Category: South Africa

Cape Point: Fynbos, Shipwrecks and the Making of a Maritime Headland

Cape Point: Fynbos, Shipwrecks and the Making of a Maritime Headland At the end of the Cape Peninsula, some 60 kilometres south of central Cape Town, a ridge of sandstone runs out into the sea and stops in a sheer drop of cliffs and spray. Cape Point in South Africa is not the southern tip […]

Freedom Charter Kliptown: The Congress of the People and South Africa’s Constitutional Imagination

Freedom Charter Kliptown: The Congress of the People and South Africa’s Constitutional Imagination On a winter weekend in June 1955, nearly 3,000 delegates gathered on an open patch of ground in Kliptown, on the south-western edge of Johannesburg. They came from across South Africa to adopt a document built from thousands of demands sent in […]

Panorama Route South Africa: Blyde River Canyon Geology and the Drakensberg Escarpment

Panorama Route South Africa: Blyde River Canyon Geology and the Drakensberg Escarpment West of Kruger National Park, the flat Lowveld comes to an abrupt end against a wall of cliffs. Climb the road to the top and you are on the edge of the Highveld plateau, looking down over the country you have just crossed. […]

Kruger National Park Conservation: Water, Fences and Wildlife Management

Kruger National Park Conservation: Water, Fences and Wildlife Management Kruger National Park looks like wilderness: two million hectares of bushveld running some 360 kilometres along South Africa’s border with Mozambique, crossed by rivers and home to elephant, lion, rhino and hundreds of other species. But almost nothing about what you see from a game vehicle […]

Voortrekker Monument: Afrikaner Memory, Architecture and a Contested Past

Voortrekker Monument: Afrikaner Memory, Architecture and a Contested Past On a hilltop at the southern entrance to Pretoria stands a massive block of granite, roughly 40 metres high, ringed by a wall carved with 64 ox-wagons. The Voortrekker Monument was built to honour the Voortrekkers, the Dutch-speaking farmers who left the British-ruled Cape Colony from […]

Constitution Hill Johannesburg: From Prison Complex to Constitutional Court

Constitution Hill Johannesburg: From Prison Complex to Constitutional Court On a ridge above Braamfontein, at the edge of Johannesburg’s inner city, stands a group of buildings that spans almost the whole of the city’s history. There is a nineteenth-century fort with grassed ramparts, a cramped prison block where Black men were held for most of […]

Featherbed Nature Reserve: Knysna Lagoon, Milkwood Forest and Protected Landscapes

Featherbed Nature Reserve: Knysna Lagoon, Milkwood Forest and Protected Landscapes At the mouth of the Knysna lagoon, two high cliffs face each other across a narrow channel where the Indian Ocean surges in and out with every tide. The western of these headlands carries no road from town and no houses on its seaward slopes. […]

Cango Caves: Karst, Conservation and the Underground Klein Karoo

Cango Caves: Karst, Conservation and the Underground Klein Karoo About 29 kilometres north of Oudtshoorn, where the dry farmland of the Klein Karoo meets the first slopes of the Swartberg, a modest entrance in a limestone hillside opens into one of the oldest tourist attractions in South Africa. The Cango Caves are a chain of […]

Castle of Good Hope: VOC Fortification and Cape Town’s Maritime Replenishment Station

Castle of Good Hope: VOC Fortification and Cape Town’s Maritime Replenishment Station Walk a few blocks east from the Grand Parade in central Cape Town and the street grid gives way to a low, five-pointed fortress of ochre walls and angled bastions. The Castle of Good Hope is the oldest surviving colonial building in South […]

Oudtshoorn Ostrich Farms: Feather Fashion, Farming and the Klein Karoo

Oudtshoorn Ostrich Farms: Feather Fashion, Farming and the Klein Karoo In the dry valley of the Klein Karoo, between the folded ridges of the Swartberg and the mountains that wall it off from the coast, the town of Oudtshoorn owes almost everything it once was to a single bird. A century ago, ostrich feathers were […]

Southern Africa Cultural Journey: Cities, Rivers, Wildlife and Memory on a 19-Day Route

Southern Africa Cultural Journey: Cities, Rivers, Wildlife and Memory on a 19-Day Route Most journeys through Southern Africa are sold as a string of highlights: a mountain, a waterfall, a game drive. Followed from end to end, though, the route from Cape Town to Johannesburg tells one long, connected story. It begins with a Dutch […]

Constantia Wine Route: Vineyards, Empire and Cape Food Culture

Constantia Wine Route: Vineyards, Empire and Cape Food Culture On the far side of Table Mountain from central Cape Town, the land drops into a green bowl of vineyards, oak avenues and white-gabled farmhouses, closed in on one side by the Constantiaberg and open on the other to the light of False Bay. This is […]

Colonisation of Africa

The Partition of Africa The Scramble for Africa, occurring in the late nineteenth century, saw European powers divide and claim nearly the entire continent. Formalized during the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, European nations established rules for colonization without African representation, leading to arbitrary borders that ignored indigenous cultures and political landscapes. This period transformed Africa, […]

Pinnacle Point & the History of Early Man

Pinnacle Point, a small promontory near Mossel Bay on the south coast of South Africa, appears to be the place where the very first human beings ever settled down by the sea. They arrived here some 164,000 years ago, during an extended ice age 195,000 to 123,000 years ago, which brought cold and dry climatic conditions and left much of the continent uninhabitable.

Johannesburg. Introduction for a South African tour.

Johannesburg is located in South Africa’s smallest and most densely-populated province, Gauteng, which owes much of its development to the discovery of gold in 1886.

Soweto for the senior traveler

Soweto for the senior traveler Soweto is an urban settlement or ‘township’ in South Africa, southwest of Johannesburg, with a population of approximately 1.3 million. Small Group Tour Southern Africa Tour 19-Day Tour · Cape Town to Johannesburg · Small group, up to 16 travellers, solo travellers welcome A half-day in Soweto near the end […]

Small group tour of a game reserve.

A small group escorted tour of Southern Africa will send visitors away from a safari with wonderful photographs and amazing experiences of wildlife, birds and truly magnificent scenery as the backdrop for stories on any of the South Africa modern “5” to see on a small group journey into the wildlife reserve.

South Africa’s garden route.

The Garden Route leaves the rich farmland and passes through the Karoo National Park which is a wildlife reserve of semi-desert area covering 750 square kilometres. Bushbuck and Blue Duikers are common in the forested areas, and Common Eland can be seen on the slopes up from the road.

A history of South Africa for senior travellers

The scenery is spectacular and diverse, varying from mountains, rivers, grassy plains, lakes, lagoons and endless coastlines to sun-scorched semi-deserts. South Africa is divided into nine provinces

Glasgow; Nelson Mandela Place

Nelson Mandela Place, Glasgow, G2 1QY Right in the heart of the city of Glasgow in Scotland is Nelson Mandela Place, a busy public square enclosing the shops on Buchanan Street, the 19th century St George’s Tron Church, and the former hub of the Glasgow Stock Exchange. It was also the former location of the […]

Exploring Southern Africa: The Definitive Guide for Travellers

Exploring Southern Africa: The Definitive Guide for Travellers Southern Africa, a subregion of the African continent, is composed of Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Eswatini (formerly Swaziland), Zambia, and Zimbabwe. (The United Nations geographic region of Southern Africa, on the other hand, is under the Sub-Saharan African region, and includes only five […]