Living for Disco

I flagged down the taxi and told him I was going in the direction the Central Hospital. In Windhoek, you have to guide taxis by landmarks – Kalahari Sands Hotel, KFC, Simon de Wet Bridge – because people don’t use street names here. Also, taxi drivers are not required to study a map of Windhoek before they take the job, so half the time they don’t know where anything is. Despite this, they often have an annoying habit of thinking they know where you want to go better than you do.

“Are you sick?” asked the driver, while his companion smiled at me, nodding.

“No, I’m not going to the hospital, I have a friend who lives near the hospital.” He nodded, as if he understood.

“Are you visiting someone who is sick?”

“No”, I said. “I’m not going TO the hospital. My friend lives NEAR the hospital. Ooh, he lives down there actually – can you take that road on the…”

We sped past the turnoff, and I pointed and said “It’s there – that’s where I need to go.”

“Don’t worry Meme. You don’t know the way round here. It is fine.”

“But… I can see the road where I want to go. Where are we going? What are you doing?”

My destination rapidly shrank into the distance through the back window, and we took a road that looked as if it led onto deserted scrubland. I started to panic. I imagined them hauling me from the car, beating me over the head and stealing my alcohol-free lager. And maybe my phone. I hoped that they wouldn’t make me bleed.

He told me again not to worry, that he would make sure everything was fine, that he would get me to the hospital.

“But I don’t want to go to the hospital. I already told you. I’m going somewhere near the hospital. I showed you where I want to go. I want to go that way.” I waved my arm in the direction from which we had come. I was getting a bit exasperated by this time. And my lager was getting warm.

“Yes, don’t worry Meme. I know the way.” he said again, clearly assuming that I was a mental patient. I think he probably wanted to get me to the hospital before I started foaming at the mouth.

We pulled up by the side of the road, opposite a couple of small stalls selling bruised apples and unidentifiable smoking meat on sticks. The women sitting around looked at me with a complete lack of interest. One of them moved the apples around a bit.

We sat in the car in silence for a few seconds while he waited for me to get out.

“Do you know this place Meme?” he said eventually.

“Yes”, I said resignedly. “This is the hospital.”

I did eventually manage to persuade him that he should take me to my friend’s house, but it was tough. He seemed irritated with me for some reason I can’t fathom.

I’ve found a new newspaper! This is fortunate, because the Namibian has been getting extremely dull lately; yesterday’s headline screamed “50c hike in milk prices!” I was underwhelmed.

It is, however, unfortunate, because it is a bi-monthly publication, so I have to wait two weeks before being regaled with news stories such as that of the poor Nigerian man living in Katutura, who can’t find his wife. This is because he woke up in the morgue after being pronounced dead and she ran away when he then turned up at their house, naked, in a taxi. The Namibian just isn’t providing this kind of need-to-know journalism any more.

The best (or worst, depending on how you look at it) news story in the latest issue of the paper is a letter from one of the inmates of Windhoek Central Prison, who is complaining about the systematic mistreatment of prisoners. Apparently, they are being subjected to having pepper spray enemas to make them pass any forbidden objects they may have secreted where the sun don’t shine – in this case, cellphones.

I know it’s not funny. I know it’s a significant abuse of human rights, but please – would a cellphone even work after it’s been inserted up your back passage and sat on for a while? I hate to say it but unless you put it inside a condom or something, the things that would get caught in the keypad don’t even bear thinking about. Also, phones here do tend to be somewhat bulky. Many of them have antennae. Can you imagine walking around normally, with a cellphone up your arse?

There are a number of second hand phone shops in Windhoek. I’ve had my cell stolen twice, and each time I have bought a new one, rather than rely on something second hand, and also because you don’t know where they’ve come from.

I am now sincerely happy about this decision.

I came out of the pick’n'pay carrying a bag with my lunch in it (chicken and mushroom pie, bag of grapes, in case you’re interested), and got on my bike. As I wheeled it past a parked bakkie, I realised that the enormous woman inside it was addressing me.

“Hello miss”, she said in a heavy South African accent. “Are you from overseas?”

I replied that I am.

“I thought so. Hi, my name is Esther, and I’m from South Africa, and the white women here, they don’t drive bicycles. It is too hot. We like the car.” She looked at me as if my poor brain had been addled by too much sun, and as a result I was letting white women all over the world down by being seen to pedal in public.

I didn’t know quite how to respond to her. I kept to myself that if she cycled a couple of times a week she wouldn’t now look as if she was about to expire from heart failure simply from sitting in the truck while her husband went to buy 15 tons of cattle feed from the farm store round the corner.

So I smiled and said “Yes, I noticed”.

I sat at my tiny breakfast bar this morning, eating a banana and gazing absentmindedly through of the French windows at the ripening oranges on the tree outside; the radio talked of rugby and an impending heatwave. It’s been a beautiful morning – clear and blue, smelling of hot dust, old fires and the weekend’s rain.

I have an old string mop propped against the bars of my security grill, and as I watched, four fat birds landed on the bars and started to peck at the string. Mousebirds are comical – they’re fat and fluffy and grey, slightly smaller than pigeons, with bright pink feet, long tail feathers and crested heads. They remind me of pompous, stuffy businessmen, although I can’t imagine why this is the image that I associate with them. There are thousands of them in the oleander bushes and the citrus trees outside my house. At the moment, on a daily basis, they are demolishing my mop for their nests. Not that I mind; I hate string mops – they’re more work than they’re worth.

I’m trying to imagine what a nest made out of an old mop would feel like for all the imminently hatching mousebirdlets. I like to think: comfy.

I’ve just been reading an article in the Namibian about a 17 year old Windhoek school kid, who used his cell phone to film his girlfriend doing something pornographic, and then sent the clip to as many people he could think of.  What a charmer.

Anyway, apparently the head of the Namibian National Teacher’s Union has had something to say about this, along the lines of ‘now we must address sex education properly,’ etc. etc. (This is a good thing, as about a fifth of all pregnancies in Namibia are in girls under 18.)  He said:  “Gone are the days when we told children that babies come with the aeroplane.”

Excuse me?  Is this a modern variation on the stork that I have until this minute been unaware of?  It’s especially bizarre, as I’ve never seen a sky so free of aeroplanes as I have in Namibia.  There just aren’t any.  Most kids in Namibia have never even seen an aeroplane, let alone had one drop a be-parachuted infant on them from the sky in the dead of night.  I would have thought it more likely that kids are being told that babies spring fully formed from the mahangu field, or from behind the shebeen.

In any case, it’s all ok, because they then shifted their focus away from the bothersome issue of having to actually tell kids about sex, and instead are concentrating on being concerned that kids have expensive equipment with which to film themselves having sex.  So that’s alright then.

Also, incidentally, my spell checker is throwing up the word ‘aeroplane’ as a misspelling.  Apparently I should be saying ‘airplane’.  This is, frankly, ridiculous.