Welcome to my first Alex Stories and Art blog

Welcome to the first blog of a series of weekly blogs.

The blog site title South African stories and art came about through my living in the East-coast port of Durban, in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. This is one of the most beautiful, although historically turbulent, parts of the world. Both the beauty and the turbulence are major themes for the blogs I expect to write every Monday or Tuesday of the week. 

The Moses Mabhida Football Stadium in Durban

Perhaps you could set some time aside to check out the current writing. You might even like to pitch in occasionally with a comment or contribution from time to time.

The project came about unexpectedly as a result of my writing eight books in 2012 and completing 50 oil paintings during 2013 to 2014. These literary and artistic creations are all on the website that houses this blog, under the headings Alex-Books and Alex-Art. You might care to look at them. Most have a distinct South African flavour.

The province I live in is host to two World Heritage sites of enormous ecological value.

A coastal lowland and marine site (Ezimvelo, including St Lucia) contains the coelacanth in its offshore habitat. The coelacanth is an ancient marine fish, a living fossil, critical on the evolutionary stage. Thought to be extinct for 70 million years, a specimen surfaced off Port Elizabeth in 1934. Many more have been recovered or sighted. I’ll write on them in due course.

We have majestic mountains rising to 3482 metres (11000 feet) to the west. I know, because I’ve often slept near the peaks of these monsters of the Drakensberg, sometimes amidst deep snow and bitter winds. We also have a fractured, rocky coastline along the eastern shores, and extensive areas of unspoilt forest, bushveld-savannah and grassland in between. It is an Eden, still unspoilt in many places.

So, nature features strongly in my writing, with an emphasis on the magnificent wildlife and its habitat. Much of my experience is rooted in a decade-long experience accrediting top-class nature guides, including those shepherding visitors in the proximity of the Big Five: including elephant, rhinoceros, buffalo, lion and leopard.

A haven for the Big Five African Game Animals

 

The province also contains a natural environment that for millennia sustained the diminutive San of the Drakensberg Mountains, a late stone-age people who faced genocide and in return left some of the most amazing rock art found anywhere in the world.

It is also the landscape that formed a long line of Zulu kings, with Shaka ka Senzangakhona perhaps the most notable amongst them. Indeed the rugged land nurtured Shaka, who through a welter of bloody conquest laid the foundations for the rise of the Zulu nation of almost 9 million souls. The Zulu nation has provided an enduring interest, resulting in a 300 page book, art works and many public presentations.

King Shaka

 

Battlefield sites are numerous, especially throughout the northern half of the province. There Zulu and Boer, Zulu and Brit and Boer and Brit sought to conquer each other with spear or rifle. Amongst the most famous battlefields are Isandlwana, Rorke’s Drift and Ulundi related to the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, and Ladysmith, Colenso and Dundee of the South African War of 1899 to 1902. I shall get to the battlefields when time allows.

As an educationist who was for many years in the senior management of a large state college for teacher training in Durban, I am also interested in formal academics, education, art and literature. I have lived through the perplexing apartheid era and first twenty years of the ‘new’ South Africa. I’ll accordingly dip into those varied domains from time to time. History, education, politics, psychology and philosophy will no doubt edge their way in on occasion. The breadth of interest comes, inevitably, from a belief in ‘life-long-learning’. The books and paintings on the website are evidence of that interest.

A lot of the blogs will be based on ‘how to....’ My intention with these is to write stuff that is straightforward and really useful to you the reader, rather than put out too much indigestible academic screed. 

I’ll start with a dozen blogs on various topics to kick off; thereafter, a blog will appear every Monday or Tuesday. You are invited to dip in with constructive comments if you wish. I’d value that. We learn from each other.

The hosting website is www.alexeducational.co.za. and my other blog site is www.alexsolutions.wordpress.com, dealing with such topics as current events, politics, education, cognition and psychology.