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.

The Woman behind the Wheel

I went down to the Copacabana the other day. Yes, the hottest spot north of Havana, where music and passion were always in fashion...until the present day that is.

In Harare, the Copacabana is a taxi rank. The area used to house the Copacabana nightclub. It closed down decades ago, but the name stuck, as it has in several other African countries I've been to (for some reason I can't understand, maybe Barry Manilow was big here?).

Either way, Copacabana is one of the major places to catch a kombi to various parts of the city, and I've been doing so quite regularly for several weeks now. I was a bit surprised, then, when, upon reaching the kombi rank that would take me out to my regular café on the Chisipiti route, I noticed a woman in a bright, coral-colored sun hat ushering people into the car. Usually, that is a job reserved for men. The guys that do this are typically conductors, leaning halfway out of speeding cars calling out the various destinations on the route “Sipiti! Sipiti!” for Chisipiti, “Bare, Bare, Bare!” for Mbare township, or just waving four fingers on their left hand for those cars speeding toward the Fourth Street kombi rank. These guys handle the money, call out stops for the driver, and provide general entertainment as they contort their bodies into whatever space is left in a cramped, overcrowded bus.

I didn't think much about the woman until we were well on our way. I was immersed in a book when I noticed that the radio, rather than blaring the usual mix of Zimbabwean contemporary, gospel, or reggae, was tuned to a talk radio program about financial planning. “It’s important to have a savings account,” the guest speaker said, “I speak to so many people who say, ‘I don’t trust the banks, I keep my money at home under the mattress.’ Why? I say. It is important to control your spending and to keep a budget by having a savings account.”

An odd choice for a kombi ride, but one, I felt that was important. It was like a ride-along with good sense.

Then I noticed a bright, coral-colored hat perched atop the driver’s head. It was the woman I had seen in the kombi rank. She was driving the car!

Now, this might not seem like a big deal to the typical Western audience, but I can count on one hand the amount of women kombi drivers I have ever seen in my three-plus years in Africa. I can remember riding along with only one other female kombi driver, and I remember how struck I was by her presence.

It’s just not something you ever see. Kombi drivers are aggressive. They work long, hard hours and spend a lot of their time in the transport yards, areas known for being rough and tumble, full of thieves, pickpockets, and general ne’er-do-wells.

I’m not sure if women are more likely to listen to talk radio, or whether this woman was an exception, but here I was, on a twenty-minute journey across town listening to a radio program extolling the benefit of savings accounts. 

(Most Zimbabweans don’t trust the banks after losing everything in 2008’s wholesale economic collapse. The banks are back up, but most of them lack the liquidity to make serious loans. The loans that are made often carry 18 to 20% interest because, again, the banks’ money supply is non-existent.)

Instead of being assaulted by reggae or American hip hop, I was instead treated to sound financial advice at a reasonable volume (this too should not be understated). I began to think about the nature of kombis – an attentive audience stuck in a cramped taxi with nowhere to go – and realized that they are the perfect vehicle (pun not intended) for communicating ideas via radio. If only more kombi drivers played these kind of programs, think of how much better-off the average Zimbabwean could be.

Part of me wishes that this was just one enlightened kombi driver, but I think it was more than that. I think the woman’s gender had a direct role in what she played for her passengers. Like an attentive mother hen, she was responsible not only for our safety but for our well-being.

There might be arguments to be made for gender differences in radio programming, or a preference for music or speech, but I won’t make them here. On one typical weekday morning, however, I was shocked and pleasantly surprised to hear some productive information from a kombi stereo. I only hope others listened as closely as I did.

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.