Wandering Gaia

“When I was a child we didn’t think about apartheid; it never really occurred to us. We didn’t know what it was. I only ever saw white people, except for our maid and my friends’ maids. We thought there were really very few blacks in the country. Blacks needed a pass to go anywhere. They weren’t allowed out of their neighbourhoods after dark, or into our neighbourhoods without permission or on our beaches or schools, so we never saw them. Then, in the 90s, it was like a curtain was pulled back: there were suddenly all these millions of blacks we never knew existed coming onto the streets from everywhere.

Before, there was a lot of propaganda from the government on the television about how dangerous and bad the blacks were, how they would steal everything and ruin everything, and how they were too stupid and backward to be in charge of something. There was a huge fear that if white rule ended, the whole of our lovely country would erupt into violent war and there would be chaos and destruction, and we would be no better than the rest of Africa. If it hadn’t been for Nelson Mandela, that’s what would have happened. He was the only one who could save us,” says Jan, a 30-year-old (Afrikaans) South African from Johannesburg.

Crossing the border into South Africa from Mozambique – from the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, from the continent proper – is like entering a different planet. One where the roads are well-maintained, where street signs exist, where the cars are all big and shiny-new, where the buses have reclining comfy seats and videos and aircon, where the landscape is carpeted with perfect rows of healthy high crops of maize and fruit that are irrigated by powerful sprinklers and sprayed with pest-control. The shops are full of bright enticing packaging, we can pay by card, things work, the toilets flush, water can be drunk straight from the taps. The contrast between a developed and developing nation couldn’t be more stark.

There is so much that is right, and so much that is wrong about South Africa. For me, having grown up with the ‘Free Nelson Mandela’ movement of the 80s and 90s, the boycott of South African goods and the music and marches of my student days, it’s a great feeling to be visiting a democratic South Africa – something I never truly believed would be possible. The country remains divided, though. Most of the cars here are driven by (robustly built) white people, the public transport is entirely used by black people. Walking to the local shops in Johannesburg to get laundry done and buy groceries is a head-turner for the local black people. Most white South Africans, we’re told, drive to the big shopping malls and do their shopping their, or send an employee (black) out for groceries. Nick’s tattoos are marvelled at – we could be anywhere else in Africa.

Except, it’s unsafe to walk around the city centre or anywhere after dark. Gangs of small children or adults regularly rob people in daylight. Jo’burg is one of the most dangerous cities in the world. And the main reason for the crime is extreme poverty. Unemployment is more than 70% and people simply cannot feed their families and multiple dependants. Hunger leads people to desperate measures, using knives and guns to get something that can be traded for food. They take even the clothes from your back. And this is one of the richest nations in the world. Johannesburg, formerly called Gauteng, means city of gold – it is named after the gold discovered here in the 1880s. Besides gold, the country has diamonds and the healthiest crop production on the continent. And yet, there is no social security for people who have nothing. No medical care, no housing (Mandela began a free housing scheme, but the quality was poor and the project ended), no food, no unemployment benefit. Nothing.

Elsewhere in Africa, people can often feed themselves using their own gardens to grow crops, Here, the land all belongs to the rich few. The very poor millions have nothing, no land. So even though they could benefit from fertile soils and a good growing climate, they have no land.

And one-quarter of the population has HIV – it’s less than the 60% infection rate at Senga Bay in Malawi, where we were, but still significant for a developed country. Corruption, the other African plague, is also rife…

The horrors that have been inflicted on these soils – from the European invasions and take-over of the indigenous tribes, to the British concentration camps of the early 1900s that incarcerated Boers in huge numbers, to the segregation and apartheid policies of the 20th century – have left their mark. But this feels like a very positive country. Mandela was released in 1990. Democratic elections were held in 1994. By 1996, South Africa had developed the most progressive, non-discriminatory, truly representative constitution in the world, based on respect, freedom, equality, diversity and, importantly, reconciliation. Mandela really is that rare human: a man who transcends his heroic reputation and saved his nation. Now it’s up to the emerging generation of educated, free South Africans to decide whether they want simply to grab at the riches denied to their forefathers, or build a socially equal state in which South Africa really does belong to every South African.

