Lusaka Sunrise

Post 57 Postscript

2008-03-04T05:44:00.011+02:00

When I left Lusaka about two weeks ago, it was a bright, sunny morning. About 20 degrees Celsius. As we zoomed out to the airport, late as usual, the 10-car presidential motorcade forced us to pull off the road and wait, Mwanawasa having returned from another state visit somewhere. Police had lined the highway right from the middle of town to make sure he could get back to State House without the slightest obstruction.

Even if it meant us missing our flight.

At first I was concerned it was a speed trap - in which we'd inevitably be fined for going 150 km/h - but of course it wasn't. The only road police I ever saw in Zambia were the automatons that worked the roadblocks, either giving you a perfunctory wave-through or bribe-inducing hassle for some perceived infraction.

Finally arriving at the independence-era entrance, the national dance troupe - who's always on hand to welcome Father Levy back from a trip abroad - was trudging back to the highway to catch a mini-bus for the long ride back into town. You'd think they'd at least have their own designated transport, being a pretty important part of 'official' Zambian things like plane landings, ribbon-cuttings and NGO conferences. Even the universally hated ZESCO (power company) employees get their own bus.

We got through security alright, mercifully didn't have to pay the arcane Departure Tax and the porters were at their servile best. The only thing preventing me from leaving Zambia was that my flight, even though re-confirmed like they annoyingly make you do, was missing some sort of reference number. No problem, I was told, I just had to go round to the Kenya Airways office in the airport to get everything sorted out.

Now, I wouldn't call myself an 'Old Africa Hand' just yet, but I'd been around Zambia long enough to know that there was no way it would be as simple as that.

Sure enough, I get to the office and it's empty. No, 'will return' sign or posted hours, just arbitrarily deserted. I talk to a security guard, who radios another security guard. Eventually an enormous man in a reflective vest - who in no way looks like he's employed by the airline - ambles over and ushers me inside the empty office. I explain the situation while he patters away on the keypad of his cellphone, eventually making the logical transition to pecking at his keyboard. He has a go at some extensions on the landline. Nothing. Someone who's supposed to be somewhere is gone. They always are.

"Is there some sort of problem?" I inquire, agitated that my flight is leaving in less than an hour and some random guy is just fiddling around with things just to appease me. Before he can answer, an Indian family bursts into the office, a father with two small children. At first I feared they might be rival customers, but even worse, they somehow know Big Guy. Greetings, updates and well-wishes add to my growing frustration, though the presumptive employee is still plying his keypad throughout the interruption. About 10 minutes later, they leave.

"The problem is that your reference number is on our other system at our downtown office, and the girl who knows how to access it isn't here right now," I'm informed with surprising clarity.

Well, where the hell is she? Can't you just CALL the other office and get my number? Or, have all the staff there mysteriously disappeared too? Why do different offices even have different 'systems'? Doesn't this enigmatic employee have a cellphone we can track her down with? Doesn't everyone in this godforsaken country have a cellphone?!

But before I can blurt out my trite Westerner rant, the employee in question - a confident-looking young woman actually wearing a Kenya Airways uniform - comes in, exchanges in local language with Big Guy and smiles at me. With the magic press of one button on the keyboard, the dot matrix printer fires up and screams out my now-precious information.

"I'm so sorry sir," she says, snickering at what I hope to be the incompetence of her colleague, "I hope this isn't your last memory of Zambia!"

"Oh, it won't be," I respond. "I've still got immigration to go through."

Last Week: Leaving Lusaka

2008-02-15T10:49:00.002+02:00

The past few days have felt like the anxious but exciting time leading up to a summer vacation or the end of exams. Change is coming. Gentle breezes and mid-twenties sunshine have put a finishing gloss on Lusaka that I didn't quite expect. Perhaps I was too quick to condemn the city as an over-grown post-colonial metropole. I dare say I'm going to miss it.

With the well-timed break in the rainy season, I've been doing as much as I can outside. Not just because I know a wintry hell awaits; strolling around under blue puffy-cloud skies with other smiling people (the assholes seem to be confined to SUVs) is one of the simple pleasures I bask in. And the taxis don't seem to honk nearly as much anymore. Once-heinous exhaust fumes are worryingly tolerable. More people say hello. Some ask if they can be my friend or how my family is doing. Others blurt a one-syllable “Howareyou?!” or challenge me to a foot race if I’m jogging by.

***

The initial ride from the airport into town, from what I remember, was a blur of novelty. Riff-raff were trying to hitch a ride into town; wiry-looking men strained as they hauled charcoal on the backs of bicycles. Aid project signs littered the roundabouts, proudly announcing which foreign government had financed that part of the road (thanks, Japan!). At midday, everything was bright and brown and crispy from the dry season. It took my eyes a while to adjust after spending three days in artificially lit planes and airports.

Arriving in Kabulonga, my eventual ‘hood, I was expected to get out of the car to exchange money. This seemed risky. Pre-departure conditioning and embassy country briefs had trained me not to trust anything. Scruffy-looking black men were particularly distressing. Half-expecting to be mugged in broad daylight – I know this sounds ridiculous – in the 50 feet between me and the exchange bureau, I nervously fast-walked across the parking lot.

With my newfound wad of Kwachas I bought a fresh loaf of bread and some fruit on the way to the lodge for the first night. Arriving there in the afternoon, I had no idea what to do with myself. I wanted to use the internet and phone to inform everyone I had arrived safely, but could do neither for it required a terrifying ride in the local-ridden mini-bus.

Not knowing what else to do, I ate the soft bread and fruit with my hands and passed out, thoroughly jetlagged. Oddly enough, I would only wake up once in the next 16 hours – to see my first Lusaka sunrise through the bedroom window.

***

Sitting out on my porch the other day, it hit me how comfortable life has become here. That afternoon, my flatmate and I had walked down to the butcher (who knows us not by name, but by steak thicknesses) to get a couple of custom-cut t-bones. We returned rancid old beer bottles, bought a baguette at the specialty bakery and hired Norman, the Nyanja-teaching cabbie, to drive us home. No need to haggle for the fare: we both know what the rate is back to my place.

So there we were, Patrick and I, havin' a few on the patio under the setting sun. Classic rock on the radio and steaks on the grill. It could have been mid-May cookout in Baltimore at my dad's. But it was Lusaka, Zambia - Africa - where life, at least for me, was better than I ever imagined it could be.

Last Week: Homage to the Mini-Bus

2008-02-13T09:31:00.008+02:00

Situation: Sitting in the stinking, hot mini-bus waiting for it to fill, it becomes clear that there is some sort of mechanical problem. It won't start. Customers continue to file in while Driver and Conductor look nervously at each other not knowing what to do.

Task: Make it to destination with maximum passengers for minimum cost. Don't let Rival Bus poach your customers, even if that means insanely irresponsible street racing.

Action: After one savvy customer catches on and switches to Rival Bus, Conductor shuts the sliding door and stands guard to prevent a complete mutiny. Meanwhile, Driver is foraging in the ditch for thrown-away cardboard and plastic bags. He disappears beneath the undercarriage to apply the refuse to a mystery bus part. Rival Bus leaves the stop.

Result: Somehow the rubbish has fixed the bus. With a running push start from the conductor, the Toyota Hiace shakes to a start and we're down the road to catch up to Rival Bus. A few minutes later we spot it, erroneously trolling up a side road to mine for customers. Speed bumps and elementary school be damned, Driver guns it past Rival. At scheduled stops, Conductor shouts "Fast! Fast!" to drop customers without completely stopping. The advantage must be maintained.

Our stop approaches with Rival hot on our tail, lights flashing and threatening to pass. Another bus is oncoming with frightening imminence. As soon as we slow, Rival swings out and floors it. Disembarking, horns blare as the two buses careen toward each other, with Rival just tucking back in to avoid a surely fatal head-on collision. Conductor, watching intently, chortles. Rival has won this round. "Ze komo kwam bili! (thank you very much!)" I shout back as the bus roars back into battle, strangely sad that it will be my last ride.

Last Week: What the Bloggers Say

2008-02-11T12:44:00.000+02:00

*A diligent effort to make one post a day before I head home*

Chris, as per usual, has used his words to great effect in describing in the emotions that go along with the feeling of impending return from his JHR experience. I'll offer my own ruminations in due course, but for now, check out his. Got me thinking.

Zambia: Music From the Official CIDA Intern Soundtrack

2008-02-08T10:58:00.000+02:00

With an MP3 player, decent bandwidth, satellite radio and city full of people that are perpetually (sometimes annoyingly) listening to music, there's been a certain soundtrack to the intern experience. Below are the ones I know for sure; most Zambian songs blend together into one Nyanja/Bemba pop blob and I can’t be bothered to find out the track names of office gospel anthems.

1. M.I.A. - "Paper Planes"
Given my distaste for Zambian immigration, the "If you catch me at the border I got visas in my name" line and multiple gunshot sounds fuelled a dark fantasy of murderous omnipotence at customs.

2. Akon - "Don't Matter"
Sung along to poorly in at least three different countries. Is this song as stupidly popular in Canada? Belt it out and people will join in, guaranteed.

3. Sean Kingston - "Beautiful Girls"
This song had me feeling suicidal at times. Catchy, though.

4. Kanye West - "Stronger"
The song that made me so desperate to download music that I found the Russian $.15/track dealy (www.mp3sale.ru).

5. J Dilla (ft. Pharoahe Monch) - "Love"
Asthmatic solidarity and admiration for Monch's singy-rap over one of Dilla's best beats. Props to SC for the heads-up.

6. Lucky Dube - "Slave"
First real African (Akon doesn't count) on the list. A sentimental choice as the poorly-named Lucky was murdered in October just as I was getting into his music. Pour one out for a Lusaka taxi legend.

7. Saul Williams - "Tr(n)igger"
Politically incorrect for Caucasians to like, but a stellar hype track for running or general stress relief.

8. Foo Fighters - "Next Year (live)"
Besides the lyrics applying to my temporal situation, I liked the accordion they threw in on the Skin & Bones live version.

9. Danny - "Kaya"
The song most likely to drift over the wall from Kalingalinga (the upscale slum close to my place) when I'm trying to sleep. Crazy Zambians all hopped up on shake shake.

10. Lupe Fiasco - "Paris, Tokyo"
Globalization, a mention of Africa and the challenges of maintaining long-distance relationships. Relevant much?

11. Jay-Z - "Party Life"
"When you're used to fillet mignon it's hard to go back to Hamburger Helper." Indeed. But what about the other way around?

12. Timbaland (ft. Justin Timberlake) – “Apologize”
After initially despising this song, I found myself singing it in the bathroom after hearing it about five times during a recent night out. Embarrassing perhaps, but worthy of inclusion.

13. Amy Winehouse – “He Can Only Hold Her”
There’s something about this whole album that’s just meal-makin’ music. We tried it at the Scottage in the summer before I left and it caught on.

14. 9^th Wonder – “Sun is in the Sky (Instrumental)”
With three months of straight-up sunshine in Lusaka, this soulful instrumental from a favourite hip-hop producer became an early anthem.

15. Pharoahe Monch – “Desire”
The title track from my favourite rap album of 2007. “Who am I? The poetical pastor/Slave to a label but I own my masters”

16. Seu Jorge - "Team Zissou"
Not one of his more famous David Bowie covers, but full of Latiny goodness. Hard to believe this guy is Knockout Ned from City of God. Going to South America next.

17. Dangerdoom (ft. Talib Kweli) – “Old School”
“I draw on anything for inspiration/A fond memory, a piece of paper, walls in a train station/It’s just that I’m Old School like that/Roll that rap over soul loops like that”

18. Tom Petty - "You Don't Know How it Feels"
An odd list-ender, perhaps, but it's what reminds me most of the 'Classic Rock' station on satellite radio, the usual setting for barbecues and house parties. This classic sing-a-long TP track seemed to be in rotation every time, bring a spirit of togetherness to housemates and bewilderment to neighbours.

'Lusaka's Ditch Flower'

2008-02-04T11:03:00.000+02:00

Go for a walk anywhere in Lusaka - even in my yuppie suburb - and you'll invariably come across an empty carton of cheap 'beer' rotting in the ditch.

Owing to the fact that my Zambian friends and colleagues would never touch the stuff and it's only sold in compound areas, I hadn't tried the fabled 'Shake Shake' opaque beer until last night. And soon, provided I can get it back safely, so will you.

Often sold out of a vat in the back of truck, I tried the far less dubious factory-made variety (see picture). For about $2.50, I got four litres in a bag that smelled like stale beer and socks. Not surprising considering the cartons aren't completely sealed; a little hole needs to be left in the top to facilitate escaping gases as a result of the ongoing fermentation process inside. But evidently, this also leads to a little bit of the liquid squirting out from time to time.

And what a liquid it is. Rancidly sour, yet sweet with floating maize meal bits and notes of "sour green apple and barnyard." Stomaching a small glass felt like a Fear Factor triumph.

Read more reviews of 'Chibuku' here. They're appalling. A mouthful is compulsory for attendance at the Importation Party. It is International Beer, after all.

Yay or Nay: Victoria Falls

2008-02-01T09:27:00.000+02:00

It's come to my attention that I have roughly two weeks left in Zambia, and have yet to see it's biggest (some say singular) tourist attraction: Victoria Falls.

It's been more coincidental avoidance than deliberate ignorance, but it'll take deliberate effort to make it there. I'm not sure if it's worth it. I made the comparison of 'If you were in Ottawa for 6 months and leaving Canada imminently, would you go to Niagara Falls?'

Thus, I put the question to you: should I take time out of my not-so busy schedule to see what the locals call 'The Smoke that Thunders'?

Yay
- With the rainy season at its peak, the Zambezi is going to be in full flow going over the edge
- As co-workers that have seen both Niagara and Victoria Falls attest, Vic is bigger, better and far less gawdy
- After seeing the better part of the entire country, a trip to Southern Province would be a good Zambian capstone (note: I hate the word 'capstone')
- Mosi, the national beer that I've drank in copious quantities, is named after the waterfall
- The vendors might be selling 'The Smoke that Thunders' bongs
- My Scottish ancestry and interest in African history dictates that I should learn more about Livingstone (the explorer who 'discovered' the falls)
- If there are any retarded curios I haven't bought yet - like that life-sized buffalo coffee table - they'll have it down there
- I can see Zambia's last remaining rhino with it's two-man anti-poaching security detail

Nay
- It's six hours (at best) by bus or a ridiculous 18 hours by train
- I promised myself I'd avoid road travel and potential 'Bus Plunge Horrors'
- It's allegedly one of those 'Now what?' natural wonders
- I think other people will be more disappointed than me if I don't go
- Everthing there is overpriced, of course, and I'm running seriously low on funds
- I might find myself in the ultimate annoying tourist situation: not being to take a picture without getting other picture-takers in the shot
- The river might be so raging as to prevent good views (from the mist), flyovers or rafting
- A bridge or road washout could mean not getting back to Lusaka in time to go back to Canada
- I'd like to perplex people by not doing the 'Annoying African Safari-Goer' things

Rules for My Return

2008-01-24T10:05:00.000+02:00

With February 18 fast approaching, social obligations are starting to add up. Thusly, as a general guide, I'd like to lay some ground rules to avoid oft-asked questions, gross speculation and misconceptions.

