Living for Disco

I’ve had a heavy week, what with one thing and another, and so the usual Friday night excursion to El Cubano isn’t doing it for me. The DJ is playing a collection of shite so loudly that the four of us are having to communicate with each other in sign language. I pick up my bottle of fizzy water, and announce my departure.

Stepping outside, I try and flag down a taxi, but I have to wait for a while. I end up sharing a cab with two girls, and despite the fact that we’re all going to different sides of town, the driver doesn’t object.

“Sista! Come with us. We’ll be safer if we’re all together”, shouts the drunker of the two girls. “We should not travel alone”, she yells. “These men, they cannot be trusted to behave.”

The taxi driver makes a noise of protest and says he is a nice person. She snorts and tells him not to talk rubbish. When she leaves the car, she tells him to be sure to look after us both, and gives me a massive hug. I think it’s a shame she’s going home – I’d have liked to have gone down the pub with her and shouted about things all night.

The driver continues on to my house, making a horrendous right turn almost into the side of a small white car. The almost-accident is clearly his fault, but the other car doesn’t help by swerving into us and trying to ram us off the road.

Our driver hunches down over the wheel like Dick Dastardly. He’s very obviously seen red, and proceeds to try and shunt the car all the way to the lights, a hundred yards or so ahead. When we protest he screams “What? What is your problem? Fuck you.” Unfortunately we’re going too fast to get out of the car safely, so there is nothing for it but to stay where we are, and hope he stops at the lights.

We pull up next to the white car at the lights, and our taxi driver starts to get out. The terrified looking guy in the passenger seat of the other car preempts him, and leans through the open window.

“This is it,” I thought. “He’s going to fucking kill him.” I think he has a knife, or a gun. Everything is in slow motion, and as I grab the door handle to run, an acrid mist reaches me, and I start to choke. He’s sprayed mace, or something like it, through the window. The other car is haring off through the red light. I can’t breathe, and as the two of us fall out of the car, the driver, screaming, starts the car and gives lunatic chase.

We stand on a street corner, in the dark, bewildered and breathless, the spray still catching in our throats. Everything is quiet.

“What’s your name?” she asks me. I tell her.

“Yours?”

“Esther”.

We shake hands, and flag down the first cab to come by.

The journey home is uneventful.

I’ve been having a quiet whinge to myself lately about how utterly boring The Namibian newspaper has become. They keep running dreadfully dreary articles about local government elections, or treason trials being postponed. I rely on the newspaper to give me inspiration in times of blogging crisis, and recently I’m afraid it’s let me down.

However, I came in this morning, and saw a headline that gladdened my heart: “Namibia makes debut at world fish fair”. Now I don’t know why, but I find fish inherently amusing. I think I may have mentioned this before. The fact that there is an international fish fair I find delightful. I can imagine them all dressed like Captain Birdseye, sitting around on their stands, surrounded by tuna steaks and caviar, and discussing the dreadful state of the pilchard harvest.

It appears, however, that the International Seafood Expo is a big deal. People come from all over to display the latest fish products, be it the food itself or the technology used to catch it. It’s the place to wheel and deal if you’re in the fish business.

Namibia doesn’t really do fish. Except for pilchards. They’re very big on tinned pilchards. In fact, I believe that Namibia donated a large amount of tinned pilchards to the victims of the tsunami. I kid you not.

Anyway, this is what the Namibian contingent had to say about the visit:

“We had a small stand and no fish. All we had was our confidence in Namibia’s existing fishing industry and prospective aquaculture sector as our point of promotion.

“Miss Namibia 2004, Adele Basson, was also with us and with the support of Namibia Breweries, plus our wooden giraffes, we were able to market our products while being able to offer the visitors to our stand true Namibian beer with true Namibian beauty and some culture.”

Those of you who have not visited Namibia will not realise the significance of the wooden giraffe in Namibian culture. They are the bait used to reel tourists into market stalls. I’m sure the sale of wooden giraffes feeds families from here to Katima Mulilo. They are everywhere. If you go to the check-in gates at the airport, I guarantee you that at least half of the people getting on planes will have enormous wooden giraffes wrapped up in bubblewrap and newspaper sticking awkwardly out of their baggage.

Why exactly they took wooden giraffes to a seafood expo escapes me though. What were they trying to achieve? I can just see it…

“Hello sir. Here, have a Windhoek lager. It’s true Namibian beer!”

“Wow! Thanks. What’s different about true Namibian beer?”

“Well, it’s exactly the same as German beer, except the girl serving it to you is a true Namibian beauty. Albeit of German extraction.”

“Oh marvellous. What kind of fish products are you promoting?”

