As an American traveler to Africa I developed in reverse. Most Americans first travel to South Africa to see the great wildlife, then discover the culture. Many of them return to experience more of that, because the cultural experience is deep and broad, and is not exhausted in one trip.
My main interest initially was culture. But when I went on safari and saw the animals in their natural habitats, it was a revelation that profoundly changed my worldview. The wildlife changed my perspective on people.
Discovering Africa
Like most Americans I had only a sketchy knowledge of Africa for most of my life. My first impressions as a child came through movies, in which Africa was only an exotic setting for a mythical adventure, and told little about Africa.
I heard the occasional Africa news story that surfaces in our daily dosage of bad news, usually about some flood, famine, disease outbreak, war or terrorist attack. The image of Africa in the news media was almost always bleak. Unfortunately, the news footage is all of Africa that many Americans ever see. And it is nothing like the experience of going to Africa.
The Human Side
When I talk about culture, I’m talking about all the human aspects of a place, not just the culture of museums or concert halls, but all the creations and artifacts of the people and the way they live.
It’s hard to grasp how huge and diverse the African continent is. Only Asia is larger. America could fit in Africa three times over. All around Africa’s edges it was colonized by the empires of Europe and the Middle East. The European and Islamic cultural influences spread into the continent, mixed with the various indigenous cultures and with each other. The result is a fascinating pastiche of cultures and cultural hybrids set against an amazing and varied natural landscape.
Most of the colonization of Africa took place in the 19th and early 20th centuries. But some was much earlier. Cape Town, South Africa, was established in the 1652. Its rich multicultural blending goes back hundreds of years.
Stellenbosch, the wine country north of Cape Town, was settled by the Dutch in 1680, then developed for vineyards by French Huguenots, who had fled France to avoid beheading. They brought the French wine culture with them. That is characteristic of the kind of cultural blending that took place across South Africa as people converged there from all over the world.
Music and the African Soul
My interest in African culture started…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at The Taucker Travel Blog…