safari nation jacob dlamini

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J acob S. T. D lamini . Safari Nation: A Social History of the Kruger National Park .

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Jill E. Kelly, J acob S. T. D lamini . Safari Nation: A Social History of the Kruger National Park ., The American Historical Review , Volume 126, Issue 3, September 2021, Pages 1201–1204, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhab502

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Kruger National Park (KNP) occupies a central place in South Africa’s past and present as a national asset and international tourist destination. Jacob Dlamini’s Safari Nation is a black history of the park that stresses the presence and mobility of African, Indian, and Coloured South Africans in the face of laws that sought to curtail independent movement and racially segregate South Africa. By focusing on social and political relations within the park beyond themes of absence and constraint, Dlamini brings to the fore ways that black South Africans “gave meaning to their lives”—living with rather than under colonialism and apartheid—and gave shape to the history of the park and the nation over the twentieth century. (Following Dlamini, this review uses “black” as a political as opposed to an ethnic or racial category, and African, Coloured, and Indian as used in the text [e.g., 8, 264].)

Safari Nation extends from the 1902 creation of the park’s forerunner, the Sabi Game Reserve, through KNP’s establishment in 1926 up to the present. True to the methods of social history, Dlamini draws on a wide array of sources, from government records and the black press to oral history interviews and personal photo collections. The book contributes not only to literature on the history of the park, and land and conservation more widely, but also to everyday social histories of Africans living with colonialism and apartheid. Dlamini divides the book into two parts: “Movement,” with chapters that consider poachers, migrant laborers, and early histories of black tourism; and “Homelands,” with chapters that zoom in on KNP to detail the history of black tourism there, how the park was shaped by the development of apartheid’s faux independent bantustans and their administrators, and how democracy changed—and in some ways did not change—relationships between the park and its neighbors.

Dlamini confronts scholarship on KNP that has reduced the relationship between black South Africans and the park to one of restriction by focusing on how conservation required displacement. This sense of limitation emerged from the very history of the park that enabled the consolidation of white (English- and Afrikaans-speaking) interests around land and labor via the promotion of nationhood. In particular, the development of a South African tourism industry included the promotion of the country as “a place where the modern (mines) lived side by side with the traditional (chiefs)” (135). Scholars and teachers of African history still confront these images of timeless Africans, and Africans at one with nature, as evidenced by the popularity of Binyavanga Wainaina’s essay “How to Write about Africa” on university syllabi. Why, Dlamini asks, does scholarship continue to focus on absence despite a history of black engagement with the park? On the contrary, Dlamini argues: exclusion from national politics did not mean absence from the national park.

Deploying a frame of “histories of presence,” Dlamini shows not only the black South Africans present in the park, but the ways their presence reveals how travel helped craft new ways of being. Safari Nation is thus a welcome contribution to the historiography of the early twentieth-century political landscape that documents the black pursuit of rights in land and the legal system. To name just a few examples, that scholarship includes Tembeka Ngcukaitobi’s The Land Is Ours: South Africa’s First Black Lawyers; Bongani Ngqulunga’s The Man Who Founded the ANC; and Brian Willan’s Sol Plaatje . Several of the most prominent political actors in these books—such as Pixley ka Isaka Seme and Plaatje—appear throughout Safari Nation as well, alongside others—such as John Dube, D. D. T. Jabavu, and Herbert Dhlomo—who engaged in questions of land and black political rights . Dlamini convincingly shows how scholarly attention to the land question obscures the fullness and complexity of black experiences of twentieth-century South Africa.

Describing the primary concerns of these black South Africans as roots and routes, Dlamini reveals how the elite positioned their right to travel without interference (routes) as equally important to their right to vote or own land (roots)—and as significant to the crafting of a South African identity (chap. 4). White officials with the South African Railway (SAR) saw trains as the means of black labor mobilization, not black tourism, and black South Africans as raw materials to be viewed by white passengers. Through the propaganda photographs, slides, pamphlets, and films on which Dlamini draws, railway officials advertised black South Africans as “the basic stuff from which South Africa could be made known to the world,” promoting ethnicized difference to entice white visitors and settlers to the young nation whose black population continued to outnumber the white. SAR advertised KNP as the “biggest natural zoo in the world” (123), and modern mines as places to see so-called tribal dances. Richly colored images from the Transnet Heritage Museum Photo Collection, featuring scenes of so-called native life and white couples having tea with vervet monkeys, bring this point home.

