Halfway down the Danube

The Line of Rail

I'm back from Zambia.

Got back the day before Thanksgiving.  I've almost entirely lost the knack of sleeping on airplanes, so long flights -- and Johannesburg-Frankfurt is over ten hours -- now turn into all-nighters.  The plane wasn't full, but there was a very annoying young woman who refused to move to a nearby seat ("But I like this seat") so I was blocked from stretching out.  So, finished a book on the barbarian migrations of late antiquity and the early medieval period; fifty pages of Gardner on Chaucer; a nature documentary; a few minutes of "Life on Mars" (the American version; didn't impress); and the first "Best of the Who" album. 

-- The barbarian book was interesting.  It was Peter Heather's Empires and Barbarians, and I have a number of bones to pick with it that are beyond the scope of a blog post.  (Fewer pots, more genes and pollen counts, and cut 75% of the academic wrangling.)  But it made the intriguing and plausible point that a lot of ethnogenesis in late classical Europe took place against a background of intense violence.  We think of Huns and Goths and Franks and whatnot as solid masses, neat black arrows moving across Europe's landscape to pierce the frontiers of Rome.  But in fact most of these were probably groups-of-groups, accumulated from smaller warbands hammered together under the stress of invasion and war.  Smaller groups that didn't agglomerate were at a military disadvantage; they disappeared, or are remembered only by specialist historians.

The Meat Pie Fear Index

While I was up in Copperbelt, I had to wait for an hour while a colleague finished a meeting.

The meeting was at a District Commissioner's Office -- sort of a combined courthouse and town hall, a low rambling building with various offices.  I wandered around a bit looking at things -- there was a trial in session, very well attended, interesting -- looked at the jacaranda trees for a bit (jacarandas are very cool, I love their seed pods) then wandered across the street to a cafe. 

Hot, flies, one big old fan trying to keep the air moving -- but, hell, there was a fan.  And water to wash your hands with before eating.  (The staple starch of Zambia's diet is corn mush, and you always eat it with your hands, so you wash your hands first.)  I ordered a vegetable sambosa and a tonic water (not for the quinine, I just think it's very quenching in hot weather).  Whoops, no vegetable sambosas left.  Meat pie?  Oh... all right.

I ate the meat pie.  I ate it with some trepidation, but hell -- I was hungry.

Later it occurred to me that I would never, ever have done this in the DRC.  And so was born the Meat Pie Fear Index!

"You are in a roadside cafe in a rural area.  You are hungry.  The only food available is a fried meat pie."

0 -- purchase and eat the meat pie without an instant's hesitation [Germany, Sweden]

1 -- purchase the meat pie, pause for a moment, shrug and eat it [Britain, France]

2 -- stare at the meat pie, think "God knows what's in that" and then "well, I'm pretty hungry", purchase the meat pie, give it a cursory examination, eat it.  [Serbia]

3 -- stare at the meat pie, think "it's probably crawling with parasites", dither for a minute until you realize you're blocking the line, sigh inwardly, purchase meat pie.  Stare at it on plate for a moment, turn it over and examine carefully.  Take a small bite and chew.  Take another small bite and chew.  Wash down with tonic water in the vague hope that the quinine will do something or other.  Over next half day, monitor self for signs of mysterious sudden internal disruptions.  All that said, eat the whole pie, because you were hungry.  [Zambia]

4 -- stare at meat pie, shake head, walk away.  Go hungry.  [Uganda]

5 -- do not enter cafe in the first place.   [DRC]

I'm not sure what this actually measures, but no doubt it will come to me.

 

Elephant in the Room

HIV.

Zambia has over a million people infected with it, out of a population of maybe 13 million.  The adult prevalence rate is believed to be around 15%.  That's a level where secondary effects really show up, even in the stuff that I'm looking at.  (I suspect it's one reason Zambia's microfinance industry is oddly stunted, for instance.)

But nobody talks about it unless pressed.

