Day three, morning two and I still get lost around Stonetown, so I make my way to the beach by following cars instead of walking around the alleys. I end up at Tembo Hotel, where the barman lets me lounge on the beach furniture even though it’s reserved for guests. He gives me ice for the drinking water I arrive with and lets me buy cool drinks at a kiosk instead of paying tourist prices at their hotel. He looks after my bag while I splash in the ocean and sometimes buys me cool drink from the bar. He always says ‘karibu tena’ when he serves. It means ‘welcome again’. Tonight’s dinner is a discovery that will keep me coming back to Zanzibar. Urojo is a yellow soup I’ve seen around Stonetown’s alleys, food markets and on stalls along the main roads. It’s on lone tables set under trees on random streets during the day and outside people’s houses at night. Tangy with a hint of heat, it’s made with flour, grated raw mango, garlic paste, chilli powder, fresh chillies, boiled potatoes cut into bite-sized cubes, turmeric and coconut milk. It’s topped with kebabs, lentil fritters, crunchy potato shavings and a splash of coconut chutney made by adding grated mango, chillies and lime juice. I eat urojo several times a day during my stay.
My search for a room to rent starts outside the post office in Shangani, which should also be known as Papasi Central. When I refuse their offers to organise jaunts, they try to sell me Tingatinga paintings and packets of spices. I stand quietly, listening to a guy singing a tune from a compilation of folk songs he’s selling. His crusty lips and ashen face make him look like a crack junkie.
‘Jambo, jambo bwana, habari gani? Muzuri sana. Wageni, Wakaribishwa. Zanzibar yetu hakuna matata,’ he croaks. It translates into something along the lines of ‘welcome, welcome sir. How are you? Very well. Welcome to our Zanzibar, where there are no problems.’
He tells me to go to the big tree close to Mercury Bar; the men there will know what to do with my request. One of them gives me a phone number with the repeated instruction to only call it at night. I call Star minutes later. He agrees to meet me at Babu Chai’s stall that evening.
‘Do you know why they call me Star?’ he says when we meet. ‘I only come out at night; never call me during the day again.’
We find a place on Aisha’s property. Her family lives on the first floor. I can live with them, which is cheaper but comes with having to abide by family rules, or I can rent the apartment on the ground floor. My kitchen is more of a micro kitchen, with only room for a sink, a cupboard and floating shelves with pots, a pan, plates, cups and glasses, and a two-plate gas stove. I have hot water, a lounge with a hard three-seater couch and an even harder armchair. The dining room has a rectangular table with six chairs, everything in mahogany, and a shelf with a German-Swahili dictionary. I put my books next to it. The bedrooms are my favourite for their traditional four-poster beds with stained glass on the head board.
Nyumba yangu. My house, in Hurumzi, where I can invite people over for tea so that when they’re at the door, they can say ‘hodi’ to ask if they can come in, and I can reply with ‘karibuni’ to let them know they’re welcome; just as I pictured it in my head when I learnt about greetings in Swahili in my guidebook.
With a new life comes new touches to old habits. Now when I go to the fish market, it’s to get three tuna steaks, which I can buy for R15. I can also make my own masala chai by boiling tea and milk with a premixed chai spice made by blending ginger, cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, nutmeg and black pepper.
The only problem I have with my house comes from my hopeless sense of direction. I always get lost on my way home, meaning all trips back start at the post office to find a papasi willing to walk with me until we find my landmark – the soccer goal post painted on the wall opposite the property’s main entrance.
One of them is a boy who regales me with wild tales of trekking to South Africa on trucks when he can find a lift, and on his feet when no one stops for him. His eyes glisten when he gets to the part where he jumps over a fence at night, his heart beating with the excitement of making it to South Africa and the anxiety of walking into wild animals. He spends a few months in Joburg working as a street barber to raise money to go to Cape Town, where he sneaks onto a cargo ship on its way to Europe. He’s discovered in the broiler and sent to jail, then back to Dar es Salaam. He ekes out a living selling Tingatinga paintings that no one buys.
One afternoon at Africa House while treating myself to my favourite cocktail, the dawa, made by muddling vodka with honey and fresh lime juice, a white woman walks in with a pet monkey that runs around the bar before settling next to the barman. It’s my cue to leave.
