Visit Detroit...Seriously

This post first appeared on the website of Trebuchet Magazine and can be found here: http://www.trebuchet-magazine.com/detroit-good-really/

So you’ve heard a bit about Detroit, and you’re curious to take a trip. Maybe you’ve got business in Chicago or Toronto, and you want to tack on some extra days’ vacation. Maybe you’re an urban explorer, who likes to break into abandoned buildings to relive a piece of history and photograph the decay. Or maybe you’ve gotten on the wrong Greyhound and now you’ve got an afternoon to kill and you don’t fancy spending it in the crippled shell of a Detroit bus station. Whatever the reason, worry not, there’s a place for you in Detroit.

Sports – Lions, Tigers, and Red Wings, oh my. Detroit has been a sporting city for decades now, and even though some of its teams have had some rough seasons in the past decade (the Lions are still the only football franchise to have gone completely defeated since the introduction of the sixteen-game NFL season back in 1978, and the 2003 Tigers were the third worst ball club of all time), that just means that it’s relatively easy to pick up tickets. It’s not all bad, either. The Pistons won their division four times over the past decade and picked up an NBA national championship in 2004. The Red Wings are consistently one of the best hockey teams in America, and have hoisted the Stanley Cup more than any other hockey team in America. With the construction of a new $444 million hockey arena downtown, you won’t even need to drive to get a taste of the ice.

Arts – Detroit has one of America’s cultural gems hidden amongst the grit and grime of downtown. The Detroit Institute of Arts has one of the country’s preeminent collections of post-impressionist, modern, and post-modern art. Here you’ll find everything from Van Gogh, Seurat, Cezanne, and Degas to Picasso, Matisse, and Rodin. Spend some time in the European section and you’ll come across a few paintings from Rembrandt and Rubens. A quick jaunt to the American wing will bring you a couple from Whistler and Church, while a wing dedicated to African American artists (one of the first and only curatorial departments dedicated to the subject) will open you up to a range of painters and sculptors you may never have been exposed to. Finally, one of the most important pieces to come out of the 1930s, Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry, dominates the inner foyer and speaks to the viewer through the ages, painting a vivid scene of the intersection between capital, labor, technology, and humanity. Truly, it is a wonder to behold.

Food – If you’re in Detroit on a Saturday, head down to Eastern Market. This six-block, public, open-air market has been feeding the city since 1891, and every Saturday, hundreds of stalls compete for business with everything from food to fresh produce, cut flowers to jams and juice. Most of it comes from Michigan, Ohio, and Ontario, through there is some flown in from other, more temperate, parts of the country. Most of it is seasonal, but you’ll still be able to find some hothouse tomatoes in November, if you fancy it. For a true taste of the Midwest, head to Lafayette Coney Island where you’ll find that staple of Middle America, the chili dog, loaded down with onions, mustard, and hearty chili. There are some upscale establishments, but if you’re looking for something truly special, check out Slows Bar-B-Q, a hot stop for anyone coming through the city, with a particular focus on civic engagement. No less a vaunted publication than the New York Times has given the barbeque a write-up, highlighting it’s belief in the community and the restoration of the city.

Drink – I was a bit too poor to engage in much carousing on this latest trip, but if you, like me, are fond of the occasional dive, you could do worse than Detroit. My friends live a couple blocks from an old hole in the wall named Nancy’s Whiskey Pub. Established in 1902 in Corktown, one of Detroit’s oldest neighborhoods, Nancy’s offers live music on Friday and Saturday nights, and you won’t find a better price on beer (if you’re a fan of Pabst Blue Ribbon, that is). First timers get a free shot of whiskey, a sort of “Welcome to Hell,” that will immediately ingratiate you with all the locals. If you’re looking for some place with a bit more upscale ambience, check out the Grand Trunk Pub. There are a wealth of old speakeasies in Detroit, the Grand Trunk being one of them. All you have to do is sniff them out. Whatever you do, make sure you take a swig of local brews like those from Motor City Brewery, Bell’s, Short’s, or Dark Horse Brewing. If you’re in for something a bit softer, go for home-town originals like Vernor’s Ginger Ale or Faygo’s soda.

