Outsiders turned icons, South Africa鈥檚 jacarandas spring into bloom
| Johannesburg
One of the first years that I watched the jacarandas bloom in Johannesburg, their arrival coincided with a revolution.
It was October 2015, and as the lanky trees burst into a riot of lilac blooms, student demonstrators shut down the campus of the city鈥檚 major university, known as Wits, demanding a halt to the rapidly rising cost of tuition.
Within days, their movement had grown from the cause of a few thousand college students into a kind of national reckoning. It had been a generation since the end of apartheid, so why, the protesters and their supporters demanded to know, had South Africa only gotten more unequal?
Why We Wrote This
With the world cooped up at home, this year feels frozen in time. But South Africa鈥檚 famous jacarandas are still blooming 鈥� a reminder that the planet keeps turning.
A few days later, every major university in the country had been shut down. And on a 90-degree morning the next week, I followed thousands of young activists and their supporters as they wound their way through Pretoria鈥檚 wide, jacaranda-lined boulevards to the Union Buildings, the office of South Africa鈥檚 president. They were there to ask that he halt tuition increases nationwide. And he did.
Looking at my photographs, I couldn鈥檛 help but notice how many were set against a backdrop of raucous purples. A woman in round sunglasses in front a jacaranda tree at Wits holding a sign that said 鈥淲E WERE SOLD OUT.鈥� Another young woman in Pretoria, the jacarandas in the distance smudged by dust and tear gas. 鈥淪orry for the inconvenience,鈥� her poster read. 鈥淲e are trying to change the world.鈥�
Jacarandas have always made for good symbolism. Their blooming is spectacular and brief. Their flowers last only a few weeks, as Southern Hemisphere spring withers into summer and the year speeds toward its end. In much of eastern and southern Africa, for this reason, they鈥檙e seared in the minds of students as a marker that exams are coming. As the urban legend in South Africa goes, if the jacarandas are blooming and you haven鈥檛 started studying, sorry, but you鈥檙e not going to pass.
In 2020, for many, the jacarandas鈥� symbolism has also taken a new form. They鈥檝e become a reminder that in a year that often feels frozen in time, the natural world, in fact, trudges on. 鈥淭hey show that everything has a season,鈥� says Laurice Taitz-Buntman, the editor of Johannesburg In Your Pocket, a popular events guide that runs an annual jacaranda photo competition. 鈥淭hey were here in 2019, and they鈥檒l be here again in 2021.鈥�
But like the British settlers who first planted them across their African colonial empire, jacaranda trees are also outsiders, and frankly, not always welcome ones. The bulk of South Africa鈥檚 jacarandas were imported from South America around the turn of the 20th century.
They are 鈥渞eflective of a history of colonialism and apartheid,鈥� when foreign trees 鈥� like foreign people 鈥� were considered superior here, says Adelaide Chokoe, an arboriculturist at Johannesburg City Parks and Zoo. In the early 2000s, the South African government banned the planting of new jacarandas in its cities altogether, warning that they were an invasive species that crowded out local flora.
And access to trees itself has long been a matter of social justice here. Johannesburg鈥檚 formerly white suburbs are so flush with greenery that the city has often dubbed itself the world鈥檚 鈥渓argest man-made urban forest.鈥� (It鈥檚 a , experts say, but even still, the city is impressively verdant.) In October and November, the green canopies in those parts of town are lit up with shocks of purple as the jacarandas flower.
But travel to the Black townships that ring the city, and to which the majority of its population was once confined, and you will find few trees of any kind. Ms. Chokoe, for instance, grew up near Pretoria, a city with more than 50,000 jacaranda trees. But she rarely saw them, she says, because 鈥渋n apartheid, tree planting was only prioritized in white suburbs.鈥� When she became a scientist herself, that fact never left her.
鈥淲hen you live with that difference, when you see who has parks and green space and access to trees, and who doesn鈥檛, you say, 鈥業 want to be part of the process of changing this,鈥欌�� she says.
In 2014, South Africa reversed its earlier stance on planting jacarandas. As far as foreign trees went, they were low maintenance and relatively benign (as long as you didn鈥檛 grow them too close to a body of water). In summer, their long branches provide shade; in winter, they let light filter through.
鈥淚 have no hesitation in saying that each one of us is intimately attached to the soil of this beautiful country as are the famous jacaranda trees,鈥� Nelson Mandela said in his inauguration speech as South African president in 1994.
Never mind that he was technically talking about a tree from someplace else 鈥� it had already come, in its own way, to belong.