I used to have a competition with my flatmate about who would be the first of us to get a donated item into the very weird – sometimes creepily so – window display of our local charity shop in Greenwich. (This was before the area’s re gentrification, when Greenwich was still full of odd shops. Two doors down, for example, was the hardware store, whose window displayed a prominent collection of dildos among the other electrical tools, and which was often shut for long periods while the permanently drunk owners were otherwise engaged at Her Majesty’s pleasure.) Anyway, I never got anything into the much-coveted window display – the peculiar ladies who worked there, made their disdain at my offerings quite clear.

But I claim my prize now. Today I saw a woman on the back of a truck in Vilanculos wearing my old grey Mickey Mouse t-shirt with the stain on the shoulder from where I once tried to henna my hair! Most of the clothes donated to charity shops in the West end up in markets in the developing world. It leads to some amusing sights, with t-shirts bearing various slogans and messages being worn by unlikely people. I saw one Mozambican girl sporting a “Blonde and Beautiful” sign on her t-shirt the other day and I can safely say that I am more blonde than her.

We moved out of our overpriced resort room and found a nice, sensibly priced place that luckily had a space because its previous inhabitants, a South African couple, chose to leave, complaining to the owner that there were “too many blacks staying there”. This is a frequent complaint, according to the owner, a Belgian guy who came here in 1993, a year after the bloody civil war ended.

We’re travelling to South Africa next and, in many ways, I’m apprehensive. We seem to have been unlucky with the South Africans we’ve met while travelling south through the continent. Most have been, in a word, horrible. There was the lovely South African family who gave us a lift from the border at Zobue to Tete, although they were black. And we met a lovely white couple here in Vilanculos in the past couple of days who are progressive thinkers and nice people. But, sooner or later, our conversations with other South Africans has tended towards subtle or not so subtle racism. There will be little digs at how black people are more stupid, untrustworthy, lazy, impossible to train, slow, etc, which is embarrassing to be a part of even if there are no local people within earshot (which there usually are). These are the sort of opinions that complete strangers would not engage you with in Europe or the US, but which seems to be a perfectly acceptable, commonplace opener among white people in Africa. Bizarre.

There’s nothing wrong with taking pride in the superiority of your own heritage or nation. I’m an expert on the subject of how it’s impossible to get a decent cup of tea outside of great Great Britain, and every time I get served a flask of tepid water with a saucer bearing a pathetic teabag – even though I am sitting on the edge of a bloody tea plantation – I am more than happy to remind people of this fact.

And I’m not the only one. Every time we are about to cross a border, local people are quick to warn us of the horrors we face once we leave their civilised nation. The roads will be shocking, we must watch ourselves as the next country is swarming with thieves, the food will be nasty and inedible, etc. Even in India, perhaps the world’s filthiest nation, we were warned about the dirty state of Bangladesh – on crossing, we discovered that it was, of course, far cleaner than its neighbour.

Vilanculos has been a disappointing stop. We went diving, hoping to glimpse one of the small remaining population of dugongs (sea cows) that graze the sea grass around here. But the water was churned up and the coral are spawning so the visibility was pretty poor, unfortunately. Now, we’re waiting in the dust at the side of the road for a bus to come and take us to Maputo. And trying not to think about the appalling road accident rate in Mozambique – more than 80 deaths in 118 traffic accidents in the past 5 days.

As we wait, there’s a busy (robber?) wasp we’re watching at our feet. The massive wasp stings a green cricket to immobilise it, and carries it to its burrow. Inside, the wasp lays its eggs in the cricket’s living body, so that when the eggs hatch, the maggots can eat the cricket. It’s gruesome but compelling to watch.

Mozambique does not exactly charm the visitor on arrival. After a long and tiring journey from Senga Bay in Malawi, involving 7 different forms of transport, one bus breakdown, one matola with a punctured tyre, one police fine for being in the back of a pick-up truck and a fight with the border taxi mafia, we arrive at Mozambique immigration in a frazzled state to be met with every type of corruption imaginable. We are charged separately for the visa (no problem), for the official to stamp the visa (a bit ridiculous) and for the scrap of paper that we filled in to get the visa (taking the piss). One guy even attempts to convince me that I need to buy a separate visa for my baggage!

