Africa notes 12/01/14

I was once recommended a writer who’d spent more time than anyone else in Africa, forty-something years in as many countries, he said the one thing that Africa teaches you is patience. That Africa forces you to become patient, erodes any sense of time pressure or hurry that you may have still harboured when you came off the boat or the plane to live here. That in Africa to wait ten hours in a bank is normal, to have no water for three days is not unusual. A bus scheduled to depart at 19h00 may only leave at 21h00 to go and get fuel, and then breakdown at 23h00. To wait for someone to return your call or email is to wait indefinitely. It is not necessarily rude to arrange a meeting and then not be there yourself when the person you invited arrives. An instantaneous bank transfer can easily take ten days to clear. Loans and applications for land may well take years to be considered. Yet, I have not become more patient after 8 years in Africa. I mean it is not patience that I feel, it is my own death that I sense when everything moves at such a snail’s pace you can watch yourself ageing, decaying, dying  before your very own eyes. Maybe that’s what the writer said, not patience exactly but that Africa teaches you how to wait. Ok, yes, we wait, but not because we know that at the end of the rainbow is the thing we have been waiting for but out of morbid resignation to the fact that even when it comes the news will be bad news. Come back tomorrow. Still we wait. Is this really the same continent that we fell in love with when we arrived – camera in hand – all full of energy and empty notebooks. A land full of red earth and beautiful smiling women with buckets of water on their heads, where sunsets are golden and ethereal. Why does the relentless heat that you once enjoyed now burden your weary heart, and drain you of all energy. Go home, friends say. But, I say, I am home.