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home sweet home: http://www.missmoss.co.za/2011/05/06/these-things-no-11/
 
 
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 Jay-Z has has his own blog, much slyer than mine. 

"Inspiration begets inspiration times infinity." - H To The Izzay

Go here: http://lifeandtimes.com/
 
Stone-pressed trousers ballooned under an accidental quarter length sleeve dress shirt.

The same cool white washed through the top and pants alike.

The very best of "mtumba" (resold donated clothing), my heart shone towards you now. What could break a heart better than matched and cardboard stiff menswear? I knew you chose something special and prepared and ironed it the evening before.

And I’m sure you ironed it yourself and I’m sure you must have grinned when you picked that out and my heart cries when I think of that.

Later I learned that to get to the meetings you cross a river which floods in the rainy season and hides slimy crocodiles along the banks. This is one of those crazy yearbook experiences which seem ambiguous and faraway. I suppose you are both of those things.

Someone drew a caricature of you on an old receipt during a meeting one time.

You were a frog, hunched forward over a wide, toothless mouth.

Never has a frog looked so smashing as you did just then.

So there you sat and soon you stood, and when you dedicated yourself before all in the audience, I tried not to cry as it would look so strange. But inside I was touched.

You see, when you talk, it’s so charming and bright. Like marbles, your mouth moves around your toothless gaps and utters speech half English and half Swahili. When I offer my ‘Shikamoo’ and say only a few words in your mother tongue, you laugh and still, you try to test me further. But the tests are never too hard, and your graceless chuckles are always surprised and impressed.

And there’s something about your laugh that is especially infectious. Your head leans sideways when you shake my hand; then when you laugh, off-center with the rest of your body, you try to lick your laughter back in before it escapes mid-breath.

So as I sat watching you stand at the front of the auditorium, looking at least 80, and collecting your little black plastic bag with shorts for baptism, I was just melting for your story inside.

The best dressed little frog, ready for the most important moment in his life, and standing alone; no family there to watch, no family that I even know of; there you were.

Later, when I offered my “hongera” and “karibu”, you pointed to Gurvinder, your 30 year old Indian Bible teacher, and said, “My Spiritual Father”.

Of course, your shoulders hunched forward and your wrinkled dimples curled into such a laugh, hot on the heels of your words.

When someone is so human it breaks my heart in such a state.

Hongera Ndugu Nduka, Karibu Sana!

 
How to challenge the norms of education for the benefit of students and teachers!
 
2011.
 
Misba: “Bereavement, sorrow, disaster, calamity, catastrophe.”

It is also the word used for the grieving ceremony which follows a death in East Africa.




A mzungu bride sat at the center of a ring of African mamas and scarved ladies-in-waiting. She sat in the central lawn-chair, facing the gate. A blue and white button down hung off her white shoulders; it looked like a nurse’s top. Her skirt was Nigerian kanga; orange and blue West African print. She wore no makeup and thick-rimmed Woody Allen frames. 




Her face betrayed affliction; she was crippled by the news. He had been killed upon impact. 




Only days earlier we had ridden the city bus together. As she mused about her new husband she reminded me of Pop Rocks candy. Her enthusiasm was electric. It was contagious; maybe I would marry an African, too.




“Can I feed him stir fried vegetables on top of pilau?” “How many nights in a row will an African man eat ugali?” 




Our African friends would advise.




Her and Joseph had been waiting for marriage to move into their small apartment in Msasani. Catherine, without waving the self-righteous virgin flag, made it clear that there would be no funny business before the vows. It had been two weeks since the wedding ceremony in his Maasai hometown. She, her moral integrity spiked with a sour and bubbly wit, glittered at the devilish implications of sharing a bedroom with a warrior. 




Maybe I would marry an African, too.










Now here she was, the self-made African success, wilted and white, with red eyes sunken behind hipster frames.




I pictured her heart, usually pink and yellow, stuffed with nubian flowers announcing her allegiance to Africa. Now wounded and spilling. Squeezed and bloated; filling with disbelief and pain and leaking out all of their plans.




I sat down beside an African woman in a yellow kitenge. We sat in silence staring at each other and fulfilling the ceremonial rites of mourning. 




The expats brought a girl called Sarah. She was a psychologist, and the day before, she had come to our school training day to offer a seminar on grief counseling and child therapy in light of a colleague’s passing. Catherine had sat in and asked questions with the rest of us as she walked us through the stages of grief and the process of understanding profound loss.




The coincidences in life can sometimes be so mean.




Sarah crouched over Catherine. The parts I caught were sad and naked. She talked about how nice her husband was.

She told the story of how he left the night before:




“He came out in his underwear, and I said, ‘Wowww unapendeza!!!’ [you look good],” her voice lifted a bit; she was a performer and the humour of this last story would be told as all of her stories were, “… and he said ‘I don’t even have my pants on yet.’ And I said, ‘I know, and I can already tell how good you’re going to look’.”

It took her several minutes to get the whole story out. She laughed.




We all smiled as tears rolled down our faces.




Not long after, an old mama came strolling in; she had a headdress wrapped around her weaved braids. Her face was wrinkled into heavy folds around her eyes. Her presence demanded respect.

She went to Catherine and kneeled in front of her. We were all silent with our eyes fixed on the center drama about to unfold.




