The following information is from the Grade Nine class of the Seventh Day Adventist Christian School in Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. We speak English, but our home language is isiXhosa, the x of which is pronounced as a click sound. Our isiXhosa name for our town is Rhini (the letter r in our language is pronounced like the ch in the Scottish word loch).
We went to the Thomas Baines Nature Reserve to discover more about the wildlife, to go hiking and to find out interesting things on living organisms such as plants and animals. We also hoped to see some of the wildlife.
The Thomas Baines Nature Reserve is named after a man who was an artist because he could do something using his own hands. Artists give us inspiration. The environment is important to artists; many artists get their inspiration from the environment and that is why they care so much about the environment. Thomas Baines painted many pictures, including the Cathedral in Grahamstown and the Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe.
We learnt about the extraordinary country that we live in and also about the amazing trees and animals that God has blessed us with.
We walked around the bush and we saw animals, different types of trees, and we also saw the dam which provides us with water. The Thomas Baines reserve is important because of the dam. We walked past the water pipeline that transport water to Grahamstown.
We learnt about different trees and animals. We learnt about one of the Big Five in Africa: the rhino. In South Africa there are two types (black and white rhino) which differ in certain ways. For example, they eat different food. The black rhino is a browser. It eats from bushes and trees such as the cat thorn tree, which is called that because its thorns are just like cats’ claws. On the other hand, the white rhino is a classed as a grazer because it eats grass. Because of this they have different faces and faeces!
We saw signs of animals such as droppings of animals and tracks of certain animals such as rhinos and buffalos. You could say these are like the fingerprints of the animals because we are able to identify them from these signs.
If tourists want to see animals they should visit reserves in the morning or evening to see the animals, when it is not hot and there is no wind.
The trees we saw were the aloe, the cat thorn, the sweet thorn and the cabbage trees. We can consider the aloe plant as our medicine, and we’ve got a month that in our language we call eyeKhala. That is our name for the month of July, when the aloe flowers. The aloe has important medicinal uses as a laxative and for cosmetics and healing. One use of aloe in isiXhosa culture is when women want to stop breastfeeding their babies. They put the aloe juice on their nipples and it is very bitter so the baby will not want to suck. Another use is to mix the aloe leaf ash with grains to protect them from insects.
The sweet thorn tree gives its name to the month of December when it is flowering – eyomNga. We also saw a tree which is called the cabbage tree (mSenge in isiXhosa) because it looks like a cabbage.
