Owing to the fact that I am no longer in Africa, any more I write under the banner of 'Dom in Africa' will be a bit of a fallacy. Therefore, I have two choices:
1) Stop writing this blog
2) Change the main blog title from 'Dom in Africa' to 'Dom Out of Africa'
I have elected to take up option #1 not because I have any problem relating this literary masterpiece/elementary narrative to the foremost Africa-based romance film of the 1980s, but just because living in Essex (or as I have said to everyone I have met over the last four months, 'just outside London') doesn't have the same excitement, vibrancy or sheer ridiculousness (although parts of Essex are pretty ridiculous, I can assure you) as travelling through ten different countries in the developing world. So I have paid a small amount of homage to option #2 with the above title, and that will do nicely.
Did you know that it is possible to survive perfectly healthily for weeks at a time without eating any fruit? Well it is. African people do it all the time - most of them live off mealie pap (cooked maize meal) and fried chicken or casseroled goat and pretty much nothing else. The odd bit of spinach, sweetcorn or green orange (work that one out) creep into their diet occasionally, but are far from being regular attendees - carb and meat seems to be all you need over here.
And during my low budget stage I did the same, just eating toasted brown bread and peanut butter (you can buy chocolate chip peanut butter over there, which is diamond), but I did have my multivits with me, which probably saved my life. They failed to save me from a certain amount of mockery though, by our friends from across the pond, who seemed to find my pronunciation somewhat amusing, but you would never catch me saying 'mult-eye-vydamins'.
I reckon I have learned as much about cultures away from Africa as I have about cultures within, so maybe this was a voyage of cultural discovery after all. Who would have guessed that Carlsberg would be the most popular beer in Malawi? Or that when American people are told to stay at least two metres away from a cheetah, they walk right up to it because they have no idea how long a metre is? How about the fact that people from north eastern Spain actually go around introducing themselves as Basque, rather than Spanish (which is largely unhelpful when talking to Africans, who barely know where Spain is)? And crocodiles are so lazy because they can go without food for three years?
My political knowledge has expanded significantly. I have learned that no Japanese Prime Minister can possibly stay in power for longer than two years, that African politicians are pretty much tribal chiefs in suits (that's not racism, it's the truth - go and see for yourself), and that Obama (despite his popularity among Tanzanian schoolchildren) needs to do an awful lot rather quickly if he wants to win a second term. It turns out the Queen is the most famous person in the world, but she is not the only queen left (everywhere from Belgium to Sweden seems to have one still, they just have even less power than ours). The British monarchy is even more popular abroad than it is at home, and we need have no fear of abolition from the antipodeans or Canadians any time soon.
Sarkozy was lucky Dominique Strauss-Kahn had some frolics with a NY hotel maid, because he would have lost the next election otherwise, and Angela Merkel is nowhere near as highly regarded within Germany as she is outside of it. Greece is truly in trouble; people aren't rioting because they are misinformed, or criminals - they just have no other choice.
And no one, not anywhere in the world, even if they are into politics, or the UK, or important political developments of the last decade, has heard of Nick Clegg. In fact, I met more people from overseas who had heard of 'The Only Way Is Essex' than the Liberal Democrats. Meanwhile, Cameron is well known and well respected already, whilst Tony Blair's image is truly marred by the War in Iraq. Dreadful shame, that.
All of this I learned from just chatting to people here and there, sometimes in the most ridiculous of circumstances - like whilst watching 80,000 naked teenage girls walk past, whilst trying to choose the dish least likely to give me food poisoning in Mozambique's only Chinese restaurant, or just during the wait for a Botswanan (to be honest he might have just swum over from Angola, but he was in Botswana) hippo to move out of the way of our canoe so we could get back to land.
What I learned about Africa was from a huge range of sources. I must have spoken to hundreds of local people, but through reading their newspapers, visiting their houses, travelling and shopping with them and eating in their restaurants I was able to gain a much fuller view of Southern Africa. A view which is very different to that of many people I met, mainly because I travelled for the vast majority of my time alone, and on local public transport. I went on few organised tours and went to no destinations with any help, security, or European accompaniment. I maintain that this is the only way to see real Africa.
And real Africa still exists very much. Granted their cellular phone usage probably exceeds our own, and Facebook is more of a social must for their youngsters than it is for you and I, but there are still huge tracts of wilderness where humans and animals live side by side, depending on each other, and everywhere you go time seems to run at about half the speed as it does in the western world.
I would love to say that Africa is full of hope, confidence and ambition, but it is not. The majority of the black people are content to just soldier on in whatever position they find themselves in, until they reach the point where they can no longer work and just succumb to the range of diseases that ravage this continent. The white people are driven to economic success, but largely have no faith in a range of political systems now unfair to them; white people cannot own land in Mozambique or Zimbabwe, they cannot enter politics in Zambia or Malawi, and are impeded from holding public positions in South Africa. Consequently, they are probably more racist, ignorant and parochial than they ever were. The white people are the ones who feel oppressed now, and given that they hold the vast majority of the wealth in most places (except in Zimbabwe, obviously) this is a huge problem.
