The heart of Darkness

“We got the gig for the Congo”, my colleague announced jubilantly. “The one with the Belgium cooperation crowd. I told them language would be no problem with your French.”

I tried my best to look excited and gave a very unconvincing grin, closer to a death rictus than an actual smile.My world was crashing down.

Oh God, No...Not Congo.

I was 22 years old, fresh out of university, a whole life of prospects and prosperity laid out for me and nothing, nothing in my whole upbringing and education had prepared me for Congo.

Not the fact that I grew up in Bujumbura, a city graced by the magnificent vista of the Mitumba mountain range of Congo across Lake Tanganyika. Not the fact that one of my closest friends from childhood to this day is Congolese. Not the fact that Bujumbura’s culture, musical taste, gastronomy and lifestyle is influenced in every way by our gigantic neighbour and the generations of Burundians of Congolese descent. Nothing in the whole world had prepared me for Congo.

Congo, a country known until the late 90s as Zaire, is a monster. A freak. A thing of monstrous potential, size and wealth, a home to a growing 68 million people belonging to a myriad of cultures some still sheltered from the world as it is known to us. It is covered with impenetrable forests, lush savannahs, volcanoes, large cities and landscapes ranging from the post-apocalyptic city-scape to green rural Switzerland. Its wealth has been its doom. The country has been routinely looted by individuals and states alike, and to the stranger, standing outside, looking in through the frame of the world media, it is a vortex of suffering, rape, disease, corruption, a complete and utter hell-hole. The heart of darkness.

Congo has been occupied over the last hundred years by the respective armies of Belgium, Uganda, Rwanda and had seven warring armies involved in its conflict at one point. The second Congo war alone claimed 5.4 million people, a meagre toll compared to the horrors the Belgians visited upon the country through their exploitative rule, pillaging the country for rubber, ivory and diamonds; 8 million according to the most conservative estimates, 10 million some say. Villages that failed to meet the rubberquotas paid the in the form of severed hands. 

Here is the wikipedia account of how the gory business took place:

Villages who failed to meet the rubber collection quotas were required to pay the remaining amount in cut hands, where each hand would prove a kill. Sometimes the hands were collected by the soldiers of the Force Publique, sometimes by the villages themselves. There were even small wars where villages attacked neighboring villages to gather hands, since their rubber quotas were too unrealistic to fill
One junior white officer described a raid to punish a village that had protested. The white officer in command "ordered us to cut off the heads of the men and hang them on the village palisades ... and to hang the women and the children on the palisade in the form of a cross."[7] After seeing a native killed for the first time, a Danish missionary wrote: "The soldier said 'Don't take this to heart so much. They kill us if we don't bring the rubber. The Commissioner has promised us if we have plenty of hands he will shorten our service.'"[8] In Forbath's words.
The baskets of severed hands, set down at the feet of the European post commanders, became the symbol of the Congo Free State. ... The collection of hands became an end in itself. Force Publique soldiers brought them to the stations in place of rubber; they even went out to harvest them instead of rubber... They became a sort of currency. They came to be used to make up for shortfalls in rubber quotas, to replace... the people who were demanded for the forced labour gangs; and the Force Publique soldiers were paid their bonuses on the basis of how many hands they collected.
In theory, each right hand proved a killing. In practice, soldiers sometimes "cheated" by simply cutting off the hand and leaving the victim to live or die. More than a few survivors later said that they had lived through a massacre by acting dead, not moving even when their hands were severed, and waiting till the soldiers left before seeking help. In some instances a soldier could shorten his service term by bringing more hands than the other soldiers, which led to widespread mutilations and dismemberment.

For more on the belgian Congo, try here.

Cold war obsessions(read the CIA) and greed for the riches of Congo allied and topped the one man who was the promise of Congo; Patrice Lumumba. The measure of the man is condensed in the last letter he wrote to his wife Pauline:

My dear wife,

I am writing these words not knowing whether they will reach you, when they will reach you, and whether I shall still be alive when you read them. All through my struggle for the independence of my country, I have never doubted for a single instant the final triumph of the sacred cause to which my companions and I have devoted all our lives. But what we wished for our country, its right to an honourable life, to unstained dignity, to independence without restrictions, was never desired by the Belgian imperialists and the Western allies, who found direct and indirect support, both deliberate and unintentional, amongst certain high officials of the United Nations, that organization in which we placed all our trust when we called on its assistance.

