Music runs through our blood. We walk to the rhythm
of Africa and our voices resonate across the valleys. We carry
within us gentle lullabyes and the powerful pulse of a mighty continent in
uproar. African music is totally alive and is so entwined with dance it’s
almost pointless to separate them. Buy a CD, go to a club, listen to
street buskers, visit a cultural village, or just walk past a church on a
Sunday morning. However you choose to experience our music, you’ll find
that it’s almost impossible to keep your feet still.
One of the most interesting ways to listen to local music is at one of
the many outdoor concert venues during the summer months - Kirstenbosch,
Durban Botanical Gardens or the Oude Libertas Amphitheatre in
Stellenbosch.
You can take a picnic, sit on the lawns among gambolling children and
listen to anything from a symphony concert or opera to kwaito, reggae,
blues or jazz.
But, of course, there are a whole lot of interesting indoor venues as
well, ranging from large, purpose-built theatres to cosy pubs or happening
clubs. For the best information about what’s on, check out Computicket
Within our rainbow nation, we have a wide range of beliefs, faiths and
traditions – which is reflected in the number, variety and styles of our
religious buildings and monuments.
From simple circles of white stones, which serve as places of worship in
some country areas, to elaborate church structures, domed mosques or
gilded temples, we have a range of sacred spots. Beautiful cathedrals lend
an air of grandeur to even quite small settlements, such as George in the
Western Cape or Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape.
One of our loveliest cathedrals, St George’s in Cape Town, is probably the
best known because of its active and vociferous involvement in the fight
against apartheid and, more recently, its support for Aids activist
groups.
You may see a number of kramats – holy Muslim burial sites – especially in
and around Cape Town, and we have many beautiful mosques, with the Jumma
Mosque in Durban being the largest and oldest in the country.
Also in Durban is the architecturally fascinating Temple of Understanding
which, as well as housing an active Krishna community, is renowned for its
delicious and very reasonably priced vegetarian lunches.
Theatres
Of course, there is a range of theatre opportunities in the cities.
Principle venues are the Market Theatre and the Civic Theatre in
Johannesburg, the State Theatre in Pretoria, the Baxter, Artscape
(previously the Nico Malan) and On Broadway in Cape Town, and the
Playhouse in Durban. But even small towns are joining in. The village of
Darling, for example, is becoming a theatre centre, mainly through the
efforts of one of its most illustrious citizens, the stand-up comic
Pieter-Dirk Uys and his alter ego, Evita Bezuidenhout. You can book for
movies and most performances online at Computicket.
top of page
Exhibitions and Galleries
There is absolutely no shortage of visual arts venues in South Africa.
As well as the large art museums in the major cities, there are so many
small galleries it is almost impossible to keep count. In addition to the
more formal exhibitions, almost every city and town has a version of “art
in the park”, where local artists can exhibit their works in a pretty
open-air setting. The biggest of these takes place on the first Saturday
of every month in King’s Park in Bloemfontein.
Museums
Think of a subject, and there’ll be a museum to celebrate it. From the
many pretty usual natural history and cultural history museums to the
rather unusual ones, you’ll find something to entertain, amuse and
enlighten you.
Some of our more offbeat museums include a butter museum, a tractor
museum, a surfing museum, a whaling museum and an angling museum. Really –
there are so many.
Probably the ones you really shouldn’t miss, though, are the Robben Island
Museum, the Apartheid Museum and the Transvaal Museum of Natural History.
For a good listing of what’s available, check out
Museums on Line
Palaeontology and archaeology
Most of us know (or knew) our grandparents, and some lucky ones even
their great grandparents. A few people have genealogical records going
back five or six or even 50 generations. But even with the odd bit of oral
history here and there, and the rediscovered skeleton in every family
cupboard, it's hard to imagine how people, who died just 50 or 100 years
before our birth, lived. We read our history books - and some of us dream
or fantasise. But it is a truly mystifying thing, this knowledge that we
didn't just spring out of nowhere. Our parents had parents who had parents
who ... How far back can we go?
Well, the latest findings support the theory that it was here in
Africa, and most likely South Africa, that we first stood up on our own
two feet and walked across the savanna.
Here that we started to
distinguish between our different grunts and snorts, and form them into
words, and learned to utilise our marvellous thumbs to take control of our
world – and to harness the awesome power of fire that came cracking down
from the summer sky.
A visit to the Cradle of Humankind near Johannesburg won't give you the
answers you're looking for - but, almost certainly, it will give you more
questions.
Lots more questions. And this is only one of the sites where
you may get a glimpse of how your distant ancestors lived. It was here, in
1947, that Robert Broom discovered the skull which was to shake the
foundations of our beliefs about who we are and where we came from.
Mrs Ples as she (although she is now accepted to be a he) was called, is the
archetypical symbol of palaeontological study in South Africa.
There are archaeological remains all over the country but not all are
easy to see.
One of the more accessible ones is Nelson’s Bay Cave in the Robberg Nature Reserve in Plettenberg Bay.
Here you can see the in situ
remains of the hunter-gatherers who lived there tens of thousands (perhaps
hundreds of thousands?) of years ago.
You can walk into a tunnel, which
shows you the different layers of debris, which filled the cave over the
millennia, while studying the explanatory texts.
Not only is it an
interesting trip back in time, it’s also a spectacularly beautiful walk
Annual Events