On Mandela's Passing

I am not South African, but I mourn Mandela's passing as I think we must all mourn the extinguishing of a great light.

And while I am not a citizen of the rainbow nation, I have lived in this part of the world for what comes to basically half of my adult life, and so I also mourn Madiba, who remade this country into something so beautiful, so complex, so impossible.  Out of his idealism, his obstinacy, his sacrifices, his collaborations, his imperfections -- and those of so many, many other women and men here and around the world -- came a country that I strive to understand, and that I have come to love.

Hamba kahle, Madiba.

Today, in Cape Town, our meeting began with a moment of silence.  And as we stood there, a woman began to sing:

Nkosi sikelel' iAfrika
Maluphakanyisw' uphondo lwayo,
Yizwa imithandazo yethu,
Nkosi sikelela, thina lusapho lwayo.

God bless Africa
Let it's horn be raised
Hear our prayers
God bless us, we are the family of Africa.

It was haunting.  And we sang with her.  We stood in silence, as South Africans, Americans, British, Swazi, Zimbabwean, and a dozen others, and then we sang, and people wept.  And I sang too.  It is a beautiful, haunting national anthem.  In full, it incorporates five different languages, including Afrikaans and English, an incredible symbolic gesture that I think really demonstrates the generosity of spirit and moral strength of the architects of this new South Africa.  And then the woman called:

Amandla!

And there was the response:

Ngawethu!

And then again, with fists raised in the air:

Amandla!
Ngawethu!

The power -- it is ours.

I don't have anything to say that has not been said more eloquently than anybody else.   Mandela was 95, and he was tired, and he had done more great work in his lifetime than anyone can aspire to -- nor would any sane person aspire to the physical, social, and emotional costs it took to accomplish the new South Africa.  So many died.  So many have been broken or damaged, maybe beyond repair.  But as perhaps you can tell from the pages and pages of other entries that precede this one, what came from that was a beautiful, troubled, brand new country.  A country that I love.  And so I will mourn with the rest in Cape Town.  And I too will sing Nkosi sikelela Afrika.

Hamba kahle, Madiba

Third World Problems

I am spending today cleaning, editing down overly long reports, and baking avocado bread.  The avocado bread is because I have an excess of avocados that are starting to go squishy on me.  So does everybody else in a 50km radius.  People gift them to one another in a sort of avocado white elephant roulette, restaurants put them on everything they can think of, and I bake up every avocado bread and cupcake recipe I can think of in the hopes that at least that will keep a little longer if I put it in the freezer.

Confounding our avocado management issues are the huge storms that have blown across Swaziland in the last week.  Last Saturday the whole northern part of the country was slammed with hail the size of grapes and golf balls.  (Keep in mind that “the whole northern part of the country” is equivalent to about the size of two US counties, but still).  Some friends and I got caught in in it driving back from Kruger.  At first it was just a very strong rainstorm – the type of squall where you consider pulling over for the 10 minutes it will take for the worst to pass over.  The roads here are narrow, and full of potholes in the rainy season and cows in all seasons.  Other cars and kombis are not always as road worthy as they could be, and in bad driving conditions it is usually just better to wait until things improve.  And then we heard “Whack!  Whack! Whack!” and realized…wait, is that hail?  We pulled over, got very lucky, and saw a gas station with just enough cover under an overhang for us.  We sat there for the better part of 20 minutes and listened to the hail slam my car. We watched other cars pull in to try and get some shelter, including a bakkie full of people cowering under a tarp, and we watched the hail shred the farms and fields of mealies around us.  When it finally slowed and we pulled out, the sky was so dark and the fields were covered in so much hail that at first I took it for fog.  The road was full of power poles, downed electricity lines, and people’s roofs, and every dip in the road was so flooded and full of mud and debris that I now no longer think it's necessary to tease myself for buying an SUV.  I’m extraordinarily grateful I did.

People all over the country have been losing power on and off as more storms come through every couple of days – though none as bad as that first one, fortunately.  Here in my swanky neighborhood we haven’t gone without power for more than a few hours at a stretch, though we didn’t have running water for about 24 hours. 

All the last lingering avocados have been knocked from the trees, and the gifting and swapping has ben extra intense lately while everybody tries to figure out what to do with them all.

