Houses in Africa

By Alma Alexander

When I was 10, I was taken from my quiet, safe corner of old Europe and deposited into an exotic new world. Africa, at once breathtaking and soul-destroying, from the snow-capped mountains and teeming game plains of Kenya and Tanzania to the haunted hunger-stalked dustbowls of Ethiopia and the Sudan – the hideous and the magnificent have always gone hand in hand there.

Nobody who has once set foot on the soil of Africa will ever be quite free of it again. When I first went there, I was young enough to be molded by it. I instinctively understand things that people with altruistic but often misguided intentions spend years fail to: it takes an African attitude to deal with something that is at once both immeasurably ancient and utterly childish. I was an African child, picking up thoughts, feelings and attitudes left lying about like discarded skins of poisonous snakes.

If I returned there today, I’d recognize it easily enough, but the rediscovery would be painful. Other people now live in my Houses in Africa. Going back to find my memory of things changed... would be as if a part of me had vanished together with it.

I keep the dust of Africa, therefore, as a memory in my heart.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alma Alexander
• Release date: Feb 10, 2011
• ISBN: 9781452429809

Alma Alexander

Alma Alexander was born in Yugoslavia and has lived in Zambia, Swaziland, Wales, South Africa and New Zealand. She now lives in Washington state, USA. She writes full-time and runs a monthly creative writing workshop with her husband.

Book preview

Houses in Africa

By

Alma Alexander

Kos Books

Kos Books

A & D Deckert

343 Sudden Valley Drive

Bellingham WA 98229

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2011 Alma Alexander

First published 1995

Table of Contents

Here be Dragons

Zambia

Swaziland

South Africa

The Dust of Africa

About the Author

Other Books by Alma Alexander

For all those who

Shared my African odyssey

And Especially for Dad,

Who began it.

Prologue

Here be Dragons

A friend once told me that the difference between the two of us was the fact that I built nests, and she was happy to live out of suitcases. Back in 1973, I thought my nest was invincible. I knew where I belonged, cozy in my world; I had the quiet routine of my days, a clutch of ‘best friends’ at school, grandparents with whom my relationship was one of mutual adoration. I was ten years old… and with very little warning the world I had built was about to come to an explosive end.

Children are rarely given any real say in family decisions. I was not asked what I wanted when my father obtained a short-term contract under the auspices of the United Nations, to go and advise the Government of Zambia on transportation projects as Foreign Aid expert. I was simply presented with the arrangements once they had been made. We would be going to Africa. We would be leaving behind everything that I knew, loved and understood, for the sake of an unknown wilderness.

I railed against it. Things are never as simple as when viewed with hindsight, and perhaps, at the time, it really was no more than childish pique and a terror of being torn away from a nest I had happily buried myself in. I wasn’t planning to have a certain kind of childhood as opposed to any other kind, I was far too young to make that sort of decision, but I did realize, however nebulously, that it was quite possible that nothing I had ever intended would come to pass. I would be literally transplanted, into a world I knew very little about, and I did not know if I would ‘take.’ Africa was a place shrouded in darkness and stalked by mystery. Whatever my life might have been like if I had stayed behind in the quiet Yugoslav town on the shores of Danube, everything was now up in the air – I could not know what my reactions would be to something I had never experienced. All that I did know was that, in the manner of ancient maps, Africa was a huge blank over whose cartographic expanse pulsed the words, Here Be Dragons.

The dragons turned out to be quite other than what I had expected. Sometimes they were entirely invisible, and I could only feel their fiery breath; other times they lay implacably across what had looked to be easy roads, forcing me to seek alternative paths through the wilderness. Africa threw up gifts and challenges which would never have come my way if I had remained buried in the tranquil, civilized, tamed, and well-beaten paths of Europe.

I never quite gave my heart to Africa, but the Dark Continent shaped my mind and my soul. I would inevitably become and remain one of Africa’s children.