Architecture – During Detroit’s heyday, the city seemed to compete with Chicago for the biggest influx of art deco skyscrapers. The city has one of the country’s best collections of early 20^th century architecture. Unfortunately, most of it is in a dire state of disrepair, and many of the buildings have been slated for demolition, if the city can ever find the funds. Friends of mine know the current owner of the Book Tower, an Italian Renaissance-style building from the early 1920s. Plans are in the works to rehabilitate the building as a centerpiece of a revived downtown, though work has yet to start. The old Michigan Central Station, built in the Beaux Arts style, narrowly avoided demolition after a local resident threatened to sue, citing the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966. Plans to refurbish it as the Detroit Police Headquarters were scrapped earlier in the decade and the building remains a broken and haunting reminder of Detroit’s glory days. Finally, the Guardian Building, formerly the Union Trust Building, is a beautiful example of a wildly successful restoration, and now houses beautiful tiles from internationally known Pewabic Pottery as well as several large works by muralist Ezra Winter. Its bold art deco design as well as its close association with the city’s financial markets has earned it the nickname the Cathedral of Finance. Take a coffee in the lobby café and try not to imagine yourself as a hard-bitten detective in some gritty film noir.

Nature – You might not think it, but Detroit’s place along the river connecting Lakes Huron and Erie presents a beautiful stretch of waterfront that is hard for any other American city to match. Stuck right in the middle of the Detroit River is the 397 hectare Belle Isle State Park. Frederick Law Olmstead, who famously designed New York’s Central Park, drew up the original plans for the park, though only some of his ideas were fully incorporated. The park boasts a botanical garden, the Belle Isle Conservancy, an aquarium that has been refurbished and staffed entirely by a group of zealous volunteers, and the James Scott Memorial Fountain, which commemorates a man who no one really liked. Like everything else in Detroit, you’ll freeze in winter, but it’s perfectly brilliant from April through October.

Alternatives – Of course, there’s more than enough to keep you entertained in the city for a few days, but if you’re one to strike out on your own, then check out some of the amazing street art around Eastern Market. The Red Bull House of Art, located just around the corner from the shops, gives up-and-coming Detroit artists a chance to show off their new works. The Heidelberg Project is one man’s attempt to stave off the worst of Detroit’s collapse by building an artistic community around the abandoned houses in his neighborhood. Local resident Tyree Guyton uses everyday found objects and reconstitutes them as thematic art incorporating nearby abandoned properties. The project supports emerging artists and young adults in the inner city to challenge their perceptions on art and discover creative outlets to give back to the community. Finally, if you’re ready for a real slice of history, you can tour Ford’s River Rouge Complex, one of the oldest and largest factory complexes ever built, measuring in at over 16 million square feet of factory floor. In its prime, it operated its own dock system and boasted over 100 miles of internal rail track. During the 1920s, the factory employed over 100,000 people – a city within a city – and acted as the centerpiece for Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry.

So, if you’ve never thought much of Detroit, let me say that now is the perfect time to think about visiting. With the city on the verge of a historic bankruptcy case, there is a real danger that Detroit will lose many of the things that make it so special. Belle Isle has already been leased off to the state of Michigan, who will oversee its transformation and restoration and inevitably charge for admission to the site, one of the few green spaces formerly freely available to inner city residents. The Detroit Institute of Arts may be forced into selling off some of its most prized possessions, including paintings from Van Gogh, Matisse, and Rembrandt, among others. Christie’s auction house has already embarked on an appraisal of the collection. The Heidelberg Project has faced numerous challenges over its 25 year history, most notably the threat of arson. The day after I was there, the House of Soul, a wood-paneled house covered in records from hundreds of various artists, burnt to the ground.

Finally, like any city on the rise, gentrification will start to take its toll on the city’s current bohemian vibe. Already, major retailers such as Whole Foods have moved into Midtown, and while we should welcome the city’s revitalization, such developments always have a price. Get in while the dirt and the grime is still a part of the city. You can’t understand Detroit without it, and once it’s gone, the city will be that much poorer.

Those Detroit Blues

Note - This article originally appeared on the website of Trebuchet Magazine and can be found here: http://www.trebuchet-magazine.com/detroit-just-bad-really/

No city evokes the sense of urban, industrial decay quite like Detroit. Once America’s fourth largest city, Detroit has fallen to eighteenth in the latest census, losing nearly a quarter of its population in the last decade alone. Houses stand empty and abandoned, often the victims of arson attacks and metal thieves. Packs of feral dogs roam the streets.. Unemployment hovers around 19%. Three of five children live below the poverty line, half of the city’s streetlights are no longer operational, and you could get a pizza delivered to your burgled house before the police get there.

Despite all this, Detroit is on the up-and-up. Young professionals are moving back into the city centre. Artists and musicians are taking advantage of the fact that property prices are at an all-time low, and upscale shops like Whole Foods are settling in to Midtown. Friends of mine recently bought a house in the historic Corktown neighborhood, just outside downtown – three bedrooms, two bath – for $60,000. Detroit has a wealth of art and cultural experiences still at hand.

