Making ends meet in Umoja

Salma is tired of running her mitumba (pre-owned) clothing stall in Umoja, Nairobi. She says business isn’t what it used to be and she spends too much time chasing the credit deals she has with her regular clients. They love the clothes, she says, but they never want to pay.

And when it rains, she has to go to the clients, through the endless traffic jam, rather than wait for them because they are reluctant to venture into the mud and sludge of the rickety market where her jua kali (informal) stall stands. And it’s been raining a lot again.

Salma’s clothes come from the huge bales offloaded at Mombasa, dispatched by Oxfam and similar charities around the world. The bales are transported from Mombasa and emptied by the mamas at the Kikomba market, near town, where Salma is a regular.

At Kikomba, most of the clothes are sold for a hundred shillings (R10) or slightly more. But then there are the numbers that the mamas know will sell at five times the 1 000 shillings that Salma’s willing to pay. These are mostly from design-house job lots. Burberry, Guess and Next are common, and lots of Italian names she doesn’t even know. Among the shoes, she sometimes finds Prada. In Nairobi, Salma is one of few sources for prêt-à-porter clothes from Paris! Her clients know it. And her clients will pay. In time.

In the afternoons, Salma usually leaves her stall in the care of three unemployed youngsters whom she pays 100 bob each (R10) for the shift. They tolerate the afternoon teens who come to the stall, try everything on, but never buy a thing.

But Salma will be back in Umoja in time to meet her regular clients as they come past in the evening. She knows her clients well, and knows who to call when she’s found what. And she’s usually right. But once she’s agreed on a bargain price with a client, she’ll often be told, “Sina pesa saa hii!” (I don’t have money now!). And this usually happens after Salma has packed the garment. So she gets tied into another credit deal that runs for a month at least. Salma says that business isn’t what it used to be.

“Maisha ni ngumu!” (Life is hard!) she exclaims. “I work for my small money.”

Salma at her stall in Umoja. (Brian Rath)
Clothes for sale at an informal market in Nairobi. (Flickr/computerwhiz417)

Her stall opens at 7am. It stays open till 7pm. After packing up and paying the guy to take her stock to the store, she’ll go shopping for fresh vegetables and groceries, and get home by 8pm. She’ll cook and eat, and by 9.30pm will have fallen asleep in front of the TV. She’ll maybe wake around 2am and drag herself off to bed. And she’ll be up before 5am again.

She says she can’t carry on doing this for little return. Business is not what it used to be.

Ultimately, Salma wants to settle near the sea and she wants to learn to swim. She loves the beach and she swears she would quickly lose the extra 10kg just because of the ‘coasto’ lifestyle.

She’s Muslim, so she’s salama (at peace) among the Swahilis at the coast and she’s thought of opening a mitumba stall in Mombasa, where there are few stalls. But her ideal business would be to sell African print-couture in the upmarket coastal town of Malindi. If she could get enough money for Malindi, she would concentrate on her own designs.

She knows she could do well because every time she gets the cash to buy fabrics, and the time to guide the sewing fundi in making up the dresses, she sells them within a day, before her bigger clients have even seen them. She could make her eclectic African necklaces in Malindi too, but she just doesn’t have the time in Nairobi.

Salma has a sister living in the States, another in South Africa, and both are doing well. But her dad is old and he wants her nearby, so Salma is struggling in Kenya. Still, she enjoys her life. When the clients have paid, usually in the first week of the new month, she goes out to have fun with her late-twenties and 30-something friends. They’re a mixed bunch, Muslims and Christians alike, a few with kids but most not. One or two of them are married. They usually go clubbing and might dance to house or R&B at some place in the hip suburb of Westlands. Salma prefers drinking spirits to beer –  Napoleon brandy and Sprite.

Even if Salma drinks and doesn’t ever wear the austere black abaya (popularly, the ‘bui bui’) or veil when out, she’s an otherwise devoted Muslim: She’s up every morning before five in her ‘bui-bui’ and a thick red scarf that she wraps around her head in the style of a Tuareg nomad. She puts her red Maasai blanket on the floor as her prayer mat and she reads passages from Qur’an for an hour, daily before daybreak.

Salma tells me that during the holy month of Ramadan, she was at the head-grinding blender from 4am so she could make her fresh vegetable ‘smoothie’ and eat a chapatti before the sun was out. She cooks many dishes but admits that she lacks the patience to make good chapattis. And she laughs a bit when relating how the noise of the blender drove her neighbours nuts before sunrise. It was only the Somali sisters in the flat upstairs who understood.

