April 2007
(25th April 2007)
It is simple to scare a Tanzanian child. It's so simple, you can do it accidentally and inevitably. The technique is easy: Be white. Usually, my skin colour here provokes the Muzungu Double-Take: child looks; child looks away; child looks back and says "Muzungu!." Muzungu is translated as "white man" or European but I have a feeling it means more than that, or used to. ...
(23rd April 2007)
I am in Tanzania. I realised, as I arrived yesterday in an overpriced taxi from the airport, and saw normal street scenes and no UN vehicles and no scared people in their heavily fortified Corollas, that this is the first normal, stable African country I've been to. That's because the others have been Liberia (just after a big war), Cote d'Ivoire (just before a little ...
→ Routine
(21st April 2007)
A day in my life:4.45 am: get woken up because someone left the alarm function working on the clock radio in the EXtreme hotel Cape Town room with a tiny window with a view of Table Mountain8 am: get re-woken up9.30 am: arrive at Robben Island Nelson Mandela Gateway. Look at bucket that served as a toilet for prisoners up to the ...
→ Pap
(20th April 2007)
Two days, two ANC heroes, two elderly white men. First, Ronnie Kasrils, formerly a guerrilla fighter for the ANC armed wing for 30 years, one of a handful of ANC fighters rumoured to be a KGB colonel, then a rather good sanitation minister for South Africa, now Minister for National Intelligence. Today, Denis Goldberg, the only white man convicted in the Rivonia trials that imprisoned ...