moving house, to wordpress

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See you there.

patter on the pavement

Everyone said it would happen sooner or later, particularly if you do something as stupid as go for a walk alone. But I was only walking home from the office, a short journey of perhaps twenty minutes at most (though I can’t be accurate on that because I didn’t actually make it home). And I’d had enough of travelling in buses and cars. I wanted to walk. I needed to move. My body was aching and begging for some freedom. Fuckit, I thought, I’ll damn well walk home.

I left the university by the main gates on Enoch Sontonga, a long, broad road (six lanes wide) that leads from the university (which lies on the top left-hand corner of Johannesburg city’s somewhat notorious Central Business District, or CBD) towards the westerly neighbourhood where I live. It was almost raining. I was in a blue mac with my bag strapped across from the top of my right shoulder to the left hip. I passed several friendly lone men and exchanged hiyas and good evenings. It was a good feeling: to walk in Johannesburg without worrying. Well, almost, without worrying. I was aware that the roads were empty – the holiday hangover still in force – and that it was perhaps a little later than I would have liked. The grey sky felt oppressive, in a very English drizzly way, and I was conscious of the lack of movement in the air. I began whistling, to signal a degree of familiarity with my route, and to break through the throbbing cloud. I passed the second set of university gates, crossed a small road, and nodded to a thick-set elderly man walking up the hill that I was by now almost trotting down. I felt him turn and watch me as I whistled my way forward, but my attention on his movement shifted almost immediately to two young men who were walking straight towards me. At me, I see, in hindsight. One was wearing a white ‘ENGLAND’ football T-shirt. He was the taller of the two, with a muzzled expression and a broad brow. His friend was small, skinny and inconsequential, I thought. I kept my eyes on the England fan. Our eyes met. Aware of the abrasiveness in his face, I smiled and started to say That’s where I’m fro… but at the very moment of opening my lips to speak, I found myself with my back against the wall and a long flick-knife pointing to my left thigh. ‘Whoah!’ I shouted. ‘What d’you want? What d’you want?’ I noticed that my hands had flung upwards, to either side of my head, and wondered how they had got there. ‘Take what you want,’ I said, a little calmer.

The smaller man had already slipped my mobile phone out from the side of my bag, and was holding it out in front as if to show it to his accomplice. We both looked to him, and I looked again to his knife, still close to my thigh. Please don’t stab me now, I was thinking, I’ve got no health insurance. Please not today. He said nothing. The guy with the knife looked confused. They both did. ‘Don't you want my wallet?' I reasoned. ‘Please! Have the wallet!' I put my hand deep into my bag, and pulled out my leather wallet. The man in the England shirt snatched it, and suddenly backed away a few feet. Then he started yelling: 'Back up! Back up!' What? What’s he saying? He seemed angry, panicky: ‘BACK OFF! Back off!’ But I have backed off: my back’s against the wall! 'BACK OFF!' he yelled again. I looked at the long knife in his hand. ‘Oh! Up the street, you mean?’ And I turned, quickly, and started walking back up the hill, towards the university. I wanted to look round, but didn’t dare in case I provoked them to come after me, with the knife. I kept walking, looking straight ahead. The older man I’d passed coming down the hill had stopped. He was watching me, with a slight smile on his face. There must be three of them in on this, I thought. I can’t stand it. What’s he going to do now? But I had no choice but to keep walking. As I neared him, he asked, softly, ‘What did they take?’ I told him, and then wondered if he, too, had been mugged by them. ‘No,’ he said, ‘but they were following me for quite a while. I realised, when I saw you, that they were watching you from way back up there.' He turned and pointed to the junction in the distance. ‘That’s when they crossed the road.’

We began walking side by side, up the hill, chatting about crime and how lucky I was not to have been stabbed. ‘I carry a knife,’ he said, ‘to stab them back! I don’t take nonsense from these kids. They’re just kids who haven’t got jobs.’ He was quick to explain that he was not ‘from here’, but from the Democratic Republic of Congo. ‘People say Johannesburg is dangerous,’ he said, now talking in French, ‘but for me, if I was in Congo, I’d be dead. Joseph Kabila would kill me.’ And then he muttered something about an army he’d fought for. ‘I can’t go back until Joseph is dead. Yes, I must be patient.’ We arrived at the university gates. I bid my new friend farewell. We exchanged numbers, and then I remembered that I no longer had a mobile phone, which made us laugh. I gave him my number at the university. ‘Yes, you can help me,’ said Joseph (unfortunately sharing his enemy's name), as I scribbled into his diary. ‘I may need your help one day. You can help me.’ We shook hands, and shared a short hug, and as he strolled away, he glanced back and shouted, ‘Ils ne vont pas te tuer, madame! Jamais! Jamais!’