And here’s the thing: Recently, a woman whom I greatly respect accused me of “playing at being poor.”  Well, not me specifically, but American vegetarians in general.  Why, she wanted to know, would people from the wealthiest country in the world eschew the food that many people here aspire to eat on paydays and Sundays, and have to do without the rest of the month?  A standard question on food security questionnaires out here is “how many times a month do you manage to eat meat?”  And I refuse to eat it because... carbon footprint.  

The woman who said this was laughing at me, not condemning me (I think), but the phrase stuck with me.  Yes, I was scared to be driving in that hailstorm, but I was coming back from a weekend being a tourist in Kruger, looking at leopards and eating a half kilo of prawns for $12  (Hush.  I eat fish).  I was scared, but my car was safe to drive (safe, mom, safe!) and the worst property damage I risked were some dents to the roof that I can’t see anyways unless I hop up and down.  Sure the power has been on and off, but I deal with that by making sure to charge my computer battery at work and going out to lunch.  When I’m worried about the water, I go buy 10 liters of bottled water.  For me, the consequence of one of the worst storms in a decade is that I need to spend my weekend baking.  Yesterday, I went to the gym on a Saturday when usually I wouldn’t because I couldn’t take a shower at home.  These are my third world problems.   I have not lost my roof, I have not lost an entire season’s plantings.  I will not get sick because the water is bad.

I do feel like I am playing at being poor.  I skip in and out of the consequences of living here, and for the most part they can’t hurt me.  I respect them, but I am buffered.  I do my research, I ask people for their stories, and then I take them home, take them apart, and reconstruct them into science.  I play at being poor.  I ask other people for their poverty, I ask for their worst moments so that I can briefly dip a toe in and walk away.  I don’t feel bad about that.  I think it’s important.  I think it can be done in a way that honors and highlights the voices of people who aren’t always heard.  But I cannot shake the fact that the difference between them and me is that I am…playing.  I drive through the ruined fields in my SUV, and I am anxious but I have options and I am safe.  I bake avocado bread and don’t eat meat, and I try really, really, really hard to do good science because other people are not playing.

New visa, feed a tiger

My 30 day visa is up on the 23^rd, and I still don’t have my temporary residency permit (despite not being an idiot!).  Which is why I fed a tiger yesterday.

When you cross the border into Swaziland, you automatically get a 30 day visitor visa.  To renew that visa, you need to cross the border again and get yourself another 30 day stamp.  There is a Swazi/South African border crossing about 20 minutes from Mbabane, but not much nearby on the South African side.  I suppose we probably could have just driven from Swaziland to South Africa, turned right around, and headed back into Swaziland with a new stamp, but I wasn’t totally sure how the customs officials would feel about that. 

An hour from the border is a place called Cradle of Life.  If you look at Cradle of Life’s webpage, it tells you that at 1pm on Saturdays you can bottle feed what is CLEARLY a tiny, adorable, tiger cub.  No, tigers are not native to Africa.  But if you have to cross the border anyway, why not feed a baby tiger?

Border crossings are a great time to break out the broken siSwati.  The standards are shockingly low.  If you can say hello, tell the person where you’re going, and explain that you used to live in Mpumalanga, you are considered hilarious and are waved on with a smile.  Sometimes, the guard will use a sentence that doesn’t fit this pattern, and then I am forced to switch into English: 

“I am asking, can I be your friend?”

 “Yes of course Bhuti!  We can be friends.”

 “Oh, I forgot to mention, I want to be your…B-friend.”

“Oh…shame Bhuti!  I already have a fiancé!” (Flash ring.  Drive away.  Brian…take note).

On the way to lunch, we got stuck behind a very large steer crammed into the back of a very small bakkie.  The steer did not look comfortable.  The bakkie was riding awfully low.  My friend and I spent some time discussing the physics behind what exactly would happen if the steer felt the need to relieve some tension at 100 km an hour.  We decided it would be perhaps unsafe, and opted to pass the steer-bakkie.  (Later, over lunch, we both mustered enough memories of high school physics to realize that probably not all that much would have happened.  But the image of a 100 km/hour cow-pukkie projectile will never not make me laugh).

After getting lost only once, and making the drive much more slowly than usual because the clouds hung over the road so heavy and so low that for much of the drive we had trouble seeing more than five feet in front of the car , we made it to our lunch spot.  The drive way is a strand of DNA.  The building itself is cavernous, and strange, and there was a schedule posted in the front shop/lobby that did not include baby tiger feeding.  The woman at the front desk waved down one of the tiger trainers.  The tiger trainer gave us the eye, and asked if we really wanted to feed a baby tiger.  Oh yes.  “Do you know what you’re in for?”  Adorable baby tiger cub feeding?  “You know they’re this big.”  And he gestured about six inches higher than my hips.  My hips are not very high off the ground, but still.  He told us to go wait out by the restaurant.  Baby tiger feeding is at one, and he would wave us over when it was time.  Okey-doke.

