The documentary, Cultivating Unemployment, uses the case study of Weenen, an agricultural community in the KwaZulu-Natal midlands, to highlight the severe structural challenges facing rural communities and agricultural workers across South Africa. It provides a very necessary insight into an important part of the South African landscape that is often overlooked in policy decisions.
We arrived in the small town of Springbok at eight pm after an arse numbing 800 km drive from our departure point in Hermanus on the southwestern coast of the Cape Province, via the often picturesque and occasionally not so picturesque towns of Worcester, Wolseley, Gouda, Porterville, Clanwilliam, Klawer, Vanrhynsdorp, Bitterfontein, Garies and Kammieskroon.
My dad and I had made the brave decision to endure each other’s company for eight to ten weeks, travelling, meandering and getting lost in four Southern African countries: Namibia, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Botswana. Our main goals were to tolerate each other’s driving ability, cooking skills and sense of direction. Secondary goals would be to visit some of the most pristine wilderness areas in Africa, meet the locals and have a few adventures.
British colonialism, Apartheid policies and post-apartheid politics have all played a role in curbing and regressing the rights of a large section of the South African population. Unfortunately for 17 million rural South Africans there are plans afoot to disenfranchise them further via the introduction of the Traditional Courts Bill.
A cinematic experience that evokes the spirit of Fellini or Rossellini, with the lush cinematography and social satire that has always been such a grand tradition in Italian cinema. With The Great Beauty, director Paolo Sorrentino pays homage to the hidden beauty of The Eternal City, while at the same time commenting on the moral and ethical decay of a city, a people and probably society in general.
A swing high above Saturn by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft revealed this stately view of the golden-hued planet and its main rings. The view is in natural color, as human eyes would have seen it. This mosaic was made from 36 images in three color filters obtained by Cassini’s imaging science subsystem on Oct. 10, 2013. The observation and resulting image mosaic were planned as one of three images for Cassini’s 2013 Scientist for a Day essay contest.
The Asiatic cheetah once had a distribution that extended across the Middle East, Central Asia, north into southern Kazakhstan and southeast into India. Today, the Asiatic cheetah has been extirpated from its entire Asiatic range, except for a small and critically endangered population in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
We recently stumbled across a beautiful video documenting a surf trip along the Angolan coast. Although the video has already gone viral (110,000 views on YouTube within one day), we just had to add it to our collection as it represents everything that Reprobate travel is all about: adventure, discovery, and natural beauty.