It is criminal how overlooked this post-industrial gem really is, and I’m here to change that. In the first of this two-part series, I’ll be looking at the city’s rise and fall. How did Detroit go from industrial behemoth to Mad Max-inspired wasteland? Does it really play host to a secret race of mole-people? Just how bad is it really? In the second, I’ll try to convince you that, yes, Detroit is a city that is worth your time.

Much of early America’s wealth came from the vast untapped resources at its disposal. Detroit started out as a French fur trading post back when beaver skin top hats were all the rage. The city grew throughout the 19^th Century as several Gilded Age resource barons took advantage of Michigan’s timber fields and copper deposits. However, it took a transport and manufacturing revolution for the city to really take off. In 1903, Henry Ford founded the Ford Motor Company, a move that would turn Detroit into the world’s automotive capital, The Motor City.

As a manufacturing powerhouse, the city became a key component in America’s “arsenal of democracy,” during World War II. Detroit alone accounted for nearly one-quarter of the United States’ tank production over a five-year period. After the war, factories transitioned from planes and tanks back to automobiles, spurring a car culture and suburban sprawl that would eventually lead to the city’s undoing. As the burgeoning interstate highway system clawed its way through the city, massive concrete, six-laned arteries took middle-class families out of the crowded city center and into an ever-sprawling suburbia.

Detroit was at its zenith in the 1960s. Over two million people called the city home and enjoyed the country’s highest income per capita. By 1960, one in six Americans were employed directly or indirectly by the auto industry, but it wasn’t all blue-collar car guys. Culturally, Detroit could compete with any other American city in terms of music, art, and entertainment. Motown Records started up in Detroit in 1959, cranking out 110 top ten hits in a decade. Diana Ross, The Four Tops, The Jackson 5, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, The Temptations – all hit it big recording in the Motor City.

Today the city’s music scene might be better known for Sixto Rodriguez, the aged folk guitarist who was at the center of the Academy Award-winning documentary Searching for Sugar Man. His Establishment Blues (1970) spoke to Detroit’s slowly evolving political/economic crisis as the latter half of the century unfolded –

“Garbage ain’t collected, women ain’t protected
Politicians using people, they’ve been abusing
The mafia’s getting bigger, like pollution in the river
And you tell me this is where it’s at.”

He wrote those words a few years after the Twelfth Street riot, one of the most destructive civic disturbances in American history. Over the course of several days 43 died, over 1000 were injured, and more than 2000 buildings were destroyed. The riots prompted massive urban flight, especially of the white population, to the outlying suburbs.

The city had always had its racial tensions, as did most of the Midwestern United States during the Great Migration, the movement of former slaves from Southern states to Northern manufacturing towns at the turn of the century. The competition for low-skill, blue-collar jobs was fierce and helped to radicalize a strong following for the Ku Klux Klan. However, the death knell for any chance at racial integration in Detroit came not through violence or race hatred, but through a 1974 Supreme Court case, Millikan vs. Bradley, which held that de facto racial segregation in schools, through district housing policies and redlining (charging blacks more for banking credit, health insurance, etc.) had to prove intent to be considered in violation of US law. In other words, policies that produced overlapping class and racial inequalities were not segregationist. This all but guaranteed white flight from Detroit’s inner city, as anyone with money fled to more affluent areas.

By the time the 1980s rolled around, Hollywood gave us Robocop, Paul Verhoeven’s hyper-violent (for the time) cop flick about a crime-ridden hellhole where mega-corporation Omni Consumer Products own the police, and mafia bosses share power with business execs.

Sci-fi dystopia is meant as a warning. It should never be this prescient.

As housing prices plummeted, property taxes did as well. Services suffered. Police and fire systems faced severe cuts. The city tried to raise taxes to offset lost revenue, prompting even more migration into neighboring, lower-tax counties, thus further eroding the tax base. Despite falling population, the city had difficulty cutting services to match their diminished needs and continued to fund lucrative pension schemes on a borrowed dime. The city now has twice as many pensioners as public employees, and it can hardly afford to pay any of them.

Desperate to clean up the pension problem that hammered any chance at a balanced budget, in 2005, Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick engineered a $1.44 billion deal with Wall Street, leaning on derivatives and complex credit swaps to fund the failing pension schemes. The deal imploded with the financial collapse and now represents nearly one-fifth of Detroit’s $20 billion debt.

