Archives de catégorie : Africa

Off to church

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Public gatherings are generally to be avoided in times of Ebola, but it’s Sunday so I thought I’d make my first stab at finding a church (which came at the expense of a beach and lobster invite from my expat friends). Many readers probably don’t share my beliefs, but let me tell you it can be a hard challenge finding a good church in West Africa, though finding any old church isn’t too tough. There’s even one quite close to my new house, and on Fridays they seem to have all night sessions with the PA system on 11.

In the west, you can hit Google and go through church websites, maybe even downloading a sermon or two. Here, you’re in the dark. So I went through some old student Christian networks and got a contact here who invited me to his church this morning. I remember meeting a Lebanese guy in Brazzaville (Congo) who told me that when you’re Lebanese you can turn up in any city in the world, and when you find your community they are more or less obligated to give you a job. Perhaps there are similarities – my contact picks me up from home, takes me to his church, takes me to visit his family in the city centre and then takes me to lunch back at his place – even though we’ve never met and don’t have any direct mutual friends. And of course, we get on very well.

A word on the church. It was on the Pentecostal side, but I still appreciated it. The choir were all in robes, that carried influences of the US south. The message dwelt on the death of a young member of the congregation who had died suddenly in his sleep during the week leaving a wife and two children. It was quite touching.

It was great to be out and about on a Sunday morning – the streets of Freetown were thronging with people heading to church in their best. So good to see life outside the restricted confines of the office. I even spotted two work colleagues in the congregation, including a member of my team. I think a lot of people are staying at home during the week because I saw a lot more life than I do Monday-Saturday. But church attendance numbers are down sharply as people do what they can to avoid Ebola. The hand washing water had run out when we arrived at the main entrance, but the key Ebola messages of avoiding human contact, washing hands, going to health services when sick and avoiding dead bodies were given from the pulpit. At one point in the service, a woman fainted. People weren’t sure what to do and the ushers didn’t have their latex gloves. Finally she was carried out – turned out she had had stomach problems and hadn’t been eating properly, but initially Ebola was in people’s minds.

Afterwards we stopped by a relative’s house in one of the old districts of Freetown. A baby girl had been born 7 days earlier, and it was now time for the naming ceremony. The house was full of relatives, and people placed cash on the baby’s belly. I was honoured to have doors opened so easily for me to see inside people’s families and homes.

GnTs and dancing in the Graham Greene house

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Yesterday, I mentioned my first invite to a friend’s place. Glad to say it was a huge amount of fun. My new friend actually only lives about 200m from my compound, in a huge family home overlooking the bay. Author Graham Greene reputedly stayed there back in the day – it was that sort of place. The host was hard at work in the kitchen putting together a shepherd’s pie. Starters was home-baked bread, with French brie hot off the plane from Dakar. The boast of the pantry was a head of broccoli (also from Dakar), which is treated as gold dust here (retail value 20 dollars). Another friend arrived to make a second dessert, and we munched, drank wine and GnTs, and tried not to talk about Ebola. There was even a guitar. The music was perfect – a mix of upbeat American pop and some jazz, with some old REM tracks thrown into the mix. We explored the house, played table tennis on the vast veranda, and set-up a regular rotation of card games, crazy dancing (just us five) and then table tennis.

It was a lot of fun. House parties are fun all over the world, so I don’t want to claim exclusive access to special evenings, but I do think there are levels of stress, exhaustion and tropical excitement here that lead to instant intimacy between people. Yes, in some ways it was one of those ‘expat in Africa’ nights. Even the simple pleasure of occasional human touches (innocent slamming hands on each either on the card deck etc) really met an amazing felt-need that particularly long-term people feel to touch again (ignoring the current Ebola advice).

The house was one of those special colonial residences you can find in Africa. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a (vast) book collection more closely alligned to my reading interests, and full of books I’d either read or listed as ‘to be read’. The house had the haunting aspect of being a much-loved family home, but without wife and kids who’d left back in July. It was full of memories and joy, and now the nostalgia of an amazing life on hold. Young children playing at hunting black mambas in the garden, long weekend nights with other families in the house followed by morning excursions to the beach. For those who knew the pre-Ebola days, it’s immensely sad. For those, like me, contemplating several years here, it’s a taste of what life could be like again soon.

Making friends

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I’ve heard it said that the older you get, the harder it is to make real friends. And that we also grow less tolerant of the patience you need to get to know people. Non-friend hobbies become relatively more attractive. We prefer a night on the sofa with a good book. As a friend of mine, Ulrich, reminded me recently in a blogpost, school days really were remarkable – seeing the same group of people Monday-Friday for years on end. People perhaps knew you better then than anyone does now. You didn’t have to find time to see your friends – you were together for hours every single day. You can’t beat that sort of interaction. But know we all live in separate houses and lives, probably for the worse.