I'm ashamed to admit that I feel a sense of disappointment. The anti-climax of attack. There's so much drama here, so many awful stories (Woman leaps from car - says she'd rather be killed than raped *FLASH* Diplomats' party ends in shoot out - Ambassador unconscious *FLASH* Man held gun to my head as I made love to my wife - I'm moving to Cape Town *FLASH* etc etc etc), that I wonder why I got off so lightly. Not much of a dinner party story is it? Mugged at knife point and, err, they ran away *FLASH*! They were amateurs, more nervous than me, and didn't appear to know what to do once they'd got the phone. If only I hadn't reminded them. The wallet, boys, the wallet. And I wasn't stabbed. Not even a scratch, a punch, or a kick in the knee. Once they'd scarpered, I was free to chat with Joseph about life in the Congo. Rather, death in the Congo. So lucky, you see. We're so bloody lucky. It's pathetic, really.

Listening to: Abdullah Ibrahim's superb album, Yarona, and sticking tight to track 3, 'cherry/mannenberg' (which I'm told is South Africa's unofficial national anthem). For those in the know, Ibrahim also goes under the name, Dollar Brand, and IMHO is a more interesting jazz man than the nevertheless great Hugh Masekela. Sorry to Masekela fans. Sorry.

from my office window

Dressed in baggy brown trousers, and a baggy brown T-shirt with something printed across the front, a man of about my age stands, bored (he has a hand on a resting hip and is looking away from the scene), on one side of a sloping corrugated iron roof which is at least nine storeys high. That's nine high storeys because the building is an office and judging from the size of the windows, it has high ceilings. He's just standing there, barefoot, watching his partner in blue overalls and an orange helmet finish some drilling. They look as though they are screwing in a new piece of corrugated iron. It's been raining a lot; perhaps there's been a leak. The man in brown is fidgeting, walking back and forth across a few slices of the iron, the sloping iron, as if frustrated by his colleague's work pace. After about ten minutes they both stand up and discuss something. The man in blue overalls fiddles with a long electric flex, which I'm presuming is attached to his drill. They talk for three minutes or so, and then, a little resigned, wander along the roof towards another section of roof, also sloping, which they saunter down until they are about three more steps from the edge (from falling nine storeys down to the concrete floor), and then they start talking again. They talk for a further two minutes, and then the man in brown seems to realise he's forgotten something. He turns, walks back up the roof, on to the other bit of roof, and collects a small broken piece of corrugated iron. He then turns back again, to walk back to his colleague. As he approaches the second sloping roof (for the second time), he drops the broken bit of iron by mistake. It slides down the roof towards the drop (of no return). About one foot from the drop, it slides to a halt. The man in brown walks after it, right up to it, bends down, picks it up, turns and walks back up the second bit of sloping roof, towards a small window. The man in blue has already vanished. The man in brown bends down, and slides head first through the window.

The man who polished our ground floor

I'm sitting in the middle of a tiered lecture theatre in a building called Senate House in a university in Johannesburg. Sitting around me, men and women wearing grey and red uniforms, or green overalls, are singing complex harmonies. Some of the women are banging on the desks, quite hard, in rhythm. Others clap, gently. I can hear the old man behind me providing a superb baritone. The songs are sung in minor scales, I'm sure, though I'm no musician. And they are sung with extraordinary power, with crescendos and staccatos, breaths and pauses, always introduced by a solo female voice.

These cleaners, these gardeners, these workers who quietly mop, wipe, shine and polish, who empty the bins, pick up the trash, and fill the plastic, who swing the swirling grey hoover across the ground floor of Richard Ward building every morning, every morning, every morning... Here they are, singing together, songs of praise, of worship, of mourning and celebration, for their colleague, E, who died on New Year's Day. They sing for over an hour, dipping slowly when MC Zodwa raises her arms into a 'T', to signal fade down, my friends, fade down, and let me speak, and let our friends speak. And a silence drifts gently across the room.

