I’ve been away longer than this before, but there’s something about a perpetually transitory lifestyle that prevents you from ever really settling for a moment.
And so, I miss home.
I miss stupid things like bubble baths and wearing heels and cranberries and terribly stupid horror flicks, and I miss important things like libraries and safe streets at night and, of course, my family. I miss things I knew I would, like driving, but I also miss things I didn’t realize I would: urban bustle – that uniquely American brand of sarcasm – free speech. I miss all these things and so many more, and I feel a sort of deep-seated fatigue that tells me I’m ready to go home. S o, here I am at the Dakar airport, counting down the hours.. and even minutes.. until I see my family.
The silly part is that I know even now that within 15 minutes of getting into my family’s car at the airport I’m going to see something and think – oh, Africa…
Showing posts with label Africa. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Africa. Show all posts
Sunday, August 9
Saturday, August 8
Valuable Skills Africa Has Taught Me
(I look forward to applying these to my graduate student career.)
- How to ride on the back of a motorcycle (with luggage)
- How to haggle
- How to pee anywhere, with some grace
- When to trust strangers
- How to speak Sheep [an international language]
- How to tell the difference between sheep, who will pursue a conversation, and goats, who won't
- How to eat a mango, passionfruit, papaye, watermelon and pineapple with only a penknife
- How to ignore men (and eventually, anyone) yelling for my attention
- How to bluff
- When to bluff
- When to call someone else’s bluff
- How to bucket-bathe
- How to conceal valuables in a mailed package
- How to kill a mosquito with sniper-scary accuracy
- How to find the Southern Cross
- When to walk in front of a speeding car
- How to tell whether someone is Christian or Muslim
- How to sit still
- Why crocodiles are malevolent sons of bitches and should be avoided at all costs
- How to accept being dirty
- How to hitchhike
- How to launder money (both literally and criminally)
- How to charge a camera battery on the most rickety of outlets
- And how to close my heart to beggars
… and, unfortunately, Skills I Really Should Have Learned, Considering, But Didn’t
- how to patiently wait ten minutes for a website to load
- how to speak Arabic (other than insha’allah, which has become a frighteningly frequent part of my otherwise secular speech)
- how to gracefully wake up at 6:45 am in the absence of fire or other immediate bodily danger
- how to quickly count fat stacks of bills (well, won't need that in grad school anyway)
Monday, July 27
Donkey Depression
I have lately been finding the same thing that one of my fellow Africa-bloggers notices in her own writing (My posts are getting longer.. and darker), so to lighten up the intensity a bit before the bitter end here I'll put up some entirely frivolous thoughts that have been bouncing around in my head for a few months about some of the most interesting characters you will meet in Africa - the farm animals.
Meet, first, the Goat. This is an entirely frivolous animal that behaves in an exclusively frivolous way; the species has just managed to collect two wits to rub together between the lot of them, and rubbing those two wits together is about all they can handle. The goat typically spend most of its time eating absolutely anything in sight, trying to stand on two legs in order to get at more things to eat, or skittering around like a ninny after having its eating interrupted. Occasionally they will take a break from eating and skittering to emit high-pitched bleats, or to pursue some illicit behavior with the nearest munching goat or the opposite sex (or otherwise), before going back to eating, climbing and skittering.
Frivolity isn't really a sin in my book, and eating can only be a good thing, so I have a pretty good feeling about goats in general. It seems the rumors are true and intelligence really isn't conducive to happiness, for goats seem pretty thrilled with their lot in life - a never-ending meal with breaks for sex and self-expression.
The goat is, in this and several other ways, almost indistinguishable from my favorite of all farm animals, the Sheep. For me, the key distinctive feature between the two lies in attitude, for while goats skitter around acting like ecstatic idiots, sheep are much more chill. Yeah, they're into eating, but they're also heavily into just hangin' out. When you meet a sheep, it might be eating; it might also just be standing around, or lying down, or taking in the sun. Though goats and sheep are almost exactly the same in size, general shape, relationship to humans, bleating sound, and probable intelligence, to me sheep just seem so much cooler. (For those less attuned to animal 'tude, look for tail diversity - goats will always have a tufty, up-pointed tail-fluff, while sheep will probably have a floppy thing of variable length, width, size, and color.)
Either one of these animals, though, is infinitely happier than their larger farm counterpart: Meet the Donkey. One of the first ways in which you are likely to meet Mr. Donkey is by wildly swerving to miss him as he saunters in front of your car. The Ethiopians tell a story explaining this strange behavior; they say that a donkey, a goat, and a dog all boarded a bus. The donkey paid the full fare and with exact change, and as a result will unabashedly waltz right in front of any vehicle that comes his way because he knows he's already paid up. The goat, however, cheating little ninny that she is, scooted off the bus without paying, which is why she skitters away every time - runnin' from justice, you see. My favorite, though, is the dog - he paid, but then the driver screwed him out of his change, so now every time the dog sees that bus again he goes chasing after it wildly barking for all he's worth, ''GIMME MY CHANGE!!! GIMME MY CHANGE!!''
(Shortly after hearing this story for the first time, our bus was chased down by a wildly barking dog and since then I've never been able to think of anything but Gimme my change! whenever I encounter a car-chasing dog.)
The dog and goat theories match up pretty well, but I confess I'm not satisfied with the explanation for the donkey. Who walks in front of a bus just because they've paid for it? Are paying customers routinely the tragic victims of vehicular manslaughter? No, there's pretty much only one reason why anyone intentionally walks right in front of a speeding vehicle, and that leads me to my own theory about why donkeys aim for any vehicle in their proximity - they're all suicidal.
I didn't come up with this out of thin air. Just by looking at him, you quickly realize that the donkey is the saddest of all the animal friends you will meet in Africa, and not just because of A. A. Milne's representation either. After seven months here I have seen a lot of silly animals doing a lot of silly things, but I have never seen a donkey smile. They seem to take pleasure neither from eating nor from resting in the shade, and I have certainly never seen any goat- or sheep-like frolicking. I have seen donkeys staring despondently at the ground; I have seen donkeys plodding along with a disheartened, kill-me-now air; I have seen donkeys hurrying with grim determination for the empty road in front of the nearest speeding bus. Donkeys, it is plain to see, are the most miserable of all of Africa's creatures.
The cruel irony of this, of course, is that in a land of goat, lamb, and beef-eating carnivores, the donkey is actually the *only* farm animal that can count on living a long life and seeing old age. And so they plod on, head down, aimless and dejected, knowing that their only ticket out of years of drudgery is that speeding minibus headed their way.
But don't worry... before anyone accuses me of getting plenty dark in a deliberately frivolous blog-post, I'll happily affirm that despite donkeys' best efforts, the cars always miss. And every time, the failed donkey gazes balefully after, lost in our dust, sighing and likely thinking in an Eeyore-ish voice: ''Lost another one.. next time.''
Meet, first, the Goat. This is an entirely frivolous animal that behaves in an exclusively frivolous way; the species has just managed to collect two wits to rub together between the lot of them, and rubbing those two wits together is about all they can handle. The goat typically spend most of its time eating absolutely anything in sight, trying to stand on two legs in order to get at more things to eat, or skittering around like a ninny after having its eating interrupted. Occasionally they will take a break from eating and skittering to emit high-pitched bleats, or to pursue some illicit behavior with the nearest munching goat or the opposite sex (or otherwise), before going back to eating, climbing and skittering.
Frivolity isn't really a sin in my book, and eating can only be a good thing, so I have a pretty good feeling about goats in general. It seems the rumors are true and intelligence really isn't conducive to happiness, for goats seem pretty thrilled with their lot in life - a never-ending meal with breaks for sex and self-expression.
The goat is, in this and several other ways, almost indistinguishable from my favorite of all farm animals, the Sheep. For me, the key distinctive feature between the two lies in attitude, for while goats skitter around acting like ecstatic idiots, sheep are much more chill. Yeah, they're into eating, but they're also heavily into just hangin' out. When you meet a sheep, it might be eating; it might also just be standing around, or lying down, or taking in the sun. Though goats and sheep are almost exactly the same in size, general shape, relationship to humans, bleating sound, and probable intelligence, to me sheep just seem so much cooler. (For those less attuned to animal 'tude, look for tail diversity - goats will always have a tufty, up-pointed tail-fluff, while sheep will probably have a floppy thing of variable length, width, size, and color.)
Either one of these animals, though, is infinitely happier than their larger farm counterpart: Meet the Donkey. One of the first ways in which you are likely to meet Mr. Donkey is by wildly swerving to miss him as he saunters in front of your car. The Ethiopians tell a story explaining this strange behavior; they say that a donkey, a goat, and a dog all boarded a bus. The donkey paid the full fare and with exact change, and as a result will unabashedly waltz right in front of any vehicle that comes his way because he knows he's already paid up. The goat, however, cheating little ninny that she is, scooted off the bus without paying, which is why she skitters away every time - runnin' from justice, you see. My favorite, though, is the dog - he paid, but then the driver screwed him out of his change, so now every time the dog sees that bus again he goes chasing after it wildly barking for all he's worth, ''GIMME MY CHANGE!!! GIMME MY CHANGE!!''
(Shortly after hearing this story for the first time, our bus was chased down by a wildly barking dog and since then I've never been able to think of anything but Gimme my change! whenever I encounter a car-chasing dog.)
The dog and goat theories match up pretty well, but I confess I'm not satisfied with the explanation for the donkey. Who walks in front of a bus just because they've paid for it? Are paying customers routinely the tragic victims of vehicular manslaughter? No, there's pretty much only one reason why anyone intentionally walks right in front of a speeding vehicle, and that leads me to my own theory about why donkeys aim for any vehicle in their proximity - they're all suicidal.
I didn't come up with this out of thin air. Just by looking at him, you quickly realize that the donkey is the saddest of all the animal friends you will meet in Africa, and not just because of A. A. Milne's representation either. After seven months here I have seen a lot of silly animals doing a lot of silly things, but I have never seen a donkey smile. They seem to take pleasure neither from eating nor from resting in the shade, and I have certainly never seen any goat- or sheep-like frolicking. I have seen donkeys staring despondently at the ground; I have seen donkeys plodding along with a disheartened, kill-me-now air; I have seen donkeys hurrying with grim determination for the empty road in front of the nearest speeding bus. Donkeys, it is plain to see, are the most miserable of all of Africa's creatures.
The cruel irony of this, of course, is that in a land of goat, lamb, and beef-eating carnivores, the donkey is actually the *only* farm animal that can count on living a long life and seeing old age. And so they plod on, head down, aimless and dejected, knowing that their only ticket out of years of drudgery is that speeding minibus headed their way.
But don't worry... before anyone accuses me of getting plenty dark in a deliberately frivolous blog-post, I'll happily affirm that despite donkeys' best efforts, the cars always miss. And every time, the failed donkey gazes balefully after, lost in our dust, sighing and likely thinking in an Eeyore-ish voice: ''Lost another one.. next time.''
Thursday, July 23
Futility of Martyrdom
There's no other way to disclaim it, so I'll be blunt: this post is going to piss some people off.
