Mercedes Sayagues
First Person
I was recently in Bulawayo, city of dreams and of shebeen queens. It has remained in a time warp because there has been little construction, because its economy is in the doldrums, because Harare has taken first place.
Bulawayo is full of pretty colonial buildings and exudes a laid-back charm. Close to game parks, it has a frontier-town quality; one in three vehicles is a safari 4×4, and three out of four white men walking along its wide avenues are dressed like boy scouts, in khaki or olive shorts, even when it is cold. Why, I don’t understand.
Men often rage about women with hairy legs and joke they must be either foreign NGO staff or feminists, or worse, both; but nobody ever asks women if we enjoy seeing male, milky white, unshapely, hairy legs displayed. It can’t be helped in the swimming pool or on the tennis courts, but otherwise, only Leonardo di Caprio should be allowed to bare his legs.
In downtown Harare, Blantyre and Lusaka, white South African men in skimpy T-shirts wear their fat, flabby, wobbly beer bellies proudly, like a nine-month pregnancy or Pamela Anderson’s boobs. When they run around in shorts in Maputo, where no local man, white or black, wears shorts unless it is full summer, and they’re buying the newspaper on the way to the beach, we don’t make them feel our disapproval of their exhibitionism, purely on aesthetic grounds. We should. I don’t understand.
On the shuttle bus to Bulawayo airport there was a French couple, loudly talking in French as if it were a secret language nobody else could understand, like Finnish or Icelandic. This is why I love travelling in the Arab world, because my Arabic doesn’t go beyond salaam aleiku, aleiku salaam, so I am spared the banality of most people’s conversations.
You want to know what the French couple was discussing? That they had forgotten their haemorrhoid medicine and denture cleaning powder. What makes otherwise normal people, who in France surely speak at an ordinary conversational level, holler their intimate problems just because they are in an English-speaking African country? I don’t understand.
He looked like a postal clerk, she as if she owned a boulangerie in Lyons. If I went into her boulangerie, she would say bonjour and merci in the usual soft French tone that you have to strain to hear. But were I to start discussing pubic lice in a loud voice after requesting a croissant, I am sure she would be horrified that a barbarian had stepped into her shop. Then why does she holler in a bus in Africa? I don’t understand.
Most tourists in Bulawayo looked as if they bought their clothes at the flea market and dressed in a room without a mirror. Yet I am sure in their home country they try to look neat and elegant. Why not here?
Young women wore wrap-around skirts that my maid would immediately put to rag use in the kitchen. Young men wore torn T-shirts that would make them qualify for refugee status and a package of free food aid from the United Nations. Many looked scruffy, although all hotels in Bulawayo, even the cheapest, have running water and there is no drought in Zimbabwe this year. The street kids looked better than they did.
The vendors selling curios looked better than the clients buying their wares. Yet the vendors and their families earn less in one year than the tourist spent on air fare. It is the poor African who should look torn and scruffy, not the rich foreigner. I don’t understand.
I have seen young women and young men come out of shacks they share with 10 others in the slums of Luanda and Kinshasa, where the last drop of clean water came with the rains two years ago. They emerge in crisp white shirts and freshly ironed dresses, looking good.
I would not look good if I had to press my clothes with a coal iron and fetch water from the public tap. I would look like a tourist. But these people from African slums somehow manage to be neat and clean. The kids are scrubbed, the girls look like dolls in braids and ruffles.
In war-torn Kuito, in central Angola, women braved sniper fire to fetch water from the river. And they brought enough water to drink, cook, bathe and wash. Yet many tourists with access to running water don’t wash. I don’t understand.
In Zanzibar, I have seen Italian tourists who looked like vagrants. Back in Milan, they would not dream of going out on the streets without an hour’s worth of grooming and their Emporio Armani T-shirts freshly laundered by their mamas. What wicked pleasure do they derive from running around a beautiful island with dirty feet? I don’t understand.
The French woman on the shuttle was twice as big as Miriam Makeba but wearing Brenda Fassie’s lycra shorts. He was wearing a floppy hat that dwarfed Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Texan 10-gallon. These were two respectable citizens, who surely pay their taxes and vote socialist, and wouldn’t dream of wearing these clothes in Lyons. Why do they come to Africa and look like clowns? I don’t understand.
But I guess I should thank them, because I laughed in the shuttle, and I laughed on the plane, and I am laughing as I write this and maybe you are laughing as well. The curio vendors are happy because they earned money and can buy clothes to look spiffy on Saturdays, when the working poor have the time of their lives to forget that on Monday they will be back on the pavement waiting for scruffy tourists. The tourists go home happy because they have had a Truly African Experience. Now I understand.