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As a visitor to our lovely land, you might be well-versed in the use of escalators. Don’t fool yourself in thinking you know how to use these in SA. There are people who will tell you that by riding an escalator, you’re accepting some unstated rules of etiquette. These people are usually foreigners. They have escalators that run the length of a soccer pitch. And the foot traffic – let’s not even go there.

When it comes to escalators, South Africans don’t have any standard etiquette. It’s true. For us laid-back and nice locals, escalators are ways to get somewhere with the least effort possible. We like that – no effort with all the rewards. They are places to have a quick catch-up as you move past a friend going the opposite ways. Or to zone out. Or to make out on. It’s just how we roll.

So here are a few things about  local escalator usage to bear in mind.

Locals tend not to hold the hand-rails: who knows what’s been there before us. Ick.  If  these sharp-edged moving steel staircases suddenly stop working, all hell will break loose. It’s known to happen. There was a famous Joburg airport incident. Google it.

Another difficult thing about being behind a local on the escalator, is that we tend to stop unexpectedly. (Perhaps we’re chatting on our phones and need to find a pen to write down that pastry chef’s phone-number for the dinner party we’re having three months from now.) Don’t try to predict when this might happen or hope for the best. We’ll outfox every time. But whatever the reason, be prepared.

Some South Africans will vacillate at the entrance or exit of an escalator. You might be tempted to approach them and try to squeeze past. Don’t.  Still others will take the path of least resistance and cross the opposite lane of traffic to exit or enter the escalator. Again take it in your stride. Being calm is the key to using escalators here.

This, however, is the most important thing to know: do not mess with a South African already riding the escalator. As a rule, we don’t stand to one side and let people pass by. Not because we’re difficult; we just don’t have escalators that demand that kind of commitment. And it is a commitment. If you come from a city with a subway, get over it. Welcome to SA; don’t anger the locals.

If you’re in a hurry, what do you do? Stand and wait or push past?  Sigh loudly or clear your throat? There is a way out.

Luckily for all visitors, this is where the nice comes in.  In the spirit of Ubuntu, if you ask nicely (we’re very fond of nice) we’ll happy let you pass on by. No bloodshed. No problem.

Just remember to choose wisely. If the big guy in front of you is snogging his girlfriend – don’t tap him politely on the shoulder. Saving those few seconds is not worth it.

Updated; first published 09 April 2009

The omnipotent Professor Mamba (& Associates) is a spectacular and heavily marketed urban version of the sangomas – also known, in less politically correct parlance, as witch doctors – that dot the South African landscape.

Magic medicine and curse-work is a profitable and vibrant subculture in South Africa. As a tourist you’d have to go looking for it, in township markets or in rural villages, but it is pervasive if not obvious. We sometimes refer to it as the magic market, which is similar to the black market only more underground.

Professor Mamba is also, apparently, more benign than some. Like just about every magic tradition the South African version also has a dark side, and some practitioners play on both sides of the fence. There is muti (medicine) that requires ingredients found only deep inside the human body, and some rituals require sacrifices; no prizes for guessing what kind of sacrifice is most powerful.

Almost all African magic relies on the intervention of the ancestors, who are both powerful and very helpful as long as you give them the respect they require. But in more modern blends of magic there is a greater emphasis on herbal potions and fringe science. Instead of throwing the bones to see into the future you may find a sangoma throwing crystal fragments and reading the pattern in those.

A word to the unwary: if you require the services of somebody like the eminent Professor Mamba, tread carefully. Stick to practitioners that work from public places where you feel comfortable, and avoid ingesting anything you can’t readily identify. Some of the strongest muti contains battery acid, for starters.

Here is an extract from the long list of services Professor Mamba has on offer:

His specialities include, but are not limited to:
…
5. Remove the black spot in your hand that keeps taking your money away.
…
7. Introducing (Mulondox) blend for enlarging the penis in both length and girth of the tissues and muscle thus increasing size. It naturally releases suspensory ligaments from the base of the testicles making it big and strong on a permanent basis with 100% erection capability.
…
11. Ensure excellent school grades even for children with mental disabilities.
…

18. Bring supernatural luck into your life to win chance games like lotto, Casino dice, black jack, machines etc.
19. Bring you to see your enemies and make demands on them using a mirror.