Yet despite this, sub-saharan Africa remains an amazing place. Stunning landscapes, fantastically friendly people, and a refreshingly relaxed attitude to much of life's less important issues (such as aesthetics) make it a wonderful place to travel through. Would I ever live there? Absolutely not, but would I visit there again? There is no doubt about it, I am going back. Not now, not soon, but in time - and I am already excited to see how things will have changed.
And during my low budget stage I did the same, just eating toasted brown bread and peanut butter (you can buy chocolate chip peanut butter over there, which is diamond), but I did have my multivits with me, which probably saved my life. They failed to save me from a certain amount of mockery though, by our friends from across the pond, who seemed to find my pronunciation somewhat amusing, but you would never catch me saying 'mult-eye-vydamins'.
I reckon I have learned as much about cultures away from Africa as I have about cultures within, so maybe this was a voyage of cultural discovery after all. Who would have guessed that Carlsberg would be the most popular beer in Malawi? Or that when American people are told to stay at least two metres away from a cheetah, they walk right up to it because they have no idea how long a metre is? How about the fact that people from north eastern Spain actually go around introducing themselves as Basque, rather than Spanish (which is largely unhelpful when talking to Africans, who barely know where Spain is)? And crocodiles are so lazy because they can go without food for three years?
My political knowledge has expanded significantly. I have learned that no Japanese Prime Minister can possibly stay in power for longer than two years, that African politicians are pretty much tribal chiefs in suits (that's not racism, it's the truth - go and see for yourself), and that Obama (despite his popularity among Tanzanian schoolchildren) needs to do an awful lot rather quickly if he wants to win a second term. It turns out the Queen is the most famous person in the world, but she is not the only queen left (everywhere from Belgium to Sweden seems to have one still, they just have even less power than ours). The British monarchy is even more popular abroad than it is at home, and we need have no fear of abolition from the antipodeans or Canadians any time soon.
Sarkozy was lucky Dominique Strauss-Kahn had some frolics with a NY hotel maid, because he would have lost the next election otherwise, and Angela Merkel is nowhere near as highly regarded within Germany as she is outside of it. Greece is truly in trouble; people aren't rioting because they are misinformed, or criminals - they just have no other choice.
And no one, not anywhere in the world, even if they are into politics, or the UK, or important political developments of the last decade, has heard of Nick Clegg. In fact, I met more people from overseas who had heard of 'The Only Way Is Essex' than the Liberal Democrats. Meanwhile, Cameron is well known and well respected already, whilst Tony Blair's image is truly marred by the War in Iraq. Dreadful shame, that.
All of this I learned from just chatting to people here and there, sometimes in the most ridiculous of circumstances - like whilst watching 80,000 naked teenage girls walk past, whilst trying to choose the dish least likely to give me food poisoning in Mozambique's only Chinese restaurant, or just during the wait for a Botswanan (to be honest he might have just swum over from Angola, but he was in Botswana) hippo to move out of the way of our canoe so we could get back to land.
What I learned about Africa was from a huge range of sources. I must have spoken to hundreds of local people, but through reading their newspapers, visiting their houses, travelling and shopping with them and eating in their restaurants I was able to gain a much fuller view of Southern Africa. A view which is very different to that of many people I met, mainly because I travelled for the vast majority of my time alone, and on local public transport. I went on few organised tours and went to no destinations with any help, security, or European accompaniment. I maintain that this is the only way to see real Africa.
And real Africa still exists very much. Granted their cellular phone usage probably exceeds our own, and Facebook is more of a social must for their youngsters than it is for you and I, but there are still huge tracts of wilderness where humans and animals live side by side, depending on each other, and everywhere you go time seems to run at about half the speed as it does in the western world.
I would love to say that Africa is full of hope, confidence and ambition, but it is not. The majority of the black people are content to just soldier on in whatever position they find themselves in, until they reach the point where they can no longer work and just succumb to the range of diseases that ravage this continent. The white people are driven to economic success, but largely have no faith in a range of political systems now unfair to them; white people cannot own land in Mozambique or Zimbabwe, they cannot enter politics in Zambia or Malawi, and are impeded from holding public positions in South Africa. Consequently, they are probably more racist, ignorant and parochial than they ever were. The white people are the ones who feel oppressed now, and given that they hold the vast majority of the wealth in most places (except in Zimbabwe, obviously) this is a huge problem.
Yet despite this, sub-saharan Africa remains an amazing place. Stunning landscapes, fantastically friendly people, and a refreshingly relaxed attitude to much of life's less important issues (such as aesthetics) make it a wonderful place to travel through. Would I ever live there? Absolutely not, but would I visit there again? There is no doubt about it, I am going back. Not now, not soon, but in time - and I am already excited to see how things will have changed.
