Living for Disco

This weekend promises to be very exciting for Namibia.  The country is attempting to build on the publicity it garnered from the patronage of Brad and Angelina and their celebrity foetus earlier this year, and is going to try to secure a place in a Most Illustrious Publication – yes! Namibia will, with any luck, soon be in The Guinness Book of Records.

For, you see, tomorrow is the long anticipated World’s Biggest Braai.  It’s been in the paper almost every day for the last few weeks, under headlines like “Preparations underway for World’s Biggest Braai!”  This morning, the day before B day, the Namibian front page features a beaming woman in full catering garb holding up an enormously long boerwors as if she’s about to sling it round her neck and dance triumphantly through town.

What they’re attempting is quite a feat.  The previous record was broken in Sydney, in 1993 when 44,158 people attended a barbeque. The thing is, Sydney has a population of 4 million – more than double that of Namibia in its entirety.  To put it in perspective, in order to beat this they’re going to have to persuade about a quarter of Windhoek’s residents to show up.  Mind you, there’s cheap food on offer, so they might not have a problem.  I can foresee trouble if people want second helpings though.  A bit of sausage and a can of coke isn’t going to fill anyone up, and there may be mutterings about whether it can really be classed as a braai if you don’t get to adorn your plate with a bit of chargrilled steak.

Another thing I’m wondering about is the organisers’ decision to have President Hifikepunya Pohamba wheeled in as the 44,159^th guest.  What if they don’t make it?  Is he just going to stand outside the turnstiles, fruitlessly waiting, waiting, waiting, until finally they tell him its all over, and he gets back in his fleet of limos for the drive home?

I’m quite nervous for them.  I hope they manage it.

As your roving Namibian reporter, I will, if I can muster the enthusiasm to schlep to Sam Nujoma Stadium tomorrow, provide an exclusive report on Monday…

When I arrived in Namibia, almost exactly a year ago, I arrived to a hot spring of burnt blue skies and brittle grass.  Everyone was waiting for the rain to come, but clouds that did appear were wispy and weak, no match for the sun’s laser eye.

The first rains came in late October, and then returned with a vengeance in January, battering the country with a ferocity that incited the rivers to rise up and sweep away whole towns.  The rains were supposed to stop in March, leaving us refreshed and clean of dust, but they kept on, and on, until almost the end of April, when everyone was tired of being continuously wet.  Rains like that haven’t been seen here for fifty years.  The country blossomed.  Everything, for lack of a more appropriate word, was lush.  As a result of these rains, the Namib desert is knee deep in grass, and the dry valley at Sossusvlei is sporting a largeish lake, complete with cape teals and avocets.  Cattle and game grew replete, reminding me of a childhood story my father used to tell me, in which the tawny, scrawny lion became ‘sleek as satin, fat as butter, and jolly as all get out’.

And then it got cold.  I was so looking forward to spring, to the early, bearable heat and the flowers, the endless sunny days of September, and then the release of the rains in October.  But no.  The freakish weather systems that seem to be running roughshod over the world’s climate have other plans.  Climate change, something I always thought (hoped) would be so gradual that it would be unnoticeable, is brazenly flaunting itself, in the outrageously hot summer the UK has just endured, and in the weather here in my corner of Africa.

Yesterday the rains began, over a month early.