Reading Theroux in Africa

I had gotten to lower Egypt, and was heading south, in my usual traveling mood: hoping for the picturesque, expecting misery, braced for the appalling. Happiness was unthinkable, for although happiness is desirable, it is a banal subject for travel. Therefore, Africa seemed perfect for a long journey.

That’s the closing paragraph to the first chapter in Paul Theroux's bestseller Dark Star Safari. It’s a book that sees him cross the continent from Cairo to Cape Town offering a glimpse into “the real Africa” – the one that tourists on their game drives and in their massive overland trucks never get to see, perhaps the one they never want to see.

It’s a return of sorts. Theroux, turning sixty on the last leg of his journey, was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Malawi, one of the earliest in the history of the program, teaching English at a secondary school in the highlands.

The book was written in 2003, before journalists, economists, and foreign policy scholars began to note that this century would be belong to Africa. No one seems to have told Theroux this. He notes continually throughout the latter half of the book how nothing had changed in the forty-odd years since he’d last lived in Africa. If anything, the continent was worse off than it was at independence. Men sit idle. The infrastructure bequeathed to African countries by former colonial powers is cracked and broken. The weeds of time have overgrown the school where he used to teach, choking the promise of national sovereignty and smothering decades of potential growth.

The Washington Post called Theroux's book “Relentlessly engaging…Theroux demonstrates how a traveler’s finely wrought observations…sometimes offer the best political and social analysis.” In some places, this is true. Theroux is at his best when he allows other people to speak for him. In Ethiopia, he meets a former political prisoner named Nebiy Makonnen, who spent ten years in prison for being “on the wrong side” of politics. One day, a new prisoner managed to smuggle in a copy of Gone with the Wind. The men, all educated, took turns reading it, hiding it from the guards. Over the course of two years, Nebiy translated the book on foil from cigarette packages. He would finish a section and give the pieces of foil to prisoners upon their release. It took him two years after he got out to track down the three thousand pieces of foil that contained his translations. The Amharic version, the only one that’s ever been done, is his copy. It’s the one that everyone reads.

These are the tales that make his journey great. Unfortunately, Theroux doesn’t give over his book to others as often as one would like. Instead, he treats Africa much like Cecil Rhodes or Henry Morton Stanley might. Theroux is the conquering hero, whether he likes it or not, forging a path through the darkest heart of Africa. He is derisive not only to Western tourists, who he faults for treating the continent like Disneyland with animals but also to Africans themselves who he attacks for not taking part in their own development.

Symptomatic of Africans’ disconnect from their own lives is the abdication of government responsibility for education, healthcare, and poverty alleviation. Instead, Theroux notes with continual and repeated disdain the hordes of disaster tourists who have taken over whole countries. Aid workers, in their white four by fours emblazoned with various agency brandings, are, in his mind, no better than the tourists who only experience Africa from the safety of a vehicle. In this regard, he echoes a specific political gripe of economists such as Dambisa Moyo and Peter Bauer - that aid is the problem in Africa, that NGOs have developed their own parasitic relationship to African poverty. They’re forever chasing the next donor dollar, undermining host country institutions so that they may keep their place and profit from the aid-industrial complex.

There are arguments to be made for and against aid, its conditionality, and its effectiveness. However, Theroux never speaks with an aid professional. Or if he does, we never hear that voice, the words as they come out of their mouths. He never attempts to understand how specific projects impact communities or contribute to development/underdevelopment. Whereas the Washington Post praises his finely wrought observations, it is more accurate to say that he watches. He sees without seeing, without understanding. He is guilty of his own particular prejudice, which blinds him to the everyday politics of a particular place. He is subject; everyone else is object.

What is worrying is that for those who haven’t visited Africa, Theroux's voice is one of the most well-known of the continent’s travel literature. I wonder whether if I had read his work before ever visiting Africa if I would have been blinded to the complexity of the continent, if I would have found my views distorted by his. While he does offer some cogent, brilliant points of political and social analysis, he distinctly ignores other realities.

Theroux was there for the honeymoon phase of African independence in the 1960s. He returns decades later to find those promises unfulfilled, and he wonders, “What happened?” He doesn't look outside the continent for answers and cannot, therefore, comprehend the failures of neoliberal economics from the 1980s on. He doesn't attempt to grapple with structural adjustment, which saw the World Bank and IMF force African countries to open up their economies and dismember government programs designed to industrialize infant economies. There’s no mention of the global price crash in the 1980s that destroyed the market for primary commodities such as tea and coffee in Malawi, Kenya, and Ethiopia or copper in Zambia and the DRC. Instead, he looks at Africans and asks, “What have they done?” He looks at aid workers and asks, “What are they doing?” One could claim that his role, as a traveler, is to look at the present reality, to judge it based on what he sees and who he meets, but without contextual history, his understanding of the present is warped by his ignorance of the past.

Theroux doesn't recognize his own privilege, and that might be the most grating thing of all. He harbors the arrogance of privilege, the faranji who is better than all the typical faranjis. He’s focused on his unique experience as better than those of other tourists without recognizing that he is often a tourist himself. He derides the public commuter buses, “bush taxis” or “kombis” depending on where you are. After one trip in the minibus, he vows never again, calling them a “death trap.” They are, no doubt, dangerous, but they are the reality for the majority of Africans who cannot afford buses, let alone luxury trains in South Africa or a private canoe along the Zambezi.

This arrogance is actually reminiscent of another famous traveler’s diary, Graham Greene’s Journey without Maps about his time in Liberia. Greene bushwhacked his way through Liberia for four weeks in 1935 with his teenage cousin Barbara in tow. He claimed his journey was unique, through unexplored territory. He was charting his own path. It’s a claim that is frankly absurd. Along the way, he met missionaries and miners, as well as a few other Europeans, plus, you know, all those Africans. As the preface to the Vintage Classic version notes, Liberia in Greene’s time had been independent for over a century. The Liberians had to push back against the English in Sierra Leone and the French in Guinea and Côte d’Ivoire to protect their territorial integrity against the imperial powers. Well-documented maps were one of the main weapons against imperial encroachment. There were plenty of them; Graham just decided not to take one. It makes for a better story.

Greene spent most of his novel complaining, a tone that Theroux adopts quite a bit throughout his trip. (As a side note, Greene’s cousin Barbara also wrote a book about their Liberian adventure. She handled it much better than he did.) Theroux expects misery, and he finds it. One gets the sense throughout his book that the trip is a convenient way to get away from everyone he knows back home. Unfortunately, he had to go to Africa to do it. One could call it masculine escapism or just recognize that Theroux is a bit of a misanthrope. “Happiness,” he claims “is banal subject for travel.” He was searching for misery, for the appalling, and he explicitly recognizes that he’s looking for it in Africa. He attacks the ‘disaster porn’ of the nightly news coverage of Africa (and there was a lot of it in 2003 with prominent civil wars in Sierra Leone, Liberia, DRC, and Somalia) but can’t understand that his vision is often of a slower-moving disaster, that of chronic underdevelopment and little will among the people to change it. And by doing so, he participates in a form of victim shaming little better than that he himself criticizes.