On the advent of Eid ul Adha in October last year, she cooked the customary pilau rice and goat meat as a special treat for a few invited friends. It was an honour to be invited but I could see she had battled to provide. With no alcohol present, she bought Coke and Sprite, warm, from the shop across the dusty road. But afterwards, tired and stressed, she admitted that “a Guinness would be great”.

Salma is tired of running her mitumba stall in Umoja, just outside Nairobi.  “It’s time to leave this place,” she says. Business is not what it used to be.

Brian Rath was born and raised in Cape Town. He now lives and writes in Kenya, and has a novel due to be published shortly. 

Funerals the biggest parties in Ghana

The chance to show off your best black clothes, eat spicy giblet kyinkyinga kebabs, enjoy unlimited free drinks and perhaps meet the love of your life – welcome to funerals, Ghana style.

Such is the love of funerals that they take up most of the weekend, and some Ghanaians want to reduce the working week to make more time for them.

“Funerals used to take up Saturday and Sunday, but now I’d say 90% of churches bury bodies on Friday as well, so people are having to take time off work to go to the service,” said Gabriel Tetteh, an online funeral planner. “With the pressure of having to fit in a visit to the service while working on Friday, and all weekend taken up, when you go to work on Monday you feel the pain.”

President Yahya Jammeh has just made the Gambia the first country to introduce a four-day working week, decreeing that the extra time should be used to devote more time to prayers, social activities and agriculture. Now some are hoping this will spread to Ghana. “The truth is that over here, public-sector workers have always found ways to have four-day weeks if they want,” wrote Elizabeth Ohene, a former government minister in Ghana.

Funerals offer the biggest parties and best socialising in Ghana, and are attended by extremely distant relatives or anyone who has known the deceased (and sometimes those who haven’t). Towns and cities are dotted with signs by the roadside advertising important funerals to passers-by, to attract the maximum number of mourners.

Ghana is also famous for its elaborate coffins, with families choosing to bury loved ones in caskets shaped as beer bottles, aeroplanes or giant shoes.

An employee of the Tchadio workshop prepares coffins representing a plane and animals in the Teshie area of Accra. (AFP)
Cultural Producer Lisa Warrener inspects a coffin carved in the shape of a frilled lizard by the Paa Joe Carpentry workshop in Ghana and commissioned for Festival Melbourne in 2006. (AFP)

“We estimate that the cost of funerals in Ghana often runs into thousands of dollars,” said David Dorey from MicroEnsure, a UK-based company that provides life insurance in Ghana. “There is obviously this cultural thing that seems to have spiralled slightly out of control.”

Some Ghanaians have complained that the fixation of funerals represents a prioritisation of the dead over the living.

“We Ghanaians, we love funerals. If you are sick, no one has money to pay your medical bills. If you need money for school fees, no one can help you. But if you die, everyone is running to give money for your funeral – a lot of money! We love funerals too much,” said Seth Akpalu, who lives in the capital, Accra.

“In Ghana, people do spend more on the dead than the living,” said Tetteh. “There are some people, when a relative is living, they wouldn’t mind. But when the person dies, they put a lot of money into it, otherwise other people will be there insulting them.”

Asked why they enjoy attending funerals, young Ghanaians said it was mainly for the social aspects, and the refreshments. “Free Fanta and small chops,” tweeted Deborah Vanessah, a singer and model. “Sexy black clothes,” tweeted another.

“Funerals are grounds to meet new partners if you are unmarried. I have met a girl at a funeral on two occasions,” said Samuel Kofi Nartey, a law student in Accra. “You know, in Ghana our funerals are parties. You get to dance with a person or sit around with them and talk about stuff and one thing leads to another.”

Afua Hirsch for the Guardian Africa Network. 

A bad shoe day in Maputo

The generosity to be found at busy intersections on the streets of Mozambique’s capital can be puzzling to first-time visitors.

My Canadian-based partner, Imelda, was hardly a first-time tourist — she grew up in Maputo. But she was still caught off guard when a couple of shoe-shine boys crouched down and set to work on her best stilettos while we were waiting for a robot to change.

For a moment she thought she was lucky — perhaps it was a new local custom, a way of offering compliments of the season? But when she looked down she was shocked.

