stabbing out its eyes, cutting off its tail, and gutting it which finally killed it. It seemed to be a female as there were a bunch of round white things I can only imagine were eggs amongst the guts. I only arrived after it was already dead, but they described what had happened with much hilarity and re-enactment. When I asked why they killed it, they said it was because it would eat their chickens and eggs, which is probably true, and because it sucks blood from people, which is completely ridiculous. It might bite a person, but not unless threatened. It seems roughly the same as killing wolves that

Ryan Cooper

Search This Blog