Moving to Freetown I can definitely feel a hesitancy about forming new friendships. I’m putting my efforts into setting up life and routines, and then hopefully friendships will follow. It’s true that this is not like the summer in Bangui – this is not a temporary posting where I just need to work hard and it will soon be over. This will be home for several years of my life. But having good friends elsewhere means there’s less pressure. And I also want to find the right people – I don’t fit in perfectly with the ex-pat crowd, though I do find time with them stimulating. But sometimes the know-it-all liberalism is a bit too much. But with West Africans there can be a barrier as well – such different life experiences and priorities.

I know there are people I’ll fit in with well who are just waiting to be discovered. I get on well with most people, and friendships will develop. However, when my family arrive I won’t have so much time for outside friends, so I don’t want to develop friendships now that then aren’t sustainable later. But tonight I have my first invite out to a colleague’s house for pizza and table tennis, and I’m very much looking forward to it.

Ryszard Kapuściński: A Life, by Artur Domosławski

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If there’s one book that pushed me towards Africa, it’s probably the mix of reportage and musings in Ryszard Kapuściński’s ‘Shadow of the Sun‘. It came out just as I started buying books and after reading the review in The Sunday Times, I bought it in hardback, reading in the car on the way to the annual family holiday in Switzerland. I haven’t read it since, though I should return to it. I read everything else he published in English, including ‘The Soccer War’ several times, which I rank as one of my favourite books.

Even back then I remember wondering why the dust jackets spoke of his friendship with Allende, Lumumba and Che, and yet I never came across those stories inside. I always thought that incredible stories of meeting these men must be in some other books of his that I hadn’t yet found. It turns out that for two out of the three, they almost certainly never met.

As this biography reveals and as we all now know, RK was rather fond of the odd embellishment, enhancing the details, not correcting mistakes that made him seem bigger than he was, and casting himself as the hero of every tale. As Domosławski’s work makes clear (which I finished this morning), RK was a man hiding secrets – that he had done some minor work for the Polish intelligence services and that he had been a card carrying member of the Polish ruling party (socialist).

While RK’s reputation is not what it was, I still have a deep respect for his writing, and an ambition to follow some of his style – telling tales from the bottom up, seeking an anti-imperialist perspective, and the literary writing.

Two other things struck me in the book:

i) He was consumed by the need to write. It would eat him up, increasingly so as he got older. Even in his younger days, he would get stressed when not spending time writing, becoming angry at parties that he needed to be back home writing. The book controversially talks about his numerous affairs – often these would be broken up after a few months because he would feel they were taking him away from his writing.
ii) When you hear about Poland in the 50s and 60s, it’s remarkable what a different age it seems. People were debating ideas, fighting for causes, looking for pure principles. Do we even have idealists nowadays? People who believe in ideas and put them at the centre of their lives? Ryzard himself said a similar thing at the end – he lamented how he found the poor in Latin America no longer ambitious for reform and liberation, but simply for their own slice of Coca-cola consumerism.

RK was no model husband or father. His long-suffering wife was always there behind the scenes, but many didn’t even know she existed, and he seems to have thought little about abandoning her for long travels to far-off lands. His relations with his sole daughter make for difficult reading. Why do remarkable men frequently turn out to be terrible fathers and husbands? Is it one or the other?

Leaving Bangui

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I’m writing this on a plane over the eastern end of the Central African Republic. I left Bangui this morning at the end of my three month posting, crossed west over to Douala, and then caught this plane which is heading back over CAR at 39,000 ft to Addis. Then it’s on to Dubai.

I’m looking forward to getting back home, though tinged with the sadness that it’s only for a month or so, and a month filled with wrapping up my life and work in the UAE. Sadly that’s been the story of Dubai – somewhere where life has been good, but always only just starting, or on the long road to finishing. I sincerely hope my next post will have more of a sense of permanence, at least for a few years, and the ease of changing jobs when I decide to, not when I need to.

This plane ride is also a chance to reflect on this posting. It’s something I volunteered for and which I knew would give me valuable and interesting new experiences. It has done both those things, but trying to think about things neutrally I realise it seems pretty crazy to be paying incredibly high rates for a luxury apartment in Dubai, while slumming it in Bangui. Why do I do such things? Part of it is force of circumstance – the need to gain all the advantages possible in the transition to the next step. But it’s also about getting new experiences – another three months in Dubai would have been forgettable. Now in five years’ time when someone asks me what I did between May and August 2014, I’ll have a keen recollection of what happened.

I’m sure I’ll write more about leaving Dubai in future posts. I actually feel slightly bitter about it – though that’s probably influenced by nostalgia as I return there now. And of course compared to Bangui – life is so full of ease, luxuries, and freedoms.