I did not yet know how insidious this process would be, how it would bite all the deeper, like a snare, if I tried to pull away too hard. How the wisdom and the knowledge I would sometimes rather not have would be quietly slipped into my subconscious when I wasn’t paying attention. How I would learn to recognize and know the country and the people I was quietly growing up in and around, and how, in the end, I would accept Africa’s power, and never want to return from it to the place I had been so terribly loath to leave.

It wasn’t simply that I had been given a chance to see an elephant in the wild, or hold a lion cub in my hands, or love and own a dog (which would have been unlikely to happen in the cramped one-bedroomed flat where my family had been living prior to our departure) – things that, for most of my contemporaries in Yugoslavia, remain dreams.

Africa’s real gift would be that I’d slowly begin to comprehend how these things fitted together. And at the end, I wouldn’t have to walk away content with a mere glimpse of a different tapestry. Africa showed me how one was woven.

I had been in Africa for over two thirds of my life by the time I finally left, and I was inexorably changed by my life there. I had been malleable clay when I arrived, and it was Africa that had a hand in shaping me into the form I exist today. For better or for worse, it had been the African sun which hardened the clay, finished the statue, and then, Pygmalion-like, gave it the kiss of life – and sent it off to slay those dragons of which the empty maps once warned the unwary traveller.

I could not know of any of this as my plane lifted off from the soil of the Old Country towards the unknown, and I cried as I watched my world being left behind. But I wept for far more than the fear and the loss. Perhaps it was the instinctive knowledge that something irrevocable had just been done, and that my life would never be the same again.

Part I

Zambia

1

The air smelled odd. The tarmac of the airport was warm even through madly inappropriate winter shoes. And the sky… the sky looked strangely painted, as though torn from a work of art, and it was altogether too big. The horizon stretched endlessly, shimmering in the distance, and the big sky was everywhere, vivid, blue, dotted with cotton-wool puff clouds.

My family landed at the Lusaka international airport towards the end of October, wearing all the paraphernalia that the Northern Hemisphere winter demanded. What we discovered in Africa was the balmy air of tropical summer – and the fact that our luggage, containing any possible changes of clothing more conducive to our new climate, had not arrived with us. Our hungry staring at the inviting pool of the Lusaka Intercontinental Hotel, where we were taken from the airport, was all to no avail until we could obtain the requisite apparel to enjoy it. And staring was something at which we got plenty of practice during our first weeks in a curious new place.

To eyes schooled in European architecture, with its centuries-old styled and solidity, the capital of Zambia looked a little like the wild west, lined with colonnades of sometimes none-too-clean pillars supporting shading roofs over the sidewalks. The main street of Lusaka was pitted with Tarmac patches and the occasional yawning pothole.

In the middle island separating the two lanes of traffic of Independence Avenue, beneath purple jacarandas, yellow acacias and evocatively named flame-trees and so-called flamboyants laden with vivid scarlet blossom, seethed a bright, thriving impromptu market full of ivory bangles (they were yet to become taboo), wooden carvings (mainly solemn faces with the broad, flat noses typical of middle-African physiognomy) ranging from the crude to the exquisite, and a vast array of items made from a green stone called malachite. This seemingly had the ability to be wrought into anything – from long oval beads strung into necklaces, with tiny, cheap spheres of green plastic in between to avoid abrasion of stone against stone, to heavily polished stone eggs and ashtrays with characteristic concentric green swirls. Malachite was a stone associated with copper bearing country, and there were rich copper veins up in the north of Zambia. As we were to discover, malachite was omnipresent.

Other stones abounded, too. Bracelets of cheap metal links, with polished, unshaped chunks of raw semi-precious stones like tiger’s-eye and rose quartz stuck on them with sometimes highly visible glue, hung by the dozens on wire stands, and elsewhere there were baskets of loose semi-precious pebbles for tourists to paw through.