Prayers are said, and a few colleagues provide memories and moments of the late, lost E. His employers - the subcontracted cleaning company, Supercare - also spend a few minutes at the front of the hall to praise the man. They don't mention the pensions they've taken away, or the fact they want cleaners here to be constantly changing shifts and changing which department they work for, in order to stop any collaboration or relationship being established between university staff and Supercare staff. 'I only met him once,' begins the Supercare rep..

A union leader speaks passionately in Xhosa and Zulu, and I understand just a few words. 'He was a strong, good guy.' Then the Word of God is spoken by a lady in a yellow-and-brown dress and matching wrap around her head, and over her shoulders. Her eyes zoom into mine and she holds up her arm towards me: 'There are some people here, who don't understand what's being said. You cannot come to a Memorial and not understand what is being said. So I will try to make some of what I say clear to the lady, so she can understand what's being said.'

The lady. Me. The one White in her own clothes in the congregation. I struggle not to blush, and attempt a smile and nod. I might want the ground to swallow me up, but I don't. I feel proud to be here with these people and honoured they allow me to attend this service, despite the fact I know only one of them and have met just three of them. I'm just the straggly blonde from the top floor. But they make me feel welcome, they go out of their way to ensure that the stranger is mentioned, is introduced, is acknowledged. You are here with us. I am here with you. We are all together.

People close to me are dying now. I think of their funerals. I think of a stranger coming. I think of the services in England that will be held. I think of the singing. The prayers. The language. I think of the speeches. The sadness. I think of the organ. The books. The hymns. I think of the vicar, robed, in white and purple. The collection for the church, that's falling apart.

After perhaps 70 minutes, the service comes to an end. MC Zodwa brings things to a close, thanking everybody for coming, and thanking the management of Supercare. And then she looks up at me, and thanks 'The lady' for coming, noting that I probably understood just a few words. She thanks me in total three times, describing the last thanks as 'extra special'. We all stand up. A prayer is said. We shuffle to the end of our row, and walk down the aisles on either side of the lecture hall, and slowly pass out, back into the corridors, into the main hall, past the sandwich café, past the Post Office, past the student health advisory rooms, into the cool air of the university grounds.

I try to calm my walk, to slow my rhythm, to take it easy. I head for the far end of the grounds, to buy a sandwich and maybe a Coke or a Super M chocolate milk. I grab an apricot stick, and chew on it as I pay for the conserved lunch. I wander away from the small shopping mall, back towards my office. I pass a man in grey and red, pushing a trolley stacked with sprays in shiny metal cans, dusters, a bucket, a long grey mop and a selection of short and tall brooms. We shyly catch the other's eye as we pass, and smile. As I approach my building, I see three ladies outside, talking in a secret circle, all wearing grey and red and one in a matching red head scarf. I'm so big, so conspicuous, so clumsy. I long for their uniform, and their colour. I pass and smile. They turn and nod, and I'm not sure what it means. I keep going, into the building. I pass through the door, onto the large mat. I stop, and wipe my feet carefully backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards. This is E's old floor.

The first thing I wanna say is...

There's nothing worse than crowing foreigners coming to South Africa and moaning about the place. Particularly white Europeans and North Americans, shocked at 'how White it is'. If you're one of them, you need to remind yourself that South Africa is (yes, present tense, because it is still, very much) a magnifying glass on the state of the rest of the world: a tiny minority of people who are disproportionately white, living a far higher standard of living than (almost) everyone else. If you're sitting in London cussing the white South Africans, remember that you are probably every bit as bad as they are. As one Afrikaner lady put it, succinctly: 'The difference between you and me is I have to look at it every day.' That 'it', so very loaded. So, perhaps, the wealthy here - and they aren't just white, remember I used the word disproportionately - can't put their head in the sand as the wealthy living in the Northern hemisphere manage to do so well. We (from the North) can pretend we don't belong to the poverty and grime largely associated with the South. But we're only pretending. The wealthy down here, can't even pretend - although if I'm really honest, quite a lot of them do a remarkably good impersonation of someone pretending they live in a place without inequality.

