Ape Rifle

As far as I was concerned until quite recently, Pemba had only two seasons: hot and really hot. July, December, October, it really didn’t matter: the sun was shining, the weather was sweet and the beach was waiting. Coming from eastern Canada, where seasons are clearly defined, to say the least, by their ability to range from sweltering inferno to Siberian deep freeze, this took some getting used to. Here in Mozambique, as the calendar told my body the weather should be cooling, the sun continued to beat down with intensity and if the temperature went anywhere it was up. Of course, this might not elicit much sympathy from those living in more northern and currently freezing climes, but endless summer quickly became a menial norm, a casual afterthought. There were no brisk, beautiful fall days, no fresh snowfall on a crisp winter morning: just the heavy air of thick humidity basking in sunshine. And that’s the way the world was.

But while I was away in Tanzania over the Christmas holidays, something happened. Someone traded in this land of eternal sunshine for a darker, more brooding twin. Since January, the brilliant sun has given way to a dull grey sky laden with moody clouds. My comfortable worldview shattered, I was confused. Was this the same Pemba? I guess I had fallen complacent in the months previous, enjoying the endless rays of sunshine guaranteed at any daylight hour I cared to venture outdoors. I had often been warned about the summer months here (December to March), but these discussions centered on the nearly unbearable heat and humidity that descended on the area during this time. Mention of rain was a mere afterthought, as in “yeah it rains more, but this doesn’t cool things down”. I was led to believe that summer here would be a bit less sun, a bit more water and a lot more heat.

Well, I was right on about the heat but not much else. There has barely been any sun, replaced as it has been with regularly scheduled torrential downpours envelopped in overcast sky. Shaken out of my beach-loving stupor, I’ve been learning the real meaning of ‘rainy season’, courtesy of the tropics. When before outdoor fun was the norm, now the weather is guaranteed to ruin any attempt at a weekend outing. Of course this is all part of a perfectly normal natural cycle, and it’s great for agriculture in the area. But that doesn’t mean I have to like it- can’t it just rain during the week?

And the storms, oh those storms; they are something to behold. Any weak blue sky offering a faint glimmer of hope for a nice day is quickly and mercilessly consumed by angry, ominous clouds, ready to unleash their contents on anyone unlucky enough to be out in the open. On two occasions now, the avenue in front of my office has transformed into a rushing river of muddy brown water within minutes of the first raindrop. In the evening, when I’m at home on the fifth floor of my aged building, the storms announce themselves with howls of wind and clattering windows, sometimes accompanied by spectacular flashes of lighting on the ocean horizon. It can be less shower and more onslaught.

As my time in Pemba draws to a close, northern Mozambique displays a whole other side of itself. After too much fun was had on the beach, the weather gods got angry. Puddles as big as lakes swallow the roads, laundry takes days to dry (and then gets wet again when it does), and existence is steamy and rain-drenched. The booming number of mosquitoes are in heaven, as well as my office and apartment. News stories abound of the flooding and cyclone destruction in more southern areas of the country. On the one bright note, the inland bush has exploded with a lush, vibrant green that is both gorgeous and a far cry from the reddish, semi-arid lands of months past. But all in all, I’ve been thoroughly reminded that tropical is not always synonymous with sunshine nor paradise.

Yesterday, during a particularly vicious lunchtime downpour, an ankle-deep river of storm water filled the avenue on which I happen to both work and live. Red from the earth it was carrying, the water washed down the slight incline towards a roundabout where it dutifully turned left and headed further downhill to join the ocean. Having seen this some of my co-workers and I, just having dashed from our cover beneath the tin sheet roof of a restaurant, quickly realized the torrential rain was no longer our primary problem. Between us and the office flowed a newly formed river where a road used to be. Some removed their sandals to test the depth of the water, while others like myself stood there trying to figure out how to get across without having to take off our shoes and socks. Eventually we managed to flag down some of the pickup trucks sloshing by, hopped in the back and got a lift literally across the street. Photo junkie that I am, I ran up the five flights of stairs to my apartment to fetch my camera and get a few shots of the scene unfolding outside. This is when I found out that, amidst the deluge descending on this fair town, my apartment once again had no water.

