Part VI

Ingwenya 4-25

There’s a guy in the hall blasting a fog horn in brief intervals.

“Meeting, T-Willy at 6! Meeting!” I think I’ll have to go to it. They say it’ll only last for fifteen minutes, but this by the African standard, which is unreliable as anything.

Tebogo and I were together as we usually are, coincidentally, in the TV room, passing the time with whoever happens to be there, which often happens to be ourselves, watching MTV and when that gets boring, African Idol, the local spin-off of the American original music show.

“So where are you going for this weekend?” he asked me.

“I told you, I’m not going anywhere.”

“Ah, eta, but you said you would.”

“Just now? I said if someone said, he come, with us, we are going somewhere for this weekend, I would. But no one has. Besides, it’s only three days.” The Idols show had been running for a few weeks now. Whatever network that had started it up was making a killing on it. Auditions from people who didn’t know how to sing but thought they were a godsend to the music industry anyway had an apparent universal appeal, and they played it again and again, repeats from Botswana, and Malawi, with previews for the next stage, the next cut, in between shots of the judges hysterias. On another channel they were broadcasting every single audition, unedited, in a row.

“I tell you, Howard is boring,” he said. “It’s Friday, but it doesn’t even feel like Friday. It could be Wednesday. People here are depressed; they just work all the time. This is why you sleep in the day, mfueto, because there is nothing to do.”

He told me he was going to Jubilee, the little shop with the broken pool table on campus where the guys who don't have girlfriends typically get their dinner. “Do you know ingwenya?” he asked. I didn’t. “Come, I’ll show you.”

We went to Jubes, got in line. SABC1 was playing on the TV. The ingwenyas were still frying, the counter lady said. It would be five more minutes. We sat at a table and shoved asidesome Styrofoam containers already there .

“Tell me, mfueto, Zambia. How much did you spend?” I guessed wildly and shot him a number.

“That’s it?” he said, “for everything?” His inqury ringed less surprise and more a desire to be certain. He wanted to know that this was possible on the budget that I told him it was. So I refined my numbers, guessed a little higher, and said something else, trying harder to be as accurate as I could, with a margin of error.

“You know, there’s a bus you can take, from Johannesburg all the way to Livingstone,” I told him.

“Livingstone. Where is that?”

“In Zambia, at the border between Botswana and Zimbabwe. I came through Botswana but you can go through Zimbabwe direct. It would cost less, though I went to Zimbabwe as well when I was there. I might go back in June; a few people have invited me.”

“You know, I might as well,” he said. I was surprised. “Yeah, that guy I showed you last night, with the bag, he is going back home at the end of the semester, and he asked me to come.” The guy he was referring to was a Zimbabwean, from Harare. Tebogo had known him for some time but he found him the previous night carrying around a bag full of Zimbabwean notes, many of them already expired. When Hayden and I were in the kitchen, he came back with handfuls of bills for 10 and 5 thousand Zimbabwean dollars. We did the math together and it came out to a few thousandths of an American cent by that week’s exchange rate. It was a good laugh. Tebogo continued. “You know, you got me thinking, mfueto. I have been in this country all my life and I’ve not been around to see the ones neighboring it. So I might go, we’ll see.”

Five minutes passed and our ingwenyas were ready. “How much?” I asked my friend.

“1.70.” he grinned a little, like even he couldn’t believe that it was so cheap. I gave him exact change – a one rand coin, a fifty cent piece, a ten, and a couple of fives that I’d found on the ground in the days before and were looking to unload.

“Come on, man, I can’t take this,” he said.

“These things, they are responsible for the holes in your wallet. Maybe they are worth more in Zimbabwe but to me they are nothing.” I gave him a two rand coin and called it even. He passed the money through some metal bars and the lady produced two steaming balls of crispy dough. I had seen these things before, in Cape Town, I realized. They were bigger there, though I suppose what constitutes a sizable ball of dough depends on whose frying it.

We stepped outside, and he ripped the bag in two and gave me a ball. “What are these called again?” I asked him.

“Ingwenya,” he said. I had to repeat it a few times before getting it right. I had to hold it my shirt because it was too hot for my hands. We started walking back towards res. “Some guys, they have two, for the day. That’s it.” I couldn’t believe it.

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah, yeah. And sometimes, a guy will come to Jubes in the morning, buy his two ingwenya, eat one and not eat the other till tomorrow.” Talk about pinching pennies: refusing to spend more than 25 US Cents for all meals in a day. For me it was a snack, a trip to the store to pass the time and learn something new about life in this country. But I couldn't get more than a literal taste of what this fried ball of dough meant to people. The real experience would have been to eat nothing else that day, and one more and nothing else the next day. “You see, this is why you guys are usually taller than us, because you get more nutrients than we do," Tebogo said, chomping into his bit and passing ahead of me for the staircase to the gate.

Poverty was such an abstract thing for most of the exchange students. There were places you could see it in Durban, of course. Taking a bus to the Westville campus passed squatter settlements for almost half the time. But walking around campus, it was easy to relegate those thoughts to another place, another world, as far from the here and now as it was at home. But people were that poor. There were students at Howard who had grown up in settlements like those and in villages not much richer, and from day to day they still lived like that. Eating that ball of dough, it was unsurprising that there were riots at the start of this semester, but that seemed like long ago now.

Looking ahead, I hadn’t really considered how short Tebogo was, either.

Blackout 4-28

Load sharing is rarely a pleasant experience. I was in the LAN today when it happened, at 1PM, writing a letter with a mouse with a busted left button. It was frustrating as it was until the air con and the lights went out simultaneously. Some sort of battery backup in the place kept the machines running for a little bit, at least long enough to save my work and check my email one last time, but it wouldn’t be long before the heat started to build, and then the computers all went out simultaneously and there’d be a line for the door. I left prematurely, came back, grabbed a notebook and a pen, my copy of Herzog by Saul Bellow and started walking to Davenport Road, to find a coffee shop and wait out the darkness. They had published a schedule for our share of the sharing to be done, but today they hadn’t followed it. Maybe it was because of the holiday – Freedom Day, the anniversary of the 1994 elections which brought Mandela and the ANC into power. They figured more people would be at home so it was best to cut the lights in the day, and not at night, when they usually do. Even so, I had no idea how long it would last. When I came back, more than three hours later, the lights were still out, and it was getting dark.

I sat in my room and read with my book on the window sill for a while, but I was tiring of it after twenty minutes. I went to the TV lounge, where the largest windows were. It was silent as anything. Usually the place was filled with people, but then, with the lights and the cable out, only the roomless squatter from Pretoria, Tebogo was sitting there in the dim light, looking over some notes for class.

“It’s been a while, hasn’t it?” I said.

“Damn, man. Four hours. I can’t believe it.”

I sat on the window sill and stared out onto the street. In the distance you could see the city skyline, and just beyond it, the first signs of a sunset on the horizon: a narrow stripe of golden light sitting snug between the blue sky and the grey mass of buildings, echoing what was surely a far grander scene on the Western edge behind us. I couldn’t tell if it was raining or not. It had been off and on all day, never more than something above a mist. Just then the ground was wet, and you could hear the sound of water droplets hitting the pavement, but it could’ve just been the runoff from the trees as well.

“Hey, Alex. I have to ask you for a favor,” Tebogo said. “This guy, he was supposed to pay me some money. He said he was going to today, but he called me and said the banks were all closed, because of the holiday, so he says he can’t. First thing in the morning, mfueto – ”

“Yeah, yeah, just tell me, what do you need?” I asked.

“Twenty rand.” He said it like it was a minor tangent to his story before continuing again. “The thing is, this guy was supposed to pay me like two days ago, mfueto, but I don’t know what happened … it’s shame man, shame ...” The last time Tebogo asked to borrow money he said he’d pay me back first thing in the morning. That was in the afternoon, and the next day, at 7AM, he knocked on my door, woke me up, and, when I answered the door, he dropped a two rand coin in my hand without a word and walked away, as if he’d never spent it at all.

I pulled out my wallet and took out two twenty rand notes and passed it to him, one behind the other. He pulled one back and saw the second, and a look of astonishment passed over his face.

“First thing in the morning, mfueto, I tell you.”

“Just give me twenty back; you can keep the rest.”

“You’re sure? Eta! You are Nkoko. Do you what that means? It means you are the man, Nkoko.” He laughed, almost mischievously, like he’d just made a killing with a hand of cards and now we were rich together.
…

We went to the kitchen where the light was a little brighter because the equally big windows and now also the glass paneled doors faced West. I stood out on the balcony. It was so quiet. Normally there was music blasting from all angles, and the sounds of a whole building of young men going about their daily business – cooking, talking with one another, the sounds of foreign soccer games being played and people watching it intensely.

“I can feel it,” Tebogo said. “I think the lights are coming on very soon. I can sense it. They are almost there.” We talked like soldiers waiting for the cannons to stop, or Italian immigrants waiting to see the Statue of Liberty from the deck of a foul smelling ship heading west – at least I imagine our conversation would have turned to something like that if we had been at this for days instead of hours. But now that they had abandoned the schedule and so far doubled the time that the lights were down, one couldn’t be certain what else Eskom would try to pull on us. There was little to do but wait, wait and guess when the lights would come back.

I stood and took in the last lights. Something about that balcony had always made me think of Kinshasa or Brazaville, though I’d never been to either place. Maybe it was just that it looked out and down onto rows of trees, so dense together it made it look like the Congolese jungle, or what I understood it to look like. The railings were all white painted metal, curved in ever so slightly and low enough that you could almost sit on it, like it had been built in an era that was modern but before safety regulations mattered enough to change the whims of architects building new cities to make the continent in their desired image. In any case, the balcony was so large – almost as much floor space as our restaurant-sized kitchen – that it only made sense in the heat, or during load sharing, in this narrow period of time when there was almost no light inside but a trickle out there. Now that it had rained, the cement floor was slick with water and it was a hazard to walk. The lights had been out for five hours at this point.

“Hey man, I saw you reading a book,” Tebogo said from inside the kitchen. “Can I see it?” I stepped inside and pulled the plain brown volume that I had been reading off the top of one of the shelves where I’d left it after my excursion that day and passed it to him.

“Is it a bible?” I rolled it over in his hand to show the spine, the only text on the outside. “Her-Zog,” he said, enunciating each syllable equally. He examined the outside, and flipped through the pages, slightly yellowed after four decades and countless checkouts from the university library. “This is a very old, old book,” he said.

“Yeah, about forty years.” The inside cover still displayed the old crest of the University of Natal, back when the building was segregated, when the TV lounge was probably a dining hall, where young white men ate and talked about rugby and black women came and cleaned afterwards.

“What is it about?”

“Do you have Saturday?” I asked. He went over to the kitchen locker where he kept most of his things and rummaged through a few volumes and items of clothing looking for the Ian McKewan novel I’d lent him a few days earlier, when he came to my room and asked plainly if I had anything for him to read. I’d taken it one from a backpackers in Johannesburg, and with nothing else to do waiting for my plane eight hours later, I read half of it in a few sittings. It was a good book, about life in London on the eve of the Iraq War. One of those hallmarks of “post 9/11 fiction”, as they say now, full of details of the intricacies of an ordinary day turned upside down by the echoes of far off world events brought uncomfortably close to home. Tebogo had taken to it vivaciously, speeding through the pages, recounting the scenes with me, asking questions during our encounters in the kitchen, but mostly just making comments of wonder and astonishment.

He pulled the book out and handed to me – the plastic covering had torn a little since I’d lent it to him. No matter. I hadn’t it put there and I had no use for it anyway. I flipped through the first pages and showed him the excerpt at the beginning of the book.

“For instance?" it said. "Well, for instance, what it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. in a mass. Transformed by science. Under organized power. Subject to tremendous controls. In a condition caused by mechanization. After the failure of radical hopes. In a society that was no community and devalued the person … There, Herzog, though Herzog, since you ask for the instance, is the way it runs.”

“Oh, I see. But this is a very new book,” he said, holding up Saturday.

“It’s a quote, an excerpt; it’s just something he put in because he thought it was relevant.”