In school we learn about slavery; all children hopefully walk away from the necessarily disturbing lesson with an understanding of why slavery is evil, and the importance of (never letting it happen again) The precise effect, however, varies in shades of subtlety, weighing a little more uncomfortably on those white students who cannot claim to know when every last one of their ancestors immigrated to the US. How awful, to potentially be descended from a slaver! MLK may have been enough of a saint to think forgiveness no big trick, but I suspect few modern Americans are frothing at the bit to boast about the slaves held by their forefathers.
While such generic 'white guilt' is a relatively useless phenomenon, considering the way that slavery is taught in American schools, it's natural that a white student would come away with an impression of belonging to that race with the most historical power - and the most historical abuses of it.
On the other hand, the same lesson inspires on African-American students something like a cultural martyrdom. In learning about slavery, they have the satisfaction of genetic solidarity with the innocent oppressed, not the raping, pillaging sadists. They may hold their heads high, untainted by historical gulit.
Visiting the old Portuguese 'slave castles' of Ghana, we received much the same treatment. Horrible whites oppressing innocent blacks, and this is where they did it. It's enough to make you want, as Leah of Poisonwood Bible wanted, to 'scrub the whiteness' out of your own skin.
(Never mind the fact that the African slave trade cut across racial lines in a huge and historically unignorable way.)
But where does the race-based oppression paradigm lead? A white and non-white student learning about human trafficking in such a way will both inevitably, though perhaps subconsciously, come to the same conclusion: whites are intrinsically more powerful than blacks, or more cruelly intelligent, or possess some other inherent advantage. How else could Europeans arriving on the coasts of Africa manage to brutalize so effectively the locals living there? And considering crews of only a hundred, max sailors, presumably pitted against the millions of the African continent, you have to wonder how far a military advantage can really take you.
I wondered the same thing privately as a child. Didn't the Africans in port cities along the West Coast eventually get wise to the impending danger of a European ship? If it really was white against black, why didn't a few coastal villages combine forces to kick the shit out of the foreign abductors, guns or no guns?? They had the home-field advantage, they controlled all the natural resources, they had numerical superiority and they had the motivational bonus of literally fighting for their lives. The Europeans shouldn't have stood a chance against that.
I could never understand this simple problem, and was always afraid to ask for fear of the abhorently racist conclusion it implies - whites must just be that much more powerful than blacks.
But the truth, stifled though it is by most African museums, is actually not racist at all - it wasn't whites against blacks. Hugely powerful kingdoms existed in Africa, the likes of which the modern [racist] American textbook cannot imagine - Dahomey, Benin, Zanzibar, Asante - warring kingdoms who frequently made slaves out of their prisoners of war, commercially-savvy kingdoms interested in guns and goods, with which Europeans were thrilled to do business. The port city locals who thrived first on international trade of coffee/cocoa/ivory/gold thrived equally well on 18th-century trade in human beings. Ironically, some of the biggest opponents of Britain's 1807 ban on the international slave trade were Africans, who lost in that stroke their livelihood. The self-righteous local guide at Cape Coast's slave castle museum was actually more likely to be a direct descendent of a slaver (or profiter of the trade) than I was, though that didn't stop me from feeling white-guilty as I stood with him in the castle's dark warehouse-cum-dungeons.
But perhaps I'm splitting hairs; regardless of how enthusiastic African cooperation with European slavers may have been, that was nothing compared to what the Africans and their descendents suffered at the hands of whites once they arrived in the New World, especially the Caribbean. In many ways, the worst aspects of triangle-trade slavery are not on the African side, but the North/South American. What difference does it make if Kunte Kinte was captured by enemy African warriors or pillaging European ones? It doesn't change the nature of his suffering on white plantations in Virginia.
However, it does change hugely the way Africans are portrayed in history vis-a-vis Europeans. To speak about them as a cultural group - which is incorrect and unfair besides, but everybody's doing it so I'll plunge ahead - Africans in a historically accurate narrative of the slave trade lose some moral purity.. but in exchange for agency. They weren't idle innocents sitting up in the trees and gawking at the first Europeans to come crashing through the bush, manacles in hand. They were kings and generals, with thrones of enemy skulls and poisoned spears, who engaged in extensive international trade centuries before the Portuguese ever got there. Little African-American children walking home from history class are holding their heads high for the wrong reason - and it has huge consequences. For what does a sense of martyrdom really buy you? Moral superiority and satisfaction, okay, but what is that really worth?
Just look at the feminists - in a triumph of idiocy, a certain feminist faction has chosen to reposit history as one long tale of male oppression of nameless female martyrs. They argue that in fact all his-tory is just a male-centric tale of keeping women down, and that behind the stature of the illustrious general there is presumably a beaten wife hiding in the kitchen crying on a dish towel.
Well gosh, centuries of abuse like that, and no wonder those feminists are so damn pissed.
And equally no wonder that chauvenism persists. 'Cos who can respect a gender that's always oppressed? snivelling behind the scenes with no influence on major decisions? inevitably winding up as victims? Sure, martyrdom can be hugely satisfying to one's self-righteous muscle, but give me the truth instead - women are powerful, and we always have been. (Ahem, Alexander the Great.) We exert power in different ways, true, but our influence is no less meaningful, and to say that we've always been oppressed is just to deny our own agency. We've occasionally been victims of men, but we have also (as several guys I know would eagerly testify) made some of them our victims, too.
I feel the same way about the truth behind triangle trade, though it's taken me much longer to realize it. By positing Europeans as the only actors and Africans as only the victims, aren't we denying their consierable historical power? By teaching African kids that all slaves were descended from innocent Rousseauian natives naive enough to invite the big ships in to play, aren't we implying that Africans didn't do much of anything worthwhile? Perhaps there's a certain bizarre satisfaction that can come from knowing, "Hey, my people weren't always on the shafted end of oppression! We had power too, and [the big conclusion] we can have it again." Even under massive tactical, numerical, and military disadvantages, the successes of various slave revolts in the 18th and 19th centuries managed to maintain a continual state of fear for their lighter-skinned peers, who loudly claimed Africans couldn't actually get anything done - and then waited up at night with a shotgun.
The race-based slaver myth is still alive and well, though. Racist whites will quietly note - and misread - the incredible international commerce of the slave trade and credit European handiwork; maybe it will seem only natural to African-American kids that they fall behind other ethnic groups in traditional measures of success, since they're the descendents of America's greatest victims. But what does martyrdom tell you anyway? It's not "I did!!", but "They wouldn't let me." Frankly, I prefer "Yes we can," and the truth - that Africans have indeed kicked some serious ass in history.
In school we learn about slavery; all children hopefully walk away from the necessarily disturbing lesson with an understanding of why slavery is evil, and the importance of (never letting it happen again) The precise effect, however, varies in shades of subtlety, weighing a little more uncomfortably on those white students who cannot claim to know when every last one of their ancestors immigrated to the US. How awful, to potentially be descended from a slaver! MLK may have been enough of a saint to think forgiveness no big trick, but I suspect few modern Americans are frothing at the bit to boast about the slaves held by their forefathers.
While such generic 'white guilt' is a relatively useless phenomenon, considering the way that slavery is taught in American schools, it's natural that a white student would come away with an impression of belonging to that race with the most historical power - and the most historical abuses of it.
On the other hand, the same lesson inspires on African-American students something like a cultural martyrdom. In learning about slavery, they have the satisfaction of genetic solidarity with the innocent oppressed, not the raping, pillaging sadists. They may hold their heads high, untainted by historical gulit.
Visiting the old Portuguese 'slave castles' of Ghana, we received much the same treatment. Horrible whites oppressing innocent blacks, and this is where they did it. It's enough to make you want, as Leah of Poisonwood Bible wanted, to 'scrub the whiteness' out of your own skin.
(Never mind the fact that the African slave trade cut across racial lines in a huge and historically unignorable way.)
But where does the race-based oppression paradigm lead? A white and non-white student learning about human trafficking in such a way will both inevitably, though perhaps subconsciously, come to the same conclusion: whites are intrinsically more powerful than blacks, or more cruelly intelligent, or possess some other inherent advantage. How else could Europeans arriving on the coasts of Africa manage to brutalize so effectively the locals living there? And considering crews of only a hundred, max sailors, presumably pitted against the millions of the African continent, you have to wonder how far a military advantage can really take you.
I wondered the same thing privately as a child. Didn't the Africans in port cities along the West Coast eventually get wise to the impending danger of a European ship? If it really was white against black, why didn't a few coastal villages combine forces to kick the shit out of the foreign abductors, guns or no guns?? They had the home-field advantage, they controlled all the natural resources, they had numerical superiority and they had the motivational bonus of literally fighting for their lives. The Europeans shouldn't have stood a chance against that.
I could never understand this simple problem, and was always afraid to ask for fear of the abhorently racist conclusion it implies - whites must just be that much more powerful than blacks.
But the truth, stifled though it is by most African museums, is actually not racist at all - it wasn't whites against blacks. Hugely powerful kingdoms existed in Africa, the likes of which the modern [racist] American textbook cannot imagine - Dahomey, Benin, Zanzibar, Asante - warring kingdoms who frequently made slaves out of their prisoners of war, commercially-savvy kingdoms interested in guns and goods, with which Europeans were thrilled to do business. The port city locals who thrived first on international trade of coffee/cocoa/ivory/gold thrived equally well on 18th-century trade in human beings. Ironically, some of the biggest opponents of Britain's 1807 ban on the international slave trade were Africans, who lost in that stroke their livelihood. The self-righteous local guide at Cape Coast's slave castle museum was actually more likely to be a direct descendent of a slaver (or profiter of the trade) than I was, though that didn't stop me from feeling white-guilty as I stood with him in the castle's dark warehouse-cum-dungeons.
But perhaps I'm splitting hairs; regardless of how enthusiastic African cooperation with European slavers may have been, that was nothing compared to what the Africans and their descendents suffered at the hands of whites once they arrived in the New World, especially the Caribbean. In many ways, the worst aspects of triangle-trade slavery are not on the African side, but the North/South American. What difference does it make if Kunte Kinte was captured by enemy African warriors or pillaging European ones? It doesn't change the nature of his suffering on white plantations in Virginia.
However, it does change hugely the way Africans are portrayed in history vis-a-vis Europeans. To speak about them as a cultural group - which is incorrect and unfair besides, but everybody's doing it so I'll plunge ahead - Africans in a historically accurate narrative of the slave trade lose some moral purity.. but in exchange for agency. They weren't idle innocents sitting up in the trees and gawking at the first Europeans to come crashing through the bush, manacles in hand. They were kings and generals, with thrones of enemy skulls and poisoned spears, who engaged in extensive international trade centuries before the Portuguese ever got there. Little African-American children walking home from history class are holding their heads high for the wrong reason - and it has huge consequences. For what does a sense of martyrdom really buy you? Moral superiority and satisfaction, okay, but what is that really worth?
Just look at the feminists - in a triumph of idiocy, a certain feminist faction has chosen to reposit history as one long tale of male oppression of nameless female martyrs. They argue that in fact all his-tory is just a male-centric tale of keeping women down, and that behind the stature of the illustrious general there is presumably a beaten wife hiding in the kitchen crying on a dish towel.
Well gosh, centuries of abuse like that, and no wonder those feminists are so damn pissed.
