I sit down at the table and notice at once that there is nobody from my tribe near me. "Oh boy, this could be a long night", I think. "Whatever you do don't be horrible to the expatriates."
People sit there in their nice clothes, laughing, talking, looking as though they're at ease with the world. An attractive blond woman in a dress sits next to me. The shape of her face seems Scandinavian, in an Asterix-In-Norway kind of way. "Hullo", she says. "Anybody in this seat?"
"No", I say. "All yours." She puts her handbag by her knees. "You're looking smart", I say. "Where have you come from?"
"The EU function, Zero Tolerance to Homophobia."
"Ah yes, I received some emails about that."
"You did? I didn't see you there. How come you didn't make it?"
I think for a moment about whether to be honest. I want to say something that will make conversation easier rather than harder. But for some reason my brain won't allow it tonight. "I'd never go to an event with a title like that", I respond.
"Why not? Are you homophobic?"
"I find the title of the event absurd, and sinister."
"What could possibly be sinister about an event like that?"
"The event is about intolerance to intolerance. What that implies is that the EU doesn't mind intolerance, just so long as it is intolerance that it approves of. It reminds me of that moron totalitarian Herbert Marcuse's belief in "liberating tolerance", tolerance for things you agree with, intolerance for everything you don't. It's Orwellian double-speak, double-think."
"Oh come on!" she says, "you're reading too much into it!"
"And", I continue. "Homophobia isn't an action, it's a feeling; a thought. An event like that is essentially an acceptance of the idea of thought crime. And in Zimbabwe, in fact, it's not illegal to have homosexual thoughts, only to engage in homosexual acts. Zanu PF, savage and barbaric as it is, understands the difference between thoughts and actions, which is more than can be said for the EU, much of the time."
"Oh my goodness, you're being completely ridiculous!" she says. "Do you yourself have any problem with gay people?"
"What gay people do is none of my business. On that particular issue I'm libertarian."
"So what's the problem?"
"I've just stated it. Had the event been slated as "equal rights for gay people" rather than "let's show our Intolerance of thought crimes", then I might have considered attending."
"In any case", she says. "People mean homophobic actions when they talk about homophobia, not thoughts, so much."
"Well it's lazy language, then, to conflate a thought and an action until they become indistinguishable. Again, something I find a bit sinister. But you're right, it's common to hear homophobia being used to refer to actions, even though the definition of it concerns a feeling."
There is a brief moment of silence. I want to say so much more. I want to point out that the only reason the authorities allowed the event to happen was because they knew it was no threat. I want to tell her that if they had genuinely felt it was a threat, it would never have been allowed to happen. The fact that the event did happen, then, is proof that it had absolutely no impact on anything, accept, perhaps on the sense of virtue of those who attended it.
I decide against saying more. She breaks the silence. "Excuse me. I'm just going to talk to Katie, over there, haven't seen her in ages. Nice to chat."
"Bye. Nice to chat."
Tuesday, April 5, 2016
Friday, April 1, 2016
Cameron Diaz and the Nazi
So there I was minding my own business, walking along la playa Blanca, looking out for the pig I'd seen frolicking on the sand the previous day, as one does, when all of a sudden I saw a sign saying, "Vegan food and coffee". The bit that said "vegan" irritated me (obviously, Jules). But it crossed my mind that a vegan stand might sell coffee a little less Nescafeyie than other places.
Some years ago I suspect this beach had been a pristine 4km stretch of peninsula. Then it looks as though some clever fellow had built a road to it so that in months every square meter of it was covered by illegal swiss-family-robinson-type wooden structures: mini-hotels, restaurants, cafes and other non-descript-wooden thingies.
Such structures would (I'm sure) have a pleasant desert-island simplicity to them were they few in number. But hundreds of them cheek-by-jowl give more of a kind of "listen-to-the-scandinavians-
In between (and in front of) the shacks, countless traders sold everything from pigs to massages to necklaces. The peninsula was without plumbing so everyone washed with vanishingly rare fresh water brought in with buckets from elsewhere. The toilets flushed with sea water (again using the bucket method). Sewage vanished magically, leading you to suspect that it ended up in the marsh area close to the beach.
Had it not been for the splendid company of my fellow wedding party-goers entertaining me with near-death boat experiences and witty "one-time-at-the-tin-roof" stories (not to mention Robyn's unforgettable, politically incorrect descriptions of China), I'd have likely arrived at the beach, drunk an overpriced GNT, and then left.
So there I was, day n on la Playa Blanca, determined to find decent coffee, and still wondering whether to go over to the "Vegan food and coffee" stand when, all of a sudden, I noticed that the coffee-selling person at the stand was hot. "Decision made!" I thought.
I trotted over. "So, do you guys serve coffee that's half way edible?" I asked.
"Hullo, yes!" she said, looking like a youthful Cameron Diaz in a lost-at-a-hippy-commune-for-
"Are you sure? Can I smell it to make sure you're not telling horrible lies?"
She smiled as though I was behaving like a prick and poured a little coffee into a cup for me. I took a sip and did a Gordon Brown smile in return (you know, the kind he gives when he's just sold all of Britain's gold reserves for nothing). "Sis", I said. "Is this it? No espresso machine? No stash of freshly ground coffee round the back you forgot to bring out this morning?"
"Well", she said. "At least it's not Nescafe!"
She was actually more beautiful than a young Cameron Diaz. Olive skin, sun-wavey blonde hair, greeney-blue eyes. "Bit of a looker hey!" I thought as I noted three peculiar things.
1. She had dry food smeared around her mouth like a toddler who'd recently eaten porridge. "That is totally not hot", I thought. "But it's some how still endearing, like children are endearing"
2. Her teeth were perfect, with the notable exception of one that looked like it had been hacked (or violently knocked) out to leave a brown, stumpy peg in its place. "Lady, when was the last time you went to a dentist?"
3. Her arms were incredibly hairy. "Intriguing that you're not self conscious about your hair. Endearing", I thought.
Christian came to me at that moment. "Dude, what are you doing here?"
"Still searching for coffee"
He looked at Cameron Diaz briefly. "What is this place anyway, some kind of leftwing-hippy commune?"
She smiled from behind the counter. "No, we're not communists", she said to him.
"Alright, China, just going to find Natalie, see you later", he said to me, walking off as though the hippy-commune had just transcriptionally activated his knee-jerk conservative-irritation genes.
At that moment a guy came up behind me. "Actually, I'm the exact opposite of a communist", he said, as he walked around me and into the coffee-shack. "I'm a Nazi".
I looked at him, waiting for him to say something that would qualify what he'd just said as a joke.
"You think that's strange, don't you, dude, because I'm black."
He was, indeed, black as the night. "Well, yeah, that did cross my mind as odd", I exclaimed.
"Dude, you've just been listening to all the media hype!"
"Media hype?"
"Dude, don't believe it all. Hitler was just trying to help his people, man. He was trying to improve them. Dude, media have been trying to vilify him for decades! I'm doing the same thing, dude, just trying to create the master race."
"So you think bad PR was his primary downfall?" I said.
He sounded like he had been recruited straight out of the cast of some cheap Californian surfer-dude movie. And he reminded me of Splinter from "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles". In fact, had Splinter been embodied in human form, this man would have been him. He walked around with his shirt off and, like you might expect of a Kungfu master, had a six-pack, and frowny kungfu eyebrows that defy description, except, to say that they had a Splinter-cum-Japanese-anime look to them. "At least you're ripped", I thought as I continued with, "Where are you from?".
"Egypt", he said.
"But you sound like you're Californian."
"Oh, dude, yeah, I grew up there. But I'm Egyptian, dude! You can't escape your roots!"
"And what are you guys doing here, on this particular beach?"
"I run this place, dude. It's a Kungfu camp, and a University."
"A Kungfu camp.....and a University?" ("On La Playa-fucking-Blanca!!" I thought. "Of all the mad places to choose!")
"Dude, I do it all man. Kungfu in the morning, university by afternoon and evening."
"What's your syllabus?" I asked, trying not to laugh at the absurdity of the guy.
