Ape Rifle

Whatever else has been said about the ‘developing’ country you have just arrived in, it never ceases to amaze those who think exotic is a country in Europe. Its history as a cultural crossroads has produced a fascinating multiethnic mosaic of a people ready-made to have cameras up in their face; you will be hard-pressed to find a warmer and friendlier place on earth, with a genuine smile accompanying every scam and request for money. With its snow-capped mountains, tropical beaches, vast deserts, dense jungles, desolate steppes, lush valleys, rugged canyons and pretty much any other landscape you could possibly imagine, the sheer diversity of the land is unparalleled on the continent- even though we say pretty much the same thing about every other country on the continent.

After decades of revolutions, civil wars, dictatorships and disastrous experiments with various economic systems, real optimism is at last in the air as ‘globalization’ worship becomes the latest ideology to screw the overwhelming majority of the country’s inhabitants. And nowhere is this more visible than in the country’s teeming megacities, where impoverished people haul garbage past expensive cars and shiny glass buildings in cliché photo opportunities. Experience this fascinating collision between old and new- often literal, given driving habits – and watch as the country strives to embrace a mythical ultra-modernity by bulldozing anything that looks old and poor. Soak up these westernized metropolises with their bright lights and well-dressed people- ‘western’ because any wealth, sophistication or infrastructure obviously cannot emanate from any other culture than our own. Settle into your hostel and listen to other travelers’ spiritual experiences carving flutes and surviving on berries in a remote village in the “real” part of the country, despite the fact the city you are sitting in is home to half the country’s population.

Pay triple the local rate to see overrated historical sites, bad-mouthing other tourists for being tourists while battling throngs of touts. Visit a famous marketplace that has become a caricature of itself due largely to its immense popularity with your lot. Avoid the large majority of the city that isn’t mentioned in your guidebook. Experience the wonders of a smoky internet café, filled with other travelers and local teenagers playing loud computer games. Indulge yourself in the city’s vibrant nightlife, world famous for consisting of bars, clubs and people drinking alcohol. The truly adventurous might want to sample a beer not available in their home country. Order by yelling in English over bad 80s music played at ear-splitting levels.

When you’ve had your fill of the skyscrapers and traffic jams, the ‘real’ country awaits- the part that is rural, materially poorer and more in step with your stereotypes of what a ‘developing’ country should look like. Make sure to “step back in time”, because rural subsistence lifestyles don’t exist in late 2006. Visit a village, take pictures of dirty children and witness traditional life as it has been for centuries apart from the motorcycles, burning garbage, industrial trucks, cell phones, Snoop Dogg t-shirts, sheet metal roofs, blaring televisions, Nestle products, power lines, girls dressed like Britney Spears and cat-calling loiterers. Chat with a smiling, toothless old man, basking in the genuine cultural experience until he asks you for money. Insulate yourself in the bubble of a backpacker hostel, meeting more Europeans than locals. Listen to a self-righteous dinner companion decry how tourism is destroying local culture as you both dig in to standard Western fare ordered from a badly translated menu. Go further off the beaten track and discover a place largely untouched by the outside world except for the hundreds and thousands of people who bought the same guidebook you did.

Whether you are looking for photogenic poverty or exploited historical sites, mind-bending traffic jams or religious temples shrouded in the ‘mist’ of a nearby chemical plant, you will not be disappointed. From the isolated reaches of a remote province that you will never visit to the various bus stations and airports where you will spend most of your time, this ‘developing’ country has got it all. With its smiling people carrying baskets on their heads, strapping live animals to vehicles and selling things in markets, there is enough to keep your digital camera busy for days and your stereotypes perpetuated for life. By preserving the more superficial aspects of its cultural traditions to cash in on them while madly industrializing for the benefit of a small elite, the country will leave you breathless (and we aren’t only talking about the air quality). But then again we’ve also said the exact same thing about dozens of other countries as well.

Not too long ago, my housemate decided we should host a dinner at our apartment to celebrate Canadian thanksgiving. Nonchalantly agreeing without paying much regard to exactly what this entailed, I soon found myself designated as the provider of the main event: the poultry dish. Northern Mozambique isn’t exactly known for its plump turkeys, so chicken would have to do. They are easily found on the streets of Pemba, often carried around upside down in bunches as they squawk away. However, word on the street was these chickens would not be sufficiently plump for Thanksgiving purposes, and wouldn’t fare so well if baked in an oven. So down I went to the market with a friend, searching for some plump white chickens. After honking our way through the cacophony of bright sights and loud sounds in his pickup truck, we pulled up to a roadside cage and picked out the three lucky contestants that were to become dinner. Consider it drive-through service of a somewhat different nature.