UPDATE: Enter Professor J.J. Ssali
07 September, 2009

It could be pure coincidence, or perhaps they are using the same advertising agency. Far be it from us to suggest that anything less than proper or medical is happening here. But we couldn’t help notice the extraordinarily close resemblance between the abilities ascribed to Professor Mamba five months ago and those now within the grasp of Professor J.J. Ssali.

Ssali, it seems, can also identify your problems before you tell them, although it is not entirely clear whether this is a psychic ability with which he was born or whether this power derives from the ancient wizardly methodologies he has mastered.

According to his marketing material Prof Ssali is regarded by many as one of the greatest healers on the planet today. Like Prof Mamba he seemingly believes that increasing the size of the male member is the most important use to which his art can be put.

Here is a sampling of Ssali’s claims:

The speciality includes:
…
Remove the bad spell from your life which keeps taking away.
…
Make you see your enemies in the mirror and make demands on them.
…
Bring super natural luck into your life

UPDATE 2: It’s raining magicians! Please welcome: Prof. Lumumba & Ali, Prof LS Lutta & Mama Muna, Dr. Shedwa, Professor Wakho and Prof MB Mobutu
18 October, 2009

Either Professor Mamba started a wildly successful franchise, or his magic extends to cloning himself, or he is being shamelessly ripped off. Besides Mamba and Ssali we have managed, over the last couple of weeks, to collect no less than five different fliers from different magicians headquartered in different parts of Johannesburg and surrounds.

But it is not their differences that make them interesting. Quite the opposite.

Three of these five newcomers claim to have single-handedly developed the breakthrough Masai Gel that is so powerful a penis-enlargement agent. It took each of them thirteen years of research, and they had to go to “amazing lengths” to find the ingredients, so expect to pay a premium. The other two are somewhat more original; one retails “Sokoto mixture” (“special for weak men in bed”) and the other peddles “Ntego Improved Cream” (“suitable for all ages”).

Three make a point of pointing out that “all whites, blacks, coloured, Indians, etc” are welcome, and we’d assume that also includes foreign visitors. Those same three will also charge only R100 for a consultation,

Now to the typical (slightly superior and somewhat ill-informed) offshore observer this may not seem like a big deal. Darkest Africa is a place of mystery and magic, after all, and South Africa is pretty mature commercial environment; combine the two and you get a heavily marketed magic franchise, right?

Not so. For many decades witch doctors were about as easy to find as drug dealers; there was one around every corner, but they kept a low enough profile to avoid the authorities. They attracted customers almost entirely by word of mouth or, to keep an open mind, through some magical attractive force that they emenated. After 1994, even with sort-of kind-of partial recognition of traditional healers by medial authorities, a couple of these practitioners set up storefronts and hired receptionists, but they could hardly be said to have gone mainstream.

Now we suddenly have websites, outlets that claim to be open 24 hours a day and a strong indications of commoditisation. Something fundamental has shifted in the magic market, we’re just not entirely sure what.

To see the full fliers, check out the Howzzzt photo stream on Flickr. All our original images are available under Creative Commons license there.

Back-to-back with the Johannesburg Zoo and smack in the middle of some of the trendiest suburbs is the South African National Museum of Military History. It has a particularly unimposing entrance and driving around it makes it seem unimpressively small. Once inside you’ll realise that this is because, respectively, the curators don’t spend money on anything other than their exhibits, and those exhibits cram an astonishing variety of artefacts into an improbably small footprint.

This isn’t a rah-rah exhibit of South African military prowess, as you could be excused for expecting from an African nation. Even though we’ve built some pretty impressive weapons at various times in our history. Nor is it limited to South African wars and warfare, although numerically the Soviet tanks deployed in Angola outnumber the South American edged weapons. It’s just a great collection of weapons, machines, implements and accessories related to the wholesale slaughter of humans. And a small sideline on patching them up to send them back into battle, spying on them in order to kill them more efficiently and suchlike.

