Robbing Peter to Rob Paul?

The latest pyramid scheme recently collapsed, leaving scores of 'shareholders' to anxiously await the return of their monies. Development Entrepreneurship for Community Development (DECI) was registered by some shady independent church as a business, which allowed it to fly under the radar of our Government undetected for quite the while. The organization encouraged people to 'plant' their investments so they could 'reap' returns of 100% interest or more...

When their operation was outed by a nosy newspaper the Government was inspired to investigate. Their findings: DECI is a pyramid scheme, which makes it illegal, so Paradisans should refrain from investing while they gathered themselves to shut down the operation. Since no good deed goes unpunished, upon hearing this DECI investors immediately herded together and bleated that since the Government had failed to enrich them, it should butt out of their business and stop interfering with real investors. Heh.

It was serious enough to make the evening news- DECI preachers preaching, mobs of investors chanting, some making overripe statements to journalists: "DECI saved my life! The Government doesn't know what its job is!" Yet in the papers, we read that Kenyans had defenestrated the Director of DECI Kenya when they found out it was a con. You'd think this would have given Paradisans a clue. Luckily, the Paradisan story ends well. When DECI finally came clean, they just asked 'planters' to claim their refunds and gentle Paradisans flocked to their offices to sign up for the repayment schedule.

Admittedly DECI was exploiting our credulity when it comes to men of the cloth (which serves us right), but did we have to go and exacerbate matters by rejecting a Government intervention that was useful, for once? When it was up and running, DECI refused to tell its clients how it was investing their money and getting such high returns. And we flocked to their offices in droves. And then we reprimanded the Government for getting in the way of making money. If I was a con artist myself, I would assume from this incident that a Paradisans and her money are soon parted.

Which is a bit unfair, admittedly. As Bernie Madoff so handily demonstrated, wealth and education are no defence against a good swindle. Confidence artists only need to exploit our natural anxiety to make more money. As evidenced by DECI's experience and our oversubscribed IPOs, there is money hanging around unbanked and looking for an investment opportunity. Like, say, a mutual fund or a sub-prime mortgage con...

New Blog Shout Out: African Bambataa

After only a couple of months of (hand-wringing, dithering and stonewalling) deliberation, Ink Head has taken the plunge into the murky waters of blogging. Put your hands together for African Bambataa which can be found at http://africanbambataa.blogspot.com/

Be sure to give him hell in the comments section :)

Try A Little Tenderness

We just got four freshly slaughtered chickens from my cousin Mooreen*, who raises these little babies with minimal interference. Not full organic perhaps, but the only shots they get are when they are chicks. After that they experience nothing but good feeding and time to grow. She raises them for something like twice the time a commercial chicken takes because they don't have growth hormones in them. Someone, finally, cares.

What makes this interesting is the maths: she sells her chickens for about 2000/= cheaper than store bought. That is right: they are raised healthier, for longer...and still sold cheaper. Cooking them is a pleasure: forty minutes in a hot bath of briny liquid and Chicken One was already trying to fall apart. Fat content: negligible. Chicken Two and Chicken Three got the oven treatment and the gravy they released was quite heavenly. Fat content: negligible. Chicken Four awaits dismemberment and storage in the freezer.

The fat content thing is not about dieting, in case you were wondering. After all, I consider freshly rendered (preferably young and organic) lard to be one of the sensory pleasures no sane person should forgo completely. My rejection of chicken fat is quite simple: for the longest time I couldn't stand to eat the stuff. It tasted quite fowl to me. Heh. But seriously folks: I don't know what Interchick is putting in their chickens. I can taste it, I don't like it, and I am pretty sure it is compromising the genetically encoded longevity that Dad was kind enough to pass on.