"Dude, we meld everything together: mathematics with language, ancient aboriginal chemistry with homeopathy, mayan stuff, ancient Egyptian physics. Man, when I meditate, I tap into my DNA from my ancient Egyptian people; just think what energy and information is stored in there? And think, I already know all of your type of education, your "western" education, or more like indoctrination, but I can also add to that, you know, dude, all of the extra stuff from my genetic history! Think for a moment about how powerful that shit is!"
At that point, I thought, "I simply must escape! PS, thanks for cock-blocking me with Cameron Diaz, who incidentally needs dental work, and probably a visit from her parents, not to mention a bikini wax, if her arms are anything to go by."
"....blah blah blah....man, that's why the end of the world is coming. It's just like Revelations all over again! Are you familiar with revelations? Dude, it's all in there!"
He seemed so riveted by the opportunity to relieve me of ignorance that I felt my leaving would some how be extraordinarily rude. So I stayed and returned to the question of Hitler. "What do you make of the Nazi footage showing thousands of dead jews and other non-desirables being tossed into mass graves with industrial earth moving equipment?"
"Dude, I've studied those images! Man, they're not even real! They're all the same people! When you study enough of the pictures, as I have, you realise they're just moving dead bodies from one staged photoshoot to another! Oh man, I can't even believe you're buying that shit!"
"Yeah", said Cameron Diaz. "They just shift them from one place to another!"
"What!" I thought. "You, Cameron, Diaz!! Trust the only hot girl on this beach to be the member of some black nazi kungfu death cult!"
I looked at them both for a moment, wondering in my own mind what Splinter's brochure would read like. Obviously, he probably wouldn't put, "Wanted: hot, vacuous and troubled vegan women for indoctrination by black Nazi kungfu death cult leader. Please apply within. Must have no clue about how to make coffee."
I escaped after what seemed like an hour or so and explained to the party what had happened. Sarah immediately said, "oh my goodness, he probably gets to sleep with all the women too, whispering sweet nothings, like "Come on baby, it's what Adolf would have wanted!"
"Damn you Whaley!" I thought. "If only I'd thought of that fricken line as my own so I didn't have to credit you with it when recounting the story! Thanks for nothin' "
I walked past the vegan store a few times over the the next two days. Miss Diaz would often wave to me like I was an honorary cult member, and sometimes look as though she might come and talk to me, only for Splinter, in the background, to immediately lift himself eagerly from his seat, as though he were preparing to deliver another groundbreaking educational sermon to me. And then I would put my head down and walk with purpose, as though I were still looking for a decent cup of coffee.
Saturday, March 26, 2016
An unusual lunch date
I walked along a leafy street this afternoon, in Medellin, taking in the splendour of the trees and buildings around me. A young lady passed me on the pavement. "Hola" she said.
"Hola" I replied.
I crossed the road some moments later and noticed that she was behind me. She said something in Spanish. I stopped. "Inglese solomente", I said to her, holding my hands up in embarrassment. She looked at me blankly so I pulled out my phone and got onto Google translate.
"Where are you going?" She tapped into it.
"I'm finding lunch", I replied.
She said nothing in response so I continued on. But she followed me once more and then took the phone from my hand as I strode and tapped something into the interface. "Do you want sexual services?"
I walked on. "No", I laughed.
Still she followed me. Eventually I stopped and faced her. "What are you doing? Where are your parents? You look like you're about 17 for godsakes!" She looked at the floor and said nothing. "argh, this is frustrating!" I thought, as I tapped what I'd just shouted into Google translate.
She took the phone. "Venezuela." We began passing messages back and forth.
"It's dangerous to walk around streets having sex with random people. You can get hurt. You can catch diseases."
"It's because of economic problems in Venezuela."
"I'm going now, I need to get lunch."
"I can take you to a good restaurant."
"No", I said. "I've already got a place to go to." I walked off and then checked over my shoulder some metres ahead. She was in the distance moving in the same direction as me. Eventually I found the place I was looking for and sat down at a table. Seconds later she was next to me. "Are you joining me for lunch, or something?" I wrote.
She nodded and looked at me like she was Puss and Boots from Shrek.
"Argh!" I thought. "There I go, minding my own business, and the next thing I'm buying lunch for a prostitute."
I thought about shewing her away. But the thought of doing so suddenly felt a bit like strangling a kitten. The waiter brought us a menu. I tapped into my phone, "Where are your parents?"
She didn't answer. Instead she asked me how old I was.
"36"
"22" she responded.
"When are you going back home?"
She pulled a ticket from her bag and pointed to a line that said, "Medellin --> Caracas", in about two month's time.
"Do you have children?"
"Yes. One. He's 3 years old". She pulled out a picture of him. He was an adorable boy with the same kind of spontaneous joyful look as my nephew. A big smile and sparkly brown eyes.
"What's his name?"
"Alexander"
"Who looks after him?"
"His godmother"
I thought as she talked that I detected a tear, but then wondered whether that was my imagination. It struck me at that moment that I was surprised that she was crying; that I was surprised that she had the full range of human feelings. Why had I subconsciously thought that she mightn't?
"Don't you know you can get hurt doing what you do? Can't you get another kind of job?"
"It's because of the economic problems in Venezuela" she replied, again.
And then I felt like an idiot. How the hell would I know what jobs she could or couldn't get? Why would she be in Colombia, hundreds of km from her child, if she had the option to be home? "Shut up already, Eastwood", I thought.
And, of course, those of us from Zim have always been familiar with economic migration of sorts. How many of us had to leave our homes? How many of us found it unpleasant, lonely, uprooting, alienating? And yet we worked cushy jobs in full time employment in decent countries. We hadn't had to sell sex to strangers as illegal aliens in banana republics.
The food came. She tucked into her salmon dish like she hadn't eaten for some time. "Are you married?" She wrote to me.
"No"
"Why?" she asked.
"Why?" I thought. "What the hell is this? Some kind of 20-questions-prostitute-power-half-hour-radio talk show?"
The immediate dialogue in my head went something like this; "it's complicated. I mean, once, long ago, my ex-girlfriend of two years turned up on my doorstep in Zimbabwe and asked me to marry her. And I really wanted to, but couldn't for all kinds of reasons that I won't go into because I hardly know you form a bar of soap; I mean you're a prostitute I've just randomly found myself having lunch with for god-sakes, and in any case, what I've just said is the kind of thing that would likely get badly lost-in-translation on Google."
"I haven't met the right woman", I eventually wrote. "And I also want to be ready in myself for the responsibility of it. And some women can be terrifying."
She burst into laughter when she read that.
And then I thought, "dude, why did you even say that? I mean you're not really that terrified of women, are you? Maybe just the crazy-bitch variety who try to panel-beat you into a better person with such implements as blow torches, hammers and badzas. And I don't even go anywhere near crazies like that anymore. And how stupid to even mention something like fear to someone who is likely traumatised by genuine violence. You really need to get on top of this casual lunch-time-with prostitutes banter, Eastwood."
"Don't worry, you're hansom" she wrote. "One day you'll find someone nice!"
"Thanks, let's hope so!"
I finished my chicken and then wrote, "If you could choose what to do in life, what would you be?"
She seemed to think for a moment. "It doesn't matter, so long as I can look after Alexander."
Her words at once reminded me how immensely middle class and lucky I was; of how I have been indulged with choice at every stage of my life, sometimes to the point of anxiety. "Hmm, should I take that postdoc at Cambridge? Or should I return to Zimbabwe? Or then again, wouldn't it be fun to run my own business at this stage of my life, at least, for a while?" Bad feelings swept over me. I felt almost dirty for allowing our worlds to meet when they were so different. It felt some how horribly dishonest. "Oh goodness", I thought, "I'm one of them; one of those leftwing trustafarians who fraternises with the masses."
I asked for the bill. "Thank you", she wrote. "Con gusto", I said as I got up and walked away. But once again she followed me. We passed a cash machine and she tugged on my arm to stop. She went into the cash booth for some minutes. When she came out I realised from her body language that she had likely hoped to contribute something to the meal, but then found she couldn't. "It's okay", I wrote. "You don't need to give me anything."
