As I travel the world I have to say that the homogenisation of cultures and architecture is an inescapable and increasingly depressing fact. Nowadays when you fly into big cities and stay in hotels you could be in San Diego or Singapore, and you would be hard pressed to tell the difference. 

It’s only when you get outside the central business districts that the unique flavour of a country becomes apparent.
The further away from the cities you get the more the real ambience manifests itself. In the countryside traditional styles of building, agriculture and dress are often delightfully apparent, and the diversity and rich cultural values that the intrepid traveller seeks make for an enriching experience. Usually this is where travelling becomes more difficult and demanding of both physical and emotional resources, but the harder the journey the greater the rewards.

It May Be Old, But It Still Works

Everything seems so venerable, so established in Europe. The houses look good enough to eat with their thick marzipan walls intersected with chocolate wooden beams, their wiggly tiled roofs and wooden shutters perched at all angles against rough walls, the village squares radiating into tiny cobbled alleys and arched doorways yielding glimpses of perfectly composed courtyards, surrounded by high walls of stone, embroidered with tendrils of red and gold ivy. The scale of everything seems so harmonious, so well integrated with the countryside.
In southern Europe the countryside is rugged and stony, softened in Spring by poppies and cosmos daisies that grow in profusion along the sides of the roads. They form a gay contrast to the rocky terrain, beige grasses and neat rows of olive trees that make the hills look as if they’re clad in khaki striped sweaters. Bright emerald grasses bejewelled with spring flowers bravely thrusting their way through the cold old earth, scarlet and bright yellow heads nodding in the breeze.
 Then there are the speckled whitewashed cobbled daub and wattled villages, where little old ladies stooped under long black garments hobble after herds of goats across stony fields. Bridges as ancient and rickety as the inhabitants arch over rivers sparkling brightly under a pale eggshell sky. Oxen strain, ploughing rows of rich brown furrows, ready for the seeds that yield the summer harvest. Men in shirtsleeves sit unhurriedly drinking under faded awnings, gnarled hands folded contentedly across burgeoning paunches, while children skipped, fight, scuffle and giggle in the dust. Bungalows and churches are scattered higgledy piggledy around central squares, the ivory glare softened by flowering pepper trees and brilliant purple and cerise bougainvillaea.
As you travel further north the terrain softens, becomes more mountainous, studded with saphire lakes and verdant valleys, indigenous forests laced with streams and waterfalls. 

By the time we got to Papgat Moerengon Gammadoelisfontein, it was closed

Like many of the newer colonial countries, the average South African town imposes itself rudely on the wide horizons of the land. The style of building is brash and purely functional, with uniform streets, bland brick houses in rows, featureless squares with the mandatory Dutch Reformed Church exactly in the centre, mostly built in ‘fifties style, with slasto, mosaic and concrete. Local councils have no aesthetic guidelines or control. Locally, however, other than height and size restrictions, if a building won’t fall down then your plans will be passed, no matter how insulting your house may be to the surrounding landscape. 
Despite our fabled summer sunny skies and legendary winters you seldom see a living soul in our villages, except on Saturday mornings when the farm workers pour into town in their best clothes to do their meagre shopping, get drunk on the littered pavements and socialise. But usually people are few and far between, and are seldom on foot.
In Europe the climate mostly ranges from abysmally awful to apocolyptically abominable, yet there are people everywhere - on tractors in fields, on bicycles in forests, strolling about villages and towns, on horses in country lanes or perched on walls outside their houses. Spanning four generations, they push prams, hang over gates chatting to their neighbours, lean on mossy walls, sip leisurely drinks at cafés, wander around the higgledy piggledy markets, disappear round corners to forgotten alleys and hidden doorways. There are no straight lines. Human habitation seems to evolve, to grow organically from the soil itself, while in the newer colonies man-made structures impose themselves insensitively on a dry, harsh landscape that hides nothing.
In South Africa there are seldom huge, ancient trees to enfold the abominably ugly concrete blocks that are deemed suitable for schools and homes. Little thought goes into the positioning of the town in relation to its natural surroundings, or the position of factories and industry juxtaposed with the roads fringed by uniformly square buildings. Only in the USA and modern Mexico did I see uglier towns than the average South African urbanscape.
European towns and cities seem to have grown naturally from villages where houses have balconies and front doors facing the street. People can actually talk to each other as they go about their lives. There are central squares with little gardens, and cobbled public areas fringed with pavement cafes.
South African cities are designed for cars, with streets laid out on a square grid pattern. There is no safe place for pedestrians, joggers or cyclists. Houses have high walls with electric fences, and no-one can see in. They are cities that encourage loneliness and alienation from others. You can live in your little piece of suburbia for years and all you will know of your neighbours is a shadow behind the tinted glass of their shiny new car.

Singing in the Rain

In the old world even large cities are made up of villages strung together. The narrow streets and squares, the formal gardens, the lovely old stone bridges across the rivers are imbued with an ancient lineage of countless lives and ardent loves lost through hundreds of generations. It is like wandering through a living legend, a fairytale come to life. Every nook and cranny resonates with the past, has a thousand stories to tell.
In the bigger cities church squares, ornate benches and pavement cafes with their bright baskets flowers above smartly striped awnings form a stark contrast to the chaotic maelstrom of traffic. Horns blare, and every tiny toy town car, of which there are legions, seem to contain a wildly gesticulating madman shouting at the top of his lungs.
The fundamental flaws of the urban cityscape are a sad characteristic of the developing world. Older cities have an infrastructure that has evolved over time to suit human needs, whilst modern cities are designed around transport needs. European cities are more densely populated than ours, yet they have a human scale that is almost villagey. London with its burroughs, Paris with its arondissements could be a series of villages joined together, with windy streets of small shops where shopkeepers greet their customers by name, with well tended public open spaces providing safe places for children to play and people to stroll in safety, with houses that face the street.

Toilets on Steroids

The more affluent the city, the bigger and uglier are the buildings. Johannesburg is laid out in a grid pattern. All the houses have high walls and security fences, and you never see a soul on the streets. The centre of the city is surrounded by alienating apartment blocks. There is nowhere for extended families to co-habit, no grandparents to look after the kids and impart their wisdom. Nowhere for people to hang out at the front gate and chat to passersby and to neighbours, no rivers with green banks and lush trees to lie and dream under.

In the “townships,” in the midst of great poverty, one can still find the social interaction, comraderie, extended families, mutual support and neighbourliness that is lacking in middleclass suburbia.
Affirmative action in the corporate sector is enabling an emerging black middle class to evolve. Yet many newly financially comfortable families have tried out life in the suburbs, and ironically chosen to go and build larger houses back in the townships that they came from. They found life in their smart townhouses to be boring, dangerous and lacking in the human warmth and support that they have been raised to enjoy.
“Ubuntu” is a word understood all over southern Africa which describes the attitude of sharing and caring that prevails in black cultures, where no matter how little you possess, you will share it with those in need. There is little “ubuntu” in affluent suburbia, let alone the underlying human love and respect implied in the concept. Though our lives may be comfortable physically, it’s everyone for themselves in our big, ugly, electric fenced mansions.

Story and Photos: Arlene Cameron