1. Don't ask me: "How was Africa?" I wouldn't ask you about North America. Zambia, fine. Lusaka, better. But not the entire continent. Unless you have an entire night for a ground-covering conversation over drinks, which I'm fine with. I'll blab for hours if asked this question.

2. Don't expect a curio: As much as I would love to bring everyone an ebony serving spoon with a warthog carved into the handle, I hate craft markets.

3. If you ask me questions I've obviously answered through the blog, I'll be mildly annoyed: Not to be a jerk, but if you really wanted a general sense of what I was doing here or the places I visited, you could have checked this place out once a month.

4. No, I didn't get (too) sick: Save a month-long bought of diarrhea at the start, I've been as healthy as I would have been in Canada. Knock on wood - no malaria, worm infestations or flies laying eggs in me. Thanks to a much more natural diet and climate conducive to outdoor exercise, I actually feel great.

5. Yes, I got robbed: But it was all in the totally-my-fault-for-being-careless kind of way. One Gillette Fusion razor shaft and a few hundred dollars in Dar-es-Salaam isn't too bad, but I don't want have to recount it over and over again.

6. Don't ask me to speak with clicks: I have the most superficial knowledge of Zambia's predominant languages - Nyanja and Bemba - neither of which have clicks. Those are South African languages like Zulu and Xhosa, of which I'm totally ignorant.

7. I haven't become a bleeding-heart 'save the world' type: I'm not about to organize any benefit concerts, toy drives or go on any Bob Geldof-approved rants about how we need more foreign aid. If anything, I'm more skeptical about the West's attempts to help places like Zambia, including things like CIDA internships, media training and importing our idea of human rights.

Soccer Night in Africa II

2008-01-23T09:23:00.000+02:00

Over at Out of Africa I've been blogging about the African Cup of Nations, and figured I would offer something of a more candid update in here.

Despite heartbreaking power cuts (see: in the middle of Nigeria - Ivory Coast), the tournament has been a cultural spectacle and a convenient excuse to socialize and drink. The perfect way to ride out a mostly reponsibility-free last month. And the football's been pretty damn good, too.

On Sunday, Ghana belted a last-gasp winner to start the tournament. Monday, the Ivory Coast narrowly edged fellow West African favourites Nigeria through Salomon Kalou's zig-zagging wonder goal. Last night, Egypt stormed out of the gate with a surprise 4-2 victory over Cameroon, including this cracker from the auspiciously-named Zidan.

Later in the evening, it was Zambia's turn against hard-to-cheer-for Sudan. With the power out again and only two hours until game time, it was a race against time to find an adult beverage establishment with a back-up generator. We ended up at Smuggler's Inn, the same seedy joint that I wrote about in September when Zambia shocked South Africa to qualify in the first place. After hearing horn-blowers and seeing national kitsch for the better part of the day, I was ready to brave the near-riot atmosphere, pesky prostitutes and eventual drunk drivers to see the nation's gloriously-named Chipolopolo (Copper Bullet) Boys.

Though Sudan's equally ridiculously-named Nile Crocodiles are previous tournament winners, they looked wholly outmatched by Zambia's enthusiasm, and, dare I say, organization. It was champagne football from the Copper Bullets; three minutes in, a clever one-two passing move opened up space for Chamanga, who drove in a determined shot from the edge of the box. To everyone's delight, domination ensued and Zambia ended up winning 3-0, sending us into a night of erratic, honk-filled driving.

"We want Eto'o! We want Eto'o!" was the chant nearing the end of the match (Eto'o is one of Africa's most famous players and plays for Zambia's next opponent, Cameroon). I can't wait until they get him on Saturday - I'll be watching intently.

An Evening in Lusaka

2008-01-19T11:38:00.000+02:00

Since the rainy season started a couple months ago, mornings have become a dreary affair; always damp, overcast and breezy. Warm oatmeal and coffee makes up for not having hot water for a scalding morning shower. My Cord hoodie has replaced a tank top as the standard around-the-house attire.

Afternoons are even darker: sometime between 10am-1pm, the grey morass of sky coagulates into hideous black storm clouds. Once the wind picks up and the internet or satellite TV cuts out, the t-banger (thunderstorm) is imminent. Locals scurry about with umbrella in hand, hoping to reach their destination before it starts. Others huddle under awnings and mango trees, hunkering down to wait out the storm.

By 5 o’clock the rain has stopped and people are heading home from work, trying to navigate flooded roadside paths choked with mud and fetid water. On my route to the mini-bus, I strategically criss-cross the street to avoid the worst ponds and walk on the asphalt when vehicles aren’t whizzing by.

Around 6, the clouds part and the first daily glimpse of sunshine radiates the earth, producing that sun-drying-out-wet-earth smell. As I head out for my nightly jog with the sun at my back, there’s often a full-arc rainbow in the east for me to run towards. Leaving the apartment complex, I pass by full-blooming gardens and trees swollen with fruit, the smell of roses mingling with the evaporating rainwater. With the usual regalia of confused stares, I’m out of the walled compound and off on my route.

I plod along past the serious-looking Chinese workers building a private hospital across the street; wave to the guards I recognize; politely decline taxi offers and thank people for moving out of my way. The only annoyances are packs of commuting school kids and marauding clouds of vehicle exhaust. With Saul Williams or N.E.R.D. piped in though your earphones and the exercise endorphins coursing through your body, it’s easy to forget where you are and get lost in an inner monologue.

By the time I race past a long homestretch of flowering vines and come to a stop at the Cypriot embassy, the road is nearly dry from the day’s rain. Ambling to my front veranda as the sun begins to set, I drink water and stretch before sitting down to take in the evening noises. The compound cat meows and prances around, eating the nymphs that begin to stir at dusk. Zambian music filters in from over the horizon as the bars gear up for another weeknight of all-night drinking. Crickets, frogs and some strange bubbling noises complete the strange symphony.

I usually sit out on the front stoop until the timed lights buzz to life and turn on, interrupting my thoughtful solitude as I head inside. It's something I'll really miss about this place.

Comin' Straight Outta Africa

2008-01-14T10:54:00.000+02:00

Some time ago, I was blabbing on about a Jason Shim-inspired opportunity to do some blogging with CIGI, the Waterloo-based governance think-tank. Two months on, I finally convinced them to let me "comment on relevant public policy and current affairs topics and issues based on personal experience and expertise." My contract, basically three posts a week for a monthly pittance, starts today.

Since part of the deal is 'peer engagement', consider yourselves cordially invited to help me get Out of Africa. My first post explains what you need to know. I'll throw a permanent link on here somewhere in the off chance you want to visit more than once.

Comments make me look busy and important. Leave them.

Afro-trippin'

2008-01-08T10:17:00.000+02:00

It’s the first day back to work after the holiday break, and the place is dead quiet. Besides the birds (and their chicks) that have slowly been building a nest in my office and the swishing of the pool outside the door, there’s a beautifully reflective silence. “I wish it could be this relaxing everyday,” my lone co-worker muses over lunch.

I agree. After blitzing through Southeast Africa for the past three weeks, all I want is peace. Since arriving back in Lusaka last Thursday – sick, stinky and nursing a festering foot sore – I have only left the house for food, internet and to rent the first season of 24. With the rainy season in full effect in Zambia, every cool downpour washes away a layer of mental fatigue and refreshes the soul. The fever broke, the foot is healing and I definitely smell better; I’m ready to reflect on the Afro-trip.

One of the things you have to respect about Africa is its size. Everything is immense. From its distances and poor governance to its heat and natural beauty, it can make you feel impossibly small. Going from Zambia to Tanzania to Mozambique and back again, I covered at least 6000km and only saw portions of a small corner of the continent.

Even within that relatively small slice, there was incredible diversity. The temperate highlands of central Africa gave way to the infernal heat of the east coast; Nyanja and Bemba became Swahili and Makua; mostly Christian places turned mostly Muslim; the thriving port of Dar-es-Salaam contrasted with the economic depravity of northern Mozambique; the black Bantu peoples of the interior diversified into myriad shades of brown as they mingled with Arabs and Asians on the coast. You would even swear there was a twinge of European blood in some of the fairer-skinned Mozambicans.

Maybe it’s a good thing that most African countries are enormous, because one of the miseries of traveling here is crossing borders. Not only do you get hit with gratuitous visa fees and unnecessary waits on the way in, but you have to pay the even more medieval ‘departure tax’ when you leave. Just like living in Zambia, on my trip I ended up paying more for visas than I did accommodation. Again, money that should have been recycled into local economies was being sent somewhere where it was unlikely to help anyone who actually needed it. The benefit of being repeatedly gouged, if there ever was one, was seeing a myopic pattern emerge from the top on down.

In Mozambique, it’s what aid workers call the ‘orphan spirit’. Working with children whose parents have died or are unable to look after them, it’s a struggle to get them to think long-term about anything. When you’re used to fighting only to survive and there might not be a tomorrow, there’s no use investing time, money or effort in anything that doesn’t bring immediate reward, or so the theory goes. As a result, stealing, cheating and general malfeasance ensue.

Since many in the government came out of similarly desperate circumstances, and most African countries were hastily abandoned after colonialism, politicians exhibit the same ‘survive first, ask questions later’ attitude. Even the hospitality industry, which should be based on customer service and satisfaction, is shockingly near-sighted. In heavily touristed Zanzibar, an hour’s wait for food was normal, the hotel staff lost bookings, security deposits and treated paying guests as more of a nuisance than the source of their livelihoods.

As a casual traveler with enough money to pay the fees and time to wait for my food, it only amounted to a small annoyance that added a layer of exhaustion to a long trip. Contrary to what I think is popular belief, travel in Africa (at least where I’ve been) is neither cheap nor that difficult, but you need to be patient and understanding. Perhaps it finally helped me come to terms with the visa fees I feel I’ve been exhorted to pay for the past six months. The more frustrating thing is seeing places like war-scarred northern Mozambique, with its coral reefs, endless sunshine and friendly people, not investing or even believing in the future.

Questions Arising from Zanzibar

2008-01-06T13:18:00.000+02:00

“To you [white people], everything is new,” the wild-eyed tout reasoned as he tried to press a polished shell into my hand for five dollars. Dressed in dirty second-hand clothes and trying to light a clearly-foraged cigarette butt, he had a point. Like many things about Zanzibar, the semi-mythical spice n’ slave island just off the coast of Tanzania, it made me think.

How did I end up here with four JHR interns (and their assorted associates)? We only met for a week in Toronto during training and there we were reassembled on a beach somewhere in the tropics. We all got along like old friends, though. Must be something about people that ask a lot of questions and drink heavily – you cover a lot of ground with it-getting difference-makers.

Why does Zanzibar feel so much more developed than mainland Tanzania (Colonial equation: Tanganyika + Zanzibar = United Republic of Tanzania)? The easy answer would be because Arab slave traders made a fortune on trading spices and people, but actually re-invested some of it into law and order. Mandatory seatbelt usage, sewer grates that people don’t steal and a deep sense of its own historical importance: haven’t seen that anywhere on the mainland yet.

What’s it like to swim with dolphins? Terrible. You go far too early in the morning after a messy night, get a nasty blister from too-small flippers and ingest litres of seawater for a precious nanosecond of dorsal fin and blowhole.

What was the difference between the east and (more infamous) west coast slave trades in Africa? Zanzibar was one of the main transshipment points for slaves going from mainland East Africa to Arabia, Persia and beyond. But unlike the West African trade – where slaves were cogs in the wheel of industrial farms of the New World, in the east they had more social mobility and were generally treated less as chattels. Also, since intercontinental trade has existed on the Swahili Coast since the sixth century, it outdates its western counterpart by more than 1,000 years. So Europeans didn't invent African slavery after all...

Why am I not hungover after drinking at least five different kinds of alcohol on New Years Eve? Because the air conditioner in the hostel room broke in the middle of the night and I sweated every possible foreign substance out of my body. “These bedsheets ought to be burned,” as my friend Chris aptly put it.

Where do spices come from? Well, thanks to the touristy-but-fun-anyway ‘spice tour’, I got out to a plantation taste fresh cinnamon bark, tumeric roots and vanilla beans. Then they tried to overcharge us.

How come I have no cool ‘Zambia stories’ to tell? It’s the Manitoba of Africa. And Lusaka is its Winnipeg.

Christmas Day in Mozambique

2007-12-26T08:58:00.000+02:00

PEMBA, MOZAMBIQUE – When the staff and students at Arco-Iris Ministries sat down to plan how to feed thousands of villagers on Christmas Day, there might have been more faith in God than in the organizers’ ability to maintain order when giving away free meals and gifts in one the poorest countries in the world.

“Just pray a lot, and love a lot. And that’s it,” implored Erica Grimaldi, one of the student missionaries in charge of the event. With a corps of 40 volunteers set to serve an estimated 2000 people, another asked to be blessed with “God’s wisdom where man’s judgment would surely fail.”

In the five years that Arco-Iris has been inviting Pemba’s village communities for Christmas dinner, problems have always arisen when food begins to run out before everyone has been fed. Last year, volunteers nearly avoided a full-scale riot when gifts and chicken became scarce towards the end.

According to 44-year-old Don Foster, an experienced American missionary who organizes smaller-scale village feedings in and around the ministry, feeding the poor in northern Mozambique during the holidays is a traumatic, if humbling experience. “The greatest culture shock for me is the cafeteria: children run for food, and they beg and they plead and they manipulate. In my entire life in all the countries I’ve been to for Christmas, I’ve never seen people begging and pleading and going hungry.”

With the kitchen staff working all through the night on Christmas Eve to roast 800 chickens and steam over 600kg of rice, everyone hoped that there would be enough. But with an event that’s not even advertised in advance – the villagers just show up in the hopes that the ministry will keep doing it – nobody knew for sure if it would be. “Miracles aren’t just raising the dead or making the blind see,” said Mozambican evangelist Norberto Sango, one of the original children adopted by Arco-Iris in 1995. “If we can pull this off tomorrow, it will be miraculous.”

***
“It is Christmas Day in Mozambique,” stated Sango with a deep inhalation, “This is going to be great!” The volunteers could be forgiven for not sharing his optimism, but when people started to show up around 1:00pm, they were in position and ready to go.

Once a critical mass was attained outside the compound’s front gate, the word was given to release the smaller kids in to the next holding pen – a giant circus-like tent inside the walls – and they sprinted across the grounds under a mercifully overcast sky.