The last bus to the nearest town, Tete, has left hours earlier, so I manage to get us a lift with a lovely South African family, travelling in a posh 8-seater minibus-car thing. Before the car can go through the border, though, we’re stopped and asked for our passports, and Nick and I are asked for our yellow fever certificates. There is noticable disappointment when I managed to locate mine after rummaging around for some time (it’s the first time I’ve been asked for it in 7 countries). Then, they try to find fault with the certificate, with my passport – peering at me and then my photo and back. Reluctantly, they have to concede that all is in order. So then they start on the driver. He has his big folder of car documents ready and again there is no problem. “Ah, you have six people in the car, but where is the proof that this car holds so many?” one guard says, with excitement, winking at his colleagues, who chime in: “A very serious offence. It is a $700 fine if you cannot prove it.”

The car has two seats in front, and then two rows of three seats – not two benches, but six individual seats with separate seatbelts and headrests. There are two empty seats – it is probably the only car on the continent carrying fewer passengers than it was designed for. The driver doesn’t have a document specificlly specifying the number of seats his car has – presumably the manufacturer didn’t anticipate Mozambique border police not being able to count seats. The driver negotiates down his ‘fine’, pays a still-exhorbitant amount, and then after a couple more nonsense interrogations we are on our way.

We cross the Zambezi River after dark – delayed by many more army and police bribe-points – and say goodbye to our car family in Tete. It’s an unlovely town, the hottest in the country because of its low altitude, and swarming with prostitutes that decorate every street and its corner like baubles on a dead christmas tree. We head to the Zambezi Hotel, a place listed as affordable in our Lying Planet guidebook and find it now a $250 per night palace, so spend a good half hour wandering around with our heavy bags looking for somewhere that’s affordable. We end up staying in what is basically a brothel with no running water, broken windows and filthy sheets for a hefty price, and emerge early after almost no sleep – the night is full of by-the-hour guests coming and going (“don’t call them prostitutes, they’re clients,” the owner says indingnantly when we complain), and the other big annoyance is the cars and trucks with their soundsystems blaring that stop, engine running, window down, to haggle prices with the hookers.

Buses going south from Tete leave at 3 am, we’re told, there are none now. We stand in the heat at the side of the road trying to hitch, trying not to burn (the doxyxyclone we’re taking still for our malaria treatment makes me very sun sensitive), and desperate to leave Tete. The roads in this Christmas-New Year inbetween are pretty empty. Eventually we get lucky and a haulage truck picks us up. We squash into the hot airless bed at the back with other hitchers and our bags piled on top, and pay over the odds for the 6-hour journey to Chimoio. There, we discover that, as with Tete, the buses only leave at 3 am. We pay $25 to stay in a caravan until 2am, and again get no sleep because the beds are infested with thousands of ants. I comb them out of my hair and spray the sheets and pillows with choking pesticide and we lie, eyes streaming in the dark listening to the night watchman talking on his phone outside our window until it is time to get the bus. Which, of course, is a much smaller crappier version of the bus we bought tickets for.

Another sleepless night, another cramped journey brings us through the ghostly dew forests of early dawn to the searing heat of morning and into Vilanculos, a small beach village near to the marine national park at the Bazaruto Archipelago. We’ve come here for the diving and because we met a couple in Malawi who have rented a villa here and said we can stay in the sitting room on an airbed for a few days. We find the villa – it’s stunning and in an amazing spot on the beach. Only problem is, we can’t stay after all – the ever-present owner, a horribly aggressive South African woman, jumps on us straight away and tells us in no uncertain terms that we are not welcome. So we hunt through the town looking for a bed, the night before new year’s eve in South Africans’ most popular holiday destination at peak season. Everywhere is booked up except one $50 per night tiny room in a resort compound with grotty, shared coldwater showers and toilets. The buses leave the town at – yes – 3 am. We deliberate a short time and decide overpriced is better than a third night without sleep, and bite the bullet.

Top tip for anyone travelling through Southern Africa: be rich. If you can’t be rich, at least rent/buy/steal a car (everyone has vehicles here, usually a fancy 4WD although it’s not necessary) because the public transport is overpriced, uncomfortable and inconvenient, and bring a tent so you don’t have to fork out for expensive rooms with bedbugs.

