Black Star: Zanzibar

Arrival in Zanzibar

Strip yourself naked. Coat your entire body in syrup. Now put your clothes on. Next step into the kitchen, a white box with windows everywhere, filled with bright white sunlight. Look around at vats of rolling boiling steaming water. Bakers pull loaves of bread out of giant ovens, accompanied by invisible, puffy clouds of hot air. Relax - you cannot fight this. This is Zanzibar.

Now close your eyes and spin around in circles. Open your eyes and step into Stone Town. Before you can orient yourself, the papasi (Swahili for "ticks") are on you. In Zanzibar, you will be dining always with insects, licking their chops in anticipation of dining with and on you. But the papasi are not bugs - they are touts. They are not after your food and blood, but more benignly, your money. Futile though it may seem, you might as well start waving your arms and swatting now; it actually does help. Just as a waive of your arm will shoo a fly away from your beer, a firm "no thank you" ("la asante") along with a convincing recitation that you know exactly where you are, where you are going, how you plan to get there, and what you will do there, will persuade the papasi to disengage.

Realistically though, if you are disoriented from the hot sticky spinning, the papasi can be of service to you: they know where you are and can quickly figure out where you'd like to go. Within minutes, they can lead you through the crazed maze of asymmetric, crowded, crumbling streets and land you in a quiet, cool place with an enterprising Zanzibarian proprieter.

Whether through your own wits or with the help of papasi, the shock of arrival passes after you settle into your own space in a Muslim residential neighborhood, complete with mosquito net, fan, and bed. You learn quickly that Stone Town, the old Arab labyrinth of narrow streets, courtyards, ornate doors, and crumbling facades, is small, with the sea to the east and the Creek Road markets to the west. With this orientation it's easy to feign confidence and not get lost.

At sunset, you watch the Zanzibarian acrobats (kids) flipping and splashing into the hot sea. You dine on skewers of fresh seafood - so many kinds - and BBQ'd bananas; sip lime and sugar cane juice, and spice coffee. Watch the sun go down. Amble over to groove to the mesmerizing music of Sauti za Busara ("Sounds of Wisdom").

Sauti za Busara

Our intent in visiting Zanzibar was to fulfill Greg's long held dream of becoming fully saturated in the rhythmic arpeggios of African music. Sauti za Busara is a music festival held annually in Zanzibar showcasing music from around Africa. We learned of the festival while listening to the best radio show in Seattle, the joyful Best Ambiance, KEXP's African music show (6-9pm and you can stream it at kexp.org).

Mingling of cultures at the festival resulted in irony. Zanzibar is a conservative Muslim island and a booming tourist destination. Full burkas (eye-slits only) are about as common as bikinis. At the festival, the mingling of conservative Zanzibarians and tourists manifested as a rather subdued Zanzibarian majority, who were content to sit on the ground and listen politely to the music, and a Western minority who stood up and shook booty to epic African rhythms.

Another obvious mingling of cultures was the Arab influence on the native Zanzibarian music. The Arabian Kingdom of Oman took over Zanzibar for about 300 years, including the Sultan moving his palace to Zanzibar. The resultant Swahili culture is a fusion of Arab and African influences. The island, indeed, has a dark history of international influence, characterized by trade and colonization, including the famous spice trade and the infamous slave trade. It wasn't until the mid-20th Century that the Africans at last took control of Zanzibar.

Hence, another highlight of the festival was taarab music, an Arabic-styled music characterized by powerful singing, driving rhythm (bongos, tabla, hand drum), string instruments (qanun - many stringed instrument played on the lap, the guitar-like oud, violins, and double bass), and accordions. Men led the taarab singing and a chorus of women in head scarves sang high, nasal harmonies in refrain. All the taarab musicians sang in unison, resulting in overwhelming shear power.

Also outstanding at the festival were the powerful, dignified female musicians. This was particularly unexpected considering the pervasive sexism and overwhelming passivity of many women in Africa.

The Maasai singer, Carola Kinasha, commanded center stage. She appeared statuesque, calm, radiating peace, and dressed from head to toe in flowing gold robes. Like a goddess, Carola sang with a booming voice and appeared absolute and eternal, as if beyond the scope of any single life. Next to Carola was her youthful sidekick, wearing a tight fitting Western-style red dress. The joker, she danced crazy and hyperactive to every song, shaking it for all she was worth, showing off all that she had, then collapsing of exhaustion at the end of a song. The supporting cast, incidentally, was a large group of men wearing gray shirts, who sang, layed down fantastic rhythms, funky bass lines, and an occasionally well-placed solo.