Moorine's chickens though: they are young, and taste soft and sweet like a young chicken should. They taste like they breathed fresh air, and had a swift and humane death. Their drumsticks are elongated and their thighs trim: these guys were not just sitting around. And the innards that came with them (gizzards n' livers) are purple-pink and firm with none of the disgusting degeneration of those mass-produced inmates. When I eat such a happy, respectfully-raised chicken, I feel happy and respectful.

All of this long-windedness is to say: yeah. even in Paradise, (an abysmally poor country by official accounts) you can raise nourishing and humane animal protein. Affordably. Nice, eh?

*Holler if you want Chicken Moorine's number. Although she raises 300-500 chickens per harvest, these babies are so popular that pre-booking is necessary. Size is inconsistent: sometimes they are big, sometimes they aren't- just like in nature. One thing they always are, though, is palatable.

National ID? No Thanks.

So, next year is election year. And this year the government will be issuing National ID cards to every Tanzanian who has reached their majority. Innocuous enough, I am sure.

Except that...in Mkapa's second term, I believe the Government decided to change the vehicle registrations to their current format which meant that everybody had to queue up and pay the government for the pleasure of doing so. The sole company authorized to make the plates was owned by good old Uncle Ben.

Then there was the changing of passports circa 2005, another wonderful experience. Half of Tanzania's budget comes from donor aid, but we have modern biometric passports. More recently, rumors suggested that government was going to hit motorists again by modernizing our laughable driving licenses. We were thinking small. Why target a couple of thousand poor bastards when you can hit up roughly 50% of the population?

When the National ID project was announced, the Minister saddled with the scheme assured Tanzanians that we wouldn't have to pay for them. Fast forward to today's headline: "Tanzanians to pay for ID cards." We're a poor country, he says. The government can't afford to foot the bill, he says. As it is, we are going to have to do it in phases, he says. Next year is an election year, I says.

I don't want to be tagged. I don't trust my government with that kind of power. Like any sane Tanzanian, I try to minimize the state's direct interference in my life as much as possible. I can't imagine a more intimate embrace with the government than trying to get an ID card, except for prison maybe or the army. Though I understand some of the reasons they are doing this (security, blah, blah, blah, security) I am not sure that the outcome will justify the investment of 200 million dollars plus.

That's a chunk of change. Why not beef up community policing to address security concerns? Why not recruit and train teachers and increase their salaries so we're not overrun with angry unemployable youth? Why not stock women's clinics with latex gloves and surgical equipment for safer childbirth? Why not reduce the defense budget and sell off superfluous government luxury cars? Oh, yeah...because next year is an election year.

A Hunger for Taste

Since our group had decided not to leave the Busara Festival grounds to find dinner, we had some snacks to keep us going. Three paper plates later we were satisfied and left the litter on the ground next to us for later disposal- the festival organizers had forgotten to put bins out. I was zoning out mildly at that point, I think the Ugandan troupe was on (great drumming but seriously chaotic transitions) when a couple of young boys came and sat near us and to the front. I thought I was imagining things when a small hand darted out to grab a water bottle, quick as a snake. It was empty, although the paper plates were not: three quarters of a puffy naan, one and a half vegetable samosas, chilli sauce- the remains of our meal.

An older boy, this one alone, came and sat to our left. He had been carting a crate around collecting empty bottles but he set it down and sat on it, ostensibly to enjoy the music. This time I was ready. Sure enough, he casually reached over to appropriate the samosas but found himself blocked off by the boys who had come over earlier. They had a stiff staring contest, and I have to say that the young boys were infinitely more fearsome than the teenager. He backed down. All of this happened quietly, at the very periphery of our group, easily missed.

Just that afternoon we had had a discussion about the crappy food critics in the papers. As I declaimed from my soapbox about the fluctuating quality of food in Paradisan restaurants, someone brought me up short and said that maybe it wasn’t appropriate to worry about things like food criticism in a country where many people can’t afford one balanced and nourishing meal per day. Point taken: perhaps food criticism can be painted as self-indulgent bourgeois decadence. But then again, perhaps not. Ironically, we battled it out over a fantastic lunch at a spot overlooking the sea.