And so is the paradox of Pemba, my adopted hometown of the past eight months. It’s a place where infrastructure is minimal when it exists at all, where rudimentary flickers of cell service, wireless and flat screen monitors inhabit the moldy concrete remains of a Portuguese colonial era more than thirty years gone. Water drips through ceilings as often as it doesn’t come out of taps. Shops and offices are stark and musty, rudimentary in their rough concrete surfaces and faded wood paneling. A neighbourhood of quietly decaying bungalows and palm tree-lined cracked asphalt nestles up against a row of strangely jagged Modernist concrete hulks now serving as local government offices and the city’s select few apartment buildings. Some vehicles are parked very permanently, their tires deflated and windshields smashed. Even the hospital has some twisted automobile hulks in its yard. Things are worn out, scratched, cracked, chipped, broken, smashed and abandoned. Wealth is exhibited purely at the level of the private individual, seen in the shiny new vehicles plying the infrastructural ghost of this broken colonial town, in the satellite dishes dotting decaying balconies, or perhaps in the gorgeous Mediterranean-style villas found along the rugged dirt roads past the beach. Public services, however, are little provided and even less expected. It would seem that new economic life is chaotically sprouting out of the ruins completely of its own accord. This is a world largely devoid of the public good. Of course, so far I haven’t even mentioned the 90% of the town comprised solely of mud huts and narrow paths.

My apartment building, the tallest in town at a towering seven floors, has a dusty junk-strewn shaft running alongside the staircase where an elevator used to be. The power supply is actually fairly decent, Pemba having traded up a giant generator for connection to the national grid not so long ago. However, there are still regular blackouts, system hiccups and power surges: sometimes it’s just my building, one side of the street, or the other, or both, or the whole town. When the lights go out at night, there is little more to do than stand on my balcony watching distant vehicle headlights bump their way up and down through the complete darkness. More often than not, blackouts are well synchronized to hit when DStv is actually showing a good film like City of God. Of course, to the large majority of the city’s residents this all matters precious little because they never have power.

Water is more of an issue. My apartment is supplied by a decrepit tank on the roof, which itself is supplied by water pumped up from a reservoir behind the building. Unfortunately, this elaborate system allows for way too many different points at which things can go wrong. Often the apartment’s tank doesn’t refill when empty, other times something breaks in the pumping mechanism. Sometimes little wood chips and bloated dead bugs pour out of the tap. Sometimes it’s not the lack of water that causes problems, but rather its overabundance. When I first moved in here in late August, the toilet in my washroom had a bad habit of not knowing when to stop refilling after a flush, happily flooding the hallway on several occasions. On an even less pleasant note, my sink drain has spewed up dirty water from points unknown to the point of overflowing the rim. Tired of cleaning up someone else’s mess- literally- I disassembled the plumbing under the sink and jammed the offending pipe with a pill bottle. Now my sink empties directly into a bucket, which I have to regularly dump down the bathtub drain or into the toilet. But at least it’s my wastewater.

My television has nearly exploded, wiping out a power adaptor and knocking out the fuse for half the apartment. The socket in my bedroom gave me quite a rough shock, enough that I swore at the top of my lungs as electricity coursed through me. Large piles of garbage are unceremoniously dumped throughout the alleyway adjacent to my building, comprised of everything from discarded cans to bovine jawbones. One such pile is directly below my window five floors down, and my lazier side has wondered on occasion whether I couldn’t just drop trash bags from up here rather than walking up and down the stairs. Sometimes a tractor with a flatbed comes by and some guys shovel it up, and other times people just light it up. It’s particularly pleasant when the sweet scent emanating from burning trash across the street drifts right up through my balcony doors. In fact, as I sit here typing this in the front room right now I’m catching a whiff of something that is quite likely garbage and most definitely on fire.

Breakdowns, interruptions, leaks, dumps and floods are the daily ingredients of existence in this town. With the decrepit state of its utilities, housed as they are within the crumbling remnants of colonial times, there is little argument that infrastructure is certainly not one of Pemba’s strong points. Maintenance is a dirty word.

And yet, just a few minutes spent basking in the turquoise waters of the Indian Ocean under a brilliant blue sky are enough to make you realize how little this really matters in the end. Pemba is largely broken, but it’s also absolutely beautiful.

Well I’m back, and in prime ranting form. Do you seriously think I could live in an isolated corner of rural Africa for 7 months and keep my uninformed opinions to myself?

