White-knuckle ride from on high
birth of the township is a metaphorical thread which binds all generations that lived under one roof, but more significantly, it’s a silent witness to the family secrets. Profoundly, the apricot tree’s shade is a place for narrating the tales and legends of the township – whether chivalrous or scandalous.
Imagine the ancient fireplaces of the African storytellers and sages, then you have a modern equivalent in Mhlongo’s apricot tree. These riveting anecdotes come from the lips of the elderly family members – notably the uncles who still speak in the argot of the Sophiatown era and play the township jazz of yesteryear. Besides the ubiquitous shebeen and corner shop, Soweto is a township with historic landmarks and apartheid-engineered social institutions such as Mtutuzeli Matshoba’s hostels.
For instance, in Avalon, the author uses the famous Soweto cemetery to explore the timeless themes of life and death from a township perspective.
Mhlongo’s gripping tales are, however, not confined to life in Soweto.Some refer to neighbouring townships such as Riverlea where the zama-zamas (illegal miners) try to make a living underground. But even these ones point to a recent apartheid past when a white or coloured identity used to be as contested as a black one.
Mhlongo’s remarkable penmanship regales with candour, wit and humour that only few wordsmiths can achieve. His is a trailblazing style which confirms the old saying that Soweto is a trendsetter. JAMES Aldred is the man every kid dreams of becoming. He climbs trees for a living, rigging rope so photographers and film-makers can reach the canopies of the tallest living things in the world. You might have seen the end result in National Geographic or in a documentary. Aldred’s new memoir, is a vertiginous, white-knuckled adventure through some of the most spectacular forests in the world. Each chapter recounts Aldred’s climbing of a single and singular tree, such as Roaring Meg in Australia or Tumparak in Borneo.
Aldred’s story is as much an education on the environment as it is on climbing. He scales a tree in England with “two skeins of ancient hawser climbing rope, two ragged harnesses, and a motley bundle of jangling carabiners – some of them clearly homemade”, he writes. Fishes of the Okavango
The Man Who Climbs Trees
He builds a treehouse in Gabon and films a baby harpy eagle in Venezuela. When he’s commissioned to get Sir David Attenborough high into a tree in Costa Rica, his sister warns him: “For God’s sake, don’t drop him.”
No worries, Aldred knows exactly what he’s doing.
And his story is even more thrilling when things go wrong.
Aldred reaches into his bag and feels the scaly flanks of a hognosed pitviper. He rides out a Bornean thunderstorm 76m above ground.
“Wind howled like a banshee through its branches,” he writes, “and ominous bangs and thuds echoed up from deep inside the timber.”
He contracts cerebral malaria, gets jabbed by a hypodermic swarm of honeybees and – most stomach-churning of all – gets infested with botflies. (Far from a doctor, he digs more than 40 of those writhing spine-covered maggots from his flesh.)
Each chapter is about 20 pages long, which makes
perfect for a camping trip, to read aloud by the fire.
If anything, Aldred’s the sort of dude you’d want to meet over a pint, but he’s probably far away, climbing some mellifluously named tree, so his book will have to do. – Washington Post.