The absolute highlight of the museum is the working tanks you can clamber onto and into, just like the real fighter jet cockpit in which you can sit while making silly sounds involving machine gun fire and rocket explosions. Sadly none of the buttons activates any ordinance, but it’s still as close to Top Gun as you are likely to ever get.

If you have any interest in the Anglo-Boer or Anglo-Zulu wars, then don’t go off to the battlefields before visiting this museum. If you are interested in South Africa’s involvement in and the Second World War (and our near siding with Germany in it), ditto. If you are generally voracious for information, then take a guided tour. But we recommend a leisurely half-day wander about the place with no set mission or objective. Just nose around until you run out of things to see.

Kids love it, naturally, and are well catered for. Some of the tank and airplane exhibits are outdoors, so pick a nice day. Admission is R22, an amount that doesn’t translate into any meaningful fraction of a currency like the euro or dollar. As for finding it, any Jo’burger should be able to direct you easily.

South African National Museum of Military History
Tel: +27 11 646 5513
20 Erlswold Way
Saxonwold

If you’re planning to visit our sunny shores for the Fifa Soccer World Cup 2010, you’ll have to make peace with our national instrument, the vuvuzela. Even if you won’t be going to any of the actual soccer matches, even if you won’t be visiting a fan park, even if you won’t so much as set foot in a sports pub, if you are in this country any time in May, June, July or August 2010, then the vuvus will find you.

To outsiders the vuvuzela is an oversized plastic horn with a long, thin neck and a range of sounds that stretch from “screech of the annoyed harpy” to “geriatric cow in heat”. To you it is something that blares, honks or brays at an astonishingly (and annoyingly) loud volume. It is possibly something you think you are entitled to complain about.

To us it is a penis substitute.

In a manner of speaking, that is. The vuvuzela is the end result of a spectator arms race at local Premier Soccer League matches, especially those between the two mega teams: Orlando Pirates and Kaizer Chiefs. In South Africa, you see, we don’t hold with that pansy-ass melodic singing they do in stadiums in Europe. We don’t politely clap our hands. We don’t whistle. We just make as much sheer noise as we possibly can.

Fans at local matches used and discarded a number of traditional and derivative instruments on the evolutionary path which reached its summit in the vuvu. In the vuvu we have it all: the maximum volume that won’t get you beaten up by the guy next to you, an affordable (even disposable) instrument and the ability to carry a rudimentary tune. Honestly. It has about the same kind of range as the bugle.

Now in South Africa soccer is primarily a black sport, in the sense that local league matches will have audiences as close as damnit to 100 percent black. That isn’t a problem; most people who pitch for rugby matches are white, and everybody is okay with that kind of racial preference for certain sports.

But during the Fifa Confederations Cup this year – a kind of miniature preview of the Wold Cup – we had a surprisingly large number of white people attending soccer matches. You know how it goes; when it’s a big international event everybody is suddenly a fan. Thanks to the Confed Cup we had a mixture of white and black in the stadiums, much as will be the case in 2010. And some of those white people, not being accustomed to them, complained about the vuvuzelas.

It hurts their ears, they said. It’s not fair to the foreign teams who aren’t used to playing under such a barrage of noise, they said. It spoils the television broadcast for foreign audiences, they said. It isn’t civilised they said.

These are roughly the objections we expect to hear from you, the visiting foreigner who has not acclimatised to the vuvu. And to you we say the exact same thing we said to our local white people: screw you.

The vuvuzela is part of how we play soccer in this country. If you want to come into our house to watch the games, then you can bloody well do so under our rules, and the vuvu rules. Even the Fifa administrators know better than to even suggest that we think about considering the possibility of banning vuvuzelas from stadiums, because that just ain’t gonna happen.

So consider yourself told. If you want to be grumpy about it, be our guest. On the other hand, you can choose to participate instead. If you can vaguely vibrate your lips then you can play the vuvuzela, and we’ll sell you one for just about no money at all. You may discover, as have a pretty impressive number of our new, white, local soccer supporters, that it’s a great deal of fun when you’re part of the problem.