Dakar: Where First Ladies are Catholic and Baobabs grow by the Sea

Senegal's population is 96% Muslim but all the presidents' wives have been Catholic. More women vote than men, there are some 150 political parties, and in early December there were Christmas trees being erected in the streets of Dakar. In other words, Senegal is just full of quirky material for my blog.

I landed in Dakar at about 2.30am, having flown from Accra on Air Nigeria via the Gambia - my most adventurous flight combination yet. The landings were rough around the edges, including some hard application of the brakes, but hey, we arrived, and so did our luggage. I caught a few hours sleep before catching the popular Sunday ferry to Goree Island to join some colleagues. Les Senegalaise are smart and chic (in fact I felt rather underdressed) in particular the charming saleswomen peddling jewellery and other wares en route.

Goree is enchanting despite its dark history of slavery and the ‘door of no return’ which opens onto the waves of the Atlantic. The island is scattered with baobabs which grow at breakneck speed compared to their southern African relatives, and narrow sandy lanes with French names trace their way among quiet pastel houses. Like other visitors, we spent the day exploring, eating fish and rice (many varieties in west Africa), and swimming.

Dakar, meanwhile, is not an aesthetic gem like Goree, but has its own sort of dusty sprawling Francophone charm. The roads are marked with well-worn but brightly painted minibuses, fuel-guzzling SUVs, ancient Peugeots and a fair bit of pollution. On the edge of the city lies the gargantuan and controversial African Renaissance monument, Stalinist in feel but only recently finished. It was built by the North Koreans, and apparently paid for by wealthy local businessmen whom the President repaid with pockets of prime land around Dakar. Nice.

In between meetings editors-in-chief, trying to resurrect my French-in-mothballs, having a dress tailored in the backstreets of the city, and drinking the fabulous green juice of ditakh fruit, I was astounded to hear not only that there was a Zimbabwean Embassy in Dakar but that the ambassador was a *white woman*. I couldn't believe my ears. Next, we heard that there was a sculpture exhibit at the Embassy so we decided to stop by. The ambassador is none other that MDC politician and activist Trudy Stevenson. I surprised the receptionist by greeting her in Shona, and it wasn’t long before both the ambassador and councilor came downstairs to meet us. I don’t think they get many visitors, let alone Zimbabwean ones, so we received a warm welcome.

As it happened, my Dakar colleague used to work as a presidential aide, and accompanied Senegal’s President Wade to Zimbabwe in 2005, where he took part in discussions about land reform with Bob. The Zanu PF entourage apparently took a rather horrified step back when President Wade appeared for the gala dinner with his white wife on his arm. Someone actually asked, 'So did people know that Wade was married to a white woman before they voted for him?'.



Anyway, I do think it was a crafty move of Bob's to send dear Trudy quite so far away whilst simultaneously fulfilling his ‘unity government’ obligations – and of course ostensibly demonstrating his non-racism to the secular and multicultural Senegalaise and their white First Lady.

I am already looking forward to my next visit to Dakar, and perhaps dinner with les Zimbabweannes…

Notes from Home

Late September in Harare. The traffic lights don’t work, but the drivers figure it out. The roads near the airport are dark and busy, crammed with commuter taxis, and a smog of vehicle fumes hangs on the early evening air. Harare is like any other third world city, apart from the fact that this scene would not have existed 18 months ago. Zimbabwe’s economy is starting to work again; it is retreating from the precipice of uncertainty that has gripped it for a decade.

We return home, where my mother has been doing some dramatic re-landscaping of the back garden. The flat-topped acacia that they planted over 15 years ago looms enormous and statuesque, with a full orange September moon rising softly behind it. There too the Lonchocarpus capassa that I planted from seed when I left for India. I believed that it could grow in completely the wrong geo-ecological zone, and somehow it did. And my dad’s Erythrina, with its heart-shaped leaves and red-bead pods. My parents joke about the garden’s resident birds being totally disoriented by the changes. The next day I simply sit on the verandah to be.

