Bared Zanzibar Chest

I have left Ndola because the three month term of my tourist visa was up. This dispatch is being sent from Zanzibar, that famed isle of spices and slaves in the Indian Ocean. This is my first encounter with Swahili culture, which strikes me as a pleasant and relaxed fusion of African with Arab. Many Swahili words contain recognizable Arabic roots, so I’ve been able to trade a few pleasantries with the locals much faster than it took me to get to speed with Bemba in Zambia. Which for the record is a puttering half-stroke speed that stalls out in the first gear.

I was in Stone Town, the Arab-built old quarter of Zanzibar Town, for two days. Though I didn’t do much there, hobbled as I was with the duties of converting German to English, plus methane, I feel that I managed to take on a charge of that ineffable “exoticism” that jaded moderns long for, just by being there. Walking around the old town and feeling as if I were back in Yemen has been enough to make my presence here its own reward.

Zanzibar features prominently on the East African tourist circuit. Scantily clad wzungu wandering around the Stone Town casbah can be heard gibbering away about climbing Kilimanjaro, or how nasty Nairobi was, or how they managed to see leopard in the Serengeti but that their luggage had been lost in transit and God! they just couldn’t think about anything else. Many are the unimpressive garden-variety wzungu fresh off a London or Frankfurt flight, some of them young things sniffing about during their “gap years.” Others among them are more faded and gnarled, beach fossils who come in motley permutations on the mélange of differing proportions of drunkenness, callousness stupidity, and lechery.

But I’ve also run into a few more reassuring wanderers, the kind of people whose taste for adventure reminds me of a few lines of Conrad I read not too long ago:

They appeared to live in a crazy maze of plans, hopes, dangers, enterprises, ahead of civilization, in the dark places of the sea; and their death was the only event of their fantastic existence that seemed to have a reasonable certitude of achievement.

Last night at a bar, I got into a conversation with one of these wild yearners. There was talk of kayaking the northwest passage, of being smuggled into Afghanistan rolled up in a rug, of crossing on foot from Tibet into Nepal, of crisscrossing the Congo on a 250 cc motorbike. It was exciting to hear tales of anticipated enterprise from one of these uncut and unpolished natural souls who sometimes crop up unexpectedly from among the deep ranks of the low-carat streamlined synthetic utility gems turned out by the institutes of modern life. Actually the supply of interesting travelers on the African circuit is not all that low—much of the perceived deficit is probably a demand-side problem caused by my natural reticence.

Yesterday I traveled north to a beach town called Nungwi. It’s supposed to be the “party town” of Zanzibar’s north coast. There was a party going on last night, true, but it was nothing like the shameless sweep of beachfront saturnalia that I had imagined. The guidebooks evidently all list this town as the thronged place-to-be, in effect warning off those who, rather than “fun,” want “authenticity.” My theory is that there is a sort of cartographical emergent property at work, which is to say that in putting the town on the map as a thronged place-to-be, they scared people away, and in so doing changed it—many of the people who make it to Africa have at least the pretense of wanting to be in the fuzzy regions of the map. Call it Lonely Planet’s Heisenberg if you like: The official cartographer cannot observe and analyze the system without changing it.

I’m not sure how long I’ll be here. Maybe a week. What next? Well—I’m glad you asked that question, because:

In closing, I have an announcement to make: (ahem, silence please) Ye e-foregathered, I am pleased to declare that I have managed to obtain a multiple-entry visa to enter the Congo, valid for three months. Wait! Wait—but soft, peace! Before you stifle me with your course whoops of jubilation, let me tell you how I got it. So far I have mostly spared you the long and disappointing story of my multiple failures to get a Congolese visa. The thought was that if I had nothing good to say, why then I wouldn’t say anything at all. Basically it is a tale, lacking all sound and fury, about idiots. A variety of Zambians told me that the could get me a visa easily, all they had to do was call so and so and it would be done. While at Arthur’s drilling camp in the bush, at one point he declared, “I could walk in there and get you a visa from those cunts without even opening my mouth!” My taxi driver Fabian had an aunt who worked at the Congo consulate, but she happened to be in Lubumbashi both times we braved that grotty bureaucracy together. Despite my enthusiasm for this liberally offered assistance, none of these helpful Zambians ever followed through. Likewise with the Congolese themselves. I met two of them during my time in Ndola. Both were full of brave rhetoric about fast friendship, about being honored to bring me along the next time they went to Lubumbashi, etc. Maybe they said these things just because they enjoyed hearing themselves say it—let’s just say that of these words nothing ever came. For a while there was even an American who said he was going to get me in. He was the manager of the Frontier copper mine, and his firm basically owns one of the border crossings. Same thing: An impressive fabric of words, yet lacking the stuff of action. It’s like magic: Mention the Congo, be it ever so softly, and the person who hears it instantly turns into a flake.

To wrap up by sounding a happy note, this is how I got it: Arthur’s brother in law is married to a woman named Ashley who works for one of the big mining outfits. Her job there is to sort out visas and work permits for managers shuffling back and forth across the border. I did not know this. One night I found myself at their house for a braai. When I told them about my visa hardships, Ashley explained where she worked and said she could get me a visa the next day, free of charge. I thought it was more of the usual and let it slide. But a few days later, as I was walking along the road, someone pulled up and called my name. It was Ashley. She was upset that I had not come by with my passport. I began to offer some excuse, but she cut me short and demanded my passport on the spot. I was reluctant to surrender it, as my flight to Tanzania was fewer than 36 hours away. But she wouldn’t relent, and I gave it to her. The next evening at 7 or so, she came by and handed me my passport. It had a Congolese visa stamp in it, complete with spelling errors and vaguely threatening legalese. Congo here I come.

Oh, and one more thing. On my last night in Zambia, I found out the truth. Rex had a girlfriend eight months back or so who died. His wife lives on. Whether he was in some way financially impacted by his girlfriend’s death remains a mystery.