Читать книгу Early One Sunday Morning I Decided to Step out and Find South Africa - Luke Alfred - Страница 4

Introduction

We all walk for different reasons. Charles Dickens rambled at night because of insomnia, getting up the moment he lay down. His walks brought him ‘into sympathetic relations with people who have no other object [than to stay awake] every night of the year’. They busied his feet as they opened his soul, curing him of the scourge of wakefulness.

Robert Louis Stevenson and his donkey, Modestine, bashed across the Cévennes to ease Stevenson’s love-troubled heart, while Camilo José Cela, the Spanish novelist, walked in the spirit of contrariness. ‘The Alcarria is a beautiful region which people apparently have no reason to visit,’ he wrote in his picaresque Journey to the Alcarria. Then, gently, and at what one might call walking pace, he contradicted himself, charming the region into life in the pages of his wistful book.

I suffer from neither sleeplessness nor a broken heart, so I walk, like Cela, out of curiosity. I wanted to look at South Africa in a different way – from a different angle – and so took to the rhythms of the gravel road, the path and the train track in the hope that such walks would tell me something interesting about my sometimes tortured country. I was tired of the media’s white noise. I was distrustful of the soothsayers, the received wisdoms and the platitudes. I come from a family of walkers (Dad was a happy, carefree hiker) and wanted to look at things afresh. The result of taking to the path is this book – a eulogy to South Africa’s beauty and the fineness of her people, her indefatigability and the jewel that is her new democracy. It is a book of cautious hope.

Finally, a word on sourcing and fact-checking. I have attempted to verify and second-source my facts wherever possible. In certain cases – the chapter on Modderfontein, for example – this has been exceedingly difficult. My only defence is to point out that this is not an academic study written by a professional historian. Rather, it is a book written by a journalist for a popular audience. For all of its fidelity to the truth, it is also a book full of stories.

Luke Alfred

Kensington, May 2016