AFRICA: Observations, revelations, misconceptions, and reflections
- I am a mosquito magnet. (Like getting twenty a day through my clothes, while wearing repellant, when no one else is getting any at all.) I knew this from my years in Indonesia but the experiment has now been replicated sufficiently to move this from mere hypothesis to fully-fledged scientific theory. #MosqitoBourne - Money seems far easier to come by in Africa than in North America. And capitalism there appears both to operate and also to work for people in a way that I've not seen elsewhere. I'm a big fan of regulation and standards; however, that being said, with virtually no rules in place anyone who wants to make money can just offer whatever service or skill or labour they can, and do it right now with no barriers of any kind. It's impressive to see. A person can start a business with nothing more than a bike pump or sharpening stone or a wheelbarrow – and relatively easily make enough money to survive on. That isn't a thing in Canada. Even more remarkably, you can also buy a baby cow or goat or chicken, let it graze anywhere (so spend little to nothing raising it) and sell it six months later for not less than twice what you bought it for – which has the added effect of making banking and market investment moot. #DasCapital - Food is more abundant and easier to come by in Central and East Africa than in Europe or North America. Basic staples and exotic accompaniments alike grow like weeds in every cranny and nook and do so all year round. If you scatter any kind of seed (tomato, bean, mango, watermelon...) onto exposed earth and wait a week or two a robust plant materializes. And along with this people are picking, selling, delivering, preparing, and sharing food everywhere and all of the time.
#NomNomNom - While almost everyone I came across in Africa was super polite, and people were often quick to smile and laugh once in conversation, it was virtually impossible to get so much as a greeting out of a stranger on the street, in a way I've never experienced in a hundred cities on three continents.
#SalamatSiang - Businesses and institutions in Uganda generally employ somewhere between four and ten times as many people as an equivalent business in North America. For instance, all gas stations everywhere are full serve and employ six or eight jockies, not one or two. (I think this should be mandatory in Canada...) #JobCreation - Vehicle exhaust in Kampala, wider Uganda, as well as in what I saw of East Africa, is likely killing much of the population prematurely. Dense clouds of black death blast into the faces of children seventy times an hour as they walk to and from school and church and on the way to get food and water. I consider this a crime against humanity – one we voluntarily perpetrate upon ourselves. (The International Agency for Research on Cancer, classifies diesel exhaust as Group 1, carcinogenic to humans.) And, though developed in the 19th century and brought into popular production elsewhere by 1975, catalytic converters have still, somehow, not made their way to East Africa.
#Blegk - I'm told by women working for Women's Rights organizations in Africa that a majority of women in sub-Saharan Africa (80% or more in some countries) think intimate partner violence, or that coming from their father or brother, is likely to their own fault and as such justified. While this is an amazing statistic alone, equally remarkable is that when polled just a fraction of males in these same societies are found to believe the same to be true. (This is messed up. What explains this?) #ViolenceAgainstWomen
- Having an Indian diaspora in your midst is an unquestionable boon.
#MasalaLove - In this part of the world, owning and using two cell phones may be more common than owning shoes or a television. Here, one phone is typically a very cheap flip phone that acts as a mobile bank account for sending and receiving money. (East Africa, you see, is not less than a decade ahead of where we are on electronic currency and, while few folks have a physical bank account, no adult is without a way to deal in “Mobile Money”.) The second phone many people have (students, business people, and Uber drivers at least) is a smart phone regular calling and internet use.
- Having motorcyclists on-call in every neighbourhood – who act as taxis, couriers, shippers/receivers, money transferers, and general runners of errands – makes life infinitely simpler and more efficient (while creating tens of thousands of flexible, well-paid, low-skill, outdoor jobs.) #BodaBodaBodaBoda - I'm not sure how the West earned a reputation for having the most bland food on the planet. The entire spectrum of foods commonly consumed here (beans, rice, plantain, cassava, taro, chapati, and eggs – all in various configurations) do not typically involve as part of their preparation the addition of herbs or spices (I include in this category exotics such as salt and pepper) and are instead seasoned with steam or by frying in quarter strength sunflower oil, stuff so dilute its almost absent its yellowness. Too, these foods rarely come accompanied with a spread or sauce of any kind. This is not because such accoutrements are rare or expensive, as they grow readily and are almost free (by local standards); instead, there seems what I can only see as a cultural preference for blandness. I found this even in places like Zanzibar, that centuries-old spice hub off the coast of Tanzania and home to vast plantations of clove, cinnamon, and nutmeg. There I ordered things like "spice tea" or "masala spice tea" or "chai" (and I did this many times all over the island at very different establishments) and every time what arrived approximated what I imagine you'd get if you passed 100ml of tepid water over a single unripe cardamon pod and then added to it 50ml of milk... Of course it could be that I suffered some kind of nervous system trauma and was temporarily unable to taste food while in Africa but locals and others who've lived and travelled there don't disagree.
#Chailessness - Ugandans may be the most temperature sensitive people on the planet, largely due to their proximity to the equator, no doubt. Where most people live, the temperature only ever fluctuates ten degrees, from a high of 35C to a low of 25C. And when the temperature dips to 28C folks are quick to bundle themselves into scarves and hats and sweaters and ski jackets, as though they might perish from exposure. A twenty degree fluctuation is difficult for most to imagine, and fifty degrees, of course, is not considered possible – nevermind seventy-five, as seen across much of Canada.