Of course, these chickens were still a few steps away from being a meal- the fact they were still alive and fully feathered was slightly problematic. My friend’s housekeeper, however, took care of that. In the backyard of his house (many of the homes in Pemba have huge yards with gardens, shacks, cooking spaces and animals), our three chickens met their end courtesy of a sharp blade, bleeding and a decent amount of headless flailing about. “Running around like a chicken with its head caught off” makes a lot more sense to me now. I also learned that to de-feather a chicken, you have to immerse it for 20-30 seconds in hot water to open the pores. The water can’t be boiling; otherwise, the skin will start to cook way before you are ready for that. With the feathers gone the feet and neck can go too (or not), and the guts can be quickly pulled out with a few handfuls. And voila, the chickens are ready to be stuffed and cooked in a gas oven with no temperature gauge, to turn out surprisingly well.

Recently, I’ve been reading The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs and Why Globalization Works by Martin Wolf, two books offering your standard ode to the wonders of economic globalization. Sachs has some interesting things to say about AIDS and malaria, and Wolf has a great chapter refuting globalization as cultural destruction, but in the end I still found myself at odds with much of what was written. Both books entrenched themselves in a surprisingly superficial perspective: ‘western’ countries are wealthy, while the large majority of the planet is poor. Why are these countries poor? Well, because they aren’t western, silly. Be equating wealth and success with its ‘western’ manifestations (industrialization, mass consumption, all your usual economic stats), it becomes sort of hard to discuss other countries without a troubling dose of cultural arrogance getting in the way. The prescriptions for global success are thus somewhat tired, particularly on Mr. Wolf’s side: if all countries become market economies and trade until they drop, then everything will somehow turn out alright. The world’s problems lie in the unfortunate fact that not enough countries are becoming smog-choked, export- processing industrial sprawls. Both authors find themselves awkwardly defending sweatshop-style low cost labour as a necessary first step on the road to the riches of industrialization. You can’t really blame them though; after all, they are economists. And economists have a tendency to confuse historical experience with universally applicable truth- call it the “if it happened there then, well it will happen here now” syndrome.

I’ve also been reading a number of documents on the relationship between poverty, development and the environment. Rather unsurprisingly, the standard approach is to find causality for environmental degradation in the plight of impoverished people, forced to rely directly on natural resources for subsistence. ‘Poor’ people do bad things like cut down trees, clear land for fields and kill wild animals. Since this state of poverty is fueling environmental degradation, the solution is clearly to push for economic growth. If only these people could find something to do besides farming and cutting trees, like maybe open a business and buy more things, then environmental degradation would be reduced. Poor people rely directly on the exploitation of natural resources to survive, and something obviously has to be done about that. But wait- don’t we all rely on the exploitation of natural resources to survive? Last time I checked, I don’t eat computer files for dinner and my home isn’t built out of ideas.

So in case you are wondering what headless chickens, Jeffrey Sachs and poor people cutting down trees have in common, well here’s your answer: being in Mozambique with all sorts of thoughts and experiences swirling around in my head, I can’t help but realize how delusional so many of us are regarding the human condition, our place in the world and our impact in it. The industrialization and modernization processes so celebrated are, in the end, reflections of our desire to remove ourselves from the dirty realities of our lives, to deny our impact on our surroundings by hiding it from view. Modernism, in the end, is about pretending that our world and the ‘natural’ world are two mutually exclusive spheres, and that those who still live in the bush are ‘backward’ and ‘primitive’ people crying out for interstate access and the Wal-Mart shopping experience.

In my usual reality of industrialized mass production, chickens grow in the frozen goods section and vegetable come from a truck. Wood comes from a warehouse, not the forest. Energy comes from a light switch, not a fire. Our consumption of natural resources, our dependence on the world around us, has been processed, shipped and packaged beyond recognition, to the point where many of us have no problem with the notion that we are no long party to this reality. Growing up as an urban Canadian, I had no idea what vegetables looked like in the ground. I never had to see an animal get its throat slit to satisfy my appetite for meat. I’ve never had a power dam flood my land. I’ve never cut down a tree. We are at the end of such long and complex processes of exploitation, production and transportation that disassociation between the final good and where it comes from is effortless, enough to convince us we somehow live ‘outside’ the natural world. Environmental degradation is so much easier when you don’t have to see it.