“This guy? Her-Zog?”

“No, that’s the character it’s about; it’s by Saul Bellow, this guy.” I pointed to the byline.

“So, is he a real person?”

“Herzog? No, he’s made up.”

“And this guy?” He held up Saturday, juggling the two in his hands, a little confused between the two, “Made up, also? Neither of them are real?”

“They’re characters, but based on real life and real people, and on the authors themselves. I mean, they’re real in that sense.”

“Oh, ok, I see,” he turned his eyes back to the book. “Yes, yes, yes, yes.” His suspicions were correct, then, or at least he suggested that in his demeanor. He opened Herzog to the first page and stood there by the door in the last light and started reading to himself quietly, mumbling the words of the first passage. I went back outside and listened more to the sound of the rain of the prior hour finally making its return to the earth as it passed over the leaves and hit the ground from the trees. Now there were two sounds: one a quiet ocean that surrounded and the other a whisper from behind, and yet I still couldn’t get over how quiet it was – that whole building – the whole campus, really – sitting patiently in the dim light, waiting to be awakened again.

Swaziland 5-5

We had already had one three-day weekend. That was for Freedom Day, the anniversary of the first free elections in South Africa. I spent it going to the Chris Hani memorial lecture at Westville with Derek and his parents. It was a nice day, followed by another day off because all my classes then were cancelled, and then another day off, because I decided to sleep in that day.

By the end of it all, though, I turned around only to realize that everyone on my program and the spattering of foreigners who weren’t were all going somewhere for the next weekend, the four-day weekend at the end of that already shortened week. Most were going to the Drakensberg Mountains straddling the border between Free State and KwaZulu-Natal, and the mountain kingdom of Lesotho that lay within it. A few were going to Coffee Bay to the south. I made some excuses for myself, that I didn’t have the right clothes for Lesotho (it was snowing there by now) and that a weekend on the beach sounded nice but not exactly what I wanted. But behind it all I knew that I wanted to get out. I’d distanced myself from all of them and now, perhaps, I was paying the price. Whatever trip I was going on was going to be solo.

So I called A. Kay, having heard rumor that there was a combie one could catch in town that went all the way to Swaziland. It was better than Mozambique, which mean spending time in a city the size of but far dirtier and a little more dangerous than Durban, with all the beaches a little farther north than was easy to get to in the time I had, and it promised to be at least a little cheap. I decided I’d take my chances.

The next day, Thursday morning, A. Kay dropped me off at a non-descript black mini-bus with some people standing outside and a trailer hitched to the back. I asked the driver if it was going to Swaziland and he muttered that it was, so I gave him my passport, got on, found a seat in the back and paid R170 to his assistant.

The bus was already half full, and when it filled up we would leave.

Some girls were sitting in front of me.
“I’m hoping to meet the King of Swazi’s daughter – the princess” one said. She paused before the two broke into laughter. “She has a very, very pretty smile, but a naughty face for a princess. She says she says she likes to ‘play’ a lot.”

That was my first brush with the Swazis.

What did I know about this country, anyway? It was small and landlocked, like Lesotho, but not broke like Lesotho. In fact, by the standards of the neighborhood, it was a sort of Bahrain or Qatar – an emirate state – rich from natural endowment (sugar, in this case, not oil) and, having managed its wealth well, it now had a developed infrastructure, and a relatively well financed population. The roads there were said to be paved; the corruption said to be non-existent, and crime was almost an urban legend.

It was, in so many ways a model for the rest of the continent. And yet at the same time (and again like some obscure Gulf state) all the reins of power were placed squarely in the hands of a remote and archaic absolute monarchy, the last one in Africa: a middle-aged man with thirteen wives, more wealth than he knew what to do with, and more kids than were in my overcrowded trig class in high school.

Was it a land of contrasts? Well, that’s a clichéd statement. I didn’t care to pass any judgments in the four days that I would be there, and certainly not before I left South Africa. But I’d see what I could find. Maybe I’d get lucky and find a backpackers that cost less than R80 a night. Maybe I’d find one or two people to talk to.

“Howszit bru,” a young black kid with a beard and a green sweatshirt said to me on his way down the aisle.

“I’m good,” I said, trying to minimize the interaction. He sat down. A minute later he started talking again.

“Is this going to be your first time in Swaziland?” he asked. I told him it was. “Ah, well. You’re going to have a very special time, I can guarantee that. You’ll find the people are a lot more polite then they are in South Africa, very generous people, they’ll ask you how you are and they’ll want to show you around. And the country itself is very beautiful as well. But mostly it’s just that, it’s the people. They’re very polite, as I say.” His accent was slightly English, like he had lived part of his life abroad or had gone to an English school. Immediately I could tell that he held himself a step above most of his peers in the country. He had an education – that much was obvious – but aside from that, his dress was a little more Western, influenced more by the styles of London or the Northern suburbs of Jo’burg than the really local colors. He reminded me a little of that black kid with the slick smile and the expensive and extravagant red coat who I met at the sailing team event a few weeks back, and then at a party on campus some time later. Every place I mentioned I had traveled to he made some comment about how unimpressed he was when he went there. Tokyo was too big, the US to inconsistent between states and cities. What bugged him most of all, though, was Cape Town. “It just doesn’t hold a lot for the typical African,” he said, as if he could lay any claim to that title. When I asked how he had managed to globe trot so much when he seemed to resent the experience so much, he just shined a simple answer through the same smile he wore throughout the night: “You could say I’m ‘privileged.’”

But after a few minutes it seemed clear that this one was different. His demeanor was more friendly, and I could tell that he had more to say then just to lament certain places and talk about superficial things. I asked him what he was doing in Swaziland.

“Well, my mom’s up there,” he said. “My parents are separated, and I go to school in Pietermaritzburg, so I go up there from time to time to see her.” So now it was clear, then. He had a split identity. The people were rude in South Africa, sure, but he did more than just go to school there, he was of and from the place, or at least half of him was.

…

We drove for three hours before reaching the border, a line in the sand marked by a pair of different flag poles, two modest, one story government offices, some welcome signs, and a kiosk on the Swazi side – like any other I had been to thus far in Africa, except without the armed guards.

On the Swazi side we finally introduced ourselves to each other. “Tau,” he said.

“Can you say it?” I did, and he sounded a little impressed. “It’s only a couple of hours or so more,” he said back on the bus. I hadn’t known that, of course, nor did I know exactly where this bus was going, except that it was going to some point beyond the Swazi border, though that much had only been a guess until we actually crossed it.

I checked over my notes again. The place I had looked up in the LAN the night before was in a place called Malkerns, just west of Mbabane, the capital, but not the largest city.

“Where are we stopping?” I asked Tau.

“In Manzini,” he said.

“And where are you going?”

“To Mbabane.”

“I’ll just follow you then,” I said.

And I did.

When we got to the bus rank in Manzini it was pouring rain. Tau threw a hood on his head and started dodging around, as if he were unused to the weather. We found some shelter in an awning at the entrance of a small store, elevated a few feet above the ground at the edge of the rank and surveyed the scene. We found a perch behind some nut vendors and surveyed the scene. It was magnificent, exactly what one wants to see in Africa – the swirling combies, the women with boldly colored head wraps, selling nuts and clothes and DVD’s, the striking mountains in the distant background and tall grass plains before them with a market of international transit paved in red dirt at our feet. Completely unphased by the rain, the men kept rolling their just arrived busses into place, often with their own feet, finding some unique patch of dirt among the others to park before the next journey. Others just walked around and shouted the upcoming destinations for the unmarked vehicles just now about to leave, as loud as they could and as many times as possible in a single breath before repeating.

“MbabaneMbabaneMbabaneMbabane! MbabaneMbabaneMbabaneMbabane!”

“MaputoMaputoMaputoMaputo!

MaputoMaputoMaputoMaputo!”

And all of it was so ordinary, one day in the life like any other in Swaziland. As far as I could see, I was the only westerner: one visibly pleased and relatively pale face in an otherwise ambivalent crowd. It’s not to say I looked out of place, of course, though in this place of commerce and transit even Tau, for his Jeans and mid-range to expensive green hood looked just as out of place.

“Don’t worry, it should stop in a few minutes,” he said of the rain as we waited.

A few minutes later the rain fell back to a drizzle so light it was a shame to even call it rain. So his instincts were sharp. He clearly knew something more about the place than a Lonely Planet Travel Guide (had I had one) could have told me.

We stepped back onto the rank and found a combie to the capital. Tau switched the sim card in his phone to a Swazi number and called his mother. All I could pick up was “car” and “backpackers” – the rest was in Swati. “My mom says she’ll be back at the house in a little bit. Then we can take the car out and find you a place,” he said getting off the phone. It took two combie rides to get from the rank in Manzini to his mother’s house in the hills of Mbabane – the first and second biggest cities in Swaziland separated by a distance that covered almost a third of the country along its longest dimension. The whole journey took about twenty minutes. On the way we passed the national soccer stadium, and then, a little further, the small but growing Taiwanese development sector and the national university. Gradually, we ascended up the hills into Mbabane, and, turning the corner around a stout mountain pass the capital city revealed itself – like some little ski town in the off-season in Switzerland, just coyly nestled between two mountains inside a valley decked in green.

I had come with the impression that Swaziland was a warm place, which seemed reasonable given all that I knew about the place – that anti-malarials were recommended for the more rural parts of the country and that they grew sugar cane there, for instance. Yet coming into town I found myself huddling for warmth, clutching the sides of my rather thin rain coat and underneath that, the sweater which I had only worn because it was cold that morning in Durban. It was the only such thing I had, but I didn't worry. Not a bit.

Part V (April 1 - April 20)

Zimbabwe Talk 4-1

For all the talk of how South African youth were apathetic towards politics, it was a little surprising, even for me, to see people’s awareness on display today as they turned heads to look at me. I took my shirt out for a spin: the one that promotes the Movement for Democratic Change and its headlining candidate, Morgan Tsvangirai. Not everyone had something to say about it, today, the day after the potentially historic election in Zimbabwe, as the results were still being tallied, but most everyone at least turned their head to look.

“He is a Western puppet” I heard three people say today. One was a self declared Marxist who I share a class with, who admitted that Mugabe wasn’t very good himself. We talked briefly before a class. Another just pointed at me and walked away as he shouted those words. The third was more daring.

“Why do you wear this shirt, and make issues out of Zimbabwe, huh?” The guy said. Watch out for the youth, I could hear a voice in the back of my head insisting.

“Because he’s not Mugabe. That seems to be a point enough worth supporting.”

“He is a Western puppet,” he said.

“You’re not the first to tell me that.”

“He is a disgrace to the people of Zimbabwe.”

“He is an opposition leader operating within a democratic system, and for that he has been arrested repeatedly and beaten half to death. If he is such a fraud, why is this necessary just to prove that he is in the wrong?”

“Where are you from?”

“The States.”

“And Hillary, and Obama?”

“What about them?”

“There are rules in the States.”

“Yes.”

“In Zimbabwe we have rules as well. And the rule is that you cannot say bad things about our government. And this man did, and they were in the right to beat him half to death for it.”

So began a twenty minute conversation that should have taken half that time. The same points kept coming up: Western imperialism, Western influence, the right’s of Zimbabwean’s to be self sufficient. There were bizarre contradictions in his tirade, like at one point where he insisted that Zimbabweans were eating well: potatoes, maize and vegetables. When I countered that Zimbabwe, once the breadbasket of Southern Africa, was getting food aid from South Africa and that people were leaving by the thousands in large part because they were starving their, he countered at first that anyone who left was leaving because they had money, perhaps to add to his general point that the rich powers that be who cooperated with the West had no business in the country in the first place. But under pressure, he moved away from that point to admit that people were starving, but for the right reasons.

“If the people are starving, let them starve. They have been hungry for hundreds of years under Western rule, so why can’t they keep starving?”

The dystopian illusions of an educated but uncompromising youth: the need for food is just a social construction brought on by colonial powers.