Herded expertly by the cudgel-wielding crowd controllers, the young ones soon had their pop, chicken, salad and rice. For most of them, it was the only time of year when they received such a complete meal, and possibly their best chance of getting anything to eat at all that day.

“My house didn’t make any food for Christmas,” explained five-year-old Nassia Carlos in Makua, the local language. “I’m so happy to receive the food. This year is so good because last year I didn’t get enough.” 14-year-old Juma Bichele added that his “Christmas is very good because many people came and I’m full of food.”

After being fed and watered, the children got gifts ranging from tennis balls to stuff animals to candy before being sent on their way. Amazingly, wave after wave of kids were funneled through the cafeteria with minimal chaos. Even when it came to the last group – the often querulous teenage boys – everyone managed to stay calm in the reassurance that there were enough gifts for everyone. Even if that meant young men receiving stuffed toys and dolls.

“I think everybody had a good Christmas,” said Pedro Jume, a Mozambican volunteer that helped translate instructions into local languages. “They all went home happy and blessed.”

***
Exhausted, sweaty and ready for some personal time on one of their holiest days of the year, the volunteers took a few moments to reflect on what, for many, had been a very different but rewarding Christmas. Though most were far away from home in a hot, humid and mostly Muslim region, they considered it a privilege to be able to serve a decent meal to all those in need.

“They villagers know there’s something different about this place; a lot of the village kids want to live here because they see the hope and light that we have,” said Grimaldi, who normally spends the holidays in Kansas City, Missouri. “Inviting them in shows them why there are so many people from around the world gathered here to serve and love Jesus.”

“In Maputo there’s a lot more Western influence,” explained long-term missionary Jennifer Mozley, who has also spent the holidays in Mozambique’s capital. “There you see a lot more ‘Christmas’ around. You don’t see so much of it here in Pemba, but even if I don’t see it with my eyes when I woke up this morning I felt it in my heart.” Even Sango, who has participated in the feeding year after year, relished the opportunity to serve once again. “This whole day just makes me want to show people how much Jesus loves them. This is a direct love, like ‘Boom!’ straight from heaven to them.”

But as much as the day meant to the missionaries, the day belonged to those who, for whatever reason, came to be fed. For those like Don Foster, it is days like these that keep Arco-Iris relevant in the community and grounded in its own sense of mission. “Iris comes into this situation with one strike against it already because it’s foreigners and not Mozambicans. Iris has to prove itself. And every year they prove that Iris loves Pemba. And that Jesus loves Pemba.”

With files from Michael Amido Abibo

Don't Quit Your Day Jobbie

2007-12-24T08:31:00.000+02:00

For anyone with a tragic lack of seeing The Painted Veil, Edward Norton plays a soft-spoken but determined character that has to fight cultural norms to avert a cholera epidemic in colonial China. Minus the colonial China, that’s pretty much what mom does here at Arco-Iris.

With a formal education in nursing and Christianity, she’s made an impressive transition from missionary student and clinician to public health officer for the entire compound of over 500 people. With over 300 of those residents being orphans not acquainted with modern standards of hygiene, the onset of the rainy season (around now) is usually accompanied by the medieval-sounding ‘cholera plague’.

Luckily for her, this place teems with kids wanting the ubiquitous ‘jobbie’. In fact, it’s almost become my mom’s surname, like: “Mama Linda! Jobbie?” As such, she cuts costs on all her projects by hiring one or two responsible people, then giving all grunt work to village kids (ones that don’t live onsite) desperate for something to do. She pays them pitiful wages, makes each work day a lesson in moral fortitude, and for some reason they absolutely love it. What I don’t understand is how she can put up with the hassle of working with these kids: they steal, fight, lie and cheat each other like that’s their jobbie. I can’t count how many times mom has thrown up her hands saying “Ugh, no more jobbies!” A cudgel would have made a fine Christmas gift, I think.

The kid that waters plants only does the ones he knows get checked. The latrine shithole diggers, in a rather intrepid move, have sub-contracted their wage to even younger kids who’ll work for less. Construction workers bribe the guards to let them steal materials. Cash payments are cynically ‘lost’ within hours. A work pair that got paid together fought so much over a single bill that it actually ripped in half. Someone with access to the compound has been stealing gasoline and threw a dead cat in the drinking well.

Each screw-up comes with a maternal morality check that reminds me of how I was scolded for misbehaving as a child. The lectures are almost word-for-word. Maybe it’s that sense of evergreen motherhood that gives her the patience to give jobbies to even the most incorrigible children. With the corrosive influences they have in the village – alcohol, idleness, abuse, neglect and like – hopefully the life lessons they learn on the jobbie will make up for their minimum wage.

Mama Linda!

2007-12-23T22:32:00.000+02:00

PEMBA, MOZAMBIQUE – I knew it would be an exhausting week when, arriving in Pemba straight from the stinking heat of Dar, the kids were upon me before I could get out of the truck and into my mom’s house.

“Mama Linda! Mama Linda! Mama Linda!” they cried into the fading twilight, chasing after our Land Rover as it roared up the hill towards the missionary compound. Just when I thought we’d lost them, a particularly determined pack raced around the corner into full view. “BROTHA BRANDON!” was all I could make out as spindly arms and Portuguese greetings came flying at me from all directions. And so began the week at Arco-Iris Ministries.

It was a welcome change at least. After a solid week of traveling and drinking, I was ready for a spiritually fulfilling Christmas detox on the beaches of northern Mozambique. Despite my awkward lack of evangelism, I was willing to deal with the southern accents, ridiculous heat and wily orphans of the compound to see how faith-based development works (or doesn’t work, like the agnostic variety). Plus, my mom was rumoured to be a chicken farming, latrine building, public health officiating missionary banker nurse who announced months ago that the Biological Son would return for the holidays.

Onboard the TAZARA Express

2007-12-22T15:27:00.000+02:00

With a Mao-like wave of his hand, an elderly Asian man bid the train goodbye as we squeaked and groaned our way out of Kapiri Mposhi. China had built the TAZARA railway in the 1960s to link the formerly left-leaning countries of Zambia and Tanzania, and judging by its austere stationhouse and poorly translated Mandarin signage, it hadn’t changed much since the Great Cultural Revolution. With 1892km to go to Dar-es-Salaam, I was hoping the tracks weren’t made out of pig-iron.

We clanked through the Zambian countryside for an entire day, the only remarkable occurrences being the odd bone-crushing jolt or clanking past a decrepit rural station. At an estimated trip length of 48 hours, this was the ‘express’ train, not bothering to stop at the ghosts of what used to be tiny country outposts, long since overgrown and stripped of all their valuable materials.

When the train did screech to a halt every now and then, some equally shady figures raced to hawk fruit, freshly roasted chicken, top-up cards and cigarettes at window-side. Though the dining car had shockingly respectable food, it was a real novelty to ‘order’ from your berth, even if it brought about the usual gaggle of beggars and on-lookers. The panhandlers wanted pens, soap or empty bottles while others seemed happy to just observe all the commotion in a place where few people, let alone a train full of wide-eyed travelers, ever visited.

Chugging high up into the central African plateau, we finally crossed into Tanzania – with all the usual arcane hassles with visas, immigration, etc – at about lunchtime on the second day. Newly-planted maize lined the plains at the foot of the ‘serious’ mountains (that’s the only name for the range that people could tell me), checkerboarding the countryside in a mosaic of pastoral life in the highlands. Women and children bent double cultivating would pop up from the field, rudimentary farm implement in hand, to smile and wave at the passers-by. Remembering how I used to do the same sort of thing as a nerdy train-kid, I usually waved back.

This is the Africa I wish everyone could see, I scrawled in my journal (good penmanship was impossible unless the train was stopped). People look happy, the place is clean and even the beggars are shilling for respectable things. Many even dress in the most amazingly coloured local textiles – not the dirty castaways of first-world fashion trends. I think I’ll shed a single tear if I see one more kid in a tattered Quebec Nordiques jersey…

Descending into the infernal heat of the coastal plain on the final morning, I awoke hot, sweaty and hungover to find that I’d slept through the game reserve portion of the trip, missing giraffes, elephants and the like. A fair price to pay for a fun night with some Zambian guys, Finnish journalists and a bottle of tequila.

By the time it hit midday, we were making our way through Dar’s outer slums as the temperature went higher and people’s faces grew longer. This was more of what I was used to – the grudging acceptance of urban poverty and the desolate, filthy landscape it produced. At least if you were poor up in the mountains you had fresh air, beautiful scenery and the TAZARA train to keep you company.

Going Coastal

2007-12-13T13:00:00.000+02:00

After five months of Lusaka's terra firma, it's off to Africa's east coast and the Indian Ocean for the holidays. As usual, I'll try to correspond as often as I can, but things will probably be fairly quiet until the new year.

That said, I hope everyone enjoys the festive season with their family and friends; I'll be trying to do the same over here, strange as it may seem in a sub-tropical, majority Muslim region a world away from home.

Christmas! (apparently how Zambians express seasons greetings to each other)

When This Is Over

2007-12-09T13:00:00.000+02:00

Though I'm not leaving for another two months, it feels like my time in Zambia - at least in terms of doing anything useful - is just about over. I'm off to Tanzania on Friday and won't be back in Lusaka until the new year, at which point I'll really be looking forward to coming home, February weather be damned.

Planning an overland trip across a continent that practically dares you to try; applying for grad school; helping JHR develop a plan for future trainers in Zambia; dreaming about having my own kitchen with really good knives and cooking implements - that lame duck feeling has crept up on me like the holiday season, bringing a similar sense of bewilderment and 'needing to get things done before it's too late.'

Playing Guest Editor

2007-12-05T09:47:00.000+02:00

Of all the PANOS projects I've been a part of so far, guest editing a special edition of Ground Up magazine has easily been the most rewarding. At least when people ask me what I did in Zambia, now I'll have a physical product to show them.

At an NGO where my impact can be difficult to measure at times, it was a privilege to design, implement and execute a project of my own. On a short-term internship (compare my seven months with the usual two years of UK and US volunteers), this was probably the only chance I had to start something from scratch and see it through.

With the generous support of the Norwegian Agency for Development Co-operation (it's been a crash course in donor politics, too), in late August I got my own budget to pay African journalists to write about how communities have adapted to climate change. Eventually, their work would be published in Ground Up - an international environmental magazine - and distributed at this week's climate change conference in Bali. So off I went.

With a $500 award for each feature, there was no shortage of applications coming in from all corners of the continent. We eventually agreed on writers from Namibia, Ethiopia, Kenya and Swaziland, and an award-winning photographer from Nairobi. My nagging demand was that they tell the stories of those most affected by climate change, usually small-scale farmers and their families in Africa's rural areas, and what they have done to respond or adapt.

That might sound simple enough, but it was a real struggle. The culture of journalism here in Zambia (and across the region as I'm learning) is to repackage official pronouncements, speeches and press releases as 'news'. Everyday people, unless they're rioting, lynching or dying, rarely matter. Last Saturday's lead story in the country's leading (only) independent newspaper was that the president has been feeling lonely lately.

It's not usually the reporters' fault as they lack the resources, time and editorial direction to write investigative, interview-based stories. Most of them are so poorly paid, pumping out one-interview stories with officials who pay for transport is the only way to put food on the table. So it felt good to give the Ground Up journalists the financial freedom to get out of their respective capital cities and talking to some real people. With their storytelling potential released on an unsuspecting African public, I thought I could just sit back and watch them to tear the lids off climate change stories across the continent. That was three months ago.

Old habits died hard for most. First drafts came back mostly with how NGOs, scientists and governments were trying to mitigate climate change for small farming communities. Line ministers were quoted at length. The main adaptation they 'discovered' were genetically-modified seed varieties, one of the most top-down, unsustainable and unrealistic responses to climate change. One story contained no interviews whatsoever. Another completely plagiarized an Associated Press story. "Yeesh!" as the say in Zambia.

While the narratives were mostly salvageable, almost all the reporters had to be sent back into the field - the real field this time - to capture the voices we were looking for. The storytelling potential was certainly there, but it was taking a lot more than money to realize.

Finally, through an elaborate system of editing, emails and phone calls, we managed to anchor each story in community-based oral testimony. People in Swaziland's low veld were cultivating drought-resistant crops in water-saving trench gardens, irrigated with recycled dishwater. Villages around Mount Kenya were reforesting the hillsides to earn carbon credits. Our man in Nairobi came through with a stunning photo essay on how climate change is driving Africa's rapid urbanization. It was all very exciting. And then came the production process.

Having spilled water on my Mac during the long writing process, using Adobe InDesign was out. That meant borrowing my co-worker's laptop in the evenings to use an eight-year-old version of CorelDraw was in. Let's just say I can see why that program is obsolete in most parts of the world.

After the magazine file went mysteriously corrupt, I misspelled 'community' on the cover and we acknowledged the wrong donor organizations in the credits (which led an actual "stop the press!" command), I don't know who learned more from the process - myself or the journalists. I think we're both proud of the end product, though, which was hot off the press hours before my colleague left for the climate change summit in Indonesia.

The Rainbow Nation?

2007-11-28T09:44:00.000+02:00

Sometimes you call tell a lot about a country by its flag: Ireland's peaceful white in between Protestant orange and Catholic green; Zambia's ubiquitous fish eagle atop liberation movement blood, black skin and copper; America's infamously bold stars 'n' stripes.

South Africa's current flag, adopted on the eve of multiracial elections in 1994, is one of the most telling. Though it doesn't look like a rainbow, it has six colours all the same - supposedly a mix between the ANC emblem, the Dutch flag and the Union Jack. Fitting for a country proclaimed to be the 'Rainbow Nation' after the fall of apartheid.

But even though the country's people - Zulus, Xhosa, Khoisan, Boers, Britons, Indians, Chinese... - are far from monochrome, the singular reality of life is that it stinks to be poor in a country where people of all colours are becoming increasingly wealthy. According to most of the people I talked to down there, this is the unsurprising source of their problem with violent crime.

***

I was excited to go to Nelson Mandela Square. I pictured some European-looking quadrangle in downtown Johannesburg where people of all walks would be enjoying a beautiful Sunday afternoon. So it was to my dismay that as soon as the impressive city skyline appeared over the horizon, the taxi driver turned sharply and headed towards the suburb of Sandton (maybe a bit too sharply as we cut off a wild-eyed motorcyclist who tried to punch out the driver's side window with us both going about 130km/h).

"What's in Sandton?" I asked, wondering where my shop-a-holic colleagues were taking me on my self-declared Cultural Experience Day. "Rich people," the driver deadpanned.

