The lyrics had been bouncing around my head for the last two days. Some songs come and go, others stick in your brain when they happen to strike the right note and refuse to leave. This is one of those this morning. Intellectual house guests with no shame in overstaying their welcome. Hanging on until you find the right person to pass them onto. Waking up for my first lecture as a journ student, they were still kicking around, terrible at taking a hint.

Some want to be war correspondents. Others want to write fiction. One guy wants to do lifestyle pieces in the newspaper.

It’s a short walk to class in the February sun that I have no doubt I will come to miss dearly when Grahamstown’s winter arrives at some distant point. There is a coffee shop two doors up from me. The proper kind, where they grind the beans and draw the espresso in front of you. Realising I can leave my front gate and have a brand new coffee in my paws in less than five minutes, I can see habit that will be quick to learn and impossible to defeat. Such glee.

Five minutes to coffee. Fifteen to the journalism building. Exactly enough time to finish drinking without burning myself. Everything fits like it was meant to.

One by one, my classmates and I claim our seats randomly in the seminar room. Little fiefdoms from which we smile and try to learn a little more about each other. Stories are slow to be exchanged. Nerves and wondering – trying to fit little boxes onto each other, I guess. It’s the easiest first move in any room full of strangers. But it doesn’t last as the course coordinator pushes each of us for our stories in turn. Who are you? What has your journey to this room over the years entailed?

On an initial telling, each of our stories are nothing like the others; nothing like I had imagined. Some seem to have traveled half the world. Some not at all. Some want to be war correspondents. Others want to write fiction. One guy wants to do lifestyle pieces in newspapers.

It’s what is not explicitly said in the many stories of the journeys to this room, to wanting to learn what each of us thinks it is we will learn here, that is really interesting. Almost everyone has made a commitment to pursuing something different to the life they knew before. To realise some unquantifiable desire to do something that means something. It’s a particular energy lacking in undergraduate courses. In places where people are moving in a direction that they have not wholly chosen for themselves.

In this room, everyone has explicitly wanted this. Has sacrificed something to be here. Some narrate long and fascinating paths. Others say more in the details they leave out. I can see already that there may be an energy to this year that only a room full of conviction might create. When paths that people have chosen, that they believe in intersect, really interesting things can happen.

Never seen the sun shine brighter. And it feels like me on a good day.

Related posts:

1. As Good a Reason to Write

It’s been an adjustment – barely five days’  space between arriving back from Cairo to carrying a car’s worth of life into my little cottage.  While the swiftly changing scenery – and life – has meant that I have thus far successfully avoided post-adventure depression, my new life and environment at Rhodes University is quite different from anything I left in November last year.

In a way, moving here and enrolling was the simplest thing in the world. Just a car trip, some paperwork and a bit of organising away from the space I occupied before. In other respects, it’s one of the scariest things I’ve ever done.

I am sure that I will stop doing it in time, but it is hard not to articulate the inevitable comparisons between Rhodes and my previous experiences of undergrad at the University of the Witwatersrand. Where Wits was a disorganised behemoth, Rhodes is a nimble rogue. Where Wits sprawled with its tens of thousands of students across four or five campuses, Rhodes has but one, sprinkled liberally (pun intended) with Arts majors and a few Science, Journ. and Law folk thrown in for seasoning. Most striking, however, is that where Wits is forever associated in my head with the purple flowers of the Jacaranda tree, Rhodes appears to have not a one. In their place, mixed in with the gravel of pavements, the grass of sidewalks and so many local gardens are tiny little red seeds.

Growing up, I was taught that they were called ‘lucky beans’. It was never clear why they were lucky, except that it was definitely not if you ate them. Oh the useful things I learned as a child. It is only many years and an Internet later that I have learned that they come from the Coral Tree, were used as lucky charms in the past and are sometimes planted on the graves of chiefs.

It’s funny how, of all the things to fixate on and associate this place with, it is the lucky bean that has become stuck in my mind. Not the occasional donkeys in the street. Not the people swearing in Afrikaans the way it was meant to be sworn in. Not even the skies of the Eastern Cape that seem somehow to stretch further, to cover more than their brethren elsewhere. All of these things are here, making life outside the front door as entertaining as it will be educational (from tomorrow, when lectures start). It is the tiny little lucky bean, though, that is this place for me.

