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africanpete-blog · 7 years

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part six

7th feb 2017

I am sitting on my balcony, and the late afternoon sun is still hot. There’s a bit of a breeze floating in off the Indian Ocean, enough I hope to keep those dastardly mosquitos away till dusk.

On the way home from school today I stopped off at my favourite roadside fruit shack, to pick up fresh mangoes, a pineapple and some tomatoes, all for under three quid. I’ve since munched though a mango and half a pineapple and may shortly pour myself a gin and tonic. Gin is really not my poison I have to say, but I had an old friend staying here and he left three bottles of the stuff in my fridge. Bless him. He had a grand time here and fell in love with everything and everyone he came across. He’s desperate to return next year and he - and anyone else, is very welcome.

Yesterday morning there was no water in the apartment, so I had to go to school unwashed and unawakened by my usual cold shower.

I amused myself with the thought that maybe my adventure here in Africa is designed to prepare me for life back in England which I fear might, after Brexshit, slowly regress back into third world status…

I have become tolerant of electricity and water cuts, and I don’t leave the tap gushing any more while I brush my teeth. I’ve grown used to pot-holes in the road, the lack of local government services, and the sight of local children running about barefoot. I’ve stopped wasting money on possessions I don’t really need and since I have been working in a primary school, I recycle everything down to the last bottle cork.

How silly of me. Of course it’s a fanciful idea. Nothing much will change in Blightie, will it?

Nevertheless these are strange times. Perhaps by the time I return, the UK will be governed by a real socialist government again, like the one here in Tanzania, which has been run by socialists since President Nyerere took power from the British in 1960. The current President Magufuli is liked by the vast majority of people because they genuinely feel he’s doing a good job, working for them, stamping out corruption and trying to create more wealth for everyone. Even in Zanzibar the locals were grudgingly respectful towards him, despite the fact that most were determined Zanzibar should be regain its independence from the mainland.

Oh, and talking of Zanzibar, I did suggest in my last instalment, that readers enticed by my experiences there should go soon because I suspect the island might soon be destroyed by tourism. It seems my instinct is correct. Plans have just been announced for a one billion dollar holiday attraction to be constructed in the north of the island. I’ve glanced at the website and the plans look ghastly….

Last week a regional city commissioner here in Dar made a remarkable public announcement. He published a long list of people, including very successful and well-known figures in the business and entertainment world, and declared that they were all active in the narcotics trade, and told them all to meet him at the central police station the following day to discuss the situation. It struck me as being a novel way of dealing with drug barons, and the increasing use of narcotics by the young pop stars and the wealthy political classes. People I talk to seem to be supportive of the commissioner. Many ordinary Tanzanians resent the young superstars who flaunt a level of wealth so much higher than their own. It’s hard to imagine the British ever being generally content with a government that acts earnestly to improve the lives of the people it serves. Hard to imagine too, Sadiq Khan inviting celebs and the sons of politicians to his office to discuss their drug habits…

However, there was a report in the Tanzanian news this week of the UK doubling it’s trade support to Tanzania. Apparently there have been assurances that Tanzania will benefit from Brexit because the UK will promise favourable trade deals. Well, Tanzania certainly has a very different approach to homosexuality to that of the UK, but in a post Brexit world, that’s got nothing to do with trade any more. Today the health minister threatened to publish the names of all suspected homosexuals in the country. It’s too hot here for me to go out wearing my pink socks, so I think I’m fairly safe at the moment…

Enough of politics...

Teaching still challenges me every day. There are good days and bad days, which I guess is normal. I had a group of students around the piano recently and as I was showing them some chord progression I played a bum note and muttered ‘shit!’ Luckily none of the students heard it. I’m not cut out to be a classroom teacher.