We walked together for some time. I was surprised by how candid he was. When I told him to his face early on that he didn’t have a hope of making a point to me if he didn’t let me finish my own, he stopped himself and asked politely for what I had to say. But for all the typical issues I had read about in papers and raised for him, the answers were the same: obscenely high inflation, divestment, and the suppression of free speech: these were all just failures in the sense that they were dysfunctional imperial models not needed in a truly independent African state. But when it came to other, less economistic things, like food, the excuse there was either that my sources for that were Western in origin and therefore incorrect, or that harm to the people were the growing pains of a nation on the verge of achieving true independence.

“It may take 20,000 years, but when we get there, we will know: Mugabe was the one to sow the seeds of change for us.”
“And 20,000 years into the future, you will be still bitter about a period of rule that lasted less than a century, still thinking that this mess the country is in now is the fault of the West, after almost every white person left in the country and every company invested there has left?”
“Our struggle goes on. Your Bush and your Brown, they would like to keep us under their foot longer, but we are not a burger nation; we do not need burgers – your burgers – KFC, McDonalds. Pah! Do you see McDonalds in Zimbabwe?”
“Of course not ….”
“Exactly.”
“… because the economy is so defunct it would be impossible to have a functioning McDonalds anywhere in Zimbabwe. That is why.” But even as I said that I could feel the econ major that I wasn’t screeching in the back of my head. What did I care about inflation rates or divestment? Free speech was one thing, but who gave a shit if McDonalds set up shop in Harare or Bulawayo? Mugabe had long stood against that “incursion,” if you want to call it that. Whatever the reasons, he had kept the West out of Zimbabwe.

His points were scattered: articulate but circular, based on delusion and bizarre readings of a national purpose derived from a historical mission. He generalized the greed of the West without making any acknowledgement of the total hypocrisy of his message. But on at least one point, the guy was right: Zimbabwe was not a “burger nation,” and despite any of Thomas Friedman’s claims of the link between world peace and the spread of the fast food industry, it didn’t need to become one. Maybe Zimbabwe was like Cuba, Mugabe its Castro. At the extreme but not unpopular end of the opinion spectrum of the Castro regime are people who insist that Castro is the worst dictator on earth. The more moderate people admit that he suppresses human freedoms but that he provides healthcare to the people, and for the most part, they eat well. Were the things that this guy told me so different? Yes, but only in that his point was that Zimbabwe was on its way to becoming like Cuba. Until then, the people would starve. Though he denied this exact point when I asked him, the result of his logic was made clear: under Mugabe, Zimbabweans would be made martyrs to the 20,000 year anti-colonial project, and, in his mind, rightfully so.

“We will go on, from Zim to Zambia, to Mozambique and throughout all of Africa, and then finally here, to this place, South Africa, and we will rid it of the people who do not belong.”

It may have been radical, but there was a sense in all that he was saying, and the underlying point was one that I had come across before. There was a way to link up the rather common disillusionment with the ANC with this fiery Mugabe rhetoric in a way that made real historical and political sense.

Since taking office, a striking blow against Mbeki since was not on policy but on ideology. Despite campaign promises to uplift the South African people by bolstering the national economy and integrating it with that of the world, economic policy had done more to support the interests of Western corporations and governments than the South African people. While American firms enjoyed better business with South Africa than ever before, unemployment is at its highest in the country than at any time since Apartheid.

In the eyes of Mugabe and his supporters, South Africans were stuck with the real delusions. The wonders of globalization: infinite growth in a world of finite resources, trickle down economics and the benefits of cozying up to the West were their utopian fantasy. Putting economic growth above all else had only made the country the whore of the West. It turned tricks for money: abandoning locally grown industries in favor of foreign owned ones. To promote integration with the world it had opened the floodgates of foreign investment. KFC’s and McDonalds were allowed to be ubiquitous as tax laws were adjusted so that these foreign firms could set up shop in the county while paying up an almost infinitesimal amount of their profits in tax. While the economic benefits may have been evidenced on paper, the means by which they were attained were still being tallied, and in the eyes of some, the less tangible costs on culture and national pride had already been too high. While Zimbabwe refused to become a ‘burger nation’, South Africa had in many ways become exactly that, both literally and figuratively, and willing so.

I was, and am perfectly willing to accept that Mbeki is the stooge of the West. Nonetheless, accepting that a regime the likes of Mugabe’s represetnts the alternative of choice is a harder stretch of the imagination.

Economic conditions in either country may have facilitated their respective development with regard to the ‘burger’ issue, but those conditions were brought on by choices at the top level. While Mugabe’s anti-imperialist wants had made the once harmonious Zimbabwe a blacks-only state, thereby shutting out prospective investors who would otherwise throw themselves into the country, the all-inclusive, free-market notions of the ANC and the Mbeki cabinet had made KFC ubiquitous in South Africa.

So was Zimbabwe’s total economic collapse calculated to keep the West out, as this fellow claimed? Or was the lack of fast-food outlets just one small thing that Mugabe could point out to bolster his credibility in the midst of total economic collapse, itself the unintended result of many a misguided and unfortunate policy carried out to almost no end? Rightly or wrongly, Mugabe and his supporters, like this one in front of me, were saying that as shit as the country was, Mugabe had planned it all along.

It’s sad as I think about it, but either is a possibility. And just the same, one might ask, did Mbeki intend for fast-food to be ever-present when his policies of neo-liberal economic advancement and global integration were introduced, or was all that just an unfortunate side-effect of his own greater project, this time, not cultural in its outlook, but economic, neo-liberal, and Western-oriented? Like his counterpart to the north, Mbeki, too, was driven by a historical mission that he was willing to risk all credibility in attaining.

Then again, South Africans were consumers, they made consumer choices. So what if they liked fried chicken that was terrible for them? It was their choice to buy it, wasn’t it? For Mugabe’s loyalists, it seemed, the choice was for South African’s to make, but they only made it because they had been brain-washed into believing that what mattered in their lives was how good their chicken tasted and how cheap it was, not how they paid for it with their health and their cultural livelihoods.

Though I didn’t ask, it was obvious to me that to this man, Mbeki was a Western puppet no different than the one on my tee-shirt. That made South Africans sheep who didn’t know any better. Perhaps that was why the country had been put curiously last on his list for imperial liberation in Africa.

“Some people would rather eat today than suffer today for a cause that will only materialize a thousand years into the future,” I said when he asked why anyone would vote for Tsvangirai.

“That is one thing that we have gotten over in Zimbabwe. We don’t think of today; we only think of the future. If people starve today so that we are free in the future it is alright. It may take 500 decades but by then it won’t matter to us. We will be free of foreign interference.”

His vision knew no temporal limitations. As long as it would take, he said, Zimbabwe would be free of foreign interference. I pushed him repeatedly to explain what this interference was all about. Was it the last whites in the country, the few, so stubborn they wouldn’t even go to Zambia just a few hours north despite their promises of huge tax breaks and a fast track to citizenship? Were they the real problem? Or the foreign corporations, the scarce handful that still had any semblance of a presence in the country? Were they the ones to blame? Surely it would take less than 20,000 years to rid the country of those, especially if Mugabe were to be reelected this time round.

Maybe the guy was getting at something more abstract.

“You study development? And what is development? How can you say something is developed or not? Really?” the guy said. He gestured towards an unattractive cement-block dorm behind us. “Is this development? I told you already, we don’t need your burgers; we don’t need McDonalds. So what is ‘development’?”
I was getting impatient. “I don’t need to defend myself to you, just for wearing a fucking tee-shirt of a guy that you don’t like.”
“It’s not to defend, it’s just to define. So do this: define development. You study it; you should know. Now what is development?” he prodded, provoking my sensibility, challenging it to confess an idea that was unmistakably ‘imperialist’ in its origin.
“Development is when people can feed themselves; people are free to do and say what they want; people are healthy; people are fed; people have clean water; they are happy; they are educated until twelfth grade and can be educated more after that if they would like; they are free to live in their own country as they do not fear that the state will take them away in their sleep for not liking its official opinions. Most of all, it means people are satisfied with their lives, their societies, their communities, which can mean all of those things together and much more. That is what development is.” And by conventional standards, it was why Zimbabwe was rapidly losing its developmental status in the eyes of the world, and its own people.
“Sure, sure,” he said. “Well, as you pointed out before, there are many different ways to interpret ‘development.’ So we would disagree there. What we want in Zim is to have our country for its own people, not the others who came here from far away. They will go back to where they came from! And our country will be ruled by a black man. That is all we want.”
“And this is not a black man?” I pointed to the face on my tee shirt. It was proof positive that the leading opposition candidate was himself a black man, an African, in fact, born and raised in Zimbabwe.
“He is a coconut. He is nothing to us. If he were here now, I would kill him myself, with two hundred knives. No! I would cut off his head and send it to Bush or Brown, one of these people, where it belongs.”

The more time I spent looking at him, the more I noticed the scars on the sides of his face. They must have come from shards of glass, as if he had thrust his entire head through a glass cabinet or a window or something some years back – they were too small and two shallow for a knife to have made. He was slightly shorter than me, but his arms and his barreling chest, encased in a tight grey zip-up shirt added to his presence. His head was shaved, which again, added to his presence. As he stood there, talking about how if Tsvangirai were to come to him he would “do it” himself. 240 years in jail, he said. If that were the time he had to do to kill this man in the way that he saw appropriate, he would do it gladly. His references for lengths of time were ridiculous, all over the map without any consistency except in they were huge. It was hard to take his numerical predictions seriously. But looking at him, I wondered quietly if he had killed anyone before.

White Zimbabwean farmers always have the same story about how they got forced out of the country: “waves of attacks,” as Joan had put it, reflecting on her own experience. Young guys with AK-47s marching onto the land, unafraid to shoot or to be shot at. Outnumbered and without a friend in office to appeal to, there’s really no way to argue with that: either you leave with the promise that you’ll come back and take what’s yours when the time is right or you just leave. By death or by will, you just leave.

We parted ways as he said he had a book for me to read “to open some spaces in my brain.” The whole conversation reeked of my ignorance of the region and his lofty sense of justice, perhaps justified in part by the former. I was sorry to be seen with him. After all of it he had come off as the victor, even if it would take 20,000 years to prove.

Towards the end of our talk another Zimbabwean came out of the woodwork to update us both. “They say Mugabe is ahead now.” She said, looking straight at me.

“You see?” the guy said.

I went back to T. Willy and put on a long sleeve shirt. The final score for this Election Day was seven to two among Zimbabweans. If the election that day were just among the people I had encountered, Mugabe would have one in a landslide. There would have been no need to torture his opposition to death. Results come in tomorrow. After that, Mugabe will either announce his victory or contemplate his next move after losing. I think I’ll keep the tee-shirt; clearly it’s the most worthwhile thing I’ve bought in Africa so far.

The next day, rumors were still circulating as results were still not being released. The threat of a runoff seemed more serious, though the possibility of violence seemed less likely than before. Even if Mugabe was retaining some support, at least the process was working, and to everyone’s relief.

Still thinking about the encounter from the day before, I wandered into the TV lounge and found Tebogo there eating something.

“How was Pretoria?” I asked him plainly.
“Pretoria was good.” He paused. “I broke up with my girlfriend.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah, she thought I was cheating on her. This long distance thing, it never works, Mafuto. There’s always something to complain about.” It wasn’t a surprise, and he didn’t treat it like one. There were other, more viable options now, like a Xhosa girl from the province that seemed to be expressing interest. I changed the subject.
“Tell me …”
“Eta?”
“Tell me, what do you think of this Mugabe guy?”
“I hate him with a passion in my heart.”
“You do?”
“Yes. He is greedy. He steals from his people.” It was the same line I had heard before, a slogan, almost, or a variation of one to summarize the Zimbabwean condition in a sentence or two.
“Everyone says that. But a guy yesterday told me that Africans have been starving for thousands of years, and in Zimbabwe, they can afford to starve longer if it frees them from oppression.”
“The government, they got rid of all the whites, took back the land and gave it to black people …” Black people who didn’t know how to farm to save their life. “… but you know, in Zimbabwe, if you get a farm from the government the government owns fifty percent of it. Any money you make, half goes to them. That is greedy, and these guys are rich because of it.” I thought about that. Who was this guy I had encountered? Where did he get the scars on his face? I hadn’t doubted for an instant during our talk that he was telling the truth about everything he said, about his convictions. They weren’t the convictions of just a dedicated party member or an uncompromising and arrogant supporter, the Zimbabwean equivalent of a talk radio listener, bobbing his head to anything and everything the host said, however ridiculous the logic behind it. He must have had some ties to the regime. I wondered if I would see him again. Probably I would. He wasn’t about to pass me in the hall without making a statement, certainly not in these next few days.