So why is this book the subject of the final blog in my two week challenge? I hated Dark Star Safari. I powered through it in part because there are some genuine gems in his narrative but also because I didn't feel I could properly judge Theroux without reading his book in its entirety. I wanted to like it. I wanted it to reflect my vision of the Africa I know.

It didn't. Ultimately, however, I came to realize that I could do better. That’s the reason this blog caps the two-week challenge set by a very special friend of mine. There are many tales that I've told over the course of this blog, and many more I could tell. There’s a book in the works, I think. It won’t be a New York Times bestseller, but then, I don’t expect it to be. I've had enough positive feedback from my writing that I hope it can provide an alternative view of Africa. There are plenty of stories waiting to be told, plenty of people I met along the way. Time to get started.

Tito Mojito and the Wealth of Nations

I had the opportunity to do some bar work this week for a little under the table cash. We had 150 people in the bar for a Bacardi promotional night (something I never would have expected in Zimbabwe, to be honest). Of course, alcohol promotions mean free booze. Three people making free cocktails for 150, well, that just spells chaos.

Luckily, we had Tito Mojito on our side.

Tito is a young, black Zimbabwean, soft-spoken, baby-faced and gentle. I thought he would get eaten alive by the crowd. Instead, he held his own and rocked the house.

Tito works two jobs. By day, he’s a shop assistant. At night, he’s working bar. He does this nearly every day of the week. Some nights are easier than others, but the nature of the Zimbabwean bar is that you don’t go home until everyone else has gone home. The clubs don’t ring a bell. They pubs don’t call time. You’re there until you’re finished, or until everyone else is.

It means you have no real idea when you’ll drag yourself through the door and into bed. This one took us from four in the afternoon, when we arrived at a bar literally still under construction, until about one in the morning.

I think I’m officially getting too old for this.

Tito handled it like a pro. He had to. We had four cocktails on offer, but far and away the most popular was the mojito. I have no idea why. Any time there’s a mojito on offer, it’s instantly one of the most popular, even if it’s badly made. Considering we ran out of sugar towards the end of the night, these could’ve been better. I guess by eleven in the evening, you’re no longer there for the taste.

Tito’s a mojito specialist. The woman running the show, Di, has known it from the first gig she ever did with him. I suspect that’s why she put the drinks on the menu. Since I hate making mojitos, I delegated all of mine to Tito. He delegated me everything else. At times, he’d have ten to fifteen drinks in front of him, running an assembly line just feeding drinks to thirsty customers. Watching a trained bartender do that is a bit magic, a bit skill, and always mystifying.

We wrapped up shop around midnight, and as Tito and I sat and shared a drink, we spoke a little about his life. He told me about the two jobs and then, with a sigh said, “I have to be up in three hours.”

What shop is open at 3 am? You have inventory or something?

“No, I’m studying to be a certified accountant. The state exam is coming up, so I have to wake up early and study for it.”

I was floored. Here was a man who worked two jobs, who took public transport every day, as he couldn’t afford a car, and in his spare time, he studied for a better life.

It’s something not uncommon in Zimbabwe, which for years led the continent with the best education system in Africa. Take a stroll through the University of Zimbabwe in the northern suburbs of Harare, and you’ll find students sprawled out on the grass in study groups or packed into the library like stony-faced owls. It surprised me to see a campus that, with the exception of the dusty paths and the jacaranda trees, could easily have been cut from an American cloth.

The combination of a well-educated populace with few jobs means that the competition in this country is cutthroat. I met migrant farmers in South Africa with university educations from Zimbabwe. The tiny country, only 12 million people, has probably lost more university graduates to emigration and brain drain than many African nations ever had.

We tend to equate poverty with ignorance when we think about Africa. Some who’ve traveled the length and breadth of the continent deride Africans, specifically African men, as lazy or worse (looking at you Paul Theroux). Neoliberal development scholars decry Africans’ lack of entrepreneurialism.

Ha-Joon Chang, an old-school Keynesian scholar at Cambridge, argues the opposite: that Africans and others in poor countries are degrees more entrepreneurial and industrial than the average Western citizen. What they suffer from, is an underdevelopment of the institutions and capital that accelerate productivity.

One of the places I think they’ve got us beat, however, is transport. Walk around any African city and you’ll become used to the sight of the beaten-up, broken down public commuter buses weaving in and out of traffic at speeds considered only nominally sane. Wealthier locals will warn you against them, complaining that they’re unsafe, that the kombis speed through the streets, that they’re the most likely to have accidents.

None of that is demonstrably false (though I would like to see some stats on automobile accidents involving public commuters in Africa). What I might argue, however, is that that when you add up all the miles driven on an average day, factor in streets where no one uses a crosswalk, where traffic lights are a suggestion at best, and where your paycheck is determined by the number of passengers you can keep in the car, and I bet the kombi drivers come out on top.

Unfortunately, driving ability is about the only way the kombi drivers come out on top. If you take a walk around Mbare township, one of the poorest neighborhoods in the capital Harare, you’ll quickly notice one name above all others: “Boss K.” It’s stuck on about 80% of the kombis in the township along with the name of the vehicle. I asked Oscar, my guide, about it.

“Ya, he owns all the kombis, it seems like. I think he must have fifty now. He puts his name on all of them and then comes up with some name to keep track of them all.” The scheme is this. Boss K rents out his cars to his various drivers. They pay him $100 a day. At the end of the night, they have to bring the car back to the depot, hand over their money. Whatever’s leftover, after gas and any repairs is theirs to keep.

Considering that a kombi holds 18 people at any one time, each of whom pay fifty cents to get across town, I can’t imagine it can be very much (though again, an economic study would be fascinating). A driver will take a route out and back from, say, Copacabana to Chisipiti. When they return to the rank, they have to line up and wait their turn to go again. “Usually about an hour,” one driver told me. You’d have to make at least five trips just to pay off that day’s loan.

I don’t know if there’s much more to say on these subjects at the moment, though they have been meandering through my head this week. Just remember that the next time you read African travel literature that complains of the “death trap” public commuters or the lazy men idling in the shade (again, looking at you Paul Theorux). Appearances can be deceiving, and there are always reasons for individual behavior.

Whether it’s a good reason is another story. For some, like the kombi drivers, they’re in a race against time. Another run could be the difference between being in debt to a dangerous man and putting food on the table for a hungry family. For others, even two jobs aren’t enough. They, like Tito, may work all day, work all night, and study into the wee hours of the morning. In a country like Zim, you do what you have to do.

Sometimes, that’s all you can do.

The Market of Memories

Tucked away in one of Harare’s shaded northern suburbs, you’d be quite surprised to come across a quaint little farmer’s market that springs up twice a week on Wednesday and Saturday mornings. With crafts, jams, vegetables, and fresh food, it’s like a little slice of Brooklyn or Seattle on a summer’s day, though with conspicuously fewer bearded hipsters.

The market has been running for three years, according to Beverly (whose name has been changed because I can’t properly remember it). A teacher for forty years, now retired, Beverly looks like the battleax you remember from tenth grade English – short, grey hair, sharp eyes, and a posture that dares you to try anything funny.

