I will Touch you, and I will Sully you

I’d like to begin today’s disquisition on Africa and its Varied Peoples with an observation about Kiswahili. Often in man’s torturous path through history, language has been spoken. As a person, I have often studied language, and learned of its many words, badly. In my studies, I have made the following discoveries. In Spanish, leaving out a tilde over the “ñ” in “años” when saying, for instance, “I am 23
years old” will somehow magically yield the sentence “I have 23 anuses”. In Russian, an incorrect emphasis on the word for “cowards” will give you the word for “underwear”. In Hindi, a retroflex instead of a dental “d” when ordering lentils at a restaurant will cause you to order the abstract concept of a political party. With Kiswahili, however, we have a potentially very serious minefield: In 6 weeks, I have found not one but FOUR hugely embarrassing gaffes just waiting to happen:
1). “Kumi” means “10″ whereas “kuma” means “cunt” – thus, when saying the price of something is “elfu kumi” (10,000), you can instead find yourself saying that the price is “1,000 cunts”. I’m pretty sure this is even more likely to happen after you’ve been sensitized to the possibility.
2). “Fua nguo” means “wash the clothes” & “vua nguo” means “undress”. This is why I do my own laundry.
3). “Kunywa” is “to drink” & “kunya” is “to shit”.
4). And finally, the possessive construction in the past & future tense. “Nilikuwa na mbwa” is “I used to have a dog” and “Nilikuwa mbwa” is “I was once a dog”. Thankfully my vocabulary is too limited to fully explore the ghastly possibilities of this one.

So basically, stay the hell away from this language, and not just because you’ll be obliged to utter things such as “wewe”, “sisi”, “bububu”, and “na nini nini”.

Last week my job sent me on my first field trip, a week-long excursion to Iringa. Iringa is a region in the southern highlands of Tanzania (there are 26 regions, like our 50 states – Dar is its own). The drive there is about 300 miles due southwest, and some of it occurs on a road. The rest of the drive takes place inside what is actually a vast prime-time Thursday night SUV commercial. You know how they have those great big 4×4’s leap gloriously from majestic promontories, lashed by mighty tides of churned earth, then land with all the terrible gravity of a thousand painfully masculine burdens upon some dessicated, primitive outcropping, chiseled chassis heaving like the magnificent final breath of some post-coital hill ogre, only to then, without missing a single beat, carve a ruinous automotive swath through a virginal panorama of desolation whose hostile wastes are clearly penetrable only by the unflappable car-cock of the Mazda B-Series?? Well, driving through the countryside of Africa is the situation in which that actually happens. The times when it’s not happening, you are inching your SUV along winding mountain paths so forsaken that I was immediately reminded of Frodo Baggins’s approach to Mordor.

In fact, the resemblance of this part of the country to the domain of some malevolent earth-spirit is astounding. It rains 8 months out of the year, and there are constantly huge, black clouds so low-hanging that at times you will see a conference of thunderheads being held in some distant valley, weirdly stuck to the ground, like a piece of the sky got lost. Everything is mud, and you begin to realize the power of mud as a substance, the respect of which mud is deserving, and which we never give it because, at most, mud functions in our lives as the most temporary of blights, the most basic & mundane of possible pollutions. Here mud is king, and it will touch you and it will sully you, and after a while, you will feel thankful, as here mud is the mark of something which belongs, which has stopped indulging that comical presumption that the hard lines & precise colors of the clean and crafted world are the neutral environment from which all others are but deviations. When it rains, that huge emptiness of valleys fills with an incongruous din, and there is a terrible dissonance with how alone your eye tells you you must surely be, and the perpetual crash of rain on rock, which is loud enough that you can’t help but conjure some abstract something that surely must be there and you simply can’t hear it for the rain.

We traveled through such places, taking 5 hours to drive 50 miles. We encountered half a dozen lorries stuck in the mud, with 20 men from miles around having come to dig them out. We crept slowly through a waist-deep mud tunnel, a foot away from a giant drop into a vast green valley. The situation must have been dire even for this part of the world, because my 3 colleagues on the trip began getting out of the car and taking photographs on an hourly basis.

The impact of roads like this on the economy of the rural areas in Iringa is predictably not good. In Makete, the main town of the district bearing the same name, which was our first destination, the power goes out at least once a week on account of rain, and it takes 2 days for an electrician simply to arrive in town to fix the problem. So though the place has had electrical lines for probably 30 years or more, in practice it pretty much has no electricity.