They have corrupted some of our compatriots and bribed others. They have helped to distort the truth and bring our independence into dishonour. How could I speak otherwise? Dead or alive, free or in prison by order of the imperialists, it is not myself who counts. It is the Congo, it is our poor people for whom independence has been transformed into a cage from whose confines the outside world looks on us, sometimes with kindly sympathy, but at other times with joy and pleasure.

But my faith will remain unshakeable. I know and I feel in my heart that sooner or later my people will rid themselves of all their enemies, both internal and external, and that they will rise as one man to say No to the degradation and shame of colonialism, and regain their dignity in the clear light of the sun.

We are not alone. Africa, Asia and the free liberated people from all corners of the world will always be found at the side of the millions of Congolese who will not abandon the struggle until the day when there are no longer any colonialists and their mercenaries in our country. As to my children whom I leave and whom I may never see again, I should like them to be told that it is for them, as it is for every Congolese, to accomplish the sacred task of reconstructing our independence and our sovereignty: for without dignity there is no liberty, without justice there is no dignity, and without independence there are no free men. Neither brutality, nor cruelty nor torture will ever bring me to ask for mercy, for I prefer to die with my head unbowed, my faith unshakable and with profound trust in the destiny of my country, rather than live under subjection and disregarding sacred principles. History will one day have its say, but it will not be the history that is taught in Brussels, Paris, Washington or in the United Nations, but the history which will be taught in the countries freed from imperialism and its puppets. Africa will write its own history, and to the north and south of the Sahara, it will be a glorious and dignified history.

Do not weep for me, my dear wife. I know that my country, which is suffering so much, will know how to defend its independence and its liberty.

Long live the Congo! Long live Africa!

Patrice

The letter is drawn from "Nkrumah's Challenge of the Congo" Ch. 11 "The Murder of Lumumba" p.128-129.

Patrice, for all you were, RIP.

The country, no doubt aided by Lumuba's murderers, then went on to produce the quintessential African dictator. A man who allied a Machiavellian intelligence, unrestrained greed, charismatic showmanship and ruthless paranoia. Mobutu Sésé Seko Nkuku Ngbendu wa Za Banga (14 October 1930– 7 September 1997).

 Good riddance.

Such were the terrifying statistics churning in my head and making me queasy as I made way to the airport, wondering if this wasn’t the worst choice of my life.

Terrific I tell myself, as we walk onto the Entebbe airport tarmac, why are we walking so far onto the tarmac. What kind of plane is it that it doesn’t even get proper parking? And why did they say I didn’t need to check my luggage in. Why am I pulling my bag along under the....GASP. GASP of horror. It is a wheelbarrow, three wheels and all other attributes save for a cabin and two wings. There is a man feet up dozing under the wing. As we edge closer he wakes up, cranes his neck around, rubs his face, straightens up and grins: “Hi, welcome. Butembo?”That is the destination. My heart sinks as I see the tell tale signs that he is the pilot, gallons and stuff. He’s friendly, so much so that he tells me to get in and help him load the luggage. Now I know why our bags are battered, bruised and abused after each trip. I took out on the luggage all my frustration of going from esteemed customer to second porter from the left.

It’s a small wheelbarrow and there are four more passengers on the plane apart from my colleague and I. Three Congolese men and a flight attendant, Patrice, Congolese. A very friendly man, who is from Butembo and promises to fill me in on the etiquette. We take off in the wheel barrow which amazingly enough once in the air is a smooth little thing. The luggage at the back is strapped and Patrice has the last seat, two seats diagonally from me. He beckons me over and proffers a primus. I nod happily and he opens it with his teeth. He tells me about Congo in a salesman’s way, like he is excited about the place and he manages to thaw a bit the icy grips of my fear. He’s good, fast and friendly with the other passengers, passing the drinks and walking stooped to chat them up once in a while.

