Swazi Booty

My fascination with souvenir shops continues.

Above: Swazi ankle bracelets worn while dancing (each pod is formed by an insect laying an egg on a tree - don't know what insect - the pods are collected, the larvae removed, a seed inserted, and the pod sewn up again - the anklets make a wonderful liquid percussive noise when shaken); metal rhino; bead sheep - I love the way these sheep have gaps between the bead spirals - they're like models of complex molecules with heads and tails stuck on.

More Swazi

Above: it's true about the dung beetles; spider; traditional beehive hut - fun concept but no windows - to decline if offered as accomodation; road transport without seatbelts; sausage tree (each sausage a foot long); a cleaner lake than the one next to the camp.

House on Fire

Near Mlilwane is House on Fire - a "cultural meeting point" / concert venue / hotel / imaginative folly which is good fun and which is a world away from the rustic African idyll of the rest camp. Their web site will give you a flavour of the sort of place it is. I had lunch there and admired the sculptures by Shadrack - which are for sale but at a pretty hefty price. When I'm a millionaire and have a big house to put them in I'll go back and buy the lot.

Mlilwane

I went to Swaziland again at the weekend and stayed in the "rest camp" in the Mlilwane game reserve - which claims to be the oldest reserve in the Kingdom. Many of the wild animals in the reserve have certainly got used to humans - the camp is unfenced and warthogs, impala, zebra, ostriches, monkeys and guinea fowl all wander in and around in a very relaxed manner. The cabins are made of thin planks of woods so it's quite possible to be woken up in the middle of the night by a duiker (a small antelope) coughing next to your head - a strange sound half way between a cough and a dry heave. The restaurant has a veranda next to a murky green lake much visited by ibis, egrets and herons - a tree has been sunk next to the railing to stop guests leaning out to feed the crocodiles - I though this was a joke at first, then a waiter threw some bread over the railing to prove his point - there was a roiling of fish and then sure enough a small croc shot out from under the veranda and chomped very fast on something - a fish sandwich maybe.

There are no lions or leopards in Mlilwane (they say) so it's considered safe to walk or rent a bicycle to get around, which is very pleasant compared to the standard game reserve experience of being thrown around on a land rover for hours on end. However, there are hippos in the reserve, and they're responsible for most of the human fatalities in Africa - the advice, if a hippo faces you and seems to be working up to a charge, is to get behind a tree, even a small one - hippos are very myopic and they can't jump, so they only tend to charge across flat land - if they can still see you. What you should do if there aren't any trees around isn't clear; although perhaps the Mlilwane hippos are so used to human visitors that they can't be bothered to charge them any more. Anyway, I didn't see any hippos at all - and I managed not to fall into the lake while slipping bread to the crocodiles; so here I still am.

Above: ostrich at the camp fire; vervet monkeys on a wall; the murky lake (note the egrets in the tree - the white dots); a blue duiker; a warthog - they often get down on their knees to graze, which seems to be a fairly serious design flaw - why don't they have longer necks? or shorter legs, for that matter.

Plague and demons

I've just finished an excellent book about the AIDS epidemic in SA, Three-Letter Plague by Jonny Steinberg - this was recommended to me by my friend Charles who runs a wonderful blog over here (and who is himself a brilliant fiction writer - do buy his books!)

Steinberg's book is about a Medecins Sans Frontieres attempt to set up an antiretroviral treatment programme in a poor village in rural Transkei - but it's even more about a local man's reluctance to be tested for HIV and Steinberg's attempts to understand this reluctance. It'd be pointless to try to summarise the whole book here - I suggest you read it - but it goes a long way to explaining the gap between African traditions and what people like me take for granted about modern health care. There's a tension in the fact that the author is white and the protagonist is black - but this is addressed directly at various points, and perhaps it's helpful in some ways for a white South African to act as an interpreter of African culture for an ignorant white Englishman like me.

