Ngidlala ibhola.

I assumed that soccer would be called football in South Africa, but it’s soccer. Because the World Cup was in South Africa last year, I decided to try watching it, and my brother Jared and I got hooked. We were on vacation for the later rounds, and on several occasions we returned to our hotel room after a long day of hiking, hoping that the big game of the day would be being rebroadcast on the Spanish channel. It always was. We learned that the commentators are actually much more exciting in Spanish, even though the only words we understood were cabeza! and gooooooool gol gol gol gol gol.

Anyway, my entire familiarity with soccer had come from gym class, Wikipedia’s explanation of offsides, and a few weeks of watching games, but when a couple other Americans went to soccer practice here, I decided to try it out with them. Somehow this has turned into me being on a sports team for the first time in my life. As though being a humanities student isn’t far enough out of my comfort zone...

Green Field is right across the road from my Res, and unless they are in class or at church, there are always loads of boys playing soccer there. For some reason, there are far fewer girls interested in soccer (one teammate attributes this to the reputation of netball as a more appropriate feminine sport), so there are only about 15 of us on the team. My teammates are very supportive of me and the other American who has never played before, so I’m having lots of fun running around and learning to play soccer.

I still can’t quite believe that this is me wearing soccer boots (cleats in American English), shin guards, and jersey number 12.

Racially integrating sports has been an important aspect of ending apartheid, and I read in a museum that “soccer is now an integrated sport.” In my experience, this is not remotely true. In the two friendly matches and two real games we’ve played, and in the boys’ numerous campus league games, I’ve never once seen a white or Indian person on the field except the Americans on my team.

I’m right in the middle of this picture.

The referees speak in Zulu, and my coach tends to start giving directions in English but quickly fall into an English/Zulu/gesturing hybrid. Because the things shouted on the field tend to be short and repeated many times, I’m pretty good at following the Zulu. I was excited in one of our games when an opposing player kept yelling “kancane” (the nc is a voiced dental click), and I knew she was telling her teammate to make a little pass. I promptly got in front of her, and the teammate never got a chance.

The people on the team make fun of the Americans when we can’t remember their names or mispronounce the clicks, but they don’t pronounce my name correctly either. In moments like this, everyone yells “Riiiiiiiiika!”

Even my American teammates have started having trouble remembering not to call me Reeka.

I’ll save details about games for another post, but here are pictures of my team. The other Americans and I hosted a spaghetti dinner for everyone the night before our first game so we’re eating in the courtyard of my Res.

In the back are Sma, Nqobile, Nozipho, Juliet (also known as Dot Com), Nozipho, and Joelle. In the front are Lihle, Thobeka, Nomfundo, Fiesta, Londeka, Sne, and Courtney.

Here are most of the same people again with Coach and Blue on the end. Two more Lihles and Ayanda weren't there that day.

Grasshoppers

There are tons of cool grasshoppers here. To those who are disturbed by close proximity to more-than-two legged creatures, I hope this will allow you appreciate them from a close but safe distance.

I saw a bunch like this one in the botanical gardens on campus.

From a highly scientific study about how much you can poke a grasshopper before it starts hopping away, Becky and I concluded that if we were birds, we would definitely be eating grasshoppers for every meal.

This is a bottom view of a grasshopper I already posted a picture of in the nature reserve near where I live. They're my favourite grasshoppers because of the awesome colours. (I’ve put my default language in Microsoft Word to English (South Africa) so that I don’t have spelling errors in my assignments, but now I feel silly with all the extra u’s.)

 

  

On the rafting trip I went on last weekend, I went walking through the savanna with my friends Becky and Caroline. In some places, the grass was taller than us.

 

The savanna biome has both grass and trees. I learned in my ecology practical that this grass smells like turpentine, but I can’t remember what it’s called. Some of the grasses have very successful animal-dispersed seeds—we emerged with tons of seeds of various sorts stuck to all our clothes.

In the savannah, we came upon a grasshopper mating ground. There were tons of pairs of grasshoppers in this position.

 

The most common trees in the savannah are these acacia trees, which are quite short and very thorny. There were, of course, mating grasshoppers all over this tree.

We even saw a few pairs in the middle of having sex.

I’ll end with a grasshopper I saw in our dorm kitchen a couple days ago when we were making chicken stir fry with spicy mango sauce. Someone who lives on my floor told us that these grasshoppers are lucky, so I didn’t let the other girls chase it away.

Dawn

Based on the debates ensuing in the wake of recent facebook statuses, the switch to daylight savings time has inspired you people in the United States to think about sunrise, sunset, and why in the world Indiana is in Central Time.

