The South African Story with Archbishop Desmond Tutu is a South African travel documentary series created by Roger Friedman and Benny Gool and produced by Oryx Media in which Nobel Peace Prize winner Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu travels to seminal locations in each province of South Africa, unpacking their history, culture, destination and politics.
The series premiered on SABC3 on Tuesday 1 February 2011, at 20h00. New episodes broadcast weekly. There are nine half-hour episodes in the series, as well as a 52-minute final episode.
Synopsis
Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu takes on a new role, starring in the 10-part travel documentary series The South African Story with Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
The series, filmed between January and April 2010, took Archbishop Tutu to seminal locations across South Africa, from the dizzying heights of God's Window in Mpumalanga to the banks of the Limpopo River in the far North East.
The journey traverses all nine provinces, reflecting on the roots of our nation, our struggle and our glorious emergence as the gateway to Africa.
It is far more than a travel series, though. The South African Story with Archbishop Desmond Tutu is a multi-faceted production, the construct of which covers history, culture, destination and politics.
High definition visuals intercut with historic archive news footage of the freedom struggle and liberation, Mahatma Ghandi, Emily Hobhouse, Albert Luthuli, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
It is the wide-ranging story of our stunningly beautiful country, the places, the people and events. It is the story that South Africa wants the world to see.
Episodes
Western Cape
Archbishop Desmond Tutu kicks off his journey through South Africa with a trip up mind-bogglingly beautiful Table Mountain, in Cape Town, reflecting on the arrival of Dutch colonialists and Asian slaves.
Later, the Archbishop visits the world-renown Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens, stopping at a hedge planted more than 350 years ago to protect the livestock of the Dutch settlers from the native Khoi-San people. The resilience of the hedge reflects the resilience of South Africa's people, he says.
The Western Cape journey concludes with a tour of the Cape Winelands, with its gabled homesteads and unique varietals, stopping off at the gates of the old prison in Paarl from whence Nelson Mandela walked to freedom 20 years ago.
Free State
Archbishop Tutu stops off at the Golden Gate National Park, arguably the most beautiful part of the Free State, with its soaring sandstone cliffs high in the Drakensberg Mountains, bordering on the Kingdom of Lesotho.
He visits a Basotho cultural village to relate the story of the old king, Moshoeshoe. Then it's on to Brandfort, the one-horse town to which Winnie Mandela was banished under apartheid.
The journey ends in the old colonial capitol of the Free State, Bloemfontein, at the monument to women and children who died at the hands of the British in the South African War.
Here, he invokes the memory of liberal Englishwoman, Emily Hobhouse, known as the turncoat heroine, who raised the ill treatment of prisoners with the British parliament.
North West
This is where it all started: The Cradle of Humankind. The iron in this dusty red earth runs in the blood of all of our veins. The sunny weather warmed our bones and helped us to make that giant leap from homo habilis to homo sapien.
It doesn't matter what we look like, or even where we come from, today. Millions of years ago, we all took our first steps here. So, we are all African.
From the Cradle of Humankind the Archbishop travels to the flamboyant Lost City, an iconic South African bush resort, with soaring steeples and sculpted wildlife.
Then it is off to tea with the Queen Mother of the Bafokeng Nation, who overcame apartheid impoverishment to reclaim the platinum wealth at their feet.
Northern Cape
In 1869, a boy called Erasmus Jacobs found a stone on his father's farm by the Orange river. His mother mentioned its shine to a neighbour, who offered to buy the stone, but she gave it to him for free.
That stone was the Eureka diamond, the first diamond found in South Africa, and it would trigger an incredible scramble for land and wealth.
The town at the centre of the rush was named after the British Secretary of State for the Colonies at the time, John Wodehouse, 1st Earl of Kimberley.
In the beginning, Kimberley was a shanty town. It was considered the land of opportunity. It was the fastest-growing city in Africa, the first town in the southern hemisphere to install electric street lighting – and the Kimberley Gentlemen's Club claimed more millionaires per square foot than anywhere else on Earth.