Compare and contrast Uganda, where it's very much part of the discourse.  The Museveni government's efforts against HIV have been downgraded a lot in retrospect -- it appears Uganda's prevalance estimates in the '90s were inflated, by various people for various reasons, so the drop was much less dramatic than first thought.  But the downgrade has been from "whoa awesome" to "still pretty solid".  HIV came up sometimes in discussions there, and people were pretty open about it.  That was with an adult infection rate maybe a third of Zambia's.  But here?  Nope: just doesn't get mentioned somehow.

A Fireman in Africa

I'm back from a couple of days in the north of the country, about which more anon. 

First I want to talk about a literary form I've just recently discovered: the naive autobiography of the former white colonist in Zambia.  ("Naive" here just means an autobiography by someone who's not a professional writer.)  I posted last week that there's not a lot of literature about the colonial experience in Zambia.  And that's true -- while there are plenty of novels about white colonists in Kenya, Rhodesia or South Africa, I haven't found a single one yet about Zambia.  But there are a fair number of first-hand accounts, and some of them are pretty good.

The most interesting so far is a book called "WIth Sword and Chain", by the last white Mayor of Lusaka.  (The title is a pun, and less alarming than it sounds.)  That deserves another post, if time allows.

A very close second is an unpublished book, written as a series of articles online, called "A Fireman in Africa".  It's the story of the guy who used to be the fireman at Lusaka Airport.  And it's really interesting.

Raymond Critchell, born 1927, went into the British Navy just in time for the end of World War Two.  Got  out a couple of years later, and answere an advertisement to work in Rhodesia.  He came to then-Northern-Rhodesia in the early 1950s; he'd live there through independence, not leaving until 1974.

You cannot have  -- I did not know this! -- an airport that receives regular international commercial flights, without having an airport fire service.  Mr. Critchell expands:

A modern history of Zambia

There doesn't seem to be one. 

There are some older books from the 1970s and '80s, and a "Political History of Zambia" published this decade.  But that's about it.  A general history of the country since independence, published in the last 20 years?  Doesn't seem to exist.

So there's a niche for some aspiring young academic.  Meanwhile, digging around at the local bookstore and the museum and online has turned up some interesting nuggets.

-- Zambia was central to a dispute between Britain and Portugal in 1890.  The Portuguese wanted to claim it to connect their colonies in Angola and Mozambique.  AFAICT, they had a decent claim.  But the British completely curb-stomped them, threatening to take away Mozambique if Portugal didn't retreat and withdraw their claim.  Which they did, albeit with considerable and lingering resentment.

-- That said, Zambia remained a complete and utter backwater until the 1920s, when copper was discovered.  It was the distant northern frontier of the British Empire in South Africa.  There was one rail line, a handful of white farms, and absolutely nothing of interest.  All of that changed when the copper -- some of the world's richest deposits -- was found.  By WWII Zambia ("Northern Rhodesia") had 30,000 white settlers and the region's economy had been reconfigured around providing cheap labor for the mines.

-- For a decade, 1953-63, Zambia was part of the short-lived Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, a state now completely forgotten except by historians and a dwindling handful of cranky white ex-settlers.  (I'm still at a loss as to what the point of this entity was, but maybe more reading will make it clear.)

-- Zambia pretty quickly developed a postwar nationalist / independence movement, which seems to have split early on between "independence for Zambia" and "independence for all white-dominated South Africa" factions -- basically UNIP (which would eventually rule Zambia) and the more well-known African National Congress. 

The independence struggle was, in the cold light of history, rather less violent and bloody than it could have been. The death toll seems to have been in the hundreds rather than the thousands, which was fairly light compared to some of Zambia's neighbors (Mozambique, Angola, Rhodesia / Zimbabwe). 

That said, there were some gruesome incidents.   In the Lusaka museum, I came across a fading photograph of Mrs. Lillian Burton.  She and her two small daughters were pulled out of a car and horribly killed in 1960.  The museum article made it sound like a wrong-place-wrong-time kind of a thing, but this interview suggests that it was deliberate murder on the part of UNIP  ("Our final decision was to kill someone who was well-known in the streets of London and there could not have been any better figure than Ms Lillian Burton who was very popular in Zambia.")