Her clean white shoes had been covered in black-tan shoe polish. Before she could recover, the leader of the shoe shine brigade stood up with his waxy brush and demanded: “100 Meticais, menina [sister].”

In a fit of rage typical of a backhome diasporian, Imelda waved down a municipal police officer. Climbing off his motorbike the burly officer burst out laughing when he heard Imelda’s complaint. When he calmed down, he addressed the chief waxer: “Do Santos, sort out your customer!”

Then, leaving no doubt about whose side he was on, he told the boy: “At least today you can afford sardhinhas [tinned fish].” He started laughing again as he climbed back on his bike and rode off. Imelda was left fuming about corrupt police and — more immediately — about how she was going to address the meeting we were on our way to with any dignity in her smeary black-brown heels.

We were going to Maputo’s Alumni Scholars Club where Imelda was to give a speech describing her experiences as a young Maputo girl who had moved to Canada where she was doing an MBA at a top university.

Clearly the guest speaker needed to look her best and live up to the “returning banking alumni” image.

Her nails and make-up were immaculate and when she got dressed that morning she had settled on a white Giorgio Armani suit — complete with matching stilettos. She cursed the shoe polishers. “I am not gonna throw you a single dime. Just look at what you’ve done to my shoes!”

But the polish boys simply threatened to apply another layer of liquid black wax. The leader spoke: “If you don’t give us 50 Meticais we will confiscate your shoes. Do you know how much wax costs?” While he presented his ultimatum, the other boys tried to grab Imelda’s shoes off her feet. The situation was getting crazier and eventually I threw a 100 Meticais note (about R40) towards the boys, grabbed a sobbing Imelda and rushed for the nearest taxi.

Maputo’s streets have become synonymous with the unwelcome attentions of shoe-shiners. Waiting for a robot to change at a busy intersection makes pedestrians easy targets. Most of the time the boys don’t even use genuine shoe polish, but a dense industrial liquid that often corrodes shoes. Most disturbingly they don’t care about the colour of the reluctant customers’ shoes. They apply whatever they happen to have.

Having cleaned your shoes, it is common to threaten to seize them unless the ransom is paid. As we hurriedly looked for replacement white shoes in Maputo’s boutiques, Imelda could not come to terms with the change in her shoes — from crisp white to greasy black. People like Imelda — returning diasporians and tourists — are the most likely victims of the shoeshine boys.

We locals have adopted a more cautious approach to robot crossings in our seaside capital. 100 Meticais for a compulsory shoe polish? That’s a good day’s business in Maputo.

Skand Felicio is a pharmacist in Maputo. This post was first published in the M&G newspaper. 

Introducing Voices of Africa

“Great, yet another blog about Africa” is not the response you want when you’re pitching the project to a group of Zimbabweans over lunch. But I understood Zaheera’s cynicism, and yes, this is another blog about Africa.

Except that it’s told by Africans, and its aim is to give the rest of the world a glimpse of real life on different parts of the continent. It’s a space to share the stories that we don’t hear often enough; the ones that get buried under the doom-and-gloom reporting that continues to shape the continent’s image.

The Dark Continent narrative has been knocked to shame but, like Fifty Shades of Grey, it persists. A soldier carrying an AK-47; naked children with protruding ribs; women balancing groceries on their heads; villagers queuing for medication – these recycled images scream “This is Africa!” when they’re really a trite, tired representation. The continent has its challenges but we are not our wars, poverty and diseases.

“An emerging market”, “exotic” women, technology booms, safaris, and National Geographic-worthy sunsets don’t sum us up either. They reduce us.

The point of this blog isn’t to romanticise Africa but to normalise it; to rubbish the idea that we exist between two extremes – despair and development; and to invite Africans to write about their world instead of being written about.

It’s time we tell our own stories. As you’ll see, it makes for refreshing reading.

Qudsiya Karrim is editor of Voices of Africa. Email her your stories, suggestions and queries at [email protected] or connect with her on Twitter. 

Kenya 101 for dummies

“You cross the equator as you drive down to Mombasa,” the tourist says with authority. He is adamant, he will not be corrected.

“The tour bus driver stopped a few kilometres after Voi,” he continues, “and all seven of us stepped out of the minibus and crossed some imaginary line called the equator.” He has photos to prove it! I do not have the heart to ask him if he had seen the “You are now crossing the equator” sign off the road. I could imagine him and his travelling companions haranguing the hapless driver, insisting that they really did want to cross the equator.