While the state sought to constrain them as modernity’s foil, early twentieth century “New Africans” lived with colonialism while consciously cultivating modern identities. In concentrating on their insistent right to travel—and new relationships with the land built to claim South Africa as their own through tourism—Dlamini’s work marks a significant departure from the extensive scholarship focused on land and the ways Africans claimed it through relationships with the ancestors, property associations, or oral accounts of the past. The travelogues left by men like Jabavu document the significance of routes to rooting them in a modern South Africa.

In its attention to leisure, Safari Nation builds on a growing literature that deals with everyday life under colonialism and apartheid (for instance, Dlamini’s own Native Nostalgia [2010] and Daniel Magaziner’s The Art of Life in South Africa [2016]). The book’s most compelling chapters examine those who visited the park on holiday and the relationship that elite and nonelite black South Africans had with travel. Tracking the “Who’s Who in the News This Week” columns from the black daily paper Bantu World ’s, and using the original African Who’s Who directories as a kind of South African Negro Motorist Green Book , chapter 3 documents black arguments for leisurely travel and the travel itself. Dlamini uses the leisure activities of Dube, Plaatje, and Dhlomo to show how elites distinguished themselves from the rest of the African population and expected the state to recognize the distinction. They likened plans to enforce Africans to display themselves in their “natural conditions” to keeping Africans like animals in the KNP zoo.

Subsequent chapters turn to how black South Africans moved and developed their own tourism traditions. Chapter 5 tracks how African, Indian, and Coloured South Africans visited and experienced KNP when so little of the country and the park’s infrastructure was intended for them, contributing to social histories of the continent that document black theater and film, sports, and consumption (by Bheki Peterson, Tyler Fleming, Laura Fair, Peter Alegi, Emmanuel Akyeampong, and Phyllis Martin, among others). Indians constituted the largest group of black tourists to the park, while African domestic workers in the company of white employers—neither on holiday nor tethered organically to the land, as Dlamini stresses—made up another. Using correspondence regarding the availability of accommodation in KNP for African teachers (mobile because they were exempt from passes), oral accounts and their dissonances, and photo albums of Indian tourists, Dlamini unpacks how these black South Africans may have experienced a holiday: arriving perhaps by car; drawing on networks of solidarity to avoid the humiliations of segregated accommodation; paying for park entry, for accommodation in a tent or hut in the Indian camp at Skukuza, and for use of campfires, water, and attendants.

The presence of growing numbers of black visitors shaped the park, particularly after the establishment of the Bantu Authorities system that stressed African autonomy in their own ethnicized spheres. In 1962, the South African Institute of Race Relations published Holiday and Travel Facilities for Non-Whites in South Africa to help black South Africans pursue leisure (chap. 6), including at KNP. The neighboring bantustans contributed to the growing number of African tourists, forcing the apartheid state to respect bantustan travel documents and the KNP to abandon petty racial discrimination in 1981. The park’s board made most rest camps “international” to allow bantustan citizens to be accommodated, and the Department of Indian Affairs pressured the board to provide better facilitates for Indians, who were ultimately given access to white facilities so they would not have to use the inferior facilities reserved for Africans.

Amid a new wave of scholarship on the operation of these bantustans, Dlamini takes seriously these so-called ethnic homelands as places in which multidimensional people lived. Several bantustan leaders declared themselves conservationists, served on park boards, and used conservation for the purposes of recognition and challenge. Oral history interviews with those who grew up near KNP or worked within it reveal few who experienced the park as tourists, but Dlamini takes the presence of “ghostly tourists” in those conversations as an entry into how “apartheid was spooked by its own contradictions” (197). Hudson Ntsanwisi, chief minister of the Gazankhulu bantustan neighboring KNP, was one such conservationist: accepting the idea of a political and cultural Tsonga nation, he also called for a radical idea of nature that could undermine apartheid political and ideological boundaries.