Insects are an unavoidable fact of life in Pemba. Mosquitoes are evidently the most infamous of the lot, peppering limbs with incredibly itchy bites and giving the wonderful gift of dangerous tropical diseases. I got my taste of malarial delirium right when I arrived here last July and, although I got a relatively mild dose, it was hardly an experience I wish to repeat. Since then I have been lucky, thanks in no small part to living in a 5^th floor apartment with a breeze and a conspicuous lack of winged bloodsuckers. To make up for this pleasant shortcoming, however, there are various spiders, flies, mites and various unidentifiable creatures to keep my housemate and I company. There is even the occasional cockroach that casually strolls in the front door- and then usually leaves after being ‘escorted’ off the balcony. However, these all pale in comparison to the king of the insect kingdom, the undisputed champion of all things that creep, crawl and scurry about: yes, I’m talking about the ant.

Anyone still believing that humans are the dominant species on this planet needs look no further than my kitchen to be convinced otherwise. In there, a veritable civilization is at work to process any grocery suffering the unfortunate fate of being placed on a cupboard shelf, counter, fridge top or table surface. Leave some food unattended and watch as a superhighway of ants soon appears- sometimes in seconds – to do their work. I wish I could say their tastes were traditional, that there was reason to the rhyme of what they attacked. Jam, sugar, sticky sweet things: these are targets I would expect. But no, these ants will go after anything at hand: bread, cereal, dishes, fruit bowls, crumbs, old paper and even drops of water.

Furthermore, they are wily and completely unpredictable. They will leave a particular food alone for days, just long enough to trick you into thinking they are no longer attracted to it. So you let down your guard just a bit and then WHAM! Your stupidity and carelessness are exposed as the victorious ants make off with their prize. Sometimes they just run around the walls frantically, or funnel up and down the doorframe just to remind you who is boss. For a while they even abandoned the kitchen for the bedrooms and bathrooms, apparently gaining a sweet tooth for my toothpaste. Oh well, I figured, at least they were out of the kitchen. But that phase was short-lived, and soon not only had they returned to the kitchen but also expanded their operations to the front room, where any food or dish left out of sight for a moment too long was soon moving a whole lot more. The ants were in complete control.

My housemate and I have tried to fight back, mostly in vain. Buns are bagged and hung off wall hooks- but still get hit. Sugar is double and triple-bagged and then zip-locked, and yet somehow the little monsters still find their way inside. At one point I hit an army of ants in the sink with a good blast from the tap, and yet they continued to scurry around and cause trouble underwater. Standing there once again beaten, I despaired: how do you stop these things!? Bygone has been sprayed numerous times on the surfaces of our humble household, sometimes to the point where poisoned ants are literally pouring out of cracks in the wall. Frustrated hands have wildly slapped down on surfaces felling untold ant numbers. In the end, however, all this seems to accomplish is to piss them off and embolden them further. Nothing is safe. It’s only a matter of time before I wake up one morning to find myself being carried off.

The other day, I came home from work to find the usual ant sprawl in the cupboard, this time focused on my box of Honey Nut Corn Flakes. By then, I’d mostly given up on trying to fight their onslaught, and that morning I had tried only half-heartedly at best to seal the cereal after breakfast. Let the little devils get in there like they always do, what do I care anymore. I thought I’d finally resigned myself to the fact that the ants eat more of my food than I do. I thought I’d given up.

But then, staring at that box in the intensely humid evening of a tropical African summer, something in me snapped. Maybe it was my species survival instinct, maybe it was all the frustration from months of ant visitations that finally boiled over, I don’t know. But all of the sudden I decided there was no way the ants were going to take my cereal from me. They weren’t going to win this time. Out of nowhere, I decided to fight back.

So I quickly poured the Honey Nut Corn Flakes into a large Tupperware container, dispensing justice to a good number of ants as I crushed the plastic bag and cereal box and tossed them away. I then proceeded to shake the Tupperware container vigorously. As the guilty ants straggled out of the cereal, dazed and confused, they met very timely demises courtesy of my vengeful hands. Then I started shaking again. And more ants scurried out to their doom. I shook and squashed repeatedly as needed, until I was relatively satisfied that my cereal was ant-free. Hopefully a horrified survivor or two made it back to its brethren to spread the news: watch out, this guy means business now.

That evening, I fought back and won. I had defended the dominance of humanity and challenged the ants’ mastery of both my kitchen and northern Mozambique in general. Maybe now they would think twice about getting into my food. Maybe now they would think twice about so arrogantly parading around the surfaces of my humble home.

Or maybe not. I really need to find more Tupperware.