Barely noticing the townships (apartheid-era ghettos for black people) whiz by, the buildings steadily climbed higher until they resembled those condo complexes beside the Gardiner in Toronto. In the heart of Sandton City - an even ritzier mall than Menlyn Park with all the big designer labels - is the heinously-named Nelson Mandela Square. I wasn't feeling the ubuntu personally, but whatever, I had a gourmet meal and bought a $30 t-shirt to get rid of the Rand I had left over from my daily 'allowance' (see: wasteful NGO spending). I guess that passed for my desired cultural experience.

***
Bloated from wine and birthday cheesecake, we raced back to airport as the sun set over the city. I had picked up a pamphlet in Sandton that advertised the Township of Alexandra as one the 'attractions' of the area. In the new South Africa, it seems even the most notorious ghettos have shopping malls and tourist boards. The most infamous of all townships, Soweto, will host the final game of the World Cup in a new 100,000-seat stadium. The problem now seems to be keeping the newly-arriving slum dwellers - rural migrants, refugees from Zimbabwe, Nigeria and all over Africa - from squatting on the fringes.

The freeway, winding its way around a hill atop Alexandra, offered a perfect view on the way back. Housing half a million people in just eight square kilometres, a sprawling but orderly grid of colourful one-room homes carpeted the hillside, tethered to central power lines in a tangled mess of wiring. In the fading daylight the perfect rows almost had the spectrum of rainbow, if it weren't for a black mass of shacks that abutted one end of the settlement.

Celebrating Africa's Humanity

2007-11-27T16:08:00.001+02:00

MENLYN PARK MALL - If the folks in

South Africa

can build a mall like this, they shouldn’t have any problems with the stadiums for the 2010 World Cup.

Five tiers of gleaming steel and glass. Shops ranging from the Apple Store to Aldo. McDonald’s. Sushi. Real espresso. A black and white Santa Claus.

This level of sophistication and inclusiveness must have impressed the FIFA selection committee, who have shown some serious gravitas in choosing and sticking with South Africa to host. It's not an easy job to bring the world's biggest sports tournament to a nation struggling to deal with racial reconciliation, a violent crime epidemic and the weight of an entire continent on its shoulders.

"This is Africa's World Cup - not ours" the taxi driver told me as we drove past the newly renovated Loftus Versfeld Stadium in Pretoria. "We're going to do this right." Outside an enormous billboard is emblazoned with the tournament's tagline: 'Celebrate Africa's Humanity.'

As presumptuous as it is to make 2010 a referendum on Africa's future, that's what inevitably will happen to a continent that many see as having no internal distinctions. Even though Africans enjoy a strong sense of solidarity and brothahood, it's bizarre to think that its 800 million people - many of whom have never stepped foot in a mall, been to a professional soccer game or sipped a double espresso - will somehow be judged by what happens thousands of kilometres away in places like Menlyn Park.

Out of Africa Africa

2007-11-24T19:23:00.000+02:00

PRETORIA – “I flew in from Zambia, though I’m obviously not from Zambia – Canada actually,” I tried to explain as we made introductions in the Johannesburg airport. “Oh, so you’ve actually been to Africa then,” one of the professors replied with a laugh. “Welcome to South Africa.”

Stranded for the better part of three hours with academics from Zimbabwe, Swaziland and Zambia, it was the most welcome travel delay I can remember. The standard greetings were cynical questions about each other’s heads of state.

How’s Bob? *deep sigh* Alive. How’s Mwanawasa? Doing his best. Unfortunately his best isn’t good enough. How’s the King? (Mswati of Swaziland) Hasn’t married anyone under the age of 13 lately.

Inevitably, talk turned back to South Africa – how it’s the most promising, exploitative and dangerous country on the continent, if indeed it even does belong. “There are really three Africas: North Africa, South Africa and Africa Africa,” one ranted, “the only reason the north and south are special is because they learned how to exploit other people the fastest.”

While I protested that founding a country on a heap of gold and diamonds buried under fertile soil probably had something to do with it as well, I hesitantly agreed. For all the commotion over foreign exploitation of Africa – first by colonial governments and now by Asian investors – South Africa seems to be profiting the most from the relative poverty of its neighbours. Unable to manufacture anything for themselves, whether it be cars, shopping malls or granola bars, southern Africa turns to its undisputed master for anything that requires serious industry.

While it’s great to have a continental powerhouse in your backyard (as Canadians well know), its presence retards the development of certain things it does better. For us it’s national defence. For a country like Zambia, its telecommunications, light industry, construction, retail chains, TV, banking, sports... are all dominated by South Africans.

Finally leaving the airport, we hit Friday afternoon rush hour traffic for the 50km drive to the capital, Pretoria. Stuck in gridlock on 10-lane freeways full of late model European cars and, most worrying of all, listening to Kelly Clarkson, I secretly pined for the potholes, Corollas and Zambian reggae I’d left behind in Africa Africa earlier that morning.

The Spice of Expat Life

2007-11-21T09:36:00.000+02:00

“Bwera mami! Tiyende! Shoot.”
- Brandon’s alcohol-induced mini-bus conductor impression

One of the best things about Lusaka is the awkwardness of expat life. On a daily basis I’m gawked, hawked and talked at, not usually in a menacing way but brusquely enough to keep me on my toes. In return I generally confuse the locals with eating nshima daily, jogging around the neighbourhood with vintage Mel Gibson hair and joking that it's my life's dream to be a mini-bus conductor (the gruff fellow who collects fares and harasses passersby to get on board).

It’s these kind of cross-cultural exchanges that get me through the days of endless back sweat, NGO frustration and homesickness. In a quiet city like Lusaka where it’s easy to slip into work-eat-sleep tedium, these interactions are a welcome reprieve from the inertia of expat life, as uncomfortable as they can seem at the time.

Sometimes, though, the absurdity of living and working over here can get out of hand. Saturday night was one of those times.

Even though I'm not the type to sequester myself in an over-guarded enclave with my own kin, I agreed to attend the 232nd Annual Marine Corps Birthday Celebration on promise of free food, drink and a perverted glimpse into American expat culture.

Lusaka's Taj Pamodzi hotel could have been Anytown, USA that night - the closest thing I can compare it to is a dreadful Amway flag-hag rally my mother once dragged me to in Cleveland. Sure enough, the marines came marching in lockstep to the national anthem, Old Glory and guns a' blazing, their gunnery sergeant barking orders and something about Iwo Jima. The corps - six spindly embassy guards no older than 20 - weren't about to be re-assigned to Gitmo anytime soon, but that didn't stop assorted guest speakers from branding them the heroic defenders of the military-industrial complex for the better part of two hours.

The keynote, none other than the marine commander himself, delivered a Georgia peach of an address. "I don' wanna offend anyone," he said in a beautiful Southern accent, "but I think you can compare the military to a pack o' dogs. The Air Force, y'all are French Poodles; well-trained and purdy, but always ready to nip at someone's heels. The army, well, you're a big ol' St. Bernard; clumsy, a bit smelly, but powerful. And the navy, you gotta be a Golden Retriever; faithful, a bit dopey and y'all love the water (laughs). But us, the Marines, we're like a Rottweiler; always vigilant, always ready to go for the throat. From Okinawa and Iwo Jima to Basra and Fallujah...[insert historically inaccurate militant rhetoric]" After a standing ovation and cutting a 'birthday' cake with a massive sword, dinner was finally served.

Riding a high of alcohol and chicken satay-fuelled nationalism, the weekend warriors hit the dance floor for a frighteningly synchronized Macarena while their teenage daughters mobbed the cigar-smoking marines. As I sat in quiet bemusement at the 'foreigners' table, I wasn't even in Africa anymore - I'd been transported into some expat purgatory which was entirely more terrifying than my attempts at local integration.

"Bwera, tiyen"(Come on, let's go) I said to my Zambian friends with a laugh, "I'll take riding the mini-bus over this any day."

Theft silences Community Voice

2007-11-09T12:11:00.000+02:00

http://www.jhr.ca/fieldnotes/view.php?aid=905

It's so easy forget how most people in Zambia live until you go to places like Soweto Market. Once there, you can't help but sense - see, hear, feel and definitely smell - the difference. Working and living in the suburbs, sometimes I go a whole month without venturing into the kaleidoscope of 'downtown'. Every time I go I can't decide if I wish I went there every day or never at all.

I hadn't been to Soweto since I first got here and, now that we're in the wet season in Lusaka, things appear even worse. The rain that I have been sheepishly enjoying - jogging every evening in the mist, drinking in the moist breezes, lulled to sleep with the tinkling of raindrops on my tin roof - is choking roads with filthy mud, pooling over monstrous potholes and will probably result in the standard annual cholera outbreak.

My biggest complaint is that the precipitation seems to have spawned a plague of airborne ants that seem to enjoy flying in my mouth when I'm running. Not exactly a pestilence of apocalyptic proportions.

That effervescent 'rain smell' that aerates the essence of the earth works the same way in the market, but since the ground is full of all manner of heinous substances, the result is sickeningly different. As we plod along towards the newspaper office, thunder claps and the skies unleash a fury foretold by their bearing - the storm clouds coming from the direction of Congo are always the worst, according to the locals and their innate ability to predict when, and for how long, it will rain.

Vendors scurry about to cover their wares - leather jackets and jeans in the part I was going through - with dirty, hole-ridden plastic sheets. With water obscuring the view from inside my dry, climate-controlled vehicle, the mind drifts back to trivial inconveniences.

Damn - it's laundry day, hopefully the maid got my stuff off the line in time. My clothes are probably getting soaked too.

This Week in Africa: Troubled Countries Edition

2007-11-02T10:53:00.000+02:00

The week started on a depressing note as Darfur peace talks in Libya broke down over boycotts from key rebel factions. Unlike the seemingly successful (though now in tatters) deal brokered between Khartoum and John Garang's rebel forces in South Sudan in 2005, there's no central command to even begin to treat with.

In an unholy mess reminiscent of DR Congo's wars from 1998-2003, rebels are turning on each other, an ineffectual international force is seen as a puppet of the central government and the ruling regime is using all the confusion to carry on its treachery. Let's hope that it doesn't take 4 million dead to bring everyone to the table.

Speaking of Africa's other troubled megalith, Big (since it really isn't all that democratic) Congo is still trying to sort out Hutu-Tutsi friction caused by the fallout of the Rwandan Genocide, some 13 years on. Renegade general Laurent Nkunda claims he's protecting the Congolese Tutsi minority in North Kivu from Hutu extremists, some of which are Interahamwe still kicking around since their 1994 exile from neighbouring Rwanda.

Joseph Kabila's government, a world away in Kinshasa, accuses Nkunda's men of war crimes and has sent in a force to disarm him after he defected from Congo's national army. With general's positions currently being pounded with artillery, 350,000 have fled the area as the Great Lakes region faces yet another humanitarian crisis.

Am I the only one wondering how over-sized polities like DR Congo and Sudan are going to manage not to split up in the longer-term?

Meanwhile, across Stanley Pool in Smaller Congo (Brazzaville), authorities have reacted to the other big story from Africa this week - the row over Zoe's Ark and the 100 or so Chadian children they dubiously planned to export to Europe as as 'orphans.' The Congolese have suspended all international adoptions in the wake of the emerging scandal.

While the facts emerge, hopefully the incident acts as a touchstone for a wider debate on adoption processes and human trafficking, and not just knee-jerk reactions to accusations of brazen kidnapping. The nature of human trafficking in Africa - where children or siblings are often quite willingly sent abroad into indentured situations with the hope of remittances and a better life - is as fascinating as it is disturbing. Adoption procedures, mired in the hopeless bureaucracy of African governments, are understandably short-cut in the name of efficiency.

It will be interesting to see how much the children's 'parents' knew about the removal of the children and what Zoe's Ark (an unfortunate name: two children of every kind?) planned to do with the them once in Europe. The might not have been orphaned per se, but they also might not have been taken against their (parents') will. We'll see.

How to Win the World Cup

2007-11-01T17:07:00.000+02:00

The question of how to win the FIFA World Cup has plagued coaches, players, pundits and billions of football fans around the world for decades. How to win the right to host the tournament, on the other hand, has become decidedly more straight-forward.

After its controversial decision to bring the Cup to South Africa in 2010, football’s world governing body announced on Tuesday that the biggest sporting event on the planet was going somewhere more familiar in 2014 – Brazil. As five-time winners, the home of the ‘beautiful game’ was a natural choice to host the quadrennial tournament. As The Economist was quick to point out, the decision puts Brazil on par with the other rapidly-developing ‘BRIC’ nations (Brazil, Russia, India and China) in welcoming a major sporting event in the next little while.

Like South Africa – another big, democratic, developing world host – Brazil’s corruption, transport infrastructure and security situation are being touted as the nation’s biggest challenges ahead of the competition. 19 cities, all looking for a share of the Cup’s considerable spoils, have applied for just 10 host city locations. The fifth-largest country in the world, the country is bound to have problems moving hundreds of thousands of fans into the interior if places like Rio Branco or Manaus are awarded any games.

But according to FIFA, the biggest problem with choosing Brazil was that it was the only choice.

Under the association’s ‘rotation policy’, each soccer federation – the groupings of nations within FIFA broken up roughly by continent – was to receive the rights to host the tournament in order, starting with Asia (South Korea and Japan) in 2002. After proceeding to Europe (Germany) last year and on to Africa in 2010, South America was up for 2014. The only problem was that Brazil won by default because they were the only country that put forth a full bid. For the supposed greatest sporting spectacle on earth, this was somewhat of an embarrassment.

So Sepp Blatter, the Swiss president of FIFA, has decided to put the tournament back on the open market. Even though it’s an absurd 11 years away, the 2018 World Cup has already received formal interest from 10 different countries. The USA and Mexico are talking about co-hosting, as are the Benelux nations. China – who conspiracy theorists believe the rotation was broken to accommodate – have expressed interest along with potential debutants Russia and Australia.

Frontrunners England, keen to rekindle the glory of 1966 when it hosted and won the competition, have dreamed up the “best British sporting decade in history” as the UK is slated to host the Olympics in 2012, the Commonwealth Games in 2014, and possibly the Rugby and Soccer World Cups in 2015 and 2018, respectively.

Mo's money, less problems?

2007-10-30T14:24:00.000+02:00

For most Africans, Mo Ibrahim is probably better known for founding Celtel - the telecommunications empire that helped make Africa the first continent where cell phones outnumber landlines - than his efforts to promote good governance across the continent.

In Zambia, the company's trademark red and yellow livery is plastered on newspapers, storefronts and even public schools under the ever-present slogan of 'Making Life Better'. It's certainly more visible than any signs of accountable leadership, but the Sudanese-born Mr. Ibrahim is trying to change all that.

Having already made life better for Celtel’s 20 million subscribers in Africa - where the company has pioneered networks in rural areas and operates in war-scarred countries like DR Congo and Chad - he sold his empire for a small fortune in 2005 and 'retired' to start a personal investment fund in a rather volatile commodity: African governance.