He reminds me of the greater majority of Congolese that I knew from Bujumbura. Teachers, tailors, cooks, furniture upholsterers, all unrivalled masters at their craft. Good hard working people with huge families, that spoke perfectly fluent, heavily accented French, Swahili and Lingala . They had huge families, dressed like kings and queens with all the flamboyancy that only the Congolese, the Italians and the phillipinos can pull off. The Sapeurs, are a magnificent subculture of their community is something I grew up hearing about and marvelling about.

It’s bravado, outrageousness and the unbridled feeding of the need to look fabulous when all else around you is bleak. Check it out here.

The flight is via Bunia and Beni and it is in Bunia, our first entry point, that our passports have to be stamped. After a very uneventful landing, we proceed to the long derelict building where the immigration officials reigns as master and current handlers of my fate.
I have heard HORROR stories about entering Congo and being asked for a “carte de Bapteme”-the baptism card, the inability to produce it invariably involving a short prison stay and the loss of every valuable item on your person. When I presented my passport, the big immigration officer lifted his eyes and asked in the most serious of tones: “Monsieur, ne seriez- vous pas un espion rwandais?”-Sir, could you be a Rwandese spy?...My blood clotted. Rwanda was perceived in the whole of the Congo as an invading force and threat, still is to date and my face is one of those those readily identifiable Burundian or Rwandese mugs.

Clot, clot, clot. He looked at me and started chuckling. Turned out he stayed in Bujumbura a few years before when things were sour Congo side and he loved it, asked me about Buja and when I passed the test as a true son of the city, he asked for the fee(20USD) and stamped my passport. I had been making plans to sign over my inheritance if he would only let me go. It has a name what I am, a coward but as the French saying goes “J’assume”, I take full responsibility.

Bunia was home then to a huge UN base, complete with mammoth choppers, white and Blue coloured tarpaulins, prefab buildings and land rovers. A few years later, horrid stories of defilement and food for sex would emerge from there. Sick and somewhat inevitable in a place where the balance of power was so upset that dignity means nothing more than a concept and a remote one at that, certainly not one to compete with food or safety.

Next was Beni, where two of the passengers got off after wishing us bon voyage. We flew over a large expanse of dark grey storm clouds (what the hell do I know about stormy clouds...although they looked really scary) and what must be thousands of square kilometres of dark green forest with the occasional red laterite road.

We landed in Butembo after a heavy rain on a laterite strip on a hill overlooking Butembo. I stepped out and saw the home of 600 thousands over a few hills.

A mist was settling in some parts of the town, the ground was muddy and the grass sodden. There was a smell of wood smoke , eucalyptus in the crisp cool air. I closed my jacket and thought to myself...this is it, I am here, in Butembo, WOW. I was here without the knowledge of anyone in the family as they would have lost it if they suspected and I figured a fait-accompli was better than consultations prior to the trip. I was scared and excited to be in Congo.

(to be continued)

Travel quotes addendum

As promised, this is the next instalment. Funny but on the website they count them down backwards, like the second bit of every journey, homebound...Enjoy


http://www.bravenewtraveler.com/2008/08/01/the-next-50-most-inspiring-travel-quotes-of-all-time/

50. Kilometers are shorter than miles. Save gas, take your next trip in kilometers.” – George Carlin

49. “Every perfect traveler always creates the country where he travels.” – Nikos Kazantzakis

48. “Our Nature lies in movement; complete calm is death.” – Blaise Pascal

47. “It is a strange thing to come home. While yet on the journey, you cannot at all realize how strange it will be.” – Selma Lagerlöf

46. “Remember that happiness is a way of travel – not a destination.” – Roy M. Goodman

45. “Clay lies still, but blood’s a rover / Breath’s aware that will not keep. / Up, lad: when the journey’s over there’ll be time enough to sleep.” – A. E. Housman

44. “As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own.” – Margaret Mead

43. “Too often. . .I would hear men boast of the miles covered that day, rarely of what they had seen.” – Louis L’Amour

42. “Stop worrying about the potholes in the road and celebrate the journey.” – Fitzhugh Mullan

41. “One main factor in the upward trend of animal life has been the power of wandering.” – Alfred North Whitehead