Whether they are lucky or not, they are most definitely colourful.

In a way, moving here and enrolling was the simplest thing in the world. Just a car trip, some paperwork and a bit of organising away from the space I occupied before. In other respects, it’s one of the scariest things I’ve ever done. People are not supposed to pursue seriously divergent ways of thinking and being. We create our own pressures to be armies of specialists, not adventurous generalists. So I worried. Worried whether the people from my life in Johannesburg would understand and stay close, or chalk me up as a reckless dreamer and drift.

With every day that passes, I see more beans. And I realise that people, deep down, feel similar pulls in their own lives. Wanting to do the things that matter to them the most, I am realising that I shouldn’t be surprised that people understand. Everyone is, after all, looking for their own lucky beans – that chance to squeeze fate until it yields. I am thankful that this place has buried me in them.

Related posts:

1. Rhodes Redux

I came across the piece, titled “Could the 2010 World Cup Cause a Food Shortage” on the Matador Network’s sports section and can’t let it go unchallenged. In particular, I have two objections to this piece. The first, and most easily dealt with, is that I feel it is wholly incorrect.

It suggests that there may be severe food shortage in the country, caused by food price inflation as price gouging of tourists in the country for the world cup causes basic staples to become unaffordable to the average South African.

Read the piece if you are feeling temeritous, and if you still think there is merit to the claims, I shall wager you a beer they will not come to pass.

The first rebuttal to this claim is that there is no plausible evidence for it. The economists quoted in the piece only claim a 1.1% – 1.2% likely rise in the cost of food. This is then paired with a link to an alarmist post in a blog on food gardening to hyperbolise the estimate to between 200% and 500%. I am not going to justify the facile views on supply and demand economics and supply chains in Living Seeds with a full rebuttal. Read the piece if you are feeling temeritous, and if you still think there is merit to the claims, I shall wager you a beer they will not come to pass.

So we are unlikely to see pentupled food prices across the economy simply because there is a world cup on. Even if we were to entertain this notion, tying it to child abandonment and causing a borderline famine is misleading in the extreme. While it is true that poorer South African households are struggling with issues of food security, this has less to do with food price inflation putting previously affordable food out of reach as it does with rampant HIV mortality destroying household incomes altogether.

Where malnutrition exists – and it does – it is disingenuine to tie it to some briefly correlating event like a world cup. It is also more than a little simplistically offensive to the large body of academic work on the problem to draw such conclusions, not to mention wholly unhelpful in mobilising support for what is an important issue (HIV) instead of some fad du jour.

Ok. That’s my spleen vented towards the logical substance of the post. These points could all be supported with further arguments, but if you really take issue with any of my conclusions, and honestly think that food prices will inflate to the point that orphan abandonment and famine will come knocking, then make your case in the comments and I will deal with you.

And so we come to Mr Kurtz and Heart of Darkness.

It’s understandable, even slightly funny on occasion, when people believe that South Africans keep elephants in their back yards, or that schools close in the event of lions nearby. If you couldn’t be expected to know better. And if you are not a participant in reinforcing such views.

It’s understandable, even slightly funny on occasion, when people believe that South Africans keep elephants in their back yards, or that schools close in the event of lions nearby.

It gets more than a little under my skin for a writer – nay, an editor – of a publication such as Matador to propagate such stereotypes. South Africa is not Ethiopia of the 1980s. Hell, not even Ethiopia is Ethiopia of the 1980s. While turning out interesting copy is important, and world cup-related writing is relevant, those considerations should not outweigh trying to avoid reinforcing the worst of the world’s one-dimensional stereotypes of Africa. Particularly when the story is untrue. And more so when it can be shown so by the most rudimentary fact checking.

Flame me if you want, but I am going to stick up for my corner of the world. I love Matador as a publication generally, but don’t feel inclined to let this slide. South Africa isn’t perfect – god knows we have enough problems to go around – but making up new ones and shouting them from a position of media privilege does nobody any favours.

