This travel book will take you on a stroll through SA's history

Paul Ash reviews Luke Alfred's book, 'Early One Sunday Morning I Decided to Step Out and Find South Africa'

Years ago, Al Gore - that Gulfstream jet-using environmentalist and former US presidential hopeful - said something I have never forgotten. He was talking about vision and how important being able to see movement had been for the progress of the human species.

"When our evolutionary predecessors gathered on the African savanna a million years ago and the leaves next to them moved, the ones who didn't look are not our ancestors." Those who looked, he added, passed on the genetic trait known as the "establishing reflex", which, Gore intimated, is why we're all suckers for YouTube videos.

Before that, the thing that really gave us the edge over other species happened when we stood up on our hind legs and began scanning the far horizons. When we didn't see any prowling sabre-toothed cats or angry wooly mammoths, we trudged off in that direction. And so walking was born, and our ancestors walked, everywhere, ending up in Siberia, Patagonia, Pondoland and even Australia long before scorecards and immigration lawyers were a thing.

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Walking is one of humanity's natural states and a cure for many ills (unless, of course, you suffer the daily drudgery of having to commute on foot to some miserable, underpaid job, in which case it isn't).

Walking, a veteran adventurer once told me, is, along with horses and kayaks, the finest mode of travel. You move at a pace that the mind can comprehend. You see things you would miss in a car (or on a bike while dodging other cars). Your senses are engaged with the world around you - unless, of course, you are doing a walking meditation, a state which I have seen certain lucky hikers fall on tough trails, when your mind is temporarily absent from the blistered feet and raw shoulders and that bloody thing in your backpack that is poking you.

It is the idea of walking into our country and its embattled history that my erstwhile colleague Luke Alfred embraces with such vigour in this book. He starts with an amble one Sunday morning from Hope Road in Mountain View, along the foot of the ridge to the explosives factory at Modderfontein.

Alfred is ostensibly walking there to learn about the cartuccere - the "cartridge girls" - who were recruited from the Italian hilltop town of Avigliana to work in the dynamite factory and some of whom were buried in the factory's cemetery after they were killed in explosions.

He is also walking through his past, his bohemian-conventional parents (his father was a personnel manager at the dynamite plant), the local library, the park with the jungle gym in the shape of an airplane, and his boyhood dogs, Smuts and Brünnhilde. If you're going to walk into history, then your own past is a good place to start.

After that, Alfred tramps further afield. Along with two companions, he walks from Salem near Grahamstown to Southwell - shortly after the common land around Salem had been restored to its original inhabitants after a successful land claim - and collides with some of the realities of the day, meeting farmers staring at uncertain futures.

He walks on Table Mountain; from the Voortrekker Monument to Freedom Park; and from the eye of the Marico River into Herman Charles Bosman's lush valley below.

He walks along the False Bay coast from Muizenberg to Simonstown; from Mooki Street in Orlando to the Credo Mutwa Cultural Village in Soweto; and up and over the hill from Carisbrooke to Ixopo, along the very railway tracks described by Alan Paton in the opening pages of Cry, The Beloved Country.

Each walk is not just about the walk, but rather a stroll - sometimes a dark one - into history. The walk is the washing line on which our stories hang out to be aired. It's a clever but satisfying trick in which Alfred has pulled a big rabbit out of a small hat.

• 'Early One Sunday Morning I Decided to Step Out and Find South Africa' by Luke Alfred, Tafelberg, R250