If the shoe fits...

Maun, Botswana
September 13, 2008
(with accompanying photos continued in the blog entry below)


With all of my travels in the past few weeks, my blog will be certain to consist of dispatches out of chronological order. No matter. As I settle back into my cottage, I’ll work my way through tales as they strike my fancy.

Today is the day to remember the shoe.

If you look at the Sebego in the photo, you’ll see the ink purported to have launched a movement in Zanzibar’s Stone Town, a warren of ancient buildings with narrow alleyways and artistically carved wooden doors. Think of it as Zanzibar’s French Quarter, only with a Moorish architectural style.

“Obama for President” is written on the shoe. And thus one fan with a single pair of shoes began a chorus of “Yes, we can,” and the establishment of a public patch of ground devoted to Barack Obama.

“If Obama can, we all can!” says the shoe’s owner, 25-year-old Masoud Salim, whose business card says, “VOLUNTEER ALSO EXPERT TOUR GUIDE.”

What a scene. There are two oil (maybe acrylic?maybe tempura?) portraits of the Democratic nominee hanging from a tree. A news article rests underneath one of the paintings. An Obama game board with bottle caps for checkers is painted on the concrete ledge. There are bumper stickers, T-shirts and carved key rings in the shape of the island. Zanzibar is burned in wood on one side; Obama ’08 is on the other. (I couldn’t resist buying the unusual trinket. I figure it’s got historical value, and it’s practical, too, since I now have wheels, praise be.)

Wherever I go I continue to be astonished by the reaction that Obama inspires in Africa. White, black, Methodist, Catholic, Zion Christian Church member, wealthy, poor, Muslim, mixed-race, baggage handler, security company owner, game tracker, government official – whether from Botswana, Tanzania, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Malawai, Kenya, Uganda – you name it, this part of the world is awash in Obama fans. (On the plane back to Maun from Joburg the other day, the flight attendant on Air Botswana pointed to the in-flight magazine in front of me and whispered, proudly, “I’m a supporter of Obama. And that’s OUR Obama.” The magazine cover shot was of Botswana’s new president, Ian Khama, son of a black tribal chief and a white British insurance employee from London. The Oxford-educated chief went on to become Botswana’s first president, Sir Seretse Khama, in 1966.)

Last month Masoud spoke at a gathering of 150 people in Stone Town, a group that included tourists from America who he says changed their support from McCain to Obama after Masoud himself spoke. His take: Obama offers “the great message of hope and change….(His) achievement is that he can inspire change in Africa.”

Masoud said Africans like the fact that Obama’s father was Kenyan, from the country next door. “But that’s not the main thing.” Hope is, he says. “My father insisted on honesty, sincerity and respect. I see that Obama embodies all those things my parents taught me.”

I and my friend Kelly Swift, formerly of The Sacramento Bee and with whom I traveled in Tanzania, got a kick out of the enthusiasm, not only in Stone Town but on the way to the Ngorongoro Crater on Tanzania’s mainland. In Karatu we stopped to take photos of enterprising entrepreneurs who dolled up their curio stands with political slogans. I’m not sure if the Obama stands are helping sell any additional wooden giraffes or beaded necklaces, but I have to believe people like us will keep stopping for the political photo op of the season. Dare I say of the century?

Not in my own words

I took the photo at Xugana Island Lodge, where I moved to my assistant lodge manager assignment in the Okavango Delta in June.


I'll be struggling for a while to try to describe what it was like living with Botswana camp workers in an amazing wilderness for three months. I miss it already. For now, I'll share with you something I read from a dusty book tucked away in "Jessie's Suite" at Camp Okavango. (Jessie was the eccentric billionairess who collected pilots' toothbrushes, if you get my drift. Her suite has a notable array of mirrored walls and black tiles, although apparently fewer than when she lived there, and that's saying something.)

This is from Venture to the Interior by Laurens van der Post:
It is one of the more unjustifiable pretensions of our age that it measures time and experience by the clock. There are obviously a host of considerations and values which a clock cannot possibly measure. There is, above all, the fact that time spent on a journey, particularly on a journey which sets in motion the abiding symbolism of our natures, is different from the time devoured at such a terrifying speed in the daily routine of what is accepted, with such curious complacency, as our normal lives. This seems axiomatic to me; the truer the moment and the greater its content of reality the slower the swing of the universal pendulum.
*****

....Van Der Post loved Africa and filmed and wrote books about the Kalahari and its bushmen. This book, published in the early 1950s, is about one of his many journeys to Africa.
He opens it with this:

We carry with us the wonders
We seek without us: there is all
Africa and her prodigies in us. --Sir Thomas Browne

TB patients on the lam

I see that the New York Times is reporting today on TB patients being locked up in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. The patients have a drug-resistant strain and have been put in hospitals surrounded by razor wire, but the patients have been breaking out of what they consider a prison to go visit their families.
This is not news I'm seeing in the Botswana press. But it does explain a lengthy television ad about tuberculosis that aired yesterday on the SABC television station we get in Gabs. It went on about how people should be tested and they could be cured if they have the disease.
What caught my attention was the odd announcement at the end, which said that the only thing that spreads faster than TB is "a positive attitude." Quite a juxtaposition.

A continent's majesty

(w/photo of Lilac-breasted roller)
Wednesday

Many blog posts ago I promised to share the quote that caused Kathleen Krueger to dissolve into tears when I handed it to her with a thank-you gift for her and husband. They lived in Africa for much of the ‘90s. Here is the quote that sums it up for me:

“I believe the chief gift from Africa to writers, white and black, is the continent itself, its presence which for some people is like an old fever, latent always in their blood; or like an old wound throbbing in the bones as the air changes. That is not a place to visit unless one chooses to be an exile ever afterwards from an inexplicable majestic silence lying just over the border of memory or of thought. Africa gives you the knowledge that man is a small creature, among other creatures, in a large landscape.”

--Doris Lessing

Obama in Africa

Some people in Botswana do seem engaged by the presidential primaries in the U.S. Mr. and Mrs. Wanzala in Maun were over the moon when I gave them an Obama bumper sticker. I took a photo to mark the occasion. Mrs. Wanzala is from Alego, the neighboring village to Obama's father's village in Kenya. She, too, is from the Luo tribe, the granddaughter of a king for that region. She looks like a queen, especially in the photos from the 1960s, with her hair in an updo like Queen Nerfiti's. Cathy Wanzala is glued to any news about Obama. She's proud that a man with African roots is doing so well.

And she feels connected to him -- Cathy and Joe lived in Nairobi and shared a roof in a kind of long house with Obama's father and his family headed by a white woman Ruth as the matriarch. (That was after Obama Sr. and his wife from Kansas divorced. Barack Obama saw his father only when he was 10-years-old when his father returned to America for a visit.) A wall and a fence separated the two families in Nairobi, but the Wanzalas saw them frequently, of course, and Joe used to go to the pub and have drinks with Obama Sr. "He was a man with a large voice that filled the room," Joe says. He also liked to drink -- a lot. He'd order "a double brandy," and when the waiter would ask with what, he'd say, "A double."

So one double brandy would come with another double brandy. Joe recalls him as a brilliant and generous man, one who used to be country's chief economist but got in trouble when he criticized the government, of which he was a high official. He fell from a very high post to impoverished circumstances for a long time; he was on a list not to be hired. Eventually, he made his way back to a better lifestyle, but the hardship had really taken its toll and he was drinking much too much. (If you haven't read Obama's book, "Dreams from my Father," you should. It explains the amazing story of Barack Obama's Kenya roots. I wish I had a copy to give the Wanzalas. They'd love it.