The star of the festival was Bi Kidude, a 95 year old Zanzibarian woman. Bi Kidude sings in the taarab and unyago styles (Arabic influenced Swahili music). She appeared frail and was led on stage slowly, wearing a blue print head wrap and dress of the same fabric that hung loosely on her thin frame. It was impossible to see whether or not her eyes were open. Behind her, the taraab band played furiously, rhythmically, a long Arabic melody with little quanun flourishes over quarter tones. Bi Kidude stood perfectly still for what seemed like a very long time swaying slightly. Could she hear the music? Could she see the microphone in front of her? Did she know where she was? The musicians played on. A local kept reassuring us in broken English, "She can sing! She can sing!"

Finally, her face broke, she licked her lips a little, and her powerful voice burst into a traditional Swahili song. The crowd went wild. Bi Kidude finished her song, bowed several times, and was led off the stage. In addition to her singing, Bi Kidude is legendary for her fascinating life and the role she has played in educating young women.

The rest of the festival was a blur of guitars, drums, and harmonies. We saw everything from folk music to Swahili hip-hop to music documentaries. Every night, we returned exhausted to our Stone Town abode to await another day of music and being accosted by papasi.

East Coast Zanzibar

People are a lot more like folding chairs than the Western mind might imagine. They're a lot more rubbery, too, and rubberiness can be maintained well into old age. Men don't really need twenty-four inches between their knees to accommodate their manhood; manhood is squishy enough for knees and thighs to press fully together. Sitting on one's hands eases the piercing grind of the pelvic sit bones on wood. Disassociation from one's own legs, such that they become indistinguishable from the fifty or so other legs in the truck bed, is a normal coping mechanism. Twenty-five people and more can sit on benches in the back of a single pickup truck with seven big bundles of firewood, four buckets of fry fat, two oversized backpacks, two bicycles, bunches of bananas, bundles of metal strips, and a bucket of fish strapped on top. These are truths to be gleaned from a ride on a Zanzibarian daladala.

We rode a daladala from Stone Town to Bweju, a beach town on the eastern coast of Zanzibar. Here we found villages of limestone houses brimming with children. Ducks sipped from puddles. Straight-backed women clothed from head to toe in colorful wraps strode with perfect posture into the Indian Ocean, casting fishing nets. Cows plodded, ribs showing, across white sand beaches. Two men and thirty small children pulled a wooden dhow out of the sea. The pitiless sun bleached or burned everything; the merciful wind blew nonstop. A giant coconut thudded heavily in the sand narrowly missing one head.

In Bweju, we practiced our Swahili greetings:

Zanzibarian: Jambo! (Hello)

Mzungu (white person): Sijambo! (Hello)

Zanzibarian: Karibu! (Welcome)

Mzungu: Asante sana. (Thank you very much)

Zanzibarian: Habari. (How are things?)

Mzungu: Nzuri. (Good)

Zanzibarian: Mambo? (How's it going?)

Mzungu: Poa. (Fine)

Repeat two or more times, mixing in "sana" (very) for variation, and you have a rudimentary dance that will suffice as a Swahili greeting. Swahili greetings are extravagant. They repeat. They ramble. They know time to be slow and sprawling.

Our Zanzibarian proprietor, Ali, told us "karibu" fifty or more times. He prepared us each a whole fish fresh from the sea, complete with lips, jagged teeth, and eyes; eggs still hot from laying; lime-covered salads; roasted aubergine & potatoes; mounds of rice pilau. The villagers, Ali's big family, crossed through Ali's place freely, oftentimes stopping to charge a cell phone and exchange a lengthy greeting.

After a few days of exploring the east coast, we folded our rubbery selves into the daladala back to Stone Town. Wizened now, armed with a small cache of Swahili words, we wove through the papasi, to the ferry, back to Dar, and on to Kenya.

"Give me my money"

We are currently in Nairobi, returning from an excursion to Zanzibar for a music festival, seafood, and tropical beaches. More on that later. Now, we would like to address an elephant, not the savanna or forest elephants, but one of the elephants in the room.