Makete and its “neighboring” town (over 4 hours by car) Njombe are places of unbelievable bleakness. Crows circle over a few ragged lanes of tin-roofed shacks. In every direction, there is a huge panorama of valleys and mountains, with similar shacks here and there, white spots on a green carpet, like little mushrooms. Clouds brush over the treetops and move faster than I’ve ever seen clouds move before. When it rains, the rain beating against the ubiquitous tin sheeting produces a deafening racket, which led at one point to the most hilarious formal interview I’ve ever seen, with 3 people bellowing violently at the top of their lungs until we had to take a break because one of them lost his voice, and I couldn’t stop laughing. At night, the darkness is a kind which one simply cannot experience in any kind of suburb – there is simply no light anywhere, period. If you go outside, you can’t see your own hands. Inside, during the power outages that usually are in progress, we would walk around with oil lanterns dangling from our arms, and one night we got a coal burner and roasted maize, building a friendly little oasis of yellow light in that black and rainy pit high in the mountains.

All the buildings in Makete are covered with huge red X’s, one of Tanzania’s few immediately obvious manifestations of the sort of questionable governance that has made Africa what it is. The reason for the X’s is that the government is solving the just-described road problem by constructing a new road through the district, which is, unfortunately, slated to pass directly through the currently positioned cluster of shacks understood to be the central town. So, the town has to be “moved” – to make way for the road that is supposed to go there! In case your entire soul has just turned into a giant fucking question mark, I provide the following soothing information: the red X’s have been there for about 10 years, and the government has yet to actually do anything to improve the road situation, irrationally or otherwise. Any day, though, somebody could come to level the town and move it down the mountain. Perhaps the roads aren’t good enough for them to get there.

We spent 2 days in Makete interviewing a small NGO called Sumasesu, which sounds like a Kiswahili word, but in fact stands for “Support Makete to Self-Support”. Silly, but this is a pretty badass organization, as their headquarters are a shack with 4 staff members, and yet they somehow do outreach work in 20 villages, and are a pretty big presence in the community, which is saying something, since the very notion that this area has any serious human habitation is hard to believe. The purpose of the interviews was, in short, to evaluate the ability of the organization to implement its projects effectively, and to find out what kind of assistance they might need in doing so – but I’ll discuss my job in more detail in some future blog post. Accompanying me on this were 3 gentlemen, one from my workplace, and the other 2 from a local organization called TRACE, which is an NGO whose mission is to help other NGOs implement their missions. These folks were notable for being unbelievably awesome, and also for basically offering me a job. One of them, a South African Zulu, was an anti-apartheid activist, and has bullet scars to prove it, as well as fluency in 8 languages (say what you will about poverty this and lack of education that and all the usual business, but Africans almost as a rule are familiar with more languages than the rest of us can even name).

Our other destination in Iringa was a place known as Iringa town, which is a town of a little over 100,000, and inexplicably a pretty popular tourist place (I think it serves as a jumping-off point for some destination I never bothered to inquire into). It has over 100 NGOs, 3 universities, and miles of shantytown. The weather there is perpetually like the most idyllic spring day in North Carolina, which unfortunately feels like cryogenic containment to Tanzanians. There we interviewed Dhi Nureyn Islamic Foundation, a very impressive organization whose nationwide outreach efforts to youth on the issue of HIV/AIDS prevention are marred only by the tiny detail that they are a religious group, and thus believe that extramarital sex does not exist as long as Islam says so. Which interestingly is also why our organization is working with them, since the USAID money from the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief functions under the assumption that sex does not exist as long as conservative Christianity says so. USAID donors are the only ones these guys can work with. In case you’re wondering, Dhi Nureyn’s taking money from the U.S. has in fact pissed off almost every other local Muslim group. Sources say irony explosions have blasted several small craters in the Earth’s crust as of last Wednesday, and are hoping the United States government will not attribute them to al-Qa’eda.

Being in Iringa was also noteworthy for an outing to a pub during which I was approached by a fellow from New Zealand. Upon finding out I was from America, he expressed his deepest condolences, and announced that he had a friend with him who was from there as well, suggesting that we meet and bond over this tragic situation. Some time later, I find myself speaking to a girl from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, who has apparently been to Chapel Hill a good bit, and knows people at UNC’s St. A’s fraternity. It’s not long before words such as “Weaver Street” are uttered. I guess it’s not as weird as the time in India when I was looking for my Urdu professor’s old grad school advisor, and just before finding him in real life, found him in a copy of William Dalrymple’s City of Djinns…but still, it’s amazing how you can’t get away from home no matter where you go. I mean for real: Weaver Street. How can you respond to that other than drunken hugging??

Upon my return to Dar, I was overcome by the most horrible exhaustion I’ve ever felt, which lasted for a week, and as I’m sitting here on Sunday night, I’m hoping to god it’s finally over. I nearly actually fell asleep in the middle of a conversation, at work. I also met my very first fellow traveler with whom I’ve spoken for more than 5 minutes: She is from Norway, has lived in a shitload of places, and generally seems really awesome. We are going to start up an adventure exchange program, as I know only Tanzanians, and she knows only people from weird-ass places like Norway, which has led us to have quite different lives here despite being just a few minutes from each other.

Hope spring is treating everyone well. Later, hos!

~ by lookwest on April 1, 2007.