“I have no use for any more stuff around my house. I got rid of all my bras. I got rid of my silver. I’m in the process of getting rid of things I don’t need!” Her deep voice reminds you of a smoker’s rasp but is crystal clear and dripping with sarcasm. I’d been told she was one of the founding members of the market, which has been running for three years now. I had to wait a bit to ask any questions as she gave a tongue lashing to someone she obviously didn't think was very intelligent.

“Why do you think I started this market? It was 2008, and our pensions were wiped out after they switched to the dollar. Mine as a teacher, gone. My husband’s as a civil servant, gone. We were wiped out and had to start over again. This is my business now.”

Beverly sold bee products – honey, beeswax candles, lip balm, and propolis. “You don’t know propolis? Why not? The Egyptians used it to embalm their mummies. The bees get it from tree sap. If a beetle or a something large gets into the hive and they can’t get it out, they cover it with the propolis and mummify it in the hive to keep the rot out.”

It seemed that Beverly was talking about more than bees.

The woman next to her, Maggie, wasn't reliant on the stall as a source of income like Beverly was. She, like Beverly, had been a teacher, her husband a mining consultant. He still works occasionally, though it’s hard going in Zimbabwe, even for a country awash in minerals.

Had she ever thought of moving? “Where to? This is my home. I’m fourth generation Zimbabwean. I have as much right to be here as anyone, even if some don’t agree.”

Maggie lived in town now, but her and her husband used to own forty hectares of land outside Harare. Now they rent, their land sold off and pillaged. “The plan was to subdivide it, make it a conservancy. Allocate plots to several families who would help in the conservation.”

It wasn't a farm? “Oh no. It was far too hilly for that. You couldn't grow anything there. No, a man came. He was junior manager at a hotel. He wanted the land for himself. It was just greed, really. He came with a bunch of war veterans. They would camp at the end of our drive and harass us every time we went by.”

I assumed that this was in 2005 or 2006, during the worst of the land invasions. “Oh no, this was 2009. This was after the new government took over. It’s still happening. People should know about it so that it doesn't happen again.”

Maggie told me about several months of harassment at the hands of the war veterans. Her husband eventually went to the owner of the hotel and demanded that he rein in his employee. “He went right to him and said, ‘I’ll tell everyone I know. I’ll tell everyone that your employee is doing this to us.’” Afraid that such a story would ruin his company’s reputation, the owner reprimanded his junior manager. Told him to lay off. He wasn't backing down that easily, however. One day, he came to Maggie’s house with a paper from the Harare provincial government claiming he was the property’s ‘caretaker.’ “Well it was ridiculous. We didn't even live in Harare province. It was a complete fraud.” Her husband took the junior manager to a lawyer. They settled. “We paid $1000, so that was that.” They’d paid him off and saved their house.

Wait, so why did you move then, if everything worked out? “Well, the war veterans lost face. They had been told they’d get this land, and then it was over. He told them to go back to whatever other property they were squatting.”

“If it was just them, it would have been fine, but there was another. I don’t know his real name, but they called him Comrade Charles. He was the only one our staff were afraid of. The other war veterans, we knew them, they were fine, but when Comrade Charles came around, our staff would hide.”

One afternoon, three men came to the house with thick poles the size of police truncheons, typically used to knock the fruit from msasa trees. “There were three of them. My husband went out to talk to them. They attacked him. They beat him. They hit him on the head, across the bridge of the nose. He has no sense of smell now because of it. They nearly killed him.”

“They beat me. One stabbed me right through my hand.” She shows me her gnarled palm. She couldn’t properly flex her right hand between her third and fourth fingers. “I still can’t move this hand very well.” One of them threatened to rape her. Maggie is 72, “going on 73 next month,” she says with a laugh. She looks like the sweet granny everyone wishes they had. The one who would always sneak you cookies with a wink and a look that says, “don’t tell your mother.”

“I was glad they didn't do that,” she says, referring to the rape. An ambulance rushed her husband to the trauma center, where he received twenty-six stitches in his head. She was admitted to hospital, the doctors worried that she had suffered grievous bodily harm. They gave statements to the police. They never heard back.

“We filed a complaint, but nothing came of it. They just forgot about us. After that, it was too dangerous to go back. We sold the land for less than it was worth, and we haven’t been back.”

I couldn't fully wrap my head around the reason for the attacks on her and her property. Was she involved in politics? “Oh no, never. I think I went to one political meeting in my life, and I was bored to death. No, politics just bores me. I've never had an interest in it.” Then why? “Oh, just greed. I think it was just pure greed and the thought that he could get away with it.”

Maggie relates the story like she’s talking about the weather. She’s sunny and sweet. She never seems to reflect on darker days; she just takes the memory in stride. Her mood only changes when I ask if she wanted to go back.

Her and her husband left some things behind. There are some personal belongings that she wouldn't mind collecting, but she doesn't know if she’ll ever get them. “I’m not brave enough to go back.” She laughs a bit, but not out of humor. She laughs that sad, quiet laugh, the one that’s attempting to stave off something dark, some memory better left alone. “I talk about it, but I’m not brave enough. Even if we had the title deeds now, I wouldn't go back.”

Maggie handles her loss better than Paul. He left his farm in 2006. “I left and went to South Africa. My wife’s a trained chef. We tried to make a go of it there, but they didn't want us. If there’s ever a book about it, it will be called ‘Living Next Door to Malice.’” Paul made jams, chutneys, spicy marinades. His wife baked meat pies, biscuits, and brewed ginger beer. On the surface, it appears that he has a successful business. That he’s doing alright now.

“No. It’s hard. We live hand to mouth. Week to week. We’re on the edge.” He says it with an edge to his voice, a bitterness that verges on tears.

Paul’s father bought his farm near Plumtree in 1948. It was marginal land, used for cattle, market gardens, and game. His father still lives in the farmhouse, the only piece of the property they still own. “They came for us in 1999,” he tells me. I thought the land invasions didn't start until after the constitution was rejected. “They didn't, but they were pressuring us. They wanted us out. I don’t know why they targeted us so early, but they did. They wanted that land.”

A stylish, middle-aged black Zimbabwean woman walked by and called out, “Paul’s! I used to buy these all the time.” She gently handled the various chutneys and hot sauces, examining each one with the care of a product long-forgotten. “What happened? I never see anything in stores anymore.”

“Well, my dear, it’s a simple thing called land redistribution.” He bites the words. They come out mean and appear to be directed at the well-heeled woman. “They took the farm that had the canning equipment on it,” he says, softening a bit, perhaps noticing that he’s put the woman on the defensive, fearful that he’ll lose a customer over a policy she had nothing to do with. “We’re a much smaller operation now. I do everything out of my mother-in-law’s kitchen. It’s a bit more expensive now after Zimglass shut down. All the jars come from South Africa. The lids too.”

The woman’s friend tries to bring the conversation back around. “It’s much better to buy it here. Look how much more selection there is.” A sale is made; the tension in the air subsides. I can tell how much the sale means to Paul. A few more dollars to get him through the week. I buy some ginger beer, sipping it while he tells me about his father’s property. “We had 200 sable on the land. At the time, they were worth $5000, so that’s a million right there. American-made fences for the game reserve. They've all been torn down. There’s no more game, no sable, no antelope. They ate everything. All the animals, gone. Poached out. The trees have all been cut down.”