We walked on. At the road to my hostel I stopped and pointed to where I had to go. She pointed in another direction. I held out my hand to shake her's. But she instead reached up and grabbed my face with both her hands and kissed me on the cheek. I had a momentary and overwhelming desire to protect her from all the evils of the world, to make sure that she and her child would some how be safe. And then I felt that crushing (and unfortunately, all too familiar) sense of helplessness that comes from knowing that a situation is much bigger than you.
Later that evening I received a whatsapp message. It was from her. I realised she must have messaged herself from my phone earlier. "Can I see you?" she asked.
"That unfortunately won't be possible", I said. "I'm going back to my home country today. All the best for your and Alexander's future."
Saturday, November 1, 2014
Ripped and Tanned 1
You know, sometimes you notice stupid shit. Like when you're in a hotel
in Europe and you see a pocket-calculator-sized patch of brail on the
wall next to the toilet, leading you to suspect that some apparatchik
has been paid some large sum of money to recommend that the hotel be
"friendly" to the "differently sighted", presumably in the off-chance
that some blind fellow in the know about brail policies at the hotel
can fumble his way around the perimeter of the establishment
attempting to find the one brick among ten thousand that contains the
bit that says, "toilet here", avoiding him the trouble of
having to ask staff where the toilet is.
Here's some other stupid shit: The other day I was walking along
the corridor at my sports club minding my own business when I bumped
into this dude that had dared me to enter a
fitness modelling competition some months previously. So the next thing I knew I was doing what any run-of-the-mill-super-closet-genius would do and avoiding an embarrassing moment by committing myself to a more embarrassing moment.
I walked away from the encounter with a sinking feeling in my stomach,
the kind I imagine you get when you've just discovered that Muammar
Gaddafi's your biological dad.
I got home and looked at myself in the
mirror and thought, "Sheesh, how the hell am I going to get this
shabby carcas into shape in 3 weeks?" I got online and looked at some
Youtube videos of people competing in the same
beautiful-when-you're-naked category I would be entering into:
"fitness model". For you beautiful-when-you're-naked ignoramuses out
there, this category is the skinny-guy-category, the one where you
don't have to look like Arnold Swazzenegger before he could speak
English. In fact you're supposed to just look like a regular dude.
Sort of. Maybe a regular dude with like 4% body fat, with freakin abs
like something out of an anatomy book, and with striations on your
ass. But other than that, you know, normal.
The fitness models are followed by the "muscle models". These guys are
also at about 4% body fat but look like someone took a fitness model
down to the local garage and inflated him with an extra 2 bars of air.
They're bigger, but not nearly as big as the next category up, the
real-deal body-builders like Ronnie Coleman, who weigh in at about 135
kg and compete at 3% body fat.
So I would be entering into the "fitness model" category, the "normal" skinny-guy section.
A moment for my personal stats before competition:
height: 6 ft
age: 35
weight: 82 kg
body fat: 10% (I think, ish)
colour: sheep-white
I had 3 weeks to drop down to about 6% fat, meaning I would have to
lose almost 1.6% of my body fat per week in order to compete. My
challenger gave me a diet of 2900 calories to follow religiously,
containing meals of egg-whites, broccoli, asparagus, chicken
breasts, sweet potatoes and salad (or some combination thereof). I did
some calculations:
1 x average daily male base metabolic burn = 2500 calories
2 x 1 hour workouts per day = 1000 calories (approximately)
Total calories out = 3500
Total calories in = 2900
Calorie deficit per day = 600
Calories in 1kg of fat = 7000
Number of kg lost per week = approximately 0,5
Weeks required to burn 3.2kg (or 4% of body fat) = 6
Weeks available before competition = 3
Yikes.
Given the above envelope calculation I thought my chances of not
humiliating myself were small. But I figured I'd just give it a bash
anyway, humiliating moments in my life featuring more like background radiation than the kind of jarring memory-etching events they're supposed to be .
I exercised religiously twice a day and ate only the food that was
prescribed. To my surprise my body changed as a mathematical certainty
every 2-3 days: my stomach got tighter, new lines of definition began
showing on my stomach, chest and legs.
I had assumed that the diet would make me feel ill but instead, for
the first 2 weeks, I felt stronger, fitter and healthier. I had a
pleasurable spring in my step. Finally in the last week I sensed my body
protest: my energy levels dropped, my muscle began wasting away
alongside the fat, I began to feel tired. My face looked
drawn.
Then there was the question of a tan. Being sheep-white I
decided to book myself into a tanning salon two days before the day. I
was in fact surprised to discover that Harare had a tanning salon at
all (In a place with 320 days of sun a year? What?). A young
20-something woman in what looked like a surgeons gown met me at the
hospital-like reception. She led me upstairs to a room. "This place is
way too sophisticated to be in a banana republic" I thought.
"Would you like a thong?" she asked.
"No thanks", I said. "I've got my swimming costume. "
"Ok, when you're in your costume lie over there", she said, pointing
to the bed in the middle of the room.
"So", I said, clambering onto it, "do you get men in this place often?"
"You're the first one!" she said. "Oh great", I thought. "My fellow
Rhodie countrymen are running around the countryside beating small
animals to death with their naked penises, and here I am getting a
fricken gay-boy tan. Let nobody ever know about this."
She slapped some creamy looking substance onto her hands and began
rubbing my body with it. It was abrasive. My skin quickly started
burning. "What is that stuff?" I asked.
"It's an exfoliator" she said.
At that moment I remembered an article I'd read in a filthy British
rag (the Guardian) about how exfoliators in the cosmetics industry
usually contained mirco-particles of plastic (the bits responsible for
the abrasive action) that were extraordinarily bad for the environment
because they ended up in oceans and rivers, bio-accumulating in fish
and other organisms and slowly poisoning them by virtue of the fact
that they are themselves toxic, but also because they attract, bind and therefore concentrate other poisonous chemicals. I felt a tinge of guilt
that I was doing something as needless as having my skin exfoliated so
I could be orange for a few hours. And then it occurred to me that
there were literally a billion women on this planet exfoliating their
skins with these crazy products every day. "Women really are an
environmental catastrophe", I thought. "Like Jeremy Clarkson with
tits."
As the spray came out of her strange contraption there was
a very acrid and unpleasant smell. "Is it safe to breathe this stuff
in?" I asked.
"Yes", she said.
"How does this stuff tan you?" I asked.
"It's got some chemical in it, natural of course, that reacts with
your skin after some hours."
"Well isn't it going to give the insides of my lungs a tan too, then?
I mean, what kind of reactions are they? What exactly are these
'natural' chemicals and what will they do to my mucus
membranes?"
"I don't know", she said. "But it's very safe, we get this stuff from the USA."
"Oh great", I thought, "that makes me feel better, know I can always
trust the FDA to be on the side of okes who are freakin' ripped and
tanned. I'm sure it's in the small print on their mission statement:
Thou shalt not yield in the face of commercial conflicts of interest and use chemicals that might poison okes who look awesome when they're naked with the products responsible for making them look like that in the first place."
All sorts of other things raced through my mind as the stinky spray cooled my skin. "What if this stuff is absorbed into my bloodstream? Do I really need a freakin' tan on the insides of my arteries? And if it does get into my bloodstream how is it going to be detoxed by my liver? It's not like the poor organ has had evolutionary preparation for fake-tan molecules in its 5 billion year journey from primordial soup."
I looked at my legs. "It's not doing anything. I need to be dark, very
dark, like chocolate!" I said.
"Oh, don't worry, it'll get dark this evening."
"Are you sure"
"Yes, in fact, I've sprayed so much on you now I'm worried you might
be too dark."
"And it won't actually just turn me some ghastly shade of orange?"
"Oh, no, sir", she added, giggling.
I finished just as white as I had started, paid 70 dollars that could
have paid for a brail toilet-sign at an orphanage of disabled, blind child soldiers, and then pranced off to the car making sure nobody I knew was in the car park to
observe what I'd just done. I quickly got home and put on a long sleeve
shirt and long trousers in the middle of a 30 degree October. Then I put on a hat and dark glasses and went to my usual cafe to actually do some ***ing work (argh!)!