And equally no wonder that chauvenism persists. 'Cos who can respect a gender that's always oppressed? snivelling behind the scenes with no influence on major decisions? inevitably winding up as victims? Sure, martyrdom can be hugely satisfying to one's self-righteous muscle, but give me the truth instead - women are powerful, and we always have been. (Ahem, Alexander the Great.) We exert power in different ways, true, but our influence is no less meaningful, and to say that we've always been oppressed is just to deny our own agency. We've occasionally been victims of men, but we have also (as several guys I know would eagerly testify) made some of them our victims, too.
I feel the same way about the truth behind triangle trade, though it's taken me much longer to realize it. By positing Europeans as the only actors and Africans as only the victims, aren't we denying their consierable historical power? By teaching African kids that all slaves were descended from innocent Rousseauian natives naive enough to invite the big ships in to play, aren't we implying that Africans didn't do much of anything worthwhile? Perhaps there's a certain bizarre satisfaction that can come from knowing, "Hey, my people weren't always on the shafted end of oppression! We had power too, and [the big conclusion] we can have it again." Even under massive tactical, numerical, and military disadvantages, the successes of various slave revolts in the 18th and 19th centuries managed to maintain a continual state of fear for their lighter-skinned peers, who loudly claimed Africans couldn't actually get anything done - and then waited up at night with a shotgun.
The race-based slaver myth is still alive and well, though. Racist whites will quietly note - and misread - the incredible international commerce of the slave trade and credit European handiwork; maybe it will seem only natural to African-American kids that they fall behind other ethnic groups in traditional measures of success, since they're the descendents of America's greatest victims. But what does martyrdom tell you anyway? It's not "I did!!", but "They wouldn't let me." Frankly, I prefer "Yes we can," and the truth - that Africans have indeed kicked some serious ass in history.
Wednesday, July 22
African One-Liners
Since I'm stuck recuperating in Conakry with the kind of internet connection that comes once in a lifetime in Africa, seems like as good a time as any to dump a collection of quotes that, over the past few months, have made me laugh.. or tilt my head and think: "?"
David, in Arusha, Tanzania, on finding a guide: "If we stand around and look white, sooner or later we'll find someone."
"Now we're full." -- the herder of a 14-passenger bus in Rwanda, on boarding his 26th passenger. (Several of us immediately protested amid general laughter that we could surely fit at least two more...)
Butros Butros Ghali, on being asked to distinguish between the Arabic bukra, insha'allah and the Spanish mañana: "The Arabic 'bukra' has none of 'mañana's sense of urgency."
David to me, haughtily, after I made a snarky remark about how unexpectedly luxurious our Congolese hotel room was: "Unlike you, I don't need to be in a nest of cockroaches to get a good night's sleep."
Debating whether or not Libya was a swell country, in response to my comment on the governmental status the (pro-Libya) Nigerien dude responded: "Well, yeah.. but who gives a fuck about democracy??"
On the mass of hair that came away from my head when I took out my braids from Zanzibar - "Man, you could stuff a pillow with that." And pressed as to the color of that still attached to my scalp: "Uh... if I had to say, I would probably say... indeterminate."
"Hey, it takes a lot of willpower to go through a can of tuna!" --David, defensively, to my stare of disgust as he tuna-stank up our squalid hotel room in Kenya.
Anna and Matt, two friendly Peace Corpsers, on the obstacles to tourism in coastal Benin and Togo: "The tourists come out here in the morning with their towels and there are like six to eight people shitting on the beach."
"And this is for.. grabbing and strangling something, I guess." --David, in all seriousness, describing an item at the label-less National Museum of Ethiopia.
(This one I can't claim to have seen myself, but it's good enough to merit repeating) On a billboard in Nigeria: Do you suffer from virginal drip?
From me to David, on a random street in Masindi, Uganda after leaping out of the way of yet another honking taxi: "You know, I'm getting kind of sick of people threatening me with vehicular homicide as a means of getting my attention."
An idealistic museum docent in Benin, showing a morality statue of a woman naked to the waist, explained to the assembled Beninese (and me) how female nudity to the waist is 'okay' in African culture. One of his countrywomen heartily disagreed, and a spot of bickering ensued. The man was persistent, but the woman soon won it beyond all claim with: "Now just what do you think would happen to me if I wandered around the street naked to the waist??"
On the crowds of people swarming around our huge bus and waving their arms madly as we attempted a cramped 3-pt-turn in congested Nairobi: "Gee, everyone here's a budding traffic director."
"Hm.. One minute." -- David's estimate for how roughly how long it would take to break down the rickety plywood-and-rusted-bolt combination ambitiously calling itself my hotel door.
(15 minutes - time spent relocating all furniture in my room to directly in front of said door.)
And finally, one more to make his parents proud: David, discussing my student health plan in the EG airport, in response to my apprehension about the insurance supplier: "Man, I would take Satan himself if he was offered to me at a 75% discount!"
(Which, with insurance companies, is more or less the same thing.)
David, in Arusha, Tanzania, on finding a guide: "If we stand around and look white, sooner or later we'll find someone."
"Now we're full." -- the herder of a 14-passenger bus in Rwanda, on boarding his 26th passenger. (Several of us immediately protested amid general laughter that we could surely fit at least two more...)
Butros Butros Ghali, on being asked to distinguish between the Arabic bukra, insha'allah and the Spanish mañana: "The Arabic 'bukra' has none of 'mañana's sense of urgency."
David to me, haughtily, after I made a snarky remark about how unexpectedly luxurious our Congolese hotel room was: "Unlike you, I don't need to be in a nest of cockroaches to get a good night's sleep."
Debating whether or not Libya was a swell country, in response to my comment on the governmental status the (pro-Libya) Nigerien dude responded: "Well, yeah.. but who gives a fuck about democracy??"
On the mass of hair that came away from my head when I took out my braids from Zanzibar - "Man, you could stuff a pillow with that." And pressed as to the color of that still attached to my scalp: "Uh... if I had to say, I would probably say... indeterminate."
"Hey, it takes a lot of willpower to go through a can of tuna!" --David, defensively, to my stare of disgust as he tuna-stank up our squalid hotel room in Kenya.
Anna and Matt, two friendly Peace Corpsers, on the obstacles to tourism in coastal Benin and Togo: "The tourists come out here in the morning with their towels and there are like six to eight people shitting on the beach."
"And this is for.. grabbing and strangling something, I guess." --David, in all seriousness, describing an item at the label-less National Museum of Ethiopia.
(This one I can't claim to have seen myself, but it's good enough to merit repeating) On a billboard in Nigeria: Do you suffer from virginal drip?
From me to David, on a random street in Masindi, Uganda after leaping out of the way of yet another honking taxi: "You know, I'm getting kind of sick of people threatening me with vehicular homicide as a means of getting my attention."
An idealistic museum docent in Benin, showing a morality statue of a woman naked to the waist, explained to the assembled Beninese (and me) how female nudity to the waist is 'okay' in African culture. One of his countrywomen heartily disagreed, and a spot of bickering ensued. The man was persistent, but the woman soon won it beyond all claim with: "Now just what do you think would happen to me if I wandered around the street naked to the waist??"
On the crowds of people swarming around our huge bus and waving their arms madly as we attempted a cramped 3-pt-turn in congested Nairobi: "Gee, everyone here's a budding traffic director."
"Hm.. One minute." -- David's estimate for how roughly how long it would take to break down the rickety plywood-and-rusted-bolt combination ambitiously calling itself my hotel door.
(15 minutes - time spent relocating all furniture in my room to directly in front of said door.)
And finally, one more to make his parents proud: David, discussing my student health plan in the EG airport, in response to my apprehension about the insurance supplier: "Man, I would take Satan himself if he was offered to me at a 75% discount!"
(Which, with insurance companies, is more or less the same thing.)
Tuesday, July 21
Something I wish I could stop thinking
"a culture that treats animals this badly deserves whatever it gets"
Monday, July 20
Why I feel bad for African internet users:
Due to high fraud in your area, this website is currently inaccessible to you. If you feel you have been blocked in error please contact a representative via email at helpdesk@travelsupport.com. Please present this value as your IP address: 41.207.30.154
Thursday, July 9
Meet the Scammers
If scamming is indeed an art (which I would argue it truly is) and the masters of its trade thus artists, then Africans may hold their heads high as possessing as much ingenuity, creativity, charm, and persistence as the best that America has to offer. (And that's a high standard.)
There is the friendly self-appointed Guide, who follows you to wherever you're headed, maintaining an amiable banter until the destination and leave-taking, at which point you are informed that you were actually led there by his guiding services and kindly pay the proper fee for his time and effort. (And no, not an accidentally gendered word choice.)
There is the Yes! Taxi, in which arrival at the agreed destination is considerably complicated by the driver only pretending to know the way. Subsequent loss of gas and time while wandering aimlessly around a city must naturally be reimbursed by you, the passenger (just punishment for your foolishness in believing the driver when he said, "Yes! I know it! Get in!").
There is the Baggage Scam, most infuriating of all scams to David, produced by the shock of a passenger arriving at a long-distance bus station with - are you sitting down for this? - luggage. While no one else is paying for the ten chickens, bale of yams, children, or possibly goats that they are transporting, the two white people who just showed up with a suitcase apiece are sure to be hit with high fees for their passengerish extravagance.
And let us of course not forget the trusty Bait'n'Switch, when the original offer assumes new and exciting forms with astronomical proportions after services have been rendered - due of course to a misunderstanding on our part, or unforeseeable problems that were unforeseeably created by the party to be paid.
***ALLOW ME TO QUICKLY INTERJECT that by no means are all, or even most, Africans enterprising scam-artists. I would not even call it an appreciable minority. But if only one out of fifty people in your average African street are unscrupulous (a figure severely below that which you might estimate in any country), another honorable two hope to make legitimate clients out of tourists, and a final two are curious/bold/bored enough to come chat for kicks, then roughly one in five people approaching us of their own volition has a great NGO you've never heard of, and we will get the artificial impression that 20% of Africans are pseudo-criminals every time. In poor countries frequented by foolish and apparently high-rolling UN types and tourists, expect the above estimate to rocket skyward. It's simply an unfortunate fact of travel that we probably meet and talk to 2% of the inhabitants of a place we visit, and 90% of its scam-artists. (The other 10% were probably on the toilet at the time - they cursed their ill-luck later.) We're just too good, and sometimes too rare, for idle criminals to pass up.
So, we have (or more honestly, David has) developed a few tricks to protect ourselves from Les Trompeurs, while hopefully not shutting out opportunities for those casual exchanges with locals that make being in Africa so sincerely pleasant. We never reveal our hotel to strangers; we wait out followers or confuse them by diverging paths; we establish clear prices beforehand so no one gets peeved later. Of course we still get caught occasionally. Sometimes we can talk our way out of it, and sometimes we can't. But by and large we deflect the vast majority of flack that flies our way, sometimes in astonishing swarms, with a system of our own that can honestly only be called a scam itself... Please, meet the scammers.
The first part of it was formulated in Yaounde, Cameroon, in response to our difficulty getting rooms with two beds. Church missions had such rooms for low prices, but refused to hostel them to unmarried pairs; while they weren't about to demand a marriage license, it was an uncomfortable falsehood we were both unwilling to play, and failed anyway to explain why in the world we would insist on two separate beds.
