Most tourists to Zimbabwe slide across the border to see the panoramic view of Victoria Falls, and then quickly hop back into Zambia or Botswana, where it’s supposedly safer. At Zimbabwe’s second most popular tourist attraction, the ruins of Great Zimbabwe, the guestbook is full of Zimbabwean names, although every few pages you’ll see that some curious European or Canadian passed through as well. In general, tourists avoid Zimbabwe because the news has frightened them into thinking they’ll die of cholera or be personally imprisoned by President Mugabe.

But there was a time when Zimbabwe had allure, when tourists weren’t afraid to come.

Three middle-aged men tell me this as we share a cabin on a train through central Zimbabwe. When the train breaks down, these men grumble about how the train never used to break down. After we hop off the train to use the bathroom in the bushes, they point to the stainless steel toilet in our cabin and remember a time when it used to work. When I offer a slice of bread to one of the men, he takes it and reminisces about a time when food was delivered to the cabins. And then he tosses me a small bag of cheap rum and we lay in our bunk beds, stuck on a dead train, all of us quietly sipping our rum.

The stories continue in Bulawayo, the country’s second largest city. Zimbabwe used to have excellent healthcare and education, says the taxi driver driving the beat-up minibus. (Even now, Zimbabwe maintains one of the highest adult literacy rates in the world, a legacy of that education system). Zimbabweans used to take vacations to London to buy things on the cheap because the Zimbabwean dollar was so strong, says one of the artists at the National Art Gallery. Zimbabwe used to be the jewel of Africa, says the guy sitting next to me, as we watch Zambia win the African Cup of Nations, a soccer tournament Zimbabwe didn’t qualify for. They tell these stories with a kind of obligatory zeal, the energy you need to relate tales so far removed from the present that they don’t feel quite real.

Bulawayo’s low, dignified, colonial-era buildings face onto wide streets lined with mature jacaranda trees, and I walk around feeling a kind of dour appreciation, like you do in a museum. Bulawayo’s central park, located just outside the city center, is all decay and neglect. Bubbling streams of sewage run through well-built canals. The aviary is empty, as is the skating rink, which is now overgrown by a mat of thick, healthy vines. The abandoned putt-putt golf course can only be identified thanks to a rusted sign, and nearby the miniature train station’s roof is caved in. There aren’t many people at the park, and the only noise comes from a bunch of truant school kids on a creaking swing set. It’s not hard to imagine how beautiful this park was in the past. No wonder everyone seems so nostalgic.

The only institutions growing in Bulawayo are the cemeteries. One day Brian, a local artist, invites me to a funeral. While we wait for the hearse to arrive, we walk through the cemetery, which is so overgrown with coarse, brown weeds that I can’t see most of the headstones. A few lithe gravediggers walk past us carrying dirt-caked shovels. Brian jokes that they’re too busy digging new graves to maintain the old ones. Finally, we stop at his brother’s grave. Brian knows its exact location; the headstone is covered under a brown bush. He stoops down and plucks a weed off, and we stand over the grave, silently picking the weeds off the small mound until we can see the headstone. Afterward, Brian waves to a part of the graveyard where the grass is so high that you wouldn’t know it was a graveyard unless someone told you. He says maybe we’ll go to his mother’s grave out there sometime.

By the time the hearse arrives, two other funerals have started. The attendees at all three funerals begin singing hymns in Ndebele. As we leave, I overhear someone say that, all things considered, it’s been a pretty light day; usually six or seven funerals are happening at the same time.

In America, we tend to think of pain as extraneous to the human experience. Suffering is an exception in what we hope will be happy and trouble-free lives. But as I move around Zimbabwe, where the parks have emptied and the cemeteries have filled, I see a different understanding of tragedy. Suffering is as integral to the human experience as joy. Bad things happen to everybody; why wouldn’t they? Brian shows no self-pity as we walk through a cemetery containing his entire family. Almost no one cries at the funeral. These are not signs of callousness or fatalism, but a recognition of life’s idiosyncrasies, the impenetrable calculus that determines who finds good fortune and who doesn’t.

People who haven’t spent time in Africa don’t understand this. No matter the problems plaguing the continent, I rarely meet people wallowing in self-pity. The West loves to feel sorry for Africa, to lament the continent’s challenges, but it’s hard to find Africans who feel sorry for themselves. And I think it’s because of a dogged belief I see from city to city and country to country: life will present challenges simply because that is what it is supposed to do, and we will go on and try to overcome them, simply because that is what we are supposed to do.

Lanre Akinsiku is a California-born travel and short story writer.