To my frustration and exactly as I'd feared: By evening I was orange. Not
slightly orange. Just orange. "What the hell was that chick on about?"
I thought. "Look at me I look like some kind of down-and-out fricken
wanna-be-porn-star who just weighed up poorly his options between penis
enlargement and tan for his first job interview."
Now that I have described myself let me bring up something else
relevant to the story. First, imagine a Silver back gorilla. Now
imagine it without hair, any hair. Now imagine it super brown, like it
new a secret place where it could get a proper brown tan for almost no
money at all. Now imagine it has a vocabulary consisting almost
entirely of the words, "yeah bro".
To be continued...
Wednesday, October 15, 2014
Flowers and proteins
There are memories I have that at times play through my head involuntarily and repeatedly.
One is about a brief period that I spent working for the London Borough of Bromley before my undergrad degree started in 1998. My job was to monitor "Y2K compliance" for the council.
Before 2000 there was allegedly a fault with how a great many computers were programmed to handle dates after the year 2000. The fear was that errors in this dating system would mean aeroplanes falling out of the sky, accidental nuclear war, hospital records being jumbled, and a bunch of other doomsday scenarios. Thanks to the Y2K bug, I had a job.
The term "Y2K compliance" at the time was a buzz-word, something that people (including myself) associated with programming geniuses who knew how to unpick the inner workings of microchips. The reality was that I sat a desk and mindlessly googled various manufacturers for the compliance level of their machines and recorded the data in a spreadsheet.
Day in and day out I sat at my table, often completing my task in an hour and trying to find ways of killing the other 7 hours of the day. I was so bored that I began trying to derive Newton's equations of projectile motion under uniform gravity beginning only with the assumption f = ma. For some moments I thought myself a little clever for doing it. But then, having done it, I realised it was such a simple problem that it would hardly have entered into the maths 101 syllabus at University. I plugged the equations into spreadsheets, simulated tennis balls doing bouncy things, and noted that Newtons equations work perfectly with the arrow of time working both forwards and backwards. Why did the Universe, then, evolve with time moving in only one direction? I had no clue, and would not discover the answer to that question for some years. Then I got bored. It was as though my mind had totally run out of fuel to burn. Even the thought of thinking seemed to consume too much energy. I began to enter a strange kind of partial brain-activity-ether-real world.
I soon discovered that my job was not needed. The council merely had a use-it-or-lose-it budget to work with and employed someone to do some "compliance" work to chew up spare money. It was the first time I looked into the bureaucratic machine, its unthinking gears in constant motion, so inhuman, so parasitic, so much like a sign post saying, "don't lean on this sign post."
The office was open-plan and the people who sat next to me and around me seemed to be career council types, the kind of drone-like apparatchiks attracted to low skill, high wage jobs. None of them asked me any personal questions. None of them discussed anything outside of soccer and what they had done the previous Friday night. And that's if they talked. Most of the time there was eerie silence while they busied themselves with something. As an 18 year old fresh out of Zimbabwe I felt like I had been transplanted from an ancient place into a heartless future in which the strange mannequins in front of me embodied all of the lifeless dystopia of nightmares: robotic, empty, bankrupt of spirit, void of curiosity.
I pathologised them on the surface, but the reality was that I felt like there was something deeply wrong with me. I sensed it was I who was strange for feeling, for thinking, for wondering about the world and its ways. I felt that I was alone in being miserable because I was paradoxically not miserable. It was as though the people around me would never know their own misery because misery itself was their baseline of existence; everywhere and therefore nowhere.
With time I even wondered whether their brains detected light as mine did, whether the three-dimensional shape of the room around them looked the same to them as it did to myself, or whether the light hitting the back of their brains illuminated the same pathways as it did in mine. I wondered whether they experienced any form of emotion that was not some how blunt.
The only escape from the machine came at lunch time. The clock would hit 1pm and I would stop what I was doing and walk down the 8 flights of stairs to the exit. I would walk across the grey road that ran between the grey buildings. Now and then I would study the structures around me: ugly and full of steel and concrete, so grotesque that I wondered whether the architects had tried deliberately to make the world an uglier place; whether they had felt it their duty to destroy beauty wherever they found it. The monoliths almost hurt my eyes with their prison-like proportions, their lazy symmetry born of computer-repeated pillars, and the communist-like poor quality of their materials. And it was as though these buildings were bowels from which the grey empty-behind-the-eyes, plodding zombies were birthed and ejected into the streets.
I would walk with the zombies until I reached the sandwich stand. And there I would wait in the queue until I finally saw her: the single red flower painted into the grey and black of the prison surrounding me. "Good afternoon what can I get you today?" she would say in her French accent as she locked me momentarily with her green eyes. I would ask for a sandwich and then I would watch her delicate wrists and hands move as she cut the bread, her firm skin, her perfect collarbones, so delicate compared to the soul-sapping ogreish pillars just behind her. I'd watch her chestnut hair sway to and fro, and her eyes look about. Her eyes seemed so human, so alive, life happened behind them. She would hand me my sandwich. "Anything else?" And I would always want to say, "just your number, please."
Many times the fantasy words were at the tip of my lips: "Would you like to get a coffee some time? You know, real coffee, ground properly in a grinder, served in an elegant cup. And we can talk about real things, like nobody around here ever seems to do."
But each time the moment came my mouth jammed and my words vanished. And then I would just thank her and look her in the eye for the brief moment that I could. And I would take my sandwich and walk across the grey street and under the grey communist buildings and enter the grey council building I worked in. And then for the rest of the day she would be the sole moving figure in the empty canvas I called my mind.
I prepared myself one day to get her number and I went down the stairs, all the time thinking about how I would deliver my lines: "It would be lovely to see you when you're not making sandwiches, or: can I give you my number?" (Maybe it would be less terrifying for her if I gave her my number instead of asking for hers, I thought.) But when I got to the sandwich shop that day I discovered that she was no longer there, that someone had replaced her with a robot. My World darkened, as though the last red flower in existence had wilted into the colourless concrete to leave just grey, everywhere.
There was also coffee: One of my chief aims as Y2K compliance officer was to make my boss a cup twice a day. It smelled and tasted awful: acrid; muddy. It was stored in a bucket-sized industrial tin, tasting much like its industrial-like paint-tin would suggest. One day I took my boss his cup and he sipped at it and immediately spat it out. "Oi, what's in 'ere? Make me another one, the milks off..."
The milk had curdled. "That's strange", I thought, "because I tasted the milk before I put it into the coffee and it seemed fine."
I went back to the kitchen and sipped some more milk from the bottle I'd used. It was perfectly fine. Then I poured a little hot water into a new mug, added to it some coffee and trickled some of the milk from the old bottle into the mix. It immediately curdled as it hit the coffee. "Interesting" I thought. Then I opened a new carton of milk and poured some into a fresh cup of coffee. It didn't curdle at all. Again I sampled milk from both cartons, the old and the new. They both tasted fine. "I know what's happened!" I thought as I walked to my boss's office. "Sir", I said, standing at his door. "May I come in?"
"Yes, come in. And don't call me sir!" he said.
"I just wanted to say that I think I've worked out what was wrong with your coffee. Essentially, I did a control experiment with the old and new milk....to cut a long story short, I suspect the milk I originally used, while tasting perfectly fine, was on the edge of going off, so that when I placed it in the mildly acidic environment of your coffee, the chemical milieu therein was sufficient to denature the already partially deteriorated milk proteins past a critical point, essentially producing the coagulation you observed...all that said, there are probably hundreds of chemicals in coffee and milk, and who knows what kind of complex chemistry could be causing the coagulation. Still, the simplest explanation could well be..."
I stopped. The freeze-frame of that moment still enters my head at times. I see it when my mind is blank, when I'm not thinking of anything in particular: his eyes boring into me, his thumb clicking his pen in and out, his eyebrows slightly turned down as if he were angry, as if he wished in that moment for a button that would open a trap-door and send me to a shark-tank. "I'll get your coffee now", I said.
One is about a brief period that I spent working for the London Borough of Bromley before my undergrad degree started in 1998. My job was to monitor "Y2K compliance" for the council.