David deserves all credit for the stroke of brilliance that has made hotelling a thousand times easier since - "What if you're my niece?" We worked out the details. He's my mom's younger brother, thus the surname difference, and no need to mention my older sisters who would seriously call into question my mom's age or his (almost 15 years apart). Finally, a simple explanation for why we travel together, inoffensive to this most religious of continents, and readily believed by everyone from hoteliers to market sellers to commanders of the rebel forces in northern Cote d'Ivoire. Even better, it has the added advantage of actually fitting our relationship rather well - David is definitely the senior partner on our team and deals with the everyday finances, and our rapport is one of obvious high familiarity and friendliness - yet lacking the romantic element that would normally be present in a co-ed pair on vacation.
Such has been the success of this 'scam' that we've expanded it from its original hotel-room dimensions to the marketplace and motorpark, enabling David to help me lower prices by 'refusing' to pay for a niece's frivolous excesses. I can show my willingness to buy to keep a negotiation going, normally risky because it screams Charge me ANYTHING!, yet with Uncle David, I also demonstrate a financially restricting force more tangible and immediate to the seller's eye than a vague, incomprehensible reluctance to pay ten times an item's value. For his prices, David plays the act of an interested but wafflingly indecisive customer, wholly dependent on the hip opinion of his highly skeptical niece. It's a fabulous scam, and I only wish we had thought of it earlier.
(Pardon the second interjection, but I would like to pre-empt any criticism that the above behavior is unfair to local business, that my post-colonial duty as a white tourist in Africa is to distribute as much money as possible among the locals. I suspect that such behavior is hardly likely to engender mutual respect and genuine cultural exchange, and doesn't provide a fair or sustainable source of aid anyway. Besides, may I assure the audience that Africans are *just* as intelligent as anyone else and generally more canny than most cultures I've met, and no seller is going to part with something at a price not worth their while. They don't want handouts, they want business - and hopefully a lively haggle.)
Part Two of our scam, formulated exclusively for francophone countries, is even better. The inspiration for this dates back to purchasing our Dem Rep of Congo visas at their consulate in Kigoma, Tanzania. I was interpreter, but once visas were obtained I skedaddled gleefully to the sunshine outside, stamped passport in hand, leaving David to shake hands goodbye with an official keen to extract a bribe. "Ah, j'ai beaucoup travaillé pour faire ces visas..." I heard him falter behind me to a blankly smiling David, who quickly exclaimed a heavily accented "Merrcee! Mercee!" over the diplomat's delicate attempts to suggest that we could peut-être offer something de petit for his travail exceptionel. His travail exceptionel (which, considering the current demand for DRC tourist visas, it probably was) would unhappily for him be recompensed only by the visa fees and his salary, for without an interpreter present, he had no access to the party identified as Mr. Pocketbook. Though we hadn't planned it that way (or foreseen the bribe attempt), it was the perfect devise for sidestepping a scam. "Merrcee!" David cried with naively broad grins as he waved goodbye, confiding later that he had indeed understood. (But why give that away?)
In francophone West Africa, we've combined David-the-French-buffoon with Uncle-David to produce the ideal situation - one in which we understand that which goes on around us and communicate what we need to, while conveniently 'not' understanding scam attempts. At many Côte d'Ivoirian motorparks/military barriers/random spots by the roadside where we stopped to play what I came to call Musical Vans, random herders or pseudo-soldiers would occasionally demand immediate payment of extra 'fees'. In the face of their fierce demands, the interpreter inexplicably sat silent as a stone, chatty just a moment earlier but apparently moneyless, while Mr. Pocketbook fumbled back a classic je-ne-parler-francais-pas that would make any good Français cringe. A few frustrated scammers were ultimately driven to screaming "Give money! Money!" at David in English in an attempt to break through our joint incompetence, but that was decidedly less eloquent, persusasive, and crowd-convincing than whatever they had to say in French, and soon after they generally gave up.
It's a rollicking good scam.
Yet we're still only amateurs among the best that NGO- and tourist-experienced West Africa has to offer, and trying to foresee the traps that will materialize out of thin air with snaky ropes already around our ankles occupies a considerable amount of my time in motorparks, that most fertile of scam-havens. Herder fees, union fees, baggage scams, van-switches, false destinations - it's definitely enough to keep you busy (and also probably entertained).
"They're gonna try to scam us," I complained out loud of the sketchy herders in a recent motorpark, plotting out some possible escape route. "Oh well," David shrugged, unconcerned: "If they scam us, we'll scam them right back."
There is the friendly self-appointed Guide, who follows you to wherever you're headed, maintaining an amiable banter until the destination and leave-taking, at which point you are informed that you were actually led there by his guiding services and kindly pay the proper fee for his time and effort. (And no, not an accidentally gendered word choice.)
There is the Yes! Taxi, in which arrival at the agreed destination is considerably complicated by the driver only pretending to know the way. Subsequent loss of gas and time while wandering aimlessly around a city must naturally be reimbursed by you, the passenger (just punishment for your foolishness in believing the driver when he said, "Yes! I know it! Get in!").
There is the Baggage Scam, most infuriating of all scams to David, produced by the shock of a passenger arriving at a long-distance bus station with - are you sitting down for this? - luggage. While no one else is paying for the ten chickens, bale of yams, children, or possibly goats that they are transporting, the two white people who just showed up with a suitcase apiece are sure to be hit with high fees for their passengerish extravagance.
And let us of course not forget the trusty Bait'n'Switch, when the original offer assumes new and exciting forms with astronomical proportions after services have been rendered - due of course to a misunderstanding on our part, or unforeseeable problems that were unforeseeably created by the party to be paid.
***ALLOW ME TO QUICKLY INTERJECT that by no means are all, or even most, Africans enterprising scam-artists. I would not even call it an appreciable minority. But if only one out of fifty people in your average African street are unscrupulous (a figure severely below that which you might estimate in any country), another honorable two hope to make legitimate clients out of tourists, and a final two are curious/bold/bored enough to come chat for kicks, then roughly one in five people approaching us of their own volition has a great NGO you've never heard of, and we will get the artificial impression that 20% of Africans are pseudo-criminals every time. In poor countries frequented by foolish and apparently high-rolling UN types and tourists, expect the above estimate to rocket skyward. It's simply an unfortunate fact of travel that we probably meet and talk to 2% of the inhabitants of a place we visit, and 90% of its scam-artists. (The other 10% were probably on the toilet at the time - they cursed their ill-luck later.) We're just too good, and sometimes too rare, for idle criminals to pass up.
So, we have (or more honestly, David has) developed a few tricks to protect ourselves from Les Trompeurs, while hopefully not shutting out opportunities for those casual exchanges with locals that make being in Africa so sincerely pleasant. We never reveal our hotel to strangers; we wait out followers or confuse them by diverging paths; we establish clear prices beforehand so no one gets peeved later. Of course we still get caught occasionally. Sometimes we can talk our way out of it, and sometimes we can't. But by and large we deflect the vast majority of flack that flies our way, sometimes in astonishing swarms, with a system of our own that can honestly only be called a scam itself... Please, meet the scammers.
The first part of it was formulated in Yaounde, Cameroon, in response to our difficulty getting rooms with two beds. Church missions had such rooms for low prices, but refused to hostel them to unmarried pairs; while they weren't about to demand a marriage license, it was an uncomfortable falsehood we were both unwilling to play, and failed anyway to explain why in the world we would insist on two separate beds.
David deserves all credit for the stroke of brilliance that has made hotelling a thousand times easier since - "What if you're my niece?" We worked out the details. He's my mom's younger brother, thus the surname difference, and no need to mention my older sisters who would seriously call into question my mom's age or his (almost 15 years apart). Finally, a simple explanation for why we travel together, inoffensive to this most religious of continents, and readily believed by everyone from hoteliers to market sellers to commanders of the rebel forces in northern Cote d'Ivoire. Even better, it has the added advantage of actually fitting our relationship rather well - David is definitely the senior partner on our team and deals with the everyday finances, and our rapport is one of obvious high familiarity and friendliness - yet lacking the romantic element that would normally be present in a co-ed pair on vacation.
Such has been the success of this 'scam' that we've expanded it from its original hotel-room dimensions to the marketplace and motorpark, enabling David to help me lower prices by 'refusing' to pay for a niece's frivolous excesses. I can show my willingness to buy to keep a negotiation going, normally risky because it screams Charge me ANYTHING!, yet with Uncle David, I also demonstrate a financially restricting force more tangible and immediate to the seller's eye than a vague, incomprehensible reluctance to pay ten times an item's value. For his prices, David plays the act of an interested but wafflingly indecisive customer, wholly dependent on the hip opinion of his highly skeptical niece. It's a fabulous scam, and I only wish we had thought of it earlier.
(Pardon the second interjection, but I would like to pre-empt any criticism that the above behavior is unfair to local business, that my post-colonial duty as a white tourist in Africa is to distribute as much money as possible among the locals. I suspect that such behavior is hardly likely to engender mutual respect and genuine cultural exchange, and doesn't provide a fair or sustainable source of aid anyway. Besides, may I assure the audience that Africans are *just* as intelligent as anyone else and generally more canny than most cultures I've met, and no seller is going to part with something at a price not worth their while. They don't want handouts, they want business - and hopefully a lively haggle.)
Part Two of our scam, formulated exclusively for francophone countries, is even better. The inspiration for this dates back to purchasing our Dem Rep of Congo visas at their consulate in Kigoma, Tanzania. I was interpreter, but once visas were obtained I skedaddled gleefully to the sunshine outside, stamped passport in hand, leaving David to shake hands goodbye with an official keen to extract a bribe. "Ah, j'ai beaucoup travaillé pour faire ces visas..." I heard him falter behind me to a blankly smiling David, who quickly exclaimed a heavily accented "Merrcee! Mercee!" over the diplomat's delicate attempts to suggest that we could peut-être offer something de petit for his travail exceptionel. His travail exceptionel (which, considering the current demand for DRC tourist visas, it probably was) would unhappily for him be recompensed only by the visa fees and his salary, for without an interpreter present, he had no access to the party identified as Mr. Pocketbook. Though we hadn't planned it that way (or foreseen the bribe attempt), it was the perfect devise for sidestepping a scam. "Merrcee!" David cried with naively broad grins as he waved goodbye, confiding later that he had indeed understood. (But why give that away?)
In francophone West Africa, we've combined David-the-French-buffoon with Uncle-David to produce the ideal situation - one in which we understand that which goes on around us and communicate what we need to, while conveniently 'not' understanding scam attempts. At many Côte d'Ivoirian motorparks/military barriers/random spots by the roadside where we stopped to play what I came to call Musical Vans, random herders or pseudo-soldiers would occasionally demand immediate payment of extra 'fees'. In the face of their fierce demands, the interpreter inexplicably sat silent as a stone, chatty just a moment earlier but apparently moneyless, while Mr. Pocketbook fumbled back a classic je-ne-parler-francais-pas that would make any good Français cringe. A few frustrated scammers were ultimately driven to screaming "Give money! Money!" at David in English in an attempt to break through our joint incompetence, but that was decidedly less eloquent, persusasive, and crowd-convincing than whatever they had to say in French, and soon after they generally gave up.
It's a rollicking good scam.
