East London

Under cloudy skies, we were docked in East London at 8:00 AM after an overnight passage from Port Elizabeth that was a little lumpy but not uncomfortably so. 

Today’s tour was the Khaya La Bantu Cultural Experience.  Khaya La Bantu was a Xhosa village near East London.  The Xhosa tribe preceded others in inhabiting South Africa.

 

It was a given that this would be a visit to a “typical” village that was atypical because no one actually lived there, only occuping it to put on a show for tourists.  No harm / no foul because who in their right mind would want 100+ tourists actually wandering around their home.  The question was whether it would be insightful and interesting.  In this case, yes on both counts.  

We were welcomed to the village with songs and dances.  The Xhosa are all about male and female roles, so we were divided by gender, the men going off to learn the Xhosa ritual of a boy becoming a man while the women learned about the ritual for a girl to become a woman.

I should have Pam put in a paragraph or two as a guest writer to describe the PG parts of the female ritual.  The male ritual begins with circumcision without benefit of anesthetic or antibiotics followed by water deprivation for a week.  The boy then lives in isolation for 4-6 weeks (down from 4-6 months in earlier generations) before being brought back to the village as a man.  This ritual is not in general practice among the majority of Xhosa any longer, but in remote tribes where it does take place, infection from the circumcision or the effects of dehydration result in a number of deaths annually.

We had a lunch of traditional foods we were assured it was safe to eat.  Now, some hours later, my decision to do so has not come back to haunt me. 

The singing and dancing started up again, this time to bid us good-bye.  As the buses pulled away, I would not be surprised to learn someone has shouted, “Okay, that's a wrap - strike the set!”.

Clouds had been building and soon after we returned to the ship a thunderstorm passed by.  As we departed the harbor, it was apparent that there were squalls in the area.  We may have a lumpy ride to Durban, especially since we will be going right into the waves and the ship will be running fast to cover the distance.