With spring comes the grand opening day of the Love Africa Carnival. I’m delighted to unveil Love Africa Carnival Note of Affection#1: Skyscapes by James Clarke.
James was born in London, but now lives in South Africa. He is a columnist for The Star newspaper and has been called South Africa’s funniest columnist by the Financial Mail! James is author of several books on natural history, cultural history and humour.
.
Skyscapes
by James Clarke
Wherever one lives on the plains of Africa one is aware of the skyscape rather than a landscape. A friend of mine, Sandy Dacombe, for years a popular voice on SABC (Talking of Nature, etc), understood this.
Just after the Millennium Sandy emailed to friends a fascinating series of despatches from Malawi.
She called the series, “From the Warm Heart of Africa” for that‘s how Malawi markets itself.
Sandy then married an old acquaintance of mine, Tony Ferrar, a widely respected biologist and authority on elephants. The couple were transferred to Zambia which calls itself “The Real Africa”.
“But all of Africa is real,” said Sandy in one of her emails, “even the unbelievable bits.”
Sandy knows central Africa well and in 2003 I received her first missive from Zambia in which she described the sky as they drove to Kafue National Park to take up Tony’s new assignment.
“I had forgotten Zambia’s magnificent skies. These are tall skies – piled high with voluptuous clouds of cream and pearl and silver, or weighted down with swollen angry thunder-heads that let down veils of rain like bolts of cloth unrolling.
“As we drove we watched purple sheets of rain envelop the distance, and the grasslands toss like choppy seas. The wind stirred up dust wraiths in the road that scurried ahead of us like startled animals.” When you come to consider it, skies are part of this subcontinent’s magic. I realised this only after I left South Africa for a spell in 1961 and, while in New Zealand, read Robert Ardrey’s 1961 book, African Genesis. I’ve never forgotten the introductory paragraph:
“Not in innocence, and not in Asia, was mankind born. The home of our fathers was that African highveld reaching north from the Cape to the Lakes of the Nile. Here we came about – slowly, ever so slowly – on a sky-swept savannah glowing with menace.”
Some of the greatest views of our sky-swept savannah can be had as one turns south off the Harrismith-to-Bethlehem road to follow the R74 – the route over Oliviershoek Pass to the Northern Berg. The sky over those great grassy hills is nearly always dramatic.
I go that way often and have seen great storms filling the sky ahead over the Tukhela Valley. A friend described the deep purple sky as “bruise coloured”, a description I shall one day steal.
In overcast Britain, in built-up Europe and in the sullen tropics one is far less aware of the sky. Landscape painters almost ignore it.
Paul Bosman, the great South African wildlife artist (now living in Phoenix, Arizona) was commissioned by a Belgian to paint a canvas of Johannesburg. Imagine a door-sized canvas: right at the bottom taking up a mere sixth of the painting was the forest canopy of the northern suburbs and the distant toothy city skyline. The rest of the painting showed a great Mount Everest of cumulus nimbus cloud. Descending from the top of the canvas three or four hadedas drifted down.
Johannesburg is a heroic sight when viewed from afar under its billowing summer sky.
Even at night South Africa’s sky can be a wonderful sight.
An acquaintance – a game farm owner in the Lowveld – hosted a New York police officer but at sunset a problem arose and he had to leave the policeman alone in the camp returning only at 11pm. He began apologising. The officer said, “Don’t apologise. I have had the most incredible evening!” He pointed at the sky ablaze with stars and said, “I have never seen the stars before.”
The San bushmen, who see stars every night through the clear desert air could have explained to him how the stars are the campfires of the departed.