Vilanculos, on a pretty but dirty beach, is a small and unappealing town strewn with rubbish and jammed with 4WDs full of rich South Africans who have inexplicably chosen to stay here. Two years ago, a typhoon wrecked the town, which was apparently very nice before. But I find it hard to believe it was ever that pretty here. Still, we’ll stay here for new year.

My Portuguese is improving – handy for Brazil, later – but it’s hard to communicate with the local people beyond initial pleasantries. The music in Mozambique is fanatastic, great beats, lovely voices – the kind of tunes that set your legs twitching to dance. And now that we’re away from the national food – which we’ve been told is burger and chips or chicken and chips – to the coastal food, things are definitely improving. Heaped plates of jumbo prawns, stuffed crab, piri piri sauce, spicy chorizo – tasty. There is again little in the way of fruit or vegetables in cafes and restaurants here. The markets are full of tasty plant matter, so I buy my fruit there, but without self-catering facilities, making salads is difficult. But, as we approach South Africa, it’s becoming easier and cheaper to buy the concentrated fruit juice brand I like – the only one not loaded with masses of sugar.

The change in landscape is immediately obvious once you cross the Zambezi. North, especially in Malawi, most of the land is farmed in regular rows of green crops; south and it’s scrub forest, dry with a few struggling plots of cassava or banana. Perhaps that’s why it’s so difficult to get a salad or veggies with a meal. But it was just as hard in Malawi and Tanzania, unless you wanted beans. Strange.

Felt another earthquake tremor this morning – Lake Malawi is firmly lodged in the geologically active Rift Valley. In parts the bottom of the lake is nearly 800 metres below sea-level. It’s fed by more than 600 rivers, but only one, the Shire River, flows out of the lake. Climate change is heating the water, reducing turnover of upper and lower levels in the lake, which may affect fisheries. But otherwise Malawi seems to be benefiting from climate change. While East Africa has been experiencing langer and more severe droughts, Malawi is seeing better rains and an increase in crop yields.

I talked to one of the country’s climate change negotiators who’s just returned from Copenhagen, today, who is of the opinion that the US sabotaged the talks, but that after the US climate and energy bill passes (by June), Team America will commit to emissions cuts. I asked him how he can be so optimistic. “Is there a choice?” he replied, deadpan.

I’ll be sorry to leave the lake and its friendly, laid back people, but tomorrow we’re heading down to Mozambique – another country, language and currency: our 7th in Africa (17th on this journey!).

Sam, our glamourous Zimbabwean campsite owner, explained the origins of the beautiful community library she built, today – which fortunately seems to have survived the earthquakes and tremors we keep getting here. It’s a great example of how villages can improve their educational faclities, so I thought I’d retell it.

It started one day in 2006, when a villager demanded to see Sam, claiming that one of her staff had bewitched his goat causing it to die, and demanding 3,000 kwecha ($20) compensation from her (the staff man couldn’t afford to pay). Sam refused to pay, saying that the guy hadn’t bewitched the goat, it had died of other causes. “Bring the goat to me,” she said, “and I will tell you exactly how it died. If I am right, you pay me 3000 kwecha, if I am wrong, I will pay you 6000 kwecha.”

The goat was brought. “Now, cut open its belly and inside you will find a red or blue jumbo [plastic bag],” she said. Sam turned around (she’s a vegetarian) while the slicing was performed on her lawn, and sure enough, there was a jumbo knotted inside. “That is what killed your goat,” she said.

A month later, the man returned complaining that her staff had now bewitched another of his goats. Again Sam insisted the goat was opened; again a plastic bag was found. Sam refused to pay, the man refused to pay. A tribunal was called.

Sam went to the tribunal and took the village chief around village and its fields, pointing out the many many plastic bags and other rubbish. “You can’t eat them and neither can your goat,” she explained. The chief was convinced and Sam won her case.

But the problem troubled the chief. What to do. He approached Sam, who found out about a facility in Lilongwe (Malawi’s capital) that recycled plastic and paid 12 kwecha per kilo. She recruited village kids aged 3 to 10 to collect bags – they would be paid 5 kwecha per kilo and the remainder went to a fund. Within a couple of months, they had cleaned up the village and raised enough for toilets to be built at the school.