Scream: Inniwot?

Talking of honesty. It's hard to be very honest here. I feel that the problem that is going to present itself in this re-emerging blog is self-censorship. It is hard to say what you think here: I've heard a lot of wealthy Anglo South Africans (by Anglo, I mean those of British origin) boast, 'As a Brit, you'll have to get used to the fact that we're awfully un-politically correct here!' , and then proceed to laugh about the fact their dogs are racist.
Guffaw. Guffaw. By un-politically correct, I think what they mean is they talk about the colour of people's skin more easily than their fellow middle-classes in England. Black. White. Coloured. Coloured. Black. Black. Indian. Coloured. White. Black. They also make jokes about the colourful tribes of the Rainbow Nation
- cute little generalisations, for example, about the fact that Cape Coloureds have rotten front teeth - without a hint of a blush. Fine. But the boast of non-existent P.C. is complex, and reveals something about the psyche of this nation that I'm not sure I want to know all about.

Because I don't think it's true that you can be frank here. Really, candid. I feel that people are very nervous about saying what they think - on all sides and both ends of the Rainbow. People speak very softly, very quietly, as if there is a shame that they are hiding, guarding and controlling. Perhaps years of shame and guilt have left many attempting to speak themselves out of existence. I've met so many people here who almost whisper, and some who speak so softly I'm sure they'd prefer not to speak at all. If I just keep very quiet, maybe no one will notice me at all...

But I'm not sure anyone here says what they really think, ever. It's all coded. For example, the ANC government is described politely as 'the New government'. This allows you to speak far more freely, as a white, than if you pined for the apartheid system. 'Since the New government has come in...' blah blah blah. 'They' and 'they're' is another one. That's how many Whites talk about Blacks. For example, a waiter at a wedding I attended in whiter-than-Persil-white Cape Town, said: 'They don't like vegetables...' This was in response to my comment to another of the guests, a black South African lady, as we stood in the food queue: 'Why don't you take a larger plate so you can fit more food on!' Before she had time to reply, the young white waiter butted in with her delightful comment. Astounded, I turned back to my fellow guest: 'Would you prefer a larger plate?' But she was a wise old bird, 'Oh leave them,' she said, employing the same abstracting and pluralising technique, 'I can always come back if I want more.' Later, the same woman asked me if I would get her and her sister some champagne from the drinks table because the drinks waiter (a fat white man) was refusing to serve them.

Oh yes, what a lovely way to behave at a wedding. All that lurve just coming on through.

Back, from Johannesburg

Hello. I've decided to come back. Came here, to Johannesburg, and somehow feel that there's too much to be said not to have a blog. So I will be doing some posts from this superb city. Perhaps not very very regular, but there will be occasional bursts of posts. In the meantime, to let you know that I have a new story up here on Barbara Campbell's wonderful 1001 nights cast, which very sadly, is soon to end. Also going from the cybersphere is Uncle Zip's Window. I'm already missing his posts, and so have to make do with re-reading certain favourites and slowly chewing over his final offerings - slightly longer pieces than usual.