Catherine doubled over and began to sob as her head rested on the lap of the old bibi [grandmother]. The bibi’s hand held her head down and stroked her mzungu hair and her cries began to rise. Defeat echoed in her Swahili wails. She had even learned to mourn like an African widow.




She lived the highs and lows of cultural integration in the course of two weeks. A trashy Tanzanian bachelorette, a wedding in the hills of Kilimanjaro, consummation of a year and a half long friendship, and finally, death and a funeral.




 An msiba.




24 years old, a pale widow in Nigerian cloth.

And the few of us who sat around her; A makeshift support system, a potpourri of gypsies who happened to share this place in time. Paralyzed, silent, slippery tears dragging mascara down our white faces. She was like us.




But she was better.

 
Anarchy is a funny word. Its been posited as the post-punk slogan for revolution and pop revolt. We like that word. We like it when we see it written and even when we hear it; because its cool. And its not real.

Well of course, sometimes it is very real. And then we don’t like it at all.

Yesterday I saw it on the face of this city. Not the written word, not the spray-painted graffiti stamp.

People, disorder, fire.



* * *

We sat in the theater. An exciting little outing to escape the dark, hot, powerless house in Micocheni.

We were wazungus, grasping at wazungu tradition as we snuck Pringles and licorice bites into the crusty, cold showroom.

The movie we wanted seemed out of order so we slapped our shillings on the metal ticket booth dugout, and eagerly ripped open plastic bags filled with very high-end, very low-tech 3-D glasses.

After a parade of Tanzanian commericals (not among the best I’ve seen), we slouched in to enjoy the Green Hornet.

It was a tongue-in-cheek, drugster action flick. And there were lots of green 3-D figure effects.

We will fast-forward to the climax of the movie.

A car chase, of course.

The ”Black Beauty” versus the drug lord pedestrians, chasing the car down winding allies, up shattering glass elevators, and through newspaper office cubicles.

The black car jumped from the screen, invading the theater, and flooding it with green streams of light and smoke.

The Green Hornet wrestled with his enemies.

The charade continued. A provocative, violent, bloody showdown. A green showdown. Straddling the line between cheeky mockery and real Hollywood screen dream, the action was exhausting and they really shouldn’t have stuck those pegs through “Bloodovsky’s” eyes… even if he was the villain.

And as our eyes turned green and we sat numbly hooked to the bitter comforts of familiar pop motifs flashing against our goggles, an African drama was unfolding outside.
A real 3-D disaster.

That same damn corner, that same corner from this morning.

I don’t know who it was, I don’t know who either of them were.

But one of them was only trying to cross the street outside of Mwenge, just beyond our Hollywood living room.

And the other, well who knows where he was going. He was going beyond Mwenge, somewhere else, and he wanted to get to somewhere fast.

And the second one hit the first one and the first one died.

And the second one stopped. He stopped his car and I think maybe he got out.

I don’t know him. I don’t know if he was a nice person, a fat person, a funny person, a sad person or a bad person.

But anarchy was stamped on his face, his legs, his spine. His car. His death.

In a place where justice is obscure, complicated and really non-existent, the people make justice of their own. Or so the story goes.

And dammit, there’s always people in Africa. Even at 10:30 at night, crowded on the most dangerous corner in Tanzania. There will always be people.

The people saw, they heard, they acted.

We sat, still dope-eyed and feeling a bit green, in our taxi.

People shouted and argued. The noise wrapped itself around all of our cars, and then around each of our heads, and settled in our ears, buzzing and threatening in the most unusual way.

A spark was lit and it coughed its way up a crude, shadowed torch. A murky figure dropped it to the ground; and tires were sucked into the mouth of the fire; it spit and sighed, slowly but violently swallowed the rubber and indiscriminate heap below.

Our driver, muttering “Jamani”-s (Oh My Godness-s), and halting his lecture on Tanzanian history, got out of the car.

“Lock your doors”, I said.

Beside us a lory truck grumbled and its red, steel tubs were off-putting so close to the pyromaniacal chaos ahead.

He came back and after liaising with some Tanzanian comrades outside, he began to try to turn the car around.

And I began asking questions.

He explained the accident.

I knew the myth of man-made justice had been made real that night.

“The people are angry, they are frustrated because the same thing happened this morning and two students were killed. They have lit the car on fire; that’s what you saw”.

I asked, “Did they kill him?”

“Yes”.

Later I asked how.

“They kicked him”.

And they chased the police away, kicking him on his way out, too.

This is a place where we feel quite safe, it is not Nigeria or Darfur; its’ a place of peace and petty crime. The people are not aggressive- as I so often say.

But when there is no social justice, and corruption and traffic mayhem are among the nation’s greatest concerns, even the most docile of our kind can react violently.

**

It’s nice when you tell a story and somehow the tragedy or the reprisal of it reconciles itself though beauty or paradox in the end. This story is too impersonal for such resolution.

We dragged ourselves home, sunken green eyelids ready to retire but unable to rest.

And in my heart I wished I had not seen the truth of anarchy, though I had found it so interesting before. Because in person, anarchy is not romantic or exciting, as 'el Che' or 'de la Rocha' might have you think.

There is something gross and indulgent about it; it leaves you emptier than you were when you faced the crime for which anarchy demanded justice. It leaves you grieving not only the pedestrian, the driver, but also the integrity of a nation already bruised.

**



 
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