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.