Attack of Everything in the World

This weekend some things happened to me.

I was walking down Haile Selassie Rd., the main drag here in the European ghetto of Dar, when I encountered a fellow who calls himself “K.” Within 30 seconds of exchanging the innumerable array of habaris, nzuri sanas, mambo vipis, & karibus which are part of any self-respecting Tanzanian’s bottomless & tirelessly deployed arsenal of greetings, K. invited me to his home, announcing apropos of nothing really, “You must meet my father”.

Quickly I consulted my Western European Diffidence Checklist*:

1. Unsolicited gregariousness? Check.

2. Extreme income disparity? Check.

3. Unnerving lack of personal boundaries? Check.

4. Much greater knowledge of whereabouts? Uh, yeah!

…

247. Shrouded in a perpetual veil of spectral luminescence? Mmm…maybe…

248. Cthulhu? Nn..o…

249. Actually a gigantic void representing the fundamental emptiness of the Real? Not any more than anything else, haha, am i rite guys?!?!!?!

So of course, I said “Okay!”

To my relief, I discovered he lived about 3 minutes’ walk from me. With 105 degrees at 100% humidity, that makes 30 minutes of North Carolina walks. I could run away. I stepped into his home, a well-appointed edifice! Signs of affluence slowed my breathing to a classy pant. A picture of the Pope hung on the wall. There was a large TV showing American sitcoms. Children were smiling. The elderly were scowling, at me, until I said some Kiswahili stuff that I knew. It was gonna be cool.

So I sit around there for a bit, and meet his dad, a military colonel who looks EXACTLY like a black Christopher Walken, and is in addition the most well-dressed human being I have ever seen. I will allow myself 2 Africa generalizations per month in this blog. This is #2: Some people know how to wear colors you have never even seen before, & somehow look like that is precisely the only thing they could be wearing. All of them live in Tanzania.

So I sit around for a bit & chat with K. about his dream of going to an American business school & how currently he works in a car factory. Suddenly he proposes that we go downtown to visit his grandmother. So we all pile into their massive 4×4, & within 20 minutes, I find myself transported from an oceanfront paradise full of armed guards, electric fences, & dessicated expats, & into Magomeni ward, Ilala district – a sprawling tribal slum in the center of town. We head off to locate his grandmother. People are pointing & shouting “white!” at me. Friends, if you are hungry for attention, and you are also white, I urge you to come visit me in Dar es Salaam immediately. Please. Please get here soon.

And so then, I find myself surrounded by a huge throng of chanting Muslims, assembled on a prayer mat in a vast, rotting gazebo. K. had apparently neglected to mention one key detail about the purpose of our visit: his grandmother was dead, and this was her funeral.

By now I had walked through damn near the entire ward & acquainted myself with every human being on the premises. I will allow myself a third generalization, that will roll over into March. Tanzanians are an extremely welcoming people. You can get by entirely on knowing one word: “karibu”. That is pretty much all you will hear, all day, every day, every time you see anyone. It means “welcome” & they fucking mean that shit.

As I waited out the funeral, I sat on a dilapidated car with K.’s half-brother, Khamis. K. comes from what I think is a pretty strange family. Let me try to explain. His father & full siblings live here in Oyster Bay. They are very affluent Lutherans, & live pretty well even by our standards. They are close friends with Asha-Rose Megiro, who lives 3 houses away – that person is the Deputy Secretary-General of the UNITED NATIONS. I will “get to meet her” when she gets back from New York, apparently. Then, K.’s mother & her husband live in the Netherlands, and are both Muslims. They have at least 2 children. One of them is Khamis, who is 23 and a traditional healer who had never left his native village of Fuoni in Zanzibar until the day that I met him. He had not seen his dad since age 12. Another is this little guy who is like 6, who was born & raised in the Netherlands, & had also just arrived in Africa for the first time for this funeral. Everyone kept making fun of him for being Dutch.

Khamis explained to me for a long time how people live in Zanzibar, & how it was so different from everywhere else because nobody much cares about earning money. We talked about the radical changes that are affecting his village – how the more people see things like computers, expensive cars, TV programs, & “t-shirts with attitude”, the more they feel stupid & backward for not knowing about such things, & the more they want to acquire the wealth necessary to get them. He was resigned to globalization, & training to become a “European-style” medical doctor. But the lifestyle he described was really like something out of a slightly-too-ideological anthropology class: no private property, people eating mangos in the wild whenever they please…a community free of acquisitiveness for its own sake & perfectly content without “progress”, until the right fetishes are foisted upon them by the inevitable flows of media & capital. I wanted to shout, “Don’t you just want to kill some people?!?” but to my deep regret I’m just not the kind of person who can shout. Maybe later. This is my chance to get the answer to that, goddamnit!