I walk across the road to hang out with a group of dudes sitting under and on a tree. A road sign reminds drivers to drive slowly. ‘Endesha pole pole’, it reads, repeating the island’s favourite word, pole pole. The house next to us is falling apart, and the only thing to see are the boys getting high on heroin or the one who always sits alone on the stoep to read his Quran.
This is where I meet Ali, who tells me from the branch he’s sitting on that he has seen me swim. He offers to turn me into a fish in water. We start our lessons at the beach next to the old house, where he misses the afternoon soccer games to help me. The game pauses for prayer time.
Ali and I meet every morning for two or more hours before going our separate ways. Occasionally, we hang out at the café where he introduces me to avocado juice. It’s another thing I don’t know until I visit Zanzibar. We also hang out at Stereya, a local joint with beach boys dressed in tropical shirts, their locks tucked into wool hats with Rasta colours. I love Stereya for the yard with coral blue walls, cheap Kilimanjaro beers and Maasai men in full traditional clothes with starry-eyed holiday squeezes on their arms. When I’m not here for the cheap and delicious plates of basmati rice served with fried cabbage and red bean stew cooked with coconut cream, I’m at the jukebox lining up a playlist with ‘Thank You Mr DJ’, ‘Weekend Special’, ‘Do Me’, ‘Yori Yori’ and ‘Falling in Love’: Ghana and Nigeria meeting South Africa in East Africa. Hakuna matata indeed.
It’s the morning of 11 June 2010. The World Cup fever that infects every place I’ve been to finally catches up with me. I go to Dennis’s curio shop next to the Gallery Bookshop. I wait for him to finish sweeping so he can help me find a vuvuzela and my national flag. We walk to the old town across from Darajani Market, going into every shop that sells Euro soccer jerseys and soccer balls, and always leave empty-handed. One shop owner ends my search by telling me that it’s foolish to leave the home of the vuvuzela empty-handed hoping to find it thousands of kilometres away.
It still doesn’t kill my buzz, though: My friend Violet is arriving today to start her new life in Zanzibar, while her husband, Tshepo, takes up a post in Dar es Salaam. They’ve also been bitten by the African travel bug, and used to live at Nkatha Bay on the shores of Lake Malawi. She fell in love with Zanzibar while attending Sauti za Busara, a music festival that celebrates African music in all its diversity and being trapped here after a power failure that lasted weeks, making it impossible to access money.
We meet at Mercury Bar, where we catch up on what’s happened in our lives in the two years since we’ve seen each other. Violet walks outside to buy smokes, and runs back to the table giddy. ‘You won’t believe who I found outside.’ Her voice is filled with wonder. An old woman whose woolly, white hair is covered by a loose pink chiffon scarf catches up with Violet. It’s Bi Kidude. I’ve been looking for her for weeks; walking around Stonetown, going around the island asking people if they’ve seen her. The answer has always been no, followed by ‘you’ll know when she’s around’.
Other than the Amazons of Dahomey, the nineteenth-century female army who would sooner cut off their breasts than lose a battle, the three women I admire more than others are Winnie Madikizela-Mandela for bringing apartheid to its knees, Miriam Makeba for her politics, activism and treating husbands like property she can acquire and discard at will when society says marriage is the be all and end all of a woman’s life, a
nd Bi Kidude. No one knows for sure when Bi was born, only that it was when the island still used rupees as currency. Bi has always wanted to be a singer like her hero, Siti binti Saadi. Against the odds set by her conservative society where women needed a man’s permission to even leave the house, the legend around her life goes, Bi disguised herself as a man to get on a boat to Dar es Salaam. She became a global star in the 1980s, when her hair was already grey. She still performs around the world and she’s known for long walks in Stonetown. She slouches on a chair at our table, pulls out a box of cigarettes and orders a hot Kilimanjaro beer. We order pizza and watch South Africa play against Mexico.
Violet’s Swahili is enough to keep the conversation flowing. It’s the only language Bi speaks, and she is genuinely shocked that I’m black and not fluent in Swahili. She’s back in town for a few weeks of rehearsals and I’m welcome to drop in provided I keep my mouth shut, seeing as I don’t speak Swahili.
Violet stays with me, and I move in with her at her friends Abbas and Sophia’s place a week later when my lease at Aisha’s ends. Before Violet, life is great but it doesn’t have female friends. When I try to befriend a woman I meet at an internet café, hoping that her recent arrival from Harare will bond us, she’s polite but refuses to meet me for tea.
