Cape Town - Rodrigo Jordán is not an easy man to impress, which is completely understandable because his CV reads like something from an adventure novel written by an excitable author with an over-active imagination.
Billed as South America’s greatest explorer, the 54-year-old Chilean has been on six expeditions to Mount Everest, and has summited twice – the first time as the first person from his continent to stand on the roof of the world. He also led an expedition to K2, in mountaineering terms a much more challenging climb, that put four team members on to the summit.
During one of many trips to Antarctica, he and three companions spent two months hiking and climbing across 400km of a previously unexplored mountain range deep in the heart of the frozen continent during an entirely self-supported expedition, where the morning temperature inside their tent was -30°C.
“On my last count, I have been 19 times to the Himalayas and 21 times to Antarctica,” he said.
In 1995, he was nominated by Time magazine as “one of the 100 young leaders for the new millennium”, and he’s won numerous honours in his own country and elsewhere in the world.
But when Jordán hiked on the Cape Peninsula mountain chain, he was blown away. Not by a south-easterly gale or by the wonderful vistas and fynbos for which this mountain is justly famous, but by a programme called Pride of Table Mountain.
Named partly for the mountain’s beautiful Red Disa and the butterfly that pollinates it, but also as a metaphor for dignity and respect, Pride has in its 16 years of existence taken some 25 000 youngsters from disadvantaged backgrounds on the Cape Flats on to the mountain – many of them for the first time in their lives. There they are guided by young volunteers from their own communities. Already some 200 guides have been trained, with most remaining with the programme for up to five years.
What particularly excited and moved Jordán was how this programme has influenced and changed its graduates, enabling them to develop confidence and social skills that they carry into other facets of their lives. And in it he found almost exact echoes of his own programme, the Vertical Foundation, that he established in Chile on his return from his first summit of Everest. He was inspired by the example of Sir Edmund Hillary’s non-profit The Himalayan Trust, for the development of the Sherpa people.
Pride of Table Mountain was established by Andrew Muir, executive director of the Wilderness Foundation, in response to a challenge by Dr Mamphela Ramphele, now leader of the political party Agang, but at the time a research fellow studying social anthropology at UCT.
During the late 1980s, Muir, then with the Wilderness Leadership School, took Ramphele on her first hike up Table Mountain, overnighting in the hut of the “coloured” Western Province Mountain Club because the then whites-only Mountain Club of SA refused them permission to use their hut.
Walking to the edge of the mountain and watching the full moon rise over the Hottentots Holland mountains in the distance, Ramphele turned to Muir and told him he needed to establish a hiking club for black youths from the Cape Flats, so they could also experience such moments of magic on Table Mountain.
It took several years to get off the ground, but the first Pride Project was launched in 1996 as a partnership between the Wilderness Foundation, WWF-SA and the Table Mountain Fund, and retailer Woolworths who sold bottles of spring water derived from Table Mountain and carrying the foundation’s logo.
Since then, another three Pride projects have been launched in the Eastern Cape, and a fourth in KwaZulu-Natal.
Jordán met Muir during a stint as a jury member for the international Rolex Awards for Enterprise – an award that Muir won in 2008 (although for a different project).
“We immediately became very good friends, and then we realised while chatting that we had these very similar organisations, Vertical in Chile and the Wilderness Foundation here, and especially the school (Wilderness Leadership School),” Jordán told Weekend Argus. “So it was in that relationship that I got to know about Pride.”
Muir invited Jordán, Ramphele (for one day), Wilderness Foundation associate Dr Ian McCallum and long-time supporter Martin Peterson to join him and three guides – Sipho Sobuza, Siphiwe Tukani and Brian Gcilitshana – on a special Pride hike to celebrate 16 years of success.
It was a four-night hike with a difference, because instead of just walking on the mountain, they also spent time walking through some of the townships where the volunteer guides and their young charges live. The party hiked from Macassar into Khayelitsha where they spent the night at a local B&B, before carrying on along Strandfontein to Muizenberg, up the mountain and across to Silvermine, then on to Orange Kloof above Hout Bay, and finishing at the upper cable-station on Table Mountain.
Jordán said sharing the home environment of the guides had enabled them to develop a more intimate relationship. “We had very profound conversations with them on those first two nights, and that gave the walk a profound meaning which was much more than just climbing a peak. And it set a tone for all the conversations that we had, during the climb and in the evenings around the campfires, which was absolutely great and moving. There was a profound truth about it.”
He said he was impressed by Pride’s motto, “You have the right to experience it (the mountain)”.
“So it doesn’t only relate to Nature, but also about how they relate to each other. I asked Brian, Simphiwe and Sipho: ‘Why are you still doing this after four or five years?’ and they answered: ‘We are a family, we’re friends’. They’ve grown a relationship among them and they can rely on each other.
“So this experience is not just on the mountain, it moves back to where they live, to the friendship that was forged on the mountain is now available to them. So the word ‘experience’ is much more profound that just experiencing nature. It’s about experiencing each other.”
Jordán said he’d listened to Gcilitshana describing to Ramphele how the most valuable thing he’s got out of Pride was the confidence to express himself, and to be able to stand as an equal to a white person and say what he thought.
“To me that’s totally understandable, it’s not a big surprise because that’s what we do (in the Vertical Foundation). But I was happily amazed that this programme does the same thing, although it starts from a different corner, the environment, but it achieves the same results.
“People were more confident in themselves, they have grown as human beings. So I was very, very much impressed by that.”
Muir believes that Pride is “really an incredible Cape Town story”.
“People are now very used to bumping into big groups of Pride kids on the mountain – it’s become part of the fabric of this wonderful heritage site,” he said.
“Our original vision was to really embed Table Mountain as an icon, not just for those who could afford the luxury of experiencing it while wearing hiking boots and a full belly of food and so on, but to actually make it accessible to as many Capetonians as possible – accessible to those who see that mountain every day, but who’ve never had the opportunity to experience it.
“For most of them, it’s the first time in their lives that they’ve been on the mountain, and it’s done in a safe way, but also in a way that really opens up that mountain to them for what it is – a real, a living mountain, through the stories that the volunteer guides tell them.
“And it’s that paired relationship between these young guides and the youths who participate, that gives me huge hope for the future. These youngsters are passionate, and they’re absolutely at one with why this mountain is important – the biodiversity, the water, the tourism and cultural heritage, and so on.
“But it’s experienced through their eyes and their interpretation, not from us old whitey environmental educators saying ‘This is what you must do’.
“This mountain is theirs now – 16 years ago that just wasn’t the case. And as custodians, the mountain could not be in safer hands.” - Sunday Argus