A Loop around Southern Africa – Day 2: A spinning dodo at the Cradle of Humankind

Ezra and I picked up the rest of the gang a little after eight o’clock, having been held up by the purchase of groceries and snacks for the road. Our first stop were the Sterkfontein Caves. Sterkfontein was where as many as five hundred Australopithecus and other hominid fossils were discovered, making it an incredibly valuable location for the study of human ancestors and their relatives. The individuals found by archaeologists mostly fell into the caves through sinkholes and died in the darkness, their personal tragedies fuelling scientific discoveries millions of years later.

We made it to Sterkfontein in time for the ten o’clock tour, which took us deep into the cave and all the way to its underground lake. The guide was an enthusiastic, if somewhat confused man, who had some rather simplistic beliefs about the mechanisms of evolution. What we took away from his tour was that we do not have dinosaurs because they evolved into chickens, and that the missing link between humans and apes is missing precisely because it evolved into humans and monkeys.

From Sterkfontein, we continued to the Cradle of Humankind Museum. It was one of the more bizarre museums I have visited during my travels. The ground floor was still all right: it was full of skull replicas and reconstructed torsos of various hominid species. Below, however, we were put on a circular boat that went down a mechanical ramp before spinning and sliding along a dark watery tunnel. The scenes around us were, I believe, supposed to represent the earliest geological history of the earth, with heating and cooling systems emulating the warm and cold periods. I was expecting that eventually, we would reach dioramas of dinosaurs, but the ride ended before we even got to the beginning of life on earth.

After the ride, we walked into a spacious, dimly lit hall with a few exhibits to the side. I barely remember what they were, as it was impossible to tear my eyes away from the exhibit at the very centre: a table with a glass case containing a life-size dodo that spun around at breakneck speed. Next to this glass case were telephones on which one could “dial” an extinct animal and hear a short story of their biology and extinction. Listening to the old dial followed by the strangely voluptuous voiceover of a dodo with a Mauritian accent drove me to hysterics.

It was mid-afternoon when we were done at the museum. There was still enough time for one or two more stops, and I was glad that my interest in visiting Pretoria was well-received by the group – or at least by most of the group sans Ezra, who as a proud Johannesburger could not entertain the thought that a tourist might consider Pretoria interesting. Still, he graciously consented to take us to Pretoria and let himself be persuaded to visit a site he had never visited before: the controversial Voortrekker Monument.

The Voortrekker Monument was built between the years 1937 and 1949 to honour the Voortrekkers – a group of Afrikaner pioneers who left the Cape Colony after it was taken over by the British. Their hope was to find a land where they could continue their rugged individualist existence beyond the grasp of an overbearing bureaucracy, but of course things did not work out that way. First, they came into conflict with the Africans who inhabited the land, and second, they discovered gold, which attracted British envy and eventually triggered the Anglo-Boer Wars. The Voortrekker Monument was built to commemorate the myth of the Voortrekkers as well as reaffirm the Afrikaner identity within a new, English dominated land, but it is a controversial building due to the history of racial conflict in South Africa, which it depicts in a very one-sided way.

The monument – much to our collective consternation – was rather magnificent. Its simplistic, blocky design on the outside belies the beauty of the late afternoon sunlight filtering in through the giant tinted windows as one stands under what is alleged to be the world’s largest marble frieze. We took the elevator all the way to the top, from which we saw the whole of Pretoria, and where we walked around the inside of the dome (this feature is not visible from the outside, where the roof is very much the opposite of round). We also took the elevator to the first floor beyond ground floor. It was filled with a haphazard collection of relics all arranged on the edges of a room that had a mock tomb at its very centre. At the front of this display burned a fire, and a grainy speaker played Beethoven’s Ninth into the echoing chambers.

Our last stop of the day was another mystifying cultural experience: we visited Spur, a Wild-West themed restaurant famed for its questionable Native American-inspired decor. Brent had visited a Spur in Nairobi and said it would not fly in the States, but we found the interior to be relatively sanitised, with only a few dreamcatchers and certainly no robotic Native American warriors. I was shocked at the number of vegetarian options on the menu, and even more shocked that they were delicious.