Needless to say, seeing life in northern Mozambique has me feel quite useless as a human being. It’s a life that is open and unapologetic about its dependence on the world around it for survival, since your average farmer has no complex system whatsoever to fuel his or her subsistence. They are on the frontlines, toiling away on the land. Meanwhile, I depend on massive industrial systems over which I have no control for my own survival. I don’t know how to farm, raise livestock, build a house or make any sort of meal from scratch (and by ‘scratch’ I don’t mean using ingredients bought at a supermarket). If the world economy completely collapses tomorrow, if all the power goes out and never comes back, well I along with hundreds of millions of ‘advanced’ people across the planet would be completely screwed. We’d have no idea where to even start. The price to pay for convenience is complete dependence, and it is a price I have been paying my whole life.

So this is why I am deeply uneasy with the prescriptions espoused by people such as Sachs and Wolf, that somehow the way to make things better is to include ever more people, billions even, in this tangled web of industrial denial and environmental distance. By buying into the system’s own hype, that we can better the planet by further alienating ourselves from our place within it, economic globalization becomes the ultimate force for good as it strives to separate people from the effects of their choices and consumptive patterns by thousands of kilometers. Not seeing the animal you are eating slaughtered is pretty good, but not seeing a landscape fouled by your electronics is even better.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not espousing eco-fanaticism. I’m not preaching a planet-wide return to the countryside- that would be pretty difficult, seeing as the world is busy piling into cities and this year has become majority urban for the first time ever. However, I’ve been thinking that there must be more of a happy middle ground somewhere, a real third way between life that is “nasty, short and brutish” in the bush and a life spent paving our planet with concrete and killing ourselves with chemicals, pollution and cancer while pretending we are somehow making things better. People need to benefit from the positive outcomes of industrialization- think health, knowledge, communication- while also becoming more aware of the consequences of our consumptives choices and action. If I want to eat meat, I should be confronted with the fact that means animals dying. If I want to buy lots of stuff at IKEA, I should be aware this means that somewhere, some forest has got to go.

Modern industrialism might certainly have delivered us great benefits, I can’t deny that, but it doesn’t mean we have to blindly run ourselves into the ground following it through to its logical conclusion. The problem with our current industrialization style is, at its root, it is a slave to the “bigger, better, more complex” mentality. But who says things can’t get simpler? Why can’t we use the technological innovations that industrialization and modernization have provided us so far to change course? Why can’t more ‘rich’ people try to grow vegetables on their property? Or raise animals? Why can’t we strive to have more energy independent homes, rather than plugging into massive power grids that ravage the environment on a grand scale? Are we so scared of our own world that we try to escape it this much?

Maybe in the end we are just lazy. Maybe we are just so entangled in a reality of alienating mass production that we can’t even think of alternatives without throwing labels such as “tree hugger” or “communist” around. But I like to hold out the hope that things can change, that we can get past this obsession with progress as a process of bigger, better and further, more cement and more steel. Of course, there might be more than a few delays to this transformation in human thinking, with countries such as China and India partying like it’s 1959 and happily driving hundreds of millions more people into smog-choked worlds of highways, supermarkets and the cement-happy life. It’s hard to blame them, though: as ‘westerners’ we haven’t exactly been any good example, happily driving these exercises in hyper industrialization through our obsessive need for cheap consumption and by celebrating them as “economic miracles” because, finally, some people in that damned Third World have decided to get their act together and become more like us.

I can’t be responsible for economic policy in India and China, but I can be responsible for myself. And personally, I want to feel less useless, less dependent. As cliché as it sounds, I wanted to be more connected to the reality of the planet that sustains me. I don’t want to lead a brutally hard life farming and dying young, and yet I don’t want to be completely clueless about what supports my survival, fundamentally ignorant the basic ingredients of life. I should learn to grow something in my backyard, maybe get involved in scaling down energy systems to a household/neighbourhood level as a fascinating line of work. I should learn how to kill a chicken and de-feather it properly. Because maybe if I start to see the consequences of my lifestyle more clearly, I will change for the better and be less destructive to both myself and others. Environmental degradation comes about not because people are mean or careless, but simply because we are ignorant. We value a system of production in which those who affect the greatest environmental change know the least about it. In our increasingly packaged reality, it is often difficult to even fathom that, somewhere down the line, everything still comes from the earth. But it does.

