South Africa - Lesedi Cultural Village

Another trip Samantha and I took was to Lesedi Cultural Village about 40 minutes outside of Johannesburg. It's a type of a open air museum / lodge, which presents for visitors the five principal tribes that inhabited South Africa before the coming of the Dutch, Zulu, Xhosa, Basotho, Pedi and Ndebele. Here is their website if anyone is interested in learning more

Visitors walk through the 5 villages, learn some native words in each of the tribal languages, hear about the traditions specific to each of the tribes... Then everyone goes on to watch a dance and drums show in a main hut and finally all visitors have lunch made up of traditional South African dishes (which includes biltong, crocodile, and ostrich). I really liked the crocodile - it was a pink, tender type of meat. No, it did not taste like chicken haha...

It was pretty cool. It was the hottest day of our stay there and I was definitely feeling it...

 Inside a tribal hut (Xhosa I think). Our guide explained that a man was allowed to have many wives but had to pay 11 cows for each one to her family. One tribe (if I am not mistaken - Pedi) one wife cost 15 cows because their women were considered especially hardworking and productive... Nice!

 Entering the Zulu village. Zulus were the most violent tribe, a tribe of warriors.

 Zulu lady making a grass mat.

 Men hanging out...

 Basotho hut.

 Lady grinding grain for bread.

 As we were getting settled in the big hut to watch the dance and music show, these super cute little kids were rocking out  to the music in the middle. Hilarious!

 And then the show began. Excuse the dark and blurry pictures. It was hard to snap photos in there...

 African DJ drumming away...

 Each tribe was represented in a different dance by men and women.

 Our menu...

 Yummy!

It was a lot of fun. A rypical tourist thing to do but lots of fun anyway.