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

14/4/2016 Day 4 of 7 sea days to Cape Verde

Still thinking all the time about Grandad Roy. Love to all the Ashpitals xxxx

My oh my,  we can feel certainly the equatorial heat today. Definitely in excess of 30C. An indoors day was needed today, even breakfast on the deck in the shade at 9 this morning was a bit too hot for us Brits (not all I have to say, some are still getting roasted and turned out on their sunbeds. There was at least one casualty of the heat today, as one man collapsed on deck 13. He was stretchered away.)

So we have entertained ourselves indoors, more art, drawing and painting a monk seal.  Pam Carter is the name of the art teacher, quite eccentric at the same time as being an inspirational woman and artist, and as if that wasn't enough, cancer and stroke survivor. She is accompanied by her husband, a former rugby player now confined to a wheelchair as a result of his career, for whom she is also a carer. Maximum respect to them both.


On the subject of inspirational we then went to Chris Lubbe's third and final talk, this one was about the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission ( links to a BBC feature narrated by Fern Britton) after apartheid, and the appointment of Desmond Tutu to chair the commission using a restorative justice and amnesty approach.   The Commission had three functions: human rights, amnesty and reparation.  Hearings took place between 1996-1998, starting in the Western Cape.
  How to forgive was at the heart of the work of the commission, but in needed full disclosure and engagement of the perpetrators. How to be listened to as part of  catharsis for the victims and their families. There is a SA government TRC site for background and ethos.  On You tube there are full hour long broadcasts of the interviews by the TRC (warning of horrific details) for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRE_eM_LtR4
 Today's talk was really visual - clips of state sanctioned violence, in particular an event referred to as the Trojan Horse Massacre, where police hid in a container and then just burst out opening fire on everyone peacefully demonstrating - I have now linked to You Tube.  He showed us photos from the commission, and added profoundly moving narrative.  There are still so many things I would like to know, but it will have to wait until I am at home, with access to libraries and internet for research. I have found another documentary which gives a more information (if you watch please be prepared for the reality), and I have also found the following 21 minutes of summary really helpful.




There was time for a few questions and answers today too. One was to ask about the presence of segregation before apartheid was enshrined in law - eliciting an uncomfortable response about the regime imposed by British and Dutch colonialists. One was to ask why there's so much inequality even now 20 years on. The answer was respectfully that 300 years of inequality cannot disappear in one generation,  I have learned so much from these three sessions and feel absolutely privileged to have been here at this time. Two of these 3 sessions are on a loop on channel 2 in our cabins now too, so I will be able to review the details I may have forgotten.

Tonight after dinner we decided to go to the Curzon theatre to watch the Headliners Theatre Company perform "Blame it on the Boogie", but unfortunately there were some technical difficulties and the show was cancelled just after it started.  The "pit lifts" went down below stage level, and as it was a dance performance it was too dangerous to carry on.

We are now back in the cabin watching parts of Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy interspersed with Liverpool v. Borusia Dortmund. It's a great thing to be able to study the map of Africa in our cabin and to learn where we are in relation to Gabon, Cameroon and Nigeria, and how we will be sailing towards Cape Verde to the west of Ghana, the Ivory Coast, Liberia and Senegal.  They were just place names, and I never really placed them on a map before.  I hope I remember all this. A few years ago I learned all the locations of all of the USA, I think I'd be hard pushed to remember even 10 accurately nowadays. Losing what I don't use unfortunately.

Our current location after another 440 nautical miles towards Cape Verde is 1 degree south of the equator and 6 degrees west, so we didn't cross the equator overnight as I had expected.  Instead we have been told it will be overnight tonight, and then we are back in the Northern Hemisphere for the final stretch, visiting the Islands - Cape Verde, Canaries (Tenerife and Gran Canaria) and Madeira before returning to Southampton.