The library was then built using plastic bag money. Now, as I walk through the village, it’s filthy with rubbish everywhere. What went wrong? “It’s my fault,” Sam says. “I got everyone to dig pits to put their rubbish in, from where it could be burnt. The village was beautifully clean. But then the monsoon came and because i hadn’t told them to cover their pits, the rubbish got wet, wouldn’t burn, buit up and overspilled.” Now no one bothers anymore. If something doesn’t work once, it is abandoned – particularly if it requires a modicum of effort.

The library is wonderful though.

It rained hard all night long and this morning the green lawn is carpeted in red petals from the jacaranda tree. The low sun is already hot and the lake seems to be perspiring – cormorants and hammerhead storks flying through steam. Fishermen are pulling in their catches, balancing awkwardly on rough-hewn heavy log canoes. Women are sprawled on the sand, chatting and sorting the fish, while kids play around them, the older ones throwing the smaller ones off their shoulders into the lake. In the distance, someone is drumming while others sing a high, lilting tune with a raucous chorus.

My fevers have mostly gone now and I’ve finished the artemisin treatment, although I am still taking double-dose doxycyclone for the next few days to make sure all the malarial parasites are really gone. In this village, 95% of child deaths under 5 years are from malaria, not Aids, even though the ACT treatment is free and easily available. The main reason, says Sam, our fantastic campsite owner who also runs a clinic here, is that parents first take their kids to the witch-doctor for cure. By the time Sam sees them, it’s often too late to do anything – the malaria has gone cerebral and they have hours to live. Which, of course, underscores the belief that modern medicine is no better than the traditional practitioner at curing this terrifyingly common disease.

For all that people bang on about the importance of respecting traditional culture – something that to me is as nonsensical as blindly following every latest fashion – some of the most deeply entrenched cultural practices are killing people. It is no surprise that sub-Saharan Africa has the highest incidence of HIV in the world when, for example, the majority practice ‘dry sex’, which involves drying the vagina with leaves or salt so that it rips during intercourse.

In Malawi, which has a very high incidence of HIV, when girls first start menstruating (between age 9 and 12), they undergo an initiation ceremony, which involves being taught ‘how to pleasure a man’ by the village chief, who will often have HIV. The result of these ‘lessons’ is often a pregnancy, which is shameful and must be kept hidden if the girl is ever to marry (non-virgins cannot marry). The ‘orphan’ child is sent away to relatives elsewhere, until they can’t cope/afford to feed it, when it returns to the village and is looked after by its grandmother. As a consequence, the villages are full of older women with very young children. Others end up in orphanages. Malawi has a large number of ‘orphans’ – foreign donors are much more likely to help support lots of orphans than lots of illigitimite children.

The country is one of the world’s biggest recipients of foreign aid. The main reason for this is its politically stable history – no civil wars or insurgencies, and a democracy nicely in place. Donors know that the country isn’t going to suddenly become embroilled in a coup or violent regime change that could leave the donor’s name unfortunately associated with a military dictatorship, for example.

The result of all this money coming in is that the government has been able to experiment with ideas like road improvement and schools. Perhaps the most revolutionary idea, though, has been agricultural subsidies. African countries agreed in the 1970s to World Bank and IMF rules that they wouldn’t subsidise agriculture – the idea being that this would allow a competitive commercial market to develop, which would be sustainable. Of course, the West, including the US, Britain, Europe and Australia, continued heavily subsidising their farmers, and also operating protectionist export markets, so that African produce is impossible to sell at a fair price in the EU, for example.

After suffering a terrible famine in 2005, on the back of several years of mounting hunger problems, President Bingu Wa Mutarika (formerly Minister for Agriculture, so he knew his stuff) decided on a radical programme of subsidy from seeds to fertilisers. The result was spectacular and immediate: Malawi went from reliance on emergency food aid to becoming a net exporter of produce. This year, the country exported a 1.1 million tonnes surplus of maize. People have enough to eat, some to store and some to sell. It’s a success I’ve not seen anywhere else in the region.