The school will be expanding to 10th grade so if I stay on next year I will probably lose the creche and early years classes which for me are the most exhausting. At the moment I am teaching music and drama to several classes of infants and if I am honest, I don’t believe they should be at school at all. They should be at home, sucking their mother’s breasts, and playing with wooden blocks…

Getting up at five thirty every morning is still a torture, and going to bed early on school nights still feels strange for someone like me who used to love working and playing long into the night. I just have to be grown up about this. Every Friday morning I accompany the entire school on a cheap, nasty electric keyboard while they all stand with their hands on their hearts and sing the Tanzanian national anthem. If I’m exhausted from lack of sleep there’s a good chance I’ll cock it up and all hell will break loose.

There is only one more week of term and then we have a week off. Hurrah!

I shall probably end up doing a few days of prop making for the school play I must direct in a month. I’ve already made a giant paper machee crocodile mask. But I’ve also booked a trip with my partner to Arusha, a town not far from Mount Kilimanjaro. I’ve hardly left Dar since I arrived, so it will be good to go inland and explore some rural life. Neither of us are interested in safaris, so I’m hoping we’ll end up in a nice hotel in some bamboo forest with yoga classes all day and maybe a local snake charmer to entertain us in the evenings. That or maybe some locals doing a traditional tribal dance, in the noddy, in the hotel lobby…

I have also booked to return to dear old Lahndan Tahn, at Easter. I’ve picked a flight which stops off in Amsterdam long enough for me to visit the city. Amsterdam was where I first lived abroad, and a city I fell in love with. I haven’t been back for years so I am already looking forward to that. I will then hang around London for a few days and then - not sure. Maybe the South of France. My puppet theatre dreams in Beziers have still not quite evaporated.

Still very much missing friends back home and I look forward to seeing them all. Still miss my freelance life, the theatre world, fresh milk and good cheese… Sometimes all this missing demoralises me, but then it dawns on me that it’s just my ego rearing its ugly head again. Staying here is about accepting what I am and where I am, just enjoying what there is around me, the teaching, new friends, the African life. Staying is deciding that it’s not a bad mistake, and not imagining that my life could be so much better elsewhere.

I am now living with a wonderful Kenyan woman and every morning I realise how grateful I am for her love, tolerance and compassion. While I am here I can choose to be happy and grateful and to enjoy what I have. It’s what most happy people do. Make lemonade, or my case - drink the Baobab juice. Perhaps I’ve come to Africa to try to break my stubborn ego, that constantly tries to make out that I’m unhappy because I am dissatisfied, and would definitely be happier somewhere else, doing something else.

I think maybe being happy is being more in love with the things you have than with the things you don’t have, and accepting that if you don’t give anything out, you won’t get anything back. How can it be that it takes a man fifty years to discover that?

Goodness gracious! - I’ve been here six months!

I’m thinking about how much I’ve adapted to this new country.

I’m more tolerant and accepting of things not working, being late, and not happening at all. I think I’ve become more present and more aware of the what is happening around me. That might partly be to the fact that I am not carrying a smart-phone - I’m just using some cheap black thing I use for local calls. When you’re out on the streets here, you have to be more tuned in to what’s around you. You have to keep looking down because of the potholes and wildly uneven surfaces on roads and pavements. On a bike you have to be sure you know exactly what everyone near you is doing because there is no highway code in operation, and you’d die if you didn’t. And at night - well there are no street lights, no patrolling police, and a lot of thieves and opportunists lurking, so it’s best to be very alert whenever you’re on the move.

I’m also not rushing about so much. I try to work up a bit of steam on the bike - just to burn off calories but that’s about it. I realise that people in Tanzania wear flip-flops all the time because no one really needs to run anywhere. You see the odd jogger of course, but around here they tend to be middle aged and overweight, so they need to run. In the peninsula, which is the posh bit of Dar where all the ex-pats hang out, you see plenty of young white lycraclad skinnys, jogging along the white sandy beaches all day. But I won’t jog. Not me. Give me a bike any day.

