A large part of South Africa remains timelessly rural and unchanging - a landscape of small settlements and subsistence agriculture, with the local trading store at the hub of local community life: a place to meet, use the telephone, buy provisions and find out what is happening in the world beyond this isolated environment. Democracy may have given people in these areas the right to vote, but it has given them little else and it will be many years before the changing lives of people in the cities are reflected in rural areas, where money, possessions and access to an income are extremely limited.