My time was short but we managed to squeeze in some wilderness. We drove five hours to Kariba, and then another two down unmarked dirt roads to the unsignposted Gache Gache Lodge. Needless to say we were among the rare visitors who arrive by road rather than by boat and, given the signposting situation, ‘twas a surprise we arrived at all.

En route, the country’s agricultural heartland – Chinhoyi, Karoi, Banket and surrounds – lies empty and full of weeds. Of thousands of hectares of land that we pass, at the start of the farming season, only one field was being prepared for planting. Now that the party has figured out how to get-rich-quick through the country’s diamond wealth, it seems there is much less impetus to bother about agriculture. What lies beneath the soil is currently what beckons. On the positive side, fibre-optic cable is being laid down the Chinhoyi road. Yes, that’s right – fibre-optic cable – as in, the internet. This can only be a sign of an economy starting to tick again, like other small indications of confidence: shopping centres in Harare repainting their shopfronts and our local municipality collecting waste for the first time in years.

We laze at the slightly run-down lodge on dusty furniture to take in the warm expanse of Lake Kariba and the start of the dry season. A group of black Zimbabweans is having an extended visit because, having stopped off for lunch, it seems that their houseboat has forgotten about them. Every sandbank markets a 12-foot-plus crocodile, and there is a pod of hippos yawning in the water not far away. Parked at the jetty is a houseboat that used to belong to the Rhodesian government -- named Janet after the wife of Ian Smith, former white minority prime minister. I sunbathe on its deck, marvel at the ironies of history, and earmark the moment for my postcolonial travelogue.

The following day we take a late afternoon drive through the surrounding bush and its groves of baobabs, some sedentary, some dancing, each ancient. There is not much game about but we have drinks on a cliff overlooking the Gache Gache river and its distant curves. Only if you care to look, in the dust beside and all around us are shards of broken pottery: all that is left from the forced relocation of tens of thousands of Tonga people in the early 1960s to make way for Africa’s then-largest hydroelectric dam and an accompanying string of national parks. No surprise that some lions – the creatures in which powerful ancestral spirits reside – take this opportunity to start calling from several kilometers away, making themselves known to us.

A few days later I return to London for the first time in nearly ten months. It is a little more foreign than last time, but the sensation soon passes. I savour the chance to walk long and freely through familiar streets and parks. Wearing a coat is an enjoyable novelty. The damp gathers round the bases of trees just like it always did; London is as it should be.

Many Different Worlds in Jozi

In the midst of a strike being carried out by 1.3 million people across South Africa, including nurses and teachers, I find it extraordinary that my day-to-day existence is not at all affected. Such is the reality of a divided society where those in the private sector economy of northern Johannesburg lead a sheltered existence. Meanwhile over 50 premature babies have been abandoned by nurses; several mothers have lost their babies in childbirth, or simply been turned away from hospitals; and funeral businesses have brought work to a halt because Home Affairs workers are simply not around to issue death certificates.

Photo credit: News24

Meanwhile regular South African pastimes such as rugby matches continue. Thousands of free tickets to last weekend’s match against New Zealand were given away in high-density historically-black areas such as Soweto, in the hope of drawing more blacks to the matches. But apparently many of the recipients simply sold the tickets instead. At the same time, parts of Soweto defy outsider assumptions. A colleague who watched the game on Vilakazi St in Orlando West was a bit disappointed that he hadn’t really felt the ‘township vibe’, commenting that he could have been anywhere in Sandton.

Not so for a recent Saturday that I spent in Soweto, not forgetting that Soweto is basically a city in itself, with significant socio-economic stratification. A friend of mine is writing a doctorate on the political economy of waste dumps; her research assistant is from Mofolo, and between them they know a lot about the wider area. Along with a visiting architecture academic, we travelled to the far south-western corner of Soweto, to the informal settlement of Protea South. To give you a sense of the scale of greater Johannesburg, Protea South is 50 kilometres from where I live on the northern border of the city. There is some running water in Protea South, but no sanitation. Some of the porter toilets are communal, but many households have their own which they clean themselves. Hand-shaped charcoal bricks lie in the sun to bake – it’s the first time I’ve seen this kind of fuel. In Protea South, one can buy a shack for 1500 rand (200 dollars). Consider the extraordinary contrast with parts of Sandton (Sandhurst, for example), where one can buy a mansion for upwards of 20 million rand (2.75m dollars). I’ve even seen some advertised for 50 million.