‘It’s as if I have a scarlet sign on my forehead that tells women to stay away from me,’ I complain to Violet and Sophia.
‘Haven’t you noticed that all local women are conservative and you are not?’ Violet says. ‘The way you dress is as good as having a scarlet sign.’
This explains why some males, including boys, snarl at me. The daring ones, like a man who confronts me at the market and a boy who tries to fix the kaftan, yell at me to my face. I kick the man in his stomach, and pull the boy by his ear until it turns red.
‘My name is Lerato, not Fatma,’ I hiss after putting the fear of God and ancestors in their hearts.
I leave Zanzibar at the beginning of July to catch the rest of the World Cup in South Africa. Violet has turned Southern Africa into her stomping ground. She suggests going to Zambia aboard the Tazara, and uses her Swahili to buy my ferry ticket back to Dar at a Tanzanian price instead of a tourist one.
I sail away knowing that my return is not a question of if; it’s a matter of when. And I do visit again in 2012 to attend Sauti za Busara, where I’m enthralled by the eclectic line up of artists from around the region and Africa. This edition is headlined by Nneka and Tumi and The Volume. Even at the after party held in Kendwa a day after the festival ends, the music is strictly African and just as varied as the shows at the main events. I return to Zanzibar again in 2016 to attend Busara with my partner and tick swimming with dolphins off my bucket list. More than anything, I keep coming back for urojo.
July 2010
The Tazara is a train that runs between Dar es Salaam and Kapiri Mphosi, two hundred and eight kilometres north of Lusaka. It’s the slowest way to travel between Tanzania and Zambia, but what it lacks in speed it makes up for by going through the Selous Game Reserve, where, Violet promises me, I’m bound to spot some game. I overlook its reputation for breakdowns.
I catch the train on a good day, when it leaves Dar es Salaam on time. The crew comes into our cabin to deliver blankets, sheets, pillow cases, soap bars and a roll of toilet paper. My cabin mates are a demure Amina and Mama Anna. The only time Mama Anna is not talking is when she is sleeping. I go to the toilets to assess my dietary options. There’s an overpowering stench of industrial bleach and the toilet bowl is clean. The bucket next to it is filled with water: It’s safe to eat solid meals.
I split my waking hours between the restaurant and the cabin. On the first night, I go to the restaurant to look for backpackers to swop stories with. I hide out there on my second day when Amina disembarks in Mbeya; the south-eastern town that connects Tanzania to Mozambique and Malawi. Amina’s departure gives Mama Anna more room to put the sacks of rice, dried fish, bundles of green bananas and other stuff she buys whenever we stop. It also turns me into the only audience for her never-ending stories. The only time we have a serious breakdown is at the Tanzanian side of the Tunduma border crossing. We wait for more than an hour for repairs.
Everything about the trip, from the scenery and the food at the restaurant to the exit and entry between the two countries, is pleasant. We arrive in Kapiri Mposhi on Sunday night; only a few hours later than the expected time of arrival.
I continue to the Intercity bus terminal in Lusaka by minibus. The terminal becomes a real hive in the morning. Two women set up stalls selling ankara cloth. Some people have already taken their places on benches outside a café next to the police station and others who spent the night at the terminal form a line outside the bathroom; waiting our turn to use the showers.
Intercity connects Lusaka to capital cities and towns in East, Central and Southern Africa. It makes selling tickets a fierce competition. Destinations are written in bold letters or beamed on screens. Bookers Express’s tagline says they’re ‘Recognized for putting customers first.’ CR Holdings Time Buses catches attention with a board that has departure times next to each destination. The right side of the board has vertical letters that spell ‘DAILY’ in white letters with black stripes. The bus for Johannesburg leaves at midday.
I’m going home to feel the fever of the World Cup. Just like I do in the first half of 2010, I’m based in Pretoria and travel to neighbouring countries when I miss the road. When I go to Harare to visit Johannes, whom I meet on the flight from Accra to Johannesburg, I find a city that’s trapped in a 1990s time warp; Waiting to Exhale is on at the cinema. Harare is a pretty city, with jacarandas in full bloom and sparkling swimming pools. It’s not the Harare of the first years of independence, when Zimbabwe is called the bread basket of Southern Africa, but it’s also not a city where only misery lives, as the Sunday Times newspaper has been saying for many years. The shelves at Spar are piled high with goods, the cooked food section has a long line of people waiting to buy sadza and stew with muriwo, as kale is called, the streets around the taxi rank and bus station are lined with vendors who sell piles of bananas, oranges and apples. At the Harare gardens, families and couples picnic on the manicured lawns, and children lick trails of melting ice cream from their forearms.
