It’s strange how the sight of Table Mountain against the blue sky of summer can make you forget everything that you have left behind. But that is perhaps what calls everyone to this place, whether they are the expected one million tourists or the African migrants who flock to this beacon of African democracy.

Cape Town is like a lover who professes undying love to you one minute then unexpectedly smacks you across the face the next. Nothing is to be taken for granted and at times it feels as if no-one is to be trusted, as if everyone is on the make. This is an arbitrary and random world where life can change in the fraction of a second – isn’t this the same in any large city? Perhaps, but in the space of one weekend alone twenty -one Somalis have been murdered here simply for not being South African.

The sun, the sea and beaches beguile you as your mind asks itself how hell can be in paradise but that’s the problem: crime in this city is almost invisible unless you traverse the ‘green zone’ of the city and enter the Townships.

Over the weekend Iggy and Musa took me to the ‘ghetto’. Not the watered down ghetto of Gugeltu I was told but the real deep shit of Nyanga – crime capital of Cape Town. Iggy told me that if you get sick here no-one can help – as you can imagine knowledge doesn’t always set you free.

We drove into Nyanga and was immediately confronted with the sight of two women fighting in the street as passers by stopped enthralled by the sight until one women hit the other one over her head with a brick and the contest was over. Everyone in the car laughed and whooped and I sat there feeling the butterfly wings of fear and anxiety gently caressing my stomach.

We eventually arrived at a friends house of Iggy and Musa’s and the drinking commenced – although I decided it best to stay sober as I started to slowly consider the reason I was here and took out my camera and began to take images. Music played, people drank and the warmth of the sun got to everyone; as next door, the boys were being taken to be circumcised.

I say boys, they are in fact between the ages of 18 and 20. This is their rites of passage to manhood. For them there will be no anesthetics, only a sharp knife and blood. Mossa told me that the Xhosa initiation ceremony is the most painful. “Life is touch and touch is pain” he said as he smiled. In Nyanga everyone you touch can cause you pain so this is a place where you choose your friends carefully – but even this cannot really protect you. Musa recounted a story where he and his friend were walking down a street when suddenly a man ran towards them and shot his friend in the head. Mossa stopped and looked at the man who looked down at his friend. The man looked up and said, “Sorry my brother I shot the wrong man”. He walked away leaving Musa and his dead friend and returned to whence he came. No police, no inquiry only one more funeral. Welcome to Nyanga.

Each time Mossa rose the bottle of beer to his lips I noticed the scars on his arms - he told me that when he was 14 a rival gang had locked him in a shed and set it alight in an attempt to burn him to death but luckily he jumped through a window. It’s hard to imagine how another human being could consciously conceive of doing this but perhaps when people have nothing to live for the only power left to them is take away the only thing that ultimately matters – life. Violence is the true economy of power here and perhaps ultimately acts of violence are the real rites of passage that makes a boy a man.

Eight hours after arriving I drove back under a darkened African sky and drank a beer and thought of home.

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So this is the start of my South African journal: it’s strange but I’ve been in two minds about writing one. As in this single posting alone I’ve returned to it and constantly changed things - which perhaps raises questions of how valid this whole thing is. But can a blog ever be seen as a factual document or is it only ever a self indulgent vanity piece? A self congratulatory exercise loosely disguised as a brave confessional. Anyway, let’s call this my subjective dialogue one that you can interpret and make sense of as you will. Perhaps in two months time I’ll regret doing this; but right now I’m hoping that this will be a cathartic experience for me - and even if no-one reads this - it will still serve a purpose.

But I’m hoping that anyone who drops in will leave me a comment or ask me a question as this is intended to be a space that I can just let out what I’m feeling, a space perhaps to share the next two months - when I can get to a computer - with friends and interested parties. And so here we are.

The last few weeks have been somewhat strange to say the least, as I’ve found myself stuck in a perpetual holding pattern waiting to depart. It’s been a time of anxiety, excitement and sadness as doors close and others open: but isn’t life always like this?

There has been a delay in the receipt of my grant, a delay which has perhaps given me an opportunity to pause for a moment and for the first time take onboard the weight of what I’m hoping to achieve in the next few months – and consider also the importance of what really rests upon it. Importance; that sounds so self indulgent doesn’t it? When I’m only going to take photographs and I’m not bringing aid or comfort to Africa. I will take and then leave - but perhaps Africa is accustomed to this by now.

I know that the delay will soon be over, as everyone in the grants management unit have gone out of their way to push through my money - and so soon I will have my funding. I thought with this news that I’d feel like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders but instead the feeling of anxiety has only increased as I knew now that there would be no more delays and no longer a place to hide from what will be an emotional and surreal experience.

I first visited South Africa between July and September of 2005 crazily flying 6000 miles to a continent where the only person I knew was someone who I had met nine months previously and only for two hours. Yet strangely it wasn’t until I was sitting on the runway at Heathrow did I think to myself how stupid this was. But this is what I’ve wanted all of my life, to be able to pack a bag and camera and jump on a plane and have an adventure. And last time was indeed an adventure. If an untangeable one.

It’s strange how detached you can become from things when you’re the outsider, when there’s nothing to align or belong to. I guess I was equally at a loss amongst the military officers of the French Embassy’s Bastille Day celebrations as I was standing in a hospice in Khayelitsha when a small child in a cot reached out their arms to me hoping that I’d pick them up. And I didn’t - as the child looked at me and cried as I walked away. His arms were still outstretched as if he wanted me to save him. But eventually he would add me to the list of all the other adults who had walked away from him and left in a room of twenty other children with nothing but the cries of each other to keep them company. But I just couldn’t stay any longer and be in that place.

Perhaps this is another cliché of the documentary photographer – the ‘woe is me’ mentality. Where photographers recite that ‘no-one knows the troubles they’ve seen’ mantra. But I chose to go to there and of course I could always get on a plane and leave – the child in the cot was the one without choices and ultimately without hope.

AIDS is decimating Africa. It is cutting huge swayths through countries and taking away whole generations in its wake. My friend, who had taken me to the hospice, had in the previous years documented a mother, father and their child who had all died from AIDS in the space of 24 hours - a whole family gone in a day.

I didn’t photograph the child in the cot or anyone else there, but I can still see his face and how the tears cut a trace into the dried white mucus that had formed under and around his nose. But everywhere in the hospice was a photograph never to be taken. I remember an Afrikaans man - the only Afrikaans in the hospice; who stared at me as he sat on the edge of his bed, with the stump of his amputated leg hanging without purpose. He was sat upright under a thin blanket that covered the window behind him. As the bright sunlight burnt its way through the blanket he became painted in a multiplicity of pastel colours and I so desperately wished that I had a camera to take the image - perhaps at that moment I didn’t care who or what his story was, only of the light and composition of his broken frame.

I was told by my friend that I could not come to Cape Town without seeing this – to see how people lived – and died but it’s only until you leave that this place touches you. Somehow you can’t believe it to be real that somehow these are all actors in a bad drama and that at some point someone will shout cut and we will all return to reality and get on with our lives. But I left and they stayed.

Perhaps ultimately the best photographs are the one’s we never take - because they are the one’s that are trapped inside of us; and as such, they are the one’s that will never leave us.

And so I’m going back.

I’m going back to see the friends that I left behind; those who cried with me at the airport when I left: and to see how the world has changed for them and see too what South Africa has in store for me once more.

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I have recently been commissioned by UCE Business School to provide the cover images for four of their new publications. The publications were designed by Homer Creative.

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