Those That Stand

An old friend. He picked us up from Oliver Tambo International Airport. Six years it had been since I saw him last. Then, as now, I was only in town for a night. This time, however, I am with my sister and her two kids. Will this be a burden on him? Unlike me (who is still a student) Mwape, my old friend, has moved on. Now, with him, is a wife (an old high school sweet heart), a car (“man look at your Citroen 5, you guys are rich” I said to him in the car park), a house financed by the bank and newly self employed. Some sort of event organizing business. Corporate training, though not quite. Event organizing, though but you cannot call it that. Big venues and expensive tickets. Lots of experts come to speak for the day. Workshops on areas he proudly announces he knows nothing about. My sister is perplexed. She asks a thousand questions. The answers are full of pride and business terminology. The wife, Mwansa, does the same but instead working for a big company owned by one man more or less. A billionaire. “He is big. He owns a football club in England.” And there you are. Your worth measured by what you own.

But of course we are glad, my sister and I. A fast car with air conditioning. The city a silhouette on the horizon, beyond the highways, in the afternoon sun. A gated community. 92 plots behind 10ft walls and barbed wire. Within in the compound are further wall fences 7ft high dividing the plots. A five bedroom house. The born again pastor of a mother blessed the house with olive oil before they moved in. We chat about their line of work in the garden while the children, ours and theirs, swim in the pool. Mwape and I buy groceries and booze. My sister and I try and cook the food while Mwape and his family watch Manchester United play New Castle (6 – 0). The knives are blunt, only one bulb out of 8 12 sockets works in the living room and the oven doesn’t work.

As we guzzle the beers, Mwape tells me about the tough times. About living up the road from a township. About him and Mwansa sleeping on a floor without a mattress. About working a job studying at the same time. About the people they shared accommodation with. Now they let relatives share with them. As I hear this I put on a mournful face and sip my beer. I was told the trials of finding documentation to work in South Africa. About the countless wasted money on untruthful middle men. Wasted hopes, year after year, while the police continue to harass immigrants randomly. Finally, he tells me, while dragging on yet another cigarette, that the most expensive way was the only way. R18,000 for each of them. “It took a long time but it was worth it.” South African ID documents. Stamps and everything. Done. This is how it works it seems. Mwape knows. He showed us. My sister is intrigued, envious even. She, on the other hand, must instead continually renew her work permit every so often and with every new job.

They are married now. They went to Zambia for their wedding. 800 guests they had. My sister screams at the number in aghast. There are photos to prove it, though the elaborate wedding cake, from its apparent size, could only feed a couple of families, surely. They paid for the whole thing. They saved for months and paid for it all. The drinks, the food, the suits for the best men, the dresses for the brides maids. Anecdotes about the line up and all its rehearsals, the most crucial ceremonies in the Zambian wedding. The best man who showed up drunk for none but the last of rehearsals. The born again, courtesy of the mum, who gave a 2 hours sermon before he wed them, with lots of advice about how the women should please the man and be obedient.

In the morning we drive the length of Jan Smuts drive and are dropped off at Park Station terminus where we board our train for Cape Town.   

Paucity Squared

“Why don’t you work in Zambia?” My sister asked, to which I replied “Because I have to be careful about who I want to hate.” I think, however, it is too late for that. I am starting to hate my Zambian counterparts already. They, the Zambian counterparts, the old classmates, the ones I used to play basketball with, the ones I admired at school, the ones I drank with at University, and crucially, the ones who have decided, one way or another, to live in Zambia, are the ones. Indeed, they put up a good performance of being happy to see me again. They go further in fact. They say they want me back. “Come work in Zambia” they say. “Zambia is changing. There is money to be made here now.” That is what they say. They make it sound like some sort of continuation of school. As if the boundaries of school have extended to include the whole town, maybe even the whole country.  As if we will continue to look out for each other like we did at school, like we used to for exams, like we did to dodge authority and violence.

No doubt I would have to start all over again. Finding a job, and with some success in that I would then have to find a place to stay. Maybe then the counterparts will come into play and I will move in with one of them in some place close to town. But all this will essentially be to place myself better to get with a woman. But which woman? Perhaps it would be some old flirt from school. Some loose end that never realised into anything. This is what I was thinking when I bumped into Koki in the Supermarket. She was wearing a colourful print dress with neat hair plaits. “You look good” she said to me. I told her she looked fantastic. I met her that night at a night club. Times it is called. There, nearly all the counterparts can be found on any given Friday, and on that Friday they were all around drinking and congratulating themselves. “Call me” she said, the voice coming from above her wonderful cleavage. After exchanging numbers she squeezed my hand.

The counterparts let me down. New years eve is always an evening that suffers from way too much hype and yet I continue to expect adventure from it. Always I end up in a crowded place too loud and with not quite the right people. To avoid such a night I imagined drinks or a braai at one of the counterparts new abodes. Something chilled, I imagined. Something where a small collection of counterparts and I can catch-up, maybe flirt, say what is wrong and dream about how we could make things better. So I phoned around and asked what was up. They were working. They were not sure. Their phones were off. They were instead asking me for a plan, as if I had not just been back in the country for three weeks only. One was worried there would be more people his flat could cater for. Instead, I had dinner with my parents and sister. We watched the fireworks from a car park, surrounded by a mob of over excited flirting teenagers. I did get an invite as late as 9pm for drinks but I ignored it. Disgusted at the thought of being an after thought.

So I called her on the 1^stof January. I had been home all day in dirty clothes listening to my parents talk. I was also working on a document with them. I needed to get out the house and be free of home for a bit. She told me she was out with a couple of counterparts having coffee. “Why don’t you come join us” she said. So I jumped into a cold shower, threw on some marginally clean clothes and drove there. “Meet Flex” she said. “He is from Nigeria.” “Nice to meet you” I said. He was tall, dark, wore an over sized t-shirt with colourful print, a baseball cap skew and a shy smile revealing large teeth and dark gums. “So what you guys do for New Years?” I asked. The counterparts rattled off a story about dinner and dancing and how I should have been there though they never thought to call me. Koki said she was at the P squared concert. “Who?” I asked. “You never heard of them? They are really good. The concert was great.” Something uncomfortable was in the air that I could not quite place. Then we were off to Flex’s hotel. In the car park I noticed Flex put an arm around Koki. Then I began to understand some things. Flex is a member of P Squared. At the hotel we met the rest of P Squared. Tall Nigerian young men, also in over sized t-shirts and skew baseball caps, only some added sunglasses (in the hotel at night) and large sneakers. Koki was not only personally entertaining Flex, but also showing the whole crew (which included camera man and manager) the night life of Lusaka. This I understood in the lobby of the hotel, as I was sat on a couch, while the rest of them took photos of each other with their phones. Only, I could not understand what I was doing there. Why did she call me if she was with this Flex guy? So I went home to listen to my parents talk.

 I realise now that I have been gone a long time and have been forgotten. Not gone for eternity, but long enough for these counterparts to have lived in my absence. They have had trials and they have overcome them. They have studied, done internships, been fired, been promoted and some of them have even had children. They have grown cocoons and hatched from them several times over. However, they seem terribly complacent about it all. I don’t see much to be proud of here. No doubt they have struggled for their material independence. Apart from their successes, in this country, nearly one women dies for every hundred child births. Workers strikes are illegal. Foreign investors have tax holidays that last years and mining companies pay laughable royalties. Last week, Electricity chargers went up by 27% for domestic consumers and only 1.5% for commercial. Yet instead, these counterparts are smug about being among the tiny group of middle class. I do not want to be part of this avaricious bunch of chicken scratching louts.