-- The independence movement got nicknamed the "chachacha", after the dance -- "we'll do the steps, and force the imperialists to follow".  The late colonial years are still sometimes called the chachacha period, and there's a Chachacha Road here in Lusaka.

The chachacha period is familiar, and kind of depressing.  It wasn't Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, but the center did not hold, and in the end the country was handed over to a bunch of guys who didn't really know what they were doing.  A common enough story, but still.

Reading the history, many of the black nationalists and most of the white leadership come across as pretty despicable.  That said, they could have done considerably worse than Kaunda (universally remembered as "KK").  He trashed the economy and allowed himself to be surrounded by cronies and flatterers, but he wasn't mad or genocidal, he didn't impose a brutal police state, and (with prodding from Jimmy Carter) he did eventually step down.  The bar for post-independence African leaders is not that high, but Kaunda clears it with a little space.

-- At independence, there was one of those crazy religious movements.  It was anti authority -- all authority, colonial and post-colonial alike.  Led by a female seer, Alice Lenshina.  Melded Christian and animist elements, immunity to bullets, the works.  Ended badly.

-- After independence, Zambia embarked on a policy of supporting black independence movements all across southern Africa.  This did not meet with approval from its white-dominated neighbors.  The Rhodesians staged a number of border incursions, and the South Africans initiated "Operation Plathond" to create and support a fairly insane and pointlessly destructive guerrilla movement in the country's northwest. 

-- Kaunda wanted the Bomb, which is why Zambia was one of a handful of countries to vote against the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in the UN back in the late 60s.  Why?  Because he knew South Africa had it.  (How?  Not clear, but my guess would be he made the various independence movements he hosted pay their rent with, among other things, intel.)  It's not clear if he seriously thought the South Africans would nuke Lusaka, but presumably he thought a nuclear deterrent would make them think twice about it.

-- And finally, Zambia may hold a record of some sort: four serious coup attempts (1980, '88, '90 and '97) without a single success.

 

Zambian English

Zambian English is odd.  Perfectly understandable, but odd.

It's derived from British English, so it's non-rhotic -- if an r-sound is terminal, or interior before a consonant, it disappears.  So car, park and farmer become cah, pahk, and fahmah.

That's easy.  But they also do some odd things to vowels.  Many of them seem to rise up a bit, so that nurse becomes nehss.  Others fall, so that gaps become gups.  And some get stretched a little, so that here and again become heah and agayne.  Combine these, and shareholders becomes shay ho das.

There's also a reluctance to clump too many consonants together.  Clusters of three or more consonant sounds are likely to be broken up by a vowel, so that a word like mindset will acquire a third syllable: mind-a-set.  On the other hand, many polysyllabalic words are pronounced with great precision; interest, for which all Americans would say "intrest", here is spoken exactly as spelled.

They also use "yah" a lot as an all-purpose particle.  "The amount of capital available is small, yah?  So the problem, yah, is not the interest rates.  They are just charging what the market will bear, yah."  -- I strongly suspect this is a Dutch "ja", acquired from the Boers.  The problem with this theory is that there were very few Boers in Zambia.  There were a lot just across the river in Zimbabwe, and of course millions of them down in South Africa, but not many in Zambia. 

There are some pleasant expressions.  My favorite so far: where an American would say "and so on" or "and like that", a Zambian says "all this and what have you".  I like that.

The Zambians say they can tell a Zimbabwean accent from a Zambian one, and also that they can usually tell which tribal group a person is from by the accent in English.  I'm not there yet.  But it's a pleasant accent, and not at all hard to understand.  In a week, I've only been confused once.  That was when the man from the Millers Association was explaining the problems they had trying to shape government policy:

"We try to work together with others in the supply chain.  We work with the farmers.  We work with the grain traders.  We try to work with the beggars, even."

"... the beggars?"

"Yes.  But they're very stubborn.  The beggars have their own association, but they don't want to work with us."

"Er..."

"They think because they are buying our flour, we can't be on the same team."

"...the bakers.  The association of bakers."

"Yes."