The Archbishop gasps at the enormity of the so-called Big Hole, and peers through the windows of Cecil John Rhodes' sumptuous railway carriage.
The Kalahari Desert, wit hits red sand and soaring dunes, cuts a swathe through the north, where South Africa shares borders with Namibia and Botswana.
In 1999, the Archbishop recalls, the busmen of the Kalahari received vast landholdings from the government as restitution for their dispossession and suffering.
Then it's on, down the Orange River, to a quaint town called Orania – where a small group of white Afrikaners created their own whites-only homeland in response to the freeing of Nelson Mandela and the democratization of South Africa.
He is served tea and koeksusters (traditional Afrikaner sweet pastries) by the son-in-law and grandson of former Prime Minister HF Verwoerd, known as the father of apartheid.
Mpumalanga
Mpumalanga, the land of the rising sun, is a province of spectacular beauty. From God's Window, on the escarpment, the land falls away towards Mozambique in the east.
The lowveld teems with the Big Five. It is South Africa's safari destination of choice.
After having his breath taken away by the view from God's Window, and visiting the spectacularly carved Bourkes Luck Potholes, Archbishop Tutu wastes little time getting into the bush.
From the safety of a viewing vehicle, he comes within touching distance of elephant, buffalo and rhinoceros – though the big cats evade him.
The Archbishop spends time at Sir Richard Branson's magnificent private bush palace, Ulusaba, before getting down and dirty with the likes of you and me at the iconic Kruger National Park.
He recalls that President Kruger, after whom the Park is named, was known as a keen hunter and consumer of biltong. Years after President Kruger died, President Nelson Mandela visited the Park for a massive children's party to celebrate his 80th birthday. The following day he married Mrs Graca Machel.
From the Kruger Park, Archbishop Tutu travels to the site on the border of Mozambique, where Mrs Machel's first husband – the first democratically elected President of Mozambique, Samora Machel – died in a mysterious plane crash.
Limpopo
The Kruger National Park straddles South Africa's Mpumalanga and Limpopo provinces, with Mozambique on it eastern border and Zimbabwe and Botswana to the north.
It is a place of legend and mystery, an ancient city – and one of the cruelest land dispossession stories with the most beautiful endings in South Africa's story.
Mapungubwe, as we call it in our Venda language, is today located at the spot where the three southern African countries meet, at the confluence of the Shashi and Limpopo Rivers.
But more than a thousand years ago, Mapungubwe was the centre of the largest kingdom in Southern Africa and through its trade in gold and ivory with China, India and Egypt, it was the gateway to the world.
Today, Mapungubwe is a trans-frontier park, a World Heritage Site, and, for the beautiful design and execution of its new facilities, the recipient of a prestigious world architecture award.
Also rooted in the mysteries of forgotten worlds are the ruins at Thulamela. These ruins, found close to the Zimbabwe and Mozambique borders, in the very north of the Kruger National Park, in an area called Pafuri, provide clues of another sophisticated society with trade links to the Far East and West Africa.
Many years later, Pafuri was occupied by the Makuleke people. In one of the most poignant scenes in the entire South African Story, Archbishop Tutu meets the chief of the Makuleke under the giant boabab tree where the tribal council used to meet.
The chief tells of the harrowing experience in the 1960s when in order to facilitate the expansion of the Kruger National Park, white people came with guns and boxes of matches, ordering the people to burn down their homes.
Today the Makuleke have had their tribal lands restored. They co-manage Pafuri with the National Park authorities. They are rebuilding their lives.
Gauteng
South Africa's smallest province is also its richest, most populous and most powerful. With the economic hub, Johannesburg, the country's most populous urban black township, Soweto, and Pretoria, the seat of government power in the north, Gauteng's golden finger is truly on South Africa's pulse.
It was in Gauteng where the country's political leaders, Nelson Mandela and FW de Klerk among them, negotiated South Africa's miraculous peaceful settlement.
