Year: 2013

Summer shopping in Mauritius: Brace yourself

Shopping for new clothes in Port Louis is less like retail therapy and more like one hair-raising experience after another. You need to be psychologically and physically prepared before entering a mall, something I’m still getting the hang of. Shop assistants have made a meal of me one too many times.

I recently walked into a clothing store in the tourist-filled Le Caudan Waterfront, and was immediately ambushed. “Where did get your boobs planted?” the owner asked lewdly. I ignored him and pretended to carefully inspect a Fedora hat, the price of which was way beyond my means.

“Is it really raining outside?” a shop assistant in the next store I entered asked, trying to strike up a conversation. I grinned, bit my lower lip and replied: “Sorry I’m just browsing. Cheers.”

As if to put me at ease and get me to stay, two other shop assistants in the store prodded me further. “You must be looking for something classier. Dinner date?” By this time I had adjusted my scarf, tripped over the wet mop on the floor, glued my ear to my Blackberry and faked answering a call. “Hello? Hello? Hel…” I was safely out of there.

I consoled myself by entering an Indian shop, thinking Indian staff would be less pushy. As I admired the summer floral dresses from Mumbai, the well-endowed shop lady approached me. “You’re blessed with curves,” she said, as if I didn’t appreciate myself. She thrust some fabric at me. “You’ll look good in these loose pants and sweater. Size 8.” These “loose pants” would be put to better use as a tablecloth but, out of respect, I relented and slipped into the change room with them.

Seconds later I heard her shout: “Do the pants fit? I mean, in there?” Before I could respond, the ultimate embarrassment occurred. The impatient, rude woman pulled back the curtain and exposed me to a group of stiletto-heeled young ladies! That was the deal breaker. I abandoned my purchases and walked out.

Privacy is not a consideration for shop assistants here. To some of them, a dressing room means a dressing down. One day I was trying on a dress that seemed a size too small, only to have a big-boned shop assistant barge in to ‘help’. “You got it wrong back here, wait,” she instructed, yanking the already tight belt tighter across my waist. As if that would make it looser.

For these shop assistants, the aim is to secure a sale at any cost from every shopper. Never mind that the jeans don’t fit or that it will shrink after one wash. “You inhale air, I push up,” the shop assistant is likely to say, grabbing your hip and manhandling your body into the garment. When her efforts fail, she will stop but never quit. “We still have nice scarves, Hermes bags, dinner plates, shoes …”

At the end of my shopping trips, I feel more than insulted but to get what you need in Mauritian malls, you have to brush off the annoyances and just swipe your credit card.

It’s not all bad though. The capital’s shopping trends can be gratifying at times. Some shops erect huge bins inside their stores with a notice: “Bring an item of old clothes every time you buy something new.” When I dropped two slightly used trench coats into a boutique’s exchange bin I was delighted to find that I became the owner of a pair of topaz stilettos. Shop owners say some of the old clothes brought back by customers are donated to charity, but no one really knows for sure. It is such a popular practice that I often see troops of college girls taking old clothes back to shops, announcing: “We’re going schwopping not shopping.” Some shops even offer “clothing surgery”, where they refashion old garments into new outfits.

The habit of exchanging old clothes also extends to the neighbourhood. Women gather for an afternoon of “swishing” – they exchange clothes that they are tired of wearing for someone else’s. Primrose skirts are swapped for fabulous suits. It’s a fun and coffee-filled event but beware: I got a deathly glare when I grabbed a Belgian sweater someone else was richly coveting.

Stella Boniro is a 23-year-old student at the University of Mauritius. Her goal is to be a fashion journalist in the near future.

King of fong kong football

In my wildest dreams I never thought I would own a soccer team. But here I am at 29, possibly the world’s youngest team owner. And the most stressed in Botswana, if not the world. It’s no joke to run a team. Ask Jomo Sono, Patrice Motsepe and Roman Abramovich.

Of course I’m still waiting to become as rich and powerful as they are. My team is just a social soccer side playing in an informal league known round these parts as the “Sunday Times” because of when we play.

The Sunday Times “league” has taken Botswana by storm. Matches are organised mostly by word of mouth and the teams include a few old men, but the bulk are wild and badly behaved youngsters — some as young as 15.

My team — Industrial Super Stars, so named after the scrapyard area in Itekeng where the majority of our players live — is made up of disgruntled and uncontrollable alcoholics without any soccer skills to boast about. My bunch was rejected by other Sunday Times soccer clubs.

In my quest to be Motsepe, I took the opportunity to name and organise the team. But finding them before a match is more complicated, especially at the end of the month. After payday, the team owner has to endure moving from one drinking hole to another in search of his players.

One of the unique things about the Sunday Times soccer league is that the usual football rules and regulations are relaxed. So relaxed, most of them don’t apply. A player can be substituted and come back into play later, as many times as he likes. A referee might smoke a cigarette during the game. The referee can also be substituted if one team feels he is biased in favour of the opponents. When this happens, the ref is likely to express his disgust at the decision by donning the kit of the team that stood by him when he was subjected to insults.

Alcohol and dagga abound and the players use them with abandon. Because most players are unemployed — especially in my team — pints of Chibuku, a traditional brew, are a regular feature at the games.

These players don’t care if team “owners” and officials such as me are present when they take their dagga. They are very uncouth. They spew venom. They don’t want to be shouted at like professional coaches shout at their players. They threaten to decamp to another side and there are plenty to choose from at the bottom of the league barrel.

In the worst scenario they threaten to form their own team that will be run and controlled by them without being subjected to civil behaviour lectures. The most foul-mouthed will tell you to your face that you don’t own them and that just because you occasionally buy them pints of Chibuku, this doesn’t make you better than them.

