Lonely Planet Guide to Africa

At the top of the wooden rack next to the bath, the extra soap (tiny stones of olive soap, bought at Dille & Kamille and never used) and toilet paper with the picture of the puppy (my favourite) and the shower-gel sit in a square white IKEA basket.
They’re crushed beneath the weight of the 30th Anniversary Edition of the The Lonely Planet Guide to Africa.

I tell myself I should read it in some sort of organized fashion. Start with the Swahili-speaking places in the East? Or with South Africa because of the townships and Table Mountain and Wilbur Smith?

Often, I get stuck reading the bio-blurbs about the writers. They have amazing lives. And names like Firestone and Clammer and Ham…

Or I read the Itineraries. One hour and twenty minutes before work, 30 minutes before I have to knot my tie, I mouth words to myself, like “Nampula” and “Quirimbas Archipelago”…. Picture Arab-African houses of stone…and dhows…and obscure books of explorers, anti-slavery activists that I could read so that I could re-trace the steps of the author….S would busily take pictures of rooftops and eaves of houses. Squeak sleepily on trains. Mebbe there’d be night trains. (I love night trains).

We could start from Maputo, at the bottom of Mozambique. (mebbe during ZIFF festival, for the afrojazz and hiphop and food and films…)

(In the American bookstore there is a book called Africa Art Now. Its big and almost 40 euros. Every Saturday after studying at the café, I drop in and read a little bit. There’s an artist from Mozambique in it. He collects guns left over from the civil war and works them into art.)

Then head to Beira…see the ruins of Sofala (an old gold-trading port) and Ilha do Mocambique, the island from where the Portuguese ran their chunk of East Africa. There are two towns. Ones Makuti, (reed), the other, stone. The book says that north of there, “…you’ll start to hear the lilt of the Swahili language with its mixture of African, Arabic and Portuguese words…” . We could take a dhow from Mocimboa da Praia to Mtwara in the South of Tanzania.

The take an overnight boat to Dar es Salaam. See buildings from the German occupation and where Mobutu came to meet Kabila….

And then to Zanzibar and Mombasa and Lamu….

ADD prompted by the sounds of people waking up… I begin to flip quicker…past Botswana’s Okvango Delta…Mali’s Dogon country…the mud mosque of Djenne, Timbuktu, the film festival in Ouagadougou…

I have to shower now.

The off-white (once-fluffy)towel hangs off the shower-curtain rail, accusing.

Office

I like the office early in the morning, or on weekends. Its like an abandoned spaceship with flat blue-grey carpeting, thin white walls and shredders that eat paper and CDs.

Behind me there's a faded, water-smudged painting, dedicated "to Sumwun, love Nora". Nora is my ex-boss's daughter. She was around 5 when she drew that. Precocious kid. She could never figure out my name.

For a long time, I had a card on my computer from my sister which said "Happy Birthday Monkey's Uncle"! (she calls her son Monkey. He calls me Munkle. Christ we're weird.).

In my drawer I have a stash of instant Cappucino and Weiner Melange. I'm a coffee nerd. as in, sometimes, I read about coffee on wikipedia. So I know that a Latte Machiato is a lot of milk "marked" with a dash of coffee. I know an Espresso Machiato is an Espresso "marked" with a bit of milk. I know that a Ristretto is not necessarily twice as strong as an Espresso. I like to watch coffee powder pour out of a sachet into my green mug with the Chinese squiggles. I even own a (single shot) Moka, inherited from an Italian flatmate. She wrote out how to use it on blue exercise paper ("instructions for dummies"), and stuck it on the back of the stove the night before she left.

There's a map on the wall. I like maps. I like knowing where places are. I wish there was a giant world map in our apartment. I would point out Turkey to visiting friends and we'd talk about how it faces Central Asia and the Middle East and Europe. Sometimes I wish Istanbul was the biggest city in the world so I could work there but still explore another country every month or so.

I listen to music on YouTube as I work. I have the most extensive YouTube playlists in existence. I have "Upper" lists and "Downer" lists, one called "No Pigeonhole" (much of this is Cat Empire, the closest songs have come to poetry for me after the Counting Crows). Sometimes I type to ryhthm. Nodding, eyes focused, feeling like a train carrying a bongo drum going over a bridge...