Yet we're still only amateurs among the best that NGO- and tourist-experienced West Africa has to offer, and trying to foresee the traps that will materialize out of thin air with snaky ropes already around our ankles occupies a considerable amount of my time in motorparks, that most fertile of scam-havens. Herder fees, union fees, baggage scams, van-switches, false destinations - it's definitely enough to keep you busy (and also probably entertained).
"They're gonna try to scam us," I complained out loud of the sketchy herders in a recent motorpark, plotting out some possible escape route. "Oh well," David shrugged, unconcerned: "If they scam us, we'll scam them right back."
Sunday, June 28
sorry, again...
A few days ago, we were walking down the street and talking about probably nothing. To tell the truth, we were probably talking about nothing for the second or third time, dissecting its various subtleties and debating the various implications therein. During this likely pointless conversation we discovered that, to the day, we had been traveling for six months.
David: six months...?
me: yup.
David: huh.
me: huh.
Perhaps this fascinating exchange illustrates better than a thousand words could where things stand now. Pardon the long delay in posting, but I confess that I'm running out of things to say.
Thank goodness that the blog medium hardly pretends to any standards of quality.
David: six months...?
me: yup.
David: huh.
me: huh.
Perhaps this fascinating exchange illustrates better than a thousand words could where things stand now. Pardon the long delay in posting, but I confess that I'm running out of things to say.
Thank goodness that the blog medium hardly pretends to any standards of quality.
Saturday, June 13
Government by the people
While we say we have democracy and the free market in the West, we don't really employ it at anything other than a macro-governmental level. Even then it's more republican - government by representative - than direct governance by citizens. Heck, we don't even elect our president.. those enigmatic elector chaps do.
Shift a few time zones to the east, and you arrive on a continent notorious for the tendency of its governments to creatively reinterpret democratic institutions. Legislatures serve to approve the decisions of the rulers; judiciaries serve to legitimize them. Elections are regime birthday parties. National security and presidential security are blurred to the point of serving the same function. Welcome to Africa, home of some of the world's longest-ruling/ most-murdering/ best-manipulating rulers in the world... and several of my favorites among them. Speaking of which, may I dedicate this entire entry to the all-too-timely passing of one of the longest.. Rest In Conscience, Omar Bongo. Perhaps now Gabon finally has its own decades-late shot at free and fair elections, but from the critical vantage point of many of my jaded countrymen, democracy anywhere on the continent too often has an icicle's chance in hell.
But in the most interesting way, at the most basic level Africa has stripped away all the trash we pile on top of popular rule and the free market. Welcome to Africa, the world's last preserve of Micro-Democracy.
You see it in the haggling - in a world where the only real price is the price you're willing to pay, there is no such thing as vendor decree. Instead, the buyer (me) and the seller (her) settle on a balance, some number in the hopefully overlapping ranges of the highest price I'm willing to pay, and the lowest price at which she can still make a profit. There is a price below which the sale is no longer worth it to her, and a corresponding price above which the item isn't worth it to me. The haggle system is idyllic in that it favors the perfect result every time - a compromise in which the buyer walks away happy because they found an item they wanted/needed at an acceptable price, and the vendor goes home happy because she made the highest profit possible.
The system is attended by all the non-governmental controls theory predicts - with more time than money, consumers will check their wares over carefully before purchase, and vendors know that low-quality or spoiled wares either won't sell well, or won't sell at all. Even under most dictatorships, the micro-economy will still continue to function under democratic principles. It's as simple as that, it's Friedrich Hayek's dream - it's a free market.
You see it in the group compromise - when David warned me early on that I wouldn't always be able to open my window on a stuffy bus, I understood him to mean that the windows were often stuck shut. (Which they are.) I accepted that, but couldn't believe what he had actually meant - that other people in the bus not wanting my window open would mean I couldn't have it open.
"What do you mean, other people??" I demanded indignantly, fresh in my righteous American individualism. "It's my window, they can keep their own windows open or closed however they like."
He warned me that such an attitude might not get far, and he was right - in shock would I discover that the cross Ethiopian women sitting meters away from me in the bus could actually claim power over the window right next to my face. The force at work was one I came to appreciate (and, in time, also use) - crowd appeal. If the women could convince a few other people to ally with them against just me, they already had a clear majority to my minority, and even the window-apathetic factions in the bus would recognize their right to tell an outvoted minority what to do with her window. I wallowed in scandalized outrage each time this happened, each time I was consigned to gasping away the dusty hours in a 100°F bus only millimeters of glass away from the fresh air outside, just because some dumb #@$*% didn't want to mess up her hair. It's probably pretty obvious that a part of me still hasn't gotten over this. But I've learned to accept the fairness behind it - even small affairs I intend to control myself will be subject to a democratic system of approval or repeal.
You see it in the power of popular pressure - I perhaps did not truly appreciate the fairness of crowd appeal until a memorable pick-up ride in Zanzibar. We had paid the herder with a large bill for the trip, and asked the price from him; upon inquiring from other passengers in the truck bed what the real fare was, we asked him for our change. Seeking to squeeze a little extra profit out of the situation, he first feigned ignorance, then denied what the other passengers said, before finally decreeing that it didn't matter since we were foreigners anyway. The awkward discussion grew increasingly heated in the small benched space until he and David flew into equal and opposite rages.
Despite all David's fury, without the resource of crowd appeal, we would probably never have seen our ten bucks again. As it was, David and I enlisted the quiet sympathy of the other passengers, all of whom had witnessed the situation and all of whom knew the exact fare. Though the herder might have been able to convince just one other person to go along with him on grounds of racial solidarity, in the face of a local crowd he had no choice but eventual capitulation.
The ultimate returning of change was judiciously, impartially, and professionally brokered by the two men across from David, a senior Muslim and a middle-aged businessman who emerged by their status and age as Arbiters. (This, by the way, is just as important a personality as any I've ever talked about before - even more interesting than the Shopper - and has become by far my favorite.) Their calm counsel was understood to represent the local opinion, and they were thus able to exert far more pressure on the herder to relinquish our money than any threat we could have made. Popular pressure demanded that he back down, and popular pressure alone upheld the standards of fairness.
And when members of society break that trust, you see it in the instant (and all too excessive) public justice. While in areas of tension this goes dangerously overboard, in daily life it serves to settle disputes fairly - as in Zanzibar - or punish unacceptable behavior. A guilty party may present to those present their excuses or mitigating factors - think of it as an instant trial, with a jury of witnesses. A judge (the Arbiter) emerges naturally among the bystanders as a local authority, perhaps a senior member of the community, or just someone who can command a presence of calm impartiality and reason. Redress is decided upon and carried out, and in irreparable cases the transgressors of acceptable conduct are punished with shaming.
I'm not sure if this would work in the private, individual culture of the United States, where scorned refractory citizens are all too happy to retreat from the public eye to the sacred territory of their own home (or the internet). Here in Africa, however, to be shamed is worse than a slap. The power of public shame is immense, the mere threat of which serves to hold together the delicate trust fibers of one of Africa's best inventions - Window Shopping.
I was blown away the first time I ever witnessed the window shopping. Though I wouldn't have imagined it, it was impossibly simple - as vehicles slow for police roadblocks or speed-bumps, locals from neighboring villages run up to the car or bus windows bearing goods for sale in their hands or on their heads. Passengers roll down their windows or lean down from high seats to peruse the wares, which most often are local produce, but occasionally other food or crafts.
In creating thus the potential for direct producer--consumer exchange at minimum prices and maximum profit, the window market makes perfect sense.. until you remember that it's taking place on one side from the interior of a barely paused vehicle, and sometimes at a vertical distances so great participants have to throw things at each other. All too often transactions are completed as the vendor begins to jog alongside the bus, hand outstretched to catch that last coin as it drops from the window, or holding the purchased sack of freshly fried dough-balls towards receding fingertips. Yet I have almost never seen a failed sale. Each time the buyer manages to catch all his purchases, and the vendor (often a kid), all his coins.
As an American I never understood this - what's to make sure I really do toss down my coins after my wares are thrown up? I'd only have to hold out a moment before the bus began to move, and then I'd be scot-free. Or alternatively, what's to stop them from grabbing the coins and scampering off if I throw down first, or if I don't have exact change? One of us has to go first, and neither of us is in a position to protest if the other doesn't follow through.
David and I discussed this through several countries before deciding that in the case of a cheating vendor, the passenger must ask the driver to stop; likewise, against a cheating customer, the locals must flag the driver down. This didn't really provide a satisfying explanation, however, because what's to say the bus-driver cooperates? or even hears over the oft-blaring radio? We still wondered.
Our Congolese train trip killed this fledgling theory beyond any resuscitation, for despite the conductor being insulated from any appeal dozens of cars away, the window market was as strong as ever. Yet it also ultimately revealed the true explanation behind why the window market works in
As we delayed for a 'croisement', women and kids from the neighboring villages swarmed below the train windows with platters on their heads. Aside from the varied produce were bottled drinks, plastic sacks, clothes, grilled meat, and tupperware, but I wasn't paying much attention to the market. When we finally started rolling again, a clamor taking place outside the bus drew even my sleepy, jaded attention; women and kids were screaming and began to run alongside the train, now gathering speed. Other locals noticed and began to yell also, smacking on the side of the car below the high windows and attracting the notice of the other passengers, who instantly got involved. A female Arbiter emerged from the seat behind me - she was a really cool, friendly lady with natural presence - and pushed her way up the crowded aisle to sort out the situation. As it was all conducted in a local language, I couldn't follow the details, but it was pretty obvious that a man on the train had somehow cheated the woman still sprinting alongside the train, yelling with energy but falling behind. The Arbiter was pissed at such a clear breach of the window-market trust, and the entire train car fell silent as things got ugly. Though it was kind of too late for payment, it was our impression that under popular pressure, he did throw the last few coins out the window for the woman to hopefully find later; excuses were muttered but not accepted, and as the Arbiter made her way back to her seat, her stony face signalled the response of the entire train car, quietly united in their disapproval of this one man.
I imagine that the remaining 6 hours in the crowded car were not very pleasant for him. Maybe it was worth the 80 cents for him. Maybe in American eyes, he still got away with it. But here in Africa, where 80 cents can mean a lot of money, the honor is still worth more.
So Africa may not be a champion of democracy as we know it, but it definitely employs government by the people. Democracy can be a bit thin at the national level, and it isn't always assured that your government will watch your back.. but at least you know that the people will.
Shift a few time zones to the east, and you arrive on a continent notorious for the tendency of its governments to creatively reinterpret democratic institutions. Legislatures serve to approve the decisions of the rulers; judiciaries serve to legitimize them. Elections are regime birthday parties. National security and presidential security are blurred to the point of serving the same function. Welcome to Africa, home of some of the world's longest-ruling/ most-murdering/ best-manipulating rulers in the world... and several of my favorites among them. Speaking of which, may I dedicate this entire entry to the all-too-timely passing of one of the longest.. Rest In Conscience, Omar Bongo. Perhaps now Gabon finally has its own decades-late shot at free and fair elections, but from the critical vantage point of many of my jaded countrymen, democracy anywhere on the continent too often has an icicle's chance in hell.
But in the most interesting way, at the most basic level Africa has stripped away all the trash we pile on top of popular rule and the free market. Welcome to Africa, the world's last preserve of Micro-Democracy.