On a typical Ugandan afternoon, we are walking along one of the ubiquitous red, muddy roads in a rural village, when three small boys appear out of the banana grove with machetes in their hands. "Give me my money!" one shouts to us and holds out his hand. We try to ignore him. "One hundred!" chimes in another. The other boy is silent - he is too busy peeling a large piece sugarcane with his machete. We chuckle slightly and keep walking. We know that we will encounter an identical gaggle of kids 100 meters on, who will appear bearing sharp implements, ask for money, and then fall into laughter.

This peculiar phrase, "Give me my money," is repeated daily by Ugandan children to passing white foreigners. The phrase begs many questions. Is "my" merely a poorly chosen possessive pronoun, or is this something deeper? Is this a demand for post-colonial retribution by the legacy of an exploited population? Is the child expressing the lopsided trading structure of developing and developed countries? Perhaps this is simply a communal view of property? Or a symbol of the longstanding foreign aid from the developed world to many African countries?

Probably this is simply an example of poor English and an encounter between poor people and people who are richer than any villager's wildest dreams. Our skin color tells them that we are rich and they are right. The phrase is an ill-executed business venture, a simple plea to get what they want and we have, like us broadcasting our resumes when we are desperate for employment, even for positions for which we are not qualified and have almost no chance of getting.

Witnessing widespread poverty has a deep effect on one's emotional and mental state. We all know that poverty exists, but it is usually a concept. When one travels, the concept becomes a reality. People react in a variety of ways to this reality; they react with humility, pride, sorrow, guilt, anger, irritation, confusion, or even paranoia. Humility comes from knowing that your own wealth is largely a product of the place in which you happened to be born. Pride is the result of knowing that your bank account is full, that you and your ancestors did something right. Sorrow and helplessness often accompany scenes of widespread poverty, like watching a legless man crawl up to you in the hot sun from 100 meters away, only to wave hello to you at your knees (this happened while we were haggling with a truck driver for a cheaper ride). Guilt and anger come from pondering solutions to poverty, observing the historical legacy of North-South relations, and at the fact that so few of our resources (human or other) are channeled into humanitarian purposes. Irritation, confusion and paranoia come from the constant harassment that can be traveling: you are a target, a walking dollar sign, a young, tremendously rich person who must continuously bat away advances from all directions.

In Uganda, there are many hardworking subsistence farmers, many thousands (perhaps millions) of small business owners, as well as many people with vast tracts of idle time. From the western viewpoint, this is a vast waste of potential.

One story comes to mind. On a sweltering afternoon, we strolled into Bigodi to arrange a wild-life walk in a local wetland sanctuary. Having decided to do the walk the next day, we idled away the hottest hours in an empty restaurant, drinking warm soda and chatting with the proprietor. After a while, we decided to play pool on the uneven pool table under the thatched roof in the front of the establishment. In no time, an audience of twelve people had gathered, including kids on break from school, old men, and men of working age. These observers huddled close and expressionlessly watched us play. Good shot, bad shot, scratch, jump shot: nothing riled the crowd. They only politely moved out of the way when we were setting up a shot and about to whack someone in the head with a pool cue.

We played a single game (Cindy somehow won despite being ignorant of the rules), and walked back to our campsite through small fields of banana, cassava, rice, coffee, maize, and other crops. We realized that not only did our "fans" not have 500 shillings (25 US cents) to play a game of pool, but that the best thing to do, indeed the only thing happening that afternoon, was to watch us play pool.

We travel through a land of economic conundrums. What is going to happen to this place? What should happen to this place? Is this situation good, bad, or neutral for the average Ugandan? Which way is this region moving? Besides observation and conversation, we have some books in our heavy mobile library to help us ponder these questions.

We arrived on the continent in the midst of the economic "crisis" in the US, with the relevant book Origins of Financial Crisis by George Cooper. The book debunks the free market myth, showing with simple examples that while the "invisible hand hypothesis" applies to commodities markets, it does not apply to lending and investment markets where rational lending and investing creates bubbles and busts. Fascinating as these concepts are to us in the West, they do not apply here in Africa, where the basic foundations of wealth-generating markets scarcely exist. There is no bailout for Africa.