“Do you have the time?”
“It’s ten to two,” I said.
“I have to go meet this girl. I’ll see you around here though.” He got up and left. I sat there, and thought some more.

Eskom is fucking us 3-02

Power outages appear to be getting more widespread and more frequent now. Until this week, Howard had been spared because its location was conveniently located between two hospitals. But now Eskom, the corrupt semi-nationalized power company responsible for keeping the lights on in this country has declared that every substation in South Africa will be subject to outages three times a week up to four hours in length, without exception. This is how they make up for their mismanagement and poor planning since the end of Apartheid: by balancing out the darkness.

Yesterday we lost power for four hours, today, another four. Either time I went down to Musgrave center with a book and waited it out. ATM’s don’t work, vending machines to buy air time do not work, and the computers do not work. To get out of some dorms, residents have been required to use the emergency release on their gates as the lack of power has rendered card scanners useless. Classes are being cancelled because there are no lights; people are having to reconsider their diets as meat storage has become a potential hazard to health. There’s no telling when it will end. The simple truth is that there’s not enough power to go around. New stations will have to be built and that is taking longer than anyone wants it to.

The girl from UCSC who was raped last semester, causing UCSC to end its program here entirely was assaulted while caught in the shower during a power outage. Eskom neatly calls it “load sharing” when they cut the power to make sure there’s enough for that week to go around. At this stage, we all share the burden of powerlessness, and the risk and inconvenience it brings. South Africa is beginning to look more and more like its cousins to the north as the year goes on. But maybe it’s been there all along.

Still Mugabe 4-4

By the end of today, there were still no official results in on the Zimbabwean presidential election, but by all accounts, Tsvangirai had won, and his Movement for Democratic Change had taken the lion’s share in the country’s legislative bodies. Rumors abounded about what Mugabe was doing, or what his closer allies were plotting. One spokesman had told the Guardian that a Tsvangirai victory would be considered a coup de état. “And we all know how coups are dealt with,” he said. Still there was uncertainty, but in the evening I thought I’d take out my shirt again to see what kind of reaction I got.

I went to Zola’s room to see who was there and to get back a mug that I had left there. To my astonishment, next to KB, an old face was standing, smiley as ever and just as friendly as before.

“You!” he said, pointing a finger straight at my shirt, almost as if he was addressing the picture on it and not me. “You and this one! This traitor!” he smiled. I didn’t feel the same threatening sensation as before, when he and I had walked around campus and he prodded me to doubt or challenge his conviction.

“You know they say he’s won,” I said.
“Sure, and we’ll kill him afterwards.” They were looking through photos of Zola’s party on his desktop. A few of me showed up among the rest, holding a beer or chatting with people. “See, now we can blackmail you,” he said, pointing at the screen. “You wear that shirt and we can blackmail you. We will send an email to the whole campus.”
I thought about that, and dictated what such an email might sound like: “Riots in Pietermaritzburg, four students injured after police open fire into a crowd, but check out these photos of Alex Park!” They shout out a vivacious laugh and continued sorting the images.
“Alex, do you have USB?” KB asked.
“I don’t. You know, we should do this again. Zola, have another birthday, next weekend. I’m doing nothing then.” They laughed again. I looked over to the Zimbabwean who was standing and still looking at the photos, muttering things in the spaces in our conversation about Tsvangirai. He could barely stand to be in the same room as a tee shirt of the man, which was maybe why he was looking away from it.
“This guy is a very big Mugabe supporter,” KB, the Zulu said. He was stating the obvious, like saying he was a student, or had a shaved head. I couldn’t look at him and not think of Mugabe, of the election, of our talk before, so I thought I’d ask him something that had been on my mind from before.
“Were you in a youth gang?” I looked straight at him and for a moment he turned his head from the screen.
“A what?”
“A gang, one of Mugabe’s gangs.”
“Do you know the Green Bombers?” he asked.
“No.” Just like before, I felt ignorant at exactly the wrong time. He looked back at the screen.
“It’s a group. They go to the white farms and make people get off the land with force sometimes.” Mugabe’s land redistribution program began in 2000. The more I get into this decade, the more I realize that the nineties were, historically speaking, such an insignificant period of my life, as the real events that would define my time – 9/11, global warming, the Bush years – only came or were only realized afterwards. Perhaps it was the same for him. For Mugabe, the nineties were a time of failed compromise and stalled efforts at economic equalization. He ushered in the decade and the century that followed by challenging incremental progress, promising to give back land to those it had originally belonged to. The youth, in all their exuberance and fearlessness were enlisted in gangs to go from farm to farm and force the whites off in the lame of Zimbabwe so that it could be redistributed back to veterans of the Zimbabwean Civil War who had fought on the nation’s behalf. Just because one was a war veteran didn’t mean they knew how to farm, of course. But they would learn, somehow. So began Mugabe’s great historical project, like Pol Pot’s going back to Year Zero some thirty years before.
“So were you in this group?”
“Hmm?”
“The Green Bombers, were you one of them?” He muttered something. “What was that?” I asked.
“I was a commander.” His seriousness was evident in the dryness if nothing else. There was a lofty element to everything he said, speaking about a mission that might take “20,000 years” or “500 decades” to realize – absurd numbers. But as I suspected, there was also a bread and butter to it all. The mission was first a job, and he had been part of that job. He held out his hands, holding an imaginary map and a small band of others standing around looking at it. “I worked with some other people, and we said today we will go here, or go there,” he said gesturing. “We will go to this farm or that one, and we went there and we told them to get off, and when they didn’t we made them leave.” As he said that, a subtle change occurred in his gesture, as he dropped his right hand a few inches below his left keeping the distance between the two, raised his shoulder an inch, twisted his wrists just slightly and just held the package there for me to see. For no more than a second, his imaginary map became a gun, and then his hands returned to their sides. He kept looking at the screen.
“This is a good photo, right here,” KB said looking at a panorama of the scene with at least twenty people in the shot, all of them holding drinks. It must have been at the height of the party, after I had left already.
…

A minute later Zola was kicking us out since he had to do a couple of things outside the room. We stepped outside and with nothing to distract him, the guy stared at my shirt intently, coming back to his original point, perhaps the only thought in his head worth holding throughout.

He put a finger square on my chest and drew a line down the middle of Morgan Tsvangirai’s smiling face. “We will cut his head off, then split it down the middle, like this,” he said. “Half to Blair,” he flicked to the left, “half to Bush, to put on his White House desk, where it belongs. The body we will burn and the ashes we’ll throw in the ocean.”
“There’s no ocean in Zimbabwe,” I said, trying not to be smart but just to match his half-joking demeanor. He balked, looking up for the first time, maintaining his grin. Of course he knew that. “Then we’ll dump it in the Limpopo River.”

A day later, I found myself in Zola’s room once more. After my ID card had been stolen, the replacement hadn’t been configured for my Res, T. Willy, and trying to get the problem fixed had led me threw bureaucratic whirlwind that ended exactly when the load sharing began, making it impossible to get it fixed at all. I needed someone to let me out.

“Alextino!” KB said. He seemed to be perpetually in Zola’s room, using his computer more than its owner. At the moment, he, Zola and one other were in the kitchen, making chicken. “Do you want a piece?” he asked. After they insisted, I accepted. We talked for a little bit and I forgot where I was trying to get to. The mood was light. It was a Friday night. Things were looking up, if only for that reason. I turned to Zola, the calmest, most collected of the three: an electrical engineering major, working on a masters degree and considering going for a Ph. D in Sweden.

“Zola,” I said. “This guy, this guy from Zimbabwe. The Mugabe guy.”
“Who? Dumzala?” he asked. I wrestled with the name until I could cut past his accent and say it right for myself. It sounded fierce, though comical as well, unsure of itself – a fitting name for a teenage militia commander.
“What do you know about him?” I asked. He dipped his piece of chicken in some sweet and sour sauce and finished chewing.
“You know he’s from here.”
“From here?”
“Born in Durban. He’s not from Zimbabwe.” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “He said he was in gang, that he went back there to vote.”
“He’s pulling your leg. But it is true, he does really believe in Mugabe.” I recalled seeing him talk with KB in some indigenous language, though none to my knowledge bridged the two countries. I asked him about that.
“I didn’t think you spoke Shona,” I said, referring to the language of Mugabe’s constituent ethnic group.
“I don’t, but most Zimbabwe’s speak Zulu anyway,” he said. Now I was even more confused, but there wasn’t much else to talk about. Was the guy just completely full of shit? I couldn’t know, and he wasn’t there to ask. Truthfully, I didn’t want to ask him. Either option could have been believable. I knew for a fact that there were Zimbabwean’s on this campus, and Mugabe supporters at that, a fact made glaringly clear to me walking around campus the first day back with my shirt espousing support for “the People’s President,” Morgan Tsvangirai, Mugabe’s arch nemesis.

Maybe the Green Bombers was just a fantasy for this guy, I thought. But he had said it out loud, in front of KB and Zola, to me, and something in his eyes said to me, at the very least, that I shouldn’t doubt his sincerity, just like when he said that if Tsvangirai were here, in front of us, he would kill the man himself.

“We’re going to DUT,” the Durban University of Technology, Dumie said. “There’s a party there. Come with us.” It sounded like an admirable idea: off campus, with new friends. They had a car, as well, which made things easier. Questions would wait for another day.

A brush with Macalester 4-10

I drifted around the fourth floor of the library today, in the African section. Extensive, but not nearly as much as you would expect for “the premier university of African scholarship.” One should wonder what the collection looked like three years ago before they grouped the five campuses that now make the University together and most of the Westville social science and humanities collections were consolidated into Howard’s, or what those collections look like at Westville now.

I noticed an inch thick black volume – a familiar looking title with a familiar name on it: Socialist Somalia, by one, Ahmed I. Samatar.

But was it our Samatar? Founding dean of the Institute for Global Citizenship and the foremost scholar of the contemporary Somali experience, with his grey hair and wiry glasses, and throated Somali accent tinged with many years of experience in London? That was him now, and if anything, this was him from years before, a reclusive scholar with a bone to pick with the powers of the world. But I assumed it was him anyway. Of three books on the shelf about Somalia his name appeared on two of them.

I picked it up. “The best book on situation in Somalia currently available,” said some Africa correspondent for the BBC. On the back was a small white price tag – 8 pounds, 99 pence, it said. Inside the inscription was the first thing I noticed.

“To my father, who did not live long enough, and to my mother, who waited too long.” There was little doubt now; it was certainly him, starring me from across the page, through decades and across continents, demanding, or just exclaiming justice with every word, and all of it with more than a little tinge of morbidity.

But at that instant I didn’t care much for what he had to say about the Horn of Africa. I flipped to the acknowledgements section and read sparsely. He thanked his dissertation adviser at the University of Denver, some people at Lawrence University where he was teaching at the time, and his “beautiful soul mate,” who made “self-exile as comfortable as could be.”

I thought about the single time that I actually sat down and spoke with him, about his pet project, the 2007 International Roundtable, which I was writing a story about, back when I was a sophomore reporter for the Weekly and events coverage was my area because the editors thought it easy. It was brief, but he was happy to talk, about the “intellectual festival” that was almost all his planning. He was chirpy in that room on the top floor, under the skylights in his high back chair, one of the few times I can recall seeing him genuinely content. After I’d asked the standard regime of questions I wanted to know about how the journal he had founded was going, or about some of his other projects, but as soon as the topic switched to something besides the upcoming “festival” – a series of lectures to address the future of the UN – he politely told me that he didn’t have the time to talk any longer.

“OK, my friend, if there’s nothing else…” I think is how it ended.