It was in Gauteng that Madiba was sworn in as the first President of all the people. And it was here that South Africa lifted the Rugby World Cup in 1995, and the African Cup of Nations football trophy the following year.
Gauteng's history is inextricably linked to the discovery of gold in 1886. Its discovery transformed a muddy camp in the old Transvaal Republic into a bustling tent town of tens of thousands of people, and then a city paved with gold that we know as Johannesburg today.
In Pretoria, Archbishop Tutu visits the seat of government at the Union Buildings. Then it's on to Johannesburg's cultural precinct at Newtown, and the iconic Market Theatre, before "going home" to Soweto.
The Archbishop lives in Vilikazi Street. Across the road is Nelson Mandela's old homestead. Vilikazi Street is said to be the world's only street with two Nobel Peace Laureate residents.
KwaZulu-Natal
KwaZulu-Natal is the home of the mighty Zulu Nation, the sugar capitol of South Africa that attracted tens of thousands of indentured Indian workers – a province studded with some of the most beautiful landscapes (and World Heritage Sites) that Southern Africa has to offer.
It was also the home of Africa's first Nobel Peace Prize winner, Chief Albert Luthuli – and of the man nominated more times for the Peace Prize than any other, who never won it, Mahatma Ghandi.
As Archbishop Tutu tells it: "The case for which he'd come to South Africa was on the roll in Pretoria, and this was Ghandi's destination when he boarded a train in Durban in June 1893.
"Dumped onto the platform, here, in Pietermaritzburg, for refusing to give up a 'Whites-Only' compartment, he spent the night meditating in a draughty waiting room. He said later it was here that his commitment to active non-violence, or passive resistance, began.
"The people who thought they humiliated him did not know they started a movement for freedom."
From the old Voortrekker capitol, Pietermaritzburg, the Archbishop takes in the sights and sounds of Zulu culture at Phezula Village before watching the sunset on Durban's glittering beachfront Golden Mile.
From the World Heritage Site uKhahlamba (the Barrier of Spears), or Drakensberg (dragon mountains) in the west, to the iSimangaliso Wetland Park in the north, from pristine bush camps to miles of endless beaches, with its temperate climate, KwaZulu-Natal is many South Africans' holiday destination of choice.
Eastern Cape
The Eastern Cape. Born into struggle. From this rugged land, where waterfalls plunge down sheer rock faces directly into a churning sea, rose many of the giants of the South African liberation movement: Steve Biko, Robert Sobukwe, Oliver Tambo, Nelson Mandela.
It is a place of incongruities, where apartheid neglect allowed the natural splendour – and the people's spirit of resistance – to flourish unhindered.
There is no gold here, no platinum or diamonds. The Eastern Cape's riches are embedded in the visual splendour of its landscapes, its cultural traditions, its human warmth.
Our journey through the Eastern Cape begins in Qunu, at the Nelson Mandela Museum, takes in the rugged splendour of the Wild Coast, with its iconic rock formations such as the Hole in the Wall rock, and visits the home of the coelacanths at Grahamstown's natural history museum.
And in one of the most profound moments of the entire series, Archbishop Tutu returns to the place where South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission began, with the so-called Wail of the Nation and a flood of tears.
"It was a grueling, grim, glorious process, that began here, in the East London City Hall in 1996, with the searing testimonies of the widows of the so-called Cradock Four, Matthew Goniwe, Sparrow Mkhonto, Fort Calata and Sicelo Mhlauli, murdered by security policemen 10 years before.
"The stories of victims and perpetrators held South Africans and the rest of the world spellbound. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission helped lay the foundations for forgiveness and common understanding from which all South Africans could move forward," the Archbishop says.
Finale
The final, 52-minute episode of The South African Story with Archbishop Desmond Tutu is a breathtaking journey from Table Mountain in the south to the Great Limpopo River in the north.
From the Cradle of Humankind in the North West, through the diamond fields of the Northern Cape, to fantastic 21st century infrastructure built to host the Fifa 2010 World Cup - Archbishop Tutu visits it all.