Maggie had mentioned that the trees were the first casualty of the new owners on her property. They’d been cut down for firewood or sold off as timber. They hadn't been managed, they were just gone. “We had beautiful trees,” Paul tells me. “One hundred years of conservation gone. They've raped that land.” His face softens and for a second, it looks like he might cry. He moves to greet another customer and our conversation ends.

I've often heard, in my time here, that land redistribution was necessary, but that it was just poorly done. There is no doubt some truth to that. The indigenous population, oppressed for over a century deserved social justice. They deserved a greater share of their home land.

But in Zimbabwe, violence begets violence. Land is more than just property. It is memory. It is livelihood. It is identity. As I wandered the farmer’s market, I realized that this space was much more than a morning diversion for ex-pat aid workers and embassy staff looking to find bargain-priced produce. It was a refugee camp, a place for those who no longer had a home, who’d come to Harare for relief, to share their stories, their experiences, and their lives. It was a place of loss and rebirth, even on the margins. Tucked away in a secluded Harare suburb, I was surprised to come across a quaint little farmer’s market. What I couldn't have known, nor ever expected, was that among the baubles and the beetroot, there were stories, tales told of the past, of the present, and of uncertain futures. 

Touring Mbare Township (Part Two)

In the last post, I visited Mbare, the oldest black township in Zimbabwe’s capital Harare. The neighborhood is dominated by high-density, low-income housing, the most visible of which are the long rows of ugly brick and cement apartment buildings known locally as hostels.

Ooh...spooky.

Overcrowded, dirty, and dilapidated, from the outside, these hostels look like hell holes, the only refuge for people living on the edge. It’s difficult, from the safety of a vehicle driving through the township to comprehend the lives that are lived in these dreary blocks. From other travels and experiences in poor countries, I knew that even in hardship, there is life. That people smile, cry, love, and die just as in every other place in the world. I wanted to visit, to see and gain a real feeling for the place, rather than sit back and let prejudice craft an experience for me.

Mbare is more than Zimbabwean. It’s a cultural melting pot that has brought together men and women from throughout the region. During the Rhodesian era, the white government used the township as a kind of holding district, a ghetto for working class men who provided the labor for the factories and other industries in the capital, Salisbury. The hostels were built to house men and men only. The showers are unisex; the apartments are small and cramped. They weren't designed to hold families.  Women weren't allowed in the townships. It helped keep the male population under control. The apartments weren't meant to be homes, merely housing. The policy dehumanized an entire population. Labor was merely an input to serve the country’s industrialization.

While wandering through the quiet streets, we met Luso, who agreed to show us around the hostels and introduce us to some of his friends. Luso was a Malawian who had stayed on after the government cleared the slums that had cropped up around the city. Known as in Shona as Murambatsvina, “Operation Clean Up,” or, more literally, “Operation Refuse the Dirt.” In 2005, the government moved bulldozers and heavy equipment into the poorest of the urban areas, ostensibly to clear dangerous informal housing and clean up crime. Many saw it as an attack on opposition supporters, as the MDC drew much of its support from these underserved areas. Within weeks, the townships had been transformed, at the cost of many peoples’ homes and livelihoods. Some returned to the rural areas. Others left the country, never to return. Areas that used to resemble Kibera in Nairobi or Kayelitsha in Cape Town now look much like they did in the 1950s – just overcrowded, underserved high-density housing reminiscent of American projects or English council estates.

As Luso led us through the property, we came upon some children playing at gymnastics. They had set up a large truck tire at the end of a long stretch of pavement bordering one of the apartment blocks. With a long run up, they would launch themselves from the concrete, stomp the rubber rim of the tire and use the force to catapult their bodies up and over, performing a full flip before landing on a pile of stacked quilts and blankets. They did it over and over and over, sprinting down the concrete, hitting the tire, and flying through the air. Occasionally they would land on their feet, more often they ended up on their backs or at times with their nose planted in the cushions. The kids were fearless, as only kids can be. They weren't old enough to remember the bulldozers that destroyed their neighbor's homes.

The run-up.

He hits the vault!

Stunning, simply stunning.

His competitor.

And a flawless landing! (Kinda)

Luso introduced us to his friend Sylvester, a short, powerfully built man who’d filed his front teeth into points. Though young, lack of proper dental care had rotted the points into jagged, brown clumps. He wore a shirt advertising his allegiance to ZANU-PF, but I wasn't sure, and didn't want to ask, if he supported the party or merely supported the giving away of free shirts. The government has a strong hold on Mbare. Campaign posters mark several buildings and trees, but it’s unclear if it’s politics of the heart or of the stomach that affords them such support. A free tee-shirt or hat can go a long way. Giving away food before an election can go even further.

Sylvester led us up two flights of dimly lit, heavily worn stairs. The hostels were built in the 1940s, and the cement stairwells exhibit the smooth, rounded corners of long use by many people. A woman ran a small shop at the entrance to the building. She sold tomatoes, onions, oil and other essentials one commonly needs on short notice. As we reached the second floor, we met Sylvester’s friends, all young men in their twenties and thirties, sitting idle on a Tuesday afternoon. One could fault them for not working, but the reality of Zimbabwe is an unemployment rate that is catastrophically high, up above 80% in Zimbabwe's formal sector. Women often work informally buying or selling goods in many of the townships’ markets, but for the men, who are more used to hard labor or more masculine pursuits, there is little demand their labor. Sylvester’s friends smoked marijuana and watched the world go by, much like their counterparts in Western project houses.

Sylvester’s room was small, maybe only fifteen square meters. He shared it with his wife and younger brother. His brother used to live in another building, but had to move in when a kitchen caught fire, smoking out the residents and damaging the building. So it goes. Sylvester owned a television, a bicycle, a radio. He made do off of “one day’s work, when it comes. One day here or there.”

RGM watches you eat.

Kitchen, Living Room, Bike Storage, Bedroom

What struck me about the hostels was that, even though they looked filthy from the outside, they were actually very clean. There was an obvious pride that the residents held for their homes. The walls held years and years of smoke from candles and cooking fires, the paint was cracked and peeling, but the floors were clean, the toilets, shared between dozens of people, serviceable.

We left the hostels for one of the local shabeens. With no women and little entertainment, many men escaped through alcohol. The Rhodesian government encouraged this, building massive community taverns with shaded courtyards and cheap beer. Though they sell bottles of Castle and Black Label, the shabeens do most of their business in local brews. Oscar and I split a bucket of chibuku, the sorghum beer favored all over the African continent. Eighty cents bought two liters of the thick, sour concoction.

“It’s a meal and a drink!” said Chibwe, a retired civil servant who frequented the bar on a Tuesday afternoon. “When you want a meal, but don’t have much money, you drink this. And you get drunk too!”

Despite it being 1:30 in the afternoon on a Tuesday, there were still a handful of men at the bar, mostly old age pensioners or middle aged security guards waiting to start the night shift. The old men dressed impeccably, pressed shirts and stylish hats harking back to an earlier time. When you have so little, you take pride in your appearance. It’s one of the few markers that you have any control over. These guys weren't alcoholics, but they did drink. The shabeen on a weekday afternoon is as much a social space as it is a drinking place. The leafy garden keeps the worst of the spring heat at bay, and if you’re lucky, someone will come along to buy you a drink.

