19/4/2016 Sea day to Tenerife

We are well on our way to Tenerife - this morning something serendipitous occurred when I was checking our position, the weather and our speed.  We were at 21 degrees north, 21 degrees west, 21 degrees Celsius and 21 nautical miles per hour. Not much chance of that happening to us again.  What could that mean in the great scheme of things? ;)

Anyway, times have since changed and here they are at 10 p.m. 24 north  18 west  21.5 nautical miles per hour and and 20 degrees celsius.  This means we have crossed the Tropic of Cancer today, have passed Mauritania and are around the same latitude as Western Sahara. We will be saying goodbye to Africa tomorrow and re-entering Europe as we visit Tenerife, Gran Canaria and Madeira over the next 3 days.

Tomorrow we are on an excursion called "Northern Panorama", a half day in the afternoon by coach with very little walking to help me deal with hip ache, instead taking in the views.  It is only 3 months since our last visit to Tenerife, so we remember Teide by cable car very well, and didn't really want to spend a day on the beach either so this one sounds new and interesting.  I am reluctant to promise live contact via wi-fi, but am more hopeful than ever!  Let's see.

Just a quick update on our sea day activities today: super healthy breakfast on the windy deck (force 6), painting a Cape Verdian woman bearing fish on head, roast turkey dinner for lunch.

                      

Our high spot today was another inspirational talk by the most wonderful Chris Lubbe, a repeat of his first talk for those who had missed it with a few extra explanatory slides and a BBC feature about race classification during apartheid. A couple of times Chris alluded to the pre apartheid times and the segregation that pre-existed 1948, the colonial times, and the embarrassment it might cause us to to know that the British started it.  Here's a timeline - it might help to clarify.

The BBC world Service has whole projects about African History to support Chris's talk,  and the extract below is from there

"A large number of laws were passed to establish the apartheid structure of government. The three most important blocks of legislation were:

• The Race Classification Act. Every citizen suspected of not being European was classified according to race.
• The Mixed Marriages Act. It prohibited marriage between people of different races.
• The Group Areas Act. It forced people of certain races into living in designated areas.

The apartheid regime had a number of pseudo scientific tests for classifying people as belonging to one of four main groups: White, Black, Indian, Coloured (mixed race). One of these tests involved putting a comb through hair - if it got stuck, that meant the person being tested was identified as African.

Every year, people were reclassified racially. In 1984, for example:
518 Coloured people were defined as White
2 whites were called Chinese
1 white was reclassified Indian
1 white became Coloured
89 Coloured people became African"

Chris gives personal perspective to the following table showing the inequality,  taken from http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~cale/cs201/apartheid.hist.html.  He speaks of the day his family's land was confiscated, resettling in a squatter camp with no possessions, attending a school with 60 pupils per class and no books, having to scavenge rubbish dumps for discarded books.



After Chris's talk I went to a second art class while Khachik went to gym, then an afternoon nap for me, just because I can.  Tonight there was another 5 course dinner and a thoroughly enjoyable Shirley Bassey night with a rather good west-end musical performer called Clare Bonsu, with all the arm, eye and hip drama you'd expect from Shirl, two Beatles numbers, two Bond songs, Big Spender, I am what I am and everything!

Until tomorrow, so hoping to get some pictures up and chat! Bye for now xx