In narrow aisles between these wares the buyers jostled the vendors, the latter often clad in distinctive and riotously patterned local cotton cloth. The design, a sort of Africanized paisley, provided an easy guideline to a sewing pattern – a slit through the biggest swirl in the middle of the length of cloth for the head to go through, a bit of neat hemming on the edges, and a perfectly serviceable kaftan would be ready in moments. The fashion was adopted in some form, sooner rather than later, by most new arrivals in the country.

The women, either willowy and doe-eyed human gazelles or broad massive shapes, bore commendably quiet babies spread-eagled on their backs in slings made from lengths of cotton or faded blankets. They frequently wore tall turbans of the same material as their dresses or skirts, and it lend them an odd air of haute coture elegance.

The turbans, however, had somewhat more of a prosaic purpose in that they provided platforms for burdens. African women seemed able to bear loads capable of defeating a cart horse exquisitely balanced on their heads, atop flattened versions of the dress turban. These uniquely African beasts of burden could be observed walking with careful balance along the city sidewalks, with a toddler hanging onto one hand, a sleeping baby on her back, and an expression of stoical serenity on her face. This was ancient tribal Africa, doing things the way they had always been done, ignoring the trappings of the twentieth century which honked and milled and stank all around them. The woman accepted her burdens with a fatalistic sense of the way things were meant to be, keeping her eyes down or a few steps in front of her where, carrying, perhaps, a knobbed stick in his otherwise empty hands and smiling expansively at the passers-by, would swagger her man.

The men were almost ubiquitously seen to sport some form of woolly headgear, which was incomprehensible to our eyes given the speed with which we gratefully divested ourselves of our own winter garb – all the more so since the woolly hats were often coupled with a complete lack of footgear. The combination of a knitted cap with a pompom and luxuriously wriggling bare toes seemed to epitomize the gentle lunacy of the place where we now found ourselves.

The Independence Avenue marketplace was further congested by whole platoons of round-faced toddlers who seemed to belong both to no-one and to everybody and who would get underfoot like stray cats. There was also the occasional impromptu hair salon where one woman would be seated on an unstable stool, consisting of three wooden pegs driven into a wooden bowl, while another (an inevitable baby on back) would be leaning over her and plaiting her hair. Zambian hair fashion ran to antenna hair-dos. Small handfuls of hair would be deftly twisted or plaited into a tall horn sticking straight up from the scalp, often with an unavoidable tuft of curly African hair untamed at the end, and this would be tied off with black or colored threat. The younger women who did not wear turbans thus went about with their own hair tightly scraped into these tidy scalp-squares, each with its own little tower, looking a little bit like human pincushions a variant of the style involved each little plait being coiled neatly on its own scalp-square, which made for a smoother silhouette but still provided for a distinctive hairstyle resembling a sleeping Medusa.

They made for amazing photographs, these exotic people and their exotic doings, and things were made that much easier because they loved having their picture taken. They would smile toothily at the camera, or strike up what they thought were good (and were often hilariously over-the-top) poses. On one occasion I had been instructed to walk around the back of a certain monument in Lusaka and come back toward my father so he could get a photograph which was not static. One of the people who happened to be by the monument at the same time, a young man wheeling a bicycle and wearing a rather picturesque wide-brimmed straw hat, cottoned on very quickly to what was going on. Without any ado he simply tossed his bicycle down and trotted after me to stroll down the required side of the monument at my side, looking up at it with commendably believable interest. Picture taken, he gave Dad a wide grin, picked up his bicycle, and blithely continued on his way.

2

We had come to Africa not knowing much about the place where we were going, but the one thing that everyone seemed to warn us about was the high crime rate. We arrived, accordingly, accompanied by an eight-week-old German Shepherd puppy named Areta, usually sliced to Ari, for convenience – she only got summoned with the full polysyllabic name when she had done something unspeakable. The puppy was, rather surprisingly in retrospect, admitted into the Intercontinental Hotel with us. Although already much beloved, it had joined our family barely a week or so before, the first time we had been within touching distance of owning a dog. It stood to reason that the sweet little bundle of fur was about to make life a little difficult for us, under the circumstances.

