Arjen Westra’s African Weblog

The journey will go on tomorrow. On the way to Nairobi to work on a guidebook (sorry, it will be in Dutch) about Mozambique, Malawi and Zambia. Enjoy your day. The coming days I will be posting some pictures if the connection allows me…

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‘This country was so terrible’, a guy, 30, said to me.

‘In the 90’ies, 1990 people where hiding on the beach while the shooting was going on in town. People who were moving with a dhow where shot. The dhow went to the bottom of the sea. Now, we want this place to be beautiful. We want you to see how beautiful this place is. When we had the war, nobody could come. Now you can come and enjoy with us.’

I am standing in a local bar in Vilankulos on the coast in Mozambique, enjoying a cold 2M beer (one of the local brands) and watching people, young and old, dance, swing, moving and grooving, smiling, chatting…

The word took me back to a conversation in once had with my taxi driver in Bukavu, Congo DRC.

The guy, in his twenties, could not believe his ears when I answered no on his question if I had ever been hiding in the bush, fleeing for soldiers. There is the world where I grew up, without any war. And there is the other world, today, on a few hours flying of young people for whom a war, seeking cover in the bush for days, with hardly enough water, some cookies is a living reality.

And the same few hours away, there was this guy who was 18 when his war was over, trying to convince me why I should take this beer, here and now.

A few weeks ago, Dutch people celebrated Liberation Day, but I wonder as a child of the non-war generation who realises how fuckin’ lucky he or she is to grow up in a free country like the Netherlands.

I realise it myself day in day out, sometimes I forget but then I always meet people who give a reminder, most of them young and most probably ex-child soldiers, like this one. His name is Renaldo, 30 years and celebrating liberty every minute of his life.

Can anybody explain me why in a country where the majority of the people live below the poverty line, I still have to pay two euro for an hour on the internet whereas in my home-country Netherlands, people have limitless broadband internet access for 15 euro a month?

It makes these countries stay behind more than necessary. Imagine what it could do education, trade etc. if everybody would have access to the internet here.

That evening, I had a beer with the manager of the French cultural centre in Maputo at the opening of an arts exhibition… ‘A litle bit bit of Kadinski,a glaas of wine?’, a friend texted me ironically from Kenya. But there wasn’t.

Talking about arts in Mozambique, the word isolation came across: ‘There is a lot of potential here, but they keep running around in circles. The art scene here is relatively isolated. Artists here don’t have a lot of contact with colleagues abroad.

That’s why a lot of painters for example stick to the so called primitive or traditional art. The foreigners like it, but it is not renewing. Same with the music. More exchange should take place among artists from across the world.’ , she argued.

We were talking about arts, but I realised that she was talking about a lot of other things. Imagine how Africa could use its full potential of young talented highly educated people if only they would have access to cheap broadband internet.

Not to talk about educating the enormous number of knowledge hungry African teenagers who can’t get their proper education because the shortage of teachers.

A lot of African countries would be better of if such a thing would be available but it seems that a lot of African politicians are more concerned about filling their own pockets.

And no, please don’t start complaining about colonials and fair trade. Don’t call corruption African Courtesy. Of course there are other reasons apart from the corruption that makes a lot of African countries where they are at the moment. But that is another story.

Reading The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman about convergence and the availability to connect to anyone in this world through cheap internet access, I realised once again that Africa is the continent where wealth and progress have an other definition. Apart from the fact that the book is extremely inspiring (please read it!), Friedman does not take a lot of time to talk about Africa. He is only saying that this is the continent where only the number of Health Clinics seems to grow. Why mister Friedman, the world does not end in Europe, US or India. Keep youn posted about his, there might me an surprising end in the book.

It’s easy to catch the atmosphere of positive growth, reconstruction in Maputo. Walking through the lush streets, you find people talking, chatting with each other. It seems that everybody is sick of the war, of insecurity and they want to show everybody.

Compared to last year, roads and buildings have been reconstructed and shopping malls are being created. Buildings got a fresh paint.

The atmosphere of growth is in the air. Although the country is still very corrupt according to the locals I was talking to. It can never be as corrupt as Kenya, I always think, when people anywhere in Africa start talking about corruption. But the last days, some things made me change my mind. I will come back to that later.

And also: the Chinese are coming. China was one of the first countries to be visited when Mozambique new president came into power last year. ‘You don’t see them here in Maputo, but they are here’, a Mozambiquan told me.

And I saw ‘them’. In the city centre of Maputo on Lenin Avenue, there was this huge Chinese supermarket with only Chinese products: from noodles, to tea to a kind of vodka-like bottles and the product you can see on the picture below.

I thought the package design very attractive but it didn’t tell me anything about the contents.

As you can see, everything was in Chinese. So I asked to one of the few shop employees what was inside. They looked from me and then to the package and back. Speechless. Laughing.

So here I found myself trying to explain in Portuguese, Which I don’t speak, what the Chinese package in the Chinese shop was telling me, but the Mozambiquan employees did nor read or speak Chinese and English.