Yes, Johannesburg is many different worlds. I am regularly humbled by people that I meet, or stories that I hear, for example, about the Zimbabweans who are putting themselves through university on waitressing wages. Leaving Sandton at about 11pm the other evening, I stopped to give a woman a lift. There was something about her that seemed quite desperate. She was trying to get to the northern township Diepsloot. In the absence of a decent public transport system, travelling by minibus taxi costs to and from Sandton for work are 50 rand (7 dollars) a day. Even on my salary I would consider that a high transport spend – and it is no doubt a ridiculously high proportion of her monthly wage. The possibility of her ever accumulating enough funds for basic economic security is virtually non-existent. She will continue to live hand-to-mouth.

So my day-to-day life is full of contrast, wherever I choose to be open to it. This evening I sit in Cape Town with a Czech colleague and his Sri Lankan friends. We have such different life stories. I listen to how he grew up under communism in an 800-year old Czech town that was razed to the ground in the interest of coal mining, and how the snow used to turn grey within a day. And I tell him about growing up in a national park in Zimbabwe with pythons and lions in the back garden. Meanwhile, our Sri Lankan dinner partner tells us about arriving as a migrant worker in Hillbrow, Johannesburg: he was robbed 8 times in his first month, and early one morning came across a half-headless body in the street on his way to work ….at which point he decided to move to Sandton.

Culinary Delights

At first I dismissed the Bryanston Organic Market for being too all-sorts-of-things for me. I looked down my anthropological-exotica nose and thought: too middle class, too orderly, too controlled, too…boring. But that was before I was converted to eating dosa and uttapam every Saturday lunchtime – possibly my favourite Indian food - cooked by a guy from Bangalore who works for an ayurvedic medicine company during the week, and is a chef on Saturdays. So nowadays I show up at the market almost religiously.

Last weekend the dosa chef invited me to the India Day celebrations in Randburg, patronized almost entirely by the Indian expatriate community. Apparently there's a big divide between the Indian expats and the South African Indians. The crowd was substantial, even late in the day, and there was much singing, dancing and freshly cooked cuisine. The white faces in the crowed were few, though needless to say I met more random internationals, this time an Italian and a Korean who both work for the UN. Social life continues to be varied and interesting, and good food seems to be at the heart of it. I recently attended my first vegan-rawfood dinner party in Oaklands, catered by an American (who also pursues her culinary passions part-time) whom I met at a talk by Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka. The food was outstanding and you would never have guessed it was all raw.

I’ve been back to Narina Trogon restaurant in downtown Braamfontein for a birthday-cum-salsa party, for which I caught a lift with a Japanese man and a Guyanan woman who live round the corner from me. Who would have guessed Wisteria Lane housed such diversity? I’ve also been downtown to Arts on Main a number of times now, where the canteen offers a tasty well-priced brunch in close proximity to William Kentridge originals. More importantly I’ve discovered that the nearby Malva Café has the best brownies in Jo’burg, followed closely by those at Moema’s in Parktown North. Perfect for break-up blues.

Nor should I forget the dinners that I’ve been treated to by Piers of Daisy Street, who is a straight-talking general rockstar with the ability to throw together a wonderful meal at short notice. He’s a particular fan of organic ostrich, and has persuaded me to step out from underneath my mostly-vegetarian umbrella on one or two occasions. In fact he even managed to entice me to eat slow-baked lamb at a dinner party hosted in old-money Dunkeld with a lawyer-artist couple in a spectacular dining room decked out in black-and-white tiles, stripes and mirrors. Twas delicious.

One last culinary mention: I went walking and basking by waterfalls in the Mountain Sanctuary Park in Magaliesburg, for which Mel provided trail mix. Mel is Canadian, so obviously she was responsible for the trail mix, but this mix had a magic ingredient which southern African trail-mixers have thus far overlooked: M&Ms. Those who’ve known me a while know that nothing featuring M&Ms will be overlooked by this particular foodie.

