Tuesday, November 15, 2011

WATERVAL BOVEN: THE BEAUTY& THE BEAST


A lodge in W.V. Boven
The Legend "Water
Falling From Above"
Talking to Your Eyes

Waterval Boven, some two hours' eastward drive from South Africa's Capital (Pretoria), is


Your Several Reasons
Your Key To South Africa In Its Own Right
Your Memory Stick
Steal its Secrets

You've hacked the psyche
Helen Zille's
Jacob Zuma's
Complete with its Malema Nemesis


Waterval Boven will for those many and more reasons always remain one of the most breathtaking sites  anywhere on earth.  For those who think party politics is is an opportunity lost.  But those who think Land First and all else shall follow, Waterval Boven is an opportunity beckoning.

That was politcs.



Yet, geographically too, Waterval Boven remains a pleasantly-intriguing union of Nature's unadulterated beauty in placid cohabitation with oft-destructive homo sapiens, the species to which Blogger belongs.


But no, the humans around this town have not followed suit with destructiveness. (Maybe they are from another planet, system or galaxy).

They have, rather, built lodges and what-have-you to enable any citizen of the world to partake and to drink in of this tangible aesthetics, an artistic beauty spattered on the parchment of the daylight sky.


Kepha-ke, (The Zulu Language) kwathi ngolunye usuku, ubusuku obufana ncimishi nabo lobu esikubona, yebo nehora ncimiji, THERE WAS NO DAYLIGHT SKY TO GREET THE HORROR THAT VISITED WATERVAL BOVEN, WHEN SCORES OF MINERS DIED IN THIS SELF-SAME WATERVAL BOVEN, ALL VICTIMS OF BY ANY STANDARDS ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD, A WORST RAILWAY ACCIDENT 62 YEARS AGO THIS HOUR AND THI VERY MOMENT.


Little is remembered today by South Africa's political intelligentsia about the contribution of non-South African in building present-day South Africa as epitomised by Waterval Boven, a veritable spectacle of engineering: God's and Man's.


All that we as politicians of South Africa know about non-South Africans who built our land is the derogatory name "Kwerekwere" used by our populace in xenophobic attacks, all because we are pre-occupied with cult worship of this one Zulu, Xhosa, Ndebele, Swazi, Pedi, Tswana, Sotho, Coloured, Afrikaaner, English, Khoi etc Freedom-Struggle Hero.


We have largely forgotten about the Mozambican survivor of that 1949 train accident.  We have a face, though.  IT COULD BE THE FACE OF ANY OTHER MOZAMBICAN!



The Kwerekwerized Face of
the RSA&Waterval Boven
(a nameless Mozambican Survivor)

I think all our politicians, ruling and in opposition, should hang their heads in shame, that men and women like the unnamed fellow above, should be so much under-remembered.


One day soon though, a day too soon for those who think such a feat will call for the Second Coming, we will all stand together as Africans Black, White, South African and Non-South African.

We will re-live the spirit of oneness kindled by that train accident well over half a century ago.

We will all of us assemble on the pages of authors like Jose Burman who describes in his book how South Africans, right in the belly of an utterly white-racist nation that was busy gestating a monstrous Baby Apartheid, rallied still in defiance to save what lives they could from that horrific accident:


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