Religious shrines Theatres Museums Palaeontology and archaeology

Live Music

Music runs through our blood. We walk to the rhythm of Africa and our voices resonate across the valleys. We carry within us gentle lullabyes and the powerful pulse of a mighty continent in uproar. African music is totally alive and is so entwined with dance it’s almost pointless to separate them. Buy a CD, go to a club, listen to street buskers, visit a cultural village, or just walk past a church on a Sunday morning. However you choose to experience our music, you’ll find that it’s almost impossible to keep your feet still.

One of the most interesting ways to listen to local music is at one of the many outdoor concert venues during the summer months - Kirstenbosch, Durban Botanical Gardens or the Oude Libertas Amphitheatre in Stellenbosch.

You can take a picnic, sit on the lawns among gambolling children and listen to anything from a symphony concert or opera to kwaito, reggae, blues or jazz.

But, of course, there are a whole lot of interesting indoor venues as well, ranging from large, purpose-built theatres to cosy pubs or happening clubs. For the best information about what’s on, check out Computicket

 

Religious shrines and sites

Within our rainbow nation, we have a wide range of beliefs, faiths and traditions – which is reflected in the number, variety and styles of our religious buildings and monuments.

From simple circles of white stones, which serve as places of worship in some country areas, to elaborate church structures, domed mosques or gilded temples, we have a range of sacred spots. Beautiful cathedrals lend an air of grandeur to even quite small settlements, such as George in the Western Cape or Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape.

One of our loveliest cathedrals, St George’s in Cape Town, is probably the best known because of its active and vociferous involvement in the fight against apartheid and, more recently, its support for Aids activist groups.

You may see a number of kramats – holy Muslim burial sites – especially in and around Cape Town, and we have many beautiful mosques, with the Jumma Mosque in Durban being the largest and oldest in the country.

Also in Durban is the architecturally fascinating Temple of Understanding which, as well as housing an active Krishna community, is renowned for its delicious and very reasonably priced vegetarian lunches.
 

Theatres

Of course, there is a range of theatre opportunities in the cities. Principle venues are the Market Theatre and the Civic Theatre in Johannesburg, the State Theatre in Pretoria, the Baxter, Artscape (previously the Nico Malan) and On Broadway in Cape Town, and the Playhouse in Durban. But even small towns are joining in. The village of Darling, for example, is becoming a theatre centre, mainly through the efforts of one of its most illustrious citizens, the stand-up comic Pieter-Dirk Uys and his alter ego, Evita Bezuidenhout.  You can book for movies and most performances online at Computicket.

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Exhibitions and Galleries

There is absolutely no shortage of visual arts venues in South Africa. As well as the large art museums in the major cities, there are so many small galleries it is almost impossible to keep count. In addition to the more formal exhibitions, almost every city and town has a version of “art in the park”, where local artists can exhibit their works in a pretty open-air setting. The biggest of these takes place on the first Saturday of every month in King’s Park in Bloemfontein.

Museums

Think of a subject, and there’ll be a museum to celebrate it. From the many pretty usual natural history and cultural history museums to the rather unusual ones, you’ll find something to entertain, amuse and enlighten you.

Some of our more offbeat museums include a butter museum, a tractor museum, a surfing museum, a whaling museum and an angling museum. Really – there are so many.

Probably the ones you really shouldn’t miss, though, are the Robben Island Museum, the Apartheid Museum and the Transvaal Museum of Natural History. For a good listing of what’s available, check out Museums on Line

Palaeontology and archaeology

Most of us know (or knew) our grandparents, and some lucky ones even their great grandparents. A few people have genealogical records going back five or six or even 50 generations. But even with the odd bit of oral history here and there, and the rediscovered skeleton in every family cupboard, it's hard to imagine how people, who died just 50 or 100 years before our birth, lived. We read our history books - and some of us dream or fantasise. But it is a truly mystifying thing, this knowledge that we didn't just spring out of nowhere. Our parents had parents who had parents who ... How far back can we go?

Well, the latest findings support the theory that it was here in Africa, and most likely South Africa, that we first stood up on our own two feet and walked across the savanna.
Here that we started to distinguish between our different grunts and snorts, and form them into words, and learned to utilise our marvellous thumbs to take control of our world – and to harness the awesome power of fire that came cracking down from the summer sky.

A visit to the Cradle of Humankind near Johannesburg won't give you the answers you're looking for - but, almost certainly, it will give you more questions.
Lots more questions. And this is only one of the sites where you may get a glimpse of how your distant ancestors lived. It was here, in 1947, that Robert Broom discovered the skull which was to shake the foundations of our beliefs about who we are and where we came from.
Mrs Ples as she (although she is now accepted to be a he) was called, is the archetypical symbol of palaeontological study in South Africa.

There are archaeological remains all over the country but not all are easy to see.
One of the more accessible ones is Nelson’s Bay Cave in the Robberg Nature Reserve in Plettenberg Bay.
Here you can see the in situ remains of the hunter-gatherers who lived there tens of thousands (perhaps hundreds of thousands?) of years ago.
You can walk into a tunnel, which shows you the different layers of debris, which filled the cave over the millennia, while studying the explanatory texts.
Not only is it an interesting trip back in time, it’s also a spectacularly beautiful walk