Bilharzia

The other day I pounced on a novel set in Tanzania called 'Exile' by Jakob Ejersbo, a Danish writer. The author had, like me, done some of his growing up there and I was thrilled to think that I might see some of my experiences reflected in the writing of someone good enough to do it professionally. That the book looked rough and cynical and was by the author of 'the Danish Trainspotting' boded even better. Mentions of places I spent time in, the view of Kilimanjaro in the morning and a liberal sprinkling of Swahili words took me back, right enough, but it was the simple word 'bilharzia' that tipped me into a full vat of reminiscence. Bilharzia was the reason why our mothers told us we could never swim in any of the lakes we encountered in central Tanzania, though some older guys I knew claimed that they often did it, and you just needed to make sure your feet never touched the bottom. I doubt many of the lakes were more than four foot deep.

I tended to trust my mother on this, as I did when it came to scorpions, jiggers, green mambas and most other issues of health and safety. I was never stung by a scorpion, jiggered by a jigger or bitten by a green mamba. I never really even knew what bilharzia was, just that it was to be avoided. I don't think I had ever seen it written down before and can't say I recall hearing the word once since we came back to Ireland, nineteen years ago. Nor did I think about it much. Turns out it's caused by Schistosoma parasites*, which burrow into your kidneys, bladder, rectum and any other private, precious parts you can think of and cause you to bloodily shit yourself to death.

Nostalgia is a rum beast.

*The Internet tells me that they swim freely in open water, which means that those older braggards were either full of shit or, y'know, minutes away from violently shitting themsleves. Ha!

I swat 'em like flies, but like flies the buggers keep coming back

I visited Egypt for a couple of weeks a few years back. I wish I had a greater understanding of what was going on there right now, but a fortnight of eating, sunbathing and visiting tourist traps doesn't tend to enlighten you on the niceties of political infrastructure and social turbulence. Nevertheless, I do recall talking to a tourguide after visiting some temple* or other. He was telling me about a village near the temple that the government want to be razed in order to build carparks and hotels and shit like that. The villagers, who look markedly different to any other Egyptians I encountered, claim to be the last descendants of the pharaohs. It's pretty much impossible to prove or disprove that claim, but it is without doubt that the people there have occupied that land for hundreds, maybe thousands, of years. When they first refused to leave their homes so that their village could be knocked down, their government shut off their electricity. When they still didn't move they cut off their water, too.

I don't know what developments have taken place since then, it's a hard thing to google when you don't remember which temple it was. But yeah, that's what I know of the Egyptian government. So if you're Egyptian, Andrew says go nuts right now. And if you're Irish, vote Fianna Fáil. They'd never do anything like that.





*Here's why I make a very poor tourist: My brain simply can't deal with visiting heaps of places of massive historical importance within a very condensed period of time. Nor do I keep a diary or take many photographs. Holidays for me need to be "Right, Andrew, here's a fascinating old place. Take about seven hours to look around it at your own leisure and then we'll take you home. Go to a waterpark tomorrow and then spend the day after that sleeping off the excitement and then we'll see you on Thursday for lots more time at another, single, fascinating old place."

maji moto

The most important three years of my youth were spent in Tanzania, east Africa, where I lived with my family between the age of 8 and 10. We lived in a small village just outside the city of Dodoma. Dodoma is nominally the capital of Tanzania and means "it has sunk" in the local tribal language, Chigogo - a name that is said to refer to an incident where an elephant got stuck in the mud. Fond as I still am of the place, I never saw anything as exciting as an elephant there. Or any mud.

For Dodoma lies in an area that is classified as 'semi-desert'. I was delighted when I discovered this and tried to mention it every time the topic of Tanzania arose for years after I came back to Ireland, making sure to say the 'semi' bit quite quietly. Rain was scarce and precious, often going nine months without making an appearance, sometimes over a year. We never had running water, meaning that both toilet flushes and showers were limited to a couple of mugfuls from a bucket once a day. I never minded, but I felt the anxiety creased on local faces when crops failed and xylophone-ribbed cattle succumbed to a diet of dust.

So when it rained, it was glorious. You'd smell it on the dry dust up to half an hour beforehand, and hear a low hum in the air as the myriad insects would ready themselves. We'd run inside to tell our mother and would then set out plastic buckets and empty metal margarine tubs and open kettles, any respectable receptacle, below the eaves of the house to catch what we could before the thirsty ground chugged it all. Then I'd wait outside until the last possible second, watching the dust speckle and spatter until the downpour became too much. Whereupon the rain through the meshed window became the evening's entertainment, superior to that of our non-existent telly and the stacks of comics I'd already read. If I was lucky it would still be lashing down as I went to sleep, soothed by the drumming on the corrugated iron roof. Comforted by the knowledge that it was saving lives and feeling a little less at odds with my previous existence in Cork; a place more accustomed to precipitation.