None of this attention to leisure and diverse engagement with the landscape is intended to obscure the displacement and struggles of life under apartheid for the majority of black South Africans. Dlamini draws out the experiences of migrant laborers, domestic workers, and those deemed poachers who shaped the park. Chapter 1 considers the struggles over the park’s resources between park and state officials and those hunters they labeled poachers. Dlamini posits the arrival in 1902 of Warden James Stevenson-Hamilton to the Sabi Game Reserve as signaling a new regime, “one premised as much on the preservation of the reserve’s dwindling fauna as on the control of people” (35). This new regime was far from uniform: park officials’ priorities often butted up against the priorities of the Native Affairs Department, and confusing laws made implementation difficult. Dlamini fleshes this out by paying attention to the battles around depredations—by wildlife on crops and livestock and perceived depredations by Africans on wildlife. Stevenson-Hamilton’s efforts to disarm Africans of their bows and arrows, which Native Affairs officials contended were necessary for Africans to defend themselves from wildlife after it became illegal for them to carry guns, is one such example. Speaking to how Africans lived within this new regime, Dlamini describes men and (notably) women hunters whose knowledge of weapons, borders, and the political ecosystem “did not stop them from moving around and eking out an independent existence, manipulating said borders in the process” (48).

Chapter 2 considers the migrant laborers who crossed colonial borders, working to earn their passes and moving through the park. It tracks the building of a relationship between the National Parks Board and the mining industry, an alliance produced from the presence of laborers and resulting in some of the park’s first roads and camps turned ranger stations. Dlamini opens with the death of an unnamed man to illustrate the park’s role as a place of movement for Africans with diverse motivations. Those passing through included laborers recruited by the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association (known as Wenela), those visiting friends and family, and those pursuing jobs outside of the sanctioned Wenela channels. Africans who stayed in the park became valuable labor for the reserve, but also cemented an image of Africans at one with nature.

Dlamini does not miss opportunities to consider gendered experiences of the park. He documents the presence of women among the hunters (chap. 1), women travelers whose holidays were covered in the black press (chap. 3), women domestic workers not on holiday in the park (chap. 6), and the women gig (or piece, as it would be called in South Africa) workers who annually cut grass to thatch the park’s accommodations (chap. 7). A 2001 fire that killed nineteen women and five men working in the park exposed just how little the end of apartheid in 1994 had changed for KNP’s neighbors in terms of its gendered labor regime. Dlamini deftly argues that while democracy may have made women citizens, it did not change their material circumstances.

The last two chapters and conclusion bring this home, as black South Africans—now rights-bearing citizens rather than subjects—can be said still to “live with” KNP in ways that reflect both continuities and change from the pre-1994 world. In 1991, a year after his release from prison, the liberation struggle leader Nelson Mandela stayed in KNP and in another bantustan game reserve; his hunt from this trip features on the cover of Safari Nation . These historic visits marked the start of an engagement between the ascendant African National Congress and a more inclusive “national” park and conservation regime. Mandela used nature in a way reminiscent of earlier black South Africans who insisted on knowing the land as part of being South African.

But as Dlamini shows, KNP still needed to make amends to communities such as the Ngomanes, who had twice been removed from land in the region and continued to experience depredations by animals for which they were under-remunerated. Dlamini documents the growth of direct and public protests against the park—such as the 2009 demonstration during which men and women of Shabalala township blockaded the road to the park’s main entrance. These citizens did so “with greater means to make their voices heard and grievances attended to, even if the attention paid to their complaints might be no different from what blacks were exposed to in colonial and apartheid South Africa” (242). While African farmers invoked the past, park officials hoped to plan for a future in which a changing conservation philosophy acknowledged KNP as part of a larger ecosystem whose human neighbors played a key part.