The old men

Buying the chibuku

“I can’t stand the chibuku, it’s for me, Blue Diamond.” Phenias was a war veteran, or so he claimed. When I pressed him further, I learned that he’d joined the army in 1980. If he were an independence fighter, he hadn't fought for very long. I slipped him a dollar, and the fifty-five year old ambled off, returning several minutes later with a small plastic flask. Its blue lid and crystal clear contents belied a poisonously powerful local vodka. He mixed it with equal parts with water. “You have to dilute it,” he said, giving me a drink. Even diluted, it tasted like a mix of rubbing alcohol, coconut, pineapple, and benzene. I nearly choked. I’d be sticking to the chibuku.

Poison

Two liters of goodness.

We spent the afternoon drinking and chatting. I tried to raise some political questions, but whenever I did, Phenias took the opportunity to answer for the group. It’s a common problem I've encountered in Zimbabwe. If there’s one person there who is staunchly pro-Mugabe, he or she dominates the conversation, cowing others into quiet agreement. I wanted to hear other voices, other opinions, but Phenias dominated the conversation. I quickly had little to say to him. By three o’clock, the worst of the heat had passed, and we left Mbare.

Driving past the hostels, the shabeens, the Mai Musodzi Community Center, and the Pioneer Cemetery, I could reflect a bit on what I’d seen. Certainly, it was nothing out of the ordinary, but the boring of the everyday brought life to the community. Before I visited, I might stare blankly out the window of a bus passing through the township. I might see a certain community hall or a dilapidated hostel and think little more of it. Now that I know a bit about the township’s history and its people, I can’t unknow what I've learned.

These people, these places, they’re real to me now, they matter. In a place like Mbare, where even Zimbabweans fear to go, this recognition is what matters. Not the recognition of a white man, but just the simple acknowledgment that they inhabit one planet, the same planet as I. It’s a powerful connection for a community that has long been overlooked.

Touring Mbare Township (Part One)

Mention the name Mbare to an upper-middle class resident of Harare, and the reaction you get will inevitably be one of, “Why would you ever want to go there?” It’s got a reputation, and it’s not a good one.

Garikayi “Oscar” Makuyah hopes to change that. He used to live and work in Johannesburg, leading bike trips into some of the city’s townships and destigmatizing areas known for high levels of crime and poverty. He recently returned to Harare and is looking to do the same for his home city. It’s an uphill climb, but the view from the top could change the way people live in the long-neglected neighborhoods.

Mbare is the oldest township in the country. It was founded in 1907 as the English settlement of Salisbury began to expand. As the growing city industrialized, men from the rural areas and as far afield as Mozambique, Zambia, and Malawi began to settle in the quickly expanding suburb of Hariri, a name that the capital later took for its own upon independence. The Rhodesian government built male-only hostels in the 1940s to accommodate the growing population and corral their labor force. These still stand, their brick and concrete exteriors chipped and cracked, their windows missing, broken, or rimed with dirt. People crowd around the doors and open landings, taking refuge on cool concrete shaded from the midday sun.

Mbare still houses one of the country’s largest produce markets, a reminder that locals used to provide most of the city’s fresh vegetables long before white farmers dominated the agricultural landscape. The local flea market is the biggest in the city, selling second-hand clothing and other goods. Its name in Shona, Mupedzanmho, means “the finisher of all problems.” It’s the last, best stop for all your fashion needs. More importantly, the market is a hive of activity, potentially generating millions in the informal sector. “It’s a multimillion dollar environment,” says Oscar. “But no one knows, as everything is liquid. It’s just cash flowing in and out.”

The township was founded on the edge of town, lying next to the cemetery, the abattoir, and the sewage works. The cemetery is still there, graves dating from the 1890s still stand, though their occupants are unknown, the copper markers stolen for scrap long ago. The untended plots uncover the history of a city divided by race. The English, Indian, and Jewish graves are segregated into their respective neighborhoods, while the Africans occupy an empty field. “They couldn’t afford gravestones then, so it’s basically one mass grave. They just buried people on top of one another,” Oscar told me. “You can see how big the cemetery is, and then you think about how many more Africans there were. Who knows how many are buried there.”

A view of Pioneer Cemetery.

The plot of land where Africans buried their dead.

Rhodesia was still a member of the Commonwealth during the World Wars. The graves of the fallen have their own designated space, but even in death, race segregates the soldiers. White soldiers are buried hundreds of meters away from the blacks and the coloreds. The latters’ shared space is subdivided as well, blacks on one side, coloreds on the other. Comrades in arms separated by the melanin in their skin. The soldiers’ graves are the only ones that have been maintained. The Commonwealth pays for their upkeep. All throughout the rest of the cemetery, weeds choke the cracked and broken tombstones, plastic and trash blown from the township litter the pathways, and it is clear that some of the mausoleums are used by the homeless for shelter from the elements. In Harare, the ancestors are neglected.

The Sacrificial Cross - A Memorial to Commonwealth Soldiers

WWI Dead. Notice the separation between British South African and Native

Turning from death, Oscar and I visited the Mai Musodzi Community Center.

Mai Musodzi was an African feminist in the early 20^th Century. If there’s ever a woman who deserves more attention, it is one of the pioneer black feminists fighting both patriarchy and racism in one of theBritish Empire’s white settler colonies. She believed in women’s empowerment through what today would be considered “income generating activities.” She organized sewing and knitting classes as well as training for nurses to work for the Red Cross. She pushed for women-run maternity wards in the city as well as registered marriages to protect women’s rights within a relationship.

These were especially important goals in Mbare. The township was never conceived as anything more than a worker’s ghetto, a place to house men to labor in the factories and other value added industries serving a burgeoning agricultural sector. As women moved to the urban areas following husbands and fathers, the Rhodesian government realized that it could use this migration to their advantage, employing women as nurses, domestics, and other professions commonly devalued as “women’s work.”

Today, Mai Musodzi’s name still graces the community center, which is now mostly used for weddings and other large functions. Out back, however, it also houses the Shukokai Karate Club.

Behind this door...lies another door.

We were met by Glover Musariri, a stocky but powerfully built man in his early forties. He is the leader of the karate club and has been practicing his art for more than thirty years. “I was three or four, and I really liked the movies of Chuck Norris and Bruce Lee.” At the age of nine, he joined the club and trained in the Shukokai style under a white instructor who now lives in Durban.

This dude.

He has about thirty to forty students, but his star pupil Brian Kupara is his pride and joy. At the age of 26, he has traveled throughout the region, earning twelve gold medals from various competitions. Glover used our presence to kick him around a little, ostensibly showing us several techniques while giving his pupil a bit of a hard time.

I’ve met kids playing at karate all over Africa, but I've never met one who took it past play. I have to admit; even I spent many summers ‘practicing karate’ with the neighborhood kids, which essentially entailed beating the crap out of one another for hours on end. To actually commit to the discipline and continue to practice for years after was outside our realm. If Bruce Lee ever knew the affect he had on kids around Africa, or even on this one man, I’m sure he would have sprung for a goodwill tour across the continent.

Who could resist? Also, hey ladies...

