The Veil Is Lifting

“Every veil secretly desires to be lifted, except the veil of Hypocrisy.”

– Richard Garnett

In my last entry I was beginning to grapple with the lifting of the veil of ignorance to the racism I didn’t register as a child and since that trip to Hartebeespoort, we have gone on another adventure and had a very different experience. This time we ended up at the very famous Cradle Moon Lakeside Game Lodge on a busy Saturday morning. Joburgers don’t have very many options so it makes sense that it was very full when we got there. How we ended up there is a bit of a funny story and it made the experiences so much more impactful.

We were supposed to go hiking in the Klipriviersberg Nature Reserve in Joburg South, but because of the limited options situation, all of Joburg was there and we could not even get to the entrance. With a whole Saturday, snacks and energy on our hands, we rerouted and headed back north to find a backup hiking spot. My initial thoughts were Melville Koppies or Hennops in Pretoria, but we were working with a list of black-friendly places to go hiking and Cradle Moon in Muldersdrift was the second option on the list. I’ll admit, I was excited to go there because I had seen the Instagram posts near the “waterfall”, and it’s in the Magaliesberg region I grew up visiting a lot.

On arrival, we were waved through the main entrance and made our way to the parking lot. We saw cool zebras just hanging out but it was a bit of a hassle getting parking because it was so full; eventually we got parking and made our way to the info center. The info center was a person standing by the bathrooms selling tickets to people in two queues. No temperature readings or sanitizers at the entrance like we had arrived to in Hartbeespoort but there were bottles of sanitizer at the doors to the ablution blocks. We paid for and collected our wrist tickets and started following the crowd. It was a huge crowd and we were all a little tense in our small groups, negotiating trails with cyclists and hyperactive 4-year-olds. At least there were more black people and we felt comfortable. Fully human, like we should be there.

There were no maps at the info center so half the time we were on the bike tracks thinking it was the hiking/walking path, but we eventually got the hang of it and figured out where we needed to be. We walked along the lake for about 7 km, spotting some bucks and more zebras along the weeping willows. For the most part, everyone kept to their groups and wore their masks but there was a group of very drunk and high young people near the widest part of the river that runs across the lodge, and I felt the Karenization starting to kick in. They were disrespecting the outdoors and as an experienced adventurist, I took it upon myself to take offense. Feel free to join me in rolling our eyes.

Thankfully though, I caught myself midway and set myself straight real quick. I was about to use the same tools of oppression white people have used for decades to keep people like me out of parks and nature reserves and I was immediately overcome with shame and disgust. Ironically, we were just talking about how anti-geotagging is an exclusionary instrument of white supremacy to keep people of colour out of nature reserves by implying that they are inexperienced thus destructive to nature and only go hiking for the likes. I was judging the people drinking and smoking on the river bank because I believed what they were doing was harmful to the environment and against the rules. I mean, they may have been breaking the rules; but who made me the class captain of rules created by some (likely) uptight white man? Black leisure is very different from white leisure and I have been socialized to believe that the “correct” way to do leisure is how white people do it and this was a difficult realisation for me.

I guess it’s easy for me to subscribe to white leisure because I have skinny privilege, thus (minus the being black thing) present the perfect depiction of an “outdoor enthusiast”. I have always been blinded by this privilege because no one ever asks me how I can hike because my body looks “right” on a hiking trail. I also believed my oppressions as a black woman outweighed the privileges that come with looking “fit” and having the means (and gear) to access these places. However, last weekend slapped me back into consciousness and made me realise that I have a lot of work to do to unlearn my biases of what leisure looks like to and for black people. I’m interrogating what it means for black people to be able to go play music and unwind in a nature reserve when whiteness has always taught me that we go to the outdoors for peace and tranquility. I am also beginning to accept that hiking etiquette is something that will just have to stay in my head while I’m in Joburg because the people here have zero regard for any of that, and I guess I would too if the highest hill in my city was 300m high. In all seriousness though, not many people of colour do mountaineering as a sport partially because the environment does not allow, but mainly because they (especially inland) have never been allowed to exist in the outdoors for leisure and I was almost part of the problem in my attempt to gatekeep what I consider to be sacred spaces.