At times, the quick shifts from migrant laborers to elite travelers, from domestic workers to holiday makers can make it feel as though there is more than one book here—but this inclusive choice is precisely the point. A multitude of black actors with diverse experiences and an array of motivations shaped both park and nation. This is a through-line that connects Safari Nation to Dlamini’s seemingly different scholarship on policing and collaboration. It is another example of the nuanced, sharply insightful work for which Dlamini has become known.

Safari Nation is more than a social history of KNP. It is a history of black South Africans opposed to injustice engaging with the land, leisure, what it means to be South African, and “ways of being” under colonialism, apartheid, and a still unequal nation. About black struggles for access to nature and travel, Dlamini writes: “Although not necessarily political, such struggles could not help but assume a political dimension” (261). Indeed, Dlamini’s history of Kruger National Park makes a bold and hopeful statement about conservation and the land question in South Africa.

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Jacob S. T. Dlamini is assistant professor of history at Princeton University and is a qualified field guide. He is the author of  Askari: A Story of Collaboration and Betrayal in the Anti-Apartheid Struggle  and  Native Nostalgia .

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Safari Nation opens new lines of inquiry in the study of national parks in Africa and the rest of the world. The Kruger National Park is South Africa’s most iconic nature reserve, renowned for its rich flora and fauna. According to author  Jacob Dlamini, there is another side to the park, a social history neglected by scholars and popular writers alike in which blacks (meaning Africans, Coloureds, and Indians) occupy center stage. Safari Nation details the ways  in which black people  devoted energies to conservation and to the park over the course of the twentieth century―engagement that transcends the stock (black) figure of the laborer and the poacher. By exploring the complex and dynamic ways in which blacks of varying class, racial, religious, and social backgrounds related to the Kruger National Park,  and with the help of previously unseen archival photographs, Dlamini’s narrative also sheds new light on how and why Africa’s national parks―often derided by scholars as colonial impositions―survived the end of white rule on the continent. Relying on oral histories, photographs, and archival research, Safari Nation engages both with African historiography and with ongoing debates about the “land question,” democracy, and citizenship in South Africa.

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"Safari Nation" Book Talk From Historian Jacob Dlamini

In this book talk, Dr. Jacob Dlamini, Assistant Professor of History at Princeton University, discusses the social history of the Kruger National Park, South Africa’s most iconic nature reserve. Dlamini's book, Safari Nation , details the ways  in which Black people  devoted energies to conservation and to the park over the course of the twentieth century and engages with questions of land, conservation, democracy, and citizenship in South Africa.

Jacob Dlamini is a South African journalist, qualified field guide, author, and an Assistant Professor of History at Princeton University. His first book, Native Nostalgia (2009), reflected on his own childhood under apartheid and his second book, Askari , won the 2015 Alan Paton Award for best South African non-fiction. In 2020, Dlamini has published two books: Safari Nation: A Social History of the Kruger National Park and The Terrorist Album: Apartheid’s Insurgents, Collaborators, and the Security Police .

This event took place on November 12, 2020 and was sponsored by the UW Department of History, the African Studies Program in the UW Jackson School of International Studies, and the UW College of the Environment Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

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Safari nation: a social history of the kruger national park.

Safari Nation . Cover.

© 2021 Ohio University Press

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The copyright holder reserves, or holds for their own use, all the rights provided by copyright law, such as distribution, performance, and creation of derivative works.

Dlamini, Jacob S. T. Safari Nation:  A Social History of the Kruger National Park . Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2021.