11/4/2016 First of 7 Sea days to Cape Verde Islands

This is the longest stretch we have ever been at sea without port stops, so we'll make sure we keep busy and plan our leisure activities and our education.  There are two art classes a day, two craft classes, two visiting speakers, several health and beauty presentations and four different types of light entertainment. And while Khachik is still going into the gym every day,  I do like a bit of telly too

This afternoon there was also a most distressing, totally necessary, illuminating talk by Chris Lubbe, former body guard of Nelson Mandela. He lived through apartheid and in today's talk he reflected on his childhood and the realisation of what apartheid meant through the things he saw around him in his own life.  He gave a bit of background to his own heritage, and how he came to be legally (in apartheid) classified as coloured. His grandmother was a maid who was raped by her white employer.  When he was born he had a lighter brown skin colour than "black" classification allowed, and blond curly hair. As an infant he went through various bizarre racist tests like measurement of the breadth of his nose, thickness of his lips using a ruler, and famously the "pencil test" where a pencil was put through his hair.  The determining factor was if it the pencil sticks in the person's curls, the person is classified as "coloured", if it drops straight through to the floor the classification is "white".  Apparently white children in black families just weren't allowed, so if a child was classified as white they were either placed for adoption or sent to an orphanage.  Chris's father said "luckily the pencil got stuck", but for Chris it meant he was not classified as black like his dad and as a result experienced many different kinds of discrimination and feelings of not belonging anywhere.

Chris then spoke about his recent work for Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu. He has several anecdotes of the fun had by Nelson Mandela denying celebrity, and imploring him to do the same. He also told us of his responsibility to tell things they way they were. He even has a piece of limestone from Robben Island, given to him by Nelson Mandela for him to use as a visual aid, so that future generations would know what their forefathers went through.  He then went on to tell several very powerful stories.  I am going to try to remember some of them.

First when he was six his family was living in port St John which I think is in the Eastern Cape on their own inherited land, farming animals.  One day two white government officials appeared on their land to give them 7 days notice to pack and leave for Durban, as the land they owned had been reclaimed as "whites only" land.  They moved without possessions to a squatter camp, and became homeless and destitute, with no system of justice to protect them.  Their former land became a whites-only holiday resort.

Next at the age of 8, on his 8th birthday in fact, his mother took him on a bus ride by way of celebration.  He became aware of  "non-white" buses, benches, toilets, hospital, areas in towns.  During the bus ride his diabetic mother became ill. The driver was unable to stop the bus to let them off. When they were let off the bus the only seat available was white only. She sat there waiting for emergency aid. A white woman agreed to make a phone call in a white only phone kiosk to avoid a black passer by being arrested.  Chris described how two policemen came and physically threw his mother from the bench to the floor, where she hit her head on the ground and was knocked unconscious. The two policemen just walked away, leaving Chris screaming for help.  Luckily it came. Some women came, reassured Chris and helped until the ambulance arrived.  This began a 3 month hospital stay, where she slowly recovered and returned home.



The final and for me most painful of all stories he explained that he had largely educated himself.  Schools were very poor.  Possibly 60 to a class, explaining he thinks the current high levels of illiteracy.  He said there were volunteers who came in to the squatter camps with feeding programmes and extra lessons.  He said one of those was a student, named Steve Biko.



Of course with the help of Peter Gabriel's haunting song Biko, his tragic story is now famous, but in the earlier days before his incarceration and untimely death in custody in 1977,  he taught Chris. Chris described searching dumps for disposed books, reading under the bedclothes with the one family torch, and always running down the batteries.



These were clear moments which inspired Chris to become an equal rights activist, and along with that came his own inevitable imprisonment for 4 months with hardened criminals.  His crime was leading a demonstration.

Following his imprisonment he decided to reply to an advertisement for trainee aeroplane pilots, only to be rejected because he wasn't white. He was bitterly disappointed and with the help of his uncle took a job on the railways. During this time he helped a black man not miss his train by allowing him onto a white-only carriage, and then walking with him through white-only carriages to reach the black-only 3rd class carriages.  Here they were both beaten up by two white police officers.  Chris was thrown to floor and sustained a severe beating and a broken arm. As the other white passengers looked on, the man he was helping was then thrown out of a moving carriage to his death.

This was the end of his talk, a cliff-hanger. Chris vividly gave an account of his devastation, how he was left to cope with this without counselling...... to be continued on 13th. Oh my word. He is still here,  having gone on to be Nelson Mandela's body guard, and has so much more to tell us about Truth and Reconciliation. This is a miracle in itself and we feel really privileged to be here with him.

 I am not going to be able to write about anything else today.
 xx

Since coming home I have been listening and watching many documentaries like this on you tube if you would like to get a bit more background to Apartheid and Nelson Mandela's family today, and a somewhat negative flip side of the Truth and Reconciliation process.