The beleaguered African

I’ve never felt as beleaguered, as an African on this continent, as I have in the past 2 weeks. Mount the plane to Cairo, all hijab’d (too bad I forgot to change out of my trousers) and ready for adventure. I sit next to a gentleman who immediately asks me what country I’m from. I smile, counter with the same question, and he says Sudan. The smile freezes on my face, but I continue the conversation… after all, not all Sudanese sanction the genocide in Darfur, right?

The air hostess comes round with papers and magazines, I choose Paris Match, he chooses the Financial Times. A minute into our perusal of our chosen literature, he pulls out a supplement on aids and asks me what the red ribbon on the cover of the supplement stands for. Now, priding myself on being a repository for trivia, and having recently asked and googled that exact question, I quickly explain it. He follows up with a question that totally smacks of a set up: “what continent is most affected by AIDS?” I play along, “Africa”. Then why don’t African people choose the symbol for aids? [He’s got a point there…] You Africans take everything the west gives… and then follows a tirade on how we Africans never question anything given by the west.

I answer him using the words of others I’ve had this discussion with: the west brought development, they brought education and picked us from the morass of our primitive cultural and religious practices, so why should we doubt the goodness of other things they bring us? He asks why, if they brought education, there weren’t any people in his field (construction) from Kenya until 1978… they were all laborers before that. How to say “idon’tknow” in Arabic? He adds that we only need to understand our problems in order to half solve them… A discussion I can bet a thousand shillings is going on in at least 80% of pubs continent-wide. Enough already with these discussions! He, naturally, counters with something else, but I’ve switched off at this point. I refuse to engage in a discussion about how doomed and gloomy the future is for Africans, for the 3^rd consecutive night.

Yesterday, a person who should know these things was scripting (verbally) the play of african conferences: someone stands and presents a paper that makes recommendations for solution of certain problems. An hour later, someone else presents a paper that says the same thing, only in a different way. Then the obligatory ‘smart alec’ of the conference stands up and complains/analyzes ‘we are just going round and round and saying the same thing’. Never is an actor mentioned, only that ‘there needs to be more work done on the following…’, and that ‘someone should look into implementation of such and such’ (kinda like watchie’s column where people are always writing “who will save us from….”). After the presentations we all go for the buffet meal(s), and leave… to workshop another day. The night before last, we were talking about how ineffective our governments are, etc. etc. Honestly, I am in no mood to go anywhere near the doom and gloom wagon again. We are a beautiful, smart people, no matter what our shortcomings are, so don’t try to drag me into self-hate, thank you! We settle into an uncomfortable silence.

He breaks the silence to ask where in Egypt I’m be going, and I indicate that I’m torn between doing Cairo and doing Luxor. He informs me that Luxor is best experienced if you time your visit to occur either on 22^nd March or 22^nd October. That’s because, on these two days of the year, the hall in the temple of (one of the) Ramses(?) hits the statue, just so, and the sun lights the entire hall up in stages. It is dark/artificially lit except for these 2 days of the year. Gotta admire that old technology, yes? The original dates were the 21^st of March and October, but they had to raise these monuments when building the Aswan dam, so it altered the dates slightly. The total blonde I am about some of these things, I ask why they couldn’t just build the dam somewhere else (question is influenced by a discussion, a few years ago, about the Sudanese government wanting to build a dam in Sudan which would effectively wipe out the cultural heritage of Nubians or some other people living in that river valley). He says it’s because the rocky geology appropriate for dam building is not found along all stretches of the Nile, so the Luxor area was considered the best.

Sounds magnificent… can’t wait.