So the funeral continued for many hours, and at the end there was a large meal of potentially toxic water (jury’s still out) & pulao, eaten with the hand of course. Giant jelly-like globs suddenly began raining on our food from above as we ate. Nobody seemed to understand that I really wanted to know what the fuck was going on. Apparently it was regurgitated parrot food – dropped, presumably, in the process of transmission to its young.

After this, though I was dehydrated & starving (I hadn’t eaten at all yet that day, & that had been hardly enough) and being pelted by endless greetings from every single person in Magomeni, K. decided this should only be the beginning of our adventure. He wanted to introduce me to Tanzanian beer. This required us to travel from Magomeni back north to the peninsula, & this time we weren’t gonna have a giant SUV. This could only mean one thing: the dala dala.

I imagine every foreigner who comes to Dar & experiences the dala dala is forever fucked in the face. I will try to be brief. The dala dala is a thing which is labeled “city bus”, even though it is actually the size of my mom’s Honda Passport. The name comes from back in the day when 1 Tanzanian shilling actually equalled $1, and it cost $2 to ride the dala dala – hence, “dollar dollar”. Now it costs a flat fee of $0.15 to anywhere in the city – no bargaining, no trouble, at least as far as money is concerned. Unfortunately, in every other regard, the dala dala is like something out of Twisted Metal 4 played in God Mode. There are set routes, but no set stops on the route. You flag one down by praying to God. There are 15 seats, and 50 people. There is no AC. You can’t see anything outside, because swarming piles of sweat-sauteed human flesh block the windows. You get off by somehow managing to communicate to the driver that you, the guy buried under 6 people way in the back, are pretty sure that you may or may not be in the general vicinity of where you wanted to go, judging by, I’m guessing, the smell?? I really don’t know. Then you scramble like hell over everyone in your way – grannies, children, the dead, the undead, the praying-for-death, children who have been spontaneously aged into grannies by being on the dala dala, & the Divine Intercession of Yahweh Himself come to bring mercy & justice to municipal transportation in east-central Africa. Because if you do not scramble like hell, then just as you are getting out the door (at which point you also have to manage to pay the guy who is blocking the door), the dala dala will begin to move, and you WILL DIE. Thanks to my friend’s skilled crowd negotiation skills, I managed to make my way to the very front seat, next to the driver. In the midst of this chaos, I suddenly notice that he is not paying any attention to the road & pointing frantically at my leg. I look down. Has it been amputated by flying car parts? No. My pen is slowly inching out of my pocket. Ladies and gentlemen, Tanzania.

So there you have it, the only way to get around Dar that won’t make me very broke very fast. I suppose I don’t have to point out that I love it.

We make it back to the neighborhood in one piece & head to a local dive. There, K. plies me with a liter of Castle Lager until I am even more dehydrated, & quite a bit more drunk than I ever get even around people I know in countries of which I am a citizen. 3 of his friends show up & identify themselves as China, Mike, and Big Rappa (there is a woman here whose legal first name is “Astronat” [sic], so that’s a thing). The first of these gentlemen greets me by saying, “Muthafucka, say ya prayaz!!”, a phrase he would return to throughout the evening. We get into a discussion about Biggie vs. Tupac. They prefer Tupac. NO WONDER THIS COUNTRY IS SO BACKWARD KZLDISLD!!!! For the next 4 hours, I am drunkenly attempting to learn how to play pool.

After this, K. insists that we go clubbing and “pick up chicks”. “You are here for 6 months?! You cannot make it for 6 months with no chicks!” is his take on my situation. He ONLY calls them “chicks”. He is very, very afraid, for some reason, that I will be “alone and thinking too much”, which happens to be a pretty decent articulation of my worst fear about life. I try to explain how I am not going to be picking up chicks in an African country with 9-10% HIV prevalence while simultaneously working for an NGO whose chief aim is to get young people in African countries with 9-10% HIV prevalence to stop picking up chicks. It is not an easy battle. I feel like giving a Power Point presentation complete with stem-and-leaf plots, clip art of admonishing hand gestures, and a breakdown by Personal, Sociological, & Medical reasons as to why his plan just ain’t gonna work for me. Instead, I promise to pick up chicks some other day when it’s not my 5th day on the continent. So I guess my question to you guys is – among many others – should I go with Bulleted List or 2-Column Text??

By now it’s about 11 o’clock. I left the house 12 hours ago, with the intention of coming back 1 hour later. I had barely eaten, and hadn’t had a drink of (verified-potable) water all day. I’d had a bunch of beers & soda on top of that. I didn’t feel too bad, but was slowly realizing that I should by all means have died of dehydration at about 6 o’clock. I was covered with dust & smelled like a poorly insulated truck of salami after a long detour in hell. The power was out, as it usually is about 6 hours a day. I took a frigid shower in pitch darkness. Then I woke up at 6 am and spent all day reading about community-based non-profits.

The end. Now get to sleep, goddamnit it, or no storytime tomorrow!

*full checklist available upon request.

~ by lookwest on February 21, 2007.