(A quick sidebar on Kwame Kilpatrick. If you, like me, love a good story about slowly unfolding, long-running train wrecks of hilarious, humiliating, brazen, and absurd corruption. You will love Kilpatrick. Detroit’s mayor from 2002 to 2008, he was recently sentenced to 28 years in prison for crimes including mail fraud, wire fraud, racketeering, obstruction of justice, and tax evasion. Beyond the blatant corruption, he is probably best known for hosting a party at the mayoral mansion that involved several exotic dancers. When Kilpatrick’s wife returned home early, she attacked one of the women, Tamara Greene AKA ‘Strawberry,’ and sent her to the hospital. Days later, Strawberry was murdered in what investigators suspected was a deliberate hit by a member of the Detroit Police Department. Kilpatrick continually meddled in the case, removing special investigators and costing the city millions in wrongful termination lawsuits. Kilpatrick’s full biography really has to be seen to be believed.)

Today, Detroit is on the verge of a historic bankruptcy case, one that will decide the future of the city. The Republican governor of Michigan has appointed a bankruptcy lawyer to govern the city’s finances. If the city defaults, pensioners will receive pennies on the dollar for their retirement plans, the city will be forced to cut even more essential services, and the Detroit Institute of Arts may have to sell off some of its impressive collection of modernist and post-modernist art to keep the doors open.Despite all of this, the city is still an impressive monument to a specific time and place in American history, and, I firmly believe, it is on the up and up. I have recently spent several days in the city, and I fell in love with it. In the next article, I will tell you why you should check it out and why a city that is so far gone still has so much left to offer.

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.

Make the Money, Change the Game

In my last post, I compared Bulawayo, Zimbabwe to Monrovia, Liberia in that they are both cities that have suffered terribly from mismanagement and negle3ct in the last several decades, such that a visit to either feels like one has walked into a stage piece from 1978. Neither city has experienced much new construction in the last thirty years, and this is evident in everything from cracked pavement to broken streetlights, from faded paint to rusted steel.

However, there is another way in which Zimbabwe and Liberia compare, and this one is far more disconcerting for the average traveler - the use of the United States dollar as the main unit of domestic exchange.

If you've traveled often through any region of the world, you're probably used to operating a kind of internal forex everywhere you go. You may go to the ATM or use traveler's checks (do people still use traveler's checks? I honestly have no idea), but the end result is a proliferation of colorful new bank notes in various denominations, a plethora of new coins in different shapes and sizes, and a clean slate of personal knowledge on what costs how much where.

In West Africa, I had to remember that a dollar was equivalent to roughly 500 cfa, but that in Ghana, a dollar was roughly the same as one cedi. Okay, one hurdle jumped, but then there were the new prices and the old prices, a result of a World Bank sponsored revaluation exercise. A banana might cost 500 cedi, but that was the old price, before they cut off three zeros, so really that banana costs fifty cents. In Sierra Leone, that banana probably costs the same, only now it's 5000 Leones. If you're primarily traveling to Francophone West Africa, you'll be relatively fortunate that the cfa covers seven countries, but if you plan to leave any of the former French colonies, you'll still need to get used to the Ghanaian cedi, the Liberian dollar, the Leonean leone, and the Guinean franc, which is the same as the West African franc but with an extra zero for good measure.

To add to the mental gymnastics, one is constantly reminded that the West African monetary union drastically devalued the franc in the early 1990s, and yet the language of commerce just took it in stride and never bothered to readjust. Thus, a 1000 cfa note is often called 200, a fifty cent piece is known as a ten, and remembering the conversions and the vocabulary while negotiating over a pack of oranges can quickly become a frustrating but occasionally hilarious cultural exchange.

It's a bit easier in Southern Africa. The South African rand has fallen to 10ZAR : 1USD. Lesotho's Maloti is tied to the rand. In Botswana, the pula is doing a bit better at 8BWP : 1USD, and in Zimbabwe, wel...

Zimbabwe, like Liberia, uses the US dollar in most day-to-day transactions. This makes sense for Liberia: the country was established as a new colony for freed American slaves in 1822 and gained its independence twenty-five years later. Its political end economic systems have always been linked to those of the United States. It has its own currency, the Liberian dollar, which is pegged to the US dollar at 75 LRD : 1 USD. The two are easily interchangeable, and, owing to their historic ties, the use of the US dollar doesn't seem strange at all.

Zimbabwe, on the other hand, uses a hodgepodge of US dollar, South African rand, and even Botswanan pula. Zimbabwe has no currency of its own, at least not lately.