Safari Nation  opens new lines of inquiry in the study of national parks in Africa and the rest of the world. The Kruger National Park is South Africa’s most iconic nature reserve, renowned for its rich flora and fauna. According to author  Jacob Dlamini, there is another side to the park, a social history neglected by scholars and popular writers alike in which blacks (meaning Africans, Coloureds, and Indians) occupy center stage.  Safari Nation  details the ways  in which black people  devoted energies to conservation and to the park over the course of the twentieth century—engagement that transcends the stock (black) figure of the laborer and the poacher. By exploring the complex and dynamic ways in which blacks of varying class, racial, religious, and social backgrounds related to the Kruger National Park,  and with the help of previously unseen archival photographs, Dlamini’s narrative also sheds new light on how and why Africa’s national parks—often derided by scholars as colonial impositions—survived the end of white rule on the continent. Relying on oral histories, photographs, and archival research, Safari Nation engages both with African historiography and with ongoing debates about the “land question,” democracy, and citizenship in South Africa. (Source: Ohio University Press )

Jacob Dlamini is assistant professor of history at Princeton University and is a qualified field guide.

© 2021 Ohio University Press. Used by permission.

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Maddox on Dlamini, 'Safari Nation: A Social History of the Kruger National Park'

Jacob S. T. Dlamini. Safari Nation: A Social History of the Kruger National Park. New African Histories Series. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2020. Illustrations. 350 pp. $36.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8214-2409-4; $80.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8214-2408-7.

Reviewed by Gregory H. Maddox (Texas Southern University) Published on H-Africa (November, 2020) Commissioned by David D. Hurlbut (Independent Scholar)

Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=55403

Environmental History as Intellectual History

Jacob S. T. Dlamini bills his book as a “social history” of the Kruger National Park in South Africa. In doing so, he shortchanges the breadth of the work. He examines the place of Kruger National Park and wildlife conservation in black South African thought. He reviews the history of black communities in and around the park. He includes an overview of black environmental thought both in South Africa and in other parts of the continent. He explores the history of black travel and leisure in twentieth-century South Africa. He reviews the literature on hunting and poaching in and around the park. The work is not a straightforward environmental history of the park. Rather it complements the work of Jane Carruthers’s Kruger National Park: A Social and Political History (1995) and others by exploring the ways that blacks in South Africa from all the communities under that designation negotiated their relationships in, around, and outside the park under white rule.

Dlamini’s first target is the notion that Kruger was exclusively a white playground. He builds on Carruthers’s work to show that African communities continued to live in Kruger long after it became a reserved area and of course provided the labor necessary to create the space. Residents, labor migrants, hunters, and workers traversed the park. The park was never just a white space. Whites in South Africa sought to define the park as part of a distinctive part of white nationalism and “modern” blacks sought to claim their place in the park, and hence their right to be part of the nation.

Dlamini divides the book into two sections labeled “Movements” and “Homelands.” In the first, he addresses both the labor the park got from residents within and just outside the park and the movement of black migrants through the park. Migrant routes to the mining region of South Africa helped pioneer the roads that would become the infrastructure of tourism in the park. WNLA (Wenela) ran regular migrant convoys from Portuguese East Africa to the Witwatersrand and the park itself eventually used “clandestine” migrants as unpaid labor with migrants working to pay off the fee charged for park entry to both visitors and migrants under Wenela’s authority.

A thread on black and white mobility through the park serves as the bridge between the two sections. Dlamini weaves discussions of African environmental thought from across the continent with those of black South African leisure studies and even gun ownership into his analysis of the place of the park in South African history. He emphasizes that people in South Africa’s black communities throughout the twentieth century sought to claim the right to use the park. Asians and Coloureds as well as African leaders and intellectuals, such as Sol Plaatje, Herbert Dhlomo, and John Dube, sought engagement with and travel to the park. Dube, for example, eventually claimed the right to own and use hunting firearms as an “exempted native” in South Africa (p. 99). This he connects to the literature on African hunting and poaching both before and after the transition to majority rule.

Dlamini also examines the historiography and literature on African land claims within and outside the park. He links the politics of African homelands under apartheid with conservation efforts and with ongoing struggles over land claims in South Africa. He uses the concept of insurgent citizenship to connect these struggles with the park as a process in neoliberal South Africa.