No related posts.

But while these stories brew and strengthen like a fine ale waiting to be tapped, here is an interview on wanderingeducators.com, who caught me even before my flight had returned from Cairo and interrogated me thoroughly on my last two months.

Related posts:

1. An Interview with Sihle Khumalo
2. Five Weeks and a Phone Call
3. 48 Hours. Interview With Jonathan Haenen

He was a small, pink pig donated (or abducted, depending on your point of view) from some friends and taken along on the journey. Partly for my entertainment and partly to realise his longtime ambition of being the first stuffed animal to backpack the length of the continent. Being a stuffed animal, actually moving himself was something of a troublesome task – which was why I was involved in the project.  For much of the early part of the journey, he lived quietly inside one of my shoes, making few demands. But in Kenya, his little fluffy snout would begin surfacing for the occasional photograph. Initially when we shared a room in the Nairobi YMCA together.

Young pig. There's no need to feel down...

As we traveled, so he became my rock. A companion in the quiet times. Excellent company in the fun times. A superb pillow in the night time. Particularly when my pillow looked a little something like this.

Yes. That is, in fact a stain on that pillow. Shiver.

Indeed, he frequently gave of his time and softness without asking anything in return except the occasional photograph to send back home. It was a tough journey in places, but not without its lighter moments. Though he was always the first to fall asleep.

Of his many piglet skills, mixing beer and wine was not one of them

We passed through forests and deserts. On ferries and feluccas. Through places where nobody had ever seen a real pig. In Sudan, I was asked if he was a hippopotamus. It was a slight which he took in good humour as he forgivingly smiled at the official who asked.

Piglet surveyed the land. But there was no sign of Pooh. - Wadi Halfa, Sudan.

He was there to the last. In my right trouser pocket as we galloped past the pyramids. Finally arrived. To you piglet, I say a heartfelt word of thanks. As you depart for new adventures of your own, know that you have planted your trotters in places that no other piglet (alive or stuffed) has likely ever been.

[with a nod and a wink to the Pretoria University Debating Union]

Related posts:

1. Livingstone, I presume?
2. One Week. Packed.
3. Bittersweet Quiet.

It was Friday morning when I was in the desert. It was cold. The dust  kicked up overnight covering Cairo and much of the pyramids in what looked like a dirty fog. I was on a horse – called Black Tiger. Seriously. Plodding over the sand, the morning sun started to burn through the dust as it rose, until the pyramids came into view. They looked something like this.

The pyramids at Giza. A fitting end to the longest dream of my life.

Two days later, and I am home. Back in the shell of the house I left almost two months ago to start what feels like the longest dream of my life. I’m too tired to feel the disconnection yet. Awake enough to fear going to sleep. To fear the end of the last day of traveling. The best answer that my tired brain can produce to the question of “how was it?” is to try and imagine living what feels like a decade worth of places, discoveries and learning. Then returning and discovering you have only been gone a tiny fraction of that time. It’s like that. Narnia - only real.

It’s like that. Narnia - only real.

I am quite sure that nostalgic pining will come soon. Like a demon in the photographs, the little postcard, the journals. Lurking in every rich piece of evidence that it actually happened. Tonight it waits in the wings, knowing it will have its chance in time. That there will be a wistful smile waiting for it soon – one which will last as long as my memory does.

But tonight is a bittersweet quiet – the kind you get when you remember lost love. Smiling at what it was. And smiling in the memory that you were a part of it. Reflection can come later. The bittersweet quiet comes first.

Like Narnia. Only real.

Related posts:

1. The Piglet That Crossed a Continent
2. The Beginning of the End
3. Not Getting Left in the Desert. A Christmas Tale.

I have four moleskine books, lovingly filled to bursting with stories from tea shops to bus stops along the way. Each is crammed with things seen, things learned, things wondered about – and bundles of papers picked up here and there. Receipts, a filthy dirty one Birr note and a couple of postcards. It is one of these that slips cheekily out of the back pages and demands to be read and shared this evening.

The postcard. And a boundless bounty of stories in the books behind.