Some who follow African politics may remember Zimbabwe's catastrophic inflation of the last decade. This wasn't the result of the global economic crisis, or of US/EU sanctions as some here claim, but neither of those helped matters much as inflation peaked at 231,000,000% in 2008. Zimbabwe's massive hyperinflation is the second worst in the history of the world. Daily inflation peaked at 98%, meaning that prices doubled every 24.7 hours. Prices soared. If one had to buy diesel for a car or generator, it was best to buy in the morning, prices could increase many times over by afternoon.

The crisis wiped out pensions, cleared bank accounts, and reduced the country to a barter system. One lodge owner told me that he allowed a friend of his to pay for his accommodation in cans of paint. In an attempt to control prices, the state ordered police into stores and businesses, froze prices for certain goods, and commanded shop owners to roll back prices to a previous date, effectively forcing business owners to halve their prices. The same lodge owner told me he kept multiple sets of accounts to appease the authorities while keeping his business running.

Maybe you've seen the Zimbabwean dollars from that time period. In 2009, Improbable Science awarded Gilbert Gono, the head of Zimbabwe's Reserve Bank, with the IG Nobel in Mathematics. The prize is given for dubious accomplishments that make you laugh, then think. Gono won for "giving people a simple, everyday way to cope with a wide range of numbers - from very small to very big - by having his bank print bank notes with denominations ranging from one cent ($.01) to one hundred trillion dollars ($100,000,000,000,000.00). It's a feat that won't easily be matched for many years to come (or until Zimbabwe reintroduces the Zim dollar).

These dollars float around now as collectables, but if you look closely, you'll realize that they aren't collected for their design elements. With inflation rampaging out of control, these notes are often simply plain paper printed with a few numbers (many of them zeros) and a slapdash etching of a lake or a bird. At the nadir of economic collapse, the bank didn't even bother to print bills on both sides, and why would you? They were literally worth less than the paper on which they were printed.

For years, the black market in Zimbabwe used foreign currency and maintained its own floating exchange rate. Of course it was illegal, and the state railed against it while many of its highest placed officials profited from the economic chaos, using their influence to game the fixed rate versus that of the black market. Ultimately, however, hyperinflation forced the government to ditch the Zimbabwean dollar and welcome the US dollar as the new basis for the economy.

This leads to some pretty interesting exchanges in shops and on street corners.

"Two dollars, please."

Alright, here's a fiver.

"Oh, ah...do you have two dollars?"

Nope, only this and a twenty.

"Okayyy...I just need to find change. What coins do you have?"

Not enough, I have eight rand, five pula, and fifty thebe (about $1.45). 

"That's fine. It's better to have change anyway. Thank you!"

This may seem like an odd interaction, but it's happened to me several times now. To make matters worse, many ATMs only spit out $100 bills. The first time I used one, it gave me five options: 100, 200, 400, 500, 1000. I thought to myself, "They can't surely mean..." They did. Your only options with many ATMs are clean, crisp, $100 bills.

It's then necessary to spend about two hours wandering around looking for change. The banks don't want to give their limited smaller bills away. Neither does Western Union. Street vendors just laugh when you ask if they can break a bill, and the various shops around town just send you down the street in a never-ending game of cat and mouse. 

If you ever can find some change, you're presented with a series of bills in a degree of usability that decreases with the denomination: crisp $100 bills, slightly ruffled fifties, still usable twenties, grimey tens, and fivers that are worn, dirty, and tattered.

And dollar bills? Well, alright, have you ever been to a smoker's house, and I mean a smoker who's smoked for the better part of six decades, not a stressed out master's student who is, at this point, surviving solely on coffee and cigarettes. I mean someone like, say, your great aunt. Okay, so you know how your great aunt has that couch that's been around for years and is probably stuffed with asbestos? It has to be stuffed with asbestos. There's literally no other way to explain the multitude of cigarette burns that have yet to burn the house down. Okay, so you're a kid, and your and has this couch, and it's dirty. Besides getting a contact buzz from the nicotine embedded in the fabric of the thing, it's never been cleaned, and your great aunt's seven cats have shed and yakked and and loved and lived and probably died all over this couch for fourteen years, each. And your great aunt has sat with her TV dinners and cigarettes watching Jeopardy since whatshisname hosted, that guy before Trebek. Merv Griffith. Ya, and you're a kid, and you're bored, and you're digging your hand in the cushions of the couch because you don't understand germ theory nor do you care about personal hygiene (a quality that some of us maintain long into adulthood). And there, between the metal frame of the pull-out bed that your cousin Gary had to sleep on for three years after his wife left him, is a snag of paper. And you pull, and squirm, and you finally manage to reclaim a dollar bill that was long ago lost to humanity. The thing is more brown than gree, it's been folded and handled so much that it feels like silk, and it smells like a sewer, but you don't care because that thing can buy you a coke and a candy bar (this is back in the day we're talking about after all). So you go out to the nearest gas station, and you hand that thing over to the wheezing, diabetic old woman watching the pumps like a hawk, like a sleepy, obese, rheumatoid hawk, and you walk out with a Dr. Pepper and a bag of Skittles to irritate the shit out of your parents with a sugar-induced game of hey, hey, hey, hey...hey, hey...pay attention to me, PAY ATTENTION TO ME.