The experience in Bangui was ideal though, and shouldn’t be unfairly tinged by a very stressful end. I’m sure looking back, I’ll see it as just what the doctor ordered – three months testing the water in communications. Taking my baby steps, and making mistakes there before I make them where I’ll be permanently based. It’s also confirmed in my mind that this is a good next step. Yes, on one side I’ll admit to being attracted by the financial benefits and the stability. But there are two other key things as well. Firstly, this work gets you a free (or rather well salaried ticket) to live and work in some of the most interesting places in the world. Secondly, I have had a feeling for a while that I had some skills that are not being used in journalism and that I’d like to develop and profit from. Key among these is team work and leadership – working on projects, motivating staff, doing things as a group, strategizing and building for the long-term.

At the same time, I hope I can find the time to work on other personal goals, linked to my journalistic life; improving my multimedia (particularly video and photo) skills, and working on my long-form writing (fiction and non-fiction).

The X61 (Nottingham-Leicester-Oxford)

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Here’s an email saved in the archive from August 2005 that was sent to my best friends Anna, Jason and Sam. I was on the verge of leaving a good job for a year back at university…

Every school day for seven years I walked along a small section of the X61 bus route with my friends. And so the well-laid timetable of the bus proved a useful guide to the following seven years. First stop in moving from my small sleepy market town was Nottingham for my first taste of university. Then Leicester for my first proper job. Finally I move to the third city served by the bus; its southern terminus, Oxford.

From October I’ll be among the first students starting a new M.Sc. in African studies, and I can’t wait. For me 12 months is about right at Anglia. I’ve learnt a bit about how television news works and I have to say it’s been the most enjoyable job I’ve ever done. But, I’ve come to realise that two of the goals important to me, being a good overseas journalist, and being a good husband / father, are likely to be incompatible. And so, I’m keen to waste no time in doing the former before beginning the latter.

That having been said, going to Oxford is really about experiencing something new and intellectually challenging. St. Antony’s college will give me some great contacts, a good knowledge base in African affairs, and an important boost to my credibility-lacking bid to work in Africa. While I’m single, un-mortgaged and youngish it’s an offer I can hardly refuse. And although it’s always easier to do something that you pay for, rather than that pays you, I’d rather tell my children about a year in Oxford than a second year in Norwich.

In Congo there are some bridges which consist of only a metal structure and four planks. The idea is to drive from one set of planks to the other, and then take the flooring from behind to put in front. There’s a certain insecurity from having no way back and no clear way forward.

Love

J

Plotting a return

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I arrived this morning in Dubai after three weeks of holiday in Cote d’Ivoire. The trip was a reminder of the dream narrative of returning – and why this blog is about tracking my life since leaving as I plot my next move. It’s hard to describe what I enjoy about the country – the lagoon and the greenery are beautiful, but the urban landscape outside the Plateau and old Cocody area is hardly pleasing to the eye. The humidity is regularly excessive, getting anything done can be a long process, and the place is full of people putting sticks in the spokes of apparently noble initiatives.

Nevertheless, I find it incredibly fun. Safe and fun. Safe yes – as someone who’s been travelling around the Middle East in the past year and a half, it’s nice to be in a place where the very worst that can happen on the potential risk radar is getting robbed.

And, as many a foreigner has found before on the continent, there’s the potential of what could be. I think that’s at the core of things – the feeling that this is a place where I can make the biggest contribution I can.

(Having made that last remark, I’m reminded by Paul Theroux in Dark Star Safari (a book I finished last night) that Africa is full of outsider good-will projects that last very little longer than the departure/death of their initiator.)

Returning immediately would probably be a mistake. Instead, I feel the next few years are about being somewhere else in preparation for a return. Concretely I need to come back stronger in a number of ways I’ve tried to outline below (not in order of priority). These are useful points to bear in mind because in the coming year, I need to leave Dubai, and so it’s good to have some guidelines to help me make my next move.

1. For one, my French needs to get better. I hear and read French very comfortably and usually have no problem communicating. But my communication is far from perfect. I need to be able to better distinguish correct French from Ivorian French, in order to be able to play a greater role in more intellectual circles. It’s one of those frustrating things that when you’re outside your mother tongue, your educational and intellectual capacities seem much diminished. I’d like to be able to give a decent speech, teach and write articles in French in a way that intellectuals wouldn’t find off-putting.

2. I’d like to earn enough money in the coming few years to be able to invest in things like property to give me both a place to stay in Abidjan and some level of guaranteed income. When I move back, it’s unlikely the post will be well paid, and most-probably it will be a mix of voluntary and low-paid positions. Included in this point is having prepared some sort of pension for retirement. I have two step-daughters in the final years of education, and I’d like to see them educated and established in life, while future children may need substantial funds for a lifetime of paid-education.