*Photo courtesy of Sokwanele – Zimbabwe.

The post Not Dying in Zimbabwe appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

After crossing the border into Botswana, I sat under the shade of a large tree and waited for a ride to the next town, when it started snowing butterflies. Clouds of delicate white butterflies danced in the trees and flowers. Thousands of them, bobbing, floating and swooping in every direction. I’d never seen anything like it before.

These are the strange moments I thought travel was about. But the further I travel, the more I realize that they are only half the story. For every unusual experience, every storm of white butterflies, there’s an equal and opposite event: a moment of dèjá vu. It happened a week after I saw the white butterflies, in a small church in a small town in Botswana.

I walked through a gravel parking lot to the front door of the church, arriving as the pastor started his sermon. The church was in the corner of a rundown outdoor mall, next to a bar, restaurant, and another church, and its white walls had turned yellow-white after daily beatings from the desert sun.

All the plastic garden chairs lining the room were filled. An usher led me to a chair in the back row next to a water cooler, where I stood to see the pastor. He was short and stout, and he built his sermon quickly, marching back and forth behind a slender wooden podium while shouting scripture at the congregation. He’d worked himself into such a frenzy that his tie flailed about in front of him, like a third arm.

I felt comfortable. Some churches have a kind of music about them and if you listen closely, you can recognize the sound anywhere. The pastor is a conductor, and his voice must be rich, so that the word of God sounds powerful and melodic. The congregation acts as audience and orchestra, shouting amens, nodding, clapping and praying when appropriate, so that every sermon has a rhythm, and even someone who’s never been to church can figure out when to do what.

Near the end of the service, when the music had died down, one of the ushers tapped me on the shoulder, and whispered that I should find him when the service was over. I figured I’d done something wrong. After the sermon, the usher and I sat together near the pulpit. He leaned in close, as though he were about to reveal some big secret, and told me that I looked like a guy seeking a spiritual experience.

Then he said my life was going in the wrong direction, glancing knowingly at the colorful wristbands I’d picked up in Namibia, South Africa, and Swaziland over the past few months. I looked down at my bracelets, too, and remembered that some people believe the bracelets are signs of evil. Once, in Namibia, an old woman said the bracelets made me look like a sangoma, a witch doctor.

The bracelets were just the beginning. When I did a full review of my appearance, I noticed that my shirt, the one collared shirt I brought for special occasions, was faded and wrinkled. My right shoe had a small hole in the toe. My beard was wild. I hadn’t combed my hair. (I never do.) Proper fashion never seemed like an issue during my travels on the edge of the wilderness, not when many of the kids I saw wore shoes or shirts, but never both.

As I looked around the room, I saw that all the well-groomed ushers–neat haircuts and no facial hair, crisp white dress shirts and cherry red ties–had pulled some ragged person out of the congregation after the sermon. I knew then that I looked terrible, maybe the way Cain looked when God cast him into the desert. The usher had just been kind enough to take pity on me.

When I left, the usher sent me off with a prayer. I thanked him, because he’d given me a small taste of my time in Los Angeles, another wonderful place where looking bad can have a profound and unintended meaning.

It’s easy to come to Africa expecting the exotic, and you don’t have to look hard to find it. Still, as much of that as I’ve seen–like when I rode my bike into a herd of elephants–the fundamentals of life don’t seem all that different. Sometimes, I feel as though the whole world’s reading from the same script.

Lanre Akinsiku is a California-born travel and short story writer.

*Photo by Lanre Akinsiku.

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Sophie still looked unconvinced, even after a few minutes of sweet-talking. I decided to play my best hand.

“We’re here, so we might as well go out,” I told her. “Either nothing’s going to happen or something interesting’s going to happen. But it’s going to be one or the other.”

Under the moon’s hard light, I saw her reply with a polite smile. But it was too dark to tell whether I’d inspired her or scared her.

I’d met Sophie and her friend Esme in Cape Town a few weeks before, and we reconnected by chance in Namibia’s capital, Windhoek. They invited me to visit Opuwo, the heart of Namibia’s rural north and a sort of capital for the Himba, one of Namibia’s most famous traditional communities.

But no matter where we walked in Opuwo, Sophie and Esme drew everyone’s attention. On the town’s main road, the women selling handmade jewelry and ornaments on the sidewalk took a moment to look at us and whisper to a friend as we passed; the children running between the scrap metal houses peered at us with bashful smiles; the men cooking the meat on open air grills gawked at us through the smoke rising in front of them; the Himba women, their breasts exposed and their skin glowing a deep orange from the mix of ochre, butter and herbs that they apply to their skin to repel insects, openly gaped at us. The many eyes on us were as loud and grating as the rumbling trucks that kicked up plumes of dust as they drove by.