And then there’s the money. Here in Tanzania I have had to get used to handling large wads of Tanzanian currency. I never use a cash machine since there are few about. The highest value note, and the most used, is the pale red ten thousand shilling note, which is worth about three pounds. I stand in a bank queue and watch as people tip out huge piles of these notes from plastic carrier bags and into the teller’s till. I watch her machine as it counts them all, then watch her nimble expert hands as she shuffles the counted wads into flat sided bricks and then flicks round the elastic bands to keep them in shape. White people here are encouraged to keep their money in two places. A couple of thousand you give out to any mugger you happen to meet, and the rest you tuck safely up your ass...

One place I’ve discovered recently is Mwenge Clothing market. It’s to be found near the city centre, next to a busy junction, on a vast area of concrete which used to be a bus station. There are hundreds of stalls crammed together, with narrow passages between large trestle tables, each protected from the sun by shabby roofs made of plastic sheeting. Bails of second hand shoes and clothing, unloved and unwanted by westerners, are emptied out on the tables till there are piles three foot high. The trader sits in the middle of the table, barefoot amongst the clothes and when people gather round to sift through, he watches. If you pick up a striped tee shirt, the trader immediately starts digging into the mountains around him till he finds other striped garments which he tosses over to your side.

Sometimes men stand around the stalls and sing a simple call and answer riff, which I realised was just a repetition of the fact that today everything on that table costs only ninety pence. Tables specialise in baby clothes, tee-shirts, bedding, shoes, and every piece of clothing you could possibly want in Africa is there, as long as you give it a wash and an iron when you get it home. I’m no fan of shopping but I love the place. It’s colourful, packed, and bustling and everyone is in cheerful good spirits. You can get lost in the labyrinth of passageways between the stalls and find yourself in a tiny leafy square, where under canopies, women lie back on old sofas while young men crouch at their feet to give them pedicures.

Close by is an area where the stall-holders are mainly older Maasai women. Most have shaved heads and large holes in their ear lobes and they sit in their beautiful red Maasai robes, threading coloured beads, toothless smiles as you pass, gesturing with their graceful wrinkled hands for you to stop at least, to look at their displays of colourful Maasai ornamental jewellery.

It’s rare to see Maasai women around the city. You generally see only the young men, most of whom occupy their time in the city by being gate-keepers and general dogs bodies for the enclosed houses. In the grassland opposite my apartment more have arrived in the last few months. Sometimes I see half and dozen of them sleeping on bits of cardboard under the trees, sheltered from the midday sun. I love to see them around, all so relaxed and cheerful all the time. They haven’t much to worry about.

Sometimes they dance. They stand in a circle and sway together while one in the middle takes a series of ever higher jumps in the air. The singing that accompanies this is mostly short staccato shouts followed by a wailing cheer. I like these little bits of old Africa poking through. There are times when I am in the city and I look around me, and think everyone here has sold their souls to mobile phones and Coca Cola and that depresses me.

25th Feb 2017

Arusha is a large town in the north west, about two hours from the Kenyan border. It’s where many tourists gravitate to for safaris around the Serengeti and schleps up Mount Kilimanjaro, and it’s where I stayed for three days with my partner during the half term break.

It’s a busy town surrounded by forest covered mountains and though there’s a pretty serious drought in Kenya and North Tanzania at the moment, the weather around here is generally cooler and wetter.

We experienced the wetness on our first outing, a trip with our guide and a couple of local lads up into a lush forest, full of jungly tendrils, halfway up a mountain - not Kilimanjaro but a smaller one nearby. The idea of the trip had been proposed to us while we were sitting in a cafe, so neither of us were suitably dressed for a long hike up to a forest and then down a longer steep track down to the bottom of a gorge. I was wearing flip-flops and a white linen suit. Not long after we set of, it began to rain. I would have preferred not to be looking like the Man From Del Monte but it didn’t matter. Our guides, who despite also wearing flip-flops, knew the terrain and conditions very well, and gripped onto us tight, keeping us clear of mud slides and cliff edges. We passed two huge and beautiful trees towering high over the others, which I was told were mahogany trees. That’s how I like my mahogany. By the time we reached the river the thunder storm was climaxing and I didn’t care a jot about my linen suit. We waded through the water surrounded by banks of beautiful forest and then finally we reached a magnificent waterfall. I was soaked to the skin but euphoric.

