Sounds of Africa Part 1

I make no apologies for this. This is the post apartheid South Africa. In fact it’s 11/14 years since the end of apartheid (depends when you measure from). We are in SA again for January and despite the 10 plus years of democracy all the gardeners are black or coloured. I have yet to see a white gardener here unless of course he is some chancer posing as a landscape and outdoor space consultant.. There’s plenty of those (chancers that is). This place is hard to beat when it comes to people being landscape consultants 1 week, architects the next, interior designers, aura specialists, … hey I might re-invent me as a ………… gardener? The title of the blog though – ‘what has that got to do with it’? Well. The most common sound in the village here is ‘the strimmer’. All the gardeners have strimmers. In fact they do not seem to do anything else other than cut grass. No lawnmowers anymore just the cricket like tinnitus that is massed strimmers. Yesterday on the way to Cape Town the motorway verges were being (s)trimmed. Not a gang mowing machine or men with long scythes. Instead: an impi of tripod strimmers. Must have been 30 of them. It looked like War of the Worlds, or Zulu Dawn as ballet.