An ancient, elder innocence...

A smoggy haze softened the harsh, angular edges of the cityscape stretching down the slopes of the Hoerikwaggo to the harbour with its gantries and bustling piers and stacks of containers; the morning peak traffic not yet stalled along the N1 and Marine Drive into the city centre.

For a moment we were both wordlessly transported: Steven consumed by his own private thoughts as he chewed contemplatively with both hands holding his messy chunk of bread, elbows resting on knees, looking out through designer sunglasses shading his perpetually bloodshot eyes from the increasingly harsh morning glare over the bay with the Island in the distance.

I imagined the scene before progress had scarred the landscape or subverted the people. I tried to imagine what it would have felt like to sit there without having to consider issues of ownership and injustice; what it would have been like to be looking out through the eyes of an ancient, elder innocence.

Watching over the herd grazing, seeing family and clansmen-and-women going about their business; collecting wood or drawing water or fishing and hunting – daily activities necessary to survive as a tribe – in harmony with the elements and nature; engaged in a vanquished and vanished, virtually inconceivable simplicity.

Gradually my imagination succeeded in stripping the landscape of the steel and concrete structures; the straight lines of roads and buildings; the harsh edges of aberrant boundaries; the imposed and assumed hustle and bustle and the rapid mechanised ugliness. I looked into an unspoilt past and the past reached out, touching my soul, wiping the grime of modernization and progress from my eyes; healing the wounds and the trauma. For just a moment I was whole and even now that image remains with me, untainted and pristine in my mind, offering comfort and respite.