To make the story more complicated the Chinese who were in the shop, could not tell me or their Portuguese colleagues because of their Chinese. So I bought it: it as a kind of gelly-like-juice with a fruity taste and I am still alive. (Pictures on the way}

The next day I was travelling from Johannesburg to Maputo overland. A 500 kilometer journey that took me almost 15 hours when I travelled by train and mini bus last year, but the the comfortable long distance bus would bring me there in only seven and a half hours.

On the way I met a Mozambican guy who just fired from hospital after two years. ‘I’ve recovered from leukaemia, and I am happy to go home.’ The last two years, he had spent in a private hospital in Johannesburg.

His family was not even aware of his arrival. He showed me a picture of one of his friends in Maputo. ‘Do you know who this is?’, he asked me. Of course I did now know. ‘This is the son of the president’, he said. He also stays in South Africa.

This guy was in the privileged position of having good health care in one of the poorest countries in the world, with, I learned one of the fastest growing economies and in a much more privileged position than the white young couple I met at Park station the day before.

I also learned that the president of this country send his family to South Africa to live there although a lot of people that I talked to wanted to leave that same country because they did not see a future.

On my seven hour bus ride back, through the beautifull landscape of green hills, that seem to change colour with the hour, I realised that in my mother country Netherlands we can’t enjoy the luxury of wondering through nature for days. Ok, wondering for hours is possible on my favorite Dutch spots: Schier and Terschelling.

Netherlands might be among one of the wealthiest countries in the world, but in terms of space you could call us a development country.

Arrived at the Parkstation in Johannesburg, I wondered what I should think about the white couple, early twenties, that I met in the Johannesburg Bus station.

I had met them the day I left. The guy came to me with a very long story that ended with the request if I could give him money because they had to leave that day. I gave him some rand, the currency here. After all it’s not my business hat somebody is gonna do with my money.

Now I arrived in the bus station a few days later and guess what? They were still there begging for money…

I went after the guy and he apparently did not feel very comfortable at all when he recognized me. ‘How much money did you make the last days?’, I asked him. ‘Five hundred rand’, he said, with a smile. Showing not being serious. ‘But at least I am not robbing or steeling people’

‘Now, tell me you story. Why are you here?’, I asked him. He told me a story that he was there with his girlfriend to bag for the accommodation, that they run out of money, that only a few months ago he was a graphic designer with work and an income, his parents had died and now they were surviving here. He told me that he did not get jobs because he was white and not black.

These young people did not fit into the profile of the white middle aged ex-parastatal workers that you found begging at traffic lights in Johannesburg. Carrying signs that they are in need of food and/or any job that you, the reader, could offer them.

But I realised that the guy in Kimberley started talking seriously about leaving his mother country because of the fact that he felt that only blacks were getting the good positions now.

He was very serious. ‘It is a kind of compensation now’ a black South African companion told me later. ‘At least a lot of white people that want to leave, are able to leave this country. The blacks never had that chance.’

It has been a while that I was able do some postings, but here we are. After my first days in Johannesburg, I spent two days in Kimberley, a kind of a sleeping city build on the wealth of diamond mining, long time ago.

Writing this while I am in a little village on the Mozambiquan coast, Kimberley seems so long ago and far away.

Nowadays not a lot is happening in Kimberley. They don?t even have a rush hour. In the supermarket, people are sleepwalking on background music buying charcoal and boerewors for their braaij and the main tourist attraction is a giant hole in the earth where, according to Lonely Planet, people moved 28 tonnes of earth to win 3 tonnes of diamonds.

Apart from visiting a farm where a San(Bushmen)-community is being trained as a security guard, I had an conversation about hunting and shooting with a local white South African who called himself a real nature lover and? a real hunter only minutes later.

I was a bit surprised, to say the least. I am not and I will never be a hunter. But I realised in South Africa, hunting is quit popular.

As a tourist, you can go on a hunting trip and pay a lot of money to shoot an elephant, a lion, or any animal that is on the menu of the company that offers the trip. ?What is the fun about shooting a lion for a huge amount of dollars??, I asked the South African nature lover opposite me.

?What you are talking about is not the real hunting?, he said meanwhile putting his knife in a juicy-medium-rare-500-grammes-t-bone-steak. ?Hunting is about being in nature, with your backpack, sleeping in the field, walking for days, making your own fire, taking care of yourself. Tracking the animals.

If you get hungry, you are trying to track an animal, kill it, for the purpose of the food. You try to take as much meat as possible in your backpack to wind-dry it for billtong at home. That is what I would call hunting.? That, also, is how every young white South African learns it from his father.

But there is a difference between hunting and shooting, I was told by my conversation partner. ?These so called hunting safari?s have nothing to do with hunting?, he said. ?That is all about money.? After our meal together, I had to catch a bus to where I initialy started my trip up North to Nairobi: Johannesburg.

Slowly moving to this Weblog… My other one is: http:www.afrikareporter.n/blogarjenwestra.html