#PrairieLife - Living in Canada means I can choose to think, or not think at all, about kidnapping, human trafficking, or slavery.
- In this part of the world the historical slave trade, according to the Zanzibar Slave Museum, was initially coordinated by the Portuguese and then the British but was taken over by Arab, Indian, and local elites, with networks of traffickers on the mainland kidnapping folks from Central and East Africa and transporting them to the island. This was still going on decades after being outlawed elsewhere and was halted, at gunpoint, by the British. (Of course, slavery remains a problem around the world on a much smaller scale and in a more hidden form.)
#PeopleArentProperty - There are uncountable numbers of young women from Europe and North America founding, running, and working for NGOs and non-profits in Africa. (Yes, there are men doing this too but the ratio has to be 50 or maybe 100 to 1 as far as I can tell.) And, quite often, they do so for minimal pay. For example, I know Americans in East Africa getting paid so little, by American NGOs, that they're unable to leave Africa – as a kind of voluntary, humanitarian indentured servitude.
#WageGap - Because of the strength and stature of conservative religion in this part of the world, homosexuality is commonly considered at least a form of mental illness but sometimes as a virulent communicable disease that has it's origins in some backward, secular Western nation (probably America) which the public feel they must be inoculated against. For their part government supports anti-Indian and anti-white propagandists and jails or murdering those who dare to come out.
#GayRightsAreHumanRights - Uganda is likely the most beautiful and the most filthy place on the planet. Along with its striking natural beauty, lushness, and wild menagerie of endemic organisms, virtually everyone seems content to create and discard garbage anywhere, at any time, and in a shocking volume that defies all reason. (This was also true in Tanzania and Southeast Asia and makes me wonder by what absurd measure it is determined that I pollute more than someone in the developing world.)
#ForTheLoveOFPlastic - Existence is a much more social and communal thing in Uganda. A person can't help but live and interact with folks in a manner entirely avoidable in North America. (Canada = 5 people/sq km; Uganda = 215 people/sq km.) This is both good and bad. Just as living in a small village, there is always someone watching; but also someone is always watching, and can, therefore, be called upon for assistance. #NeighbourhoodGossip - Every place in Uganda is far more accessible to anyone with any budget than in North America. I mean, you can always go to a lake or national park or neighbouring town, via any mode at any speed and with a full range of luxury, and then find there accommodation for any sum from as little as a dollar or as much as a thousand dollars per night. I really can't imagine that happening in BC, say. #Doable - On just one trip, twice in the span of five kilometres the car I was travelling in was pulled over by police. When asked why we were being stopped the officer, one of three standing at the window, explained that we had been speeding and that the fine was 200,000 shillings. (This is not some “bad apples” but formal procedure.) After some friendly but forceful conversation through the window, and the handing over of our driver's licence, the cops would have the driver exit the vehicle and stand in the sun for ten minutes explaining that all of this was clearly a huge nuisance for everyone involved and that we could just be on our way for as little as 20,000 shillings. Each time this happened our driver, a friend and local, declined and asked instead for the speeding ticket, saying that he had no cash to spare and if he was speeding the fault was his and not ours. Though this seemed like the best possible response it also always had the side effect of pissing them off – which felt like a gamble and something less than ideal. His turning down their generous offer seemed to catch them off guard, leaving them without a readied response and forcing them into a kind of checkmate of their own making, requiring them to either ignore a traffic violation deemed so serious as to require us to stop and the efforts of three officers or otherwise produce a written record and carbon copy of their collective misdeed. #PoliceCorruptionSucks
- Twice in three months I visited different barbers in Kampala – my third and fourth professional haircuts since 1987. To my dismay, neither knew what to do with my hair and I left with crazier, if shorter, hair than I went in with.
- The germ theory of disease has yet to make its way to East Africa but miasma theory isn't even really in play there either, from what I can tell; instead, a more dominant mixture of witchcraft (largely the evil eye) and God theory of dis-ease prevails – grounded in a vague and shifting groundwork of coincidence, correlation, and suspicion. All of this is only aided by countless missionaries from the West. And, as a result, locals spend non-trivial amounts of their time and earnings having curses and spells put on others or going to church or to the local witch to ward off the curses and spells of others. This is devastating, observably so, to social relations, public health, the economy, and the general education of the populous, to name just a few...
#HogwartsOrBust - Custom-made goods are ubiquitous in Uganda. Anything from furniture to jewelry can be handmade in your neighbourhood, quickly, and at low cost, from just a drawing and to any specs and using virtually any material you could want.
#MakerCulture - Along with employing many more people, every job here seems to take much longer. Instead of getting a document notarized you have to get is signed by one person, stamped by another, laminated someplace else. And all of these have to have an official-looking seal of approval. (“Official-looking” because no one actually cares if the thing is real only that it looks serious. For example, if the embassy doesn't emboss or stamp your documents or use official government letterhead on the document, they will still ask you to provide such and tell you where you can go to have it made.) Then when this is done your documents need to taken to a woman in a different office who stamps it and adds her signature before passing it to another guy who reviews the lot and makes a photocopy. Then the papers sit on a desk for a week or three and you must return at an arbitrary time to take your documents down the hall to get someone else's stamp and one last signature, before waiting in a three hour line-up to pay the equivalent of $0.32 to a guy who only takes exact change and disappears for no apparent reason every fifteen to twenty minutes. #Kafkaesque