There is a deeper point to be made here. When is it appropriate to care about what we put in our mouths, to make that a mission? Food is one of the most democratic of sensory experiences, and is the stuff of life itself. I have only ever been truly, deeply hungry once to date, and I cannot recommend it. The twist, of course, is that at the time I was surrounded by relatives who deliberately let me starve. I suspect they enjoyed it, our little family iteration of class warfare. Sure, food is about meeting a basic need. But it is also about the politics of a clan, a society. When I ate again in friendlier surroundings, after my encounter with starvation, I shared three tiny fish over steamed bananas with two other women. Barely a fingertip of salt, and I don’t know if we even had cooking oil, but the love with which it was seasoned made it one of the unforgettable meals of my life.

There is of course the idea that food criticism belongs to those who obsess about the thickness of a home-made mayonnaise, or slurping down perfect Kobe beef burgers stuffed with blue cheese and truffles. There is a time and place for that, just as there is a time and place for hand-tooled Italian leather shoes and precision Swiss watches with kinetic mechanisms. But a true gourmand is omni-voracious and can tell you that there is as much pleasure to be found a simple soup as there is in foamed sauces.

Those boys who were scavenging our leftovers don’t have the time to give a shit about whether the pastry on the samosas they filched was crisp or soggy. That much is undeniable. In a perfect world, they would have someone to make sure they ate right. Someone should care about whether their bowl of beans had enough coconut milk, if it was too thin. Someone should remember to slip them their favorite treats whenever possible: grilled shrimp from Forodhani perhaps, or a square of halwa. Someone should love them through their palate*.

Tasting love and celebrating life through the palate- this is, in the end, what an obsession with good food is really about. I believe that even the meanest slum, the meanest village has a natural gourmet, someone who will take the time to make her ugali smoother perhaps, or his brewed beer particularly satisfying, or his stew deliciously fatty. It is a talent, like an eye for color or perfect pitch. Perhaps the real bourgeois sin is to think that that They, Those Others, are too damn Poor to appreciate the fundamental pleasure of food the way that We the Rich can apparently afford to do. Really?

* I have to plug this book: Delicious by Sherry Thomas is probably the ultimate gift for the gourmande slash romance reader in your life. Her characters’ relationships to food are poetry and philosophy all at once.

Voices of Wisdom 2009

I am ashamed to say that this is the first year that I bothered to attend the Sauti Za Busara Music Festival in Zanzibar. Typical of course- I am usually the one yakking on endlessly about how we should have festivals of all kinds that celebrate our art and give us a chance to appreciate it. Busara has been running for three years now. Paradisans- this one is worth it. At the prices that locals pay, it is hardly more expensive than a weekend at Kigamboni and infinitely more interesting. So, the recount:

1. Book Salaam was stellar, considering it was the first of its kind in Bongo. Patrick Neate made for an excellent host, and can I say the man has some seriously good poetry? I was amazed at the difference that hearing people's writing spoken out loud can make to how you relate to the text. I have struggled to find a way to describe the evening, but it was one where you kind of had to be there to appreciate the atmosphere, the mood, the writers' works and the music, the festivities...A number of people have some ideas about doing something in the same vein in Paradise every so often and I think we are about due. What would interest me most is confluence: if we could get the Anglo-oriented intellectuals (us) to link up with the Swahili intellectuals and some of the more proficient Bongo Flava artists we might have something very exciting on our hands.