But is it sustainable? Like most poor countries, the government doesn’t reap much from taxation – most people don’t pay tax. More than 60% of the national budget is donor aid. Germany, for example, has more than doubled its donor money to 64 million euros over the next 2 years. But in general, donor money has dwindled recently because of the global economic crisis. If the donor money continues to flow in, then subsidies should remain sustainable. But Malawi’s market is other poor countries, like Tanzania, Mozambique and Zimbabwe. In fact, much of the maize export this year went to Zim. And how did Mugabe afford this? Simple, Malawi loaned Zimbabwe $100 million to buy its maize. Hhmmm.

I guess it’s no different to what the West does when it loans the poor world money to buy its overpriced farm produce, but the West can better afford this game. Of course, there is the whole issue of whether a country should be forever dependent on donor money in this way. Certainly, Bingu much prefers money from donors and NGOs than investment from foreign companies who might want to see a return on their investment. A few investors from cigarette companies to cotton manufacturers have been chased out of Malawi in recent months. The government likes to retain absolute control, and is starting to get rid of white farmers too.

One of the problems with free money is that it can seem limitless (which it pretty much is, here). So, the fuel crisis, which has been semi-resolved, stems from the fact that the government coffers were completely empty of foreign currency, so there was nothing to pay Tanzania with This might have something to do with the fact that $3 million went on ministerial Mercedes cars last month, and then Bingu treated himself to a $15.9 million private jet – is he starting to sound a little like his neighbour Bob?

Perhaps one reason that democracy doesn’t work in Africa is back to the cultural tradition issue. Village culture is a mini dictatorship, where everyone knows his place and at the top of the tree is the chief – in the local village of Senga Bay, where I am, he’s a youngish man called Dalankwanda. So, you can have a national idea of democracy, where everyone gets a say, but back in your real everyday village life, the government is irrelevant – it’s a dictatorship ruled by the chief. This dichotomy permeates all the way through to the government. Meetings between ministers are divided between the ‘traditional culturalists’ and the ‘Western progressives’. But ministers only rarely vote on their principles – they want to be on the winning side always. So, while it works in their favour, they will go with the idea of democracy. When it doesn’t, they’ll call foul: “But it’s against our culture”.

Most wars and insurgencies in Africa are not pro democracy or equality, they are in support of their tribe or faith. The people fighting or voting, are supporting more rights or powers or a better position for their tribe, not equal representation for all. This is an important distinction, I think, in comparison to other continents. It means that even in a democratic election, people will vote for their tribal representative – who is expected to uphold their interests above others’ – and if he is not elected, they will either wait their turn or forcibly remove the guy from power. There is no notion here that the leader is the servant of the people, either. Even if he is voted in, he is expected to rule with impunity – hence the corruption, which is expected. South Africa, which was recreated on the basis of a fight for equal representation, is a notable exception. I haven’t yet been there (it’s coming!), but I understand that democracy there is not just a tool for getting your tribal guy into power, but a stronger philosophy along Western lines.

It’s not a purely African thing this. I see similar struggles with the meaning of democracy in parts of Eastern Europe. Arguably, unfamiliarity with a non-dictatorship model of governance was the reason for Hitler’s success in Germany.

As Malawi grapples with its current cash crisis, the government has absurdly become obsessed with a new way to spend vast amounts of money: changing the national flag. It was announced a few weeks ago that the flag, which currently depicts a rising sun – the name ‘Malawi’ means sun rising over the lake – must be changes as a matter of urgency, because it is a national disgrace: Malawi’s sun is not rising, it has risen! As a proud nation, the flag should show a round sun in the centre of the flag, rather than the embarrassing still-rising sun. The newspapers have been full of this for the past week, devoting at least 5 pages every day t the various reasons for this necessary change, with full-page endorsements from various politically ambitious ministers and businessmen. This utter nonsense will cost billions, but luckily, the country has plenty of donors…

The power outage in Zanzibar has persisted for three weeks now and, rumour has it, is set to continue for at least another month. It’s a huge problem for the islanders at their busiest tourist season. Everything has to be brought from the mainland, even water, because the bottling factory on the island has shut down from lack of power. The souvenir and craft shops are struggling because even the Italian tourists, who fling their dollars around with the same generous abandon that Berlusconi sprinkles his affections, are not going to spend a couple of hundred dollars on a carved sculpture that they can barely make out in the gloom.