I have been told to go and write shit in the papers whenever I called some of my players to order. “Just because you write for newspapers doesn’t mean you can lecture to us about good behaviour,” I have been told countless times.

It is a bit unfair because other football team owners, such as Sono, Motsepe and Abramovich, are not subjected to this treatment. By the same token, just because my bank balance hovers close to zero most of the time, it doesn’t mean I should be subjected to this sort of treatment, I mutter to myself.

Although I’m not given the respect that I deserve, the team is happy to use the water in my house to wash the kit. I’m also the custodian of the kit, which is a raw deal. Come half time nobody listens to the coach. They don’t want team talk. They just want alcohol and that foul-smelling green stuff.

One of the Industrial Super Stars officials is my younger brother. One recent Sunday we Mosikares were accused of having hijacked the team.

Drunken debates ensued. I came up with the idea of forming a rival team to the neighbouring Itekeng Soccer Club when I realised that the majority of my present players were not being given a chance to prove themselves.

To explain the set-up for a South African audience, let’s put it this way: if Industrial Super Stars were a political party it would be Cope; Itekeng Soccer Club would be the ANC.

My breakaway plan was hatched in the middle of the month when I did not have money to buy a team kit. So one of my cousins — among those now accusing me and my brother of hijacking control — went and bought the kit at one of the Chinese shops in town. It is a “fong kong” kit costing less than P200 (about R250).

I wanted to refund him so that I could be left to run my Industrial Super Stars the way I liked, but he refused. My cousin can be difficult to deal with. On the field he will agree to be substituted only when he wants to smoke a cigarette.

In our way my team is like a close-knit family. And like all families, we bicker. It’s just as well we hardly ever win any matches — when we do, the boys drink until they drop.

Oarabile Mosikare is a reporter for Mmegi and Monitor newspapers. He lives in Francistown, Botswana. This post was first published in the M&G newspaper. 

Hassan Hajjaj’s rockstar portraits

Hassan Hajjaj’s portraits from Marrakech capture the colour and spontaneity of his childhood in Morocco. His sitters – ‘not just musicians but the snake charmer, henna girl, bad boy, male belly dancer’ – often wear clothes he has designed, standing in spaces totally covered by patterns he has chosen, and the photographs are eventually set in a frame he has constructed.

Click on an image below to view the gallery.

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This post was first published on the Guardian Africa Network.

Wed for bed: Underground marriages in Egypt

Khalid and Egan (not their real names) are undergraduate students at the American University in Cairo who are “deeply in love” in every sense of the fairy-tale phrase. They are desperate to marry but cannot afford it. So they turn to a solution that is popularly referred to in Egypt as “underground tube marriages”.

These secret unions, also called urfi marriages, have exploded in colleges throughout Egypt. Despite officially being banned, they have an established Facebook presence and are spawning new entrepreneurs. Weddings and dowry payments typically cost thousands of dollars in Egypt and even if a marriage is concluded to the satisfaction of the bride and groom’s families, city apartments are way beyond the means of many newlyweds.

To make matters worse, in predominantly Islamic Egypt, sex before marriage is fiercely discouraged and engaging in premarital sex can have dire social consequences. Many families in Egypt are ready to disown their children if they live as partners without official marriage. It is this pressure and the urge to engage in premarital sex that drive many students into urfi marriages.

What is required for the secret unions to take effect is simply consent between boy and girl. Usually two witnesses, often friends, sign the secret marriage agreement. After this, the consenting boy and girl are legally married. This union is halfway between the official Egyptian legal system recognition and traditional family understanding of marriage. That’s why the couples who partake in these ceremonies consider themselves “married”.

In some colleges the urfi marriages take place in abandoned lecture theatres or in secluded accommodation hostels. These are as cordial as conventional receptions. If the urfi marriage was conducted in, say, an abandoned science lab, a feast of drink and food will follow at the same venue after the conclusion of the vows. Noisy conversation and jive music in any college dormitory on a weekend is a sure sign of the celebration of an urfi union, said one elated new bride, proudly showing me an ivory-coated ring that she deftly hides from her family and outsiders.

The need for secrecy does not just apply to the couple. The witnesses, though they may welcome an invitation to officiate, also want to be secret — it is a social embarrassment to be labelled a conveyer of secret marriages.

But a girl who engages in secret marriage faces the possibility of never marrying formally if the outside world manages to unlock her secret past. If an urfi marriage does not work out, and a prospective suitor hears about her past, he could spurn her.

Urfi marriages are more about chemistry than money, even if they are not always about falling in love forever. As Egan admitted: “I could not wait for us to finish our four-year degrees and then marry. Even if that was the case, he could never afford the $7 000 and the Toyota Prius that my family demanded in order to give their consent.”

The proliferation of underground marriages has turned some enterprising students into semi-successful businessmen. Some students advertise their services on university notice boards and others offer “marriage witnesses” services on Facebook and other social networking sites.

One third-year physiology student, who spoke to me on condition of anonymity, said: “I usually charge fellow students $50 if they want me to be a secret marriage witness. I’m never short of customers — every two weeks on average — and I’m paid more thereafter to make sure I lock my mouth once outside the ‘underground’.”

It is not all merry sailing for the lovers. There is no legal status awarded to these marriages if the relationship turns sour.

The courts do not place any paternity burden on the man if these marriages end in divorce and the belligerent parties emerge from the underground to take their custody battles into the legal courts above. But Egan, who was well through her first urfi marriage, summed it up: “Urfi marriage gives me a feel-good feeling and erases my guilt whenever I want to indulge in pre-marital sex.”

Hadid Beduwi is a Chadian journalist married to a New Zealand diplomat in Alexandria, Egypt. This post was first published in the M&G newspaper.