Namibian Roads are Good to Think With

Uncharacteristically I nearly missed my flight but, thanks to my trusty taxi driver jumping a few red lights (only feasible very early on a Sunday morning), I made it to the boarding gate just in time. Friends in Windhoek laid on a wonderful relaxed brunch, tucked against the hillside in Eros, and the next morning I caught a bus to Swakopmund.

Swakopmund is a little difficult to put one's finger on. Its postcolonial essence is perhaps captured in a shop sign painted on the entrance of an old German building that caught my attention when I first visited a few years ago. It proclaims: “Where N$1 is still worth R1”. I always found this a little bizarre, given that the Namibian dollar is pegged to the South African rand…so surely there would never be any doubt about this particular equation. My anthro-historical interpretation of the sign is something about colonialism's continuity, I suppose, and a hankering after certain (non-monetary) values. Anyway, one of Swakopmund’s selling points is its quietness. Not a lot happens there. Walking the beach was liberating, and my friend Angela has two fabulous golden labradors which kept me company most times.

We enjoyed sundowners in the Swakop river dunes one evening – a quite extraordinary moonscape of scenery. Namibia is home to a strong circle of women friends who are all leading unconventional lives and doing interesting things. It was really good to be away from the city, not to have to care about my appearance, or whether my clothes matched.


Where else in the world can you hire a car for $45 a day with unlimited mileage? Clearly I was so impressed by this little nugget that I was already half-way from Swakopmund to Henties Bay on the Skeleton Coast when I realised that I didn’t have my driver’s licence. Oh well. It clearly wasn’t that important to the rental company either! And at the turn off to Uis, where the road is barely differentiated from the surrounding desert, flanked by miles of flatness, I figured I was unlikely to encounter any roadblocks. Uis is a really a dorp. I think it only has about 20 buildings. Nevertheless, I’m lucky enough to have friends in most dorps, regardless of country, so had a guided tour of the area with my friend Victor that afternoon. Namibian roads are good to think with – they are long, wide and empty.


I received some curious look from other travellers, surprised to see a blonde gal with shades driving alone around dusty Damaraland in a Walvis-Bay-registered 2x4 sedan car. My wheels may have been modest, if not amusing, but nonetheless it was exhilarating being on the road again. There are long stretches with no mobile network – not that common an occurrence nowadays -- so that too was somewhat liberating. I spent two days in the Brandberg, Namibia’s highest mountains, under an incredibly bright moon, the night-times big and still, and traversed by my old friends, the Scops and Pearlspotted Owls. I had forgotten what it’s like to witness that endless blanket of stars overhead, to be enveloped in that big silence. The landscape is rugged and striking, full of granite and ancient lava flows, and the colours of the mountains change by the minute. The Damara homesteads are dispersed and desolate, and I wondered where they get water.


Food poisoning prevented me from making it to the White Lady rock paintings – sadly I had to turn back when I was already over halfway -- but the guides at the site were wonderful and, seeing that I was on my own, offered to drive me and my car back to the campsite, and walk the 7km back to work. The nearest doctor was only 100km away, they reassured me.

At the next-door lodge, where I had a luxury ready-made tent, the menu was heavy with oryx and not much else: oryx schnitzel (obviously), oryx bolognese, and so on. I passed on those and managed to procure some yoghurt and maize meal porridge. Next to the bar was an empty fishtank, and the conversation went something like this:

Victor: Where’s the snake?
Barman: Oh, it’s gone. It escaped. We think someone helped it.
Me: Oh? What kind of snake?
Barman: A python.
Victor: What happened?
Barman: Yeah, well, we took it out during the Germany-Spain game to show some guests, and we’re not quite sure what happened after that…

From Brandberg I took a long slow gravel-road drive through Khorixas to Twyfelfontein (“doubtful fountain” – altogether an appropriate destination given my love circumstances) to see the ancient rock engravings which are Namibia’s first World Heritage Site. Having the freedom to stop whenever and wherever one pleases is such a privilege. I clambered up rocks and hillsides to see the views, ponder over a never-ending miscellany of curious rocks and stone formations, and breathe in those wide open spaces.




