Voices of Africa

Are you ever one of those people who complain (loudly) about the portrayal of Africa in (Western) media? I know I am one of them and I have written about it several times (including here on the Global Changemakers site). Well I was told long ago that complaining and then proceeding to do nothing about the thing which you complained is just as good as keeping quiet and I want to challenge you all 'complainers' out there take part in an amazing project that has been doing something about the image of the African continent and the people who populate her lands.

Voices of Africa is an ambitious project launched by the Mail and Guardian some years ago that aims in their own words to: 

"..tell the stories the world doesn’t hear often enough. We believe the everyday accounts of Africans getting on with life and showing adversity the middle finger deserve more attention. From the fashion-crazy women in Dakar to the eligible bachelors in Somalia; from the extravagant weddings in Tanzania to the nightlife in Nairobi, we want to showcase life in Africa by those who live it."

I find a quote by the Editor of Voices quite profound, she talks about the negative vs positive extremes we see so often in the media and says something that for me sums up the whole project: "An emerging market”, “exotic” women, technology booms, safaris, and National Geographic-worthy sunsets don’t sum us up either. They reduce us."

We are people before we are Africans. Just like the Europeans, the Asians, the Asians; we are just people with all their consequent faults, strengths, joys and profound sorrows. And that is the story the world needs to see more than exclamations about how great it is that our literacy rates are improving or how sad it is that wars have blossomed in several African states. The fact that those Africans fighting those wars, those African grandmothers learning how to read in a shack in some distant rural village are just people. Add your voice, head on over to the Voices of Africa site, take a look at the guidelines and submit your story for publication. :)

I dare you to change the way the world views our continent.

Of Border Posts and Efficient Inefficiency

Dear Honourable Minister,

It’s 4am right now, and more sensible people than me are resting and preparing for the day yet to come. Yet I find myself feeling the urgent need to throw in my two cents on recent comments you uttered about the deplorable state of the Zimbabwe – South Africa border post.

You very rightly pointed out that the border post is in a state that is not befitting what is for many visitors to our country, their first point of contact with Zimbabwe. It is a slow, dusty, dirty, inefficient, bureaucratic nightmare that for many consumes up to seven (and more recently forty-eight)  hours of their lives each time they attempt to navigate its treacherous terrain. This is a state of affairs that I agree with you, cannot and should not be allowed to continue. But that is where my agreement with you ends. I simply do not think that building a new border post will solve the problem we are currently facing. Perhaps I may be wrong, and heaven knows that the view from the top might be very different from my view as an ordinary Zimbabwean citizen who had to navigate the border post over a dozen times in the past year.

My reasoning starts with the fact that I think that the problem with Beitbridge border post is the Beitbridge border post. In over ninety percent of my travels, the problems always occur on the Zimbabwean side of the border and hardly ever on the South African side. If we are to build a second border with South Africa, my imagination somehow seems to think that the Beitbridge border post (along with all its officials, information systems and their attendant problems) will be used as a template and we will have not one but two problems. Allow me to put forward the proposition that two problems are worse than one, and certainly no problem is better than one. So what do I propose as a solution? Getting rid of the one problem we currently have: the Beitbridge border post.

Please bear with me, I am not proposing tipping the entire edifice into the Limpopo (though I confess the thought has occurred to me on several occasions as I stood in what seemed a never ending queue). I am proposing completely rethinking the way the current border post is run, the way it is managed and the way its handles visitors.

As it stands the border post is inefficiently and horribly run; I have seen occasions where only two desks will be manned by Immigration officials yet there is a queue that stretches to the near horizon. In an age where smartphones are talking to their owners, the border post still relies on Immigration officials manually reading visitors passports, there is no system to discriminate Zimbabweans entering Zimbabwe from foreigners (one would assume that would automatically benefit the Zimbabweans who do not have to go through visa checks of any kind from the foreigners, who would also be benefited in not having to queue with the significantly greater volume of citizens) and despite the fact that buses contribute the greatest flow of human traffic there is still no discernible effort to try and fast track their flow through the border post.

The border post is also corruptly run. I have witnessed with mine own eyes bus passengers being made to pay twenty rands each to skip Customs checks. Those buses which refuse to pay are then held up deliberately and in some cases I have seen buses pay off one official then be held up by another official who demanded he be paid off in turn (One memorable standoff which began after we had passed through Immigrations and Customs and theoretically entered Zimbabwe lasted three hours).

