Living for Disco

So, my holiday was wonderful, thank you. Mozambique is a beautiful country – the antithesis of Namibia in many ways. It’s deeply lush and green, for a start, with real rivers that are filled with water, and not dust. The landscape is thickly packed with palms that hurl coconuts to the ground in abundance, and mango trees that drip with fruit. The heat and humidity is extreme, but was quelled by the off-shore breezes that we enjoyed while lazily eating samosas bought from small boys on the beach, watching graceful dhows and men with fishing baskets from the comfort of our shady tree.

The sea was like a bath, particularly in the quiet, friendly town of Vilanculos; the water was warm, still and clear, unlike the coast at Swakopmund, where the Atlantic breezes make you wish you’d worn your thermal underwear, and why, oh why, did we decide to drink a beer outside? In the party-central that is Tofo, admittedly, it got a little rough, as the tail-end of a cyclone whipped the surf up just too much to make swimming enjoyable. However, sitting on the beach, drinking a beer and watching the surfers provided perfectly adequate entertainment. I have to say that I have never been in the presence of so many finely sculpted male torsos. I am considering moving to Cape Town, and becoming a professional letch (if I can control my drooling problem).

Maputo is alive and vibrant in a way that Windhoek just… isn’t. On the way in, we passed a heaving, shouting, lively muck-filled market, strewn with piles and piles of stinking rubbish, and through which a multitude of bashed up old cars tried to navigate. Amidst the mess were stalls selling a multitude of items: piles of soft charcoal; multicoloured mosquito nets, blowing in the breeze like so many giant condoms; plastic shoes, both new and used, and other clothing; mangoes, pineapples and small, sweet bananas; soft fresh Portuguese bread; sarongs in multi-coloured African prints, sporting pictures of teapots, of scissors, or of the Mozambique flag with its AK-47 emblem. The bus jittered through the pot-holed road onto the main tree-lined throrough-fare and we headed into the city, and to the haven of our hostel, where we found a balcony overlooking the bay and the waving palms.

One of the best things about Maputo is the fish market. You can’t really get much good fish in Namibia. Seafood isn’t a priority here – it’s meat or nothing. But in Maputo’s fish market, an abundance of marine bounty is on display. Blue and pink crayfish, the size of lobsters; buckets full of squirting clams; crabs; calamari and octopus, tentacles quivering; prawns of all sizes from prince to king and beyond; scarlet groupers with blue spots; enormous, grey shiny barracuda. We bought too much, and went out back, to where the restaurants will cook it up for you, expertly and deliciously, and sell you plenty of 2M beer to wash it down with.

I’m starting to understand what people mean when they say that Namibia is ‘not really Africa’. Please don’t misunderstand me – I in no way agree with them, and still think it’s a really bloody stupid thing to say. It’s just that if Mozambique is anything to go by, Namibia must sometimes seem extraordinary in its quietude and emptiness to people coming from the relatively densely populated countries like Malawi and Zambia. Where are the people? Where is the noise and the life and the energy? The truth is, really you have to look a little harder to find that in Namibia, but it’s there, in Katutura and Khomasdal, and further north in Opuwo and Oshakati and other towns - in other words, the places where tourists very rarely go.

It was quite odd, returning from an extremely hot country to another extremely hot country. I had forgotten that after holidays of this kind I’m used to landing at Heathrow and being smitten by unforgiving winter winds and thrust into a melee of people who look pale and discontented. I almost expected Namibia to be a cool relief, but no, it’s still too effing hot.

It was bliss to leave Namibia for a while; this is the first time I have done so since I arrived, well over a year ago. But now it’s good to be back, and to be reminded just how starkly beautiful it is here.

I had almost forgotten.

He was thin and wiry, and intelligent looking, and he smiled at me from across the room. I was in an animated conversation about weight belts and buoyancy with a Dutch friend of mine at the time, and I believe I was miming bobbing to the surface of the water like a balloon, so it seemed inconceivable that he could fancy me. However, it seemed to be the case. He came over, and bought me a drink, and we had a shouty conversation, and a bit of a dance.

Everything seemed to be going swimmingly, and so we moved to the benches outside where it was cooler and quieter, and we could actually hear each other speak. This proved to be a big mistake. We were having a perfectly amiable conversation about something, when he blew himself totally out of the water by uttering the following words:

“I like you, Rachael. You know your place as a woman.”

Anyone who knows me will at this moment be burying their heads in their hands and thanking God they were far from the inevitable explosion. But they would be wrong. I smiled pleasantly*, and said:

“And my place as a woman… What would that be exactly?”

“These women nowadays. It has all changed. So many women, they are having jobs where they are put in a position of authority over a man, and that is wrong. Women have a place, and it is not to tell men what to do. You know that.”

“Er, excuse me, I know nothing of the sort,” I replied. “Are you trying to tell me that women should be subservient to men?”

“Well, it is obvious. Women are weaker than men.”

“Physically, sometimes, I’ll give you that. But generally speaking?”

“What do you mean, generally speaking? Be specific.”

“OK. Do you believe that women are not equal to men in every day life?”

