Lisbon: If you really loved her, you'd buy her...

No, not a diamond ring, not a bouquet of flowers , not even a box of chocolates...

You would, if you were a true Portuguese, buy her a beautiful tin of sardines:

Surviving Fascism with Fatima, Football and Fado

Antonio Salazar, Portugal's ruler from 1932 to 1968, relied on a secret police force and all the other tools of authoritarian regimes, in order to stay in power.  However, compared to fascist rulers like Hitler and Franco, his rule was relatively benign - for instance he opposed anti semitism.  Nevertheless his rule marked a period of dreadful poverty and intellectual suppression.

The Portuguese turned to Fatima, Football and Fado to help them get through his long rule.

Fatima 

The small town of Fatima rose to fame in 1917 when three shepherd children witnessed visions of the Virgin Mary.

During Salazar's rule, works on a monumental scale, were commissioned to commemorate the apparitions:

 

Football

Today there is Christiano Ronaldo.  When I was growing up it was Eusebio.  Born in the former Portuguese colony of Mozambique, he grew up playing football barefooted.  One of the greatest players of all time, he was Portugal's equivalent to his Brazilian contemporary, Pele.  In his fifteen years with Benfica he scored 317 goals in 301 appearances.

After England winning the World Cup in 1966, one of the happiest days of my childhood was in 1968, when Manchester United (starring George Best and Bobby Charlton) beat Eusebio's Benfica team to win the European Championship.

Fado

Like Flamenco, Fado features mournful tunes about hardship and loss.  Unlike flamenco, there are no beautiful dancers or zippy guitar music, to lighten the mood.  Michele and I went to a well reviewed Fado restaurant in Porto.  The main difference between this experience, and a trip to a dental hygienist, is that with a hygienist, you know it will soon be over.  Note to self:  do not always rely on Trip Advisor.

The real reason why the IMF keeps visiting Portugal

I always thought that the reason for the International Monetary Fund's ("IMF") frequent visits to Portugal, was either the level of unemployment:

or the fragile state of the country's finances:

Turns out I was wrong:

Cascais: Europe's 2018 Youth Capital

Cascais is an elegant seaside resort, half an hour outside Lisbon, that is full of rich tourists and retirees.  For some reason it was declared the 2018 Youth Capital.




This award is accompanied by an official poster showing what young people do, when they go wild and crazy:

Lisbon: The world's largest tram museum

If, as I do,  you like old trains and trams, you will love Lisbon. The transit authority continues to rely on prewar "remodelados" to clank you round Lisbon's ancient, narrow streets.

Photos: Porto's Street Art

Portugal: Terrible timing in Porto

Lent in Porto

Growing up as a Catholic in the UK, I combined an early appreciation of the joys of the local pub, with a respect for people like my parents, who had the willpower to abstain completely during Lent.

Now that I have retired and reached the age of 60, I thought it a good time to finally emulate them.  Initially the timing was great - not many inviting pubs in the Rwenzori Mountains, and Zanzibar is a Muslim country.  But we are now in Portugal and the temptations are multiplying.

Vinho Verde:  Portugal's "session wine"

A good Vinho Verde is fresh, fruity, slightly effervescent, and absolutely delicious.  It is also relatively light in alcohol (8.5% to 11%), so you can guzzle more of it before you start to regret it.

Jealousy is not an emotion that I am proud of, but I have to confess a certain envy, as I watched Michele enjoying suitable refreshment as we admired the view over the river Douro

The "Red Nectar"

Porto is of course named after the delicious fortified wine invented by the English (Editor: are you sure it's not the other way around?).

In this city there are a million ways to enjoy the stuff, but I cannot take advantage of any.

The bookshop that charges admission

All over North America book stores are being forced to close their doors.  Maybe they need to take a page out of this store's book and charge admission.  People line up for the privilege of buying a ticket just to go and see the store.

Mind you it's easier to charge admission, when you helped to inspire JK Rowling's vision of Hogwarts, and the interior looks like this:

Paris it ain't

Porto fully deserves its Unesco World Heritage designation:

But if you are looking for the sort of picture postcard perfection that you associate with places like York and the centre of Paris, then you might be disappointed.  This place definitely has a comfortable, lived in feel, that I happen to find appealing.

Chumbe Island: Surviving Jellyfish to see a Hawksbill Turtle

We have just come back from an overnight stay at the beautiful Chumbe Island Coral Park resort.  This is an environmental project run by two expatriates, the German founder, Sibylle Riedmiller and a young Canadian business graduate from Ryerson University.  The hope is that one day it will be run by local staff.  In the meantime the project aims to maximise the economic benefit to the local community - employing 45 people for a resort that has just 7 rooms.

Eco- tourism

Management choices attempt, wherever possible, to limit the environmental impact of the resort.