LOVE AFRICA CARNIVAL INDEX
Skyscapes by James Clarke (Note of Affection #1, Love Africa Carnival)
Nani’s Sari by Sherissa Roopnarain (Note of Affection#2, Love Africa Carnival)
The Tree by Adrian Neil Chellew (Note of affection#3, Love Africa Carnival)
Animal Portraits by Susan Kiguli (Note of Affection #4, Love Africa Carnival)
Spring Oak & Melville by Louis Greenberg (Note of Affection #5, Love Africa Carnival)
Inverted Season by Karina Magdalena Szczurek (Note of Affection#7, Love Africa Carnival)
From Ethiopia, Hello By Michael Ambatchew (Note of Affection #8, Love Africa Carnival)
The Taste of Chicken by Dineo Maboe (Note of Affection #9, Love Africa Carnival)
Holiday in De Rust by SA Partridge (Note of Affection #10, Love Africa Carnival)
Lovebirds, a play by Alex Smith (Note of Affection #12, Love Africa Carnival)
On Love, Writing and Senegal by Mariama Ndoye (Note of Affection #13, Love Africa Carnival)
Please send submissions to Alex at loveafricacarnival@gmail.com , that are:
1.Original and unpublished
2.With author’s full name, place of birth, country of residence and a couple of lines of ‘about the author’ bio.
Please register or log in to comment
» View comments as a forum thread and add tags in BOOK Chat
Algeria's Way
Drinking from the Dragon's Well
September 1st, 2008 @17:09 #
An auspicious beginning for this project. Thanks, Alex and James.
September 4th, 2008 @21:49 #
Mwape Mumbi, a film maker from Zambia sent a message on Facebook...
--------------------
Re: Skyscapes by James Clarke (Exhibit #1, The Love Africa Carnival at Book SA)
"Skyscrapes" is pure gold. Dripping with magic. A soul awash in life's colours. At which stage I am prompted to share the bit below with one and all, in something of an extention of "Skycrapes". I hope all will enjoy it just as much...
"THE OPEN SPACES OF CINEMA FROM AFRICA"
by Don Francesco PEDRETTI
One day I came up against a film that seemed to go very slowly because it was set in the infinite spaces of a landscape that looked at me.
And so I began to look as well and to walk.
But I walked like a plane that seems to be almost still although really it is travelling at over a thousand kilometers per hour in the wide open skies.
I looked at the landscape and felt as though I were still and I had the sensation that it was penetrating my spirit.
I looked with eyes that were not my own and I saw things that I had never thought of before and all of them had a meaning of their own and a place of their own, all in my life.
I realized that I was running quickly towards things, towards a living space that is part of the lives of other men and also part of my life.
Another day I understood that in those wide open spaces large hearts grow that can contain love for all creatures that live in the earth, crawl on the earth, break out of the earth to blossom, or look down from the sky like the stars and the moon full of light and mystery.
A wealth of memories a thousand years old, that had remained naïve or enchanted, the tenderness of maternal love, the mystery of life that dies and is recreated, endless crying and joy.
I discovered another space, the immense space of the African heart and I learned to grow patiently, and to speak patiently, when it was my turn and to see that life broadens out endlessly as the desert surrounds the oasis, as the forest around the trees.
I discovered the immensity of the African heart… Then they explained to me the violence of passion and the repetition of unending dances, the kind welcome and the power of destruction, the great rains and the ghibli on the earth next to the desert, multicoloured joy or the tender whiteness of robes, the courage of men and the fear of wild beasts.
I heard the hurricanes of the human passions and countless deaths for nothing.
I heard of tribes rising up against one another like the waves of the infinite ocean.
I felt beauty in the religious sense, beauty that in a thousand different forms, unites man to man and man with the earth and sky.
I do not want to lose these vital wide open spaces that I have approached through cinema from Africa.
I shudder at the thought that perhaps these wide open spaces will be lost to the wind blowing from the North.
Won’t the men of Africa continue their struggle so that all men understand that there are still spaces for life?
• An article by Don Francesco PEDRETTI, COE [The Centro Orientamento Educativo] Milan, Italy, as published in a Panafrican Federation of Film Makers [FEPACI] 1995 compilation themed CINEMA: Africa and the Centenary of Cinema, ISBN 2-7087-0588-1."