Just back from South Africa, David Whetstone reports on cultural links with the North East. Pictures by Jenny Dewar

BACK from South Africa and what do I find? That the North East has been basking in a mini summer heatwave and smug people are observing: "You’re not very tanned."

In South Africa, where I have been with the Swallows Partnership, autumn is knocking. The sun drops around 5pm and it’s dark by six.

The Swallows Partnership is an elaborate cultural exchange programme founded by Peter Stark, director of Northern Arts in the 1980s and then one of the drivers of the Gateshead Quays development.

Visiting the Eastern Cape province of the new South Africa, he had a hunch that there were things it could learn from the North East and vice versa.

With a late career bursary from the Arts Council, he was able to explore the potential for "an extraordinary and complex cultural chemistry across the globe to the mutual benefit of both communities..."

Many artists, actors and cultural practitioners have made the journey in both directions since the partnership – named after the migratory bird which spends time in both places – started in 2003.

Peter is in the process of applying for an Arts Council grant to take the project forward to 2010 and 2011. Funding from the equivalent body in South Africa has recently been granted to the Swallows Partnership, a clear indication that it is deemed to have been a valuable exercise. I travelled with the latest party of North East Swallows delegates, from Umtata, in the Transkei "homeland" where Nelson Mandela was born and brought up, to Port Elizabeth, where the legacy of colonialism and apartheid inevitably elicits a mixed response from first-time visitors.

Count me among the latter.