And maybe then I will realize why the tendency to blame poverty for environmental degradation borders on the ridiculous at best and the knowingly dishonest at worst, steeped as it is in the politics of denial where ‘economic growth’ is the answer before any question is even asked. It’s much easier to blame the ‘poor’ than to confront the problem inherent in the lifestyles of the rich and developed. At least the former face up to the consequences of their survival and offer no excuses; meanwhile, millions of us shirk responsibility, hiding behind massive industrial machines that sanitize our lives and shelter us from the nasty stuff. Sure, ‘poor’ people cut down trees and alter eco-systems (even nice looking ones, at that). But have I not done the same, even significantly more so? Has my life not being responsible for the felling of hundreds of trees, and the exploitation of god knows how many other resources? The only difference is I’ve had the luxury of someone else doing it for me, somewhere else, so I can pretend it doesn’t happen or that I’m not responsible for it.

So hopefully, by seeing chickens run around with their heads cut off, rolling my eyes at the usual line from western economists and realizing that a rural Mozambican just trying to survive doesn’t a fraction the effect on this planet that my bloated lifestyle does, I’m slowly learning to be a better human being. Maybe I’m learning that positive change entails our lifestyles meeting halfway. The technological innovation that supports mine coupled with the simplicity and greater self-reliance of theirs. And if it’s already too late, if greed and mindless growth take the day and our whole industrial system eventually crashes down on itself, well I guess that’s my problem and not theirs. While I’m trying to figure out how to eat an iPod, chances are they will still be farming away.

There is nothing quite like the shock of rejoining the urban world after months of existence in a quiet little isolated town. From the plane window Dar Es Salaam spread out before my eyes, with its cluster of highrises crowded up against the coastline and its spiraling mass of tin sheet rooftops shaping the landscape as far as I could see. Miniature-sized traffic snarled intersections in dense settlements, industrial silos and petroleum tanks poked out of the fray, humanity scurried around in its self-made concrete world- all these were reminders of a reality I knew existed but had forgotten how to digest with my own senses. Disembarking at the airport, I suddenly felt reconnected to the ebbs and flows of the world, a connection that is often rather tenuous during my current stint in northern Mozambique. A crowd mobbed the visa application windows in the terminal, with passports flailing and US dollars waving. As I struggled to get noticed by the immigration officer amidst what seemed like half the population of the Comoros Islands just off a plane, I could feel my excitement rise. Crowds. Bustle. Energy. Life. Welcome home, urbanite.

From the airport parking lot, my taxi pulled onto a roadway larger than I had seen in months, into a flow of battered dala dalas and rumbling trucks. The smell of diesel hung in the air as the roadside offered a steady string of disheveled industrial estates and warehouse size commercial ventures. Intersections were a dusty jumble of market stalls overloading the corners, people darting across the lanes, and immobile vehicles purring in line as the crossing road flowed by. As the taxi waited far back from the frontlines of the traffic light (a traffic light!), hawkers streamed down the lanes of vehicles and by my taxi, selling everything from oranges, newspapers and snacks to globes and a wall clock. As we snaked our way from intersection to intersection, soon we were in the city center, surrounded by busy streets, worn-looking concrete office complexes and people in business suits darting down the sidewalks. From my perspective at that particular moment, Dar was an urban explosion, a place of previously unimaginable bustle and energy. I guess northern Mozambique will do that to a man. I was enthralled by the chaotic dance of the rush hour dala dalas, packed to the brim and swerving liberally about the way.

I found Dar a hard place to read in the few days I was there, as my impressions of the place were dominated by the mere fact that I was back in a city. So whatever one may think of the place, to me it represented a wealth of urban delights; a helping of crowds, consumerism and bright lights wrapped in a sun-baked, dusty package. This overwhelming sensation was furthered by the disorientation encountered in a new place when one has no sense of direction, and every experience is an isolated island in unrecognizable surroundings reached by taxi. Raucous barbecue restaurants, bamboo garden bars, roadside stalls for sampling the local moonshine, darkened discos where the guards try to get you to buy them drinks; I had no clue where I was, but I was loving it.

Dar offered the sort of sprawling, rudderless urban form that emerges when density and a moneyed class combine with a glaring absence of public infrastructure and zoning enforcement. Randomly located islands of wealth scatter among shack-lined dirt roads in suburban areas, sometimes kilometers away from the small portion of the city that is bank towers and boulevards. Guarded and enclaved, you can enjoy your pastries, your coffee, your Subway or your South African chain restaurant in a comfortable bubble of wealth and expats, gated off from the dusty jumble outside. These environments offered me a chance to pretend I was home for a few minutes, wandering down hospital-like aisles of useless food products and junk food calling to me in their shiny packaging. Of course, the fantasy was tempered slightly by the darkness of a quasi-permanent power outage.