I wonder what he was like at this juncture in my life. His peers must’ve always been intimidated by him, always talking in class, challenging the professors and usually getting away with it. I wonder who his mentors were. Surely they were full of praise for him, as he was not just smart but hardworking, not just chatty but a good orator as well. And yet he was from Somalia, had lived through so much. English was not his first language, and the West, not the home of his earliest experience, where childhood had been, where things made sense, if they made sense anywhere. His career must have been completely set out for him and his life … maybe it was in turmoil, wrought with the awareness that his home was a place that he could never go back to and never correct. I wonder, if he had the option, he would have traded one for the other.


World News Tonight, from two rows behind 4-18

A week ago, Mbeki was called upon by the regional consortium SADC to sort out this mess in Zimbabwe. He flew to Harare, first, the Zimbabwean capital, and then to the much anticipated meeting in Lusaka, Zambia, where I ended my Easter Vacation a few weeks ago. After a few days, meeting with other heads of state and Morgan Tsvangirai, he held a press conference, declared that there was “no crisis,” and went back to South Africa. Last night, at a seminar held in the lecture hall where I normally have my “Food and Global Political Economy” class on Fridays, a whole room full of Zimbabweans – mostly black, a few white – voiced their disagreement. They were not quite up in arms but nearly there, after two hours, as two MDC opposition leaders and one of my own professors spoke about the political, social and economic crisis in Zimbabwe today.

The political liaison to KwaZulu-Natal for the MDC was the first to speak.

“Let me be clear, there is a ruling party in Zimbabwe today, and that is the MDC. Zanu-PF and Mugabe are its largest opposition, but they are the opposition.” The crowd applauded loudly.

Two days after I had left Zimbabwe, the election happened. Despite all their efforts to rig it, Mugabe and Zanu-PF lost decisively by every account but their own. Since then, more than two weeks later, they have illegally withheld the results to the outrage of the MDC and Zimbabweans everywhere. SADC was called in to resolve the dispute and ensure that the situation doesn’t become like Kenya. Two weeks in, there are still worries that it may.

I stayed at the seminar for two and a half hours, one of the last people to remain. I had a question for the speakers that I sincerely wanted answered and that was realistically the only reason why I stayed. I raised my hand but missed the first round of questions, so I slipped myself into the second.

“The issue of Presidential Scholarships from Zimbabwe was raised earlier, but I’m wondering, if there’s no secret that these scholarships are only issued by cronyism and political connections to the regime, why this university continues to accept them without question?” Some people nodded in agreement.

But the most damming thing I heard came a moment later, from a gruff looking man wearing a blue MDC shirt sitting two rows behind me, perhaps an official from the party in South Africa. He said that just last night he had been called to the port to check out a suspicious looking cargo container bound for Zimbabwe. The container had just come from China. Its cargo manifest said it was carrying jeans. But a look inside revealed boxes upon boxes of weapons instead.

“I don’t know what the regime is preparing for,” he said in a voice that filled the massive room, “but they are preparing for something. How can one say this is not a crisis? How can the government of this country allow for such things to pass through its hands?”

They had called the police immediately that night. But this morning, he told us, reading the Daily Mail, it was revealed that the container had been sent to Zimbabwe. Fears of Zimbabwe becoming Kenya suddenly became more real for the two dozen people still left there. This morning, the same story made the front page of the UK Guardian, complete with the South African government’s side of the story.

“If the manifest is in order, there is nothing we can do,” a port official said. This, despite the fact the UN has placed an embargo on Zimbabwe.

The Guardian story also mentioned that the port workers, many, though not all of them probably from Zimbabwe, with family still in Zimbabwe, had refused to process the container. They had been ordered to do it anyway, lest they lose their jobs and be sent back to their home country along with that container.

I thought of that man in the blue shirt, standing among compatriots, Congolese, Mozambicans, and South Africans, all of them politically conscious and working class, working the late shift at the port, between the beach and the Sailing Team’s club house, in plain view of the revolving restaurant where Shanice had her birthday, all of them standing together with their gloves off to show this man what they had found. And the doors opened, and all they saw was racks of rocket launchers and assault rifles. There was no abstraction to any of it. Rumors of the malign effect of China’s influence in Africa and Mugabe’s insane commitment to hold onto power at any cost, along with the fears of the Zimbabwean Diaspora that their homeland would be turned into a crisis zone for the world to see if they didn’t already: all of it was real, and sitting inside a COSCO container like any other. Row upon row – most of them probably had cheap electronics or sandals. But this one had history in it. I couldn’t help but shudder as he told us.

Part III, 2-27 - 3-12

Scatterings 2-27

My inbox came with a warning this morning. “… 200 students at the Edgewood campus in Pinetown blockaded the entrance in a protest action aimed at drawing attention to the slow pace at which students are receiving financial aid payouts. They also point to the registration appeals process which is taking too long to complete,” it said. “The South African Police Services are on the scene.”

I thought about what Joan had said.

How close is this country, really, to being just another African state that’s period of optimism and economic functionality has given way to chaos, where the whites leave in droves and the blacks divide themselves among their clans and fight it out with each other for dominance? This is the most stable nation in Africa, they say, so probably pretty far. The real danger of the youth should never amount to more than the small riots and roadblocks at universities that it does now.

That is the realistic expectation, which is more than the benefit of the doubt. People who were surprised about Kenya were either ignoring huge aspects of the fragility with which the nation was being held together for virtually its entire half-century of existence, or they were just being completely unrealistic about how stable Kenya really was.

Until then, I roam the campus and the city, with occasional ventures elsewhere, catching glimpses of the “true” face of this country, it’s “wildness” as Joan had said – but just glimpses. Other times I feel as though I could be anywhere, maybe not the states but certainly in a lot of other places. Then, at times, even that will change.

This morning I found myself in the lounge of my dorm watching whatever the resident already there was watching. It was an American talk show, one of those Christian ones where they two women talk about Christ like it was a man they had both loved from another time in their life and still thought fondly of.

“Thank you for sharing your story with us,” the host said. “I can feel the love of Christ running through you, and I just know it’s running through many of our viewers right now. Now I want to talk to you about bringing some of that love to those most in need. With your one-time gift of just 48 dollars, you can help build a well for a village in a drought stricken part of the African continent, bringing water to ten people. For 480 dollars, you can bring water to a hundred people on the African continent, for life.”

It took me a minute to appreciate the irony that I was watching this from the one corner of the African continent, albeit not a very drought stricken one. The wonders of globalization had brought requests for charity almost to the back door of its intended recipients, and I had been caught not even realizing it.

It wasn’t long after that that I reaffirmed an earlier decision from that morning, that I needed to get out today. I hadn’t been into town since the week before, and with no classes on Wednesday, it was as good a time as any to go. I took a Combie from Gate 4 to the City Center, arriving around 2 PM. Hungry, I set out for lunch at one of the local eateries.

One thing positive I can say about Durban for certain is that the blending of foods has never been inconspicuous. The people here have been fusing cuisines for as long as the option has been available, and you don’t have to walk far through downtown to find the local creations. In the States they might be called “Asian fusion.” Here, they’re just lunch. Dishes like mince meat samosas (an English meat recipe packed inside fried Indian dough), and its reverse, chicken curry pies (Indian meat recipe inside English dough). Boerwors, the Afrikaans sausage of choice can be found almost anywhere for anyone and served by anyone as well, be they Indian, Zulu or other. Some places also stock mutton sausage, which is essentially the same thing, except more acceptable among Hindus. One item recommended to me by my fellow sailors is the somewhat common chip and cheese roti – a serving of French fries covered in cheese sauce and served in a flat Indian bread. I didn’t find that today, so I settled for a heaping pile of chicken curry over pap – the indigenous South African version of a thick maize porridge common throughout almost every part of Africa. At a mere 12 Rand with servings of two kinds of coleslaw, it was more than just delicious.

But that was the only highlight of my outing.

A few blocks later I took a swig from my water bottle but decided to save some for later and slipped it into my shoulder bag. Not long after I felt wetness on my right leg. With rain passing in and out that day, I ignored it, figuring it was just a leaky roof that I had walked under. But not long after it felt dripping, and looking down, I realized my water bottle had opened itself up and emptied inside my bag. The book I was reading at the time and a notebook were sorely damaged. For a minute I threw a fit on the street not caring who saw me.

I took both items out and kept walking. For four Rand I took the bus to the beach and decided to make the most of it all by sitting and reading comfortably situated between the heat and the breeze. At first, I first laid down on a concrete slab with my bag under my head. After that became uncomfortable, I sat up and kept the bag to my side. Not even five pages into reading I heard a sliding sound only to notice a kid my age with his hand on my bag. When he saw that I had caught him he nonchalantly kept walking as if to apologize for inconveniencing me.

“Get a job, motherfucker!” I yelled from twenty feet away, again not caring who saw me. He kept walking. I’ve realized this week that I’ve become more significantly more bitter towards the people here since the last time I was here.

Even if it doesn’t thrill, always, this part of Africa at least it manages now to do something for me that the whole continent is known to do for foreigners and returning immigrants, people who have one foot in the West and another here: it pisses me off, frustrates and annoys me. Tourists, falling under the larger category of visitors, don’t feel that. Visitors either see nothing of the place or only see what is unfortunate but ultimately does not affect them. Visitors are filled with optimism for the place, but it is often a sensation that is entirely baseless, or based only on the most selective understanding of the country they visit. There are visitors in my group. I may have been a visitor my first time here, but that subject is still being debated. My view certainly wasn’t very selective then.

But the next time someone tries to rob me I’ll link it to this time. The frustration will pile on itself and admitting to it will concede everything that is so unexceptional about this place. Within a few weeks I will be conceding my own Afro-pessimistic attitude to anyone who will listen. “This continent is going nowhere fast,” I’ll tell the jubilant incomers. Maybe then I’ll say I’ve lived here and I know it for what it truly is.

“The great thing about being a pessimist is that you’re constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised,”

- George F. Will

Honestly, I can’t wait. I think I’m finally beginning to fit in.

Easter Break pals and the like 2-28

I couldn’t help but feel discouraging tonight.

Hayden and I have been riding a streak of actually getting along, something that I suppose is born out of necessity more than anything else, being the only non-black and among a very few non-Zulus in our entire dorm. So we cook together; it’s what we do. As of two weeks ago, the little group that was the party that we came here with did what most all cliques do after whatever veneer of optimism that was covering it wears off and people realize they’ve spent too much time together: it split apart. Some stuck with each other; others went looking for new people. Hayden and I were one of very few who had distanced ourselves long before, and in our separation, we’d found each other, in the kitchen.

The conversation at first was about what to cook, and then about stupid, trivial things like “what sort of music do you listen to?” a question I hate to ask and hate even more to answer, as my answer is inevitably a variation on everyone’s: “I listen to a lot of stuff, but mostly Bob Dylan and Jazz.”

That was how it started anyway. Later it got into a more sincere talk about Africa, and environmentalism, a subject that touched on briefly, which he was fine to talk about but that I only listened on.

“Everything gets recycled, and people get recycled, and that’s how you go on,” he said. I was impressed. It was one of a few instances where he sincerely let his guard down what still at times appears to be a basic instinct to be smug had subsided. Even then he was still being wise, and not in the most positive sense. But there were some (admittedly rare) times when he actually looked less than on top of things, when he willingly accepted that he didn’t know more than the other person in the room about the given subject, and his humility, however reluctant, showed through.

“What does ABSA stand for?” he asked as we passed one of their branches during our day at the Victoria Street Market.
“Associated Banks of South Africa,” I said. “There were like four or five of them and they merged together years ago to be more competitive.” For every inch he gave me I’d repay him with two.

But tonight as we made Thai curry he began telling me about something sincerely and my willingness to reciprocate never came through.