This is the first of a two-part entry on Mbare. The township has a life of its own that is virtually unknown to the majority of Zimbabweans. It has its own characters, its own history, its own culture. More than anything, I wanted to experience more of this culture – to visit one of the hostels, to drink at the local bars known colloquially as shabeens.

I got my wish, but that’s more for next time.

Religion is the River of the World

It’s a typical Sunday in Harare. A cool wind breaks the heat, the streets are quiet, and everything is closed. The city center is dead. Traffic

For someone like me, who does not find his purpose through religious devotion, Sunday is a day of rest. It’s a day to sleep in, to have a barbeque, to read, to write, and to reflect on life.

Truly, this is good.

For the majority of Zimbabweans, however, Sunday is a day of praise and worship, a day that lasts all day whether you like it or not. Whereas God rested on the seventh day, his followers work.

If you visit Zimbabwe, you may be curious to see women dressed in solid blocks of color – white, green, or blue – wandering the streets like nuns who've broken free from the convent. Men wear badges and carry Bibles. You’ll regularly find them underlining passages in their down time as security guards, taxi drivers, and civil servants.

These are the worshipers, the men and women of the Apostolic Faith Mission Church and the Salvation Army.

Religion in Africa is big business, as anyone who has lived here can tell you. At times, the faithful take it a bit too far. Pentecostal churches in Nigeria support organized witch hunts. Traditional healers in Tanzania slaughter albinos to concoct potions that will bring riches, for a price. Muslim marabouts in Senegal essentially control the country’s political system; it’s near impossible to get ahead without their blessing. South Africa’s Dutch Reformed Church collaborated extensively with the Afrikaaner nationalists to craft some of the most racist policies of that country’s apartheid regime.

Zimbabwe especially is a country marked by its faith. Here, pornography is illegal. President Mugabe regularly attacks gays and lesbians in his political speeches, an effective diatribe that garners him more than a modicum of support. Here, sex scandals have been used to discredit opposition party candidates. MDC-T leader Morgan Tsvangarai has done more than his fair share to stir up tabloid rumors, though until his recent romantic trysts and troubles, the government-run media regularly questioned his sexuality in an attempt to sully his reputation amongst the average Zimbabwean.

Like the United States, the politics of morality are an effective tool to capture a large bloc of eligible voters. Even with accusations of electoral fraud, many here recognize that Mugabe courted the religious vote in a way that significantly boosted his support throughout the country. He attended weddings and funerals in the rural areas. He campaigned heavily to gain the support of the Apostolic church, one of the largest congregations in Zimbabwe, with over 2.3 million faithful, making up nearly 20% of the population. While tabloids scrounged for stories about Tsvangarai’s sex life, Mugabe worshiped and prayed with some of the most ardent, and influential, members of the religious community.

This religious fervor can’t be underestimated. Driving through Harare and into the rural areas on a Sunday afternoon, one can scan the horizon and pick out a half dozen separate congregations kneeling in fields and on rocky outcrops. Clad all in white, they look like spirits floating through the dry, golden savanna. These aren’t huge groups. They seem to number about thirty to fifty, growing until they reach a critical mass and break apart, a new group taking up another piece of land about fifty meters away.

The sermons last for hours, sometimes days. “They sleep outside some days. They build fires, they cook meals, and they pray for days and days.” Barbara is a Zimbabwean who left the country seven years ago. She comes back a few times every year. “The head of the church is known as a prophet. He’s believed to see the future. He can communicate with God. You go and kneel in front of him like you’re talking to the Holy Spirit. The say, ‘okay, you have to do this, you have to do that.’ Then they pray over stones. You take the first water of the day, before anyone opens the tap, and you put the stone in the water. You have to drink the water three times a day, or bathe in it. It’s supposed to be healing.”

There are Catholics and Anglicans in Zimbabwe, but like much of Africa, the older denominations are slowly dying away, being replaced by syncretic models that combine traditional beliefs and spiritualism with Christian evangelical ideology. Nigeria may be one of the biggest markets for this type of religious belief. Indeed, it’s practically an export. I've been continually surprised at the amount of major preachers from that country in this part of the continent. Any time you find a church that mentions fire, power, or suffering, you can bet it’s run by a Nigerian.

Religion is always a bit of a balm to ease the pain of everyday life. It’s no different here. Zimbabwe is a difficult place to live. Unemployment is high. Money is tight. People scrape by, if only barely. “In a way, from my point of view, it gives people hope,” says Barbara. It might not feed the family, but for many, hope gets them through. It feeds the soul.

The City in Spring

It’s spring in the Southern Hemisphere. While leaves are turning and falling in North America and Europe, flowers are blooming and the days are growing hotter in Zimbabwe. The two go together, the flowers taking the sting out of the September sun.

The rains won’t come for another month, but the days are growing hotter. This means temperatures regularly above 32 degrees Celsius (or hovering in the low nineties for those of you in the States who have yet to switch over to international standards). It is, in short, hot, and it doesn't help matters that power cuts regularly eliminate any hope of relief.

It’s nothing like the deserts of West Africa, where the sun hit the earth like a hammer striking an anvil, beating you into submission like a piece of pig iron, but then the Sahara doesn't have hundred of leafy jacarandas to shelter under to escape the heat.

The jacarandas aren't native. In fact, they are a vestige of colonialism, imported from Central and South America as ornamentals in an otherwise colorless landscape. They've been criticized by environmentalists and agronomists in the country, for some good reasons: they’re non-native, they require too much water, they squeeze out other indigenous vegetation.

No doubt that these are legitimate arguments, however the trees have become somewhat iconic to cities like Harare and Bulawayo. Their wide, leafy boughs shade many streets in the Harare’s upper class neighborhoods, and at the moment, their lilac-colored flowers have infused the city with beauty and whimsy. Jacarandas line Leopold Takawira Street, one of the main arteries from the city center into the northern suburbs. In a strong wind, thousands of delicate trumpet-shaped flowers stream like rain from their branches, littering the ground with a thick layer of violet-blue petals. They cover streets and sidewalks like a thin layer of snow, and you can’t help but smile at the beauty of it.

The trees have been around long enough that several local anecdotes regarding the jacaranda govern life here.

“We used to say in school that if you hadn't started studying for exams by the time the pods broke on the jacaranda tree, there was no hope. You were done for.”

“These trees have their own uniform, you see? We at school all have our own colors for the uniform, and so does the jacaranda. Green leaves, purple flowers, brown trunk, white roots.” When this mechanic was a kid, they used to say that if the jacaranda was wearing its uniform that the students didn't have to wear theirs. I assume it had to do with the timing of school holidays, but I couldn't quite understand his meaning.

The jacarandas aren't the only sign of spring, however. Pink, red, and violet bougainvillea creep over garden walls and climb up streetlights. Bold golden trumpet vines have exploded in parks and gardens all over the city, and in some private houses, red and white roses remind one of England’s imperial legacy. Despite thirty years of majority rule, proper British tea gardens with their quiet fountains, winding paths, and impressive blooms still remain in isolated pockets around the city and the country. Perhaps they hold out hope for the return of monarchy, lonely little outposts besieged on all sides by the encroaching African bush.