Half an hour later we look across the lawn and see two tigers on leashes ambling towards us.  They were NOT adorable, tiny baby tiger cubs.  They were small-ish tigers on leashes.   Like large dogs.  But tigers.  Tigers!! Sure, the leashes were chain, but I have serious doubts about how effective they would have been if 400 pounds of 10 month old tiger had decided to go wherever it pleased. 

Right about this point I start thinking about how much time and evolution has gone into me not wanting to be in a small space with a tiger.  One tiger climbs a tree.  Another decides she is not interested in going where the trainer is tugging her, and they spend some time pulling one another back and forth in a pond while the tiger starts looking more and more pissy.  The woman from the front desk asks the small crowd that is watching this process who has signed up to feed the tiger.  We tell her we have.  She tells us to walk over to the tigers.

“Um…Sesi…the tiger isn’t going to eat us, right?”

“Hmmm….I’m sure I can’t tell you that.”

“Wait…no.  No is the only correct answer to that question.  The only thing you were supposed to say there was ‘No!”

Shrug.  I am not feeling any less skeptical about this.  There have been no liability wavers.  I am getting the sense that this is one of those things that 99 times out of 100 makes for an awesome facebook photo, and that 100^th time ends with “Fulbright scholar mauled by rogue tiger in South African conservation park”

But we head towards the tigers, and my friend hops down, hands me her camera, and walks over.  I remain deeply skeptical (aka chicken), but eventually suck it up, grab the camera and follow the tiger on the leash.

My friend is very brave.  “What this entails” is getting a giant tiger hug.  The tiger rears up on its back legs, puts its front paws on the trainer’s shoulders, and starts sucking out of the bottle.  After a few minutes the trainer turns to us and offers to let us try.  And I utterly chicken out and say no thanks.  And my friend is much braver than me and goes for it.  I take pictures.  The milk goes all over my friend and the tiger, and the trainer, and the tiger nuzzles her from time to time.  She is told not to let the tiger do that.  When my friend is done being brave, the second trainer turns to me and asks if I want to hold the bottle.  I decide to stop being chicken and go hold the bottle while my friend takes a picture.  There was something very cub like about the tiger.  She just wanted a snack, she just wanted to play.  But yikes.  Tiger.

We got lunch afterwards, and laughed at how strongly my friend reeked of tiger.  It was wonderful.  On the drive home the clouds had cleared up and we could see them hanging across the veldt below us, and the sun came out and lit up the mountains behind us.  It was beautiful.

Shopping

There is a new grocery store in Mbabane.  I can't remember if the space it takes up now was a vacant lot or some nondescript looking warehouse the last time I was here, but it is new, and it is amazing.  I have no idea what the actual population of Mbabane is (wikipedia suggests it is around 95,000, but there is no citation for this).  We have...let me count...five or six stoplights (here they are called robot and I will never not be delighted to tell somebody to take a right at the second robot while giving them directions somewhere).  The "central business district" takes up all of five city blocks.  There is a marketplace next to the taxi rank where you can get bananas, avocados, paw-paw, pineapple, melons, and cashews, and there are several smaller spaza shops where you can buy things like bread, boxed milk, sweets, and mealie meal.  And now there are four very large grocery stores bounded by six robots and five blocks and adjoining the market women and the spaza shops.

We have one of each.  ShopRite, Pick'N'Pay, Spar, and now, oh goodness, a Super Spar.  You can walk to any of one of them from any other one within five minutes.  All of them are busy most of the time, although some of them are more airy shopping experiences than others.  This may seem strange, but the thing I can't help thinking about from the new Super Spar is not the outstanding cheese selection (that means there is something besides gouda), or the little coffee shop in the corner, or the sneaking suspicion that maybe, if it is a very good day and I am very lucky, I may be able to find bagels there at some point, but the fact that the grocery carts have little...baby seaty things on them.  What's the word for those?  Car seats?  But on a grocery cart.  You know.  The place where you would stick your baby while you shop.  