You know what I'm talking about, right?

These are the only dollar bills that have ever made it to Zimbabwe.

It's not like the country has a direct line of credit to the US mint. These things get passed around and recirculated ad nauseum. New money must come into the system eventually, probably through traveling diplomats, businessmen, and criminals (sometimes all three embodied in the same individual). It is, after all, relatively easy to transport bills internationally. The same cannot be said of coins. Anything below a dollar is paid for in rand and pula from neighboring South Africa and Botswana. 

They've set the exchange rate at 10 rand to the dollar, so it makes the math relatively easy, but there's little to prepare you for paying for a drink and getting your change in three different currencies.

I've even seen quite a few $2 bills here. Most Americans, I'm sure, aren't even aware that they still produce $2 bills. I have a few left over from when I was a kid, but using them in daily transactions is about as common as using the Sacajawea dollar coin. Can you even name who's on the $2 bill. 

It's ahh...shit. It's Fillmore isn't it? Millard Fillmore?

It's Jefferson, bitches.

There's been some talk of reintroducing the Zimbabwean dollar, but after a senior politician (read: Mugabe) floated the idea at a recent political rally, the panic on the stock market forced the party come back and table it as a "long-term strategy." 

So grab all the trillion dollar notes that you can. One day they may be worth something. For now though, you're probably better off drawing up your own money with a pack of crayons and some scrap paper. The resulting disaster may be valued by at least one person, which is more than can be said for the Zimbabwean dollar.

Bulawayo Beats: The Mood on the Streets

It's been about a month without any worthwhile Internet, and in that time, I've completed the last 500km of my cycling trip, kicked it for a couple of weeks in rural Botswana, and have crossed the border into Zimbabwe. 

It's impossible not to have some preconceived notions about Zimbabwe. I guess that's true of most places, but Zimbabwe stands out for its notoriety on the international stage: attacks on white farmers, brutal political violence, hyperinflation, economic collapse, outbreaks of cholera, etc. Perhaps what Zimbabwe is most known for is the old man who has been in power for over three decades and has presided over one of the most staggering declines in human development outside those societies engaged in open conflict: Robert Mugabe. 

The old man is one of the dinosaurs of African politics, and Mugabe has built a reputation as the head of one of the most repressive states on the continent. You only have to research Gukurahundi, or the Third Chimerunga to come to terms with the blood that has been spilled here since independence.

Knowing all this, it was with real trepidation that I decided to cross the border from Francistown and set up shop in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe's second largest city and the main stronghold of opposition to Mugabe's rule.

Hint: It's kind of a fixer-upper.

I've been to some pretty tense places in the world. I've lived in Jos, which has experienced some of Nigeria's worst interethnic violence over the last ten years. I traveled through Côte d'Ivoire on the eve of a renewed civil war. I spent time in Liberia and Sierra Leone, two countries slowly rebuilding after decades of savage violence at the hands of brutal warlords. Hell, I even unwittingly crossed into Guinea-Bissau about an hour before a coup d'etat threatened to bring down the biggest little narco-state in the world.

All my past experiences, however, were born of chaos, and as frightening as it may seem, if you know how to navigate chaos, it becomes relatively predictable. I can't say the same of a police state, where violence is directed and the men with guns seem so much more dangerous. 

I've been in Bulawayo nearly a week now, and I'm not dead yet. This is what I've learned so far.

In all my travels, everyone I've ever heard speak about Zimbabwe invariably says something along the lines of, "The scenery is unbelievably beautiful. The people are the friendliest in Africa. It's a shame what the country has become." That statement is more true than I could have imagined.

This country is stupidly beautiful. It's winter here, though if you were coming from a temperate climate, you wouldn't know it. To me, it feels like an autumn day in England (at least on one of the rare days when it isn't raining). During the day, it's dry, sunny, and warm. At night, the temperatures fall to just above freezing. To me, it's perfect, but Zimbabweans seem to have inherited the English predisposition to complain about anything and everything. I recently overheard someone at a cafe say, "See, this is the problem with the weather during this time of year. If you sit in the sun, you get too hot, but if you sit in the shade, you need a jumper." You've heard of 'first world problems,' this is a decidedly 'privileged Zimbabwean problem.'