As the Water Cooler reported, the newly-minted Ibrahim Index of African Governance uses five different "quantifiable and objective" criteria to judge how effectively a given country is governed. As expected, the obscure but apparently well-governed island nations of Mauritius and Seychelles topped the list while ungovernable Somalia finished an ignoble last.

Last week, Mr. Ibrahim's foundation finally unveiled its much-hyped Prize for Achievement in African Leadership, a $5 million prize awarded to a former president of Mozambique, Joaquim Chissano. The field was limited to heads of state who have left office in the past three years, not exactly a large group in a continent where leaders cling to power past constitutional and rational limitations. Organizers have already admitted it is unlikely the prize will be awarded annually for wont of suitable candidates.

So what long-term effects (if any) will the existence of such a prize have on African governance? Mr. Chissano won for negotiating an end to his country’s 16-year civil war, initiating multi-party elections and stepping down on time. Will the prospect of a large retirement nest egg encourage similar magnanimity amongst his contemporaries? Sadly, I doubt it.

The index is surely a useful tool for policy-makers and the award does shine sorely needed light on continental governance, but for deeply entrenched and enriched African leaders, the prospect of maybe winning some retirement money is unlikely to motivate a paradigm-shift of governance. The phalanx of patronage that surrounds the Mugabes, al-Bashirs and Musevenis of Africa means that leaving office is about more than losing power. It’s a lifestyle change that affects your inner circle of friends, family and political supporters, and is unlikely to be peacefully influenced by outsiders.

Encouraging good governance – so that African leaders preside over peaceful democracies where decisions that are made for the benefit of more than a privileged few – was probably better fostered by Celtel than Mr. Ibrahim’s current venture. Bringing connectivity to the rural areas of some of the continent’s worst-governed countries has allowed the disenfranchised to access and share political information like never before. It has brought the Internet to affordable handsets that are, increasingly, the African gateway to the web.

Mr. Ibrahim has often said in interviews that homegrown success in the private sector is the key to his continent’s salvation; that, like him, enterprising Africans need the economic tools to succeed no matter the government of the day. Perhaps an investment award for Africa's most innovative business idea or a loans programs for small business would see Mr. Ibrahim directly making life better in Africa once again.

On a happier note...

2007-10-30T13:14:00.000+02:00

All-around virtuoso and newest employee of CIGI, Jason Shim, has alerted me to an opportunity to apply for one of these blogs. Since part of the application process is three sample posts, over the next few days I'm going to give it a go in here. Apologies to those expecting the usual affable round-up of Lusaka news and views; It'll be public policy analysis with a human face for the next little while.

Enjoy?

Ruin-minations on life

2007-10-29T10:45:00.000+02:00

The best thing about spilling water on your big fancy computer is that you come to a few important realizations about life.

1. Meaning lies in people, not technology: even though our gadgets make it easier to interact with others, it's the people, not the conduit, that's important. As the popular African proverb goes: a person is only a person because of other people (ie not because of what, or how much they own). It's good to be reminded of the fragility of materialism.

2. Don't get too comfortable: Had all of this not happened, I probably would have extended my stay in Zambia to design publications and do training for PANOS, as staying in Lusaka and doing layout stuff would have been easy. Without the technical ability to sustain that inertia, it'll be back to the drawing board in the spring, which is admittedly much more exciting.

3. I actually learned something: As opposed to past technological disasters of the computing kind, I don't really stand to lose any irreplaceable data if my hard drive is fried. Thanks to some disciplined file back-upping before I left, things aren't so dismal.

4. Be vigilant: The chances of something bad randomly happening to you are exceedingly low (though often most feared). Instead, it's things like this, when you foolishly let your guard down and get burned for your complacency. Lesson learned. Thanks, life.

Anchor Leg: The '05' Road

2007-10-22T11:34:00.000+02:00

Just when I got down to thinking of how to best describe the amazingly exhausting last leg of the trip, Bryna went and did a great job on the JHR site.

In many ways it was the best part of the trip, spending Thanksgiving crammed in a truck experiencing what felt, really for the first time, like the proverbial 'Real Africa'. A fitting end to a safari that frustrated, amazed and journeyed its way across the country.

Leg Four: Safari by the Numbers

2007-10-18T09:46:00.000+02:00

4 – nights spent at Flatdogs Camp, just outside South Luangwa National Park

5 – confirmed hippo sightings in our campsite

20 – hours spent on ‘safari’ game-viewing in the park

4 – members of the usual Big Five viewed

2 – members of my Big Five viewed (croc deathroll and nonchalant warthogs)

2 – items stolen in daring moonlight raid on our campsite

150 – dollars saved from camping/safari fees as a result of said theft

35 – estimated number of Saddam Hussein portraits on policeman’s shirt

2 – number of suspects ‘interrogated’ (see: hopefully not severely beaten) by police

400 – estimated number of buffalo in herd that blocked the road for half an hour

x – number of multiple orgasms allegedly experienced by obnoxious American site-mates

5 – average number of seconds monkey sex seems to last

2 – major food thefts by baboons

1 – number of times I fell asleep from drinking too much white wine on safari

too many – inside jokes made about auto-erotic asphyxiation

8 – days spent without shaving because of stolen razor

3 – number of threats to grow a neckbeard

Leg Three: The Luangwa Road

2007-10-16T15:07:00.000+02:00

The Bradt Guide, the generally crap but singular guidebook devoted entirely to Zambia, described the road from Chipata to South Luangwa Park as more of a goat path than a vehicular thoroughfare.

Since the author of the book just happens to be a safari tour operator, he’s happy to exaggerate the dangers of independent budget traveling to shill for one of his company’s overpriced all-inclusive vacations. With decidedly low-clearance Toyota Corollas in Chipata claiming to make the trip in the standard three hours, all the talk of fording rivers and German tourists dying of thirst turned out to be more hyperbole.

Waking up at an unholy hour on Thursday morning, I immediately regretted my decision to gallivant around town to all hours with my co-workers the night before. I packed it in ‘early’ after having a drink spilled on my crotch at 2:30am, while Binion et al drank straight whiskey and stayed out until 5:00am.

My roommates from Lusaka had arranged for us to go up to Luangwa with an English guy who they randomly met at a campsite. It was amazing as Alan, the affable gardener from Winchester, just happened to be going everywhere we were, even all the way back to Lusaka when it was all over. The five of us would spend the better part of 24 hours crammed into his truck over the next five days.

True to Bradt’s fear mongering, the most dangerous thing about the gravelly road wasn’t the potholes or wash-outs, but the bossy South African convoys that overtake you in an epic cloud of dust, stop up ahead and take photos with the damaged black Africans, let you pass them, then repeat the process all over again. Hey, breu!

But far worse than dustin’ up the other drivers on the road, it was obvious that travelers like them were having a deleterious effect on the locals that lived in the quaint, if materially poor, round-hut villages dotting the landscape. As (usually) well-heeled tourists are the main travellers that ply the road, drive-by handouts have left their footprints on the mentality of entrenched poverty.

Stopping for a pee in a seemingly deserted stretch, they pop up out of nowhere looking for the ubiquitous ‘sweets’. Slowing to pass through the one village, the small children line up shoulder to shoulder, begging hand extended, and began fake-crying on cue. Through the wailing, whatever they were asking for was obscured into the morass of one imperceptible wretch.

Unsurprisingly, how to spend your safari money so that it actually gets recycled back into the local economy – instead of going to the foreign owners of the lodges and tour companys – isn’t covered in the guidebook either.

Leg Two: Kwacha Kum'mawa

2007-10-12T13:50:00.000+02:00

When the sun rose over Chipata, it revealed an eloquence I hadn’t expected for a trans-shipment border town on the very edge of Zambia’s eastern frontier.

Hulking trucks from Malawi ploughed their way through the river of cyclists navigating the bustling downtown strip, pleasantly lined with purple-flowered jacaranda trees and ringed by brownish tree-topped mountains. According to Binion, the Ngoni people – fleeing the genocidal Zulus in South Africa – settled here in the late 19th century in the protection of the surrounding hills.

Cool winds swept down into the valley from over the mountains, giving the air a refreshing, if dusty, quality. At least it wasn’t Lusaka’s alveoli-destroying combination of diesel exhaust and burning garbage.

That’s what I thought, anyway, until we left the confines of the guesthouse and fumbled our way to Kwacha Kum’mawa, the magazine whose staff we would be training over the next three days. The only regional print media in all of Eastern Province, their office is located behind Kapata Market’s smoldering garbage dump. A dubious locale for a workshop to be sure – their production room/internet café had been converted into a ‘conference centre’ fully equipped with a small blackboard and no chalk.

Computers were piled everywhere because the room they were supposed to move them into was also being converted – into a hair salon for re-trained commercial sex workers. Obviously, Kwacha Kum’mawa interprets its role as a community stakeholder differently than most publications. The magazine is on the frontlines of a program that physically goes around to bars at nighttime distributing condoms and leaflets to help curb Chipata’s appalling 26 percent HIV prevalence rate. As I wrote about for JHR, they also offer skills training programs for sex workers who want to be journalists.

In speaking to some of them who had come for the training, I was surprised that they considered commercial sex work a natural segue into community journalism. I’ve heard those ‘I became a journalist by accident…’ stories before, but this? They need basic literacy and reporting skills, but who else gossiped more, had as many contacts and was used to getting information out of people?

And they were just part of the motley (see photo) crew – poets, plumbers and homemakers all turned up, basically anyone who was loosely connected to the magazine and wanted some free training and lunch. It made the workshop frustratingly hard to design – how do you teach layout to someone who’s never used a computer before? – but there was something exciting about the difference-making potential of working with such raw reporters. For once the experience differential was enough on my side for some knowledge osmosis to take place.

Safari Relay, Leg One: To Chipata

2007-10-10T14:55:00.000+02:00

I knew it would be a fun ride to Chipata when Binion, my usually straight-laced colleague, showed up at 9am last Sunday morning with a Castle firmly in hand. "I get excited when I'm leaving the city," he explained. That made two of us.

Of course we got off to a horribly late start, spending the next two hours dilly-dallying around Lusaka making sure we had enough booze and music for the 600km drive. If road trips with friends aren't fun enough, being allowed to drink excessively in the vehicle is the best thing ever.

What was obviously not the best thing ever was eating shitty mayonnaise, again. About 100km and six beers into the journey, the crappy fried food we'd choked down leaving Lusaka was causing some serious distress. Every mountain climb felt steeper, every bowel-shaking pothole more reverberating. After loosening every possible ligature around my guts - seat belt, belt and pants, in that order - I had achieved some sort of gastro-intestinal zen that allowed me to block out the awfulness and enjoy the trip. Innard peace, if you will.

The more Binion drank (pictured above with telltale cider and partial Canadian tuxedo), the more he was a like a schoolteacher in our little portable classroom. Flora, fauna, mountain ranges, river valleys, the sites of gruesome road accidents; he knew them all. We couldn't help but laugh uncontrollably when, whizzing past a seemingly normal-looking cow at 140km/h, he looked back sagely and declared it to be two months pregnant.

The late start proved to be a scenic, if annoying, boon as the sun scorched our backs over the hump of the Central Escarpment, just beginning set as we descended into the Luangwa River Valley. The scraggly leafless landscape of the highlands gave way to the banana and palm trees of the riverine scenery. The only problem, other than the ever-present threat of my bodily fluids spraying everywhere, was that it was dark and we had only made it halfway to Chipata.

Usually, driving at night isn't that big of a deal. It isn't in Zambia either, unless you're driving the last stretch of the Great East Road (actual name) to Malawi. Potholes that were easily spotted in daylight become bone-jarring axle-breakers. The moon and stars become legitimate illumination. Bandits hide in bushes at the side of the road waiting to ambush good Samaritans unlucky enough to help fake vehicle breakdowns.

All that to say when I collapsed in my bed in Chipata, a full 10.5 hours after leaving Lusaka, I was epically exhausted but excited to arrive. Not because I was anticipating a professionally-rewarding training workshop with in-need Zambian journalists; I could finally undo my pants all the way.

Nants Ingonyama! (And other incomprehensible Lion King jibberish)

2007-09-28T09:29:00.000+02:00

Having been cooped up in stinky Lusaka for the past two months and change, I'm finally getting out in the wilds for a breath of fresh air. I hate to admit it, but I'm going on safari.

But in the Swahili-translation sense of a journey, not the multi-pocketed khaki vest, pith helmet and beige short-shorts tourist variety.

Since rhinos are extinct in Zambia, I've made up my own Big Five wish list:
1. Something big and feline successfully killing something deer-like
2. Male hippos goring the calves of other males
3. Crocs doing something that involves the death roll
4. Bull elephants in musth
5. Non-chalant warthogs

It's not like I post regularly enough for anyone to get worried about not updating, but I doubt I'll be able get anything up on here until for the next couple weeks. I promise a full report on Eastern province and South Luangwa on my return.

A Love Letter to Immigration

2007-09-22T12:52:00.000+02:00

Chief Immigration Officer
Immigration Headquarters
Lusaka, Zambia

Re: Paying $700 in visa fees to volunteer in Zambia for 7 months

Dear Sir/Madam,

First let me cordially congratulate you on the grand opening of your new Customer Care Centre, a stunning achievement in superficial improvement. I had the opportunity to stew in frustration in the new waiting area last week, and I’d like to be the first to applaud you on a comfortable choice of furnishings. Your foresight in providing the finest in padded seating is nothing less than visionary.

I would also like to take this opportunity to further commend your honesty in calling long-term visitors, volunteers and immigrants to your fine nation ‘customers’ – just like the hapless cash cows you see them as. Surely these ingrates have nothing more to contribute to national development than exorbitant visa fees; it’s not like they would have recycled that money into the local economy to people who actually needed it. Thank goodness we have institutions in this country that shackle foreign investment and discourage return visits. The distinct privilege of being in Zambia demands your most vigilant protection and restriction.

In conversation with your most esteemed immigration officers, they have expressed disbelief with arguments to the contrary. It is, they would argue, just as frustrating for Zambians to gain access to the frozen wastes of Canada. This tit-for-tat attitude is wholly appropriate for a nation whose people can wait for development while their government figures out how to better antagonize would-be interlopers. There once was a time when Canada flung open its doors to the world to become a more prosperous nation, and we all know how that turned out. Having surged up development indices in recent years, Zambia is well-placed to set an international standard of border protection.

As ever, bold leadership is needed to see this through. Anything less could see the development of a tourist-driven services sector, vital foreign investment in agriculture or, worst of all, the all-out invasion of those annoying peace corps volunteers.

Yours in therapeutic sarcasm,
Brandon Currie

Strange Encounters of the NGO Kind

2007-09-21T11:33:00.001+02:00

Under the baleful watch of PANOS Pictures that encircled the room, distinguished guests and honourary patrons and trickled in at a torturous pace. I'd made the mistake of showing up on time and didn't know anyone. For the hyped-up launch of my host organization's five-year strategic plan, it was disconcerting that I, the lowly intern, was the model of punctuality.