He begins the book with a review of African environmental thought that connects both African environmental history with its attempt to deconstruct conservationists’ narratives and circles back to Nelson Mandela’s use of “ecological citizenship” to create a new, non-racial definition of South African identity. Dlamini contends that Mandela “used nature to assert a common South Africanness.” He plays on the irony of Mandela’s use of the imported jacaranda trees as part of his assertion of such a citizenship, noting that “the jacaranda tree did not need to be indigenous to serve as one of the symbols of a new South Africa” (p. 241). 

Dlamini’s themes read more like a work of intellectual rather than social history, illuminating the importance of ideas in the construction of African nationalism in South Africa. This review barely hints at the complexity of the book. He has constructed a powerful and thought-provoking work.

Citation: Gregory H. Maddox. Review of Dlamini, Jacob S. T., Safari Nation: A Social History of the Kruger National Park . H-Africa, H-Net Reviews. November, 2020. URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55403

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Safari Nation: A Social History of the Kruger National Park

R 320.00

Safari Nation opens new lines of inquiry into the study of national parks in Africa and the rest of the world. The Kruger National Park is South Africa’s most iconic nature reserve, renowned for its rich flora and fauna. According to Dlamini, there is another side to the park, a social history neglected by scholars and popular writers alike in which black people (meaning Africans, coloured people and Indians) occupy centre stage.

Safari Nation details the ways in which black people devoted energies to conservation and to the park over the course of the twentieth century – an engagement that transcends the stock (black) figure of the labourer and the poacher.

By exploring the complex and dynamic ways in which black people of varying class, racial, religious and social backgrounds related to the Kruger National Park, and with the help of previously unseen archival photographs, Dlamini’s narrative also sheds new light on how and why Africa’s national parks – often derided by scholars as colonial impositions – survived the end of white rule on the continent.

Relying on oral histories, photographs and archival research, Safari Nation engages both with African historiography and with ongoing debates about the ‘land question’, democracy and citizenship in South Africa.

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Elderly Iranians Feel At Home At Noor Active Living in Santa Clara

By Julie Ershadi

Mahin Afkhami worked for an affiliate of Iran’s information and tourism ministry in the 1970s when the Revolution broke out. She and her husband, who had four children studying at universities in the U.S., found themselves unable to send them money to apply for green cards. The couple traveled west to sort out the status of their children’s visas, in what they believed would be a brief trip. They ended up leaving behind everything they had in Iran: their belongings, their wealth, and life as they knew it.

That was 38 years ago. Today, like the hundreds of thousands of Iranians who lived through the revolution and moved abroad, Afkhami speaks proudly of the efforts she made to rebuild her life and ensure her children’s success. Yet as she has advanced in years, she has made the decision to move to an assisted living facility rather than rely on her offspring.

Unlike many elders in the Iranian expatriate community who live with their adult children, Afkhami – who shies away from disclosing her age – is a resident of Noor Active Living , an assisted living facility located in Santa Clara , California. The idea behind Noor is to provide an environment that would be familiar to an Iranian population of patients, who often feel isolated receiving care outside of their home country and away from their families.

“My children want me to go and live with them, but I refuse,” she says in a recent afternoon. “I would be interrupting their lives. They come to visit me and I go over there, but I’d rather have my privacy and live here.”

Noor Active Living was founded with the purchase by a group of philanthropists of an existing assisted living center in need of major renovations in 2009. The idea was to create a place for elderly Iranians in the United States, based on the Kahrizak Charity Foundation , a nonprofit that provides care and a living environment for the elderly and handicapped in Iran.

The driving force at Noor is its executive director, Nazila Safari, a medical doctor in the U.S.  and Iran. Like virtually all of the residents and staff at Noor, Safari is an Iranian immigrant who had to start over in the United States.

Inside the Noor facility, the walls are decorated with calligraphy and traditional paintings. A small study contains a library of books in Persian , including War and Peace in translation, a book on Afghan cuisine , history books, and poetry. On all the floors are authentic Persian rugs , donated by one of the center’s patrons.