‘Why do they stare at us?” Esme asked earlier in the day. She seemed to be wilting from the attention, or maybe from the late afternoon heat.

“Probably because you’re white,” I said.

Later, at the only touristy restaurant in town, on a small side street away from most of the eyes, we continued our conversation.

“Race isn’t an issue back home,” Esme said, referring to Holland. She was still unnerved by the amount of attention she and Sophie had received earlier.

“No, race is an issue,” I said, “It’s just not an issue for you.”

The eyes we’d seen earlier, the ones full of unspoken questions, I’d seen them before. You get the same looks when you’re the Token Black Guy. At Berkeley, where the population of black students hovers around 3 percent, I was often the only black guy in my class. Later, in various jobs, I was often the only black guy in a room full of white men. Sidelong glances toward me were inevitable. Over the years, I’ve gotten used to the eyes. And I’ve developed a knack for pretending I don’t notice.

But Sophie and Esme hadn’t. In Opuwo, they were so obviously out of place that for the first time their whiteness was an issue, something to think about and consider and fret over. Why are they staring? Are my shorts too short? Do I have something on my face? Is it because … I’m white?

Now, after dinner, I asked them to join me at a dive bar in an isolated northern Namibian town. A few months on the road had shown me that the fastest way to learn about a town is to go where the people like to sin. Sophie said yes.

So Sophie and I walked down the dark road next to our camp site, toward the loudest bar on the main road. There were no streetlights, and we didn’t need them. The moon was full and handsome. The smoke from the meat grilled earlier in the day lingered acridly in the air, mixing with scents of diesel and trash. A cozy warmth had replaced the uncomfortable heat of the afternoon.

Under the fluorescent lighting of the bar, a few guys played pool in the center of the room, and a group of men and women crowded around a jukebox in a back corner. As we entered, all of the eyes in the room slid towards us. Coy smiles erupted. You’d have thought we were the ones with orange-hued skin.

Sophie and I bought a beer and walked onto the patio, where a woman began speaking to Sophie in Herero, a local dialect. Sophie shook her head, indicating that she didn’t understand. The woman continued speaking, slurring a few of her words, then turned her glassy gaze to me.

Like Sophie, I threw my hands up. She opened her eyes wide in surprise, and began speaking faster.

“I don’t understand you,” I said, smiling, and throwing my hands up again.

The woman barked at a man across the patio, signaling him to come to us. He was shorter than all of us and stood in a wide-legged sway. The fluorescent lighting bounced off of his bald head.

He greeted us in Herero.

“Hello,” we both replied in English.

He spoke to us in Herero again, this time a little slower, enunciating every word. We both remained silent, with wide smiles on our faces. Then he started speaking to me in short bursts, waiting for me to respond in English, before pointing to me, and then to Sophie, and then back to me, laughing thunderously, spit gathering at both sides of his mouth. Everyone on the patio looked on in a harmony of smirks.

And then I realized what was happening: Sophie was white, which was a novelty in this town. That much was obvious. But I was black, and couldn’t speak the local language, and talked like Sophie, who was white, and that was downright absurd. We’d come to experience the novelty of rural northern Namibia, and we both ended up becoming the main attraction.

We visited a nearby Himba village the next day, but it felt like a waste. We’d gotten the essence of Opuwo by the time we walked back to our camp site the night before, when the bitter smell of smoke still hung in the air, and the moonlight illuminated our path and the stares of the people walking by.

Lanre Akinsiku is a California-born travel and short story writer.

*Photo courtesy of Caitlinator.

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I was the 20th person on a 16-passenger bus out of Graskop, sandwiched between a giggly old man clutching a can of beer and a shy teenager who wouldn’t shut up. I’d been in town exactly 19 hours, which is an eternity in Graskop time.

Graskop is a delicate South African town in the middle of nowhere that is overrun by a sprawling, emerald green forest and wide-eyed tourists who come to take as many pictures as they can before moving on to somewhere more interesting. As part of a year-long, 14-country trip through Africa, I decided to come here because, well, everyone else does.
I woke up at 6:00 a.m. for a hike to God’s Window, a vista overlooking a nearby canyon. The guidebook said it was a five-kilometer hike to get there, although it turned out to be a seven-kilometer hike that ended after two kilometers when I took a bus the rest of the way. In 20 minutes, I hiked to all of the vistas at God’s Window, took photos to show my Facebook friends, and rode another bus down the mountain. A timid fog covered only the tops of the trees, and, if I’d stuck around a little longer, I probably would have written something about how ethereal and mystical the scenery felt. After I packed my bag at the hostel, it was 11:30 a.m.