The poor, worn-down driver might have debated with himself on whether to leave them on the wayside for the man-eaters of Tsavo to find them, or to bend a geographical fact just a little bit.

“Would this lie change the face of the world and stop the mother of all wars?” he might have pondered. Most probably not, so he left the authoritative tourist in his ignorant bliss, with photos to prove it.

For the record, dear tourist, you cross the equator while driving away from Mombasa, away from Nairobi, heading up north. When you reach the equator, a sign by the road will let you know that you are now crossing the imaginary line. And you will have photos to prove it.

Tourists at the equator. (Marc Samsom/Flickr)

Kenya is an English-speaking country because the British Empire paid us a visit once upon a time and stayed for longer than three days. That also answers your query about why my English is sooo good. We do not have tribal languages – nowhere in Africa will you find anyone speaking a tribal language. We have African languages. Like you, we have mother tongues, national languages, and official languages. But if you insist on asking, dear tourist …

“How do you say ‘Hello’ in Kenyan?”
“We don’t.”
“You don’t?” There’s a look of incredulity on her face. “You don’t say ‘Hello’ in Kenyan?”
“I mean, we don’t speak Kenyan. No one speaks Kenyan.”

I’ll give the girl some credit. She at least knows where Kenya is located in Africa. Kenya, a country of great wildlife, authentic photo safaris, pristine white beaches, coconut trees, the Maasai, an ocean with waters of 28°C and the fastest long-distance runners (Aren’t they simply amazing?).

However, Kenya is more than that. Reading up a little on my country before coming to visit will go a long way. A good travel guide is a must. Do us Kenyans a favour by going to the market place, daring to take local transport and trying out our local dishes, however strange they may appear to be. That is how we say “Hello” in Kenyan.

We have a fair amount of sunshine, given that Kenya lies in the tropics. However, when it gets muggy in Europe with the mercury caressing +40°C, do not assume that the heat wave does not bother me since I “must be used to the heat in Africa” in the same way I do not assume that you, having grown up in mild climates, must be used to wintry subzero temperatures.

It’s true that we have extraordinary long-distance runners in Kenya and our athletes excel all over the marathon map. But what is not true is this: I am a Kenyan, therefore I run. All of us did not grow up running many kilometres to school barefoot, up hills and down valleys. It is also not true that the reason for our athletic prowess lies in the water. Rather, it lies with the lions. Yes, Simba and his pride. We Kenyans are perpetually running away from our ferocious, man-starved lions, for many kilometres on end, up hills and down valleys.

(I’m kidding.)

Kenya – and by extension, Africa – is not a bubbling petri dish of pathogenic bacteria that could decimate the human race any second now. If you, dear tourist, are concerned about la tourista (traveller’s diarrhoea), rest assured that Africa has no monopoly on this. It’s also to be found in London, Paris, Tokyo, or New York, where you probably come from.

You can sleep comfortably knowing that we not only have water in Kenya, but we also know how to boil and filter it to make it fit for consumption. We wash our fruits and vegetables; we even wash our hands. With soap. Looking for Evian? You should try our brands of bottled mineral water sourced from our own mineral springs.

Now for a little geography lesson.

If you are French and wish to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, you’ll have to go to Tanzania. Of course you can land in Nairobi and then drive all the way down to Tanzania. You can see Mount Kilimanjaro very well from Kenya, no fear. But trust me on this one: Mount Kilimanjaro is very much in Tanzania. Disregard what the travel agencies advertise, ignore the “Kenya: Do a Safari! Climb Kilimanjaro!” posters in the Parisian metro. Check your map of East Africa. See that sudden detour on the Kenya-Tanzania border that starts at the coastline heading inland? That’s where the map drawers went “oops!” and skirted around Mount Kilimanjaro. Or perhaps they hiccuped over their nth beer, causing their fingers to slip, and ended up with a straight-but-uneven border. Whatever the case, if you see “Visit Kenya! Visit Mount Kilimanjaro!” on a tourist brochure don’t get your geography all tangled up.

But do pack your bags and come visit. Come see – not climb – the mountain while heading down to Mombasa. Come speak Kenyan with us! The journey will be worth the destination.

Jean Thévenet, a work-at-home mum, was born and raised in Kenya. She now lives in France and blogs at http://hearthmother.blogspot.com.