Quote of the week
It seems that the more places I see and experience, the bigger I realize the world to be. The more I become aware of, the more I realize how relatively little I know of it, how many places I have still to go, how much more there is to learn.
Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life — and travel — leaves marks on you.
The journey is part of the experience — an expression of the seriousness of one’s intent. One doesn’t take the A train to Mecca.
As citizens, rich or poor, black or white, we are excluded from the heart of the processes that create all levels of government around us. None of us is more excluded than the migrant Tembu and Pondo miners of places like Marikana. They have literally nothing, for not even the land on which they leave their families behind can ever belong to them, thanks to a disgraceful political bargain made by the ANC with traditional leaders, entrenching the power of chiefs to control the allocation of land in territories under their authority. The decision may have bought the ANC a degree of political support in Transkei for a decade, but it cannot possibly be fair or democratic to make a man or woman incapable of owning (or trading) the land they were born on. Apartheid made the accident of birth a burden for life. The ANC still does the same to people born on tribal lands. – Peter Bruce in Business Day