I couldn’t miss that bus out of Graskop. I was supposed to be in Swaziland before nightfall, and the trip required a series of transfers that likely would take the entire day. To get to Swaziland, I needed to take a bus to Nelspruit, a much bigger middle-of-nowhere South African town. But the only way to get to Nelspruit from Graskop is to go first to Hazy View, a 30-minute ride away through more winding, emerald-green forests.

Before I could grab my seat on the bus, an old man began speaking to me. He thought I was South African.

“English,” I replied.

“How can we talk then? I don’t speak English well,” he said. “Another language?”

“Spanish?”

He laughed and waved his finger. “No, no, no.”

The bus started moving, and the old man’s beer sloshed lightly against the can’s sides. I closed my eyes. When you’re traveling on a budget, simple discoveries, like finding somewhere to nap, or finding clean water, or finding somewhere to put your bags, become a raison d’être.

“Are you from the U.S.?”

A young man was speaking to me now. He added something to the end of his question, but it was trampled under the whine of the bus’s engine.

“Yes,” I said. “California.” I opened my eyes, slowly. The young man had small beads of sweat ready to launch themselves down his forehead.

“I’ve been to the Czech Republic, Spain, Italy. I’ve been to many places. I’ve always wanted to go to the U.S.”

“It’s very nice there.” I wished he could see the period at the end of my sentence, the finality of it.

“What do you do?”

Explaining the whole writing thing would take too much time. “I’m a painter.”

“Ahh, I am too! I also like house music. I make my own songs. They call me DJ KB Blaze. Would you like to hear some?”

“Sure.”

DJ KB Blaze with the shy voice and sweaty forehead opened his phone and played two shrill, up-tempo house songs. That little adventure left 16-and-a-half minutes of travel time.

The ride was smooth; you never know what kind of driver you’re going to get when you hop on a South African bus. Sometimes the driver does everything right: he doesn’t pass when there’s a hint of danger, drives at a moderate speed, moves over speed bumps carefully. Other drivers drive as though they don’t care whether they live or die. We had the former. I closed my eyes again.

“Are you whispering at me?!” the old man shouted. The entire bus, front to back, rippled in laughter.

“These ladies,” he pointed to a few women sitting in front of us, “they know English better than me.” He smiled, and I could see his tongue through the window where his two front teeth should have been.

Fourteen minutes left to Hazy View.

“So how is it to live in Texas?” DJ KB Blaze asked.

“It’s very nice. Hot.” Normally, I’d correct him and explain that California and Texas could be two different countries. But that would take three or four minutes that I could use to sleep.

“Someday, I would like to go to the U.S. That is my dream. Maybe I can visit you there.”

“Absolutely. That would be cool.”

He pulled out his phone, again, and I recoiled at the thought of listening to more music. “Here, add me on Facebook,” he asked.

I added him and made a mental note about “the true meaning of globalization.” Eleven minutes to go. I closed my eyes.

“Are you well?” the old man shouted, giggling again, and tipping his head back to drain whatever beer was left in his can.

“I could use a beer,” I said.

He laughed and waved his finger, “No no no.”

“Do you have a sketchbook?” asked DJ KB Blaze. “I’d like to see some of your drawings.”

I opened my bag, shifted a few books around, and pretended to be disappointed that I couldn’t find my sketchbook. “Nope, don’t have it.”

I closed my eyes. Eight minutes to go.

“You like books?” asked the old man with the empty beer can.

“Yes.”

“I like books, too. I am strong.”

I closed my eyes and heard the old man crush his can. He started talking to me in a South African dialect, completely abandoning English, laughing at his own jokes.

Three minutes left. All hope of my nap was lost. I smiled and laughed when the old man with no front teeth laughed, and watched the last of the forest melt away.

“What will you tell people about Graskop when you return to America?” asked DJ KB Blaze.

I hadn’t thought about that. I was too busy hiking and taking pictures and getting the hell out of Graskop to think about what I thought about Graskop.

And we’d just arrived in Hazy View.

“That it was pretty, I guess. Very green.” I knew I sounded stupid.

“OK, well maybe I will visit you in Texas.”

“Sure,” I said. We all jumped off of the bus, they in separate directions, and me, off to Swaziland, with a camera full of pretend memories.

Lanre Akinsiku is a California-born travel and short story writer.

*Photo by Lanre Akinsiku.

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