Some linguists call these African accents "New Englishes".  I don't see it, myself.  If they were using a lot of loan words, or odd constructions derived from the underlying Bantu, then maybe.  But they don't seem to.  It's just English with another funny accent -- no stranger than Dublin or Dallas.

Tribes

We have a facilitator, a guy who helps us get meetings.  Zambian, thirtyish, economist-turned-consultant.  Very energetic.  Like a lot of Zambians, he has a biblical name -- let's call him Elijah.  Elijah is pleasant enough, and very engaged, but up until tonight hadn't shown much emotion.

So we're sitting around the table having our evening meeting -- five consultants, Mary the admin, and Elijah.  The following conversation takes place:

Colleen (a consultant):  ...so they're trying to sell it for export, but the volume is just too big.  The first posting on Zamace didn't attract a single bid.

Me:  Wait, remind me.  What is "Zamace"?

Colleen:  It's the Zambian commodities exchange.

Me:  Oh, right.

Colleen:  So we don't know what their exposure is, but they've taken at least $20 million in commercial bank loans --

Me:  You know, "Zamace" sounds like the name of a 70th level reptile lord in World of Warcraft.

[silence]

Colleen:  [blank look]

Mary the admin:  Oh my God you are such a dork.

Elijah:  [silently laughing]

Me:  Elijah?

Elijah [struggling to compose himself]:  Ah, hah, ha ha --

Me:  Horde or Alliance?

Elijah:  For the Horde, man.

Me:  For the Horde.

Zambia: Cross-border trade

There's a lot of trade between Zambia and the DR Congo.

Makes sense, right?  Congo's agricultural sector is a mess.  And the southeast corner of the country -- Katanga Province, next to Zambia -- is all mining country, with few farms or ranches anyway.  Someone has to feed those miners, and it might as well be Zambia.  Food from all over the country flows up the Great North Road to Congo.

But!  Most of the trade?  is informal.  That is to say, it's smuggling.  Trucks full of (say) sacks of grain drive north towards the DRC and then park a couple of miles from the border post.  Guys on bicycles swarm south across the border, using bush trails that snake well wide of Congo's Customs checkpoint.  The truck is unloaded, a sack at a time, and its contents dispersed onto dozens of bikes.  Back they go through the bush.

(A while back I blogged about a border post between the DRC and Uganda.  There was smuggling around that border post, too, but not so much -- it was in a mountain valley, so smugglers would have to go far around, and through some pretty rugged terrain.  The DRC / Zambia border, OTOH, runs through a lot of flat land that's covered in scrub forest... easy to get around.)

Since Zambia doesn't charge export taxes, the Zambian government doesn't get too upset about this.  (Congo is losing a lot of money on import duties, but hey: that's Congo's problem.)  In fact, Zambia rather likes the current system.  The Congolese pay in dollars -- their economy is very dollarized, and anyway nobody's going to take Congolese francs.  That's hard currency for Zambia, which is good. 

The smugglers in Zambia -- sorry, the "informal traders" -- are actually organized; they've set up their own group, the "association of small cross-border traders" or some such.  It's formally registered as a business organization in Zambia, and it barely bothers to conceal its members' activities.

However, Zambia is losing one thing: good statistical information about exactly what is leaving the country.  So, a year or two back, the Zambian government contacted the "association", and offered them a modest sum of money to produce a study estimating just what, and how much, was crossing the border from Zambia for the DRC without going through Zambian Customs first.  Effectively, the government was saying "Hey smugglers -- we'll give you some money to tell us just what you're smuggling out of the country".

And they did.  It's a nice study, too -- very professional.

More on this anon.

White Zambia

So Zambia was originally supposed to be a white settler colony.

That didn't work out.  Zambia -- northern Rhodesia, as it was then -- was too far away from the Imperial centers of expansion, too backwards, too remote.  There just weren't enough white settlers.  By independence, in a country of around 3 million, there were maybe 75,000 whites: simply not enough to rule.  So Southern Rhodesia (modern Zimbabwe) cut the north free and embarked upon its own strange 15-year experiment in minority government. 

Over the next 45 years, the white population steadily declined.  Today there are maybe 10,000 or 15,000 (it's quite hard to get good numbers). 

