Bloemfontein

My South African odyssey has taken me to Bloemfontein, a large town in Free State province. It is a relaxing place for me, because I do not know it well, and it does not know me well. I am freed from the wealthy middle-class rut of my home town.
Yesterday afternoon, I took a long walk on the wide, dry boulevards. I had been given directions, but I decided this time to get the 'conditions of possibility' to work for me. It is a condition of possibility of a planned walk that the route be deviated from (if this were not the case, it would mean that I could walk in any direction and still get home). Deviate I did, into some rather rundown districts; you know you are getting to the interesting parts of a town when sex-shops begin to appear. I saw very poor white men, an unusual experience even now. They have very tanned skin, which contrasts with their sun-bleached blonde hair. There is a broken look in their eyes.

Stumbling along the hard shoulder, I found a chess piece in the gutter - a rook, or castle. The castle symbolizes Bloemfontein well. The white, afrikaans speaking community here is a bastion of the old values of apartheid. This is a place where men are men, women are not much at all, and body-building supplements have a prominent place in every supermarket. On the other hand, black Sotho-speakers make up 90% of the population here, and since the fall of the old regime, they have come to occupy almost all the important regional government posts. A castle, we may note, doesn't change hands by degree - it is held either totally, or not at all.