A Young Mans Thoughts While Astral Travelling in the Karoo

As I looked out over the plains of the Karoo at four thirty on a December summers morning, I realised that the monolith that is the Swartberg Mountain is purple not black. Maybe at the time when the old people named this colossus, the word purple was considered to close to the colour of the European royalty that they, my great grandfather, European refugees and settlers had fled from and so being affiliated to the various protestant churches of the day, and in a time when it was popular to stride around Africa with a gun in one hand and a bible in the other, black was the pious colour of this white tribe. Perhaps that is why so many places in South Africa start with the word Swart which is the Afrikaans word for black. There again there are also a tremendous amount of names beginning with Wit, the Afrikaans word for white. Ah yes that's it, in antiquity things were a lot more black and white.

There is of course nothing black about the soul of Africa. The statement, "Black Africa", is a "White European" term and misrepresents both the colour of the people, their nature, their spiritual understanding and how the world looks in Africa.

Southern Africans are by their very nature some of the most colourful people one could ever meet, with a ready smile and quick mocking wit. Their many languages and dialects are also enormously descriptive and persistently use adjectives and comparatives of nature to describe the life or situations they find themselves in. They have, in addition to their cultural attributes, an uncanny linguistic ability with the majority fluent in over seven languages and are far more spiritual than Europeans. They see spirituality as part of which they are not something they will become.

But it was four thirty in the morning and my cousin James and I had been tasked to travel on horse back on a round trip of six hours, rounding up the cattle grazing on the scrub in the veld. This may sound like an exciting task, but it isn't and the reason I had volunteered was the opportunity it presented to me to be alone with my thoughts and take in the sights, sounds and smells of this paradox which in my view was unsurpassed.