Life would shoot out of the dust and cover the area in a lush veneer of greenness that might sometimes last an entire fortnight. Red scorpions would temporarily become more of a worry and malaria rates in the region increased (I caught it two or three times during our spell there). We'd go and skim stones on temporary lakes (which once led to my five year-old brother requiring stitches on his head after a misunderstanding with some older Tanzanian girls). And, excitingly, a  very small tortoise would invariably end up on our verandah the morning after a deluge.* We'd adopt it as a household pet, vastly preferable to the incessantly mewling kitten we once found on a rubbish heap who died after three days despite our best efforts to feed it milk through a syringe, much safer than a dog in a country where rabies vaccines are a low priority, more loyal than the chameleons we'd lovingly place on our mosquito nets, only for them to feck off once they realised that there were more flies elsewhere. We'd call them all Polepole (po-lay po-lay - 'slowly' in Swahili) and try to work out what the hell they ate. And when they tired of us and refused to leave their shells, and we tired of them and found a new snake to throw rocks at, we set them down on the dust and they ambled off.

*I never quite understood why this happened or if, indeed, they were tortoises rather than turtles, until a quick Google check assured me that they were most definitely tortoises and that the poor fuckers were presumably trying not to drown.

It's Not What You Said, It's How You Said It.

I’ve dilly-dallied for a while over whether or not to respond to the words of Kevin Myers over the past week or so and finally decided that I may as well say a few words, if only to try to get the feeling of extreme annoyance that I’ve had since I read his piece off my chest. I was away at Oxegen the week before last and so I was a little shut off from the outside world and therefore blissfully unaware of Myers’ piece until I saw Bryan Mukandi’s response to it for the Irish Times, linked to on his blog. I’m glad that Bryan was given the forum of the newspaper to express his views but, in a way, it’s a shame that it took an African to be the one to publicly denounce Myers. Every right-thinking Irishman should have been lambasting him for such a shameful display of racism. For that is what it was.

To clarify, I don’t entirely disagree with Myers’ central thesis that “self serving generosity has been one of the curses of Africa”. Pouring money into Africa without being sure of where it’s going is no help at all, and is liable to end up in the wrong hands, most likely those of one of the many despotic, Mercedes-chauffeured, fat dictators who have so much of the continent in their stranglehold. In a pre-emptive strike against those who might accuse him of being uncaring, Myers is at pains to point out that he has been to Ethiopia and has been hit in the pocket by forking out for these ungrateful little bastards. Well Kevin, I have been to Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda and therefore take huge umbrage against his talk of how “the wide-eyed child we saved, twenty years ago, is now a priapic, Kalashnikov-bearing hearty siring children whenever the whim takes him”. Like many of you, I had to reach for the dictionary for the word ‘priapic’. It means:

1. Of, relating to, or resembling a phallus; phallic.
2. Relating to or overly concerned with masculinity.

So Myers is either calling the men of Ethiopia a bunch of dicks or, more likely, he reckons they are overly macho. Yep, macho, gun-happy, promiscuous idiots - that’s how Ireland’s best-known columnist chooses to characterise the men of an entire nation. That, Mr. Myers, is nothing but cheap and pathetic racism. An intelligent man like yourself should really know better than to tar an entire nation with such a disgusting slur. And that is why you have been reported to the Gardaí by the Immigrant Council of Ireland.

Of course, he doesn’t stop there, choosing also to brand the entire country of Somalia as “another fine land of violent, Kalashnikov-toting, khat-chewing, girl-circumcising, permanently tumescent layabouts.” So that’s two huge nations dismissed with a sweep of the Myers’ pen. Truly shameful. It is this kind of crass, vile language being applied to pretty much an entire continent of people that leaves Myers without a leg to stand on. I'm bored with his article by now, but he also suggests that malaria "is one of the most efficacious forms of population-control now operating". It's also a particularly horrible way to die Kevin, but you don't need to worry about that, I suppose.

I am not a self-righteous hippy. I am not a politically-correct puritan. But I fail to see why anyone should have to listen to that kind of bile-filled, hateful crap from anyone in the mainstream media, and that is why I will not be buying the Independent again for as long as Myers is in their employment. Kevin Myers, you are not Jonathan Swift and this is not a Modest Proposal. You are a shock hack and this is an indecent proposal.


Update: When writing this piece I completely forgot to throw in a link to another response to Myers I came across that I really like. It's from bodhránbanger and it's called 'Why Kevin Myers is No Longer a Journalist'.