You see it in the haggling - in a world where the only real price is the price you're willing to pay, there is no such thing as vendor decree. Instead, the buyer (me) and the seller (her) settle on a balance, some number in the hopefully overlapping ranges of the highest price I'm willing to pay, and the lowest price at which she can still make a profit. There is a price below which the sale is no longer worth it to her, and a corresponding price above which the item isn't worth it to me. The haggle system is idyllic in that it favors the perfect result every time - a compromise in which the buyer walks away happy because they found an item they wanted/needed at an acceptable price, and the vendor goes home happy because she made the highest profit possible.
The system is attended by all the non-governmental controls theory predicts - with more time than money, consumers will check their wares over carefully before purchase, and vendors know that low-quality or spoiled wares either won't sell well, or won't sell at all. Even under most dictatorships, the micro-economy will still continue to function under democratic principles. It's as simple as that, it's Friedrich Hayek's dream - it's a free market.
You see it in the group compromise - when David warned me early on that I wouldn't always be able to open my window on a stuffy bus, I understood him to mean that the windows were often stuck shut. (Which they are.) I accepted that, but couldn't believe what he had actually meant - that other people in the bus not wanting my window open would mean I couldn't have it open.
"What do you mean, other people??" I demanded indignantly, fresh in my righteous American individualism. "It's my window, they can keep their own windows open or closed however they like."
He warned me that such an attitude might not get far, and he was right - in shock would I discover that the cross Ethiopian women sitting meters away from me in the bus could actually claim power over the window right next to my face. The force at work was one I came to appreciate (and, in time, also use) - crowd appeal. If the women could convince a few other people to ally with them against just me, they already had a clear majority to my minority, and even the window-apathetic factions in the bus would recognize their right to tell an outvoted minority what to do with her window. I wallowed in scandalized outrage each time this happened, each time I was consigned to gasping away the dusty hours in a 100°F bus only millimeters of glass away from the fresh air outside, just because some dumb #@$*% didn't want to mess up her hair. It's probably pretty obvious that a part of me still hasn't gotten over this. But I've learned to accept the fairness behind it - even small affairs I intend to control myself will be subject to a democratic system of approval or repeal.
You see it in the power of popular pressure - I perhaps did not truly appreciate the fairness of crowd appeal until a memorable pick-up ride in Zanzibar. We had paid the herder with a large bill for the trip, and asked the price from him; upon inquiring from other passengers in the truck bed what the real fare was, we asked him for our change. Seeking to squeeze a little extra profit out of the situation, he first feigned ignorance, then denied what the other passengers said, before finally decreeing that it didn't matter since we were foreigners anyway. The awkward discussion grew increasingly heated in the small benched space until he and David flew into equal and opposite rages.
Despite all David's fury, without the resource of crowd appeal, we would probably never have seen our ten bucks again. As it was, David and I enlisted the quiet sympathy of the other passengers, all of whom had witnessed the situation and all of whom knew the exact fare. Though the herder might have been able to convince just one other person to go along with him on grounds of racial solidarity, in the face of a local crowd he had no choice but eventual capitulation.
The ultimate returning of change was judiciously, impartially, and professionally brokered by the two men across from David, a senior Muslim and a middle-aged businessman who emerged by their status and age as Arbiters. (This, by the way, is just as important a personality as any I've ever talked about before - even more interesting than the Shopper - and has become by far my favorite.) Their calm counsel was understood to represent the local opinion, and they were thus able to exert far more pressure on the herder to relinquish our money than any threat we could have made. Popular pressure demanded that he back down, and popular pressure alone upheld the standards of fairness.
And when members of society break that trust, you see it in the instant (and all too excessive) public justice. While in areas of tension this goes dangerously overboard, in daily life it serves to settle disputes fairly - as in Zanzibar - or punish unacceptable behavior. A guilty party may present to those present their excuses or mitigating factors - think of it as an instant trial, with a jury of witnesses. A judge (the Arbiter) emerges naturally among the bystanders as a local authority, perhaps a senior member of the community, or just someone who can command a presence of calm impartiality and reason. Redress is decided upon and carried out, and in irreparable cases the transgressors of acceptable conduct are punished with shaming.
I'm not sure if this would work in the private, individual culture of the United States, where scorned refractory citizens are all too happy to retreat from the public eye to the sacred territory of their own home (or the internet). Here in Africa, however, to be shamed is worse than a slap. The power of public shame is immense, the mere threat of which serves to hold together the delicate trust fibers of one of Africa's best inventions - Window Shopping.
I was blown away the first time I ever witnessed the window shopping. Though I wouldn't have imagined it, it was impossibly simple - as vehicles slow for police roadblocks or speed-bumps, locals from neighboring villages run up to the car or bus windows bearing goods for sale in their hands or on their heads. Passengers roll down their windows or lean down from high seats to peruse the wares, which most often are local produce, but occasionally other food or crafts.
In creating thus the potential for direct producer--consumer exchange at minimum prices and maximum profit, the window market makes perfect sense.. until you remember that it's taking place on one side from the interior of a barely paused vehicle, and sometimes at a vertical distances so great participants have to throw things at each other. All too often transactions are completed as the vendor begins to jog alongside the bus, hand outstretched to catch that last coin as it drops from the window, or holding the purchased sack of freshly fried dough-balls towards receding fingertips. Yet I have almost never seen a failed sale. Each time the buyer manages to catch all his purchases, and the vendor (often a kid), all his coins.
As an American I never understood this - what's to make sure I really do toss down my coins after my wares are thrown up? I'd only have to hold out a moment before the bus began to move, and then I'd be scot-free. Or alternatively, what's to stop them from grabbing the coins and scampering off if I throw down first, or if I don't have exact change? One of us has to go first, and neither of us is in a position to protest if the other doesn't follow through.
David and I discussed this through several countries before deciding that in the case of a cheating vendor, the passenger must ask the driver to stop; likewise, against a cheating customer, the locals must flag the driver down. This didn't really provide a satisfying explanation, however, because what's to say the bus-driver cooperates? or even hears over the oft-blaring radio? We still wondered.
Our Congolese train trip killed this fledgling theory beyond any resuscitation, for despite the conductor being insulated from any appeal dozens of cars away, the window market was as strong as ever. Yet it also ultimately revealed the true explanation behind why the window market works in
As we delayed for a 'croisement', women and kids from the neighboring villages swarmed below the train windows with platters on their heads. Aside from the varied produce were bottled drinks, plastic sacks, clothes, grilled meat, and tupperware, but I wasn't paying much attention to the market. When we finally started rolling again, a clamor taking place outside the bus drew even my sleepy, jaded attention; women and kids were screaming and began to run alongside the train, now gathering speed. Other locals noticed and began to yell also, smacking on the side of the car below the high windows and attracting the notice of the other passengers, who instantly got involved. A female Arbiter emerged from the seat behind me - she was a really cool, friendly lady with natural presence - and pushed her way up the crowded aisle to sort out the situation. As it was all conducted in a local language, I couldn't follow the details, but it was pretty obvious that a man on the train had somehow cheated the woman still sprinting alongside the train, yelling with energy but falling behind. The Arbiter was pissed at such a clear breach of the window-market trust, and the entire train car fell silent as things got ugly. Though it was kind of too late for payment, it was our impression that under popular pressure, he did throw the last few coins out the window for the woman to hopefully find later; excuses were muttered but not accepted, and as the Arbiter made her way back to her seat, her stony face signalled the response of the entire train car, quietly united in their disapproval of this one man.
I imagine that the remaining 6 hours in the crowded car were not very pleasant for him. Maybe it was worth the 80 cents for him. Maybe in American eyes, he still got away with it. But here in Africa, where 80 cents can mean a lot of money, the honor is still worth more.
So Africa may not be a champion of democracy as we know it, but it definitely employs government by the people. Democracy can be a bit thin at the national level, and it isn't always assured that your government will watch your back.. but at least you know that the people will.
Thursday, May 28
Punch Buggy
When I was a child, one of the magical and increasingly rare highlights of any day was to land a victory punch on an unsuspecting companion in the classic game of Punch Bug Spotting.
Never would I have believed, until five months ago, that there existed Americans who did not know of this game; cautious in my recent experience of punch-bug ignorance, however, I will explain the rules. They are but two: that (1) Whosoever espies a true, original, Volkswagon bug in any recognizable state of repair has license to [gently] punch their companion, while informing the victim of the color of applicable punch-buggy for their verification. Naturally, rule (2) follows that since any spotter can punch, after revealing the presence of the bug in question the punch initiator had better protect him or herself from an eye-for-eye reprisal by calling "No back-tacks". These are the only two rules, rendering the entire planet a free-for-all for whoever has the quickest eye, fist, and claim-calling combination (which I usually didn't), and explaining why the game was so enormously attractive to the five, seven, or ten-year-old versions of myself.
I say five, seven, or ten, but in truth I have never really stopped playing the Punch Bug Game. It is more the sad disappearance of true VW bugs around the time of their modern replacement than any onset of maturity that caused bug-punching to peter out of my life in middle and high school. My assumption at the time was that true punch bugs were nearing extinction, and that I had better get used to their sleek, shiny, more highly evolved strain and relegate the days of the true Punch-Buggy and bug-punching glory to the fond memory archives of my childhood.
But not so.. punch-bugs, I have been delighted to discover, live on in their own unassuming afterlife.. for Africa is where punch-bugs come to die.
I first noticed this on a side street in Khartoum, probably not more than a week into the trip. Out of the corner of my eye I spotted a sight I hadn't seen in years, one that made my heart leap so suddenly with unexpected joy I almost forgot myself before leaping into action - had David already seen it?? - I flew to punch him first, hollering the triumphal cry of the puncher: "BLUE-PUNCH-BUGGY-NO-BACK-TACKS!!"
David stopped short, staring, bewildered at his lightning defeat. Well, of course I could sympathize with that - he had just missed the only punch-bug opportunity either one of us might see for the entire trip, and even in my impromptu victory dance I well understood that anyone would be upset.
David, however, was remarkably obtuse to the causes behind the swift and unexpected blow he had received. How foolish, to forget such a classic game - even in a ten-year lapse of punch-bug activity - or fail to apreciate the implicitly global nature of the playing field! I began to chide him mericlessly for it.
Difficult and slow was it for me to grasp that David - hold onto your hats here - had never played the punch-buggy game and - WORSE - did not even know of its existence. !!! The mind boggles. What about popular culture?? I demanded. Books, television, movies?? "Heck," I demanded in frightened defense of such a time-honored institution, "what'd you think we called them 'punch-buggies' for anyway??"
He denied ever even having heard such a term.
Well, I wasn't about to let his incomprehensible ignorance rain on my punch-bug parade; it was just too bad he was the only plausible victim within arm's reach for the next eight months and when we (incredibly!) saw another VW bug two weeks later, he was pummelled a second time. "Green-punch-buggy-no-back-tacks!"
The confusion of the first attack was now replaced with an annoyance that threatened to grow dangerous if my hit-and-runs were repeated. A small voice of reason piped that I should let it go; it wasn't worth it, it wasn't adult, and it wasn't fair in any case to play against an uninitiated. But punch-bugs were too deeply absorbed into my character - years of being punched by my quicker, smarter sisters and much quicker, smarter dad meant that a punch-bug victory was like a golden trophy, the pennant of glory for the youngest and slowest member of the family to wave in triumph for the few hours (or minutes) before it would inevitably be snatched back: the Holy Grail of my childhood. Despite losing almost every time, I had revered the Punch Bug Game with an ardency explicable only by my youth (but which the onset of adulthood has done little to erode). To let a VW-Bug pass quietly by with no comment, as if nothing had happened, was unthinkable.