All of South Africa is in one time zone (because it would be silly for Cape Town to be by itself), and apparently there’s no daylight saving times. Where I am, the really obnoxious birds start screeching and squawking at about 4am, the sun comes up around 5, and it gets dark a little before 7pm. I’ve shockingly managed to become more of a morning person (maybe because of the birds), and I’ve seen several really fantastic sunrises while I’ve been here.

A couple weeks ago I went camping by a lake with my friends from church and we went walking a little ways around the lake as the sun was coming up.

Ducks!

 Last weekend, I went on a rafting and camping trip with the Mountain Club (which seems to be about 50% Americans). There was an epic thunderstorm with really amazing lightening in the distance in the evening, so I spent the sunset huddling under a tarp, but the sunrise over the lake the next morning was really beautiful. 

I had a paper due on Monday, but I was really tired after rafting and a somewhat interrupted night sleeping on the ground, so went to sleep soon after getting back without working on the paper. I’ll spare you the horrific details of what time I (very efficiently) wrote the paper, but I spent dawn on Monday watching the light behind my curtains gradually intensifying as I wrote about the impact of the African National Congress Youth League.

The ANC was founded in 1912, but by the 1940s it was criticized by the rising generation of South Africans due to “weaknesses in its organization and constitution; to its erratic policy of yielding to oppression, regarding itself as a body of gentlemen with clean hands and failing to see the problems of the African through the proper perspective.” These young people founded the Youth League, and many including Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela were important ANC leaders for the next three to four decades. They revolutionized elitist ANC ideology to focus on Africanism, the idea that Africans should learn about their history and redefine a positive self-image, and that because they were a nationally oppressed group, they could only “win their national freedom through a National Liberation Movement led by the Africans themselves.” The Youth League members also replaced the reactionary tactics of passing resolutions and sending memorandums to the British Commonwealth and South African government with mass-based protests, marches, stay-at-homes, and strikes. It was the dawn of a new era in the struggle...and I think those two ideas actually stayed interesting for 7 pages.

International Relations

As I was reading for my South African politics class this week, these two quotes caught my attention.

Nelson Mandela describing the first President Bush:

“He was a man with whom one could disagree and then shake hands.”

"No man can deny that 50% of racial hatred in the world arises because people speak different languages." -Anton Muziwakhe Lembede, 1935

Plants

African animals get a lot of press time, for the obvious reasons that big mammals are very exciting and for the most part quite different from anything you see wandering around Indiana. Because anyone who's reading this is in a temperate climate in the northern hemisphere and probably hasn't seen a lot of foiliage lately, I’m going to highlight some of the really beautiful plants I’ve seen around Pietermaritzburg.

My campus has an amazing botanical garden by the agriculture buildings. The largest area is the evolutionary garden where students can learn about the evolution of plants. There are a bunch of bridges crossing over a little stream, and here I am on my favorite bridge. It's made of sticks and it wobbles up and down amusingly as you walk.

 

These plants with huge, holey leaves are everywhere, and they remind me of the rain forest in Costa Rica.

  

There were also lots of these tree-resembling ferns in Costa Rica. I love how the unfurling fiddle heads look like the tentacles of a giant sea monster.

 

I took this picture in the botanical garden as well, but there's also one of these trees right outside my Res.

 

 Another area of the garden contains commercially important plants including some that are similar to the more wild ancestors of domesticated plants and others that would potentially be more productive in South African environments than the western crops they grow. This is a pineapple.

 

I saw these flowers yesterday when I hiked to the base of Howick falls.

I saw these blue ones on the first day I arrived on campus.

These yellow ones were at a place called World's view where you could see the path the voortrekkers took over the mountains to settle in what's now Pietermaritzburg.

These tree things with tops that look like cacti are all over the place. I took this picture in a park I pass when going to campus from downtown.

Palm trees are also very common, and I particularly pass these orange fruits on the ground when I walk from the main campus to the agriculture campus.

 

 I always search for plants that I recognize from home, so I was very excited to see this oak tree in that park.

I think morning glories are beautiful, even though they're also weeds here.

There are even a few dandelions here.

This flower reminded me of the flowers that grow from bulbs and home, and that I don't get any spring this year. Everyone please appreciate the crocuses and tulips and especially the daffodils a little bit extra this year on my behalf.

 

I'll finish with my favorite South African flower which is on the 50 cent coins here. The plants are in the genus strelitzia, commonly called crane flowers or bird of paradise.