Hillside village in the Ciskei

The road (R72) between Port Alfred and East London runs through what used to be the former independent homeland of the Ciskei.  All along the way one sees small Xhosa villages scattering the countryside.  Coming from the East London side just before the Keikamma Pass there is a little village on a hillside on the left.  I’ve always wanted to snap a photo of it and the chance finally came on my last trip to Slummies.

When you look at a scene like this its hard to comprehend the simplicity of the existence these people carve out for themselves here compared to how we live in the cities.  Its a hard and isolated life and compared to us they are a lot less fortunate.  I often wonder though if its not us city folk that are less fortunate living behind high walls never even seeing our neighbours, rushing everywhere all the time and having everything at our fingertips.  We have become soft and probably wouldn’t survive a week in those kind of circumstances.  Yet we are all happy even if we live in very different ways.  Oh my word.  I just wanted to post the pictures and I here I started to go all deep and philosophical.  Anyhow,  the reason I wanted to post this today is that its Heritage Day and even though our heritages (and way of life) are all very different we are all South Africans living in the same rainbow country.  Happy Heritage Day.

This Post Has One Comment

  1. Gaelyn

    I like the various colors of these homes.

Comments are closed.