Before 2000 there was allegedly a fault with how a great many computers were programmed to handle dates after the year 2000. The fear was that errors in this dating system would mean aeroplanes falling out of the sky, accidental nuclear war, hospital records being jumbled, and a bunch of other doomsday scenarios. Thanks to the Y2K bug, I had a job.
The term "Y2K compliance" at the time was a buzz-word, something that people (including myself) associated with programming geniuses who knew how to unpick the inner workings of microchips. The reality was that I sat a desk and mindlessly googled various manufacturers for the compliance level of their machines and recorded the data in a spreadsheet.
Day in and day out I sat at my table, often completing my task in an hour and trying to find ways of killing the other 7 hours of the day. I was so bored that I began trying to derive Newton's equations of projectile motion under uniform gravity beginning only with the assumption f = ma. For some moments I thought myself a little clever for doing it. But then, having done it, I realised it was such a simple problem that it would hardly have entered into the maths 101 syllabus at University. I plugged the equations into spreadsheets, simulated tennis balls doing bouncy things, and noted that Newtons equations work perfectly with the arrow of time working both forwards and backwards. Why did the Universe, then, evolve with time moving in only one direction? I had no clue, and would not discover the answer to that question for some years. Then I got bored. It was as though my mind had totally run out of fuel to burn. Even the thought of thinking seemed to consume too much energy. I began to enter a strange kind of partial brain-activity-ether-real world.
I soon discovered that my job was not needed. The council merely had a use-it-or-lose-it budget to work with and employed someone to do some "compliance" work to chew up spare money. It was the first time I looked into the bureaucratic machine, its unthinking gears in constant motion, so inhuman, so parasitic, so much like a sign post saying, "don't lean on this sign post."
The office was open-plan and the people who sat next to me and around me seemed to be career council types, the kind of drone-like apparatchiks attracted to low skill, high wage jobs. None of them asked me any personal questions. None of them discussed anything outside of soccer and what they had done the previous Friday night. And that's if they talked. Most of the time there was eerie silence while they busied themselves with something. As an 18 year old fresh out of Zimbabwe I felt like I had been transplanted from an ancient place into a heartless future in which the strange mannequins in front of me embodied all of the lifeless dystopia of nightmares: robotic, empty, bankrupt of spirit, void of curiosity.
I pathologised them on the surface, but the reality was that I felt like there was something deeply wrong with me. I sensed it was I who was strange for feeling, for thinking, for wondering about the world and its ways. I felt that I was alone in being miserable because I was paradoxically not miserable. It was as though the people around me would never know their own misery because misery itself was their baseline of existence; everywhere and therefore nowhere.
With time I even wondered whether their brains detected light as mine did, whether the three-dimensional shape of the room around them looked the same to them as it did to myself, or whether the light hitting the back of their brains illuminated the same pathways as it did in mine. I wondered whether they experienced any form of emotion that was not some how blunt.
The only escape from the machine came at lunch time. The clock would hit 1pm and I would stop what I was doing and walk down the 8 flights of stairs to the exit. I would walk across the grey road that ran between the grey buildings. Now and then I would study the structures around me: ugly and full of steel and concrete, so grotesque that I wondered whether the architects had tried deliberately to make the world an uglier place; whether they had felt it their duty to destroy beauty wherever they found it. The monoliths almost hurt my eyes with their prison-like proportions, their lazy symmetry born of computer-repeated pillars, and the communist-like poor quality of their materials. And it was as though these buildings were bowels from which the grey empty-behind-the-eyes, plodding zombies were birthed and ejected into the streets.
I would walk with the zombies until I reached the sandwich stand. And there I would wait in the queue until I finally saw her: the single red flower painted into the grey and black of the prison surrounding me. "Good afternoon what can I get you today?" she would say in her French accent as she locked me momentarily with her green eyes. I would ask for a sandwich and then I would watch her delicate wrists and hands move as she cut the bread, her firm skin, her perfect collarbones, so delicate compared to the soul-sapping ogreish pillars just behind her. I'd watch her chestnut hair sway to and fro, and her eyes look about. Her eyes seemed so human, so alive, life happened behind them. She would hand me my sandwich. "Anything else?" And I would always want to say, "just your number, please."
Many times the fantasy words were at the tip of my lips: "Would you like to get a coffee some time? You know, real coffee, ground properly in a grinder, served in an elegant cup. And we can talk about real things, like nobody around here ever seems to do."
But each time the moment came my mouth jammed and my words vanished. And then I would just thank her and look her in the eye for the brief moment that I could. And I would take my sandwich and walk across the grey street and under the grey communist buildings and enter the grey council building I worked in. And then for the rest of the day she would be the sole moving figure in the empty canvas I called my mind.
I prepared myself one day to get her number and I went down the stairs, all the time thinking about how I would deliver my lines: "It would be lovely to see you when you're not making sandwiches, or: can I give you my number?" (Maybe it would be less terrifying for her if I gave her my number instead of asking for hers, I thought.) But when I got to the sandwich shop that day I discovered that she was no longer there, that someone had replaced her with a robot. My World darkened, as though the last red flower in existence had wilted into the colourless concrete to leave just grey, everywhere.
There was also coffee: One of my chief aims as Y2K compliance officer was to make my boss a cup twice a day. It smelled and tasted awful: acrid; muddy. It was stored in a bucket-sized industrial tin, tasting much like its industrial-like paint-tin would suggest. One day I took my boss his cup and he sipped at it and immediately spat it out. "Oi, what's in 'ere? Make me another one, the milks off..."
The milk had curdled. "That's strange", I thought, "because I tasted the milk before I put it into the coffee and it seemed fine."
I went back to the kitchen and sipped some more milk from the bottle I'd used. It was perfectly fine. Then I poured a little hot water into a new mug, added to it some coffee and trickled some of the milk from the old bottle into the mix. It immediately curdled as it hit the coffee. "Interesting" I thought. Then I opened a new carton of milk and poured some into a fresh cup of coffee. It didn't curdle at all. Again I sampled milk from both cartons, the old and the new. They both tasted fine. "I know what's happened!" I thought as I walked to my boss's office. "Sir", I said, standing at his door. "May I come in?"
"Yes, come in. And don't call me sir!" he said.
"I just wanted to say that I think I've worked out what was wrong with your coffee. Essentially, I did a control experiment with the old and new milk....to cut a long story short, I suspect the milk I originally used, while tasting perfectly fine, was on the edge of going off, so that when I placed it in the mildly acidic environment of your coffee, the chemical milieu therein was sufficient to denature the already partially deteriorated milk proteins past a critical point, essentially producing the coagulation you observed...all that said, there are probably hundreds of chemicals in coffee and milk, and who knows what kind of complex chemistry could be causing the coagulation. Still, the simplest explanation could well be..."
I stopped. The freeze-frame of that moment still enters my head at times. I see it when my mind is blank, when I'm not thinking of anything in particular: his eyes boring into me, his thumb clicking his pen in and out, his eyebrows slightly turned down as if he were angry, as if he wished in that moment for a button that would open a trap-door and send me to a shark-tank. "I'll get your coffee now", I said.
Monday, October 6, 2014
The heart of Malawi
I was excited to go to Malawi because it meant driving through Mozambique and, particularly, Tete. And I was excited to go through Tete because of the people I had met at my local touch rugby group who spent time there. One fellow only a few weeks ago had turned up to a game with a giant bruise on his thigh. "What happened?" I asked.
"Yeah, hey, had my bachelors in Tete last week. Got out of hand, fell
through a roof, hey, nearly broke my leg. Humour."
"Why did you come up to Harare, medical treatment?"
"Ah, ja, no, hey, too much Renamo activity there right now. Just
keeping my head low for a bit."