The people are also ridiculously friendly. I seem to have learned over the course of many travels (to my detriment) to ignore most people who accost me on the street. "Excuse me, sir, how are you..." often leads to a market stall selling trinkets, a Moroccan rug dealer, or a man who will perform back alley exorcisms (Nigeria can be a very, very strange place).

I've become so used to this kind of street harassment that I often shrug it off and ignore 98% of people I pass by on any given day (a habit that has served me well in New York and London). So when I was stopped in the street by a young guy with dreadlocks, asking me if I'd like to come to a watch his traditional dance group rehearse, I immediately thought, "Right, how much is this going to cost me slash where will you take my harvested organs?"

To my surprise, my organs were not harvested, nor was I made to sit and drink tea while someone tried to foist an old djembe on me. It was a rehearsal for a music and dance troupe who performed traditional Shona, Ndebele, Kalanga, and Tswana dances. They'd traveled all around Africa and even into Europe for competitions, and damn, were they good. They asked nothing of me and were just excited to meet me and have me in their company. I haven't felt so welcome among strangers in a long time.

Other Zimbabweans just seem to really love people. Not since I was in West Africa have I had so many strangers greet me on the streets or from moving vehicles, but whereas in West Africa I always had the fleeting suspicion that my rarity as a white foreigner evoked normally reserved smiles and excited shrieking children, in Zimbabwe, I feel like a well-known neighbor out for a stroll. 

Like any beloved neighbor, the people on the street are quick with a joke and a wink to lead you through the drudgery of the everyday. Crossing through a busy parking area, I found myself trapped behind a car that was attempting to pull out of a parking space and into traffic. Forward a bit, then reverse, a bit to the side, do a quick three pointer, wait, go, stop, back again, stop, wait for it...wait for it...reverse one more time for good measure, drop the clutch, and...damn, stalled. Having to break stride and try to find a way around this idiot, a man in a suit casually remarked, without even looking my way, "Ya, the traffic here is annoying," before continuing on his way without another word. I imagine his quip brought a wry smile to his face, matching the one on my own.

Then there's the other side of the coin. The landscape is beautiful; the people are amazingly friendly. It's just a shame what's become of the country.

Bulawayo is like a city trapped in time. I haven't experienced anything quite like it. The closest memory I can find is that of the Liberian capital, Monrovia. There, as here, walking about gives you the sense that the city planners decided sometime in the mid-1980s that they just weren't going to bother building anything anymore. There are literally no modern buildings, nothing new and exciting, just cheap steel, cheaper concrete, and faded paint. You get this vibe like the cities' civil engineers just up and decided, "Meh...good enough"  and went on to do other things. 

In Monrovia, you could understand this. Other things included 'not dying,' as various rebel groups rampaged through the city. The bullet holes that pockmark nearly every building are a constant reminder of the country's civil war and the two decades of hell meted out by the various warring factions. In Bulawayo, there's no such evidence, nor, unless you study the country's economic history and the city's role in manufacturing for commercial agriculture, any overt reason as to why the city is a throwback to Margaret Thatcher, Live Aid, and early episodes of "MacGyver." 

Sometimes, this kind of 'stuck in time' atmosphere is appealing. The village center in my home town hasn't changed much since the turn of the century, and if you passed through, you might consider it 'quaint.' It's maintained its 'Americana' appeal through a series of family businesses - a pharmacy, a hardware store, a clock shop. Get anymore quaint and you'd expect to find a toffee shop next to a cobbler's. 

No one, on the other hand, sees architecture from the late 70s and thinks, "Oh that's quaint." Certainly not in a country's second-largest city. Instead, you have to sit back and wonder, "What happened? Why has this city died? Why has it suffered like this?"

And who designed those streetlamps?

Stop and think about it for a moment. We're so used to development and construction that it's difficult to imagine any prosperous urban landscape as anything other than what it is at our present moment. Memory is imperfect, and unless you're specially attuned to the creative destruction of the modern city, it's hard to remember that that Starbucks used to be a newspaper agent's, that that boutique used to be a hardware store, or that that ATM used to be a telephone booth that stank of hobo piss. Maybe you can remember specific examples of what used to be, but when an entire neighborhood has changed, it's difficult to piece together the previous landscape of the street.

