Adventures of an Expat in South Africa
If you like the Victorian era, a visit at Lindfield House Museum in Johannesburg's Auckland Park neighborhood is a must. There you get to meet the legendary Katharine Love who not only owns the house but also lives in it and doubles as museum curator, tour guide, and cook. Let her take you back in time to another era, and then savor the present with heavenly scones during afternoon tea.
I've written about so many different things to do in and around Joburg that I decided I needed to bring these to my readers again, this time in a slightly more structured fashion. So I've decided to pick different themes and summarize my Top 5 recommendations for each. Today's theme: History in and around Johannesburg.
When we moved to Johannesburg, it soon became clear to us that everything revolved around Fourways. Shopping, restaurants, the fabled Montecasino, doctors' offices, a cinema - all of it was clustered around a large and busy intersection teeming with cars, minibus taxis, pedestrians, and street vendors. It was like a village of its own. But it wasn't always that way.
In Part One of this series I talked about Wilhelm Verwoerd and the legacy of his grandfather Hendrik. I left it off with Wilhelm leaving for Europe in the 1980s, where by virtue of being exposed to a more liberal worldview he became increasingly disillusioned with that legacy. Learn more about Verwoerd's life, his relationship to Nelson Mandela, and the atonement for his family's sins.
To think that I had to move many thousand miles away from South Africa to learn all about this man who is so inextricably linked with its history: Hendrik Verwoerd.
Any South African will immediately know his name, but as an expat you may not be as familiar with it. Other names loom larger ...
A brief explanation about the demographics of South Africa:
Based on the latest census in 2011, roughly 9% of South Africa’s population is white. Within that group, about 61% are Afrikaans speakers, 36% are English speakers, and the remaining 3% speak other languages such as Portuguese.
A good ...
When I was still a kid, my older brother, who’d been off to university for a few years, decided to travel around South Africa for a few months.
I remember when he came back and regaled us with his stories. He is a wonderful storyteller, and as an impressionable teenager I’d sit there and ...
Apartheid is a word you will have heard almost immediately upon moving to South Africa, or perhaps even earlier. It is of Afrikaans origin and means, roughly, the separation and classification of people according to race. It’s a term inextricably linked with ...
“So you’re raising your children English?”
“Yes, my husband is English.”I overheard above conversation some time ago while I was waiting, along with other mothers, for our children to perform in a public speaking contest Dainfern College was participating in.
My ears perked ...
Recently, I told you to watch White Wedding if you’d like to get a feel for South Africa and its culture.
But perhaps you’d like to dig a bit deeper and learn something about its history as well?
Many many years ago, when I still had the stamina to read books of a thousand and more pages, ...