Perhaps it is this desperation that makes the touts (appropriately called ‘papasi’ by the locals, meaning ‘ticks’) so very irritating. There are high levels of poverty and unemployment here, as elsewhere in Africa, but I still find it inexplicable that there are so many men seemingly with no better occupation than to hang around in the streets of Stone Town and the horrible port side hassling tourists. Naturally, there are no women among the groups of men who follow us around, annoying and sometimes abusing us – no, the women are working, looking after children, cooking, cleaning, doing the laundry, the shopping and everything else.

After one too many episodes of unpleasantness, we decide to leave the island and catch the ferry to Dar es Salaam, East Africa’s second busiest port, for a bit of peace and quiet. Here, it is cooler, there is a good strong sea breeze, power and fewer mosquitoes – although the bedbug problem is making up for it. Two of the people working here have malaria at the moment, so we’re still diligently taking our malaria tablets. There’s a research project in a district not far from us, looking at mosquito repellent use and effectiveness in local communities. The researcher heading the trial, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, says that the results of their 7 month controlled trial show a 75% reduction in malaria among those using DEET, compared with those using placebo. DEET is actually really cheap, if you buy it on its own, and simple effective lotions can be made just by mixing it with vaseline.

There’s still no malaria vaccine, so preventing bites is the only option for people who live in risky places. It’s a disease of poverty – in Europe it’s been pretty much wiped out. The Tanzanian government wants to start national spraying of DDT to get rid of the vector, but NGOs and other agencies are persuading it to wait for a less harmful agent. Trials are underway comparing DDT to agents from citronella to neem. Meanwhile, 2000 children die every day from malaria in Africa.

Aids is an even bigger problem than malaria in Dar, according to Tanzanian doctors I’ve talked to, who work at one of the hospitals here. Most patients in the ward are dying of Aids, even if their death is described as ‘from TB’. (I heard that trials are underway here for the first new tuberculosis vaccine since the BCG in 1920. Appropriate, I suppose, since Koch worked in the hospital in Zanzibar for some time.) One of the biggest problems here is preventing maternal transmission of HIV. The medics are having good success in preventing transmission during pregnancy and labour – all pregnant women are routinely screened and given drugs if necessary – but the problem is afterwards. Women are advised not to breastfeed because the virus can be transmitted through the breast milk, but they continue to do so because not breastfeeding immediately reveals their HIV status to everyone and the stigma is apparently a greater burden than the risk of infecting their child. Also, many of these women are too poor to feed their infants anything other than breastmilk.

The conditions doctors here have to work under sound horrific. There are shortages of everything, overpopulation is stretching resources in healthcare in combination with chronic underfunding. Women have an average of 7 children here – the hospital one of the doctors works at with her 12 colleagues sees 70 births a day on average. She says that she educates and advises women on birth control, but usually sees the same women returning within a year to give birth again. Clearly, national population control measures are not working. In South Africa, they launched a programme of condom distribution, but unfortunately, the instructions for use papers were stapled to the condoms. Oops.

Where we are staying, all the guests are Western tourists; the campsite is a favoured choice of the tour companies that do budget backpacker trips across Africa on a modified truck-cum-bus. It looks like quite a fun way to travel – certainly far easier than having to negotiate horrendous public transport and arrange your own route and accommodation, like we do – and everyone seems to get on well even though they’ve been cooped up on a truck together for 10 weeks. They are completely isolated from local people, though. They stay in campsites like this one, mix with other truck passengers and don’t even know where they have been – when I ask them, they say they’ve been to beaches and wildlife parks, bungee jumping and snorkelling, but they are hazy even about countries, having to check their passports for visas to be sure of the names. It’s a strange way to travel with activity sessions interspersed with tedious journey times during which, apparently, everyone sleeps because they have to be on the road at 5am every morning. I think it’s quite an expensive way of doing it – far better would be to go to Queensland for a couple of weeks, where you can do all the same things but with no long truck journeys in between, although, I guess there are no lions in Queensland…

We’re going to head south to Malawi for Christmas on the lake.