The following day our guide took us to Lake Duluti, also situated in the middle of lush jungle. We took a canoe this time and with another guide, we paddled gently around the edge of it, gazing in awe up at blue arsed monkeys, sitting high up in trees. We saw three large monitor lizards lounging at the water’s edge and a huge variety of the most stunning birds I’ve ever seen, including a pelican. I have to say though that I was most enchanted by the malachite kingfishers, which are vividly coloured and have red beaks. I could have watched them all day.

Once we’d had our fill of wildlife, we were driven by our guide to a Maasai market, which turned out to be an enormous dusty, arid field, miles from anywhere, where hundreds of tribesmen brought their cattle, sheep and goats. Herdsmen and boys stood about, each with a few animals gathered around them, waiting in the hot sun. It was a bit smelly but an awesome and touching sight. But it was also a bit depressing because the drought meant the livestock were emaciated, and the Maasai’s were miserable.

The guide suggested I try a traditional Maasai drink, so we dipped into a wooden shack at the side of the field where food was being prepared. A woman stirred thick lumpy white liquid in a large steel bowl which I was told was a mixture of cows milk and maize. I was offered a tin cup half full of it. I think it best not to tell you what it tasted like. It was one of those experiences I guess you tick off, happy knowing you’ll never do it again.

On the way back to the car we stopped by a small crowd of men gathered in a circle around an old man who was speaking through a loud-hailer. Laid out on the ground on a bit of newspaper in front of him were three eggs, arranged in a line, half submerged in a pool of brown liquid. The speaker was angry about something. I questioned our guide and was told the old man was ranting about factory eggs and Coca Cola, which he claimed were the curse of the western world and which caused stomach ulcers and an early death. I heard him say ‘mzungu’ which is slang for ‘white man’ and the crowd turned and grinned sheepishly at me. He had pointed me out, and said I had arrived to underline his point that whites were dangerous and should not be trusted. Although I was in complete agreement with everything he said, I suggested to our guide that we might move on.

I guess it’s obvious to you now that I have a particular interest in the Maasai. They are the only people who have refused to be completely sold down the river by missionaries, colonialists and greedy European commodity traders, and they’ve held on stubbornly to their past, their culture and traditions.

Our short holiday also included a trip to a coffee plantation. Whilst I am addicted to the stuff, I was aware I had no idea where it comes from and how it’s produced. This plantation, beautifully lush and landscaped, looked like it had been planted in Somerset. I’ll travel a very long way for a decent cup of coffee and I certainly had a grand cuppa there. Marvellous.

We also had time to look round the local market in Arusha. It was very much like the markets here in Dar, a massive lively, noisy sprawling place - selling meat (dead and alive), veg and spices in one section while the rest, dedicated to second hand clothes and cheap Chinese household goods. When you wonder around these places, you begin to understand how the economy works. The vast majority of the population have no education beyond the age of twelve, and exist way below the poverty line. There’s very little manufacturing industry, so most earn a precarious living finding things to sell to other people. If you’re lucky you have a stall, or you can sit in the shade with a sewing machine and mend whatever people bring you to mend. If you own a cart, you can be paid for delivering piles of fruit, or charcoal, or just empty plastic water bottles. But if you’re not so lucky, you wander through the crowd carrying bottles of soda, water, bananas or mangos in buckets on your head, and rattle coins in the palm of your hand. Most of the trade in Tanzania and much of the social life takes place at the side of the road, often by, or on makeshift wooden bridges over the filthy concrete open drains that run along both sides of the roads. Most people are engaged in some form of selling, because for the poor and uneducated that’s all you can do. The country’s president has recently introduced state education up to the age of eighteen. Not a moment too soon, I say.

Oh shit. I’m talking politics again…

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