Out of Afrika

I am now out of Afrika.
In just a few hours I will land in Europe, to begin the next phase of my life, with my base in Budapest. My move out of Cape Town is semi-permanent. I’ve emptied and cleaned my apartment on Hope St. and I will never live there again. In fact, as of now, I don’t feel any strong desire to live anywhere in Africa any time soon.
I am glad that I made the step of moving to Cape Town. It has been an intense year; frequently happy and feeling myself confronted by tremendous beauty, and just as frequently confronted by deeply ingrained injustice, privilege and cynicism. In many ways I feel that I have grown in negative ways as a result of my time in Africa, less hopeful and more scared, less engaged in collective struggle and more alienated from black and poor people. It is important that I leave now, that I reconnect with collectives of daring, irreverent and loving revolutionaries.
All the same, my time in South Africa is not finished.
I have begun the research required to do a major piece of writing on the white anti-apartheid activist and radical thinker, Richard Turner. I am greatly inspired both by Turner’s ideas and by the choices he made about how to live an open lifestyle, towards liberation, in times of severe repression. I finally succeeded in handing in a proposal to write a masters’ thesis, on this topic, just a few days before leaving. If they accept my proposal, my writing will proceed towards getting an MA degree, and hopefully continue into something longer and more beautiful after my degree is completed. So, in short, the work of interviewing people and producing writing will bring me back to South Africa within some months.
Further, I am not yet done with this website. There are still many more stories I would like to tell, and photographs that I would like to share. My apologies for the silence of the last months. I hope to bring this site up to date within the next month.

fly free, love…