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Some used it to go to work at the casino, others to attend school.
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Ecologists have designated the region as the Pondoland Center for Plant Endemism, with a host of species found nowhere else in the world.Ĭrossing the footbridge, I found a constant stream of villagers. Its sweeping hillsides, dunes, seasonal wetlands, woodlands, estuaries, and offshore reefs are a biodiversity hotspot. The region is also an environmentally important area, a transition zone between sub-tropical and temperate climates.
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There are instead wells, drainage pits, and the occasional rooftop solar panel. State power lines and plumbing still don’t go to these villages. The footbridge - funded by an Austrian non-profit group upset at reports of children drowning as they tried to swim the river - takes you from modern South Africa to Pondoland, South Africa’s least economically developed region, which under apartheid white rule was the nominally independent tribal homeland of Transkei. A narrow footbridge crosses the River Mzamba to a very different landscape, where manicured lawns are replaced by rolling pastureland four-lane highways become tracks impassable when wet cars give way to cattle and neat condominiums are replaced by ramshackle villages with metal-roofed shacks. Leaving the airport at Durban on the east coast of South Africa, I drove south for three hours down the coastal highway past surfing beach resorts, condominiums, and retirement villages to a giant casino complex beyond Port Edward, the last tourist town. Sometimes, the boundaries between different worlds are breathtakingly stark. Nearly a year later, there had been no arrests, and no apparent progress in the investigation into his murder. When he resisted, they shot him eight times in front of his 17-year-old son, then sped away. One evening last March, a Volkswagen Polo pulled up at his home, and two men posing as police dragged Bazooka outside. But Sikhosiphi Rhadebe’s real love was the magnificent coastal lands of South Africa’s Eastern Cape, where he chaired a community organization campaigning to prevent an Australian mining company from strip-mining their sand dunes for titanium, one of the world’s most commercially valuable metals. They called him “Bazooka” after his favorite soccer star.