Two reads offer strikingly different takes on corruption in Africa. The Fate of Africa by Meredith is a 600 page post-colonial history of the nations of Africa. The book is a mass of names, dates, cities, and improbable events, but the major thesis is that leadership in African countries has been so atrocious that all potential has been squandered. Until the very last page, Meredith describes a tangled mess of corruption from which he offers little hope.

On the other hand, in The End of Poverty, Jeffery Sachs writes about his experience with free market reform in countries all over the world. In a chapter about Africa, he argues forcefully that precious little foreign aid to Africa actually goes to helping Africans develop economically. Rather, foreign aid goes to crisis management (i.e. emergency food aid) and expensive Western consultants (who often propose solutions that assume Africa to be far more like the west than it really is). Sachs argues that corruption in Africa is not the cause of Africa's failure to thrive; that corruption is on par with similarly poor countries elsewhere in the world; and that only education and economic opportunity will reduce corruption, and not the other way around.

In The Shadow of the Sun, Polish journalist, Ryszard Kapuscinski, interweaves his personal tale of traveling as a journalist in Africa with African political history. He emphasizes that for people who are struggling to survive, all else is irrelevant. Education has very little meaning to a subsistence farmer; rainfall, a few tools, peaceful neighbors, and a decent supply of charcoal are life.

We conclude this entry on poverty from an internet cafe in Nairobi, a place where we feel very much at home. We are surrounded by middle class Africans who move like they have places to be and socialize like they have things to talk about.

So what can we conclude from life on the ground? Our observations and conversations show that many struggle every day trying to fulfill basic needs in a place where the safety net does not exist. Regardless, people survive while demonstrating mind-boggling acumen: the man walks down a chaotic Kampala street carrying a refrigerator on his head; our guide, Bosco, grabs a metal pot of boiling water out of the fire with his bare hands; the knee high child bounds silently up the steep rocky trail from the bottom of a deep valley. Material progress comes slowly: a few roads are built, a few cell-phone towers are put up, a few schools are opened, a few opportunities are gained.

Who knows, perhaps someday the boy with the machete and the poor grammar will sit all day at a computer terminal with a little roll of fat hanging over his waistband, filling his bank account with shillings.

Until next time,

C and G

30 hour bus ride

We sat in a European-style cafe in Jinja, enjoying the perfect chi of perfect decor while sipping perfect espresso drinks when one thing became unquestionably clear: we would be taking a 30 hour bus ride from Jinja to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Having just returned from a five day trek in the mountains compounded our enjoyment of our splurge at the cafe. However, we did not interrupt our routine lives of pleasure and comfort in Seattle merely to step into a travel life of the very same routine and pleasure we find at home. There are many ways to get from Jinja to Dar es Salaam, but in the decadence of that cafe, only the 30 hour bus trip seemed right for us.

We left Jinja (and dearest brother, Joe) on Monday afternoon at 4PM. Our Akamba bus was not special: no AC, no frills, and probably no shock absorbers. But the driver was proficient and in some respects heroic, as he bounced us tenaciously along unimaginably riveted, pot-holed dirt roads. We crossed into Kenya in a few hours and at 7PM the orange sun set, the hazy moon rose, and the Kenyan night came fast.

Those nighttime hours en route to Nairobi blurred with dozing, restless sleep, heat, humidity, and interminable bouncing, like a ship in rough waters. We reached Nairobi around 4AM in a half-asleep stupor and waited for two hours for our bus to depart for Dar. In the meantime, we found African milk tea, news on the TV, and a really nice freshly scoured Asian squat toilet that smelled like Ajax and was worth much more than the thirteen cents we paid to use it.

At 6AM, we joined our African colleagues, who were bundled up against the "cold" of night in coats, scarves, and hats, to board the bus to Dar. The conductor passed us small cakes, pea samosas, and boiled eggs for breakfast and we set off at 6:30. The sun rose at 7AM, revealing a landscape very different from the fecund, populated greenery with which we had become familiar in Uganda. Dry, flat, brown lands peppered with shrubs, herd animals, and lone herders sprawled into the distance. Time passed in arrhythmical spurts of sleep and hazy consciousness for another few hours until we crossed into Tanzania around 9AM.

