South Africans, high-five yourselves — we have caught up with Africa! On a visit to Tanzania 12 years ago, I thoroughly enjoyed the huge, spicy tiger prawns at dinner on my arrival in Dar es Salaam. The following day I could see the clear blue waters of the Indian Ocean inviting me for a swim.
As I stepped out of the lobby the air got thicker, with a faint smell which intensified as I wandered down Ali Hassan Mwinyi Road, past the Aga Khan Hospital on Barack Obama Road. There were piles of uncollected rubbish on the streets, but not as bad as rat-infested Alexandra township just beyond Sandton. As I got closer to the beach, the smell of sewage grew more oppressive. I turned right onto Kenyatta Drive, and at Coco Beach at Oyster Bay I saw the source of the stench. From a large blue plastic pipe, raw sewage spewed onto the golden sand and into the ocean. From the rocks nearby, fishermen cast their nets and rods into the sea. To their left, bathers enjoyed the warm waters and blue skies. A few young people jogged and exercised on the beach.
After catching my breath, I returned to the hotel. At dinner I opted for the beef while my colleagues tucked into the prawns and other seafood the hotel staff proudly proclaimed comes off the coast of Tanzania.
Many of the city’s potholed roads are named after African statesmen — Nelson Mandela, Kenneth Kaunda, Haile Selassie, Ahmed Sékou Touré. I wondered if Selassie would have approved of his name competing for space with uncollected rubbish, or what Sékou Touré would have thought seeing sewage gush onto his road. In Zanzibar, dirty water flowed from the streets into the sea as I made my way to the famous fish market.
On a trip to Nairobi and Maputo a few months later, I saw pretty much the same: uncollected rubbish on streets named after the continent’s favourite sons, including Robert Mugabe and Muammar Gaddafi. With little investment in infrastructure, the sea and rivers are the only places to dispose of sewage. The prawns still looked appetising in Maputo, but dinner for me would be beef. In Lagos, there were no street names as there were no traffic lights, street signs or pylons to affix them to. Why would Lagos need streetlights when it couldn’t power up homes and factories? When the lights repeatedly went out at the Federal Palace Hotel on Victoria Island, only the South Africans were surprised.
Our traffic lights worked
As I walked back to the hotel in Dar, my thoughts turned to SA, which at the time seemed to be on the way up. Our traffic lights worked and motorists largely obeyed them and the officers on the road. Rubbish in the Joburg city centre got collected. Unlike the faded uniforms of the Tanzanian police, our police wore crisp uniforms with shiny badges. Electricity was available almost all of the time. I wished and hoped SA would never plunge to those levels of a failed state.
But already there were similarities: new-SA politicians were in love with their heavy SUVs, sirens and blue lights, like their Kenyan or Nigerian counterparts. Our police developed a taste for a "cool drink", or kitu kidogo ("something small" in Tanzania and Kenya).
Now SA has caught up with the rest of Africa: if you are brave enough to venture into the inner cities, you navigate piles of rubbish while keeping an eye out for muggers who operate in broad daylight. The SA National Defence Force has given up trying to stop raw sewage flowing into the Vaal River, which supplies Gauteng’s water. The situation is not much different in our other river systems.
The cocky South African who a decade ago vowed never to eat seafood in Africa has been humbled.
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