Still, it gave me time to think. Spacing out during some vapid chit-chat with board members and other stuffy types, I was hypnotized by the images. For all PANOS' wishy-washy rhetoric about building media capacity and providing platforms for the marginalized, their photos are visceral - the stuff of World Press Awards.

What would their subjects think of us, assembled in a swanky hotel lobby getting toasty from the open bar, proclaiming how to go about their development? About NGOs who preferred glad-handing with donors to getting their hands dirty with training the journalists who would tell their stories? 15 percent 'administration' fees? The entire African aid regime which seems, more often than not, an exercise in futility?

I excused myself and, nabbing a peanut chicken satay and glass of white wine, wandered around ruminating in the photo gallery. I felt a tap on my shoulder a minute later - my colleagues had arrived and wanted me to meet some Scandinavian donors. I reluctantly went back to work.

Book Club: A Long Way Gone and Graceland

2007-09-19T09:12:00.000+02:00

According to the grandstanding of Vanity Fair, Ishmael Beah and Chris Abani are two of the African writers that “mean nothing less than a golden age of literature from the continent.”

That’s asking a lot of the authors of A Long Way Gone and Graceland, a rehabilitated child soldier and exiled saxophonist respectively, with only four published works between them. You could read their entire catalogue in the time it takes to figure out how to pronounce Chinua Achebe.

It’s clever of VF to say ‘from’ the continent instead of ‘on’ the continent: both Beah and Abani now live and work in the United States, where they’re undoubtedly more well-known than on their home continent. Unsurprisingly, it’s this familiarity with the West that makes both books so easy for us to consume.

Beah’s meandering through bucolic pre-war life in rural Sierra Leone is grounded by his love for American hip-hop artists like Eric B and Rakim and Public Enemy; they become symbols of his humanity in a world awash with African brutality. In a scene where Beah and his friends are about to be executed by villagers who presume they’re child soldiers, the boys perform their rap dancing routine to prove that, no, they’re just innocent kids. Symbolically, Beah’s rap tapes are burned by his commanders in the ceremony that anointed him as a child soldier.

Throughout the midst of his brown-brown-fueled killing spree and subsequent rehab, it’s these same kinds of moments – the boys imitating Rambo movies, having a Coca-Cola with his friends in Freetown – that give the book its Starbucks marketability.

Graceland is a similar proposition, though entirely more complicated. Abani’s tragicomic portrayal of Moroko, a swampy slum in Lagos, is anchored by the novel’s protagonist – an aspiring Elvis impersonator who sneaks out at night to watch American films. Disappointed with the diminishing returns of his career choice, he turns to the more 'African' pursuit of doing odd jobs for Nigeria’s ruthless military regime.

Alternating narratives between Elvis’ childhood in an Igbo village in the countryside and his adolescence in the sprawling capital city, Abani sprinkles recipes for traditional ethnic dishes in between chapters as the book flip-flops between the casual violence of the countryside and the political strife of the city.

The author’s turn is that as Elvis integrates into city life and experiences the West he longed for – the music, movies and Malboro cigarettes – the more he hates it and looks for meaning in his tribal upbringing. As a political exile living in Los Angeles, I wonder if Abani has gone though the same process.

Next up: Paul Theroux’s Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town. There’s nothing like a little travelogue to inspire unattainable regional tourist aspirations.

The Chipolopolo Boys

2007-09-10T11:01:00.000+02:00

The thing with African soccer is its lack of inhibition. Not that Europeans or South Americans are reserved, but there’s certain protocol – organization, technique, non-lethal fan violence – that is ignored to exciting and sometimes tragic results.

Like so much of my brief experience here, there’s no routine, ordinary or usual. There’s a vague overarching goal (whether winning a game, getting a volunteer visa or not dying on the mini-bus) that can be achieved in any way imaginable, so long as it somehow gets done. Reinventing the wheel every day is part of what makes African life, and football, so vibrant and frustrating.

The goal yesterday was for Zambia to qualify for the African Cup of Nations, to be held in Ghana early next year. The Chipolopolo (Copper Bullet) Boys were up against it, needing an away win in Cape Town against continental funboys and group leaders South Africa. *2010 World Cup wistful note: I hope I get to watch game in that stadium*

It was the final game of a bizarre qualification phase for the national team. In June, 12 Zambians died in a stampede when they beat Congo. Last time out (as someone no doubt remembers), Chad somehow didn’t receive their usual drubbing and managed a draw in Lusaka, leading to the ridiculous semi-firing of Zambia's head coach. After already hiring his replacement – a Frenchman – the national media rallied around the flag and successfully argued for his reinstatement. Just last week, a Zambian player dropped dead during practice with his club team in Israel. A circuitous route to Ghana, if there ever was one.

Smuggler’s Inn, the local haunt showing the game on big-screen, was a tomb until the crack of game time. Then they poured in with the usual regalia – scarves, novelty headwear, annoying noisemaking devices – and even a few songs. With an incredibly loud roar for the numbers in attendance, I settled in with a Mosi and hoped my adoptive country could make it to the Gold Coast if I couldn’t; at the very least I’d have more games to watch at the bar.

Everything started off as expected: terrible ball control, frequent losses of possession and errant passing and all over the pitch. But there were equal parts breathless speed, tackling and opportunism that made for the exhilarating anarchy that sport’s all about.

The first half was, from an entertainment standpoint, one of the best I’ve ever seen. Zambia’s tireless pace (if nothing else) tortured the South African defense into a series of embarrassing mistakes, and just six minutes in, the Boys capitalized on a giveaway to take an early lead. The crowd eruption was euphoric if somewhat muted, as if they expected the advantage to be short-lived. I certainly did.

But the team had confidence in spades. 28 minutes in they made it 2-0. Two minutes later it was 3-0 and people just lost their shit. The hardcores stuffed dinner rolls in their pints (a local custom? see photo) and doused each other in beer while casual fans danced carelessly in the aisles. As dusk set in and the game ended – final result 3-1 – a triumphant chorus of car horns filtered in from the road as decorated vehicles raced the streets even faster than usual.

After everything, from scandals to fatalities to braving alcohol-related collisions, at the end of the day the Chipolopolo Boys had qualified. That’s all that really mattered.

The greatest human rights paper that never was...

2007-09-05T11:14:00.000+02:00

I knew something was up when Howard, one of The Advocate's marketing foot soldiers, showed up to my place early on a Saturday morning with an odd request.

Despite having put the paper to bed the previous evening and supposedly sending it off for printing, he wanted all of the original materials: articles, photos and ads. Assuring me that he just needed them for a donor's website, I warily gave him the files and we both went about our weekends.

It never really occurred to me that the editor had secretly planned to redesign the entire paper without my knowledge. Throughout the torturously glacial process of getting the content together for The Advocate's first issue, he had always liked my design, even if we disagreed on everything else.

As the newly 'hired' production manager and human rights consultant, it was my job to make sure the paper looked good and that it stuck to its mandate: the voice of the voiceless. The editor seemed to have other ideas, though, as he wanted his own self-promoting story to run on the cover and, most worryingly, a half-page photo collage of his wedding day. After explaining I wouldn't be able to volunteer my time if the paper didn't amplify unheard voices and promote development dialogue, we agreed to give legitimate content higher priority.

Slowly, better stories filtered in from the paper's remarkably committed journalists. Spending their own time and money in the field doing interviews and internet cafes typing articles, they tirelessly worked the human rights beat to the best of their ability. They talked to kids who had been illegally kicked out of orphanages; subsistence farmers affected by drought; activists shut out of protesting during the SADC summit; people making illegal charcoal because they had no electricity to cook with. It was raw, ragged and a copy editor's nightmare, but had real potential.

Having a drink with two of the reporters after thinking we had finished the paper, we had a laugh at all the fuss over wedding photos and story placement. "We're glad you put your foot down," one tells me, "but now you know how Zambians operate: they get money to do something and promote all their friends and family. Nothing on merit." Satisfied from a job well done, we went our separate ways, looking forward to seeing the paper on the streets.

Half-expecting to see hawkers selling The Advocate at the traffic lights over the weekend, the paper, and its editor, went missing for the next three days. Repeated calls, text messages and emails didn't elicit a response.

Finally, on the following Tuesday I received a SMS from the editor saying the paper was being redesigned because I "hadn't followed instructions"and that I had been relieved of my duties because "I was impossible to work with." According to the message, the paper would be released the following day. As frustrated and angry as I was, I decided to wait until the paper came out to respond.

So I waited. And waited. Finally, ten days later I caught wind that the paper was being officially launched. Having been fired, I wasn't there to witness the fiasco that ensued, but the staff told me there was an insurrection against the editor for, indeed, running his story on the cover and publishing a half-page wedding collage. Worse, most of the human rights content had been either buried or completely omitted. Apparently they berated him into accepting shared decision-making responsibility for editorial placement. "We're so embarassed we can't move in public," one of the staff confessed.

The reporters want me to come back and patch things up with the newly-humbled editor. Others say he didn't really fire me, but gave me more of an indefinite leave. What I'd really like to do is apply for a media grant and start my own nepotism-free human rights teaching newspaper.

Zambia’s economy is booming: NYT

2007-08-27T14:11:00.000+02:00

It's not everyday that Zambia makes headlines in the international media, even less so when it coincides with something I'm doing at work. So when the New York Times busted out a 1000-plus word feature on China's role in Zambia, they had a captive audience (procrastination warning: they'll make you pay to read it in a couple days).

It's come at a good time because I've just been brought on as a consultant to help PANOS organize an international conference on this very topic. We're supposed to be bringing together journalists from China, Africa and Britain to improve coverage of Sino-African relations in all three media markets. The idea is to encourage more nuanced debate around Chinese involvement in Zambia's extractive industries (as the Times did predictably well), because current reportage oscillates between sugar-coated grip n' grins and polemic assaults on everything Asian.

But it's a political minefield: the project is being funded by the UK embassy and one of its expected outcomes is to "manage Chinese influence" (read: limit) in Africa so that it "reflects UK priority messages." This presumably means greater respect for workers' rights and environmental protection, but also implies a certain condescension towards the "Chinese model of development."

Equally frustrating has been the stonewalling coming from the Chinese embassy. They don't want anyone - their journalists, officials or academics - to have to sit through three days of paternalistic scolding. They wouldn't even respond to the Times, so I doubt I'm going to convince them to agree to open dialogue on the human rights situation in their mines.

But they're right to rebuke the disingenuity of the project proposal. It's not that Chinese influence doesn't need a harder look - Lord knows they have co-sponsored the Darfur genocide and provided markets for all manner of poached animal products - but the British government seems more a jealous bridesmaid than a willing partner.

Nifuna ku gula nshima

2007-08-24T14:00:00.000+02:00

If I didn’t want a buzz cut, fade, flat-top, weave, extensions, Afro-perm or French braids, there wasn’t much change of getting a decent haircut in Lusaka, I thought. But after almost two months since my last coif, the mullet had grown unprofessionally long, teetering on the brink of a decidedly un-European mini-Kentucky Waterfall (Clarke, 2007).

Suggestions on where to go from Peter, the nearly-bald Welshman, didn’t exactly inspire confidence – expats here have some of the most garish ‘dos I’ve seen since singular dreadlocks and side rattails in Spain. There’s something about the Zambian frontier that seems to inspires epic head and facial hair.

I thought about going the big hair route, but my Western sensibilities proved too strong. So the other day I found myself at Scruples, located at the nexus of cultural imperialism that is Arcades shopping mall, hoping they would live up to their strangely ethical name. I would have vastly preferred a cheaper and more authentic Zambian experience, but some things you just don’t leave to chance.

Ushered into the hair washing station, I'm treated to the obsequious treatment you’d expect in an over-priced expat joint. The staff buzz around my chair with servile offers of massages, rubs and exfoliants, multiplying my guilt for entering into this neo-colonial arrangement. I resolve to give the wash girl a decent tip for a scalp massage that seems to go on forever, calming my frayed nerves ahead of the Big Cut.

My confidence is shattered as I look over to see an Arab man reaming out my would-be stylist for getting too many clippings down his shirt. After blow-drying him every which way, the customer blusters off and the visibly annoyed employee lets out a deep sigh as he makes his way over to my chair.

We trade non sequiturs as I try and explain the idea of a Euro-mullet – short on the sides, long on top and the back but always with the scissors: fight your predilection to using shears, except for fine tuning. He seems to grasp the concept and starts off in awkward silence. I have no idea if making forced small talk is the norm here too.

In my solitude, interrupted only by the sound of the scissors and the occasional hair pull, I start thinking way too philosophically about haircuts. As I watch the hair fall to the apron and cascade onto the floor, I wonder what information it holds. Years of watching too many forensic science documentaries have taught me that hair is a living spectrometer of your body, recording what was going on when the cells were dividing at the root. Could my hair clippings hold the key to what food poisoned me two weeks ago? Were there traces of nutrients from my dad’s amazing going-away dinner in there?

The resulting stomach rumblings bring me back to more important questions, like where I can get a decently-priced lunch at the mall. Asking the stylist, he looks around plaintively and says that Arabian Nights “serves very nice food for me.” Somewhat irked that he has me pegged for another fickle tourist, I trot out some newly-learned Nyanja. “Nifuna ku gula nshima,” I demand.

After a moment of bewilderment, he laughs heartily and shakes my hand. “You like to eat nshima and you speak Nyanja?! I’m Mwache.” After correcting him that I only speak exactly 5 phrases of local language, but do indeed eat boatloads of mealie-meal, we cover a lot of ground on the importance of cultural immersion in new environments. We go so deep in the onion I barely notice that he’s done an admirably good job on my hair – texturizing, layering and blending with confidence.

Blow-dried and sculpted, he sends me down the road with a friendly wave, both of us relieved that our assumptions about each other proved to be wrong.

Lil' Bob and the ZimZam Twins

2007-08-20T19:01:00.000+02:00

Writing about Zimbabwe this past week has been as fun as it has frustrating. Because as funny as it is to hear Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe proclaim to be "bringing sanity to the pricing arena" or fighting "the brazen imperialist conspiracy," it's deflating to know that too many Africans still believe him.

Zambians have a better vantage point than most, perched atop a long land border with Zimbabwe, sharing Victoria Falls and a colonial heritage as the twin Rhodesias. Having a something of a inferiority complex, Zambians still look south with jealousy. After all, Zimbabwe used to be known as the Bread Basket of Africa and had infrastructure to rival South Africa, even if its independence struggle was considerably messier.

“Zambians are just traders,” a co-worker informs me, as we discuss Zimbabwe over lunch. “Zimbabweans are producers. It’s better there, even now. I know it,” he declares with authority.