It came as a goodbye present from Maya, a backpacker I met on the ferry somewhere between Wadi Halfa in Sudan and Aswan in Egypt. She owned a journal of her last two years of travels from India to places closer to Sudan that is more art than narrative, more inspiration than information. And from its pages came a poem on the cheeky falling-out postcard. A poem given hundreds of years earlier from pages of someone else’s book – one that begs to be shared.

It was composed by a poet called Rumi, and it goes thus:

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.

You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.

People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.

The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.

Related posts:

1. Things Remembered. Things Not.
2. The Beginning of the End
3. Checking in

In my mind, I step back to this afternoon. To an unnamed Samaritan from Omdurman who sat with me through our 6 hour bus trip from Gallabat to Khartoum to make sure that I arrived in the capital safely. Who bought me lunch and took me to smoke shisha and drink chai in Gedaref en route. For no compensation, no motivation other than to make sure I felt welcome, felt like I was a guest in his country.

I have no response. No words of thanks that could ever do justice to such hospitality.

That evening, this man in the taxi refused to share the fare, insisting on paying for the taxi to take us into Khartoum city, so that he could haggle a good price for a hotel room for me. Then personally coming with me to inspect my room and leaving me his details before he carried on his way. “I leave Khartoum again tomorrow morning”, he tells me, “but if you need anything, anything at all tonight, just call me and I will come”. I have no response. No words of thanks that could ever do justice to such hospitality.

I promise myself in the morning that this is a place whose kindness, whose generosity towards me is one I owe it to myself to pay forward someday, as best I can, to some other traveler. Opening my door to go out and explore the city, I find my key in the lock – where I had forgotten it in my tiredness last night. It’s been left untouched all night. It’s unreal.

After Ethiopia, Sudan is a breath of fresh air. But all the kindness in the world doesn’t erase the fact that men and women cannot pursue the same lives here. That images of a president, brought to power in a uniform, stare down from the walls, from billboards. That buildings devoted to oil, money and state power stand as palaces next to the austere exteriors of those devoted to the betterment of people.

After Ethiopia, Sudan is a breath of fresh air. But all the kindness in the world doesn’t erase the fact that men and women cannot pursue the same lives here.

It’s a city littered with soldiers. Not the police, but the blunt instrument deployed by any state whose rulers have cause to fear its people.

Arbitrarily, my iPod skips to Juno Reactor’s City of the Sinful as I walk the Khartoum streets to the Republic Museum – created inside a church, whose memorial plaques to dead parishioners are lost behind  case after case of gifts that the president has received from foreign dignitaries. I am scowling by the time I realise that everywhere I walk in the museum, I am being followed by a giant studio light.

The Republic Museum. Epic lighting courtesy of Kuwait TV

A beaming man appears behind me and explains that they are filming a TV show for Sudan’s independence celebrations, and would I please be willing to give him a short interview. To say a bit on how I have found the country. What do I think?

What do I think?

That contradictions can’t be neatly summed up. That the generosity of some of the most warm-hearted people I have ever met cannot be summed with the actions of rulers whose ambition has killed hundreds of thousands. There is no clever phrase – no simple synthesis of everything that can express a place. Or a people. Or a life.

I think it’s a hard lesson to try to understand what it means to be able to hold both together without trying to create some total truth, some sum of it all which exists nowhere except in our own minds.

Bdr Aldeen-khalafallah Alawad, the man from Kuwait TV

My actual answer, for what I was asked – in the warm smile of the interviewer, a subtext about how I feel towards the spirit of the people I have met – is much more succinct.

I love them.

Bonus picture! Gold model tank presented to Pres. Bashir by the Military Industrialization (sic)

Related posts:

1. Not Getting Left in the Desert. A Christmas Tale.
2. The Beginning of the End
3. Chikuni Mission, Chisikesi

Lonely Planet’s Africa guide, incorrect on other matters Sudanese (like the currency having changed its name and been nationally reprinted two years ago), put the Bagrawiya ruins high on the list of Sudanese sights worth seeing. Lying north of Khartoum, on the way to the town of Atbara, they are a series of small pyramids clustered closely together, making for a rare photographic opportunity for someone wanting to treat themselves to something special for Christmas. The same someone who blithely assumed that there should obviously be a town nearby, or attached to the complex, where he could overnight on his general trek north to Wadi Halfa and Egypt.