I can't remember if we have those in the US or not, I've never paid much attention. But in Swaziland strollers and baby seats are not standard equipment.  When the baby is very, very small she doesn't go out much, and when she gets a bit bigger, you carry her on your back using a towel or a blanket or a lahiya, depending on the weather.  I don't think I saw anybody using the baby-carty-thingies, but I was so struck by the fact that they existed.  ShopRite and regular Spar are full of women carrying their children on their backs, in a very normal and practical way.  Pick'n'Pay has less of this, but you get the sense its because the very small children are with their aunties or caregivers, while the ones who can walk are (almost) as likely to be following around their (English speaking) dads as they are to be holding their mom's hands.  Only Super Spar, the new, fancy grocery store with the cheese selection and the espresso counter, offers customers a row of baby-equipped carts as they walk in the door.

I don't know why I fixate on these little baby chairs, but I have a sense that they are a visual marker of globalization, class, wealth, and aspiration happening around me.  Do you shop at ShopRite or Super Spar?  Who do you want your child to be?

Up in the mountains

The last time I lived here in Swaziland, I stayed about 15 minutes out of the capital city in a place called Ezulweni.  Literally translated this means "The place of heaven" and the tourist board (yes, Swaziland has a tourist board.  Of course!) will occasionally more loosely translate it to "The valley of heaven"instead.  It is an undeniably beautiful place.  My house backed onto a nature reserve.  In the summer -- when the paw-paws and bananas around my house were ripe -- my roommate and I would sometimes wake up to the thump-thump-thump sound of vervet monkeys playing on the roof.  Disconcerting, I promise.  Maria claimed that if they ever broke into the kitchen the trick would just be to point at them rudely ("monkeys and people think the same types of body language are rude") until they backed themselves out again.  I am very grateful that I never had to try this.  Much as I trust Maria's skills as a monkey-whisperer.

This time I am staying about 15 minutes out of town in another direction, in an area called Pine Valley.  As far as I can tell, "Pine Valley" loosely translates as "British people lived here when Swaziland was a protectorate, and now lots of English-speaking ex-pats live here instead." It is also very beautiful here.  My cottage has a little deck that looks over a pool and succulent garden, interspersed with granite outcroppings.  The yard drops into a valley full of large, pleasant houses with large, pleasant plots of land around them, and little toy cars puttering peacefully across the roads between them, and then back up into the mountains.  The mountains are not covered in pine trees, the way you might expect from the name, but they are dotted with granite boulders and covered in green scrub with the occasional crop of trees that I am not botanically-inclined enough to be able to name.  A few of them probably are pine.

I have recently been driving a Lexus, rented to me by my very kind landlord.  I feel totally absurd driving a Lexus around the city.  Especially driving a Lexus that parks next to the pool in the house with the gorgeous view and the private deck.  It makes me feel ostentatious, but it also makes me laugh.  I feel like the absolute portrait of a colonialist (perhaps a CDC apologist colonialist, no less).  Fortunately, later today I will pick up the Honda that I have bought for my very own, and relinquish the Lexus.

Everybody who lives here full time manages just fine with your standard set of sedans, hatchbacks, and small pick-ups, but how could I manage as a successful ex-pat in Africa without driving an SUV?  It just wouldn't do, would it?  Sure Swaziland's roads are often in better shape than Atlanta's, and sure I mostly drive from my very nice house to my very nice office, but everybody knows that Africa -- AFRICA, that dark, mysterious continent full of crocodiles, lions, and mud tracks through mysterious, foreboding jungle villages, demands something closer to the jeeps in the Disneyland Indiana Jones ride than, you know, a boring old car.  Well, that and the fact that a Honda-CRV was the only decent car available that I could buy with US dollars.

It is a strange mixture, and no lie.  I look forward to chasing monkeys off the roof of my new car as soon as the opportunity arises.

Expect us when you see us

Here I am again – Sanibonani phindza futhi Swaziland.  I have this habit that I cannot seem to shake in which I acquire people whom I love in America, and then leave them behind to move to southern Africa for 28 months, 11 months, or 9 months.  Is there a sequence in that?  Somebody with a skill for patterns please let me know, and help me predict how long the next sojourn will be.

This time it is the nine (eight and a half, really).  Of course, the first time I promised 26 months and that became 28, and the last I promised six months and that somehow morphed into 11.  But this time, well, this time I think nine months gone is enough for me.

So – sanibonani phindza futhi Swaziland.  I can’t wait to see how this goes.