I found much of the book very uncomfortable reading - the narrative about the AIDS epidemic itself (one in eight people in SA are HIV positive; 800 South Africans die of AIDS every day) and the various obstacles that health workers have to overcome or fail to overcome; but also the accounts of magic and witchcraft which are an integral part of rural culture in SA. I have almost no tolerance towards religion and mysticism in any form at all, and I'd willingly go ten rounds with any Christian, so there's no reason for me to expect myself to tolerate superstition any more in African culture - but then this clashes with a willingness to try to respect the beliefs of people whose views are different from mine - shouldn't I suspend my cynicism towards a culture I know very little about, at least initially? However this sort of thing astounds and repels me:

- babies sleep badly because they're sensitive to evil spirits; the dead can visit you in your dreams and ask you to perform rituals for them; envious neighbours can cast spells to make demons visit you while you're asleep and force you to eat raw meat or have sex with them; epilepsy is caused by demons who attack their victims from within their bodies; the tikoloshe demon is a foot tall, has an old man's face and a long beard, and his penis is so long he carries it over his shoulder - he is visible to children and the adults he has sex with - he's willing to murder the enemies of his human lovers; the impundulu appears as a handsome young man and seduces women when they're alone; and so forth.

Steinberg writes, "I was struck for the first time by the full weight of what it means to live in a magical world... in which the gap between ill wishes and the means to fulfill them closes. Those who wish to ruin you can do so by little more than wanting it."

My own reaction is: what nonsense, what ignorance. But my response is certainly very limited, as these beliefs are apparently still central to the social and psychological reality of people in rural areas here - astonished rejection isn't going to help understanding. The relation between a belief in witchcraft and attitudes towards AIDS is complex and indirect and again I won't attempt to summarise it here - but Steinberg's book challenges all sorts of (Western) assumptions on all sorts of levels - which is a rare and worthwhile achievement for any book.

Zuma's twentieth

I'm still struggling - and will go on struggling - to understand the cultural complexities of this country. The other evening I had a lesson in the distance from continental Europe in regard to the private morality of public citizens:

For the past couple of weeks the media have been full of the story of President Zuma fathering a child out of wedlock with the daughter of an old friend of his - the old friend didn't know about this relationship before the news broke (and the mother, Sonono Khoza, bizarrely tried to deny the existence of the baby in the first place). This seems to be one too many sexual relationships for most people - after all, Zuma already has four current wives and 19 children, and the ANC has been working hard to defend its leader's hyperactive sex life as a perfectly acceptable embodiment of traditional Zulu cultural values. However, Zuma was already living under the shadow of a rape trial from four years ago - he was found innocent - and the latest bulletin on his sex life seems to have tipped the balance of public opinion - his polygamy starts to seem like a post-hoc justification for just not being able to keep it in his pants. Another unfortunate detail for Zuma is that the ANC Youth League launched - the day after the story broke - an anti-HIV/AIDS campaign with the slogan "one boyfriend, one girlfriend" to encourage all South Africans everywhere to stick to one partner and use condoms (Zuma clearly failing on both counts with Sonono).

Until now Zuma himself has seemed to be relaxed and confident about his polygamy - he's said in public fora that he feels it's more moral to acknowledge multiple relationships and legalise them rather than follow the Western custom of having secret affairs (possibly with a dig at a certain French president who was an unacknowledged polygamist, and an American president who famously didn't have sex with a woman who nevertheless had sex with him). The latest scandal rather undermines Zuma's earlier position.

The other evening I was was having dinner with a group of South African teachers who asked me at one point what I thought of the Zuma story. Partly to be polite, I said that his private affairs had, perhaps, little bearing on his political ability, and that the ultimate judgement should be about whether he's helping to solve SA's many problems. But this was a European view. The teachers all disagreed with me - Zuma was a public figure and he needed to set an example in everything he did; his disregard for public opinion about his private life was a reflection of his arrogance, etc. The conversation continued and at one point Zuma was compared - very negatively - with the saintly Mandela, and I finally realised that what's underlying the apparently prurient public obsession with Zuma's sex life is a deep concern that Zuma represents a massive falling away from the high ideals of the old ANC and the great optimism generated by the fall of apartheid. Many South Africans are dismayed by the lost opportunities of the past twenty years - and they feel that politicians like Zuma are much to blame. Zuma's personal peccadilloes are symptomatic of a much wider malaise - he's now embarrassing his electorate on top of disappointing them, and even those who started off wanting to give him the benefit of the doubt are not in the mood to forgive him for the fling too far.