Near Twyfelfontein I camped on the Aba Huab river, neighbouring with a horse safari group and some overlanders. I exchanged some Nam dollars for US dollars with a Belgian traveller who, poor soul, hadn’t realised that there aren’t exactly ATMs at every corner once you get out of Windhoek. En route to Omaruru via Outjo I stopped at the remarkable Vingerklip for more striking landscape.

My trip was rounded off with a visit to another friend who is raising eyebrows in Omaruru by bringing yoga, Ayurvedic medicine, and contemporary sculpture to this conservative marginally-bigger-than-Uis dorp. Altogether very inspiring and refreshing. From there, a short stop in Windhoek to enjoy the culinary delights of the Craft Centre cafe, and now back to life in Jozi ...I'm already into my eleventh month back in southern Africa. Unbelievable.

The World Cup Comes and Goes

I'm not ashamed to say that I let myself get caught up in some of the World Cup fever. It was almost impossible not to! The build-up to the opening game was indeed quite something. Vuvuzelas could be heard from early in the morning for at least a week beforehand, starting from 6am, no less. And on the 11th of June, it seemed that the entire city left work at lunchtime and took to the roads to make their way to see the opening game. The streets were overflowing with yellow-and-green tshirts and South African flags, and everyone was terribly excited. The traffic was so congested going down to Melville that I had plenty of time to practise blowing my vuvuzela out of my car window, which is actually something of an art. The first week of the Cup was blue-skies-but-bitterly-cold. The sun shines, but the average winter morning is about 6 degrees, and we had a few days of 2 degrees as well, which certainly shocked all the European visitors. There's not really anything by way of indoor heating, so it requires something of a different wardrobe approach.It seems there's nothing like a big sports tournament to distract a nation from its chronic problems. It was certainly a unifying experience for South Africans, even if temporary and surface-deep. There were some issues, of course, especially on the transport front but, contrary to all the Afro-pessimist predictions in the European and American press, the stadiums *were* ready, and so was the fabulous new high-speed Gautrain.


I watched my first ever soccer game at Ellis Park (Slovenia-USA) with visiting Croatian friends, preceded by Portuguese lunch at the legendary Troyeville Hotel. The whole experience was really surprisingly enjoyable. Everything was well-organised and professional, and all the facilities operated totally smoothly. Go South Africa! I also went to the Ghana-Uruguay quarter-final which was devastating for Ghana, and for all of us African supporters, but experiencing Soccer City at night with 85 000 spectators was quite something. I did have to wear earplugs, fyi. My favourite game, however, was South Africa-France, which I saw in the Newtown fan park: really an amazing atmosphere. I had plenty of visitors, some of them friends, some sub-letters: Mexicans, Germans, Americans, Croatians, Swazis, and Lesothans, so that also made for quite a lot of fun and quite a lot of linen laundry.

My explorations of downtown Jozi continue. On a public holiday during the tournament, I had a lazy brunch at Narina Trogon in Braamfontein with a collection of internationals and one or two locals. Yeoville was next on the cards, to visit the Hotel Yeoville exhibition at the new public library. Sadly it was closed due to the holiday, but I persuaded the group to acompany me to visit the Congolese artist whom I commissioned to paint a hair dressing sign. I've been wanting one for ages. I think Yeoville's residents were a bit surprised by this group of apparent tourists wandering around their neighbourhood, but we felt no hostility or threat. Needless to say I'm thrilled with my new sign.After Yeoville we went to Arts on Main, after checking out a regenerated block of apartments next door -- all of the spaces are very modern and minimalist, with some fab cityscape views. They are selling for next to nothing, given the relatively 'undesirable' location, but difficult to know what will happen in this area in the long run. Jo'burg has a number of these experimental projects, which is good to see. Main Road is verging on being Brick Lane-ish, albeit on a much smaller scale. There's also a small new independent cinema downstairs, and funky coffee-come-fashion shop. Other recent cultural visits include a Cuban exhibition at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, and sitting in the winter afternoon sun for open-air Senegalese kora music at the Alliance Francaise.
There is no shortage of things to do here. So, the World Cup came and went, after many months of preambular hype and speculation. Many of us started to fade about halfway through, once Bafana was knocked out, and we realised that we'd been burning the candle at both ends for a few too many weeks. But all in all, it was great to be around for it. And although there are now lots of vacant stadiums littered about the place, we do have some nice new roads and some progress on the public transport front!