Not so, Bulawayo. If you could travel back ten years, then twenty, you'd find the same buildings, maybe with a fresher coat of paint. Maybe the clock on city hall would still be working, instead of being stuck at 4:35 on one side and 11:22 on the other. Other than that, your only clues would be the current fashions and cell phones.

Doesn't matter. Africa time.

The city is haunted by a former prosperity and seems to manifest the old cliche 'down on its heels.' Sidewalks are cracked; the roads are filled with potholes. The streetlights are mostly broken, their faded blue paint wracked with rust and decay. You see a strange mix of cars that speak to the disparity of wealth in the country: a brand new Mercedes Benz next to a well cared for but worn Nissan Sunny, Toyota Landcruisers standing alongside ancient Mazdas, all of them parked behind meters that haven't worked for decades.

Probably for good reason..

The large park in the center of town has the feel of an abandoned Soviet-era amusement park. Weeds choke out any flowers that might have been, termites swarm over grass and tree, the playgrounds and monuments are littered with styrofoam takeaway containers, cans, and broken bottles.

Brought to you by Stalin's ghost...

the lovely people at Chernobyl...

and depressing monuments worldwide.

For me, Bulawayo may be synonymous with 'neglect' or 'decay,' and I have to wonder whether this city is indicative of what's happened in the rest of the country. I've heard that there haven't been any new roads built since independence, that sanitation, water, and electricity have all suffered from years of austerity, not the kind we speak of in the west, where politicians tell us we have to tighten our belts, but the kind of austerity that comes instead from literally having no money left in the bank. Recently, Zimbabwe's finance minister admitted that the entire country had $217 left in the treasury. That's less money to run a country than I pulled out of an ATM last week. I recently met an education official who confided that the Ministry of Education had $20,000 to spend for the entire month of May. That's supposed to cover books, teachers' salaries, infrastructure improvements, etc. It invariably doesn't.

It'd be easy to get down on Zimbabwe in general and Bulawayo in particular, but that's not my intent. I've loved the last few days I've spent here, in part because of the beautiful weather and the beautiful character of the people. 

There's another reason as well though, one that leaves me optimistic for the future. Everywhere I've gone in Bulawayo, I've seen people on bikes. You look alongside major roads, and there are cycle lanes running in every direction. Indeed, there are cycle lanes everywhere. They're ancient, for sure. Most of the signs are rusted and worn, but the paths are in great shape and can take you wherever you want to go. It's incredible to see so many people cycling, more than I'd see in most major American and even some European cities. Certainly more than I've seen anywhere else in Africa. At a time when Americans are introducing bike shares to cities like Chicago, DC, and New York, arguing over cycle lanes, traffic restrictions, helmets, and whether or not cyclists should be treated as pedestrians, vehicles, or some kind of hybrid motopeople, the people of Bulawayo are just cycling along to work and school without any thought as to whether they're being progressive, health conscious, or environmental. For them, it's just the best way to get around. 

And look like the f***ing boss while doing it.

And I know that many are on bikes because they can't afford cars, that if the city hadn't suffered through thirty years of mismanagement and neglect that the streets might be crammed with all manner of vehicles spitting out smog and carcinogens, but here's the thing: modern life is cyclical. We pick up new habits to save time or better our health, and then put them down again when we realize that, actually, the old ways were better. Our cities sprawl and we leave public transport for personal vehicles before we get tired of sitting in traffic for three hours and we start to wonder if maybe it'd be nicer to live closer to work in a revitalized downtown. We ditch butter for margarine before we realize that margarine tastes terrible and only kills you quicker. We eat more meat because we can afford it and it's cheaper before realizing that the meat industry is actually terrible and all that beef is clogging our arteries. We move to office jobs from the blue collar world of physical exhaustion at the end of the day only to realize that we need now to get some kind of exercise or risk turning into a soft, pasty pile of dough. Sometimes you just need to hit bottom before creative destruction kicks in and you can build yourself up again.

In that regard, Bulawayo may be well positioned to rise into a progressive, modern city. Don't make any mistake: Bulawayo will rebound. It's decline came about in part because of violence and instability, because of disastrous fiscal policies and hyperinflation, but like the rest of the country, it is well positioned for a renaissance. The only question is whether the economic and political climate will bless the city with rain after such a prolonged drought (metaphorically speaking). 

We can rebuild it...we have the technology.

I think it will come about. For some reason, the bike lanes give me hope. In this beautiful land, with brilliant, friendly people, you have to believe that the better angels of our nature can overcome the demons in office. I'm optimistic that can happen, and I'm looking forward to the day it does.