Each cabin is built on top of a 10,000 litre cistern for storing rainwater.  The island is currently experiencing a drought.  Nevertheless there was plenty of water for our showers.



Readers of this blog will know how much I appreciate flush toilets.  I was a little sceptical when I heard about the composting toilets.  Turns out that I should have been more open minded.

The bark mulch that was provided, did a fantastic job of keeping the place smelling nice.

Jellyfish and Turtles

On the snorkelling trip, we all got stung by the clouds of microscopic jellyfish in the water.  The stings were mild - not as bad as walking through a patch of nettles.  Afterwards, the stings affected each person differently.  One poor girl had a miserable night of it as her body reacted badly:

Michele was feeling the stings as much as anybody, but she had come to the island to see a turtle.  Our guide swum fast in pursuit of the elusive turtle.  Michele, not normally known for her love of water sports, kept up with no complaint.  Eventually we were rewarded with a sighting of the turtle.

  
Personally, I would have given up the chase as a lost cause if it was not for Michele.  As it was, by the time we actually found it, we were the only tourists still in the water.  We were able to follow the turtle as it swam around the reef.  Our presence did not seem to disconcert the turtle (Editor:  how would you know?).  Anyway after about ten minutes we decided that we should leave the poor creature alone.

Development: Different Takes from two impressive Muzungu women - (Editor's warning, long and academic)

"Muzungu" is the word used in East Africa to refer to white people - similar to the way the word "gringo" is used in Latin America.  Last night Michele and I were lucky enough to meet two impressive women able to share insights based on practical experience in one case, and academic research in the other.

Take 1:  A project that seems to tick all the boxes

By definition it is almost impossible to find a project that ticks all the boxes in terms of impact and long term viability.  In a typical scenario, a dynamic big hearted individual or group, does more than walk to the other side of the street when confronted by abject misery.  The problem, of course, is what happens when the founders are no longer around.  This is the toughest box to tick when it comes to building a sustainable project.

Finally, after visiting countries in Latin America, East and North Africa, we have stumbled on a project that seems to tick all the boxes for impact and long term viability:

This project is the Hands Across Borders charitable society's Jambiani Tourism Training Institute ("JTTI").   One of the ironies of Zanzibar tourism is that so many of the staff come from the mainland.  The reason for this is that in Zanzibar the government schools fail completely when it comes to imparting the rudiments of arithmetic and the English language.  Students graduate high school not knowing their times table.  Whatever the reasons for this situation, the result is that much of the economic benefit of the islands' hotels flows overseas. 

The JTTI addresses this problem head on.  Tuition is free, and places are reserved for students so poor that they cannot afford the fees at other colleges.  Students are also provided with the nutrition they need to study effectively.  Graduates can look forward to gainful employment with one of the islands' many hotels.

The "secret sauce" of this project is the adjacent guesthouse property (see the Air BnB description), which should generate the necessary funding for the indefinite future.

To understand how this was achieved it is necessary to know a little bit about the ups and downs that Pat, and her husband Dr Alistair Pirie, have had to go through along the way. 

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

One amazing part of the story is that prominent members of the local Jambiani community did not just twist Pat and Alistair's arms to start the project, they also came up with three quarters of an acre of prime beach front property to locate the project on.

As Jambiani has developed into a popular tourist destination, the value of this land endowment has increased exponentially.

The project's prospects  looked even brighter when the founders won World Bank funding for the construction of a guesthouse to generate an income for the vocational school.

However this a part of the world where good deeds are frequently punished.  Even though the money from the World Bank came through, and even though the builder was paid, the construction was left incomplete.  The matter is now before the courts, and may well be resolved by the year 2050.

No Evil Deed Goes Unrewarded

During Zanzibar's 1964 Revolution, thousands of the ruling Arab class were massacred. The survivors escaped to places like the Gulf, with little more than the shirts on their backs.  However many of them have subsequently prospered.  In many cases, through a mixture of ability and hard work, they have been able to ride the Gulf region's boom, to restore their family fortunes.

Incredibly, given the history, they still feel an affinity for Zanzibar and have set up a foundation for supporting worthwhile projects on the islands.  Pat and Alistair obtained the funding needed to complete the construction of the guesthouse, from this foundation.  The guesthouse is now open for business, and training at the JTTI will resume once sufficient funding has been generated by the guesthouse.

Take 2:  Re writing the accepted Chinese African narrative

The academic at our table was Dr Lucy Corkin, who earned her PhD from the London School of Oriental and African Studies by writing about the relationship between the Chinese and Angolan governments.  That work has been repackaged as a book:

The accepted Western narrative on China's role in Africa, is that a monolithic China plays the various African regimes for dupes, obtaining vast resources from corrupt governments in return for punitive loans and dodgy infrastructure.  In other words, they are repeating the trick of the early Dutch settlers who managed to buy Manhattan Island for the price of a bunch of trinkets.  Lucy, who hails from South Africa and speaks Mandarin, spent three years investigating this narrative using Angola as a case study.  