For a start, we had no real chance to get on with the all-important task of house-training, with the result that the Intercontinental’s carpets, despite the copious layers of newspaper he had laid out in the bathroom, inevitably became a little stained and malodorous. Also, the puppy kept hours which did not necessarily suit the rest of her family, and it was not unusual to be woken up at 5 am by a half-conscious struggle to retain the bedclothes the dog was straining to pull off, or by having carelessly exposed toe chewed experimentally with puppy-sharp teeth as potential breakfast.

A few days of this regime was enough. Much as we loved the beast, it was the dog or us; and we decided on a boarding kennel until we could find a place to settle more permanently. We definitely needed to give every member of the family their own space. Our days thus began to be shaped by father’s hours of work – this was the first time we had encountered the Western idea of a nine-to-five job; in our native Yugoslavia the hours of work were often from seven to three, earlier in summer – the interminable visits to our kenneled prisoner, and, all too soon, my starting school.

I had arrived in Zambia with a store of English perhaps a little greater than that of my contemporaries in Yugoslavia, largely through the efforts of my father. All the same, it was a dead knowledge, based solely on the written word. In many respects it fell far short of what was required in reality. Now I learned, and learned at one of the cruelest and the most thorough learning environments possible – the school playground.

Telling apart words that sounded too terribly similar to me, words like ‘difficult’ and ‘different’, became a matter of life and death; mistakes were neither forgotten nor forgiven and usually wound up leading to gales of giggles by those who had goaded me into making the error and myself, scarlet and humiliated, hiding in some corner while fiercely committing the blunder to memory so that I would never make it again. ‘Aw-REE!’ squealed the fiendish little torturers in glee after my first attempted use of the word ‘awry’; I quickly corrected my pronunciation. And I was the source of enormous entertainment when I, who had only just discovered my first ever Western Christmas carol, innocently asked someone about the We Three Kings of Orientare.

However it all went to serve a purpose – I learned the language, fast. I had initially been placed in the American International school, but the American form of education, even in the context of exotic Africa, eventually proved to be even more foreign to all of us than anything we had encountered so far. Before too long my parents had started looking around for alternatives and found one – a convent run by German nuns in the plush Lusaka suburb of Woodlands.

The fact that I wasn’t even baptized did perturb Sister Fausta, the nun in change of the junior school, somewhat. She was chubby and little with round wire-rimmed glasses and a wimple that had the annoying habit of slipping too far back on the silvery-grey curls and gave her the distinctive mannerism of always yanking it forward with a distracted hand.

She couldn’t exactly drag out my pagan status as a valid reason for refusing me an education, however, and she agreed to give me an admission test – most of which I passed with flying colors. That is to say, most of the arithmetic went fine, but I did make something of a dog’s breakfast of division – if only because its presentation differed markedly from any manner in which I had seen division depicted before.

‘She can’t divide!’ Sister Fausta exclaimed morosely at the completion of the exercise, picking up something that might serve as a legitimate shield against the heathen invasion of her school. However, once I had seen the light as to what was wanted, I managed to even the division – and Sister Fausta grudgingly agreed to accept me into what was by then the middle of Grade Five, one of the youngest in the class.

We’ll see how she copes, Sister said piously, all the while watching me with wary eyes behind those innocent round spectacles. And so I began my career as a convent girl.

The atmosphere here was far different from that of the happy-go-lucky American school. The convent was run along strict German lines. We marched into assembly every morning in straight lines of proud little uniformed Christian soldiers, and the syllabus was a little more solid and more organized than that of the chaotic show-and-tell American system. I shared a classroom with the daughters of many European diplomats and expats, as well as the daughter of Zambia’s President Kenneth Kaunda.

Young Miss Kaunda