GOODBYE

drumstick

On top of the wall of the walled garden behind St John's church in central Hackney, a large grey squirrel is eating a chicken drumstick. A few minutes' walk away, in front of the Town Hall, two men are twisting many metres of Christmas lights into the branches of a pair of trees:
"I know it's still September but we gotta lot to do before December luv."
In the West End, G is talking about fiction and journalism and the greater strengths of 'oblique writing'.
"The journalist bit of your brain makes you ask really stupid questions. When you're spontaneously you, not you the journalist, you are much more interesting."
This says much less about me than it does about most journalism today. Less tidy writing, writing that doesn't have an obvious beginning, middle and (particularly) end, is more interesting, more real, more honest and more revealing. Nearly all journalism is encouraged to be neat. Fit life, fit conflict, fit Buddhist monk protests into the neat box of the report. End on a firm conclusion, a firm question or back at the beginning.
G and I return to questions of fact, questions of truth and questions of fiction. Dropping the aspiration for objectivity and truth is the way forward. It's not so alarming, if you stop to think about it seriously. Letting doubt in, and fantasy (the KFC squirrel), raises the game of understanding and learning.
At the gallery, the one artist I wanted to meet had stayed in Ghana: Glen Turner, who once gave me one of his oil paintings. I scrawled a note and passed it on to another artist, Wiz Kudowor. Wiz's work became the subject of much debate later: the men saw the phallus, the ladies only faces and sun. Even when the men pointed us to the testicles below, we all said, "But the faces, the faces."
"Wombs," one of the men added.
G gave a good talk, leading us through the painting. And then another piece of Wiz's work, about colonialism in part. Wiz listened and chuckled.
Earlier, there was drumming. Drumming with branches from Highgate, broken, torn and shaped earlier that day. Master Drummer of the Ghanaian Royal Palace. Asante became apprentice drummer at the royal palace when he was four years old. He is among the very best drummers in the world. Playing for maybe twenty of us in Pall Mall. He drummed and told a story...
"This is a story about the difference between seeing and believing..." drums drums drums "... You cannot always believe what you see..." drums drums drums "... and you cannot always see what you believe..." drums drums drums "...an African diplomat living in a smart white suburb in the States..." drums drums drums "...Goes to his local store to do some shopping..." drums drums drums "...He asks the lady behind the till for some dog food..." drums drums drums "...What for? says the tiller I see no dog..." drums drums drums "... do you eat dog food? I can't sell you dog food. You eat dog food?.." drums drums drums "...I have a dog, says the diplomat, and the food is for him..." drums drums drums "... but the lady wouldn't sell him the dog food, believing still that he the diplomat would eat the food.." drums drums drums "... the following day, the diplomat returned to the store..." drums drums drums "...and asked the lady at the till for some cat food.." drums drums drums "... Why do you want cat food? I can't see no cat. You eat cat food?.." drums drums drums.. "I want cat food, the diplomat said, for my cat, at home.." drums drums drums "... but the tiller refused, I don't sell cat food for you to eat..." drums drums drums "... The following day, the diplomat returned to the store..." drums drums drums "...with a paper bag under his armpit..." drums drums drums "...He went straight up to the till..." drums drums drums "...What do you want today? said the tiller.." drums drums drums "...The diplomat pulled the bag from under his arm..." drums drums drums "...since you never believe me, I ask you to take this bag and put your hand inside..." drums drums drums "...The tiller took the bag, and slowly, carefully, reached down inside it..." drums drums drums "...She felt something at the bottom of the bag, and pulled her hand out quickly..." drums drums drums "... Her hand was covered in shit..." drums drums drums "... I'd like some toilet roll, the diplomat said..." drums drums drums drums drums drums drums drums..
G wasn't happy. Some people were laughing. Later, G said it's about the audience. This Pall Mall audience changes the joke, alters the way the joke is understood, the story is read and received. I wondered if I shouldn't have laughed. He was right, G. Was he? So I've been rethinking some of my conversations with a certain J, since that night. What a good night. The drumming was incredible. I bought an album. Ohene Kesee a Ebin or Big Chief with Shit on his Face. Can't imagine Phil Collins coming out with something like that. There we go - the wrap up, the conclusion.
Nothing Oblique.
In the taxi, back to Camden, I heard that two people I'd been talking to, who'd disappeared, had been having sex in la galleria's toilets. Only later did I wonder if Wiz's Youth was the inspiration. She finally understood. She finally got it. And that was her only response.