At the moment, those are the two problems that stand out to me: inefficiency (both technological and human) and corruption. Here are a few thoughts from my sleep befuddled mind (I am hopeful that the readers of my blog will add their own two cents in the comments section). I propose increasing the manpower at the border post, the money that would be used to build another one would go well to hiring a few hundred extra officials. I propose dividing incoming traffic into distinct groups, Zimbabweans, SADC residents (who one assumes don’t need visas) and the rest of the world (who one assumes need visas and individual diplomatic calculations on the relative amount of time they are allowed into our country. Perhaps we could even go so far as to introduce a system where Zimbabweans who leave the country for less than a week actually don’t have to be ‘processed’ but need just present their ID’s (this is out there but thinking out of the box never hurt anyone methinks). At the very least, we could take a page out of our South African neighbours’ book and put up tents when the border is expecting peak traffic ("Lesser artists borrow; great artists steal" – Steve Jobs).

I propose modernizing the technology used at the border post, after all the trouble the Government takes to collect out fingerprints, would it be too much of an effort to imagine a fingerprint recognition system to scan in returning citizens? Or at the very least, passport readers to ease the strain on the Immigration officials. We have several universities with Computer Science and Electronic Engineering Departments, let them put their heads together to produce the necessary hardware and software needed. Politicians continually tell us about African solutions to African problems, here is a test case to test the efficacy of this mantra.

The corruption one is a bit trickier to negotiate. One would imagine that corruption would be eased if officials were paid better. Again, the millions that would go into a new border post would more than cover a bump in their salaries. And an anonymous tip off line to allow officials to call in their colleagues and a reward for these whistle-blowers? I have seen such strategies being employed by the corporate world, I would hazard a guess and say that this would go a long way in decreasing corruption. And perhaps a hot line that would allow travellers to simply SMS corrupt activity (and perhaps ideas) and the identity of the officials (prominent name badges on the officials perhaps?).

These are just a few of my sleep addled ideas. Perhaps in the light of a new day more ideas will come. But allow me to express my highest sentiments and the fervent hope that my ideas will perhaps start a conversation about the problem sitting at the gate of our beautiful country.

A Concerned Citizen,

Zikhali

From Paris With Love

You have to admit, life is a little weird. I started this blog a little over a year ago with a blog about moving to Johannesburg and my feelings about living in the City of Gold. What followed was a series of blogs about my observations on South Africans, my encounters with racism and the terrible inequality that marks South African society. Now, one year later, here I am on the other side of the planet, this time I call Paris my new home.

You would think that living in Paris would be any writer’s wet dream? Inspiration falling from the gargoyles that line the ancient cathedrals on Parisian avenues, or perhaps being inspired by the countless fountains or courtyards filled with couples whispering sweet nothings to each other? In a way yes, I have had my head twisted around in a way it hasn’t been since I first moved to Algeria and came face to face with the Arab world. I have been opened up to another world, a whole new continent, a whole new people.

But at the end of the day, there is still that bothersome thing called life, to be precise, there is that bothersome thing called school. After my “delayed gap year”, I am back in University and the transition has been far from easy. To be honest: it has been harrowing. This is the part you imagine having to wake up early for twelve hour days, commuting seventy kilometres from where I live to the heart of Paris, an academic workload befitting one of Europe’s top varsities. I wish I could smile and say it has been nothing but peaches and roses but it hasn’t. But this is life, one can only grit one’s teeth and keep going at it until the time comes when it is second nature and you wonder what all the fuss was about.

But till that day comes, writing has to take a back seat. It is painful thing to do, a sacrifice as painful as any blood sacrifice the Jews had to take up to the Temple aeons ago. I am a writer in every sense of the word, images seem to be trapped in my head, I keep tapping interesting thoughts into my Blackberry (I now have such a long list, my next short story should be interesting if I ever get round to it). But if the pain begins to be overwhelming, all I have to do is look to my famous writer friend, Novuyo RosaTshuma, who was recently accepted by Wits University for a Masters in Creative Writing. This in the same year that she published her first novella to critical acclaim. Yes, the rain might be long in coming, but be sure it will come.