3. I need to develop some extra skills. I am lucky to count some amazing friends among my community in Abidjan, from published writers, artists and directors to business people and innovators. A small number have been helped in some way by my journalism, but for most, they are simply good-hearted folk who are friendly. Sometimes I even wonder what they see in me. When I return though, I think I need more skills to bring – international journalism is useful for opening internal doors in the country, but the impact is outside the country not within it. English skills are often similarly externally focused. Multimedia work will hopefully be part of the future, but I think I need more – whether that’s a particular business skill, greater excellence in multimedia, something IT related, or agricultural, I’m not sure.

4. Writing in a non-journalistic way needs to be a part of my Ivorian future. There’s the opportunity that the lack of English-language books on Cote d’Ivoire provides for someone who wants to write about the country. But also there’s simply the 10,000-hour logic, that writing is the professional activity I’ve done most in my life, and so it should be built upon. For this, I need to practice and study creative writing. Being a ‘writer’ would open up space internally and give me something so say about myself.

5. Perhaps related, I’d like to continue carving out this small niche called ‘English language expertise on Cote d’Ivoire’. That means maintaining and improving social media networks so that in the future when I want to do something (like return or publish a book), I have something established.

6. Perhaps most importantly, I need to get back to an environment where Africa (ideally West Africa) is a prominent part of the context. Ideally this would be working and living on the continent. Whatever job I do next, the place where you live provides the environment for your continual education. I feel that I am still very ignorant about much in West Africa, and I need to be close to elites and conversations about development and politics, in a way that I’m not here. While there are certain touching points (youth unemployment, over-large public sectors, and sometimes, rising radical Islam), in general the Middle East region has its own very separate set of issues.

Freelance dreams

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Last week I met up with a young British journalist who was in Dubai after just giving up a good editorial job for the freelance life. She was looking for advice on working in the region, and where to be based. I have to say that it did give me a new enthusiasm for my options in the future, and in particular a more concrete sense of how I could perhaps live in Abidjan and cover the West African region as a freelance reporter. Such a life would have enviable freedom in terms of reporting on what I wanted, in the form I’d want (e.g. photos / video) and with time to follow my nose/curiosity, and do other stuff in the working week. Abidjan has good connections to the region, and hopefully within the next few years low-cost airlines will have arrived. With my Ivorian passport, there’d be no visa trouble, and unless things change dramatically, West Africa is one of the most unreported regions in the world, so there’d be little in the way of competition.

My beef with the freelance life is that I tend to stress about income. But my dream is that in 5-10 years’ time the mortgage will be paid off, I’ll have a pension secured, live in my own house, and ideally have some guaranteed income (e.g. from renting out a house or two). That way, I’ll be a bit more secure and can get a little income security and a lot of adventure. I could also run businesses, private projects, farms, blogging, teaching, write books, etc. One can but dream.

Villa Washington

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Rather randomly, a Congolese (Brazzaville) student sent me a message on Facebook, saying he’d remembered me from my time at Villa Washington and wanted to reconnect. The Villa was the US embassy’s cultural centre in Brazzaville and each week (Thursday?) they held an evening in which someone was invited to give a short presentation – often a visiting American. Not so special you might think, but it attracted hundreds of young Congolese every week – and once inside the door almost everyone spoke English to each other. I was invited to watch, then came to speak, and I ended up presenting a few times and attending almost every week. Sometimes I would just give a short behind-the-scenes talk on whatever reports I had done that week. I could often record a radio vox pop (in English) as well.

Looking back it was perhaps a bit odd, but there was a certain vibe about those evenings that was infectious. I found it great to just hang out with the young folks who knew that the world didn’t give much thought to their country, and that they had the misfortune to be born in a country that didn’t offer them many opportunities. Outside the centre students used the street lights to do their homework in the absence of a stable domestic electricity supply.

Maybe it massaged my ego as well – I was treated like a star on those evenings (probably just for being a white foreigner from the radio), although in my own mind I was just another young person like them.

For those attending, there was a palpable sense that America offered an alternative to their francophone elites who’d sown up the country for themselves. In a sense, English was the language of hope, and the US must have seemed (from a distance) as the land of opportunity. I like to think that there was a distinctly non-francophone lack of hierarchy as well. The ambassador was in frequent attendance, as was a good friend of mine from the embassy, the Charge d’Affaires. These students were not people Congolese society considered important.

Those were happy times with a real sense of community – those young Congolese, the folks at the SIM mission where I stayed for most of my time, and the handful of local expats (largely ambassadors and diplomatic number twos) who met every Tuesday evening to discuss short stories.