It’s easy to see how the perception can be skewed. Zimbabweans that make their way to Lusaka are often economic migrants that cross the border, make money and go home. When I go to see a home available for rent, a stylish Zimbabwean landlady picks me up in her sleek SUV, esoteric computer built into the dashboard. An interior designer, she wants to furnish the place with an African feng shui philosophy.

As she drops me off, reality kicks back in when she receives a disturbing phone call. Her friend, a civil rights activist, has been detained by the Zambian police for printing a protest banner at the local office supply store. During last week’s Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) summit, organizers were careful not to let anyone interrupt the careful stage-management of their flaccid debate on Zimbabwe.

Make the perfunctory pronouncements on finding a regional solution. Vaguely acknowledge something generally not good is happening in the country. Let Mugabe do his routine. Agree with him that Zimbabwe will never again be a colony. Don’t ask why he feels the need to keep restating that stupidly obvious fact.

It didn’t make sense to me. Why would SADC leaders allow one of its most prosperous countries (not a long list) to fester and threaten the stability of the entire region? How can you call 5,000 refugees a week ‘economic migrants?’ Why couldn’t they call for regime change when Mugabe’s has already threatened to sic his youth militias on anyone “disrupting” next year’s to-be-rigged presidential elections? When Weimar Republic-type inflation is so bad Zimbabweans are looking to Zambia as a promised land?

Judging by Mugabe’s rapturous audience at the summit, the answer is obvious: his anti-colonial card is still trump. Even leaders who are blatantly pro-Western, like Zambia’s, dare not swim against the tide of populism. Michael Sata, the leader of the opposition here, nearly won the last year’s election on an anti-Western/China platform.

To most Africans outside Zimbabwe he’s still the formerly-imprisoned hero of the independence era, whatever his faults. Like Nelson Mandela minus the magnanimity of forgiving one’s oppressors and moving forward in a spirit of reconciliation. As South Africa prepares to host the World Cup as the pinnacle of sub-Saharan achievement, and as Zimbabwe slides further into chaos, the value of getting over colonialism will become even more obvious.

A Day in the Life

2007-08-15T09:18:00.000+02:00

7:15 – As usual, I’m woken up by the Nyanja ramblings of the guesthouse staff as they shuffle about at an unreasonably early hour. Muli bwanji?! Nili Bwino! Groan.

7:45 – I fumble my way through a shower in the hazy morning light that filters through the dingy curtains of my bathroom window. The light’s burnt out, complicating the fine art of balancing the hot and cold taps; in between scalding and freezing, I cleanse.

8:30 – Go to the internet café to put together a document package to extend my 30-day volunteer visa, only good for two more days, as per the instructions on the immigration office’s website. I also print off handouts for a human rights presentation we’re giving to journalism students later in the day.

9:30 – Mini-bus downtown to the regional immigration office to find that my careful preparations are for nothing: the clerk wryly informs me that my covering letter is addressed to the wrong person, too explanatory and that we need to pay, again, to have our visas extended for just three more months. It’s one million Kwacha ($300 CDN), only payable by certified bank cheque. If the chief officer feels like it, he might let the one fee cover my entire stay, but probably not. It’ll likely be 1.5 million next time. That Sinking Feeling sets in – what kind of country desperately in need of tourism and foreign investment treats visitors this way?

10:00 – We regroup at an Internet café. I call the Canadian consulate, where they proceed to make things worse: they tell me that even though I’m volunteering I have to apply for the more complicated work visa. Better still, I’ll have to leave the country while it’s being processed, then re-enter at the magical date it’s been activated. The closest border to Lusaka in Zimbabwe. Great. Hello Bobby Mugabe!

10:15 – New information leads us to believe we can get our visas renewed at the national immigration office, back in the suburbs we just came from. We cab it back.

10:30 – Signing the registry, we’re ushered into a room entitled ‘Investigations.’ A lady flips through our papers nonchalantly, eventually saying we still have to pay the one million, but that it’ll be good for however long we stay. The only thing is that we still have to get the certified cheque, take it to the cashier and we’re good. We sign another registry as we leave.

11:00 – At the local bank, I withdraw money only to find that certified cheques are only available to account holders, and it somehow takes 48 hours to sign up for one. We’ll be illegal immigrants by then.

11:45 – Desperate and half-convinced exile is imminent, we return to the office without the Hallowed Cheque to try our luck with cash. I’m more than ready to start offering bribes at this point.

12:15 – After a horrendously nervous wait in line, we finally see the cashier. He informs us that yes, cash is indeed acceptable, but only US dollars. Wad of Kwacha purposely in hand, I conspicuously start counting out one million before he can protest. “Give me the money so I can count it,” he laughs, “I don’t steal that much anymore.” Unsure of how much I actually give him, we get a receipt and are sent down the hall to get a temporary stamp while our visas are processed.

12:30 – To our horror, a cacaphonic horde of American peace corps volunteers pack the hallway leading to The Room. We push our way in to see passports already stacked high on the clerk’s desks for processing. If they break for lunch and we have to wait, we’ll probably have to cancel the presentation we’d spent two days preparing for.

12:50 – Mercifully working through lunch, the clerks finally stamp our passports, giving us 30 more days in the country in which to pick up our new visas which are now in the works. We sign a registry for a third time. The name on the front of the book is ‘Goofy.’

13:15 – Hurriedly order lunch at the ill-named LA Fast Foods. It takes 30 minutes to get our food.

13:55 – Arrive at the University of Zambia, to find we’re supposed to give our two-hour workshop in a stuffy computer room. I respectfully request a new space.

14:15 – In an airy, if rundown, classroom, we finally start the presentation. Compared to the rest of the day, it goes well: we don’t bumble too much, students ask insightful questions and we leave the MA students with an assignment to write a human rights article. Done.

17:00 – Arrive back at the guesthouse, just bushwhacked. I contemplate going to a glad-handing cocktail party, the only real draw being free booze. Even that’s not enough to make me dress up and schmooze.

18:00 – Get groceries, Mosi and some fresh peri-peri to prepare a masochistically spicy stir-fry. The burning hurts so good.

20:00 – I sit and wrote this entry, half in the bag, listening to Mwanawasa butcher yet another prepared speech on public television. He’s imploring the Zambian people to “act in their true character: with order and stability,” during an upcoming Southern African summit in Lusaka. The irony isn’t lost on me as I flip the TV off and finish my post, exhausted.

A drinking club with a running problem

2007-08-13T11:00:00.000+02:00

Something dawned on me as the Land Rover negotiated the treacherously potholed road leading to the Leopards Hill Forest Reserve. So that’s why all the expats drive these things. I still didn’t fully understand why they had altimeters installed in the dashboard.

Faint arrows of white talcum powder cryptically marked our route, each one appearing by the roadside just when we seemed completely lost. The sight of other bewildered drivers reassured us that we were headed in the right direction.

“So are you a Hash Virgin?” my driver asked. Well that entirely depends on what you mean by… “Hash House Harriers, I mean,” she quickly corrected.

“Yeah I think so,” I respond, “I did something in junior high school called a harrier, which was basically just a long-distance run through the woods.”

“This is sort of the same thing, except here they drink and take the piss out of you afterwards. They like to call it a drinking club with a running problem… and have a lot of fun with first-timers,” she explained. At least I’ll have some liquid courage for whatever hazing ritual these mzungus put me through. Hopefully they haven’t been on the wrong side of civilization for too long…

The truck chugs up one final incline and we’re at the meeting point: a grassy plateau overlooking a hazy mosaic of beautifully forested hills. Finally some geographical relief! Lusaka is so damn flat. Wow, this is my first time really out in the bush. Are there, like, lions?

A chorus of friendly greetings from various nationalities calms me as I head to registration. I’m pleased to see a balanced mix of Zambians and expats. At least someone will be subject to domestic law if something happens to me. I make my way to registration. “Hasher’s name?” a grizzled Brit asks with a toothy grin, anticipating my response. “None,” I admit, “I’m a virgin.” He puts an asterisk beside my name.

After a bugle call and some confusing rhetoric regarding the prescribed route, we set off. Having barely recovered from a bought of mild food poisoning earlier in the week, I decide on the walking course, not wanting to upset my precarious balance of bodily fluids.

Along the way I chat up the seasoned NGO workers, busily asking questions about their vast worldly experience. Brittle blades of long grass crackle underfoot as we blaze a trail over rolling hills under the delicate afternoon sun. An eagle studies us carefully as we stop at the top of a ridge, reminding me that we are in the African Wilds. So how ‘bout those lions? “Not a chance”, one Hashmate tells me. “We’re so bloody rowdy we scare everything off, virgin Hashers included!” he exclaims with a wink.

Back at the starting point, the advertised post-exercise antics are well underway as we filter in from the walking route. Kegs of Mosi and Castle lager are rolled off a truck, cigarettes are lit and a large circle is formed around an empty crate where the indecencies are to take place.

Two Master Hashers run the show, following a strict agenda of forcing selected parties to chug beer while regaling them with the Hashers’ Anthem. I’m immediately propped up on the soapbox to answer the standard set of ice-breaker questions, but I can’t even blurt out my prepared answer before the chorus kicks in.

“Ohhh... and cheers to Brandon, he is true! He is a Hasher through and through...” they start as I’m muted by downing my liquid rite of passage. This happens every weekend? I could get used to getting a nice shine on out in the country on Saturdays. Some exercise too. “And it goes down, down, down, down,” the crowd finishes as I conclude my inauguration.

Stasis

2007-08-07T11:50:00.000+02:00

The last week has been sort of a waste-case as PANOS has been in the process of moving into a new office. Last Monday I arrived to work to find my office being stripped and painted (customary upon vacating a premises), then today I arrived at the new place – assured that it would be ready to go after the long weekend – to find the painting crew at in again in my new office. Not wanting to spend another workday with my head swimming in paint fumes and annoyed that I’d walked 45 minutes for nothing, I turned around and took yet another day off.

I thought the free time would be a boon to some important side projects – finding a long-term place to live and helping to launch a community newspaper – but those too have yet to bear fruit.

Despite plastering ads around town, combing the classifieds, networking with whoever will listen and ingratiating myself on Facebook, I’m no closer to finding a house than I was when I arrived. With the knowledge that my hostel, which is too expensive to stay at long-term anyway, is closing down at the end of August a looming expiry date hangs over my head. I’m wary to really dig in and get down to work without the sense of security that comes with have a stable place to hang your hat.

Similarly, my efforts to help The Advocate – more of a good idea than a potential publication – get their first issue off the ground have been frustrating at best. The young upstarts that are trying to get it going brim with enthusiasm for the issues of the day and, from what I’ve read, are good enough writers. They’re journalists that are fed up with the media status quo in Zambia, sick of being muzzled by editors and tired of chronic underemployment.

But the problem is that none of them have any idea how to manage and organize a paper. They’re great beat journalists, extremely hard-working, but sorely in need of top-down guidance and marketing advice. Since they ‘hired’ me as production manager and human rights consultant, the ‘editor’ has broken just about every meeting we’ve agreed upon, missed every deadline and has still failed to deliver any content for layout.

When they approached me couple weeks ago to work with them, they assured me the paper would be community-based and have a human rights focus but it’s become increasingly apparent they’re willing to publish anything under the sun. News, opinion, sports, business, lifestyle and – at my insistence – a human rights section, has cast too wide a net for such a small undertaking. Furthermore, they want the paper to be national and have correspondents stationed all over this huge country, which even the established dailies can’t maintain.

They need to start just in Lusaka, establish a reputation with quality critical content, and start courting advertisers to make the paper sustainable (they currently only have enough money for six weekly issues). I have a meeting this afternoon with the editor to tell him so, if he doesn’t cancel.

Mic'd

2007-08-05T13:43:00.000+02:00

Waiting for a late-night mini-bus, your standard issue bus hustler inquires
Mini Bus Hustler: You know what we call your people in Africa?
Me: Yeah, mzungus.
MBH: *laughs* Right, but to me you’re BLACK MAN!

At a downtown intersection, a squalid kid asks for money
Mangy child: Boss! Boss! Kwacha for food… hungry.
Rubs gut, points towards Hungry Lion fast food behind me
Me: Where’s your mom?
Points vaguely to a mass of people
Me: Has she no Kwacha for food?
MC: (smiles) But I waaaant boss cream.
Motions again with licking action
Me: *laughs* You want ice cream?! That’s not a meal.
MC: Fine, chicken.

Near an open-air market, a stray vendor tests the limits of entrepreneurship
Bad salesman: You want screwdriver?
He displays a case where over half of the pieces are obviously missing
Me: Um, no thanks.
Undeterred, he reaches into a back pocket, producing a set of novelty-sized pink combs
BS: Combs? Good price.

Walking by the utterly decrepit Lusaka Central Police Station
Zambian friend: And that’s our main police station.
Me: Why are so many windows broken?
ZF: Oh, that’s where people have jumped.
I wonder how wretched Zambian prisons must be

At an open-bar social after making a human rights presentation at a journalism conference, undecipherable Zambian pop music plays loudly
Co-worker 1: Hey Brandon, the floor is open. Come dance with us!
My eldest colleague, clearly three sheets, motions to the dance floor Me: No, thanks. Maybe after a few more of these.
I point to my Mosi (local beer), not at all wanting to confirm white dancing stereotypes
Co-worker 2: C’mon, it’s your human right to dance!
Co-worker 3: *laughs* Like you told us, freedom of expression!

Busy Hands

2007-08-02T18:12:00.000+02:00

Of all the cross-cultural problems I thought I’d face in Zambia, I knew eating with my hands wouldn’t be one of them. Liberated from the annoying gentility and overall nuisance of cutlery, I was excited to see just how efficient it was to eat how God intended.

Turns out, very. For my head-in-the-trough eating 'style', metacarpals beat the hell out of anything civility has come up with.

And, oh, the fun. Step 1: Wash your hands in rosepetal water, or Purell if none available. Step 2: Grab a blob of mealie-meal (the white morass on my plate). Step 3: Roll 'er around in your palm till it forms a gooey orb. Step 4: Dunk it in your gravy, trying scoop up assorted bits of vegetable matter as you go. Step 5: Try and guide the entire sopping package into the foodhole with minimum embarassment. Step 6: Appreciate why the word nshima, translated into the local language, literally just means 'food': you're fuller than after Thanksgiving dinner and it cost all of $2 to make.

Book club: The Trouble with Africa

2007-08-01T11:34:00.000+02:00

That Robert Calderisi’s “contrarian essay” was the first book I read in

Zambia

was more a matter of duty rather than preference; I figured I’d slog through the dense non-fiction on “why foreign aid isn’t working” before moving to lighter subject matter.

But I must admit I was hungry for something contradictory. Promises of political incorrectness and “making things painful for the aid establishment” whet my appetite for a Bono-Geldof skewering.