40. “The open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose himself.” – William Least Heat Moon

39. “Travel only with thy equals or thy betters; if there are none, travel alone.” – The Dhammapada
38. “Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are.” – George Eliot
37. “Worth seeing, yes; but not worth going to see.” – Samuel Johnson, on the Giant’s Causeway

36. “An involuntary return to the point of departure is, without doubt, the most disturbing of all journeys.” Iain Sinclair

35. “Traveling is like flirting with life. It’s like saying, ‘I would stay and love you, but I have to go; this is my station.’” – Lisa St. Aubin de Teran

34. “Once in a while it really hits people that they don’t have to experience the world in the way they have been told to.” – Alan Keightley

33. “Half the fun of the travel is the aesthetic of lostness.” – Ray Bradbury

32. “Bizarre travel plans are dancing lessons from God.” – Kurt Vonnegut

31. “We wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment.” – Hilaire Belloc

30. “I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.” – Susan Sontag

29. “I should like to spend the whole of my life in traveling abroad, if I could anywhere borrow another life to spend afterwards at home.” – William Hazlitt

27. “A child on a farm sees a plane fly overhead and dreams of a faraway place. A traveler on the plane sees the farmhouse… and thinks of home.” – Carl Burns.

28. “I love to travel, but hate to arrive.” – Albert Einstein

26. “Don’t tell me how educated you are, tell me how much you traveled.” – Mohammed

25. “One always begins to forgive a place as soon as it’s left behind.” – Charles Dickens

24. “When one realizes that his life is worthless he either commits suicide or travels.” – Edward Dahlberg

23. “Without new experiences, something inside of us sleeps. The sleeper must awaken.” – Frank Herbert

22. “Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did now know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.” – Italo Calvino

21. “He who has seen one cathedral ten times has seen something; he who has seen ten cathedrals once has seen but little; and he who has spent half an hour in each of a hundred cathedrals has seen nothing at all.” – Sinclair Lewis, on sightseeing.

20. “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a cash advance.” – Bumper sticker

19. “Travel at its truest is thus an ironic experience, and the best travelers… seem to be those able to hold two or three inconsistent ideas in their minds at the same time, or able to regard themselves as at once serious persons and clowns.” – Paul Fussell

18. “Most of my treasured memories of travel are recollections of sitting.” – Robert Thomas Allen

17. “I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.” – Mary Anne Radmacher Hershey

16. “Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter.” – John Muir

15. “When you’re traveling, ask the traveler for advice / not someone whose lameness keeps him in one place.” – Rumi

14. “There are only two emotions in a plane: boredom and terror.” – Orson Welles

13. “To be on a quest is nothing more or less than to become an asker of questions.” – Sam Keen

12. “The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.” – G. K. Chesterton

11. “When you are everywhere, you are nowhere / When you are somewhere, you are everywhere.” – Rumi

10. “When preparing to travel, lay out all your clothes and all your money. Then take half the clothes and twice the money.” – Susan Heller

9. “The autumn leaves are falling like rain / Although my neighbors are all barbarians / And you, you are a thousand miles away / There are always two cups at my table.” – T’ang dynasty poem

8. “It is not down in any map; true places never are.” – Herman Melville

7. “People don’t take trips – trips take people.” – John Steinbeck

6. “We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend.” – Robert Louis Stevenson

5. “It’s a battered old suitcase and a hotel someplace and a wound that will never heal.” – Tom Waits

4. “The map is not the territory.” – Alfred Korzybski

3. “It is solved by walking.” – Algerian proverb

2. “He who would travel happily must travel light.” – Antoine de Saint Exupéry
1. “What am I doing here?” – Arthur Rimbaud, writing home from Ethiopia

Travel quotes yet again...