Seen from the air, Harare might exhibit a polka dot motif – purple, yellow, and red crushes of color against a green and brown background. From the street, the wealthier neighborhoods, with their irrigation systems and private gardeners, look like something out of Dr. Seuss. One wouldn't be surprised to meet the Lorax, begging people to leave his trees alone.

Ultimately, the trees may have to go. The Ministry of Environment recently pushed for the removal of the jacaranda, citing its intensive thirst for water and its alien status in the region’s ecosystem. For now, however, the tree will most likely remain, if not for its beauty than for its utility. “It’s a good shade tree,” a security guard told me, “and it grows fast. Even in the rural areas, they like this tree. It provides wood for the fire and for building.”

Personally, I can’t imagine this city without its stately jacarandas. In just a few days of spring, the trees have captured my imagination, reminding me of Washington DC’s cherry trees, a gift from the Japanese, or the London plane, itself a hybrid of American and Turkish origin. They may not be indigenous, but they've left their mark, and I hope they stay.

New York to Harare: Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman"

There’s a local community theatre troupe here in Harare that’s been around since 1931. They may be amateurs, but they've managed to stay in business over eighty years, perhaps by being the only game in town.

I had to stop and think about that for a while. This performing arts group has been through World War II and Rhodesia’s unilateral declaration of independence from the United Kingdom. They've survived Ian Smith’s police state and a civil war to achieve majority rule. The theater has seen Robert Mugabe inaugurated as a hero in 1980 and watched him become Africa’s villain par excellence on the international stage over the last decade. Through it all, the troop has maintained its cohesion and is still performing.

I had the opportunity to catch one of their shows last night – Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. The play is brilliant in its own right, but I had to ask, how does it translate from New York in the 1950s to Harare in 2013?

The play features Willy Loman, the salesman, an aging dreamer worn out by the rat race in the post-war boom years. He’s a traveling salesman, opened up the whole Northeast to the Wagner Corporation, but as the years have gone by, he’s watched all his old contacts retire and pass on. Old Willy’s still got it though, by necessity. Bills pile up. If it’s not the mortgage that has him underwater, it’s the fan belt on the refrigerator, the broken stove pipe, the insurance premium. Willy can’t afford to retire, as much as he needs to. His two boys are at home for the first time in a long time, but he fights with his eldest son Biff, while his younger son Happy spends all his time and money chasing women. In the end, Willy realizes that he’s worth more dead than alive. Maybe the payout from his life insurance could get his son Biff back on track, and so the play ends with Willy’s death, ground down by the system like so much grist in the mill.

Rereading the play, I found myself identifying with the elder son, Biff, lost in the world, unable to find a place for himself, unable to find happiness in other people’s expectations. Struggling and not succeeding. He’s inherited some of his father’s delusions, the three men making stories for themselves that take away the pain of social immobility.

That’s a whole different entry though. What I discovered is that Death of a Salesman still says a lot about America today, but it doesn't particularly reflect the current state of affairs in Zimbabwe.

I've been told several times now that Zimbabweans are the freest people in the world. It doesn't seem right on paper, but it begins to make sense if your conception of freedom falls along the socio-economic rather than the civil-political spectrum.

The economic catastrophe that ended with dollarization in 2009 wiped out bank accounts nationwide. It reset the system to zero for all but the top elites. One guy, let’s call him Tim, told me that he had $20,000 in the bank back when the crisis hit its lowest point. It disappeared overnight when the government scrapped the Zimbabwean dollar.

“Fine, you've taken my money, I don’t have to pay off any of my loans,” Tim told me. “It was great! I only wish I had taken out more.”

In his mind, Tim is beholden to no one. He owes no money to anyone. He owns his house outright. He owns his car. He doesn't have much of a choice on that one. You cannot get a loan for a car in Zimbabwe. It’s impossible. The banks charge interest at eighteen to twenty percent, a byproduct of the wholesale collapse of the economy. An entire people saw their life savings disappear overnight, and there has been very little to restore their trust in the banking system. Without liquidity, the banks have nothing to loan and must charge interest equivalent to the average American credit card.

No one in Zimbabwe has the sort of career mentality that permeates the American system. Instead, nearly everyone I speak to has several different projects ongoing at any one time. They have to diversify, to hedge their bets against the threat of a return to the volatility of 2007 and 2008. One woman has an IT service, a gardening service, and runs a cocktail catering business. At any one time, any one of her enterprises could be losing money, but as long as one is in the black, she can keep her head above water.

Of course, this is common in Africa, where you’ll often meet people who work security at night, maintenance during the day, but have at various points taught primary school, worked as a mechanic, or sold SIM cards on street corners. You don’t, however, expect to find the same thing with middle-class entrepreneurs.

At a critical moment in Death of a Salesman, Willy complains to his neighbor Charley that his boss, Howard Wagner, the snotnose who took over after his father died, laid him off. Willy remembers when Howard was in swaddling clothes. He remembers Howard in diapers, worked with his father, even suggested the name Howard. “Imagine that?” Willy says, “I named him. I named him Howard.”

Charley replies, “Willy when’re you going to realize that them things don’t mean anything? You named him Howard, but you can’t sell that. The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell. And the funny thing is that you’re a salesman, and you don’t know that.”

Zimbabweans could take Charley’s side in this case. The only thing you got that matters is what you can offer other people. But they also have learned hard lessons in community. One businessman told me that the only thing that got him through the crisis was his connections. Once you made a sale, you had to get the Zim dollars out of your hands as quickly as possible. It was like a game of hot potato, but one that would undoubtedly end in ruin. With prices doubling every day, you didn't want to get stuck with trillion dollar notes worth less than the paper they were printed on. Without food on the shelves, and with people literally starving, a community of black market guys bought food from farmers, and established an entire network of distribution to the poor and needy, some charitable, some for the right price. It was the only way to survive. If you didn't have friends, if you didn't have connections, you starved.

That’s why Tim claims that Zimbabweans are categorically freer than anyone else in the world. They had to build communities. They had to find help. They had to do it outside of the government. As a result, he owes money to no one. He is beholden to no one in power; no one has the ability to deny him food, clothing, or shelter. He has his friends, he has his community, and if anyone ever wants to come and mess with him, he can stand up and resist any intimidation.

Granted, he’s in a much better place than the majority of Zimbabweans. Miller’s play wasn't written about the upper crust of American society, but rather the lower-middle class who struggled to make their way in America’s ‘make-it or break-it’ culture. Willy just barely survives with Charley’s help. His neighbor offers him a job and gives him fifty dollars every week to help scrape by.

There may also be a bit of bravado in Tim’s claim that he can stand up in resistance to intimidation. An old Indian woman in Bulawayo, a friend’s mother, told me about her former life in Mozambique. When the rebel’s came for her and her husband, they owned a little shop, selling basic goods to the community. They didn’t owe anyone anything. They had friends, but after several months of violence and intimidation, they had to leave Mozambique with little more than the suitcases they could carry. They came to Zimbabwe with nothing and had to build it all back again. Even the best of friends sometimes can’t you from organized violence, whether its rebels or the state.