“So I was talking it over with Kelly and Nicole and Jordan today, man” – already I knew this wasn’t starting well. It sounded oddly like an inquisition, like a setup for peer pressure, like he was one of the housemates to tell me what the other three actually thought of me. He also said ‘man’ far too often and so often in just the wrong places entirely. Once I had caught him say the word three times in two short sentences, at the beginning and end of one: “yeah man, that’s a great idea. Yeah man, I’ll talk to you later, man,” I think it was. Waiting for a cab at the grocery store one afternoon, a fellow international student from Iowa not on my program had mentioned that he was especially pissed at someone else from his university, a fellow Iowan who talked too much and had absolutely nothing to say, because he represented his state poorly, and he felt that the association was carrying over. Hayden was from San Francisco, the only other guy on our program, and Asian, so I knew exactly what he was talking about. “Have you seen the South Park episode about the Prius?” I asked him. “That’s exactly what he’s like.”

“Yeah, anyway, I was talking with Kelly and Nicole and Jordan, and we were talking about our plan for Spring Break. Your totally welcome, but um, we were thinking of starting in Nambia, and then going to Botswana, Zambia, then to Vic Falls and then maybe through Zimbabwe then, and then down back to Durban through Mozambique.”

They, we, had two weeks. It had taken my group four years ago that much time to travel from Cape Town to Durban along the coast, stopping periodically but never more than two nights at a time. Some times we drove for ten hours straight. It was a great trip, a fantastic trip, but in a part of the world where the roads were admirable, the people were easy to get along with, and there were no borders to cross. I couldn’t help but raise the obvious question.

“You really think you’ll have the time?”
“I don’t know, man. I mean I hope so. It’s just kind of a once in a lifetime opportunity, you know? I just don’t know when the next time I’ll be in Africa will be.”
“How long do you want to spend in Namibia?” I asked.
“Maybe a couple of days.”
“Just in Windhoek or do you want to go elsewhere?”
“Probably just there, yeah.”
“And then to Botswana?”
“Yeah, man, yeah.”
“Truthfully, if you cross the border into Botswana from Windhoek, it’s really just the same country all over again. It’s all the Kalahari Desert; I mean if you want to see the coastline in Namibia or something, that’s different –“
“Yeah, well it’s a different city, a different country, different culture and people.”
“Sure. But I mean, what you could do is just fly to Johannesburg, which would cost you half as much, and then just go to Gabarone, which is only a few hours away from there, and then go up through Botswana and see all of that.”
“Where’s Gabarone?”
“It’s the capital of Botswana.”
“That’s true, man, but I really wanna see Namibia.”

Less than a week ago he couldn’t even pronounce the capital of Namibia correctly, despite insisting since he got here that he wanted to go there. The place name was also the name of one of South Africa’s most common beers. Wind-Hock, he said, referring to the beer. “Vint-Hook,” I corrected him. Tonight he didn’t know where Gabarone was. He also seemed more than a little unrealistic about the distances he was intending to travel. Just coming back to Durban from Maputo – the capital of Mozambique an close to its southernmost border – took about six hours. That was where the roads were well maintained and the flood damage was minimal. Coming from farther north where that was not the case could take you a week, and that was just Mozambique. They were small mistakes, forgivable for people not planning to go to these places or who were but were also curious and still asking questions. But this guy was determined, and assumed he knew exactly what he was doing, and for his smugness I couldn’t help but rub his errors in from time to time.

Even so: Namibia, Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe. Even Mozambique was on the list. It had all come together in one place, even if it was just a map in his head. I respected his insistence, and I was flattered that he would invite me.

“You could also fly from Windhoek to Lusaka, in Zambia, go to Victoria Falls from there and just skip over Botswana,” I advised him. “Like I say, the stretch between Windhoek and Zambia is going to be a lot of the same landscape.”
“Yeah, but I really wanna see Botswana.”
“What specifically?”
“(Laughs) Infrastructure?” It was a curious answer, and one that I didn’t really understand, though I knew saying that out loud just wasn’t going to get us anywhere. “There’s also some AIDS camps that I want to see there.”
“AIDS camps?” I was again unsure what he meant. It sounded like he was talking about a leper colony or something. “Where about?” I asked.
“One of the big cities.”
“So in Gabarone.”
“Yeah, maybe. I have to look into it.”
“That’s the only big city in Botswana,” I said.
“Well I don’t want to just see cities, man. I mean cities are cool, but what appeals to me, personally, is that really expansive African landscape, you know? In my opinion, that would just be a really amazing experience, so I just kind of want to see that, man.”
“You just said you want to see some AIDS camps.”
“That’s true, man.”
“In Gabarone.”
“Well you know, I’m just thinking about my own logistics right now; a lot of this can change. I’m not spending any more time here after the semester’s over, so I just don’t have any other time, man.”

And there again was that smartass attitude of his, overshadowing whatever possibility his trip really had. It had backfired before, when he had distanced himself from the group in part to befriend two French engineering students who he considered more worth his time but who hardly returned the affection. Later, it was in signing up for an especially but unnecessarily rigorous course schedule, which, as it turned out, had left him no free time to do the things he wanted. He had to switch out of almost all his classes.

This evening he had proposed we make a curry out of potatoes, coconut milk, turmeric, red chili powder, onions and leftover sausage. I thought it was ridiculous, but somewhere over the course of our talk, it actually turned out alright. He was happy to take credit for it, and I let him have it.

“So how do you think we do this?” he had asked me on the onset.
“I don’t know; this was your idea.”
“Curry? I thought that was your thing.”
“This is another kind of curry.”

Twenty minutes later, after boiling the potatoes with olive oil like you would pasta, cutting up four sausages to add to the two we already had and taking out a can of coconut milk which until then he had kept in a fridge for god only knows what reason, he admitted amidst a trickle of laughs that he had no idea what he was doing. For me, the metaphor to everything we were talking about was glaring. “I think I’ll just figure it out as I go along,” he said.

Yeah, and maybe I’ll meet just you afterwards, when you’re done with it all.

Free State disaster zone 2-29

For this weekend, the program arranged for us to take a trip into north and west of Durban to see the epicenter of the Zulu world. For the second weekend in a row I had plans far off campus, and this time I didn’t even have to pay, so after class I went back to my room, packed my things, took a few notes and got ready to leave.

My phone rang. It was a text message from Nicole, inviting me to a protest.

I wasn’t sure what she was talking about, so I went to the library and looked for the big news. The story that day was about a mess at Free State University in its namesake province on the western border of KZN. Some white kids had filmed a group of custodians – three women and one man – running around like fools and eating meet which the boys had taped themselves pissing on just moments before. As they ate, the boys espoused the “way of the Afrikaner” and some other white supremacist nonsense.

Half an hour later, I went to the bus stop. Alana was passing out printouts from CNN.com summarizing the story. Everyone in the group was disgusted, and so was I, but unlike them, I was neither shocked that this had happened or about how the group was reacting to it. I thought back to my conversation with Shelden returning from Newlights, about the rape last semester and how people had reacted to it, about how, when people came across they didn’t understand, they went back to Apartheid, to race, to the old paradigms that made the system evil from inside and out and perhaps still did.

“I can’t believe people are surprised this happened,” Yohanna said. Alana agreed
“People think that since the Apartheid laws ended that there’s no more racism, no more Apartheid, but there is,” she said.

It’s a common phrase among both South Africans and Americans who talk about race relations in their own country that systematic oppression of black people has not ended with more progressive legislation, it simply went from being overt to being subvert, where it continues to act but in more subtle ways. Racism is said to be ever present among whites, just hidden behind closed doors where whites talk quietly amongst themselves. So when what was meant to be an inside joke among a few white people was exposed to South Africa’s blacks and to the world after the girlfriend of one of its makers leaked after they broke up, the angriest saw it as the true face of White South Africa – young whites acting out their fantasies of racial domination in front of the camera.

Assuming that whites were always just inclined to be secretive about their true racial opinions anyway, how representative this was of what they really thought of blacks was unclear for those who harbored suspicions anyway. Naturally, some just assumed the worst: every white person in the country was into this sort of shit. Overnight, one group’s sick joke had made a full ten percent of the country look almost as bad in the eyes of the world as they had before F.W. De Klerk went against his party to release Nelson Mandela from prison eighteen years ago. South African whites had found their Jenna 6.

At the bus stop, rumors circulated about how the video had been made and what had inspired it, so I was glad to know something about the province and its predicaments already. Even during Apartheid, Free State had been a bastion of white and specifically Afrikaans rule. Having forfeited the Cape Colony to the British at the onset of the twentieth century, the Afrikaners ventured east in search of a place of their own to live free of British incursion, eventually settling into two independent republics, Transvaal, built squarely in the desert on a plethora of gold mines with Johannesburg at its center, and the more scenic, more arid Orange Free State to its south.

As the city of Johannesburg grew uncontrollably with its exploding gold economy, attracting black workers in droves, Free State emerged as a more homely alternative for modest Afrikaners whose intent in moving east in the first place had been less about getting rich and more being allowed who to associate with, a right denied to them under British rule.

After the Second Anglo-Boer War, when the British, led by Cecil Rhodes, crushed two Afrikaner republics intending to wrest their wealth for themselves, Free State, and its counterpart, the Transvaal, were consolidated into the greater Southern African Empire. After independence, they became provinces in the South African Republic.

But Free State’s identity as the Afrikaner homeland, where no one could incur on their way of life lived on. Even today, among white people, it was known for little more than its secluded landscapes and reclusive inhabitants. Street signs were often in Afrikaans only, and before 1994 you couldn’t even be in the province after dark if you were black. Being caught otherwise could have landed a person in prison, and often did. Since then, a few compounds of Afrikaners had sprouted up there, founded by old whites who were determined to find one last place to live on their own accord, as they wanted, free of the English and black people. The places gained international notoriety – a curiosity for those who had followed the anti-Apartheid struggle to its last days and wondered now about who that tremendous paradigm shift had left behind. Journalists would sometimes venture out there to interview the Afrikaners about what there lives had been like since Apartheid had ended, like some “Entertainment Tonight” feature on the villainous cast of yesterday’s news, long after they’d held the attention of the world. “Especially Hateful White South Africans: where are they now?” If you ever had doubts, they were in Free State.

As it turned out, the video had been made a few years ago as a protest among friends to one of the university’s failed attempts at integrating its on campus residences. After the university had been opened to black applicants, the residences were made open as well. But after a few years, as integration of the races was failing to materialize, the administration pushed to put blacks and whites in the same dorm. Riots ensued among both parties, and administrators all but gave up, reviving the issue once every few years after incidents of violence would break out again between whites and blacks as one stepped onto the other’s turf and was assaulted for it.

Now South Africa’s blacks - if not the world at large - wanted answers. The whole of the white race in the country was being asked to provide an explanation for the actions of a few.

I remember one night how I mentioned off handedly to some of the girls that I was glad NJ didn’t feel out of place with us on our nights out. I enjoyed his company, and it was nice that he didn’t feel or even look out of place at the venues we went to despite usually being the only black person in the entire room.

“We don’t like what you’re saying, Alex,” one of them said.

Three of the girls in my group are black, and just like in the States, any even slightly general comment about black people could be interpreted as racism, and racism was not tolerable, despite how true some of the notions were. On the other hand, during our nights out, people were frank when they said they hadn’t met a single white person that night that wasn’t racist, like announcing the uncontestable conclusions of some recent study.

As our pus went out the main gate and down Francois Street, we passed some telephone polls with the headline news posted to them, enticing passersby to buy a newspaper and read the whole story (South Africa is one of the few countries in the world where newspaper readership is on the rise).

“Zuma cheated taxman, says state,” read a headline from the Mercury. Zuma also had four wives and was rumored to be HIV positive, and at that juncture, he was still simultaneously being investigated for corruption a sling of corruption charges and primed for the nation’s highest office. Moreover, as Nikita had memorably pointed out to me, some of his reported interactions with women were more than just the result of “old-fashioned” ideas about gender roles, as some had said, they were outright assault.

The program had arranged for this to be an assembly of all their exchange students in the province, and a few others. The twelve of us from Howard made up the bulk of the group, but there were still a few from other places – four from UKZ-N’s Pietermartizburg Campus, and one from the University of Witwatersrand, outside Johannesburg, who had come there originally from the University of Minnesota. Spotting a chance to socialize outside of my predetermined clique Howard attendees, I leapt at the opportunity to meet the new people.