And as if to encourage me, the other day I happened to listen to Steve Jobs famous Stanford commencement address where he talked about being only able to connect the dot’s looking back. So while I wait for the dot’s to make some sort of discernible pattern, here’s a toast to life; its beauty, its vagaries, its absolute randomness and the incredible tragedy of being human.

The Eiffel Tower is really bigger than I would have thought!

Check out this photo stream on Paris, la nuit. It has beautiful photos!

Confessions of a writer

I am a computer scientist damnit!

I am supposed to be capturing data and transforming it into linked lists, studying their complexity and writing time sharing algorithms for execution by the kernel. But I write. I write and I write. I don’t write in C or Java or any other of those languages that Bill Gates & his ilk bequeathed upon us. I write in the language of Shakespeare and Shaw. I dream in metaphors like Oscar Wilde and poetry soothes me like the sound of music does a restless baby.

My fingers are never happier than when they are racing across my keyboard creating worlds and lives. My mind is never sharper than when it is imagining the lives of characters brought to life with the stroke of a key and killed by the time it takes to get to the spacebar. I write with the reckless abandon, opinions, beliefs of a deranged mind. No cow is too holy not to be explored, to not have its inner being laid bare on the page for all the world. What do I care of political systems or the private parts of South African presidents? If they make for interesting reading I will write about them. What do I care for a thousand years of religious dogma? If my character Anna does not believe in it, then so be it.

And so it is. So it is and so it shall be. I write to let loose the demons and angels that fight in my heart for release. I write to let the tears that I cannot allow to flow down my face to flow down the page. I write like I am possessed by the spirit of a little boy in India wondering if the tiger will be his next reincarnation. I write like that white farmer who watched a hundred years of his family’s heritage burn down in what is called reformation. I write like the lover lying in bed, his body yearning for release but his loved a thousand miles away. I write like the street kid sitting on the street corner begging for just five rands to buy his lunch. Just five rands.

I write for those who shall never have a voice. I write with my voice; a voice which is voiceless at times. A voice caught in the strict trappings of social dictate or supressed beneath the hierarchy of power in real life. On the page it is a voice that is as loud as the voice of God; a voice that can strike fear through the coal black blood of my pen bleeding life onto the page. I write as a scream to the world that doesn’t hear my voice, or perhaps to the world that does? I do not care. Listen if you will, what you make of it is not my business. That is up to you. Open your mind and let me in, let me wreck havoc with your beliefs, let me play with your best china and smile as I let it slip through my fingers and come crashing down at your feet.

I write because if I didn’t I would explode. These thoughts that race through my head have to have somewhere to go. They have to have somewhere to go to. I write because I am a witness to a life that is mine, a life perhaps that deserves to be witnessed by the page. Our silent pact. Our shared secret. Take, blessed and broken the words of my life. Take them, blessed and broken the tears of my heart. Take them broken and blessed the whispers of my heart. Do what you will with them O page, I cannot carry them in my heart forever.

I write as if possessed, words explode out of me as if from another being. I try to ignore them but if I do for too long my life begins to withdraw from itself. I hear noises in the middle of a silent room or silence in the heart of noise. I see glimpses of a world half lost, and I know I must find it. I sit to write with a vague inkling of what will come out of the page and lose myself. As if in a trance, the words march out in front of me, little soldiers in my army, preparing to wage war on reality. It is a sweet, sweet relief; like finding an oasis in a desert, or finally peeing after holding it in for too too long.

And then it is done. I have given birth to a page. Or twenty pages. Or a hundred pages. It matters not. All that matters is that within those pages I have captured something. I have hunted down through the wild forests of imagination a mythical creature and tamed it with my pen. Now it lies there, tamed but still dangerous to any who dares to enter the confines of the story. Dares to leave this reality with all its neat borders and rounded curves and comes to confront my creature. Perhaps you shall tame it? Perhaps it shall tame you? Who knows? I certainly do not. Neither do I care. My job is done. I have written. I can go to sleep. I am human once more.

    

When I am gone those words shall remain. When my bones have been ground to dust by the winds of time, those words shall remain. When the world has been ravaged by the hounds of hell and the heart of a million suns has torn the skins from our flesh, those words shall remain. Those words shall remain. The pen is mightier than the sword. Its words shall remain.