On Sunday afternoon, Johannes and his friends take me partying to a downtown bar that’s packed with patrons; there is no sense of doom or the gloom South African media says are the only things to experience in Zimbabwe. We clink our bottles of Heineken, toast to Harare’s comeback and dance to 1980s R&B. The only time I feel the city’s financial problems is on Monday morning when I walk from ATM to ATM in the business district until I find one that hasn’t run out of the American dollars that have long replaced Zimbabwean currency.
From Harare, I travel by bus to Blantyre in Malawi, to catch a bus to Nkatha Bay. Violet and Tshepo lived here before relocating to Stonetown and Dar es Salaam. She insists that without visiting Malawi my travels will lack a dash of magic that can only be found along the shores of Lake Malawi.
My stay at Butterfly Lodge is the most romantic time of my life. I arrive at dawn and wait a while for a taxi to take me up the hill to Butterfly Lodge. Here, ecotourism and leaving a positive mark on the community are a philosophy. There’s a heap of compost that we take fruit and vegetable peels to. There are toilets with running water but, unlike the pit toilet, they don’t have a view of the scuba divers playing in the crystal clear Lake Malawi as it flows to the horizon.
I get a discount rate on my chalet when I volunteer to work at Gulugufe crèche. It’s one of several community programmes initiated by the proprietors of the lodge. I’m ‘Madamu’ Lerato in the mornings at Gulugufe, where I sometimes run out of my class after the roll call for giggles that turn into loud laughs; the kids in the village have names that come from the Bible, and mostly the Old Testament. I cannot believe that, in 2010, there are still people in Africa whose lives are just starting with names like Abraham, D
aniel, Ruth, Esther, Isaac and Solomon. I’m Sister Lerato in the afternoons when the artists who run curio shops along the stony road discover that I’m friends with Tshepo and Violet. I look forward to laundry day, when I wash my clothes at the lodge and give them a final rinse in the lake. I swim after items that float away. I’m a regular tea guest to parents who want to show their appreciation to people who work at the preschool and people with family members in South Africa. I’ve always had wanderlust but could not think of anything more boring to do with my time than to spend it in Southern Africa. Malawi – the warm heart of Africa as its people call the country – makes me fall in love with the region.
Wherever I am in Southern Africa, I always make my way back to South Africa by taking a bus to Mozambique, where I spend a night or two in places like Tete and Xai Xai before continuing to Maputo to get a bus to Pretoria. Mozambique is one of the most beautiful places in Africa, and now that I know how cheap it is for a Southern African to experience, I can’t get enough of it and the early morning walks on the beaches and hot evenings dancing with strangers who treat me like a lifelong friend.
XIII
GOING TO UGANDA
November 2010
I’M AT HOME IN Mabopane watching CNN when Giles comes on screen. The young man sits cross-legged at a hotel patio, calmly telling the reporter why he stands by his words. His tabloid, Rolling Stone, ran a series of stories calling for gay Ugandans to be killed. ‘Hang them,’ one headline instructs.
I’m on a bus to Kampala a few days later to interview Giles. I hope I don’t kill him first. I start my trek in Gaborone, so I can get Botswana into my passport. ‘The bus leaves at 8pm sharp,’ the lady at the office says when I buy my ticket to Lusaka.
The afternoon moves in slow motion at the Gaborone-Lusaka Express bus company. The only passengers around for about three hours are me and Mme Gloria, already settled with legs stretched out on her straw mat. Her luggage includes two mink blankets in see-through bags and a large suitcase that’s empty for now. When she returns to Gaborone in a week’s time, it will be filled with the African print cloth she trades in. Her arm is swallowed by a handbag that’s big enough to fit a newborn, and comes out with a container of Ntsu snuff. Next out is a roll of two-ply toilet paper. My mother Dikeledi and the women I spent every day of my first four years on earth with – my two aunts Mapula and Mangaka, their mother mmaMalebane, grandmother mmaMandla and great grandmother mmaMabote – sniff Ntsu. I stretch my legs, rummage around my bag to find my container of Ntsu – I sniff it on days when missing my grandmother becomes unbearable.
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