Fordsburg, Mayfair and a Taste of India

It was Freedom Day yesterday, commemorating the first-ever non-racial democratic elections in South Africa in 1994. So it was fitting that I finally made it to the Apartheid Museum, which was excellent and definitely deserves a second visit. I went via Melville and Observatory first to pick up friends, and after the museum we went to a fabulous and buzzing Gujurati restaurant in Mayfair. So I drove many new streets today, which I’m rather proud of.

The museum helps me to make sense of the many bits of jigsaw that I am collating about South Africa, including a recent visit to the ‘Indian quarter’ of Fordsburg. We were a curious group two Saturdays ago: a Senegalese author; a Botswanan of British-Philipino descent, an Indian South African, an Ethiopian-American, and a white Zimbabwean.

We started on 14th Street, where the ‘oriental’ Fietas market used to be (before it was forcibly closed and moved under the apartheid government Group Areas Act) and where our friend-and-guide used to stand on the corner selling combs as a boy. He showed us where his family’s house once stood, before it was knocked down – although the homes of certain professionals such as lawyers were left alone, as well as religious buildings such as mosques. The stand remains vacant, with only a small plaque recalling what passed there in the 1950s.

Growing up, N. attended to no less than 9 different schools because his family were forcibly relocated so many times. And during the times when they lived in ‘grey’ areas (areas that were being made white, or which were being protected from non-white settlement), he used to wait in the school library until it got dark, because otherwise he would be beaten up on the way home.

From 14th Street we went to Akhalwaya’s Fish and Chips, on the corner of Mint Road, where N. has been a customer for about 20 years. Akhalwaya’s specialises in a unique type of toasted-curry-and-fries sandwich. Strange sounding, yes, but original, suitably fattening, utterly delicious, and enough of a meal to last you most of the day. We then sauntered into at least two Indian sweet shops: they always make me a little weak at the knees until I actually eat the sweets and am reminded of how utterly overpoweringly sweet they really are.

The ‘new’ Oriental Plaza is one of Joburg’s most racially mixed shopping malls, offering a huge array of food and wares ranging from a samosa bar with a permanently long queue and stainless steel kitchenware stalls, to West African print fabrics, Chinese shoes and wedding shops.

Wandering along Main Road and its tributaries, we drank fresh coconut juice on the sidewalk, perused Bollywood DVDs, made banter with the stall owners, stared jealously into restaurant windows where masala dosas were being dished out, and I bought some spices and paneer for a Pakistani dish that I’ve been wanting to make for months.

We then swung by Wemmer Pan for some reason only known to S., where there’s a bizarre children’s park with miniature replicas of Johannesburg’s best-known buildings. At the entrance there’s an enormous statue of someone who looks like Jan van Riebeeck and inside…wait for it…there’s a truly enormous statue of Michael Jackson. Yes, in a children’s park. Oh the irony. And oh, the photo opportunities.

Leaving Mayfair yesterday with a very full stomach, I went into a store opposite Shayona’s to buy basmati rice. The Asian managers may have been a bit surprised by our racially mixed trio, but sold their basmati with sincerity and gusto. On hearing that I was a Zimbabwean, they pointed to the black assistants at the back of the shop, saying ‘Ah yes, they ran away from Zimbabwe too…’. At which all of us - assistants included - dissolved into the kind of genuine and binding laughter that only stems from incongruous interactions in unexpected places, mixed in with a measure of southern African humour and an undertone of sadness. One of my favourite kinds...