Miller, in the end, is cynical. An avowed socialist, he empathized with America’s working man, pressed to the limit by corporate greed and the capitalist system. Willy is a dreamer, the last of a dying breed, when deals were made on personality and sealed with the shake of a hand. He thrived in that system, but he hasn't been able to adapt. To Miller, Willy’s relationships are dead and meaningless. In Zimbabwe, which has experienced so much pain and upheaval in the last decade, these relationships are still alive, still important. They’re the only thing that carried so many through such trying times. Like America, however, what matters is what you can eat. People still have to scrape and fight to survive. In Zimbabwe, like in many places, you can’t dine on friendship, but you can dine with your friends.

African Jams: The Artist and the Audience

I've got a heresy to confess: Until recently, I've never really liked traditional African music.

Whoa, whoa, whoa! Wait up. Let me explain. I love Amadou and Mariam. They put on a hell of a show.

I think Tinariwen are alright, but for my money, I’ll bank on Bombino.

I’ll get down with some Nigerian club music, especially P-Square. It takes me back to my days in Niger and the creepy David Lynch room at Pub 227.

And if you’re looking for a real killer beat. You have to check out The Very Best.

These, however, represent African artists who've crossed over and blended much of the best from their homelands and from the West. Amadou and Mariam latest album was a killer that brought in big names like Santigold, TV on the Radio, and Scissor Sisters. Bombino just burns it in a distinct departure from his forebears, and his first album brought him enough accolades to team up with Dan Auerbach from The Black Keys. The Very Best teams Esau Mwamwaya from Malawi, with the Hackney hipster duo Radioclit (I assume they're a bit hipster, I mean, isn't everybody in Hackney just a little bit hip?). And if you've seen any of P-Square’s latest videos, they've dropped a lot of their local flavor to mimic the flash and muscle of American hip hop artists like Kanye West or Lil Wayne (who The Very Best mock to no ends in the above video).

But these aren't the artists you hear on a daily basis in Africa. These aren't the people who have their music pumped out of crap kombi speakers or blasted from store fronts in crowded markets. Instead, that’s where you’ll hear Lesotho famu, Nigerian Hausa music, and high-pitched ululations from heavyset diva vocalists. It’s a piece of everyday life in much of Africa, but one that I never appreciated.

Then I met Simba.

Simba is from Bulawayo. He’s a member of the Hloseni Arts Group, a traditional music and dance troupe formed in 1997. They've toured all over Africa and Europe, performing in a mixture of Shona, Ndebele, Tswana, and Kalanga. If this sounds familiar, it’s because he didn't harvest my organs. He invited me to watch one of their rehearsals, where I was struck by the hospitality and generosity of everyone present. They all wanted to shake my hand, and everyone wanted to know my name. If I was going to watch something I normally wasn't a fan of, at least I’d been welcomed and treated like an old friend.

The Hloseni troupe blew me out of the water, and I realized why I’d never enjoyed this type of music. Traditional African music is as much performance as sound. It’s dance, it’s life, and it doesn't lend itself to Western music culture for a variety of reasons.

Primarily, I think the greatest challenge African performance poses to Western audiences is the space in which it may be enjoyed. Western music creates an adversarial space: audience versus performer, the stage versus the seats. Judgment is inherently built into the performative space. African music, on the other hand, is communal. Dancers move in between musicians. Voice is interwoven with movement. Nearly every traditional performance I have witnessed in Africa incorporates the audience in the action. Audience members are encouraged to dance, are encouraged to play. They take their place with the performers rather than remaining passive onlookers. They clap. They stomp. They shout and sing. In traditional music, these sounds are not merely noise but are incorporated directly into the performance, shaping and reshaping the performance of an old favorite.

In this way, traditional music is much like the very best jazz. One of my favorite recordings of all time is the pirated version of Clifford Brown’s Night in Tunisia. It was recorded (illegally) the night he died in a car accident. He takes a simple melody, one that everyone knows, and is able to transform it, making it his own while giving it to everyone equally. Every single person is participating in that performance just by being there. The energy is palpable. You can’t listen to that song without imagining yourself in a smoky back room at four in the morning, drink in hand, hoping the dawn never comes.

That’s a tangent, but an important one, as a lot of jazz flows out of the rollicking, free-wheeling nature of traditional music. It’s there for you, you right there in that chair, the person I can reach out and touch. Consequently, African music doesn't lend itself to our modern thinking on sound and amplification. In much of the modern sound tech world, it’s all about levels, hot spots, acoustics, but when you start to mic up drums, marimbas, and guitars the entire concept of ‘level’ flies out the window.

Take voice, for instance. In the West, we place greatest emphasis on voice, on lyrics, on melody and harmony. Voice, where present, typically exists at the forefront of performance. In African music, a vocalist has to fight for her place in the soundscape. She shouts and ululates, clawing for her place above djembes and marimbas. When she’s given a microphone, her voice is suddenly much too prominent. Amplified, she becomes too harsh, too dominant.

This is especially true when recorded. Once you start to combine the difficulty in mixing levels with the kombi driver’s propensity for pumping his music to its highest volume, the voice becomes distorted as it shreds any hope that you’ll stave off a hearing aid until sixty.

I used to wait tables at a little jazz club in London. We had a prominent Malian artist on stage in late summer. Two houses each on a Friday and Saturday night, so it was kind of a big deal. While we set up the club for the diners and guests, the band went through their sound checks and set their levels. All I could think was: why are we even bothering with a sound system? The venue held two hundred-odd people. It’s small, intimate, the exact opposite of the open bars and desert stages of Bamako and Timbuktu. We didn't need microphones. If anything, we needed to line the walls with shock absorbers. This wasn't supposed to be a ‘sit down and enjoy’ sort of night. He wanted everyone up and dancing and he was going to blow them out of their seats with all the force he could muster. They weren't listening to his record at home, where they could quietly lower the volume to share their eclectic musical tastes with their bougey upper-middle class friends over a fairly middling wine.

Until I saw the Hloseni troop perform in person, I couldn't give voice to why I didn't like traditional music. Recent work by psychologist Chia-Jung Tsay at University College London, however, gives some empirical support to my previous disinterest in this art form. In a series of studies, Tsay gave clips of classical music competition finalists to participants. Their task: to determine who won the competition. When presented solely with audio clips, participants weren't very good at judging the quality of performance. Even experts scored no better than novices at determining a winner from sound alone.

However, when presented solely with a visual clip of a performance, novices and experts alike were much better at determining a winner – despite not hearing even one note. Without sound distracting the listener, the participants are able to appreciate the other aspects of a performance, indicating that our place in a performance is more than the sum of its parts.

I suspect that this is why, until recently, I never gave much credit to traditional music as an art form that I could appreciate and enjoy. Most of the recordings that blared away in bush taxis and market stalls were just direct transcriptions of what an artist would do on stage. That is, they were performances stripped of performance. Hloseni changed that. They showed me something that I always knew, at least subconsciously, that music cannot be separated from those who make it, nor can it be separated from the audience that appreciates it. Western amplification may help us to enjoy music on a greater scale, but we lose something as we’re pushed farther and farther from the stage. A dance is as much a dance for the athleticism and artistry of the dancer as it is for the earth shaking under foot and the dust kicked up in the process.

Music as performance. Performance as process. A hell of an idea, one that’s several thousand years old, but still alive and well and living in Africa.