In short Tete (the town, bang in the middle of the 350km corridor) was much like it had been described to me: A desolate cowboy's mining town set in the middle of the parched Tete corridor, about 40 degrees celsius, sprinkled with shacks and the odd petrol station. And studying the landscape as we drove through it was like studying an alien land from a spaceship, such was the disconnect I felt watching the arid earth and scraggly trees rolling by hour after hour while I sat cocooned in metal and fabric, passing an uncountable number of small children, ragged and dust-swept, like they'd been hewn from the bush. Their main (and possibly only) past time was seemingly to mortgage away what little future they had. And the evidence of their mortgage was everywhere by the ton: charcoal piled up kilometer after kilometer in giant bags, waiting to be bought by truckers for sale in urban centres. Vast swathes of areas by the road resembled a tennis ball: mown flat, calved like an accidental hair-trimmer's damage into a thick bed of hair. I gave it 30 years beforethe area would resemble a mystical dead planet.
I hoped, thereafter, that Malawi would be a breath of fresh air. The Monza border post (joining Moz with Malawi) was small and inhabited by the usual touts and people selling trinkets. The touts forced themselves on us. An eloquent Malawian standing close by felt (for some reason) the need to defend us in perfect Victorian English. "Ay, why do you not leave these good people alone? Can you not see that they have driven many kilometres and do not need nefarious merchants of confusion like yourselves disturbing their already arduous day?"
The tout turned to me and laughed. "Ah ah, you see now, we have a good Samaritan before us!" They proceeded to have a jousting match in which the most eloquent and verbose of the two was impossible to make out.
So far so good I thought, they're speaking better English than the English, which is a good start. I went to the tout and said, "Excuse me, can you tell me, what is the biggest problem facing Malawi, in your view?"
"Ah, poverty", he said.
"But why are people so poor?" I asked.
"Ah, it's because we are no longer being given enough money."
I was gobsmacked. No "Ah, our government is stealing all the money" or "We don't have the right conditions to promote business growth" or "agriculture will never work until we have proper land title". No, just "Ah, geev me munn", and all the eloquence of thought didn't seem to change the basic assumption that income should be given rather than earned.
On the road in I saw many of the same signs that I had in Mozambique: an exploding population and a landscape butchered by tree-cutters. On the road we passed a huge billboard advertising a presidential candidate. "Vote for me for general change" said the enormous writing beneath a smiling candidate. I giggled. "General" I thought. Why did he use that word? Is it because the list of things to change is so big that if he were to list them, he would have needed so many bullet points that the print would have been too small to be suitable for a billboard? Or was it because he didn't have a clue about what really needed to change? Or was it that the nature of change required was so obvious to everyone that it didn't require more explanation than "general". Or was he in fact the military man, "General Change"?
We drove for hundreds of more km. As we got closer to the lake the road became lined with ever more people walking, riding and talking. I kept on thinking, "round the corner we'll get away from the people and there'll be some good stretches of empty bush". But the emptyness never came. People were everywhere. "This is overpopulation" I thought. Trees subjected to a permanent holocaust. A lake increasingly vacuumed of all life.
We drove through this dusty village, human-to-goat ratio approximately 5:1, and after passing dust-caked shacks came to this peculiarly large house just off the main road. This was our holiday home. An attractive well-kept woman, all smiles and giggles, greeted us at the door with 2 bleached-white poodle-type dogs. "What the hell
is she doing with these Hollywood dogs in a Malawian township?" I thought to myself. "They're totally white, not even a hint of dirt from dust, like she wakes up in the morning and shampoos and hairdry's them before breakfast." As she stroked these things I couldn't help but think, "Oh my god, they're so freakin' out of place here, probably going to get eaten by rats, or killed by the rabid nomadic dogs eating road kill just a stones throw away from here."
The house was a single story home with 4 bedrooms. There was no furniture to speak of and the floors were just grey concrete screed without carpets. There was no kitchen for some reason. Three solitary chairs sat in the sitting room facing an enormous flat screen television that blared out MTV.
The rooms had been packed with hastily-built bunk-beds. We were placed in them, 6 per room. I drew the short straw with 4 others for a small brick house outside. In total there were 16 people to share two toilets, one shower. "This is going to be interesting" I thought.
Festivities get off to a good start: We had some drinks on the verandah and chatted with the other expats who'd arrived from Malawi and Kenya for the event (The Lake of Stars music festival, as it was called). I asked the expats some questions. Why wasn't there a single mealie in the ground? Why was there not one single visible entrepreneurial venture? Why had nothing been done about the deforestation? In short, what the hell were they actually achieving in Malawi?
To my dismay they had nothing useful to say. They agreed that, at best, they were ineffectual and, at worst, damaging.
The landlady's cousin arrived a couple of hours later to take us to the festival (situated at the lake). We agreed on a fee of 3000 meticash (about 6 dollars or so). He packed us into this minibus and drove us there. On arrival we paid him the money but he immediately retorted: "ah ah, but it was 3000 each!" (ie he was demanding 60 dollars for a 3 km journey) The situation deteriorated. He was adamant that we had taken advantage of him. Protests from the Malawians that 3000 was already way above the market value, fell on deaf ears. Eventually he sped off in what seemed to be an obvious rage.
The festival itself was bizarre to my Zimbabwean sensibilities. At home such a festival would have been in an isolated place, far from the masses. In Malawi, it seems the population density is so high that escaping the masses is not an option. The resorts are therefore plonked in the middle of sprawling townships that hug the edge of the lake, the tourists living cheek-by-jowl with the locals. On our beach, for example, the fishing boats and children splashed in the waves within putting distance of our GNTs. And so the festival was the same: festival incomers were matched by far greater numbers of locals from the area, who seemingly had just strolled down to the road to partake in the music.
In short Malawi seemed to exhibit all of Zimbabwe's malaises, with none of its graces. People, for example, moved at approximately half the pace of my own countrymen. They were more sloth-like, more distracted and far less purposeful with their movements.
At the restaurants and bars, for example, you would have to put your hand up to get their attention. When they saw you, they wouldn't drop what they were doing and think, "there: behold the client, I must serve him." They would slowly remove their hands from their pockets, sometimes stopping to momentarily pick their noses, or finish a conversation with their friend, and then stroll over to you. On every occasion food took 2 hours or more to arrive. The first time I went into a restaurant I ordered a fish. The waiter took my order after the usual parade of me waving to him. Every half an hour I asked him where my fish was. "Ah, yes, boss, it's coming now-now!"
After two hours he emerged to say, "Ah...Mr, the thing is....that, besicall... they have justi noteeced in the keetchen that the greeel is not working."
"What do you mean, the grill isn't working? So you haven't grilled my fish?"
"Ahhhhh" he says, shaking his head and smiling.
"Well how come you only just noticed that the grill isn't working, does nobody check on the fish? You just stick it in, hope for the best, and whip it out just before you give it to the customers?"
[silence]
"So there's literally nothing for me to eat?"
[silence, shakes his head as if to say 'no']
With that we got up and left. At first I thought it could have been a statistically non-significant event, but repeated experiences at many restaurants (both cheap and expensive) were the same. I was left with the impression that Malawians are not even able to compete with other Africans, let alone with Chinamen or Indians. Everything I saw reinforced the idea that they are an African Titanic, sinking slowly into the morass, with the only caveat being that there is no orchestra on deck.
We arrived home at about 2am and stumbled into the sitting room. To my shock and horror I discovered the poodle-madame's domestic servant sleeping with her baby on the floor of the sitting room, no sheet and no mattress to speak of. The house was open plan so she was literally in everybody's path. As we stumbled about she lifted her head for a moment as if to study us with her tired eyes and then went back to sleep. It dawned on me then that the owner of the house had turfed the servant out of her accommodation so that she could rent out the servant's quarters (in which I and 4 others were sleeping), expecting that the servant would then just "make a plan".
There seemed to be no trace of the notion that treating another human being in this way was wrong, or indeed embarrassing. The situation reminded me that the idea of fairness and human rights is so uniquely Western; the idea that man is born equal and therefore has some semblance of value despite his innate position in his hierarchy of birth. And yet, it is also only a very recent Western idea. I was reminded again that the behaviour I saw in the madame was not unusual: what was unusual was that my culture, for the briefest second before midnight, had decided that it was no longer acceptable to behave like that to people of a lower social rank.