In my experience of this corner of the world, limited to fragments of Mozambique and Tanzania, I’ve had to readjust my ideas regarding the display of wealth. There seem to be no really wealthy areas per say; everywhere the general infrastructure is shoddy if existent at all, the environment raw and unkept. Rather, there is only private wealth, concrete block homes with grated windows behind walls; isolated shopping centers with expensive wares suffocated by shacks, taxi stands and garbage-strewn streets; expensive-looking 4WDs navigating bumpy dirt roads. Apart from a few major boulevards and a basic city grid in the city center, urban layout is left to its own chaotic yet dynamic devices. Suburban sub-divisions appear in dusty fields next to slums; highrise apartments grow randomly from the landscape miles from anywhere; generators rumble away. Public services are barely provided, and little expected. Everyone who can afford a car drives and parks anywhere, creating congestion on roads that cannot handle either activity.

So long have I focused my interest in the urban on skylines and transportation systems, on panoramic views of landmarks and highways of flowing tail lights. This might work to some extent in the ‘industrialized’ urban areas of North America or East Asia, for example, where we have built up our environments on such an enormous scale that the citizen is lost amongst showcase urban skylines and elevated highway concrete pillars. My time in southern Africa has been helping me to overcome this bias, and understand the city more as a sum of its people than its infrastructure. It’s not that difficult really, since public infrastructure is on the rather sparse side in this corner of the planet. If it exists, it is likely falling into disrepair or under permanent construction.

So Dar wasn’t so much a landscape of physical urbanity as it was a swirl of Kiswahili, people in business suits, drunk mzees, young south Asians in suped up cars, or perhaps the entrancing call to prayer right outside the window. It was having access to Chinese food and drinking ice coffee at a drive-up diner. It was joining the expat crowd on a beautifully situated suburban terrace with waves crashing against the rocks below; it was dancing in random one-room clubs to all the same music I’ve been hearing for the past three months in Pemba (apparently, Sean Paul is taking over the world). It was getting a wash and a haircut at a salon, the first time hot water had graced my head in longer than I can remember. It was just watching the daily lives of traders and hawkers as they sat outside their shops and stalls. It was navigating the bustle of faces and stories on a sidewalk in the city centre, or maybe dashing across a roundabout, the vehicles too caught in traffic to make their usual effort to hit pedestrians.

Dar Es Salaam was my reintroduction to the urban world that we as humans are flocking to in ever-larger numbers despite the fumes, crowds, grinding traffic and strained infrastructure this environment increasingly offers worldwide. Seeing the city from the air, I was reminded of something I read in Mike Davis’ Planet of Slums:

The cities of the future, rather than being made out of glass and steel as envisioned by earlier generations of urbanists, are instead largely constructed out of crude brick, straw, recycled plastic, cement blocks, and scrap wood. Instead of cities of light soaring toward heaven, much of the twenty-first-century urban world squats in squalor

This is perhaps an overstatement concerning Dar- I found on a whole the city was bright, cheery and mostly devoid of the bleak urban cynicism that clouds much larger, more dangerous and more dysfunctional cities. My shock at being back in an urban environment aside, Dar was less of an onslaught than it was a pleasant encounter at a manageable level. Nevertheless, its disregard for the trappings of planning and infrastructure, its jumbled landscape of shacks, gated malls, SUVs and loitering hawkers, reminded me once again that our standard conceptions about life emanating from realities such as Canada are perhaps off the mark. We like to think of the planned, organized city as the standard for humanity, a state attainable by those ‘backward third world’ countries if only they would stop being so corrupted, poor and chaotic. When every society eventually gets its act together and emulates the Euro-American world, as the Economist tells us they should, they will join the modern world of glass and steel through the inevitable march of economics and progress.

Somehow, I’m less and less convinced of this. The world of glass and steel is not so much a natural outcome of human progress as it is a forced landscape of state grandstanding and real estate speculation, hermetic worlds built for a quasi-imaginary ‘global elite’ by sweeping the unsightly masses aside. Maybe those of us emanating from the more regulated areas of the ‘developed’ world need to stop seeing ourselves as the human standard, the shining example, and come to terms with that fact that perhaps we are the anomaly on this planet, an over-regulated fluke in a sea of tin shacks, power outages and raw human interaction. Lest this make one overly pessimistic about the human condition, a place like Dar Es Salaam demonstrates that, even in these nooks of the planet labeled ‘backward’ or ‘poor’ by arrogant self-appointed centers of power, there is much life, culture and energy to be celebrated. Where the resources and coordination necessary for gleaming urban mega-projects are but a distant dream, the people shine through and make the urban experience a fascinating one.