Brokedown Palace
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.