Time Capsule

I soar over Africa on a route that I have traveled before. The land below me now seems familiar, even if not completely known. This path from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania to Nairobi, Kenya is one I have now traveled four times; three times in air and once overland.
As I peer out the window in this moment, I see the recognizable shape of Zanzibar. It is a color 3-D version of the map I have studied in the Lonely Planet during my explorations. In my head, I locate the towns and roads and landmarks that I have visited on that off-shore island. From up here, it is a very different perspective.
As the minutes put miles between me and Tanzania, it feels strange to leave this part of the world. I am sure that it will seem even stranger in a month’s time when I board another flight on an east African carrier to leave Africa for the foreseeable future. Though it has been only three short months, some part of me feels like I have been exploring roots here forever; that my time here is timeless, sort of like the continent herself.
This morning, Torin and I looked out over the water and the port of Stonetown on Zanzibar. It is an ancient island with varied history. Around us, a group of African men congregated in the shade of rusty shipping containers, headed from who knows where to who knows where carrying who knows what from one place to another. Many stared at me with my curly blond hair waving in the wind. Torin made a comment about the stares despite his presence. An old man wearing blue denim shorts over the top of torn khaki trousers waltzed by and smiled a “Habari?” in our direction. “Nzuri sana,” I replied. “Nzuri sana, unasema, nzuri sana!” he laughed back over his shoulder, chuckling at my Swahili response of very good to the greeting question “What’s the news?” Another man twinkled by us on an antique one-speed bicycle, sending good feeling and good will with a simple good morning. As the departure time for our ferry neared, a pair of gentlemen tried to pick up our bags and carry them to the ferry for a tip. I hoisted my heavy backpack onto my shoulders and shrugged them away. After ten months, I’m accustomed to packing around my belongings.
In line, a little girl with plaited braids, no shoes and a fancy dress a size or two too big smiled and waved at me, looking away shyly when I smiled back. Gaining courage from my attention, she began to speak to me in both Swahili and English, laughing when I responded, but still giggling when together we exhausted our mutual vocabulary. With dimples and bright brown eyes she looks like a poster child. This morning she is nestled between her mother and baby sister, who sit in a line of women in traditional colorful kangas, one wrapped around their waists and another around their tops. They look in some way mysterious and powerful surveying the world from their covered bodies. How does it look to them?
We boarded the ferry behind two short, waddling Indian women. Suitcases with maps of the world went before us, followed by cardboard boxes tied with string and Torin’s and my mountaineering backpacks. Torin’s yellow ski boots, flung over shoulders outside his backpack, drew even more curious looks than we did.
Africa is what she is. She is timeless and changing. The months I have shared here in 2006 show her in a particular dynamic light. They are a time capsule, a vision of a particular moment in her perpetual history. Leaving Tanzania this morning, the singularity of this time, of the insights that I have gained, has hit me harder than it has leaving any other place. Sitting today on the dock, I was struck as I have never been by what it means to be here now. Observing the world around me, thinking of the history I have read, I recognized in a new way how vastly different these places will be in a few short years. She is dynamic and ever changing, this Africa. These months are portraits of a moment in part of a much greater, larger, complex history. They are impressions from three short months, a time capsule of the East African story, one portrait among thousands, part of my portrait from May 2006.
Africa. I call her thus knowing that my moments of experience do not encompass Africa as a whole or the experiences and histories and cultures of her dozens of countries. However, I think that some of my observations are relevant to Africa generally, particularly in the light that many outsiders see her, which fails to acknowledge her variety. Even so, the history of colonialism, (shared by all Africa except Ethiopia), of underdevelopment, affect many of the continent’s contemporary issues and may make it possible to draw some conclusions. In addition, when it comes down to it, all that appears here are my unedited impressions. They are to be taken as such.
Africa has so much to share and to celebrate. She is particular, unique, unlike anywhere else in the world in diversity, in history, in riches. She is what she is, and must be taken as such. She has her own soul and countenance, her own frustrations and eccentricities. Some of these include a constant inability to make change for anything. It is almost impossible to buy something without the change making turning into an extended journey to each neighboring shop. Her cultures understand time completely differently; large towns are centered around a clock tower, but in the market one buys watches by the pound, and neither buses nor meetings nor anything else obey the rule of time anyhow. For me Africa has meant spectacular sunsets and natural landscapes of every type, plains and hills and mountains and volcanoes and waterfalls and deserts. She has shown me old men with caved in lips and glasses that magnify their eyes as they clarify the world around them. It has been pool tables outside in the rain and checkers played on street corners with plastic water bottle caps and barefoot football games on muddy fields with balls made of twine and plastic bags. She has been smiling children anxious to have their photo taken and older women who begin to shake their heads as soon as they see the camera in your hand. She has made me more visible than I have ever felt as I am identified as “Mzungu” out loud everywhere I travel. She has challenged me to smile and connect with people inclined to see me skin color as a walking dollar sign, and taught me the art of bargaining patiently while I learn the rules of proper pricing. She is white-toothed or toothless smiles in dark faces, overcrowded buses, malnutrition, Coca-cola in glass bottles, colonial history, tourists in khaki wear. She is products that I have seen nowhere else in the world, a place where cars and boats and bicycles have second, third, and fourth lives after they would have been long retired other places.
Africa is no darker or more mysterious or less accessible then anywhere else in the world. She is no further away than a plane ride, and communication anywhere else is no farther away then a $2 cell phone SIM card. She is a mix of tradition and modernity unlike any other place I have experienced. She is large and eccentric and humbling and so human. She can’t be judged by anyone thing, or characterized in any one way. She is what she is, and must be loved and respected and valued for her multiplicities and contradictions. She is willing to share them with you, and if you are open to her, she will change you in some deep non-understandable way. Opening my eyes to this dynamic world in these months in these African countries has humbled me both in the face of nature and that of humanity. She is what she is. I try to learn to love her for all of it.