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...