After wading through touts, hassles, and confusion at the border, we boarded the bus again around 10AM. We drove on and on....it felt and looked similar to driving though Montana. Grand purple mountains rose in the distance all around us. The land appeared vast, parched, brown, and far less populated than Uganda. Herds of cows and goats grazed and mud huts were covered with metal rather than plant fibers. The villages were only slightly greener than their surroundings and the ubiquitous Ugandan farmer was naught to be seen. As the day wore on, the luscious smell of meat roasting wafted through the bus.

We stopped briefly in Arusha, where clouds obscured Mt. Kilamajaro. Each stop was brief...barely enough time to find a toilet. On one stop, Greg got yelled at for peeing outside the loo. At another, Cindy got swindled into buying two rotten bananas for $1. The sun set at 7PM. The heat was intense; sweat was profuse; all inside the bus was sticky.

Akruba was scheduled to arrive in Dar at 7PM, but we didn't get in until 10:30PM. The hyper-vigilant taxi driver who stormed us after we got off the bus informed us that the hotel where we planned to stay was closed. He knew a better hotel - just as cheap and brand new. He'd take us there.

We believed it was a scam. But we were too tired, dirty, and unempowered to care. We bounced another few blocks along unpaved roads to....a really nice, clean, cheap hotel with AC? Yes, we did. We never would have found the place ourselves. It was gem hidden amidst piles of rusty corrugated metal roof panels.

We took the room, showered, watched the TV, slept, and in the morning decided to stay another night. After a day exploring Dar, we ferried off to Zanzibar, where we now sweat by the sea - more about this decadence later.

Peace,

C & G

Snaps and Haikus

We are currently in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, after a 30 hour bus ride. . . more on that later. For now, we are writing about the eight days we spent in Eastern Uganda near the Kenyan border, including three nights in Sipi, five days backpacking on Mt. Elgon, and a night in Mbale.

Backpacking allows one to settle into a place, live with rhythm, heighten the senses, and suffer miserable discomfort. Five days in the wilderness left us with calm spirits, remarkable images, and a mad desire for calories. We gazed at a distant peak covered in clouds, we slowly and gruelingly ascended, we slept in a cave as bats plopped guano on our tent, we weathered inclement rain, we brewed coffee and tea, we devoured food fit only for the hungry, we had interesting conversations in smokey huts, we labored under a thin oxygen supply, we rediscovered the endless farm that is Uganda, and, finally, we gazed back at a distant peak covered in clouds.

A narrative of a backpacking trip would be fine ennui; the feeling of backpacking is better represented in images. The following are images in pictures and haikus. The pictures represent scenes and landscapes in moments that a finger happened upon the camera trigger. The haikus depict little observations that stuck to our minds, which we then stuffed into the 5-7-5 syllable haiku format. We amused ourselves by writing them on a windy afternoon in our tent at Mude Cave. We had to reduce the quality on the pictures by 90% to get them to upload. We had to reduce the quality of the haikus to make them digestable for the public.

-C and G

Matatu: Jinja to Sipi

Boy sitting on man,
brother sitting on sister,
four people; one seat.

Sipi Farm Girl

Girl walks goat through town
rope tied to goat's leg stretches
across red mud road.

Below Sipi Falls

Red winged starling tied
to a string, last gasp flapping.
The boy shows it off.

Lunch in Sipi

A local hotel:
mud walls, dirt floors, three benches.
We eat rice and beans.

Trekking Mt. Elgon

Heavy backpack, hunched
head down, watching feet step on
tough tiny flowers.

Night in Tutum Cave

Waterfall slapping
on left. Crazy bats squeaking
on right. Fall asleep.

Supper on the mountain

My legs like basalt,
heavy with lactic acid.
Squat down and eat gruel.

Wagagai Peak

The everlasting
flowers bloom on the extinct
volcano Elgon.

Morning Alarm

"Cah!" - We from the tent
burst, to scare Raven from food.
He makes a poor thief.

While boiling afternoon tea

Why are these little
white butterflies falling from
above? Are they dead?

A smoky conversation with Beca at the fire

In Kapchorwa, the
boys are circumcised at age
18. They can't cry.

Descending Elgon

Enter a new world:
"Wahhhh!" "Mooooo!" "Cock a doodle doo!"
Civilization.

A conversation in Mbale about polygamy

The first daughter of
wife number one vows to us
never to marry.