TRAVEL SPECIAL: Blue remembered hills

On a nostalgic return journey, Janice Warman wonders why the Eastern Cape is not thronged with tourists…

The Eastern Cape has a bloody past: it’s where the English were settled to defend the frontier against the Xhosas in the 1820s, and where the terrible forced removals of the apartheid years happened. It’s the birthplace of Nelson Mandela. And it gained lasting notoriety worldwide for the death of Steve Biko in custody, a death that led to the film Cry Freedom, which portrayed the friendship of Biko and the liberal newspaper editor Donald Woods.

It’s an unlikely holiday destination. Most visitors opt for the Garden Route through Knysna and Plettenberg Bay. But the region’s Sunshine Coast has better weather than anywhere else in South Africa, and anyway I had my own reasons for being there. I was on a pilgrimage down memory lane to my alma mater — Rhodes University in Grahamstown — where 30 years before I’d made friends with three students who had gone on to fight the apartheid system with every power they had and who had been tortured, imprisoned, and finally released to be part of the new South Africa.