dragon's tails

J was sitting in a fancy beach bar, looking out to the Atlantic. She was with friends, including a five-year-old boy who had asked J to draw a tattoo on to his stomach: 'I want a dragon.'
J began drawing, with thick felt tip, a long tail, a long nose and some big teeth. When she'd finished, the kid ran off to show his tattoo to various unsuspecting members of the public. An hour or so later, the boy came back.
‘You forgot the wings,’ he whined in thick Canadian drawl.
Surprised by this omission, J immediately began drawing two large feathery wings. As she did so, she noticed on the beach in front them, a face which reminded her guiltily of The Black and White Minstrel Show that her parents watched on TV back in the seventies. A young, fit man was kneeling in the sand, quite close to the water. His arms were stretched out to either side so his body, which was covered in sand, formed a cross. His mouth was wide open as if he was about to start yelling, and he was wobbling. His entire body, shaking. He looked as if he might fall straight forward onto his face, were it not for a friend standing at his side holding his arm firmly.
J had stopped drawing the wings for several minutes and was staring at the kneeling sandman. She saw him starting to vomit. Thick white, creamy bile dribbled out of his mouth, down his sandy chin before falling in lumps to the ground.
‘What are you doing?’ interrupted the boy, irritated that J's attention had drifted away from the tattoo.
‘Just watching those guys down there.’
At that moment, sandman fell forward, face down, into the sand and didn’t move. The man at his side, and another friend, moved to pull him up off the ground. They dragged him the few feet towards the sea where the waves were at their weakest. They were obviously going to clean the vomit from his face in the water. J relaxed, briefly. But instead of washing him, she saw the two friends drop the man face-down into the sea, where he remained for several long seconds without moving.
J started to wonder if he was in fact very sick indeed, but dismissed the thought because his friends didn’t seem in the slightest bit stressed. They were moving so slowly and gracefully.
Eventually they pulled him out of the water. His body was loose and heavy. The second, slightly larger friend, tried to pick him up and swing him on to his shoulder. But he couldn’t lift the body. So the other friend tried to help, and then another, and together they all pulled and heaved the body on to the shoulder of the tallest. And then the three of them walked up the beach, towards the main road.
As they passed J and the boy, the child said: ‘Is he dead?’
‘Oh no... probably just a bit sick.’
‘He looks dead,’ insisted the five year old.
They watched the men disappear from view, the body bouncing like a long piece of soft metal over the tallest friend's shoulder.
J realised she'd just watched someone being murdered. She noticed the café's music playing in the background. Inoffensive Brazilian tunes. The waiters came and went with trays of coffee. An angry Russian, wearing effeminate swimming trunks, walked past muttering angrily to himself.
‘The water is very dangerous,’ he grumbled, referring to a jelly fish sting on his leg.


Meanwhile, I'm pondering this. I like Said's work a great deal, and Frantz Fanon has guided me for the last 15 years or so and continues to do so, plus I'm a known fan of Sharp Side: so I'm hoping the latter will expand his thoughts on Camus, in this context, please.

last night

'So, you think you can fictionalise Africa?'
'Sorry?'
Silence.
'Well, no, I'm not sure. What I think is that the journalist's mantra of objectivity is false. There is no objective truth. What interests me is the area of doubt, and the idea that we actually never know that what we've seen is really what was there. I'm not sure that conventional non-fiction forms allow much space for doubt and imagination.'
'Have you heard of the film Flames?'
'No.'
'It's a film about female liberation fighters in Zimbabwe.'
'Ah -'
'It was made by white people.'
'Oh -'
'They decided to turn it into fiction because they couldn't get all the material they wanted on the record.'
'When was it set? Under Smith, or now, under Mugabe?'
'Then. Liberation from colonialism. From whites. And these whites, the film-makers, they sexualised the women. The women were doubly oppressed in the film, as black Africans and as women.'
'That sounds bad. What was the film like?'
'Oh, obviously I didn't watch it. I didn't want to. Why would I want to watch a film about Africa made by whites? Imagine! A film about Zimbabwean liberation made by whites!'
'Were they white Europeans, or white Zimbabweans?'
'I think there was one white Zimbabwean and the rest were Europeans,' pause, 'but they were Whites.'
The breed, presumably.
'This reminds me of Kapuscinksi, and the debates about his work.'
Blank.
'He was Polish. A journalist for the state news agency, and also a writer. He wrote books about Iran, the Soviet Union, Ethiopia, Angola and, oh, lots of other places. Some people loathe him, others love him. In Kenya, there are some writes - Binyavinga Wainaina is perhaps the most outspoken on this - who hate Kapuscinski's work on Africa. They say he was a racist who made things up. And there are some Europeans interested in Africa who agree. Strangely, his book on Angola, Another Day of Life, is popular among many Angolans I know. Many black Angolans. They know he made stuff up but the images and the narrative he employed succeeded in providing a marvellous insight into Angola at that time, when the Portuguese were all leaving.'
'There are so many whites who make stuff up about Africa. Do you really think you should be considering fiction?'
'Yes. I do. In part to protect my sources.'
'And do you really think it would be a good idea to do a project like this in Africa?'
'Yes, I do. You could take the news reports coming out of somewhere like Sudan, and have Sudanese writers, or East African writers turning them into fiction. It would be great. I love the idea that something very creative, something very exciting and positive can be produced from all the violence and the negative press.'
'And you think that African journalists could do this despite the lack of electricity and water and all the other stuff they have to put up with?'
'Sorry?'
'You think they could keep up technologically, that the lack of electricity wouldn't be a problem?'
'Look - it wouldn't have to be exactly the same project, but it could be something similar. What's the problem? There are plenty of people across the continent who are writing books and writing journalism, and who manage to file stories every day despite the difficulties they encounter. Why should this be any different?'
She's laughing now, chuckling to herself: 'And all that heat. All the traffic. In Nigeria, it would be very difficult.'