Except, three hours into the bus ride and staring out at a barren, rocky moonscape, it was starting to become clear to said person that there is no town out here. No village. No small hamlet. No nothing. To highlight the point, a camel passed by the window. Lying dead in the rocks, staring at the passing bus. I swear to god I could not make this up if I tried.

I have brought no supplies, no tent, nothing except my daybag of electronic goodies and a backpack full of clothes, a wholly insufficient first aid kit and a stuffed toy pig

“Bagrawiya!”, the conductor pokes me, smiling, and terror sets in. Forget overnight. I would not last the day here. I have brought no supplies, no tent, nothing except my daybag of electronic goodies and a backpack full of clothes, a wholly insufficient first aid kit and a stuffed toy pig (who will be the subject of an entirely separate post on my return). Then heads turn to look outside the window and there, in the windswept desert, in the flat middle of sandy, rocky nothingness are a line of tall thin pyramids. Stretching out of the sand, like some real-life version of Ozymandias’ empire.

I am too busy panicking to remember my camera. All I can recall is being left behind as the bus roared off in Chisikesi, Zambia. Except this time it will be in the desert. And no Jesuit missionary will be coming to scoop me to safety. That electric cold feeling that you get when you are in real trouble passes through me, followed by the sickening onset of worry. I wonder how well I will be able to beg to be allowed to stay on the bus. Will I be understood? Screw my pride.

But the bus keeps going.

Bagrawiya passes into the distance behind us and I sit deathly quiet, watching the clock on the bus. Five minutes. Ten minutes. Fifteen. The bus slows to a stop. I prepare to throw every Arabic word I know at the conductor to let me stay. It’s not much.

The view outside the bus just past Bagrawiya. Not a good place to disembark.

But it’s just a security check, and the bus starts rolling on again. Twenty minutes. Fifty minutes. An hour. Nobody says a word and we just keep going. Nobody, besides me seems to have even entertained the utterly stupid thought of being able to get off at Bagrawiya. I am the last person on the bus to get on board with the we-are-going-to-Atbara vibe.

The man next to me looks over and asks “You are going where?”.

“Atbara”, I reply. And thank God quietly under my breath”.

Related posts:

1. It’s the Night Before Christmas
2. Two Sides to a Story
3. Chasing Unicorns. The Sudanese Visa.

To Egypt and the final pages of what has now become three filled journals of places, people and stories all jostling to be told. And told they will be, in time. Polished, sifted through and lovingly assembled until not a piece remains unaccounted for. In Wadi Halfa, before falling asleep one night, I had tried to recall what my mobile phone in South Africa looked like – a device I must have used dozens of times a day before I left it behind in November. I couldn’t.

Waking up, I spent an hour trying to recall instances I had used it, how I must have opened it, or dialed numbers on it. Nothing. No shape, no form of the device remains in my mind.

Trying to look back to the early days of setting off, tracing back to when I must have given it to my brother, I grinned, laughed and wistfully recalled conversations in Zambian buses lasting only minutes. Recalled watching the senior students at Chikuni mission playing football. Hearing the history of the Zimbabwean railway system from the retired rail engineer who shared my cabin between Bulawayo and Victoria Falls. Even sitting waiting for my brother to finish invigilating an exam on the morning I left.

Nothing. No shape, no form of the device remains in my mind.

All of these in detail. In colour. Held in a part of my memory somewhere that always, always finds the memories – bitter, sweet – that give me history and returns them to me as new. But no phone. Nothing.

Concerned, and slightly amused, I turn on the light for a minute. I pick up my journal and a pen and quickly scrawl before I go back to bed, grinning:

“Day 43. Lying on my bed about to go to sleep, I try to remember what my phone  looks like and I can’t. No matter how hard I try. What does that say?”

Related posts:

1. Two Sides to a Story
2. Not Getting Left in the Desert. A Christmas Tale.
3. Planning them plans and scheming them schemes