Magwa Falls is in the heart of Pondoland, slightly inland from Port St Johns in the Eastern Cape province. This is South Africa's Wild Coast - a beautiful, remote area full of mountains, rivers and jungle, which stretches 250 km along the continent's South-East coast.
The Wild Coast was once part of the Transkei, an Apartheid-era homeland. For decades, it was politically and socially distanced from the rest of the country. This history, together with its sheer inaccessibility have left it one of the most culturally unspoilt areas in SA. It's a place where the people carry on with their lives in a very traditional way, close to nature, and where places such as London, Paris or New York are simply unimaginable. Large-scale development has not reached the Wild Coast, and backpackers are the main overseas visitors to the area.
Gwexintaba (the village at the top of Magwa Falls and home to Magwa Volunteers) is particularly unaffected. There is no electricity apart from the volunteering project's solar panel. It's a world with no television, no lights, no running water or refigeration, and very few vehicles. Most of the people earn their livings from subsistence farming, and the local store stocks only the bare necessities. It's a lot like any other isolated rural village in Sub-Saharan Africa. This is how hundreds of millions in the developing world live, and there is no better place than here to experience first-hand what it's all about.
The Goso Forest, an extremely rare and ancient example of Afromontane Forest, surrounds the village. This is a collection of around 50 huts and a school. They sit atop a plateau, through the middle of which is a 2,5 km-long, 240 metre-deep slit in the earth's surface. At the head of this gorge, Magwa ("The Fallen") Falls plunges to a boulder-strewn, jungle-lined river below. In full flood, Magwa is one of South Africa's most phenomenal, although least-publicised, natural spectacles. It's difficult to imagine the forces that ripped apart the earth to form this waterfall, with its perfectly sheer sides. How long ago it happened simply boggles the mind. Because of its inaccessibility, it has escaped development, and is mostly only visited by a few backpackers at a time. Most of them would agree that it's a definite scenic highlight of their South African tour, and a rare glimpse into another world.
Magwa Volunteers is a short walk from the waterfall, at the edge of the plateau. The view of the hills and valleys below stretches off to the Indian Ocean in the distance, in a patchwork of grassland, thatched mud-hut villages and jungle. The volunteer centre is at a higher altitude than the coastal mountains around Port St Johns, with the ocean on the horizon. It is one of the few places in the world where, every day, you can see ships literally floating above the mountains, sailing back and forth to destinations which bear little resemblance to this place, with its back-to-basics reality and age-old traditions.
The word was the name of a legendary king, the first man on earth, who was the father of the Xhosa people. Today they are a loosely-knit group and are made up of the Bhaca, Bomvana, Mfengu, Mpondo, Mpondomise, Xesibe and Thembu, as well as smaller groups. They each have ideas, traditions and cultural differences which make them unique, distinct entities within the amaXhosa, and there is sometimes animosity between the groups - they would rather refer to themselves as being a Thembu or an Mfengu than a Xhosa. However, their common language and a broad set of traditions bind them together.
Their traditional home is in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. 5.5 Million of the estimated 8 million Xhosas still live here. They have inhabited the area for hundreds of years, having in the mists of time been part of a larger migration by the Nguni race from the area around the Great Lakes.
Cash money was not previously part of the culture, with wealth and the economy being based on cattle ownership. Today's world is money-mad, but not so long ago if a man had a hundred cows, it was the same as owning a BMW. This is still very much part of the thinking in this part of the world. For instance, in order to get married, a man must go through a complex set of negotiations with the bride's family, the central part being that he must pay a dowry consisting of cows.
Other traditional practices abound. Sangomas (witchdoctors) are part of everyday life, and provide a vital link between this world and the next. They throw bones to predict the future, and burn muti (medicine) to affect the weather and to banish evil spirits. They diagnose illnesses and prescribe herbal and spiritual cures, and are highly respected members of the community.
Ancestor-worship is deeply ingrained in the culture, and serves as a backdrop to Christianity, the religion to which most people subscribe. They see no conflict between the traditions of the ancestors and Christian beliefs, and the people are in general deeply religious. That being said, ancient spiritual practices continue - for example it is common practise that, on important occasions, animals are sacrificed to appease the spirits. People use magic to protect themselves from enemies and to bring prosperity.