But they still punch above their weight. 

Zambia was a mining colony, and most of the whites were involved with the mining industry. So it didn't have as many big white-owned farms, ranches and plantations as Rhodesia / Zimbabwe to the south.  We're talking 1% of the population owning 10% or 15% of the land, as opposed to 3% of the population owning half the land.  Ironically, this meant that the big white farms that did exist, were able to survive much better.  Because they didn't utterly dominate the landscape, there wasn't an overwhelming need to break them up or give them back to black ownership.  So, while big white-owned farms have almost disappeared from Zimbabwe, there are still a bunch of them here in Zambia.  A lot -- maybe a majority; I'm not sure yet -- of the big commercial farms here are still in the hands of White Zambians.  They're second, third, fourth generation, the children and grandchildren of the farmers who hung on after independence nearly 50 years ago. 

-- One oddity: while there's plenty of lore and literature about the white settlers in Rhodesia and Kenya, white Zambia seems to have kept a very, very low profile.  Okay, there aren't a lot of them, and Zambia's fairly obscure.  But it's an English-speaking country.  And it's not like there are a lot of African countries where the descendants of white settlers are still playing an important role in the economy.  (South Africa, Kenya, Zimbabwe, umm, maybe Namibia?)  So you'd think they'd be discussed more.  Nope.  They seem to keep to themselves, and as far as I can tell nobody has written any best-selling novels about them.

Banks and bankers tomorrow.

 

 

To Zambia

And so to Zambia.

Zambia's a medium-big, landlocked country in South Central Africa.  It's in a truly dreadful neighborhood; it shares borders with the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola, and Zimbabwe.  Remarkably, Zambia has had a more-or-less peaceful history since independence, with just a couple of local rebellions and one failed coup attempt in 1997. 

To get here I flew via Johannesburg, which is twelve hours from Frankfurt.  (Night flight, so I didn't see a thing; dozed fitfully and read.)  Jo'Burg airport is delightful -- clean and lovely.  The tiles on the floor are in a brown and white "African" pattern which is really nice.  Images of Nelson Mandela are everywhere.  There are a couple of good bookstores, which I may hit on the way out.

Then to Lusaka, capital of Zambia.  Lusaka is about 15 degrees south and about 1200 meters up, which means it has a hot tropical climate notably moderated by altitude.  Both days so far have been hot, getting up to around 37 (high 90s) but then dropping down to 20 or less (mid 60s) at night.  I like this.

Cecil Rhodes, that awesome lunatic, intended for "Northern Rhodesia" to be a white man's country.  And, you know?  It perhaps could have been.  It was thinly populated.  The natives were divided into small tribes, militarily much less threatening than the large Mashona And outside of the low, sweltering Zambezi Valley, most of it was free of the fevers that killed whites wholesale.  In an alternate universe where the British Empire lasted another 50 years, Zambia might have seen a million white settlers.  But in our world, there were never enough whites interested in settling a distant frontier when there was still plenty of land in South Africa and Southern Rhodesia (modern Zimbabwe).  So while there were (and still are) white Zambians, they were never more than three percent of the population, and are probably well under one percent today.

Zambia is not a crowded country.  It's about the size of Texas, but there are only 13 million Zambians.  And Lusaka is an inland city that's not on a lake or river -- it just grew up around the intersection of the country's two biggest roads.  So Lusaka sprawls.  There are only a few tall buildings in the downtown; otherwise, the city is just growing outward onto the veldt.

I got a nice walk in today -- 4 or 5 km.  (I'd been planning to walk about twice that far, but the midday sun changed my mind.)  Walked up to the new shopping mall on the Great Eastern Road, then came back through a pleasant neighborhood of tree-lined streets,that had obviously been a residential suburb back in colonial times.  The streets are mostly in pretty good condition, which is encouraging. I stopped for lunch, and to cool off, at an Indian restaurant -- Zambia's Indian population is small compared to Kenya's or Tanzania's, but as usual in Africa it occupies several key economic niches, with the pleasant spinoff of good Indian food.

Tomorrow: talking to bankers.