At this point he looked a bit shifty, but he still hadn’t really clocked onto the fact that he was digging himself a hole so deep he could have warmed the cockles of his heart on the earth’s core.

“Well, yes”, he said. My mouth must have dropped open, because he hurriedly tried to explain himself. “Look, if someone breaks into the house, where we are living together, what would you do?”

“What would you do?” I asked.

“No, I asked you first. What would you do?”

“What would you do?” (We went on in this vein for some time - I won’t bore you with the number of repetitions.)

“Come on Rachael,” he said placatingly, while preparing to deliver the coup de grace, the argument that I could not refute. “How can a woman be equal to a man? You do not have a penis.”

Oh, well, doh. Silly me. How could I be so stupid?

“What the FUCK does having a penis have to do with anything at all? How is this relevant? What in GOD’S NAME are you talking about?”

“It is women like you,” he said, as if explaining to a small and stupid child, “who are lesbians. This is what is wrong with the world.”

At this point, I became incoherent with rage.

“What? What? Jesus. What the fuck?” Never let it be said that I cannot hold a reasoned and articulate argument in the face of utter lunacy. This man had clearly sped through delusional and was now on the superhighway to deranged. He looked about 30, but perhaps he was in fact 150 years old, and had simply discovered the elixir of youth.

“Come on Rachael,” he said, looking at me reproachfully. “Don’t piss me off.”

“Don’t piss you off? Don’t piss you off? How about you try not to piss me off? In fact, I’ve had enough of this conversation. I am going now.” And I left.

I went to relay the conversation to my friends. I delight in doing this kind of thing. Sometimes I take a perverse pleasure in having conversations like this, because they allow me to make fun of people who richly deserve it. While I was busy recreating my facial expressions for my friend Danny, my erstwhile admirer returned to my side.

“Rachael, I think we had a misunderstanding. I would like us to be friends. Can I explain?”

I thought that maybe I had actually misunderstood his comments about penises and lesbians, and so I sat down with him to have another bash.

“How did I misunderstand?” I asked him.

“I think that this is not so important. Can we talk about something else?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I fundamentally disagree with something that you have said, that pertains to my very existence in this world. We cannot talk about something else.” He clearly thought that we had had a minor disagreement, and that once I got over being silly, I would consent to sleep with him. I wanted to find a way to tell him that if I did, I would effectively be drowning my soul in a bath of acid.

Fortunately he solved everything himself, by taking a heavy silver ring from his thumb, and dropping it down the front of my top.

I looked at him, and then I looked down at my chest. I looked back at him.

“Oops,” he said, a creepy smile taking over his face. “Look, I seem to have dropped something. Let me just get that.”

I grabbed his wrist as he reached for my cleavage, and I put my face very close to his.

“Don’t you dare touch me, you total fucking lunatic”, I said clearly and slowly. I retrieved the ring myself, and slammed in onto the table top. When I got up to leave, he grabbed my arm in an alarmingly strong grip, and forced me to sit back down.

“Listen, I’m sorry, the ring was loose.”

“You really do think that I am that stupid don’t you?” I asked him. He said nothing. This time, when I tried to leave, he didn’t try and stop me.

Hours later, as I was pouring myself into a taxi, he came up to me and grabbed my arm. He wanted to come home with me. Obviously I told him where to go, but I have to confess that he scared me. I honestly think that a man like that would have no compunction in doing anything to a woman, in the belief that it is his penis-given right to impose his will on a (in his view) weaker being.

I hope that I never meet him again.

I was awoken from a drugged stupor by something that sounded like a child having a major, head-bursting tantrum.

BLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH it screamed. I wondered whether the child in question was being tortured in some inventive way, so I had a look out of the window. A distressed goat was being roughly manhandled and bound by the side of the bus. Clearly, it was joining us on the journey.

I surveyed the jumble of arms and legs that belonged to the 250 passengers already squeezed onto the 25 seater bus, and wondered where on earth they were going to put the goat. Under the seat with the onions? Slung from the ceiling, from whence it could shower everyone with urine and goat poo? It couldn’t go behind the driver’s seat, because that space was already occupied by a deeply traumatised chicken.
I needn’t have worried. They just put the goat on the roof.

BLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH shrieked the goat, as it was hefted skywards. BLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH, it wailed pitifully as it was attached firmly to the luggage rack.

Once in place it seemed to calm down. I can imagine it thought lying on the roof in the sun was preferable to being manhandled and thrown around like a sack of potatoes. It probably wished it had a margarita and a good book to relax with.

Once a few more people were shoehorned into the bus, with their luggage, we prepared to set off again. I braced myself; it seemed to me that being strapped to the roof of a bus going 120 km per hour wasn’t exactly what the goat had expected after it’s brief minutes of peaceful solitude.

Sure enough, as we set off down the road, a wail of surprise drifted in through the open windows. I put myself in the goat’s position. Whither the margarita? Why are my ears suddenly being pinned to the back of my head by this insane wind? Hey! Why is no-one listening to me? Hey!

The rest of the journey was punctuated at regular intervals by increasingly pathetic brays of complaint from the roof. I returned to my drugged doze, and dreamed of dancing goats.