Too soon?

Long overdue, says Calderisi, a Canadian with over 30 years on the ground in Africa with leading international organizations, foremost the World Bank. His depth of experience on the continent adds weight to his thesis, that the proverbial ‘trouble with Africa’ is the West’s incessant guilt over its decrepit state.

“Poverty is more of a Western issue than an African one,” Calderisi says, “most Africans consider poverty to be as natural as the wind or rain, rather than something they can actually do anything about.”

His message is two-fold: it’s not really our fault, and we have stop aid, not poverty, now. If we don’t, we make it too easy for self-interested African leaders to continue to blame the West for their predicament while they stifle the natural enterprise of their people and maintain the political and economic status quo.

Yes, slaveryimperialismstructuraladjustmentprograms have been psychologically and economically damaging, but they don’t explain why Africa has been going backwards since independence.

Calderisi uses the comparison that in the 1960s, South Korea was poorer, less endowed with natural resources and more brutally colonized than most newfound African nations. But sturdy leadership encouraged foreign investment, not aid, which was managed somewhat responsibly in the national, not personal, interest.

Contrast this with the Central African Republic, more of a geographical description than a state, where French aid was converted into ceremonial pomp for the crowning of its ridiculous self-imposed emperor Jean Bedel Bokassa. The difference with this all-too-common tale is that he used his newly minted sceptre to “bludgeon student protestors to death and serve their flesh to foreign dignitaries.”

This sort of anecdotal evidence is typical of Calderisi’s style, using his personal experience with African aid to counter the armchair critic whose knees jerk to the sound of cutting off aid and enforcing debt repayment. And it’s hard to dispute. When you’ve seen Nigerian ministers using oil money to buy champagne “merely for bathing,” you can’t help but scoff at celebrities groveling to the G8 for greater aid commitments.

In the works: Ishmael Beah’s Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy a Soldier, the first book I’ve bought purely on a Daily Show author appearance. So much for lighter subject matter, I know.

Crystal Mef

2007-07-31T17:19:00.000+02:00

I’m havin’ nightmares, a woo-hooo
They say I’m just p’noid

Entombed in the blurry translucence of a mosquito net, it usually takes me about two or three minutes to realize where I am when I wake. That’s usually because in my dreams I’m transported to disorienting parallel realities – some funny, others horrible, but all frighteningly real.

I’m wakin’ up in the middle of the night
My heart keep thumpin’ like sumpin’ ain’t right
What’s goin’ on?

“Any family history of mental illness, depression, schizophrenia or vivid dreaming?” the doctor asked me at the pre-departure travel clinic. “None of the above,” I snickered, trying to figure out what ‘vivid dreaming’ meant. “Don’t laugh,” she warned, “these things affect everyone differently.”

When I go outside I feel something behind me
I’m lookin’ back but nothing’s around me
What’s going on? I don’t know. What am I trippin’ on?

I just wanted her to prescribe the cheapest and easiest to take malaria prophylactic. It wasn’t going to be covered by my insurance package either way, so I skimped on the expensive dailies and went with weekly dosages of Mefloquine. They’re safer to drink on, I was assured, but can be mentally “destabilizing.” $250 later, and I had myself a seven-month supply of what I joked would be “some good shit.”

There’s somethin’ in the room
It’s lurkin’ in the shadows
Starin’ through the darkness
Man, I don’t know

It’s cold here at night, well into Celsius single-digits, and have seen nary a mosquito. A part of me is disappointed; I was looking forward to going to war with the little buggers. As such, I’ve yet to figure out the exact mechanics of my mosquito net – it just hovers over my bed in a knotted clump, suspended from the ceiling.

As I read in bed, I start to drift off when out of the corner of my eye I trace the familiar silhouette of the female anopheles. With surprising ease, it evades my first swat, cleverly retreating to the dark background of the wood floor. I get out of my comfortable bed into the cool air, determined to stalk the stealthy vector. After a period of fruitless hunting, I give up and decide to just unravel the bed net – only to find it full of holes. With panic creeping in, I hear the awful whine of the ‘skitter closing in, now accompanied by half a dozen of her malarial sisters. Shivering, I shine the flashlight around frantically, but can’t see any of them. I feel them landing on my neck and shoulders. Biting me. Jolt.

I wake up in rat’s nest of sheets, full of sweat, to see the net still suspended over me.

These four walls are closin’ in
These voices ain’t my friends
They hauntin’ me
Those, those memories

I’m with my friend Darryl and we’re blazing through the Sahara at night, trying to find our way back to Europe from a music festival in the desert. The desert is dark and cool as we navigate mountain roads in our Toyota 4x4, when the road abruptly grows so narrow that I’m staring over the side of a rocky precipice through my passenger side window. We careen over.

Somehow we survive, but have become hopelessly lost. Instead of heading north to Europe, we go west, traversing the desert, until we see a cluster of lights in the distance. Thinking it’s the Tangiers crossing to Spain, we celebrate our salvation. But as we descend into the city, it becomes obvious where we actually are – Freetown, Sierra Leone.

The dimly lit streets resemble a post-apocalyptic wasteland more than a city as we hastily try to make a three-point turn to retreat. The truck stalls as fear grips us both. Our vehicle is slowly surrounded by civil war disfiguration – mouths padlocked shut, lips sliced off, ‘RUF’ carved into chests – we’re trapped. Snap.

I wake in a similar fashion, cursing my decision to read Long Way Gone before bed.

And one day, they may even catch up with me man,
But ‘till then I’m Leonardo, Catch Me if You Can

(Lyrics from “Nightmares” by The Clipse)

Correspondent’s Diary: Kanyama

2007-07-27T11:18:00.000+02:00

(Note: as some have pleaded, whenever I write my weekly JHR correspondence I’m not allowed to post it here - just link to it. Instead I’m to attempt a story-behind-the-story narrative that will poorly mimic the excellent feature on The Economist’s website)

Despite its location deep in south-central Africa, Lusaka has very Western feel about it. Tinted-window SUVs roar down multi-lane roads, winding their way around shopping plazas, landscaped roundabouts and austere international hotels. Land Rovers painted UN-white haul families to the local burger joint for combo meals before they amble to Blockbuster to rent the latest Hollywood film.

But from my suburbian enclave it doesn’t take long to see Zambians “living in their true nature,” as a colleague described it to me.

Going downtown, the façade of development holds up well as you cross Cairo and Cha Cha Cha roads, where retro-chic Independence-era buildings and soaring palms charm with a fashionable amount of tropical dilapidation. You pass over a single set of railway tracks to see a different sort of freight train: a teeming horde trudging along the narrow gauge in the typical African fashion. Babies dangle from their mothers' backs, tethered with a brilliant fabric that matches the one cushioning the woman's head from her precarious load.

Paved roads become badly potholed and eventually degenerate into ragged dirt pathways as our bus plods ever westward, parting a river of harried pedestrians. They pass so close to my window I can smell them. It's not the North American 'I'm sweating out my high-cholesterol diet' body odour, but something earthy, not necessarily foul. It's only as we pass the acrid dried fish stands that I wince. The brightly-painted shops of the city have given way to the dizzying spectrum of a sprawling open-air market. Heaping baskets of dried beans and nshima (the local cornmeal-like staple) contrast with a rainbow of fruits and vegetables displayed under gnarled wooden shelters. Large women stare out from behind them with snow-white eyes.

As we approach Kanyama Clinic, there's litter everywhere and animals running loose in the streets and sewage canals. Kids run alongside the bus in grubby flip-flops while adults look idly by, aloof to the passage of journalists through a thousand untold stories.

At our destination we finally pile out of the bus, into the courtyard of the biggest anti-retroviral treatment (ART) centre in the country. We're there as part of PANOS-sponsored journalism workshop to improve reporting on HIV and AIDS. The apparent problem as we're led into the bowels of the clinic is that it didn't look like there was all that much to report on. Certainly not the abbatoir of human misery I was expecting.

The previous day I'd given a presentation on the 'human rights dimensions' of the pandemic, the real reasons why HIV has spread so rapidly here. Gender inequality, lack of access to prevention/treatment and stigma surrounding positive status were my main points. Despite the obvious majority of ARV patients being young women, these stories were conspicuously absent in Kanyama: the wards were empty, the store rooms were overflowing with free drugs and we were treated to a stigma-fighting theatrical performace and song.

As I wrote, the real human rights story is no longer access to treatment, but rather its more elusive cousin, adherence. Thanks to president Bush's PEPFAR plan and Billanthropic (Clinton and Gates) initiatives, the clinics are overflowing with free, generically produced ARVs. That's obviously a step in the right direction, but it fails to address why, in Lusaka, over three years of free access has failed to make anything but a cosmetic change in the AIDS death rate. Patients may not be showing up to clinics in wheelbarrows anymore, but they're still dying at the same depressingly high rate.

The point that PEPFAR and Project (RED) miss is that HIV/AIDS is a social, not medical problem. The plea for more pills = less death might sell a boatload of t-shirts and get you on the cover of Vanity Fair, but access alone is no magic bullet.

Bar + Club + Fried Food = Goodnight

2007-07-22T13:46:00.000+02:00

Talent, a soft-spoken financial reporter and our host for the evening, had us out for an adult beverage or two on Friday night. Whiplashing our way through gear changes, we raced through the pitch-black Zambian night in his stylish mid-level sedan, ending at the Northmead ‘strip’ – a typical stand of watering holes that seems to spring up wherever there’s a critical mass of weekend thirst.

The African night, and nightlife, was probably one of the most stigmatized topics of my pre-departure. Never walk around at night. Watch for bandits. Always take taxis, even a hundred yards. Don’t linger. Drinking makes you a target. Take no valuables. Travel in groups. All of which becomes limiting when it gets dark at 5:30pm.

So it was with a mix of exhilaration and primordial fear that I got out of the car and crossed the threshold of continental sobriety.

Red Shoes Diary

2007-07-19T10:39:00.000+02:00

In light of Lusaka's shoddy public transport - overcrowded mini-buses that often crash or taxis that fleece mzungus like me - I've made the empowering decision to walk to work. It's not a bad hike, 25 minutes or so up a big hill out of the city then into the suburbs to my office. The paralyzing fear of trodding around alone as a white guy has faded fast - people don't pay me much mind and the biggest hassle is fighting off taxi drivers trying to give me a ride. I get way more broad-smiling 'good mornings' per capita than I would in Canada anyway (which is to say, none).

Besides, it's a great way to become attuned to the rythmns, vibrations and mechanics of daily life.

As I leave, the security guard at my hostel shakes my hand and wishes me a good day. Out into the street, and a gaggle of uniformed schoolchildren bounce by, singing their way to morning class. Past the taxi stand, a chorus of undecipherable yells and whistles ring out to solicit my business, while newspaper and fruitsellers dodge traffic to ply their wares. Up the hill, a mangy transport truck spews hideous diesel fumes in my face as it whizzes by, full of stoic construction workers looking on. Turning left onto Leopards Hill Road, the road flattens as it heads out of town, stretching past aid agency headquarters and foreign missions, where I'm more likely to encounters gardeners and security guards than ordinary folk. After about a kilometre of white-washed high walls, topped with either electrified fencing, barbed wire or embedded broken glass, I end at the PANOS office, shoes dusted with red dirt and ready to face the day.

Must See TV

2007-07-18T15:09:00.000+02:00

The paint seemed barely dry on the doorway as I entered Muvi TV's head office in Lusaka earlier today. The place had a posh, but cobbled-together feel about it. Like radio and cell phones before them, private TV stations are on fire in Zambia right now.

In the company boardroom, drab concrete walls framed an enormous cherrywood table encircled by high-backed executive chairs. Our host, director of programmes Mr. Chela Katwishi, had a personality and tenor befitting his furniture and job description. As the head of the only independent broadcaster in the country - that has "critical content" and not just Nigerian soaps - he's on the frontline of pushing Government's resolve to observe the editorial freedoms of this relatively young medium. With a varied background in radio (a source of almost constant belligerence) and the president's office (strict deference to Father Levy), he knows what buttons to push. The key, according to Katwishi, is to know where authorities are vulnerable and "hit as hard as we can," but also to know when to back off (this, I assume, was in reference to the law that forbids "insulting the president").

And judging by the office space, Katwishi's designer suit and the rates they tried to charge my host organization for airtime, it's all very profitable to be critical of public officials. The director quoted a recent study done by the University of Lusaka - since withdrawn for mysteriously unknown reasons - that Muvi TV has three times the viewership of government broadcasters ZNBC. He claims that political call-in shows receive over 80,000 text messages per day.

So, hopefully he can help. A colleague and myself were at the station to pitch a live debate on Zambian farming policies that addresses the troubling problem of food shortages in a vastly fertile and well-watered nation. We agreed on a short 15-minute format that would pit struggling small-scale farmers against government officials and leaders of the farmers' unions.

"Juicy, crispy, and to the point!" marvelled Katwishi, in a reference that made me even hungrier for a bit of lunch, but equally eager to work with a man who's setting the the Zambian media market alight.

Safe and Unsound

2007-07-17T12:46:00.000+02:00

So then, I'm here and all that. Too early for any astute cross-cultural observations: so far I've been asleep in Zambia (19 hours, if you can believe it) longer than awake (6 and counting).

It was a harrying trip, first across the sea to the Netherlands for a surprisingly vice-free 9-hours in the second-hand smoke, beautiful mullets and people-watching of a Western European capital. Then out across Europe and the Mediterranean, over the Sahara and River Nile into the stereotypically African landscape of long, blonde grass and Acacia trees in Nairobi. From there it was but a leap to Lusaka, where customs would make Canadian healthcare look a model of efficience.

As the sun chased me from Europe, I thought of what the people I'd just flown over would wake up to this week. Tunisians walking to morning prayer. Kenyans dragging themselves out of bed for another bustling week in The Cradle. Darfurians, waking up to uncertainty. The herds of animals on the plains, the fish in the Great Lakes. And there I was a little dot in the sky passing over this vast continent, wondering what my reality would be when I woke up.

Colophon

2007-07-04T06:03:00.000+02:00

As has been my staunch (one-time) tradition at the beginning of a blog: a word on the nomenclature. Because I'm not actually there yet, and still have no real idea of what to expect, I have to go on what I know. Which isn't much.

Even for sub-Saharan Africa (a bad qualifier for anything), Zambia seems relatively inconspicuous. Sure, it's rife with AIDS, malaria, food insecurity and dollar-a-day poverty, but compared to its more infamous neighbours - imploding Mugabeland (Zimbabwe) or schizophrenic DR Congo - poor ol' Zambia seems a tad plain.

But, of course, any nation of 11 million (not to mention the 39th biggest in the world) is bound to be full of intrigue and, dare I hope, good stories to tell. That's what Lusaka Sunrise, the short film, is all about. With any luck, that's what this namesake will come to impart as well.