2. The Music! I make for a particularly bad music critic because my reactions tend to be less than nuanced: I like it. I don't like it. That's it. In my defence though, music is primarily a physical experience isn't it? The piercing of clear, sweet singing, the rhythmic pulse of a good beat, goosebumps, submersion. Got all of that and more during the festival. Acts that stood out for me: Omega Bugembe Okello, the faculty of the Dhow Countries Music Academy, Ty. The first is a fusion group led by a Ugandan earth goddess type singer- can we get an Amen for neosoul?The second was simply gorgeous, the sound of veteran musicians making beautiful sounds with ease and confidence and familiarity. The last is a UK hip hop artist whose music is quite good- and you know how I'm so immune to the hippidy hop. One of his back-up singers, Andrea, is doing things with her voice and a music box that have to be seen to be believed. That's her on the left, sitting next to Baby Soul who can scat like Ella reborn.



3. Unguja. The last time I was on the island was maybe four years ago. This jewel of the Indian Ocean is changing. Modern life is rolling over it and in another decade will probably have scoured clean the unique and interesting flavors that took centuries of cultural encounters to build. There are a lot more young men on the streets than before, a lot more strung-out people too. You can sniff the edges of the drug addiction epidemic. I love going to the island for the heavy weight of history I feel there- not all of it comfortable. A few generations ago walking around in Stone Town, a dark-skinned kaffir girl like me from the deepest interior, I imagine I may have been caught, collared and stuck in a cargo hold bound for Arabian shores. Watching my fellow tourists meander by in cargo shorts lugging telephoto lenses it seems silly to feel melancholy and displaced. But I like going to Zenj to get the historical blues before dipping into the ocean at one of the perfect beaches, it keeps things in bittersweet perspective for me. Now I have to make sure I go as often as I can before this ancient, complicated place becomes less challenging.

Yeah. I am not sure how much wisdom per se was included in the Busara festival, which I had always assumed had a much more pronounced music history feel to it than it does in reality. Still, it is a unique and excellent event. The old fort is a very evocative setting, the free entry makes for a great mix in the audience and really, does one actually need any convincing to attend a music festival in Stone Town?

Writer? Uh...maybe?

Oh Lord. The hellish gap between my blogging intentions and my blogging output is staring me in the face again. I knew I should never have made that resolution about posting more often: last year when I had no such lofty ideals I was much more productive. And as I keep telling Ink Head, blogging is a muscle that has to be exercised...I just got a little lazy.

Anywho, I am off to stock up on culture and clove perfume in Zanzibar over the next two days. Book Salaam is making its debut as a fringe event of the Sauti za Busara annual music festival. African Bambataa is a fan of the dude of honor, one Patrick Neate, who is coming down from the UK to support the Tanzanian iteration of his critically acclaimed London Book Slam. Just about everyone I know from the Paradisan writing scene is heading there en mass, all thirty or forty odd of us. I don't know what to expect but I know that whatever happens, it will be good.

As I started running down my list of preparations this evening- camera battery plugged in, where are the moleskine notebook and black ink pens, don't forget to pack clean underwear and a phone charger- I realized that this year I might be in imminent danger of aspiring to become a Writer, thanks to the overwhelming temptations of a collegial atmosphere. The other day under the influence of alcohol and warm enthusiasm from a nearly-published author, I let it slip that I would love to write biographies. And I would. But what posessed me to admit it?

What's the problem, you ask? This is a matter of self-definition, and determination, and choices- all that good stuff. I remember an article by a new author- I think it may have been Alexandra Robbins/Abby Wilner, or maybe someone completely different- who basically said that calling herself a writer and then trying to live it was one of the most terrifying things she had ever done. I could relate to that. I suppose anyone who has ever enforced a clear distinction between their artistic and pragmatic sides can relate to that.

As a writer with a small double-you, I can comfortably pursue my more lucrative and socially-approved ambitions. I can dedicate myself to my job. Admittedly it consists largely of reading and writing, but it comes with a salary and perhaps even health insurance in the future. As a writer in small caps I can fantasize about making enough money to buy a Fahm in Africah while nursing my other plans for world domination. But if I were to allow myself to capitalize that double-you, things would have to change.