It occured to me that not even the few rabid blood-river Afrikaners I had met would think it acceptable to dump their servant with a 4 month old baby in the middle of their concrete sitting room floor while they rented out their maid's quarters for fast money. And if they did, for some reason, they would be embarrassed about it, they would attempt to hide what they had done from their foreign guests, knowing that such practices were not acceptable elsewhere. The poodle-carrying, American-TV watching madame of the house felt no compunction to hide what she had done, let alone arrange a mattress for her worker-woman.
The house itself was so badly made I thought it might fall down if I leaned too hard on the walls. The pillars on the verandah, for example, were squank, the walls thin, the various fittings appallingly badly installed. The toilet in the servant's quarters where I slept, for example, was covered in a pool of water from some leak.
Since the floor looked pretty disgusting and potentially laden with waterborne diseases I decided I would crouch on the bowl, long-drop style, rather than sit on the seat and have my feet immersed in the water. I placed one foot on the seat while standing at the toilet entrance and shifted some weight onto it. Crack! The toilet immediately ripped out of the floor and clanged onto its side. "Ah fuck! Now look! Argh!" I thought. I stood in the water and lifted the toilet onto its base and balanced it precariously on the thin crust of concrete it had been precariously supported by. The pipe from the cistern had by now disconnected itself from the tilting toilet bowl and sent 30 litres (or so) of water gushing onto the floor.
After some minutes I got the toilet bowl upright. And then I managed to re-attach the pipe from the cistern to the bowl. I tried a test flush. The horror: half the water went into the toilet bowl, the other half squirted out backwards through the dodgy fitting onto the floor, adding another 15 litres of water to the developing pool. I was like, "What the fuck are you morons doing, for crying out loud! How do you expect to run a country if this is how you do your fucking plumbing!"
The electrics were done with the same dedication as the plumbing and, as such, the house seemed in imminent danger of burning down.
On the last day, the landlady came up to us with her pooches in hand and demanded 50 extra dollars for "gas". Given that we had been given 1 solitary pan to cook for 16 people, and had only done eggs in the morning, we estimated our gas bill at about 3 cents (most people spending 50 dollars on an entire year). We therefore declined, leading to another standoff in which she accused us of "taking advantage" of her. We stuck to our guns and mentioned that the gas was not part of the original deal, and that we'd be happy to fill the gas cylinder for her again, thereby replacing what we'd used. She then simply dropped her demand and sat down to watch more of her favourite American TV channels.
Before our departure we went to her as she sat in front of the TV and thanked her for having us. She escorted us to the door and shook our hands and said, "I'm sorry for everything."
"Everything?" I thought to myself. Maybe there is a hint of shame in there somewhere. I felt that the lady summed up much of Africa's elite in a nutshell. The TV was this window into this enigmatic Western life that she longed for, but which she didn't understand the origin of; like it was magic of sorts, its trappings obtainable if she could only perform the right kind of rain-dance, the right rituals, the right pantomime act to unlock the magic from the ether. Again and again I was (and am) reminded, that too many Africans are in love with the form of civilisation rather than its substance. And sadly, American television itself reports almost exclusively form rather than substance, a window into a decaying empire, its own citizens in the process of forgetting the origin of their prosperity, celebrating the outcome of previous generations of sacrifice and building; worshipping the empty shell of blind consumerism without its productive corollary.
It was against that backdrop that I returned to Zim a grateful man. As soon as we were into our border the charcoal selling was gone. There were trees,. There were empty spaces. There was the odd monkey, purple crested Turacos, the prospect of seeing duiker. During the 750 km drive to Malawi I had not so much as seen a single monkey or buck. Zim had this strange sense of order and civilisation, of welcome emptyness, of a different energy from the heart of darkness that I had just visited. And so, more than ever, I feel grateful to be in Zimbabwe, to be in the last refuge of partial wilderness, where nature has some semblance of hope against the marching virus that homosapiens sapiens has become.
"Yeah, hey, had my bachelors in Tete last week. Got out of hand, fell
through a roof, hey, nearly broke my leg. Humour."
"Why did you come up to Harare, medical treatment?"
"Ah, ja, no, hey, too much Renamo activity there right now. Just
keeping my head low for a bit."
In short Tete (the town, bang in the middle of the 350km corridor) was much like it had been described to me: A desolate cowboy's mining town set in the middle of the parched Tete corridor, about 40 degrees celsius, sprinkled with shacks and the odd petrol station. And studying the landscape as we drove through it was like studying an alien land from a spaceship, such was the disconnect I felt watching the arid earth and scraggly trees rolling by hour after hour while I sat cocooned in metal and fabric, passing an uncountable number of small children, ragged and dust-swept, like they'd been hewn from the bush. Their main (and possibly only) past time was seemingly to mortgage away what little future they had. And the evidence of their mortgage was everywhere by the ton: charcoal piled up kilometer after kilometer in giant bags, waiting to be bought by truckers for sale in urban centres. Vast swathes of areas by the road resembled a tennis ball: mown flat, calved like an accidental hair-trimmer's damage into a thick bed of hair. I gave it 30 years beforethe area would resemble a mystical dead planet.
I hoped, thereafter, that Malawi would be a breath of fresh air. The Monza border post (joining Moz with Malawi) was small and inhabited by the usual touts and people selling trinkets. The touts forced themselves on us. An eloquent Malawian standing close by felt (for some reason) the need to defend us in perfect Victorian English. "Ay, why do you not leave these good people alone? Can you not see that they have driven many kilometres and do not need nefarious merchants of confusion like yourselves disturbing their already arduous day?"
The tout turned to me and laughed. "Ah ah, you see now, we have a good Samaritan before us!" They proceeded to have a jousting match in which the most eloquent and verbose of the two was impossible to make out.
So far so good I thought, they're speaking better English than the English, which is a good start. I went to the tout and said, "Excuse me, can you tell me, what is the biggest problem facing Malawi, in your view?"
"Ah, poverty", he said.
"But why are people so poor?" I asked.
"Ah, it's because we are no longer being given enough money."
I was gobsmacked. No "Ah, our government is stealing all the money" or "We don't have the right conditions to promote business growth" or "agriculture will never work until we have proper land title". No, just "Ah, geev me munn", and all the eloquence of thought didn't seem to change the basic assumption that income should be given rather than earned.
On the road in I saw many of the same signs that I had in Mozambique: an exploding population and a landscape butchered by tree-cutters. On the road we passed a huge billboard advertising a presidential candidate. "Vote for me for general change" said the enormous writing beneath a smiling candidate. I giggled. "General" I thought. Why did he use that word? Is it because the list of things to change is so big that if he were to list them, he would have needed so many bullet points that the print would have been too small to be suitable for a billboard? Or was it because he didn't have a clue about what really needed to change? Or was it that the nature of change required was so obvious to everyone that it didn't require more explanation than "general". Or was he in fact the military man, "General Change"?
We drove for hundreds of more km. As we got closer to the lake the road became lined with ever more people walking, riding and talking. I kept on thinking, "round the corner we'll get away from the people and there'll be some good stretches of empty bush". But the emptyness never came. People were everywhere. "This is overpopulation" I thought. Trees subjected to a permanent holocaust. A lake increasingly vacuumed of all life.
We drove through this dusty village, human-to-goat ratio approximately 5:1, and after passing dust-caked shacks came to this peculiarly large house just off the main road. This was our holiday home. An attractive well-kept woman, all smiles and giggles, greeted us at the door with 2 bleached-white poodle-type dogs. "What the hell
is she doing with these Hollywood dogs in a Malawian township?" I thought to myself. "They're totally white, not even a hint of dirt from dust, like she wakes up in the morning and shampoos and hairdry's them before breakfast." As she stroked these things I couldn't help but think, "Oh my god, they're so freakin' out of place here, probably going to get eaten by rats, or killed by the rabid nomadic dogs eating road kill just a stones throw away from here."
The house was a single story home with 4 bedrooms. There was no furniture to speak of and the floors were just grey concrete screed without carpets. There was no kitchen for some reason. Three solitary chairs sat in the sitting room facing an enormous flat screen television that blared out MTV.
The rooms had been packed with hastily-built bunk-beds. We were placed in them, 6 per room. I drew the short straw with 4 others for a small brick house outside. In total there were 16 people to share two toilets, one shower. "This is going to be interesting" I thought.
