A bit of everyday life in the suburbs of Abidjan, Ivory Coast There’s a wonderful lack of urgency on the sandy streets of Gonzague, this ramshackle development stretched out along the pedestrian unfriendly, coastal route to Grand Bassam. Why hurry anywhere, when you can dawdle in the sun and sea breeze, chat to neighbours or a shopkeeper, making a trip to the shop last twice as long as any westerner would? A goodbye to a parting guest might become a…
Dear Ethiopia Actually, why am I starting with the word dear, when what I really want to say is, “fuck you”! It’s difficult to hold anything dear about a place that has institutionalised the ripping off of visitors and does so with a level of contempt that may well be unique. If it was just me that had similar thoughts, I’d keep my whining to myself and any other embittered travellers for when we’d had a few too many beers,…
It often takes time to dig up the real cultural differences when you cross borders in Africa but sometimes evidence leaps out at you immediately, such as in Somaliland: neighbouring Ethiopia and nearby Sudan are almost devoid of the brightly painted shop fronts that you see on many streets in Somaliland. Such art can be found elsewhere in Africa but each region has its own take: sometimes modern and stylish but often crude, or what some in the art world…
You won’t get very far on a street in Sudan before you run into a sittet shai, a tea lady providing essential hot refreshments to passersby: tea, sometimes laced with cinnamon or mint; coffee, with flavours like ginger, cloves or cardamom; karkadeyh – hibiscus tea. Whatever the choice it will come totally saturated with sugar. Crouched on little chairs behind their paraphernalia and a charcoal burner with a steaming kettle, these ladies are an essential part of everyday life. Over…
Traveling the lyrics of Ian Dury Once again the chance arrived to tick off another destination in my pointless quest to travel the lyrics in Ian Dury’s, Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick. Even without its link to the opening line of the legendary (ish) song I would have gone to Sudan anyway, precisely because it’s near the bottom of the list of places to go to for sensible people and near the top of the list of places the…
Somewhere in rural England a wizened figure in the landed gentry is bemoaning the loss of the good old days of empire. His echoes reverberate to the ears of a tattooed skinhead, wistfully staring into his can of super strength lager in a grubby, urban apartment, festooned with Union Jacks, waiting for an English football team to live up to the days when we conquered the world. No doubt, both would be surprised to learn that some measure of…
The custom, auto-rickshaw scene in Sudan In a short space of time, cheap, Asian imports have transformed many aspects of life for Africans: mobile phones are now within reach of the relatively poor, opening up communication in what has always been an oral culture that values the spoken word over the written one; Chinese motorbikes have created jobs for two-wheeled taxi drivers and increased access for individuals in more remote places that you might have had to wait a week…
A Catholic wedding in Sudan Dear God I had expected to be writing to you with your Allah hat on, seeing that Sudan is a Muslim country, but as luck would have it I got invited to a Catholic wedding so thought I had better have a few words with you about it. Whatever religious hat you had on when you created the people of Sudan you must have been in a good mood, as they are a likeable lot…
Who’s going to put Egypt back together again? “What do you think of President Sisi”, asked one of the charming young ladies who had been helping me buy a train ticket. “Well, er um”, I waffled, trying not to commit myself too much in one direction. We were, after all, standing by a group of people queueing for tickets and the wrong opinion, too firmly expressed has caused some to disappear without trace during his excellency’s reign. “I hate him”, she…
Taking tourist security to that extra level in Egypt Deep in misty dreams of sumptuous temptations, something knocked on the doors of my subconscious, cruelly beckoning me back to the world of daylight. The unwarranted intrusion into my reverie metamorphosed into the insistent clatter of fist against the shoddy carpentry claiming to be my door. Some words of arabic had little trouble piercing the feeble woodwork, “hokouma” was the only word I needed to understand, government. “Yeah,yeah, yeah”, I grumbled…