By breakfast the second day, I had already left the long table of Howard students to go sit with two girls from Pietermaritzburg and the one guy from the U of M at first and now Witwatersrand. Before long, the talk turned to Easter Break plans. We had almost two weeks off, as it turned out.

“I was thinking about going to Botswana,” I said. They sounded interested.

Zululand 3-1 (written at a truck stop @ 14:18)

We started late today, like yesterday, pushing our schedule back another half day. Supposedly we’ll be seeing a museum, King Shaka’s grave and a few other things tomorrow, the day we go back, instead of this afternoon which has been taken up by incessant stops for food, a side effect of both starting late and the Shakaworld resort that we stayed at yesterday not providing the lunch they had promised us.

It’s about halfway through now, and this trip has said few things positive about the organizational sensibilities of everyone involved.

Earlier today it was a stop at a plaza of fruit stands where our tour guide bought us bottled water, crackers that tasted like nothing and an assortment of fruit which was almost impossible to eat on the bus. That we had to make the stop at all was difficult enough, especially upon hearing that even though our guide refused to call it lunch, it was going to take the place of lunch anyway.

“I don’t want to call it lunch,” she said, “because it’s really more of a snack. There’s really nowhere to eat from here until we get to the Game Park for dinner, so come now, and I’ll buy you some snacks for the road.”

But instead of making a wholesale purchase for all of us, the woman had to take piecemeal orders for each individual group at each individual stand after the twenty of us had broken up into groups of four or five and scattered ourselves across the place, despite the fact that every stand was selling exactly the same thing.

“Does anyone want some bananas?” she asked when she got to my assembly.
“Sure.”
“Guava?”
“Why not.”
“Peaches? If we get peaches we have to wash them.” If there was any sink in the vicinity it wasn’t like we knew anything about it, so honestly I’m not sure how she expected us to answer that one

Half an hour later we were back on the bus, peaches in hand, which brings us to now, at a service station complete with a Steers, a KFC and a convenience store where I write this now. Despite her claim that there was nowhere to eat until our final destination for that day, just twenty minutes down the road we discovered this place to make up for earlier follies – both those of our guide and Shakaworld. On arrival, she promised to buy lunch for anyone who wanted. I passed, knowing that the final stop and its promised buffet were (in theory) just a few hours away.

But half of our especially large group took up the offer anyway, ordering burgers and chips at Steers and then coming to wait on the bus for their orders while the rest of us waited for them.

Through the window in the parking lot, I saw Nicole walking atop the half wall that separated the parking from the lot next to it in her bare feet, like a balance beam. She didn’t order anything, money-conscious vegetarian that she is.

“I love her,” one of the girls in the bus said. “She’s just so in her own universe.”

Watching her, it made the day thus far feel easier manage, after lunch had been cut out of our schedule, and the waiting it had necessitated, which only added to the stress already induced by the Mariah Carrey singles, played on repeat throughout the bus despite our vocal complaints. If any of it had bothered her, she didn’t show it, walking from end to end of that wall, and then stopping on the street side to gaze onto the landscape. I wondered if she was looking at anything at all, or just checking in case there was anything to see.

Afterwards she climbed down an adjacent pay phone to reclaim her sandals and water bottle. A car pulled into the space in front of it just as she was getting down, and she waved and exchanged smiles with its driver, as though to apologize for taking up the space, though he didn’t seem to mind.

We went on the road not long after.

The good, the bad and the smug 3-4

So, is it worth noting that Hayden had the brilliant realization earlier today that he could fly from Windhoek (he still can’t pronounce the place name) to Lusaka and skip over Botswana, like I had advised him to days ago? Of course he didn’t care to mention that part in our conversation earlier. Honestly, I doubt he even remembers. The real matter for him is the added convenience that this will bring. Someone should tell him what I forgot to mention earlier, though, which is that there are no flights between those two cities. The whole of Namibia has a population about the size of Oakland, and Lusaka, by most accounts, is a sprawling jungle mess with tall buildings that house corruption and little else. There really isn’t a lot in the way of traffic between those two locales. This isn’t Europe, after all. There’s no Rhyne Air or universal Rail Pass to just sing you along from one third world state to the next. All your flights have to go through Johannesburg, and by then you’re not really traveling between countries in the traditional sense, your just making two separate trips, and at a great cost which I doubt even he could afford.

So much of the time, it’s not even what he says it’s just how he says it that pisses me off. No matter how flat he falls he just can’t admit that he doesn’t know that much about this region. He still thinks that Cape Town is an easy weekend trip that won’t cost him that much and that he won’t even need to take off class for, and that Zimbabwe is plenty safe just because Chris from Umzumbe who went there and pet lions said it was cool. To prove how much he knew and how busy he was knowing it, he blew up at Shanice earlier today when she asked him for advice on traveling the neighborhood.

“I’m not in the business of making itineraries for people,” he said smugly in the kitchen tonight. That’s right, Hayden, because you can barely hammer out a plan for yourself.

I could tell you more stories, but I really don’t care to this evening.

The news and business as usual 3-5

The headlining news on TV hit on all usual themes today: ANC rivalries, issues for the upcoming election, Mbeki’s denial, Zuma’s populism, and all of it under the ubiquitous subject of crime. As of today, Zuma wants to reopen discussion of the death penalty, which was outlawed after 1994. No study on the subject has ever proven a link between the death penalty and a reduction in crime, and people seem to get this, but it does go to satisfy a thirst for retribution which runs high in this country.

“I think the death penalty is good,” one mother whose infant daughter was killed by a stray bullet in downtown Johannesburg said. “They took someone from my family, and now their family will also lose someone.”

Last year there was an average of 51 murders in South Africa every single day, it said. Zuma hasn’t been afraid to call it a crisis, in firm opposition to his rival, President Mbeki, who calls the nation’s reputation for high rates of violent crime a “misperception.” He and the goons in his cabinet appear to be the only ones claiming that.

They were about to go onto the next story, about riots at the Edgewood Campus of the University of KwaZulu-Natal, in the Pinetown township of Durban. But one of the guys in my dorm entered the room just then and changed the channel to look for a soccer game or something. I didn’t bother to stay after that, but no matter, there’ll likely be something about it in my inbox tomorrow morning.

Thoughts 3 -7

Sometimes I’ll just go into a sort of trance, lying in bed after a nap (I do that a lot here; maybe it’s the heat) or just sitting at the laptop between extended typing sessions where I think about bullshit back home – drama that burned a hole in me a semester and another world away. When I hear someone mutter a greeting across the hall and through my door in Zulu, and it’s such a relief. It’s startling, too, but just to be reminded of that: I’m here, I’m in Africa. If ever I want to shut out my contact with home, or even just restrict to a select few people, I can. I don’t even have to do anything, I’m already here and they can’t touch me. If I hadn’t told anyone no one except the registrar would know where I was at all. If I leave, go somewhere else, through a string of combies and busses and trains, in the backs of pickup trucks and bicycles or anything else, then they’ll never be able to track me.

I was never naïve enough to believe that I could evade all my problems with other people just be putting some distance between me and them. Just look at the racist, still backwards Afrikaners who, in failing to either move to Australia or take Desmond Tutu’s words of self-forgiveness to heart, they just moved off to Free State or the Karoo to live in a compound with other whites as hateful and backwards as they are, where they are as far from the people they fear as they can possibly be while still being in someplace they call home. How much of their inferiority complex is the result of being the neglected part of a now powerless white minority in a black country on an even blacker continent, and how much of it is baggage from 400 years ago, when they were the collected runoff of the prisons and poor-houses of Amsterdam and sent here, rejected from their homeland but still forced to serve it anyway? No one wants to be an Afrikaner these days. That’s what people will tell you now. The truth is that no one has ever wanted to be an Afrikaner. No one wants there people’s only contribution to the international cultural melting pot to be a string of rugby stars, fragments of a language that nobody likes and an usual tasting beef sausage that only South Africans can pronounce and that’s only eaten in South Africa. Nobody wants to have to go out into the world and defend that, either.

“But to speak Afrikaans would be like speaking Nazi, if there were such a language,” J.M. Coetzee said of his college days in London in the seventies. You might be surprised how little things have changed since then.

Nobody wants to dance like an Afrikaner, or fuck like one. If you’ve ever been to a white club in this country you’d understand what I was talking about.

I’m not an exile here, wondering why I ever left home, nor am I a fully acculturated citizen of an adopted society. I’m an exchange student, for chrissake. I take classes, I travel, and I’m frugal with money. I buy people drinks even when I can’t afford it. And I observe, and meet people, and I write. It’s a job; it’s a living; it’s a way to focus at those times that I forget where I am or what it is that I’m doing here. On days like today, that’s what gets me through.

Is dis goed met jou? Ek kan nie kla nie. Ek lekker werk.

Alles van die beste, totsiens.

Tilt 3-8

A few people invited me out last night, and reluctantly, I accepted, knowing full well I had nothing else to do that night and really I hadn’t gone out in a long enough while that the money I would inevitably spend there seemed justifiable.

We called A. Kay, the international crowd’s designated cab driver, and he arrived within ten minutes. A. Kay’s always been known to be a nice guy, with fair rates. He remembers names and talks to you while he drives. Between rides he smokes Stuyvesant cigarettes, which is probably why only the front half of his upper teeth are left, but his car never wreaks of smoke, even slightly. And with one exception, when he’s praying at the mosque for an hour and a half on Friday afternoon, any day of the week between 6AM and 12AM, he’s available for hire. With his tinted windows, he was also willing to fit five people in the back seat this night while I rode shotgun.

The club we were going to was called Tilt, and it was just across the street from the International Conference Center – a massive modern looking glass and white painted steel complex built a few years after 1994, on the site of an old prison. When we arrived, I was reminded that the government had left the main gate, a wall and two guard towers of the old institution to serve as its own memorial. You could see it all from the balcony.

The towers still had their light blue glass in tact, like the control towers of a small airport, lending them both a surprisingly contemporary air that almost matched the ICC adjacent to it. To think: only fourteen years ago there had been a prison in downtown Durban, square between the beach and city hall, established to collect and neutralize the threat of non-whites reluctant to submit to the Apartness which the state had imposed on them. It was chilling.

But after Apartheid’s end, the police state that was its caretaker also vanished, and instead of being pushed into the townships on the peripheries of the cities where it was ignored, and cracked down upon ruthlessly when it spread elsewhere, violence had spread throughout the country, in the cities, the suburbs, on the beaches of Durban and in the clubs on Florida Road. In tearing down one prison, the state had left others to be overcrowded. Now there was talk of reinstituting the death penalty.

On our way to Tilt, one of the people in our cab, a black student who I hadn’t met before with an accent that suggested he had gone to boarding school mentioned that he had had a difficult afternoon.

“I saw someone get shot today.”
“Who? Where?” the attention inside the cab focused acutely.
“It was a thief, outside the Workshop,” he said.

That was one of the main shopping areas of the city, right downtown, a block from city hall and very near the Combie stand where Hayden and I had witnessed the fight between the blacks and the coloureds where one had a machete a few weeks before.

He went on to explain that the thief had shot the first round after running from wherever he had come from. The crowd panicked, and then a pair of cops shot him in the chest. As he stumbled, almost to the ground, they shot him twice more and he fell, never to get up again.

“The police here are so corrupt,” one of the girls said.

It was true. There propensity for excessive use of force was infamous, even if it, like the death penalty, had the political advantage quelling the public’s lust for retribution. But even as a cop could be unnecessarily violent towards one party, they could just as easily be found to be in bed with another. Letting some heinous criminals slide because they had paid them off and killing others because it was the easiest way to end their crime streak – that was the way of the police these days.

A. Kay interjected. “Oh, but you can’t blame the police,” he said.
“They shot somebody today,” the original witness said firmly.
“They’re told to shoot to kill these days, because if they didn’t there’d be more crime, and nice people like you wouldn’t want to come here anymore.”

On the way, we stopped at the ABSA so Yohanna and the shorter Amanda could get cash. There was an ABSA ATM on campus, and the extra detour had added ten rand to the bill, but that didn’t seem to deter the girls.