A friend of mine checked out the blog and pointed out that the link to the quotes was dead. So here they are again, as a link, full text and with an addendum. Enjoy.


http://www.bravenewtraveler.com/2008/03/07/50-most-inspiring-travel-quotes-of-all-time/



1. “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” – Mark Twain

2. “The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” – St. Augustine

3. “There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.” – Robert Louis Stevenson

4. “The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.” – Samuel Johnson

5. “All the pathos and irony of leaving one’s youth behind is thus implicit in every joyous moment of travel: one knows that the first joy can never be recovered, and the wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.” – Paul Fussell

6. “Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.” – Jack Kerouac

7. “He who does not travel does not know the value of men.” – Moorish proverb

8. “People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.” – Dagobert D. Runes

9. “A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.” – John Steinbeck

10. “No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.” – Lin Yutang

11. “Your true traveler finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty-his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.” – Aldous Huxley

12. “All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.” – Samuel Johnson

13. “For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” – Robert Louis Stevenson

“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” – Henry Miller

14. “Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things – air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky – all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.” – Cesare Pavese

15. “One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” – Henry Miller

16″A traveler without observation is a bird without wings.” – Moslih Eddin Saadi

17. “When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things will happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in.” – D. H. Lawrence

18. “To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.” – Freya Stark

19. “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” – Mark Twain

20. “Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.” – Miriam Beard

21. “All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.” – Martin Buber

22. “We live in a wonderful world that is full of beauty, charm and adventure. There is no end to the adventures we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open.” – Jawaharial Nehru

23. “Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going.” – Paul Theroux

24. “To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.” – Bill Bryson

25. “Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

26. “Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by.” – Robert Frost

27. “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” – Lao Tzu

28. “There is no moment of delight in any pilgrimage like the beginning of it.” – Charles Dudley Warner

29. “A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.” – Lao Tzu

30. “If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay at home.” – James Michener

31. “The journey not the arrival matters.” – T. S. Eliot

32. “A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles.” – Tim Cahill

33. “I have found out that there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.” – Mark Twain

34. “Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quiestest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.” – Pat Conroy

“A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” – Lao Tzu

35. “Not all those who wander are lost.” – J. R. R. Tolkien

36. “Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.” – Benjamin Disraeli

37. “Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.” – Maya Angelou

38. “Too often travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the conversation.” – Elizabeth Drew

39. “Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe”……Anatole France

40. “Travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind.” – Seneca

41. “What you’ve done becomes the judge of what you’re going to do – especially in other people’s minds. When you’re traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don’t have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.” – William Least Heat Moon

42. “I soon realized that no journey carries one far unless, as it extends into the world around us, it goes an equal distance into the world within.” – Lillian Smith

43. “To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.” – Aldous Huxley

44. “Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art.” – Freya Stark

45. “The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.” – Rudyard Kipling

46. “Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.” – Paul Theroux

47. “The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.” – G. K. Chesterton

48. “When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.” – Clifton Fadiman

49. “A wise traveler never despises his own country.” – Carlo Goldoni

50. “Adventure is a path. Real adventure – self-determined, self-motivated, often risky – forces you to have firsthand encounters with the world. The world the way it is, not the way you imagine it. Your body will collide with the earth and you will bear witness. In this way you will be compelled to grapple with the limitless kindness and bottomless cruelty of humankind – and perhaps realize that you yourself are capable of both. This will change you. Nothing will ever again be black-and-white.” – Mark Jenkins

The flight of the crows

So I was sitting at the hotel bar having a cold beer at the end of a long stifling hot work day. Across the road, over the roofs and the multitude of coconut palms, a huge flock of birds rose and swirled in the air, perhaps a hundred of them. They flew in that beautiful way that fish swim, erratically then all of a sudden, like a computer engineered move, all, heading the same way. I wanted that very moment affixed forever in my mind, a sign from above and beyond that against all appearances, everything is and will work out just as it should.


Now let me say that again.

The birds were big scary crows, flying over a slum, it was 33 degrees C and a fly was swimming in my beer.

I am in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, staying in a hotel off the airport road, a long stretch of tarmac running along waste land, industrial buildings and big shiny glass fronted nouveau-riche leatherette emporiums selling Malaysian furniture. Then past the airport, an explosion of noise, colour, smell and demographics as you hit one of the most congested crossroads of the continent. Serious. If such a study was conducted over the number of meters covered per hour at given crossroads in Africa, this would take at least bronze, close behind Kampala’s taxi Park area and Kinshasa’s bush meat and sorcery centre (just a wild stab in the heart of darkness..).

