Slow Witness

Rhino Horn. Asians think it's a cure for headaches and hangovers. Rhino slaughter is on the increase and on their conscience, but the Asian mafia paying poor Mozambicans to go shoot Rhino and hack off their horns, don't give a damn. They just want the money. Kruger Park rangers, have a lot of walking to do. Through bush filled with snakes and other biting things. With rifles ready, they stroll the long elephant grass, searching for snares and steel jaw traps and poachers.

You are deep in Elephant country. You are on foot. You feel alive, because your senses are in overdrive. Elephants with young can be unpredictable and dangerous. As a photo-journalist doing a story on the South African borderline you've heard there is an 'informal' border crossing hidden deep in the bush. So you are on foot because you are going 'local'. Following local trails that crisscross the tall elephant grass that contains, wild African elephants. You heart is racing.

It's a Sunday morning, and you are up on a hill. But this is not just any Sunday, you know, a back home kind of Sunday. Or any kind of hill for that matter. This is a Kosi Sunday and the hill overlooks the Kosi river estuary which spills into the Indian Ocean. The hill is on the south eastern edge of Africa looking towards Madagascar some 400km out across the horizon line. Your Landcruiser is parked behind you, standing up to her runner boards in red grass. A species of v

Part 1. South Africa’s 3500km long and convoluted border line, which straddles the Indian Ocean from Kosi Bay on the East coast to Alexander Bay on South Africa’s cold Atlantic West coast, wanders diverse landscapes, cuts through socially complex and disparate communities, and demarcates where the developed super power economy of South Africa ends and the ‘rest of Africa’ begins. I'd purposely started my borderline story for French GEO in Alexander Bay, the most northw