“70 Rand.” That was the bill: even, and agreed upon before we had left, with the extra addition for the earlier stop. A. Kay didn’t use a meter.
“Ok,” Yohanna said. “So that’s twelve from everybody, right?” I didn’t even care to acknowledge that request with an unimpressed look, so I just paid my ten and stepped away from the car.

Sunday morning 3-9

Before Tebogo invited me, I hadn’t been to a church service since I was in my early teens and at my aunt and uncle’s house in the mountains of New Mexico where it was compulsory. Even then, I failed to get along with them for more reasons then I can name. My dad had always said he looked at his older brother and saw what he might’ve been had I not come into the picture. He was tall, built, and had a temper that a ten year old could, and often did set off (my cousin was never quite as quiet as I was at that age). The man simply did not know how to relate to children, and neither did his wife. And that somewhere down the line, after a bout with alcoholism and (family rumors have it) coke, they took up evangelical Christianity as their new path could only mean bad things as far as I was concerned. After all, just because you’ve been saved doesn’t mean you’re a good person, it just means you have a veneer to cover your bad deeds with.

And then on Saturday night, Tebogo invited me.

“I think you should come to church with me,” he said getting something out of his kitchen locker. “You sing, the guy talks while you sit there, you feel good. I’ll come get you, half-past-nine.”

To be clear, in principle, I’ve got nothing wrong with religion or with evangelical Christians and their churches. I like gospel music; I respect a lot of evangelicals that I’ve met. I know and I can see how their faith has bettered their lives, so to be invited by this one who I knew came at first as a surprise, but then, I thought why the hell not.

“Sure,” I said. “Come wake me up.”

Tebogo was a member of the Tswana tribe, one of the few at Howard, and hailed from Pretoria. With no place in the area and very little money for a room even if their weren’t a housing shortage, he did what a lot of students without housing did, he squatted, keeping his few things – clothes, a suitcase, notebooks, pencils, Tupperware, an iPod and a bible in a pair of lockers in the kitchen – and sleeping between a couple of chairs that he put together every night in the lounge with the broken TV across from Hayden’s room in the basement of Townley Williams.

We had met at the beginning of the semester. Considering that the kitchen was shared between three floors, it was odd that so few people seemed to actually use it. Tebogo was in and out almost any time that I was there, for breakfast, lunch or dinner, though rarely to cook anything. Usually he was just going through his lockers, charging his phone or socializing with some of his friends, mostly Xhosas from the Eastern Cape.

Early on we’d talked about the city. He didn’t like it much. “The beaches are not that great,” he said. Pretoria was a half hour drive from Johannesburg in Guateng, the desert province in the middle of the country where all the gold mines were. They might have had sand there but there certainly weren’t beaches. Even so, he was insistent, Pretoria was better. If I came to Pretoria, he would show me a real city. The people were nicer there as well, he said. Here where most everyone was Zulu and only hung out with their kind, in Pretoria the people were willing to talk to you no matter who you were.

“So what should I wear?” I asked on Saturday.
“You could come like that,” he said. At the time I was wearing quick-dry shorts, a short-sleeve shirt and flip flops. I wondered what kind of church this was, but on Sunday morning, I found out. Tebogo came and knocked on my door, dressed in leather pants and flip flops and holding a small bible in one hand. We walked up Francois to what I thought was science related building. As we got closer, I realized it was. The service was in a rented lecture hall upstairs.

When we got inside the whole crowd, mostly students, was standing and singing hymns. “You can read Zulu, can’t you?” Tebogo said, clapping between rhythms with the assembly. He pointed to a projection screen where the words were spelled out for the newcomers who hadn’t yet memorized them. They switched to English not long after our arrival and it went on like that for most of an hour.

“Lord, I can feel your presence here today, amen,” the pastor, a thirty-something coloured man with a wide smile said. “I really do believe that everyone here today has been touched by Him, and if there’s anyone who hasn’t yet accepted you, Lord, as their personal lord and savior, then maybe today will be that day that they do, amen.” The assembly echoed that one.

Halfway through, the pastor asked if there was anyone who had not yet been saved, and three people raised their hands. He asked them to come see him after the service.

I remembered Joan asking me if I belonged to a church or not. “I’m working on it,” I remembered saying. Wherever she was now, she would have been happy to know I was at a place like this, among my peers, standing, clapping and singing with all of them. I’m not sure if the presence of God was something that had been conjured in that lecture hall or if it were real. Honestly, I didn’t matter to me then. Whatever this presence was, at the very least, I understood what the pastor was talking about.

After the service Tebogo and I went and sat down over some coffee with one of his friends, another T-Willy resident. I realized Tebogo had only recently been converted. “You know the bible says that if your arm makes you sick, you must cut if off, if your eye makes you sick, you must take it out,” he said. “I called home and I told my girlfriend back in Pretoria, ‘I’ve been saved,’ and she just said, ‘what are you talking about?’” he laughed. “You know this guy is going to Zambia,” he said, pointing to me across the table. “Of all the places, Zambia! Zambia and Zimbab. I keep telling him, they are crazy their, mafutu, crazy.”
“Of all the places in the world? Well, you know, there are good beaches in Somalia, I’m told. And there’s a nice resort in Sierra Leone, and another in Liberia. Oh, and the jungles in the Eastern Congo? Beautiful. You’re right, man, I should just go there instead.”
“They cut off people’s arms in Zambia, mafutu.”
“And South Africa has the highest violent crime rate of any country not at war. Zambia is not at war; neither is Zimbabwe.”
“But you go to Johannesburg, you can collect statistics, you can see for your own eyes what’s going on there. They keep records of that. In Zambia and Zimbab, there is no one to do that, no one.”

It was all in good spirits, of course. I was joking a little, and Tebogo was being overly cautious. In any case, he was right: after two and a half hours of singing and hearing a sermon, surrounded by people my age who had “accepted the Lord as their personal savior,” I felt good. I felt optimistic. I had the whole day ahead of me, and for now, I was sitting next to friends, and one in particular who was genuinely looking after me. I don’t care if he was wearing leather pants and flip flops at the time. His heart was genuine.

“Did I see you at church today?” A young woman asked me on the stairs up towards the library later that evening.
“Yeah, I was there,” I said.
“Who did you come with?”
“Tebogo, the Tswana, from Pretoria. Short guy with a gold tooth. He had a red shirt today.”
“I don’t know him.” She started walking away. “Did you enjoy the service?”
“I did,” I said.
“Well I hope to see you there again, and many, many times after.”

I smiled and walked away without saying anything.

Johannesburg Talk 3-12

“There is nothing in Johannesburg, I swear!” A. Kay said, his hand swatting at the air as he drove us back from the mall today. This, after Jordan had said that he, Kelly and Hayden were kicking off their Easter Break with three full days in Johannesburg.
“I’m really not sure why Hayden wants us to be there for three days,” Jordan said. “He’s got some itinerary but I haven’t looked at it at all. I’m just worried we’ll get bored as hell there. A. Kay, what parts of the city should we really avoid?” He was talking about safety.
“Well, you don’t really want to see any of the city,” he said. “You can go downtown, but it’s just buildings. See this is what you do: you take a day; you go to the Apartheid Museum. Get the cab driver’s number, and when you’re done, you call him back. After that you go to your Backpackers or wherever you’re staying, and the next day you can see Soweto, that’s the largest black settlement in South Africa, and then the next morning, get out of there. That’s how you go to Johannesburg.”

But of course, since they were leaving Lusaka by way of international jet to Lusaka, that wasn’t really an option. They were stuck there, and why anyone would want to be for three days, without intending to see a lot of the nightlife or the arts seen there would have been a mystery to me. But Hayden was intent on going to see his “friend” Chris, one of several he had half-handedly acquired during his time here. Like the French engineering students and the pair of Tutsi refugees he had courted with them at a bar in Durban for their stories of fleeing machete wielding militants in the Eastern Congo, Chris was someone who Hayden had taken up and called a friend after not many encounters because of what he was as a connection, a story.

I had actually met Chris myself. He was the young Brit at the Backpackers in Umbzumbe who had been traveling along the South African coast with the cute girl who’d flown down from London to see him and always wore striped halter tops. Everything thought they looked cute together, even me, but they weren’t together – not in that sense – it turned out later. They were just best friends. When I thought back to it, I liked that about them. I wondered if there had been any tension between them in the past and it had taken a long time to work out but now they thought every minute of it had been worthwhile.

But regardless, Chris was to me the one who had advised us all to take a train to a rural part of Zimbabwe and pet lions. If you look close, you can find three completely ludicrous things to do in that single piece of advice. Never the less, it had set Captain Smug off onto the seas of Southern Africa, at least in his head. He was determined to go to Zimbabwe after that. I’m not sure if he’ll make it this time, though he’ll probably have the opportunity if he’s smart about it, which is not guaranteed, either. More importantly and already scheduled for now is a trip to a township outside Johannesburg to see Chris’ NGO, a pediatric burn victim support center with the strange title Children of Fire.

From how Chris had talked about it, it sounded like they did good work, but I couldn’t stand the name. Why couldn’t they have just called it something generic, or at least less like the title of some obscure fantasy novel? After all, who said that just because you had been scolded with hot oil a few years before meant that you were now one of these elusive “Children of Fire”?

I told A. Kay my group would only be there for an afternoon and a day and then leave very soon after that

“See that’s perfect,” he said. “You spend a day there, and then the next morning, you’re gone, because there’s other places you can go that are better, like Zambia, or Zimbabwe or something.”

With the two girls from Pietermaritzburg, Cat and Kate, and the guy from the University of Minnesota who goes to Witwatersrand outside Johannesburg, I’m planning to go to Johannesburg on the afternoon of the 19th, stay there until the early afternoon of the 21st and go to Gabarone, Botswana. We’ll spend 24 hours there before leaving for Fransistown, Botswana by train, then we’ll take a bus north to the Zambian border, cross over in the early evening and stay in Livingstone, by Victoria Falls for the next two nights. If the locals say its safe, we’ll walk across the border into Zimbabwe and see what we can find before heading back. After on the 26th we’ll take a bus to Lusaka and see more of Zambia before flying back on the 30th before classes start the next day.

I made up the schedule myself, planning every detail I could and synthesizing it into seven pages of word processed notes and a dozen emails. There are a bunch of people going to Zambia at the same time: Hayden, Kelly and Jordan is one group. Nicole, Shanice and Alaina are another. We’re almost guaranteed to be in Livingstone on at least one of the same nights, though with any luck I’ll get to pick and choose who I see among them.

It’s weird how there’ almost a competition going around: our four versus the other groups of three. But if that’s the case then I want to have the better trip. I want to beat the socks off of them. If they go to Zimbabwe, I want to go to Zimbabwe and do it better. If they get a cheap ride through Botswana I want to get an even cheaper and dirtier one.

Tebogo warned me that they ate rats in Zambia. If these others don’t, than maybe I will, because I’m going to have a good trip, by god, a fun trip, a memorable trip, and I’m going to take lots of notes and lots of photos. The other three will look up to me at the end of it and say “I’m glad I went with him.” When we get back, Isaac will come to one of our parties across the river and tell the boys about how I saved his ass from armed guards in Zambia. But I might not have to, either. Maybe it’s his good Christian moral compulsion, but Tebogo’s promised to utilize his connections to pressure a guy here at school from Zambia to call up his friends back in the home country to protect us during our time there.

“They’ll tell you where to go, where not to go. Maybe afterwards you give them fifty rand or something,” he said. If they come through and they do that well, friend, I’ll give them plenty.

I don’t know what beer they drink up there but I’ll drink it. I don’t know what they eat up there but I’ll eat it. I’m not sure what’s outside the tourist circus in Livingstone, the bus stop and the airport in Lusaka and the bus in between but I’ll find something of it, and when I’m there I’ll take lots of photos and lots of notes and tell all of you what I saw. And whatever fountain Hayden thinks he’s leading his party to in Johannesburg, I’m going to skip the search and look for something better and more fascinating, and when the time comes, I’ll leave and know I hadn’t wasted a second in that place.

Don’t worry, folks: I’m going to do great.