Men and women occupy distinct places in Xhosa society, and both go through traditional coming-of-age ceremonies around age 16. These are extremely important - for instance no Xhosa male will be considered a man until he has undergone the circumcision ritual, which happens while he is attending a type of training camp where he has to live with other initiates, perform rituals and observe the ancestral traditions. Visitors to Pondoland will often see ghost-like young men wandering naked except for a blanket, their skins smeared with white clay.
Most people live in round wattle-and-daub huts, thatched with grass and built at little expense (although rectangular houses are becoming more common). They are normally windowless and chimney-less, with no running water and with light being provided by candle, paraffin lamp or open fires after dark. Cooking is usually done over an open fire, and the staple diet is Nquso, a mixture of cracked corn and sugar beans. Because meat is expensive and refrigeration almost non-existant, the diet is mostly vegetarian, with little variation.
A typical day will consist of the children going off to school, the women performing their chores, such as housework, washing clothes in the river and tending the fields; while the men tend to the livestock and perhaps attend a community meeting to discuss an important matter. Because of the lack of electricity, the people go to sleep earlier here.
This is a very rural, agricultural part of the country, and it has a strong sense of community, around which everything revolves. There is a tendency towards collectivism, and the society could perhaps be described as a form of natural communalism. The Wild Coast is one of the few places in South Africa where tribal law still predominates. Chiefs and headmen are appointed by the King, a much-revered figure. They dispense justice according to tribal law, and make important decisions, in particular regarding land occupancy. All land here belongs to the tribe, and the people are allocated their individual plots, which they use for subsistence agriculture.
It's all part of a fascinating system in which ancient traditional values are still the guiding lights in people's lives.
It's a sunny afternoon and the view behind us is expansive as we set off from the volunteer project. The Indian Ocean is on the horizon, and the land falls away from our plateau in a series of deep valleys and hills, dotted with mud-hut villages, to end in cliffs at the seaside, 8 km away. Half of what we can see is bright blue sky and ocean, the other half ranges between deep green and straw yellow - jungle interspersed with grazing and fields, as far as the eye can see.
We're heading for Magwa Falls at the other end of the village - 2km away along a winding dirt road lined with round, thatched huts every hundred metres or so. As we leave the project's gate, we meet Pam The Music Man, a teenage cow-herder with a guitar and his family's cattle. Pam & his brothers are a very musical bunch and are regular performers at Magwa Volunteers - many an evening has turned into a rural rock concert with djembe drums, guitars & original African rythyms. Pam agrees to come & play at the project this evening, and heads off after his cattle, strumming his guitar and singing tunefully in a language none of us can understand.
We cross a makeshift bridge over a small stream. Two women are washing clothes in the river, a typically African scene (although I wouldn't want to drink the water if I was living downstream). We carry on up the heavily-rutted road. We pass a cow. We pass an old man standing by the side of the road. "Molweni!" we all say. He replies with "Molweni!" and "Gunjani?" (how are you?). "Ndi-pi-li-le," we are fine, but struggling with the pronunciation. He laughs at us and we laugh with him.
We carry on up a slight incline. We pass 3 goats and 2 more cows, who look at us strangely. On our right is a small fenced-off field full of dried corn, and a circular mud hut with a conical, grass-thatched roof. A woman standing outside waves at us and we wave back. There are 2 small children playing in front of the hut, they both yell, "Molweni!" which we yell back at them.
We're passing a cow and 2 sheep on the left and a football field on the right. There's a group of 10 year-old boys playing football with the volunteer centre's ball - it's a bright orange official FIFA World Cup ball, the only one in the village and therefore the bee's knees. They all yell "Molweni!" and we watch them for a while, cheering when one side scores a goal.
The football field is next to the school, which consists of a 30 metre-long building with 4 classrooms, and a smaller rectangular building. We can hear a kids' choir singing, and as we get nearer we see about 20 of them grouped together in a motley array of school uniforms and singing with a tremendous amount of enthusiasm. They seem to do it in such an uncomplicated and unabashed way. No-one is afraid to sing at the tops of their voices here, how unlike home. If they entered Karaoke competitions they'd be champions. They finish a song as we reach them & we clap and pass by to a chorus of molweni's, hello's and how are you's.