Writers write. It is their raison d'etre, whether or not they succeed at it in the public eye. Writers write at the expense of ambitions to own a farm, at the expense of jobs with health insurance, sometimes at the expense of healthy relationships. In college I took a class for African Studies that brought me into contact with the work of a brilliant short story writer from Zimbabwe. His work was devastating, I can still recall some of it by memory (and my memory is a Swiss Cheese, evidently, since I cannot retain his name). But the man is/was also struggling with some pretty serious mental health issues in his civilian life. And I get it, I get him. Aspiring to Be a Writer and let the artistic side make the decisions is a rather unattractive ambition for anyone who likes the idea of a neatly ordered and logically progressive life.

I recently came across a potential ally in the quest for a literary magazine, an ambition I had been secretly nurturing for a couple of years. As it turns out, this year marks the beginning of a literary revolution in Paradise. This social idea is coming to fruition in many minds all at the same time: SOMA magazine, rumors of a writers' workshop, Book Salaam...we're all negotiating our alliances and rivalries in the area of innovation and collective effort. I have no idea how this will turn out, it could go either way: a small but critically-acclaimed journal someday, and the chance to do some interesting work, or complete loss of momentum. In an effort to guard the latter somewhat, this is the first entry in the This Writing Life section of the blog. With some luck, it will not go the way of the food blogging entries. Let me end here since tonight I have some homework to do: who is Patrick Neate?

Coming Out- Of the Back of the Bookstore

Although an out-and-out scorn for novels in the romance genre rarely bothers me, the faintly pitying dismissals of other avid fiction readers never fails to get under my skin and fill me with an impotent anger. Sadly, it is only in the past few months that I realized what the problem was: I have been ashamed of my reading habits all these long years. I have been that furtive buyer of bodice-rippers, clutching her brown paper parcel upon exiting bookstores like a drug fiend afraid to be seen in the wrong part of town. I have feigned interest in the high brows of people's private bookshelves while secretly scanning the spines for the flowery script and pastel colors favored by romance cover designers. But today I'm coming out in defence of my beloved genre.

The thing is that I understand perfectly well people's misgivings. It is not all Jane Austen out there, and there are copious amounts of execrable materials that get printed in the genre. I know that a number of readers who are high in the instep tend to look down on us romance lovers as precious but misguided literary idiots, though we would thank them to remember that our insatiability is what keeps book empires afloat so that they may afford to offer them more refined fare. Sure, the unimaginative may assume that we cannot discern between the fairy-tale worlds of love stories and the complex, unpredictable, elusive yet curiously universal experiences of love in The Real World. And by keeping silent, I feel that I have tacitly agreed to these and all the other rude misconceptions about this wonderful genre and those that write and read it.

La Dee and I proudly display our hodgepodge collection at home to the enduring irritation of Our Lady of the Fixed Smiles: "Must you put all those...those...books where people can see them? What will your visitors think!" I don't blame her; the bookshelves are laden with about 70% romance novels, bolstered by texts we will never read after college but could not bear to part with, very excellent fantasy/science fiction and the odd literature grandee. As it is, people usually think and state the obvious: 'Wow, you guys really like books! you really like those romance books, eh?' To which there is no polite reply other than 'yes.' Nothing like a Regency to teach one sardonic understatement.

So what is the big deal, you ask? I had a straw-that-broke-the-camels-back moment a couple of days ago when having a discussion about literature and fiction. As my colleague snarfled on about having read 'Judith Whatever' when he was a child as his only experience of romance, for the first time in my life I suffered an acute attack of testosterone allergy. As a person who fits snugly into some pretty classic 'disempowered' boxes, (African, Black, Female, and Young) I have lapped up romance as an escape tool and a refuge from the patriarchy. I like Le Male enough to consider myself a true androphile, but sometimes even in literature He needs to STFU so that the other noises can filter through. Don't think I am not aware of the patriarchal conformity in classic romance novels mind you, with their marriage and reproduction ideal. But we can get to that another time.