Festivities get off to a good start: We had some drinks on the verandah and chatted with the other expats who'd arrived from Malawi and Kenya for the event (The Lake of Stars music festival, as it was called). I asked the expats some questions. Why wasn't there a single mealie in the ground? Why was there not one single visible entrepreneurial venture? Why had nothing been done about the deforestation? In short, what the hell were they actually achieving in Malawi?
To my dismay they had nothing useful to say. They agreed that, at best, they were ineffectual and, at worst, damaging.
The landlady's cousin arrived a couple of hours later to take us to the festival (situated at the lake). We agreed on a fee of 3000 meticash (about 6 dollars or so). He packed us into this minibus and drove us there. On arrival we paid him the money but he immediately retorted: "ah ah, but it was 3000 each!" (ie he was demanding 60 dollars for a 3 km journey) The situation deteriorated. He was adamant that we had taken advantage of him. Protests from the Malawians that 3000 was already way above the market value, fell on deaf ears. Eventually he sped off in what seemed to be an obvious rage.
The festival itself was bizarre to my Zimbabwean sensibilities. At home such a festival would have been in an isolated place, far from the masses. In Malawi, it seems the population density is so high that escaping the masses is not an option. The resorts are therefore plonked in the middle of sprawling townships that hug the edge of the lake, the tourists living cheek-by-jowl with the locals. On our beach, for example, the fishing boats and children splashed in the waves within putting distance of our GNTs. And so the festival was the same: festival incomers were matched by far greater numbers of locals from the area, who seemingly had just strolled down to the road to partake in the music.
In short Malawi seemed to exhibit all of Zimbabwe's malaises, with none of its graces. People, for example, moved at approximately half the pace of my own countrymen. They were more sloth-like, more distracted and far less purposeful with their movements.
At the restaurants and bars, for example, you would have to put your hand up to get their attention. When they saw you, they wouldn't drop what they were doing and think, "there: behold the client, I must serve him." They would slowly remove their hands from their pockets, sometimes stopping to momentarily pick their noses, or finish a conversation with their friend, and then stroll over to you. On every occasion food took 2 hours or more to arrive. The first time I went into a restaurant I ordered a fish. The waiter took my order after the usual parade of me waving to him. Every half an hour I asked him where my fish was. "Ah, yes, boss, it's coming now-now!"
After two hours he emerged to say, "Ah...Mr, the thing is....that, besicall... they have justi noteeced in the keetchen that the greeel is not working."
"What do you mean, the grill isn't working? So you haven't grilled my fish?"
"Ahhhhh" he says, shaking his head and smiling.
"Well how come you only just noticed that the grill isn't working, does nobody check on the fish? You just stick it in, hope for the best, and whip it out just before you give it to the customers?"
[silence]
"So there's literally nothing for me to eat?"
[silence, shakes his head as if to say 'no']
With that we got up and left. At first I thought it could have been a statistically non-significant event, but repeated experiences at many restaurants (both cheap and expensive) were the same. I was left with the impression that Malawians are not even able to compete with other Africans, let alone with Chinamen or Indians. Everything I saw reinforced the idea that they are an African Titanic, sinking slowly into the morass, with the only caveat being that there is no orchestra on deck.
We arrived home at about 2am and stumbled into the sitting room. To my shock and horror I discovered the poodle-madame's domestic servant sleeping with her baby on the floor of the sitting room, no sheet and no mattress to speak of. The house was open plan so she was literally in everybody's path. As we stumbled about she lifted her head for a moment as if to study us with her tired eyes and then went back to sleep. It dawned on me then that the owner of the house had turfed the servant out of her accommodation so that she could rent out the servant's quarters (in which I and 4 others were sleeping), expecting that the servant would then just "make a plan".
There seemed to be no trace of the notion that treating another human being in this way was wrong, or indeed embarrassing. The situation reminded me that the idea of fairness and human rights is so uniquely Western; the idea that man is born equal and therefore has some semblance of value despite his innate position in his hierarchy of birth. And yet, it is also only a very recent Western idea. I was reminded again that the behaviour I saw in the madame was not unusual: what was unusual was that my culture, for the briefest second before midnight, had decided that it was no longer acceptable to behave like that to people of a lower social rank.
It occured to me that not even the few rabid blood-river Afrikaners I had met would think it acceptable to dump their servant with a 4 month old baby in the middle of their concrete sitting room floor while they rented out their maid's quarters for fast money. And if they did, for some reason, they would be embarrassed about it, they would attempt to hide what they had done from their foreign guests, knowing that such practices were not acceptable elsewhere. The poodle-carrying, American-TV watching madame of the house felt no compunction to hide what she had done, let alone arrange a mattress for her worker-woman.
The house itself was so badly made I thought it might fall down if I leaned too hard on the walls. The pillars on the verandah, for example, were squank, the walls thin, the various fittings appallingly badly installed. The toilet in the servant's quarters where I slept, for example, was covered in a pool of water from some leak.
Since the floor looked pretty disgusting and potentially laden with waterborne diseases I decided I would crouch on the bowl, long-drop style, rather than sit on the seat and have my feet immersed in the water. I placed one foot on the seat while standing at the toilet entrance and shifted some weight onto it. Crack! The toilet immediately ripped out of the floor and clanged onto its side. "Ah fuck! Now look! Argh!" I thought. I stood in the water and lifted the toilet onto its base and balanced it precariously on the thin crust of concrete it had been precariously supported by. The pipe from the cistern had by now disconnected itself from the tilting toilet bowl and sent 30 litres (or so) of water gushing onto the floor.
After some minutes I got the toilet bowl upright. And then I managed to re-attach the pipe from the cistern to the bowl. I tried a test flush. The horror: half the water went into the toilet bowl, the other half squirted out backwards through the dodgy fitting onto the floor, adding another 15 litres of water to the developing pool. I was like, "What the fuck are you morons doing, for crying out loud! How do you expect to run a country if this is how you do your fucking plumbing!"
The electrics were done with the same dedication as the plumbing and, as such, the house seemed in imminent danger of burning down.
On the last day, the landlady came up to us with her pooches in hand and demanded 50 extra dollars for "gas". Given that we had been given 1 solitary pan to cook for 16 people, and had only done eggs in the morning, we estimated our gas bill at about 3 cents (most people spending 50 dollars on an entire year). We therefore declined, leading to another standoff in which she accused us of "taking advantage" of her. We stuck to our guns and mentioned that the gas was not part of the original deal, and that we'd be happy to fill the gas cylinder for her again, thereby replacing what we'd used. She then simply dropped her demand and sat down to watch more of her favourite American TV channels.
Before our departure we went to her as she sat in front of the TV and thanked her for having us. She escorted us to the door and shook our hands and said, "I'm sorry for everything."
"Everything?" I thought to myself. Maybe there is a hint of shame in there somewhere. I felt that the lady summed up much of Africa's elite in a nutshell. The TV was this window into this enigmatic Western life that she longed for, but which she didn't understand the origin of; like it was magic of sorts, its trappings obtainable if she could only perform the right kind of rain-dance, the right rituals, the right pantomime act to unlock the magic from the ether. Again and again I was (and am) reminded, that too many Africans are in love with the form of civilisation rather than its substance. And sadly, American television itself reports almost exclusively form rather than substance, a window into a decaying empire, its own citizens in the process of forgetting the origin of their prosperity, celebrating the outcome of previous generations of sacrifice and building; worshipping the empty shell of blind consumerism without its productive corollary.
It was against that backdrop that I returned to Zim a grateful man. As soon as we were into our border the charcoal selling was gone. There were trees,. There were empty spaces. There was the odd monkey, purple crested Turacos, the prospect of seeing duiker. During the 750 km drive to Malawi I had not so much as seen a single monkey or buck. Zim had this strange sense of order and civilisation, of welcome emptyness, of a different energy from the heart of darkness that I had just visited. And so, more than ever, I feel grateful to be in Zimbabwe, to be in the last refuge of partial wilderness, where nature has some semblance of hope against the marching virus that homosapiens sapiens has become.
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