In the dining hall, the Iranian-born chef prepares a lunch of ghormeh sabzi (a herb-based stew) for the 12 residents and staff members. Even ta’arof , the Iranian form of etiquette, is present, as when the site manager invites a visiting reporter to stay for lunch.

Outside is a patio lined with persimmon trees and palm fronds. There, accompanied by three caretakers and another resident, Afkhami tells her story of leaving Iran and coming to the United States. She produces an issue of Kayhan International , dated June 3, 1976. Page 3 features her promotion to deputy director for technical and planning affairs at the Tourism Facilities Compan  of Iran.

The group is seated at a patio table spread with Iranian tea, a box of gaz nougat  (candy) fresh from Esfahan , and other traditional snacks. Everyone exchanges knowing glances and nods somberly as Afkhami describes how hard it was to rebuild her and her family’s lives from the ground up.

“I came here with just one small suitcase of things for myself because I didn’t have plans to stay,” she says. “But things got worse. Me and my husband were both in good positions over there, so we would’ve been killed. We never went back.”

“The children were working, going to school, and had a lot of expenses,” she recalled. “It was just the six of us working. Hard.”

Noor’s executive director Safari qualified as a doctor in Iran. But when she came to the United States 22 years ago, her degree was not recognized, and she had to attend U.S. medical school to continue her practice. While in school, she took a job as a live-in nurse with an elderly couple.

“At that time, I didn’t have anybody here,” she says. “So they became my parents, my grandparents, my whole family.”

Alone in a foreign country, she developed a close bond with the family that would change the course of her life.

“Their kids moved out,” she recalls. “I got married and took the elderly woman with me until I could find a place to put her. I noticed all of these assisted living places. I was looking for which one would give her as much love and support as I was giving her.”

It was during her search for a care facility that Safari discovered a pressing situation: here and there, solitary elderly Iranians living in facilities where they related to no one. “There would be one or two Iranians. When they would see me, they would say, ‘Oh my God, you speak Farsi ! Nobody understands me here, I don’t like the food – this is not good!’ It was bothering me,” she says.

Safari started going to assisted living homes in the little free time she had between work and medical school. She wanted to spend time with these elderly Iranians who had been alone up until then. She would sit with them at the care facilities where they lived, translate their words when necessary for the nurses, and spend time with them when their children weren’t available.

As she became more deeply involved in the field of elderly care, Safari helped to open a Sunrise Senior Living branch in Sunnyvale , California, a town adjacent to Santa Clara. According to the company’s website, Sunrise operates internationally with 315 facilities in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom .

Opening the Sunnyvale branch got Safari noticed by a group of directors hoping to start their own assisted living community, a not-for-profit facility created with the needs of elderly Iranians in mind. They asked her to help open Noor in 2009, and she agreed. She supervised renovations on the building that the group had acquired, but declined to run the facility, asking them instead to find someone else as she pursued her own professional activities.

After the completion of renovations in 2011, the facility sat unused for two years while the board searched for a substitute for Safari. They approached her again, this time with success. Safari has been director of Noor Active Living since 2013.

As a not-for-profit organization, Noor relies on donations from board members and community groups, as well as the fees charged to its residents. These funds cover expenses, and do not earn a profit for Safari and her staff, which is composed almost entirely of recent Iranian immigrants. The overarching aim, they say, is the respect, comfort and longevity of their patients, who have traveled so far and, in many cases, given up a great deal in the face of political turmoil in Iran.

“They had their independence, their house, their job, their respect in Iran,” Safari says. “They were looking forward to retiring there, going to the supermarket and speaking their own language, negotiating all of that. All of a sudden, they’re an immigrant, they’re brought to a new place where they can’t go anywhere or even speak the language.”

Chewing on gaz and sipping Iranian tea, Noor’s staff members echo the same sentiment that Safari described: what they do is more than a job – it is the love and care of the elderly members of their community, who are living thousands of miles away from the place they all call home. Afkhami, for her part, speaks warmly of the life she lives at Noor.

“We had everything over there,” she says, remembering her life in Iran before the revolution. “Now, this is the best place I could be. It is home.”

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