We carry on, with more singing in the background. We pass a herd of goats and some chickens standing outside more mud huts. Most of these simple houses are about 5 metres in diameter, and many are painted bright turqoise, an unexpected colour scheme in this area. Others are pink or a peachy colour, while the rest are plain mud. They all have thatched grass roofs. The huts are interspersed with fields of bone-dry corn and areas of knee-high grass, with the forest rising in the background. It's autumn, so the grass is turning from green to yellow.
Set slightly off the road is one of the village's two stores, a small rectangular building. It has a large gas bottle outside, with a pipe leading to a small hole in the wall. It is connected to the village's only refrigerator, which contains large bottles of beer. They will come in handy later, so we buy most of them. The store has a counter running length-wise down the building. It's flimsily fenced off with chicken wire, behind which are sparsely-stocked shelves containing items such as cooking oil, maize meal, pilchards in tomato sauce and Nestle infant formula. Near the door is a large drum of paraffin with a hand pump - an important item in the village, as paraffin is a major fuel for lighting and cooking in this electricity-less place.
The shopkeeper is a very buxom woman with a fancy hairdo and a red dress. She smiles at us (everyone is always smiling at you here) and reminds us to bring the empty bottles back for the deposit, then we're off again towards the Falls.
We pass a man who is shouting at the top of his voice. He's speaking to his friend who is standing at least a hundred metres away. Magwa Falls are pretty close now - we can hear them, and see clouds of mist rising above the gorge like steam from a cooking pot, so the guy has to shout extra-loud to be heard. Pondoland Telecommunications, the network with the best rates. We're passing quite a few people - kids off to the football, snappily-dressed teenagers, women carrying 25-litre buckets or heavy-looking bundles of firewood on their heads. Ouch. Each greets us with an exchange of "molweni's," and it seems each hut we pass has at least one half-naked toddler who shouts his or her hello's. We're getting quite good at speaking basic Xhosa.
We also pass sheep, goats, donkeys, pigs and cows - the Wild Coast Big 5. They all seem to be in pretty good condition. The village dogs are a pretty scruffy bunch though. Once, we see a donkey standing dead-still next to a hut with its head half-lowered and eyes closed, looking like it's done absolutely nothing for hours and isn't intending to. I'm beginning to understand how it feels.
We can hear the falls thundering close-by now. It sounds like a LOT of water! We leave the road and make our way along a track towards the first viewpoint. It's quite a surprise when we reach it: a tourist information centre has been built there by the government. It's the only example of Western architecture out here, and has never been used - a large, modern, empty structure with sliding glass doors and a wooden viewing deck looking out over Magwa Falls.
Which when we see them are spectacular. Tons of water crash endlessly to the river-bed almost 150 metres below. Exotic-looking plants cling to cracks in the cliff-face. Mist billows up, making it look like a scene from a film. The distance to the bottom of the gorge is vertigo-inducing, and I step back from the ledge after a quick look at a dark, misty chasm. Waaay below, the river forms white-water rapids around the jumble of boulders along its jungle-lined path.
We were going to walk to the other viewpoints, then across the falls to the tea plantation, which sits unexpectedly amidst the jungle on the other side of the gorge. But this is really nice, it's getting towards sunset and we've got a few days ahead of us. So we decide to just open some beers, watch nature's movie for a while and savour the African vibe. Here we are, miles from anywhere on the other side of the world, sitting next to a spectacular gorge that must've taken millions of years to form (unless the earth just split apart in one awesome moment). I vaguely wonder where all that water comes from.
What can I say but, cool. It's nice to realise that there's a completely different world out there, and that life isn't all about cars, skyscrapers and shopping malls. Or about the shortage of money and time, and the need to buy things which don't improve our lives that much. I'm glad I came here, I think it's an essential experience, one to be remembered.
Later on we'll head back to the volunteer centre for dinner cooked on an open fire and an evening of live music, all under an African sky, with no light pollution and millions of stars. Tomorrow we'll plant potatoes, or weed the cabbage patch. Then go for a hike through the forest to the base of the falls, or play football with the kids. Or try baking traditional bread in the solar oven. Something like that. Probably. Unless something unexpected happens. We'll have to wait 'n see. Tomorrow, as they say, is another day.
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