Berkley Center

The Orange River is South Africa’s longest river; it starts in the highlands of Lesotho and travels westward, before it forms the border between South Africa and Namibia. We rowed roughly 100 kilometers in the span of four days along the section where the river cuts through the center of the Namib Desert.

The scenery was unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. For most of the day, we sat in pristine blue water, where the banks of the river were covered by green vegetation; however, directly next to the hills were massive brown and gold sandstone mountains and rock formations. We were rowing through an oasis in a massive desert, and there were no signs of human intervention. It was true nature.

Even more impressive than the natural beauty were the fascinating people with whom I traveled. I took the trip with the Berg en Toer Klub (BTK), which translates from Afrikaans to "mountain and tour club," or "outdoors club." The BTK was created in the early 1900s, and because Stellenbosch University is traditionally Afrikaans, the club has its roots in Afrikaans custom. This persisted until the present day, and I was told that only recently did the BTK start to advertise in both English and Afrikaans. Today, the club retains many of the traditions of its past.

Needless to say, this became a very instructive experience for me. Although I am taking an Afrikaans course, I was ill prepared to spend an entire week with 70 pure Afrikaans speakers. Beyond the language barrier, I was fascinated and confused by many of the cultural traditions that we underwent. On our first night on the river, the other eerstetouriste ("first-timers") and I were required to memorize and perform several songs in Afrikaans. Eventually, we received a songbook with hundreds of traditional BTK songs.

Many of these traditional customs also concerned me, for they seemed to convey antiquated views on gender roles. For example, we rowed in two-person boats, and each boat was “owned” by a male, while females were forced to jump from boat to boat multiple times each day. Moreover, the 70 person group was split into eight person groups that cooked and ate together. Each group member was assigned a specific role within the group, and every group leader was male, while every group cook was female. Finally, and most intriguingly, we engaged in a custom called slee every night, in which we would gather our sleeping bags and pads together and watch as group members performed jokes and skits. At a certain point every day before the slee, the men would be forced to find a female slee date. He would then be expected to provide wine and sweets to his date during the slee. Of course, I was completely unaware of this custom, and as a result, I was a fairly undesirable nightly date.

As someone merely expecting to be rowing and camping throughout the week, I was confused about these strange customs. Though I eventually began to appreciate them as aspects of Afrikaans culture, I was also conflicted about the ubiquity of well-defined and traditional gender roles. Coming from a progressive environment and mindset, I had forgotten that gendered expectations remain common throughout the world, and what I encountered pales in comparison to that in other cultures, especially in places like tribal Africa. Ultimately, this experience allowed me to experience a tension created by the progressive modernization of culture. While I do believe that cultural preservation is incredibly important for global diversity, some would argue that there is a point at which cultural traditions must be discarded in the name of modern morality. I do not know what this point is, and I do not even know whether I believe this moral universalist view; however, I am now more aware of the nuances that can be found within cultures, and I will make sure to bring wine and sweets the next time I go on a trip with a bunch of Afrikaans people.