Keso is the most respected blogger within China’s IT industry. The style of his articles are mostly narrative and objective, giving readers a general sketch of South Africa by introducing different cities and sights during this trip. Keso, like the other bloggers, talk about visiting MIT Group and the IT industry in South Africa.

Keso visited South Africa as part of a bloggers tour organized by the South African Embassy in Beijing during February 2009.

Keso has many blogs, but his South Africa entries can be found at his Donews blog page.

Highlights:

1. Explaining Africa in pictures (1)

South Africa has three capitals: they are the administrative capital Pretoria, the legal policy-making capital Cape Town, and the constitutional capital, Bloemfontein. Our first stop on the trip was Pretoria. It’s a city of two hundred and forty million, and 50km from South Africa’s biggest city and financial center, Johannesburg. This is closer compared to Beijing and Tianjin: it only took 40 minutes by car.

2. Explaining Africa in pictures (2)

32km west from Pretoria, there is an ethnic cultural park called Lesedi, a little like Beijing’s Chinese Ethnic Culture Park. They use performances and presentation of crafts to present ancient African tribal culture. In South Africa there is a population of 4.8 hundred million. Most of today’s South Africans have separated themselves from traditional tribal lifestyles. The Zulus of Lesedi put on furs and wear knifes, only as part of their job. Just like the many Chinese ethnic minority representatives who only wear traditional costumes during the time of the Two Sessions.

3. Explaining Africa in pictures (7)

Cape Town is an ancient capital in South Africa, established in the 17th century by the Dutch East India Company. At the beginning Cape Town was the company’s depot station during their expeditions to India and East Asia. At present there are 3.5 million people living in Cape Town, almost half are "colored" (those who are mixed race: Africa, Europe and Asian), 31% are black, 19% white and about 2% are of Asian heritage. This has contributed to the unique culture that Cape Town has compared to the other parts of South Africa (in South Africa as a whole, 80% of the population are black).

4. Explaining Africa in pictures (9)

24.com is the biggest Internet portal in South Africa, and also the core asset of the MIH Group. They provide related services to Chinese Internet news, Instant Messaging, to social networking, to electronic devices,blogs and SNS, and the website looks like a South African version of Yahoo!

The South African Embassy also arranged a BBQ for us and the South African bloggers, where we chatted. In South Africa about 10,000 people write blogs (how many are there in China? There are 1.62 hundred million. Any normal figure in China, put in it South Africa, and it becomes a scary figure), in 400 people who use the Internet, only one writes a blog. Apart from the service charge, the other reason could be because media regulations are too free in South Africa, so the significance of blog-writing has been reduced, and people don’t have as strong a desire to express. Blogs in South Africa are primarily about technology, products and politics. And because there are less people writing blogs, people who write blogs are more likely to become friends offline.