“Fish products?”

“Yes. That’s why we’re all here.”

“Right. Well, I don’t know about that, but don’t you think these wooden giraffes represent our burgeoning fishing industry extraordinarily well?”

“…..”

In this post, I will mostly be answering questions from Gord and Uncle Did, seeing as the latter also asked about music, and the former requested a review of a gig I went to on Saturday night.

When I first arrived in Namibia, I was enormously excited about the prospect of going to see live music. I asked a few people about the various opportunities to see artists, and who was out there, and I drew a blank. There were some concerts by local Afrikaners, but I don’t tend to like Afrikaner pop music. At the risk of being labeled a racist once again, it generally sucks ass, and it sounds as if it’s been pasted together by a four year old with a copy of A Tune A Day for the guitar and a pot of non-toxic glue.

Over the last six months, there seems to have been somewhat of an explosion in accessible live music by Namibian artists. One amazing guy is Elemotho, who I have now seen five times, and who is always excellent. However, on Saturday I went to see a Namibian legend: Jackson Kaujeua came along to support his equally talented son, Jackson Jnr at the Warehouse Theatre. Jackson’s been on the Namibian gospel music scene since the 70s. He was exiled in the UK and in the US during the war for independence because his lyrics leaned too heavily towards the revolutionary, and he came back in the early 90s. He’s been making music here ever since.

What made it great was the incredible energy they put into the performance. The whole band looked as if they were having just about the best possible time. They got down there in with the audience at the front, and worked everyone up into a dancing frenzy. They sang in Herero, in Damara Nama, and in English. Jackson Jnr’s music is, ironically, a bit more traditional sounding than Jackson Snr, who sings as soulfully as Marvin Gaye in a voice like dark brown gravel.

They seemed to combine their different styles seamlessly, and they both had an incredible stage presence. Admittedly, I think Jackson Snr’s outfits had something to do with it – he changed three times, finishing up in a patchwork leopard/tiger print suit, with a tiger print hat, and a pair of spats.

I remember sitting there, my face stiff from smiling, as they belted out the last number, as the crazy dancing rasta at the front leapt on stage to help with the drumming, as all the dancers just let go, and as the atmosphere just went crazy how fucking lucky I am to have been there, and seen it. I’d like to put it in a box, and keep it for when I’m home.

I am sitting alone in my hotel room, savouring the rare opportunity to watch the TV. I am watching a very bad horror movie called Venom. I’m not watching it out of choice, but because in this hotel, although each room has its own TV, they are connected to a network and only one room has the remote.

We have just got to the point where two girls venture to the spooky garage of a dead man. One of them steals some money from the dusty till, thereby sealing her doom. I am all psyched up for some blood and gore, when the channel changes, and I find myself watching an advert for KFC on the sport channel. The phantom channel-hopper then scrolls slowly through a selection of programmes before landing back on the horror movie in time to see the girl have her face sandblasted off with a car-paint stripper.

There is much running around and screaming. By the time the heroine (clearly even at this stage, she will be the only one to survive) sends her friends off to get help, I decide to turn it off.

I am lulled to sleep by blood-curdling screams from the surrounding rooms.

We had some ups and downs at work last year. One of the downs was a kleptomaniac receptionist who in her short tenure manning the phones managed to abscond with:

1 scanner
1 projector
1 fan heater
1 cash box full of cash
N$100 from my purse
N$100 from a colleague’s purse
N$44,000 in forged cheques, which she cashed at the bank, and which eventually led to her rather dramatic ’surprise’ arrest one morning in our boardroom. It was a bit like a surprise party, but without the punch and the streamers.

So in a drive to reduce the incidence of theft from our offices, one of my colleagues has been shuffling around my little office for the last half hour sticking stickers on everything that could be construed as ‘company property’, and asking me what things are so he can tick them off on his sticker list (“Rachael, what are these in English?” “Pliers”).

I was sitting here minding my own business, tapping some numbers into a spreadsheet as is my wont, and he came over and just lifted up my keyboard. While I was using it. Then he stuck a sticker on the bottom. I didn’t realise there was so much crap under my keyboard – or that I’d lost that much hair lately.

There’s a sticker on the phone (Telec6009), a sticker on my monitor (Compt1015), one on the back of my chair (Furnt1505), and one on the free UNICEF Alcohol Aids HIV wallplanner, of which we were donated 250. Given the way staff are regarded in this place, I’m hugely surprised I didn’t get one stuck to the back of my neck (Volnt2007).

I don’t really see how it’s going to help though. The one on my chair has only been there three minutes, and it’s fallen off already.