You see, romance has always been my go-to place when relentless masculine ego threatens to overwhelm me. Throughout high-school, literature was heavy on Le Male and His Angst, whether we watching Oedipus self-destruct, or MacBeth self-destruct, or Okonkwo self-destruct, or that little snot from Catcher in the Rye also, you guessed it: self-destruct. Kafka, Faust, Theatre of the Absurd, and nary a healthy female character in sight. This diet was leavened by ye Sylvia Plath and Bessie Head poetry to guarantee that our budding sexual identities and politics would be fully saturated with wariness for the Madness that is Woman. Did I mention MacBeth*? Yeah.

So on holidays I would cool out with a little romance, inhabiting worlds where gentler passions were allowed to see the light of day, female sexuality wasn't a red-toothed dragon waiting to devour someone unworthy man of feeble character, and humor was welcome. It was a wonderful introduction to some simple truths, such as Guys Have Feelings Too, Beware The Villains, and Don't be Afraid to Buck Convention if You are Fighting For Your Happiness. And it wasn't until Mrs. O'Connor made us read some Magical Realism towards the end of high school that the literary horizon changed for me (Thanks, POC!).

Enter: that female voice. Prior to reading books like The Red Tent, The Poisonwood Bible, A Thousand Splendid Suns and Purple Hibiscus I had never even imagined that someone out there might articulate my politics, feelings, thoughts and other less tangible experiences with so much more eloquence than I ever could. How to explain? Achebe will always be great but Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie made me cry for half a day after reading her book. In many ways, my favorite romance novelists of yore guided me to them by giving me the tools to recognize the sound and cadences of that particular voice within seconds of browsing any title in a bookstore.

But it doesn't end there- no genre worth its salt remains static or rigid. Just as Fantasy branched out from Tolkien into Phillip Pullman, Guy Gavriel Kay and numerous others authors' mind-bending works, so has Romance gone forth and multiplied into a variety of offerings to suit all tastes and brows. Some of the big name romance authors have secondary lives as university professors, computer programmers, eminent physicists, farmers, librarians. Along with happily-ever-after, a romance reader can get a mass of information on the most interesting things- like the difference between a clusterfuck and a snafu in American military slang.

Best of all is that this genre lends itself handily to whatever place the author is coming from for the dissection of whatever issues the author cares about. It is easy to overlook the fact that a genre need be nothing more than a format, a vehicle for the author. Romance has mushroomed democratically in recent years in all kinds of interesting directions: erotica, paranormal, gay and lesbian, ethnic 'minority,' futuristic dystopia- you name it and the likelihood is someone is trying to get their manuscript published in that sub-genre. While in the 1980s the M&B (that's Mills and Boon to you uninitiated) industry was heavily pushing the dominant-man-submissive-inexperienced-woman schtick, these days their offerings include second or third marriages, older-woman-younger-man relationships and even mild BDSM and polyamory themes. And these are the conservative publishers of "cheap" romance. So whatever your flavor, there is romance for you out there. And if there isn't: write it. That's how some current best-sellers got started. Like the best literature, the good stuff in Romance can capture the intangibles and explore the human condition with insight, poignancy and artistry. It just does it with a good dollop of lovin' thrown in.

Wheeeeeeeewooooooh, glad to have gotten that off my chest. Alright with the world now. What's this got to do with Paradise, say you? Nothing much, other than the sad fact that it is damn hard to get your hands on good romance out here but yours truly is always willing to lend a book or two (after you swear on the blood of your unborn children that we will get them back). And if its not your thing, no worries- we all have our blind spots. Mine is anything vanilla-scented so naturally La Dee loves vanilla-scented things.

Have a loving weekend.

* Is any other Lady MacBeth fan eternally disappointed that she descended into madness in the end? And has anyone watched that pivotal scene in Mystic River? Somebody should have gotten her Oscar nod that year.