And besides, I had fully explained to him both rules. He was just as eligible as I to be the puncher instead of the punchee. As far as I was concerned, the playing field was level, and let the punching begin.
Not even I expected the massacre that awaited in the capital of Ethiopia, however. The streets of Addis Adeba were lined with '60s Volkswagons in all shapes and sizes, and classic punch-bugs proliferated in every color of the rainbow. (No, really - favorites were burnished gold, turquoise with white racing stripes, and iridescent purple.) After perhaps his 20th time getting punch-bug-punched, David announced in a voice that brooked no discusion that he was through, and declared a moratorium on the Punch Bug Game.
I was nettled. This was the punch-bug paradise I'd been waiting for since age 10, when true punch bugs began to melt out of the West like roaches at a Raid party. No Punch Bug Game? On what grounds?? "You know, you can play too," I charged. "I don't wanna play!" he snapped. I was pretty sure the maneuver was illegal but could think of no, and mutinously began to count up all the punches I was missing out on. I made it to 77 before we left the capital a day later.
It was well into March before I ventured another punch. I had let about a dozen beautiful opportunities slip by, quietly tacking them on to my embittered total of Denied Punch Bugs, but as the memory of the Addis VW Spree faded I began to hope for a gradual and perhaps unnoticeable punch-bug recussitation. My first tentative efforts, quiet and delicate, won looks of contempt but no damning decrees, and soon we were back to the normal pre-Addis level of a few punches a week. I'm not actually a terribly observant person, but after a decade of scouring streets for a punch bug even the chancest glimpse of one of those pastel rounded roofs has the effect of a mild electric shock. Before long, it had a similar effect on David, who began to associate old VWs with vague yet impending danger. He never attempted a counter-attack, though, preferring to retaliate with snide comments relating to his being engaged in some other task, such as finding a taxi or changing money, which might have trumped vintage-car spotting. Such remarks always carried the unmistakeable whiff of superiority; the implication, of course, was that perhaps I ought to restructure my priorities.
I knew better.
But as always happens when one's competition is sub-par, I too got slower, and lazy. No need to race to the punch, really. It would still be there, and let's face it - so would David.
And so it happened one watershed morning about four months into the trip that, as I drifted in and out of cognizance in a share-taxi station wagon, David caught sight of a punch bug and thought : Red-punch-bug. With a stroke of brilliance he identified the ready opportunity and a negligent victim, and spluttering "RED PUNCH BUG! RED PUNCH BUG!" he began to wail on my shoulder with the zeal of a beaten-down underdog suddenly clawing its way to the top. He was so excited that he punched me six or seven times. Irked at the unexpected reversal, I archly informed him that You're only allowed one punch per bug, before punching him back because he had neglected to preclude that possibility by calling no back-tacks. He was oblivious to anything but his triumph. The impossible had come; he had beat me at my own game; anything could happen. I was similarly affected and began to keep greater vigilance, getting him back with another one a few hours later.
At five months, I have now probably punched David close to five hundred times (not counting, of course, the Lost Bugs of Ethiopia). For his part, David claims 24 victories, a modest total until I add that 22 were in the last fortnight, and 21 of those this afternoon in a memorable drive through what could only have been the Final Resting-Place of Punchbugs while the other passengers leaned away from us with looks of alarm and disapproval. Then the moment came - a white bug loomed up suddenly by the side of the road. Instantaneously, we both whirled in our cramped seats, fists almost colliding on their way to target, blurting "WHITE PUN--" Recognition dawned of mutual victory and mutual defeat, and I realized: He is worthy of the Punch Bug Game.
I suppose every master worth her talent must one day come to see herself challenged by her prodigy... but I pity the next person he takes to Africa.
Never would I have believed, until five months ago, that there existed Americans who did not know of this game; cautious in my recent experience of punch-bug ignorance, however, I will explain the rules. They are but two: that (1) Whosoever espies a true, original, Volkswagon bug in any recognizable state of repair has license to [gently] punch their companion, while informing the victim of the color of applicable punch-buggy for their verification. Naturally, rule (2) follows that since any spotter can punch, after revealing the presence of the bug in question the punch initiator had better protect him or herself from an eye-for-eye reprisal by calling "No back-tacks". These are the only two rules, rendering the entire planet a free-for-all for whoever has the quickest eye, fist, and claim-calling combination (which I usually didn't), and explaining why the game was so enormously attractive to the five, seven, or ten-year-old versions of myself.
I say five, seven, or ten, but in truth I have never really stopped playing the Punch Bug Game. It is more the sad disappearance of true VW bugs around the time of their modern replacement than any onset of maturity that caused bug-punching to peter out of my life in middle and high school. My assumption at the time was that true punch bugs were nearing extinction, and that I had better get used to their sleek, shiny, more highly evolved strain and relegate the days of the true Punch-Buggy and bug-punching glory to the fond memory archives of my childhood.
But not so.. punch-bugs, I have been delighted to discover, live on in their own unassuming afterlife.. for Africa is where punch-bugs come to die.
I first noticed this on a side street in Khartoum, probably not more than a week into the trip. Out of the corner of my eye I spotted a sight I hadn't seen in years, one that made my heart leap so suddenly with unexpected joy I almost forgot myself before leaping into action - had David already seen it?? - I flew to punch him first, hollering the triumphal cry of the puncher: "BLUE-PUNCH-BUGGY-NO-BACK-TACKS!!"
David stopped short, staring, bewildered at his lightning defeat. Well, of course I could sympathize with that - he had just missed the only punch-bug opportunity either one of us might see for the entire trip, and even in my impromptu victory dance I well understood that anyone would be upset.
David, however, was remarkably obtuse to the causes behind the swift and unexpected blow he had received. How foolish, to forget such a classic game - even in a ten-year lapse of punch-bug activity - or fail to apreciate the implicitly global nature of the playing field! I began to chide him mericlessly for it.
Difficult and slow was it for me to grasp that David - hold onto your hats here - had never played the punch-buggy game and - WORSE - did not even know of its existence. !!! The mind boggles. What about popular culture?? I demanded. Books, television, movies?? "Heck," I demanded in frightened defense of such a time-honored institution, "what'd you think we called them 'punch-buggies' for anyway??"
He denied ever even having heard such a term.
Well, I wasn't about to let his incomprehensible ignorance rain on my punch-bug parade; it was just too bad he was the only plausible victim within arm's reach for the next eight months and when we (incredibly!) saw another VW bug two weeks later, he was pummelled a second time. "Green-punch-buggy-no-back-tacks!"
The confusion of the first attack was now replaced with an annoyance that threatened to grow dangerous if my hit-and-runs were repeated. A small voice of reason piped that I should let it go; it wasn't worth it, it wasn't adult, and it wasn't fair in any case to play against an uninitiated. But punch-bugs were too deeply absorbed into my character - years of being punched by my quicker, smarter sisters and much quicker, smarter dad meant that a punch-bug victory was like a golden trophy, the pennant of glory for the youngest and slowest member of the family to wave in triumph for the few hours (or minutes) before it would inevitably be snatched back: the Holy Grail of my childhood. Despite losing almost every time, I had revered the Punch Bug Game with an ardency explicable only by my youth (but which the onset of adulthood has done little to erode). To let a VW-Bug pass quietly by with no comment, as if nothing had happened, was unthinkable.
And besides, I had fully explained to him both rules. He was just as eligible as I to be the puncher instead of the punchee. As far as I was concerned, the playing field was level, and let the punching begin.
Not even I expected the massacre that awaited in the capital of Ethiopia, however. The streets of Addis Adeba were lined with '60s Volkswagons in all shapes and sizes, and classic punch-bugs proliferated in every color of the rainbow. (No, really - favorites were burnished gold, turquoise with white racing stripes, and iridescent purple.) After perhaps his 20th time getting punch-bug-punched, David announced in a voice that brooked no discusion that he was through, and declared a moratorium on the Punch Bug Game.
I was nettled. This was the punch-bug paradise I'd been waiting for since age 10, when true punch bugs began to melt out of the West like roaches at a Raid party. No Punch Bug Game? On what grounds?? "You know, you can play too," I charged. "I don't wanna play!" he snapped. I was pretty sure the maneuver was illegal but could think of no, and mutinously began to count up all the punches I was missing out on. I made it to 77 before we left the capital a day later.
It was well into March before I ventured another punch. I had let about a dozen beautiful opportunities slip by, quietly tacking them on to my embittered total of Denied Punch Bugs, but as the memory of the Addis VW Spree faded I began to hope for a gradual and perhaps unnoticeable punch-bug recussitation. My first tentative efforts, quiet and delicate, won looks of contempt but no damning decrees, and soon we were back to the normal pre-Addis level of a few punches a week. I'm not actually a terribly observant person, but after a decade of scouring streets for a punch bug even the chancest glimpse of one of those pastel rounded roofs has the effect of a mild electric shock. Before long, it had a similar effect on David, who began to associate old VWs with vague yet impending danger. He never attempted a counter-attack, though, preferring to retaliate with snide comments relating to his being engaged in some other task, such as finding a taxi or changing money, which might have trumped vintage-car spotting. Such remarks always carried the unmistakeable whiff of superiority; the implication, of course, was that perhaps I ought to restructure my priorities.
I knew better.
But as always happens when one's competition is sub-par, I too got slower, and lazy. No need to race to the punch, really. It would still be there, and let's face it - so would David.
And so it happened one watershed morning about four months into the trip that, as I drifted in and out of cognizance in a share-taxi station wagon, David caught sight of a punch bug and thought : Red-punch-bug. With a stroke of brilliance he identified the ready opportunity and a negligent victim, and spluttering "RED PUNCH BUG! RED PUNCH BUG!" he began to wail on my shoulder with the zeal of a beaten-down underdog suddenly clawing its way to the top. He was so excited that he punched me six or seven times. Irked at the unexpected reversal, I archly informed him that You're only allowed one punch per bug, before punching him back because he had neglected to preclude that possibility by calling no back-tacks. He was oblivious to anything but his triumph. The impossible had come; he had beat me at my own game; anything could happen. I was similarly affected and began to keep greater vigilance, getting him back with another one a few hours later.
At five months, I have now probably punched David close to five hundred times (not counting, of course, the Lost Bugs of Ethiopia). For his part, David claims 24 victories, a modest total until I add that 22 were in the last fortnight, and 21 of those this afternoon in a memorable drive through what could only have been the Final Resting-Place of Punchbugs while the other passengers leaned away from us with looks of alarm and disapproval. Then the moment came - a white bug loomed up suddenly by the side of the road. Instantaneously, we both whirled in our cramped seats, fists almost colliding on their way to target, blurting "WHITE PUN--" Recognition dawned of mutual victory and mutual defeat, and I realized: He is worthy of the Punch Bug Game.
I suppose every master worth her talent must one day come to see herself challenged by her prodigy... but I pity the next person he takes to Africa.