I’m not even driving but I can feel the belligerence, the traffic bitch, build up. Then I look out the window and meet eyes with the passenger of the incredibly colourful, gaudy, tasselled, red velvet upholstered and sardine packed affair of a bus, dala dala they’re called, next to the car I’m in. He has, as does everyone else on the bus, the defeated look of someone that can’t tell his own sweat from that of the other five people next to him. Guilt and immense gratefulness for my own air conditioned, IPod fuelled, chauffeured selfish lot.

Past the static traffic horror spot, you drive past a prison and two cemeteries; yummy...no doubt a reminder that they will get you this life or the next, and then get to where I am staying. The hotel in itself holds an unbeatable advantage over the neighbourhood, it has AIR-CON.

The heat, you see, is hard to imagine. Imagine a hot steamy sex session, next to a brazier only alone clammier, wetter, stickier and without the sex. Hitting the thirties at night is not unheard of. During the day it’s worse, what with the humidity, the moving about and the recurring thought that people pay for this kind of weather...Horrid.

So after a long day’s work, full of extremely satisfyingly smashed targets, a phone call from a dear dear friend(partner in crime, all in one friend, God I miss him- kinda guy) I am sitting with my best friend and colleague, having that beer that feels like a massage to your nerve endings, and I look across the road.

A very busy road, full of trucks ferrying cattle to the slaughter house, dala dalas, bikes, toddlers running across the road, women in kangas, the national printed cloth, water carriers with their carts. Life is teeming here. Oops, S£%t, teeming in my glass too. One of the three hundred flies about me has just dropped into my beer and is doing the dog paddle, or whatever the equivalent for flies, across the foamy surface. I look at the insect slowly drown, slowly, then realize how both cruel of me to let it and how unfair the world is to me, that it should drown in MY BLOODY BEER. So I empty the beer in the potted plant next to me and poor myself the rest of the bottle.

Across the road is the ramshackle one level tin roof, shop front face of so many African slums. Slum by definition( Wikipedia, where else) means “a run-down area of a city characterized by substandard housing and squalor and lacking in tenure security.” And as I look across, I can see some of that. From my high perch, in undoubtedly the most expensive place to stay for miles, I can see squalor alright. I can see poverty. But I can also see so much more. The place is alive.

The water carriers, big, healthy magnificently built men are bantering, one mother is scrubbing clean a five year old in a bucket, the kid is laughing and so is the mother. An old man is asleep in a chair and next to him a dog, in a stupor as deep as its master’s. A young man is chatting up a stunning looking woman, who looks enthralled with the sweet nothings he is proffering. The exhaust fumes are interspersed with the tang of the ocean, which amazingly you can still smell (or am I being overly romantic) and the waft of fried chicken. Over the different shades of rusting tin roofs the palms soar, high, majestic, structural, sleek figures.

Even around me, the hotel staff who all live across the road into that which I have been told by the sheltered Elites of Tanzania to fear, avoid and shun are happy people. They’re great and since realizing that I speak Swahili have been on first name terms with me. So much so that when they were swamped with clients they asked me to help pass some bottles over from where I was....I knew I’d arrived. They’re happy.

Life in all its simplicity, chaos, harshness and immense, oh so immense beauty.

And then the crows flew, a huge cloud of ink birds rising from the mass of houses. The birds were crows. Followers of warring armies, gougers of eyes, winged dark omens, these scavengers half rats, half hyenas that western and African culture alike (so far as I know) have associated with lying, dirt, treachery and death. They were BEAUTIFUL.

The crows flew. Having spent a day eating, battling for every tiny spare scrap with their kin and humans, they flew, responding at some call of nature. From where I was sitting I saw them rise, scatter, then flow back together, heading west into one of those tortured African sunsets. A shot worth the opening and the end of any epic movie.

I was transfixed by the beauty of the moment and I was grateful. Grateful to be alive, for the fly in the beer, the camaraderie of the staff, the rank end of the day smell ( yes...FCUK researchers have a long way to go), my friend infront of me, the fact that I am constantly reminded how lucky I have been and that I still have the naiveté to still enjoy it.....

Wouldn’t want it any other way...