I know this is going nowhere. I want to say 'But there are so many Nigerian writers. Brilliant Nigerian writers. And so many reporters. OK, they're working in conditions that are not as easy as we are here in the UK, but they produce a lot of work.' But I know it's a waste of time. What I am saying is floating over her head because of my skin colour. I have no right whatsoever to write about Africa. And because she is black, she has every right to tell me all about that huge continent. She has the monopoly on the entire continent because of her skin colour, because she was born in Nigeria. That she is mixed race, that she is the product of a Nigerian parent and an English parent is irrelevant. She is Black and only black. African and only African. I am white and only White. I belong to Whiteland.


the night before


'I get really sick of my friends who are mixed-race who say they're black. I say to them 'What about your mum (or dad)? Doesn't she count? Doesn't the white bit of you count? And it's like, they just wanna prove they're black or they're against something or they're angry. They're half and half, or a third and two thirds, or whatever, but they aren't one or the other. And why do they care?'
'Perhaps -'
'Sometimes, when I'm performing, and I mention that I've got a white boyfriend, black people in the audience go crazy. They start shouting. I got bottled in the wrist by one guy, just because I said I had a white boyfriend. When I'm performing and there are lots of white people, I think they all heave a sigh of relief.'
'Christ, it's all a bit pathetic isn't it?'
'Exactly.'
We drink a bit.
'But you know white and black audiences can be very different. I think a lot of black people, well, you know, we're brought up in a way that at the theatre or at a comedy or whatever, we interact and shout out and say what we think. You've gotta be up for it with a black audience. With white people, they listen a lot more.'
'It's funny you say that. Before you arrived and went on stage, there was a woman here. She was a young black woman. The only black person in the room. And she was very up for it, you know. She was right up there and ready to interact with the comics. At one point, she started singing along to the comic who was singing on stage before you got up. She had an amazing voice.'
'Oh right! Great!'
'Yeah, she was. But the comic got kind of annoyed with her, saying she was an attention-seeker. And then she started saying she was mad. And what was worst of all was some of the audience went along with it. They were bullying her.'
'Oh right. But I'd heard she was mad...'
'No. She wasn't. She was just chatty, extrovert and I think a bit nervous.'
'And maybe she was used to that sort of interaction on stage?'
'Well, exactly. It's like when we went to see Elmina's Kitchen in the West End. The audience was 90% black - and it was the noisiest conventional theatre show I'd ever been to. People responded to the play verbally. But if you go somewhere like the National, the wealthy upper-middle class audiences sit and say nothing, and if anyone does make a noise, people get angry. It's not done.'
'Yeah.'
'But I don't think it's simply a black thing. I used to hang out at this Working Men's Club in Hammersmith. I had a friend there, Betty. We used to go and play Bingo and I'd buy her Port & Lime. Once I won the Bingo and I had to buy seven Port & Limes for Betty and all her friends. But the point is that there, at the Club, a very white very working class club, everyone was very outspoken, very noisy, always shouting and yelling. '
'It's amazing being a black female comic. There are still times when I get on the stage and a member of the audience will say, Ha! You're Black! And I'm like, Yeah, I've known that for the last 31 years - is there any other insight you'd like to share with us all?'

the night before that

'It's nice of you to say stuff about the way white people behave in Africa. You don't need to.'