Wednesday, May 6
How to Eat a Street Mango
(A Step-by-Step Instruction for the Mango-naive)1.) Acquire tasty mango for a few dimes from a street vendor - either a man pushing a large wooden cart stacked with them, or perhaps a passing lady with a platter on her head supporting a mango pyramid. Note: It is important in this endeavor not to actually be looking for a mango, as mangoes only appear when one is not looking for them.
2.) Back in your Sudanese hotel room, take penknife and stab ambitiously into the center of the mango, discovering a large hard pit you never knew existed. Hack away at fruit, chopping off the skin, and attempt to cut some flesh off from the center. Meet remarkable slippery resistance. Try again with more force, smashing the fruit to a pulp without actually managing to remove any, and narrowly miss slicing your fingers.
3.) Eschew all decency and go at the fruit with your teeth in an inspired effort to actually get a bite. Get instead a sticky syrupy juice all over your face and both hands, and some pernicious mango threads tangled in your teeth which are impossible to remove. Notice with some dismay that the naked fruit seems, at this point, to be all pit. Regret removing peel so carelessly, and try to bite off some of the flesh clinging to it. Succeed in getting more threads stuck hopelessly in teeth. Swear never to eat a mango again.
4.) The most delicious mango lassi of your life in southern Kenya leads you back to temptation only a month later. Repeat steps 1-3 with new pit awareness and lowered expectations, but little variation. Renew anti-mango vow.
5.) An enterprising mango merchant brandishing a machete in central Tanzania convinces you to backslide once again into mango mania - by offering to do the cutting himself. A few swift and simple slices later, and the demonic pit-and-peel number masquerading as edibility is transformed into a series of easily plucked cubes inside a neat peel shell, detached from said pit. Eat, and rejoice.
6.) First-hand witness of the Mango Merchant's Machete Miracle inspires you to cautiously attempt replication of his feat at home with your penknife. Purchase another mango at the first opportunity, your discerning eye and fingers carefully selecting one with smooth, unblemished green skin, gently firm to the touch. You know the secret now - to separate the fruit as soon as possible from the fiendishly powerful pull of the pit.
7.) Upon first slice learn that “firm to the touch” is not actually ideal for mango-eating. Neither is green. The fruit inside is pale yellow, and hard. Be a good sport and try to eat it anyway. (When you do give up, the remainder may be pitched out your train window.)
8.) Weigh carefully your next mango purchase, taking care now to select one that is quite soft indeed and a rich peachy color. In a Nigerian car park, take your penknife and, holding the mango flat-side-up in your other hand, slice horizontally from the top down either edge to – but not quite through – the little stem-butt at the bottom. You should now have two shallow hemispheres of mango with an equatorial cut. Leave the 
bottom one be; the top is your first task. Shimmy the knife in as thinly as possible around the edges of the top, and peel away the skin – almost as you would a banana- to give you access to that crabby pit.
9.) The next part is the most important step of the whole mango ordeal. Using your equatorial cut as a guide, wiggle the knife in along the hard surface of the pit underneath. Your goal is to slice the entire top hemisphere of mango away from that pit. Cu
t through the tenacious pit fibers by breaking the first law of pen-knifery and cut towards yourself, from the pointed end of the fruit down to its stem. If you need to, you can dissect the mango-hemisphere to help you get the knife in along the face of the pit, but leaving the hemisphere as whole as possible will avoid that smashing problem you had earlier.
10.) Once the top half is liberated, you are almost in the mango-clear. Cut the lung-shaped flap of fruit into hunks with ease and stuff into face happily, or just bite them off like a pig. Resist the temptation to simply bite off those little clumps at the edges that yet cling to the pit, however; you will get naught but aforesaid sticky syrup and teeth-threads. The trickiest part in this step is actually to fend off those vultures that will now materialize out of thin air and clamor at your shoulder for a bite.
11.) After finishing the top hemisphere, you can begin on the bottom with more or less a repeat of steps 9-10. Unfortunately having to hold the naked pit for this will cause your left hand to become more or less covered with mango goo, but as you're actually getting to eat some, who cares? Consume mango with enthusiasm after tithing the vulture-beggars, and congratulate yourself on a Mango Well Enjoyed.
Friday, April 3
Introducing...
This morning I woke up to David bouncing around in his pajamas, clapping his hands and singing with great energy his most hated song, known to us only as.. the Jambo Song.
This is an idiotic and highly repetitive tune created chiefly for the delight of simple-minded tourists and played, to David’s eternal chagrin, continually on loop along certain parts of the Swahili coast. As near as we can tell, the lyrics consist entirely of the words “Jambo”, “Karibu”, and “Hakuna matata”.
Of course, I have to take his word for all this, as I have – infuriatingly, to him – only heard the Jambo Song once, at Fort Jesus in Mombasa, and its catchy childish spirit did not for whatever reason lodge in my memory at all.
It is perhaps because of David’s extremely well-respected reputation as an incisive, talented and controversial scholar among both the peers of his field and his legitimately worshipful students that I have chosen to introduce him with this particular image, clapping and singing, to those of my own acquaintance – that is, those readers deprived enough to know this man only through my writings. Their loss, truly, for half the adventure on this marvelous trip comes from David himself.
The first thing to know about David is that he is fascinating. He’s got stories to shock and delight from five continents, as well as a mind like a sponge for information. So many times on this trip, trapped in a dusty bus for half a day, I have said something along the lines of “So tell the entire history of Iran for the past hundred years” and he can actually do it. And will, too, without complaints! I’ve learned more in the past three months than I did my entire freshman year. The best part is, he’s completely unpretentious about it, hedging immediately if he isn’t absolutely sure on some remote fact, and he makes it interesting by adding personal details along the way.
The second thing I would have to say about the prof, and this has probably saved my life a dozen times, is that he is quintessentially capable. David knows how to recognize and avoid tinderbox situations long before they ignite, he’s flexible and open-minded enough to roll with traveling in all its unpredictable glory, and he has a sixth sense for sniffing out scams. And even when we do get into a sticky pickle, he can talk his way out of anything in three different languages.
Most of the time, it’s all I can do to watch and learn.
Even if the above traits have played a much more critical role in the success of this trip, my favorite thing about David is, frankly, that he’s fun. I’m usually pretty needy for alone time and social diversity, but was amazed to realize somewhere in Ethiopia how long it had been since I’d hung out with anyone else, and how much I hadn’t noticed. David’s like that – you can spend two hours or two months talking with him and not get bored. He has a quick sense of humor, a good listening ear, and a lot of buoyant optimism that can get you through the most frustrating bureaucratic red tape. He’s also not above bouncing around our hotel room at 6:30 a.m. singing because we’ve been having a spectacular trip for three months, and are (insha’allah) going to continue having a spectacular trip for four.
Unfortunately, the aforementioned playful side means that David is not above inflicting certain petty cruelties on me, his hassled and long-suffering traveling companion. Living together for this long, we’ve become more than familiar with each other’s little vulnerabilities, and David knows well that the threat of going to the same restaurant twice, putting his feet on my pillow (keep in mind they look like mine), or, god forbid, giving me a sweat-hug - gah! - will make me capitulate pretty quickly.
Thus the need for MAT, Mutually Assured Torture, so I am doing my best to pick up the Jambo Song from him. Despite not knowing it at all, now that it’s been stuck in his head for ten days I’ve had ample opportunity to listen to it (or his rendition of it), and think I could reproduce it at will. I intend to bust it out at just the moment when it finally fades from his uppermost consciousness to lie dormant below the surface, waiting only for a well-timed “JAMBO!!” from me to revive it in force. I’m really looking forward to that moment, though it will probably earn me a faceful of his vile sweat towel.
And just as he’s getting over his first fits of rage at the unexpected comeback of this Swahili tormentor, I plan to remind him that really, it’s only thanks to him that I know the song at all.
This is an idiotic and highly repetitive tune created chiefly for the delight of simple-minded tourists and played, to David’s eternal chagrin, continually on loop along certain parts of the Swahili coast. As near as we can tell, the lyrics consist entirely of the words “Jambo”, “Karibu”, and “Hakuna matata”.
Of course, I have to take his word for all this, as I have – infuriatingly, to him – only heard the Jambo Song once, at Fort Jesus in Mombasa, and its catchy childish spirit did not for whatever reason lodge in my memory at all.
It is perhaps because of David’s extremely well-respected reputation as an incisive, talented and controversial scholar among both the peers of his field and his legitimately worshipful students that I have chosen to introduce him with this particular image, clapping and singing, to those of my own acquaintance – that is, those readers deprived enough to know this man only through my writings. Their loss, truly, for half the adventure on this marvelous trip comes from David himself.
The first thing to know about David is that he is fascinating. He’s got stories to shock and delight from five continents, as well as a mind like a sponge for information. So many times on this trip, trapped in a dusty bus for half a day, I have said something along the lines of “So tell the entire history of Iran for the past hundred years” and he can actually do it. And will, too, without complaints! I’ve learned more in the past three months than I did my entire freshman year. The best part is, he’s completely unpretentious about it, hedging immediately if he isn’t absolutely sure on some remote fact, and he makes it interesting by adding personal details along the way.
The second thing I would have to say about the prof, and this has probably saved my life a dozen times, is that he is quintessentially capable. David knows how to recognize and avoid tinderbox situations long before they ignite, he’s flexible and open-minded enough to roll with traveling in all its unpredictable glory, and he has a sixth sense for sniffing out scams. And even when we do get into a sticky pickle, he can talk his way out of anything in three different languages.
Most of the time, it’s all I can do to watch and learn.
Even if the above traits have played a much more critical role in the success of this trip, my favorite thing about David is, frankly, that he’s fun. I’m usually pretty needy for alone time and social diversity, but was amazed to realize somewhere in Ethiopia how long it had been since I’d hung out with anyone else, and how much I hadn’t noticed. David’s like that – you can spend two hours or two months talking with him and not get bored. He has a quick sense of humor, a good listening ear, and a lot of buoyant optimism that can get you through the most frustrating bureaucratic red tape. He’s also not above bouncing around our hotel room at 6:30 a.m. singing because we’ve been having a spectacular trip for three months, and are (insha’allah) going to continue having a spectacular trip for four.
Unfortunately, the aforementioned playful side means that David is not above inflicting certain petty cruelties on me, his hassled and long-suffering traveling companion. Living together for this long, we’ve become more than familiar with each other’s little vulnerabilities, and David knows well that the threat of going to the same restaurant twice, putting his feet on my pillow (keep in mind they look like mine), or, god forbid, giving me a sweat-hug - gah! - will make me capitulate pretty quickly.
Thus the need for MAT, Mutually Assured Torture, so I am doing my best to pick up the Jambo Song from him. Despite not knowing it at all, now that it’s been stuck in his head for ten days I’ve had ample opportunity to listen to it (or his rendition of it), and think I could reproduce it at will. I intend to bust it out at just the moment when it finally fades from his uppermost consciousness to lie dormant below the surface, waiting only for a well-timed “JAMBO!!” from me to revive it in force. I’m really looking forward to that moment, though it will probably earn me a faceful of his vile sweat towel.
And just as he’s getting over his first fits of rage at the unexpected comeback of this Swahili tormentor, I plan to remind him that really, it’s only thanks to him that I know the song at all.
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