In the case of Angola, she found that country's elite had used the relationship with the Chinese to bolster their position in an astute manner.  They were far from being the dupes portrayed in the standard Western narrative.  Of course whether the man in the street derived any benefit from the relationship is a different issue - one that she does not investigate in her book.

Using Lucy's book as a pulpit for my own two cents on the subject....

What I like about this book's thesis is that it is a reminder of the "agency" perspective.  The agency perspective attempts to navigate between blaming the victim on the one hand, and giving a free pass to every murderous kleptocratic dictator on the other.  

From an agency perspective the outcome of any injustice is a function of two things:  first, the original injustice, second the response to that injustice.  In other words the consequences of an injustice are not necessarily predetermined.  They are also affected by the actions of those in a position to dictate the response to that injustice.

Nelson Mandela's heroic conduct is illustrative.  After the terrible injustices that he had endured, nobody would have been surprised if he had become just another brutal dictator pursuing a policy of violent retribution and personal enrichment.  He chose another path.

The contrast between modern day Chile and Argentina provides another example pointing in the same direction.  Both countries endured the rule of violent dictatorships backed by the U.S. in the 1980s.  Given this common legacy it is interesting to see the difference between the two countries now.  Chile is the richest country in South America, while Argentina is a basket case that continues to lurch from one crisis to the next.

The important thing about the agency perspective is that it asserts that the actions of an evil dictator like Idi Amin are not pre- determined, and we should not give him a free pass for all the terrible things that he did.

In 2014, an Amazon reviewer of Ruth First's book, "The Barrel of a Gun" using language that prefigured Trump observed:

The book covers Africa's Big Man syndrome, which is again rearing its ugly head.  The misappropriation and outright theft of assets and resources is sad.  Maybe the time has come to prosecute those in developed nations who make it all possible.

Am I the only person who finds these sanctimonious sentiments written by a non African irritatingly patronising? They imply that Africans themselves have no agency.

Far more bracing are the words of the great Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe.  In his 1983 book "The Trouble with Nigeria", he wrote:

"The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership.  There is nothing wrong with the Nigerian character.  There is nothing wrong with the Nigerian land or climate or water or air or anything else.  The Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal example which are the hallmarks of true leadership" 

Two weeks ago, a Nigerian newspaper, The Daily Trust, published a column where the writer observed that Achebe's trenchant criticisms are just as valid today as they were in 1983.

Dreaming in Zanzibari

We are born with the ability to day dream, but before too long that ability is lost to the demands of complexity and the pursuit of distraction.  I could not post this blog were it not for the accumulation of decades of complex coding.  

But even when we have the choice, we turn our back on day dreaming.  People lucky enough to retire with health and wealth, feel the need to make a job of it.  Communities are built around acres of fertile farmland which is soon drowned in fertiliser and pesticide, and kept green by draining the water table.  People grow exasperated chasing a little white ball around, as it refuses to go in the right direction.  Finally, they drown their sorrows at the 19th hole.

Life in Zanzibar is not perfect.  Its heritage is built on the Arab slave trade. There are all the opportunities for corruption and incompetence that you can expect of any regime that styles itself as a "Revolutionary Government".  Garbage is accumulating, aquifers are draining and the coral reefs are tenuous.  Education is far from adequate.....

But....but...but

Zanzibaris seem content.  Life (for the men!) revolves around the three pillars of prayer, fishing and sleeping - no alcohol, no tv, no internet.   In the meantime they have enough to eat, nature provides......Salaam-Aleikum.

Life at the Top and Bottom of the Food Chain in Ruaha

Top of the Food Chain

First clue we got that something was up, was the sight of vultures in the trees:

We speculated that there must be something dead being guarded by a predator.  That supposition was confirmed by the stench and sight of a dead giraffe.

And sure enough it was being guarded by its nemesis

  
and family

Bottom of the Food Chain

Life at the other end is not quite so dramatic

The beetle on the right is a guy.  He has his head and hands in the dirt, while he is pushing the ball of dung with his back legs.  The other one is a woman.  She is catching a free ride because she has very important work, don't you know.  She will soon be laying eggs in the middle of the ball of dung.  I would like to say I know how he feels, but I wouldn't dare!

Some signs you are just meant to obey

"I had a tent in Africa"

Mdonya Old River Camp brought out Michele's inner Karen Blixen

The bed was super comfortable

The tent even had an en suite bathroom complete with flush toilet and shower.  The shower water was heated by solar panels.

The only glitch was that a thirsty elephant had raided the water tank, thereby knocking out the supply of water to the tents.

Delicious food served with all the decorum of Downtown  Abbey, completed the sense of bygone elegance

- oddly enhanced by an audience of Impalas