Crossing the boarder to get into Zambia in the middle of the night I realized that I didn’t have US$5 or local equivalent to buy the visa to get in. I scanned the queue and focused in on two young looking white travellers. They were going to Livingstone as well, and I encouraged them not only to stay at the hostel I was booking in to but also to lend me the 5 bucks until then.
In Livingstone I had planned to get some Zimbabwean million and trillion dollar notes and wondered if I would have to cross the boarder into Zimbabwe somehow to get some. Right outside the backpacker’s door was a young hustler.
“Can I get you something?” he asked.
“Like what?”
“Anything at all. You want it, I get it”
“Ok, I want a trillion dollar note”
He pulled out a wad of notes from one of his many pockets.
There were a few ten and twenty million dollar notes, and a few ten and twenty billion dollar notes.
“Any trillion ones?”
“Come with me, one minute walk I can get you some. You smoke hash? Can get you hash!”
Got to love hustlers for their resourcefulness!
Later I was walking up the main street of Livingstone when I met Thomas. I was buying grilled corn on the cob from a street seller. He stopped to tell me that he was surprised and amazed to see a white person eating street food. I told him I was hungry for a proper meal, and did he know somewhere I could get good, cheap local food. He was even more shocked and said he will take me to eat Sima. Leading me there he kept asking if I was sure I wanted to go and if I was scared.
I ate my Sima, shredded salty spinach and beef with my fingers, as I had gotten used to doing in West Africa. Thomas was really and truly amazed then. He kept repeating that white people don’t eat with their fingers, and he did an imitation of someone very delicately eating with a knife and fork.
I didn’t understand a lot of what he said, he talked all the time, he talked fast, and most of his sentences ended in ‘what what’:
“White people come to Zambia with ideas about what what. But the black people here don’t want to work, they want to relax and what what. So the white people do this and that and what what… you understand?”
I nodded as though I did, I got the general gist, but I really felt like the key verbs in his arguments were missing.
And then he really shocked me.
Out of nowhere he asked me if I was a lesbian.
“What! No! Why? What! No!”
Perhaps I was a little too quick to answer and deny it. Perhaps my eyes were wide with fear and my ‘no’ was a little too high pitched and a little too defiant, because he asked me several more times.
Apart from in the little gay nook in Melville Johannesburg, no African had questioned my sexuality. In fact, I usually went to great lengths with my over embellished ‘boyfriend back home’ story. Thomas wasn’t buying the boyfriend story.
After he asked me a few times I told him that if he asks me again I’ll leave, and he didn’t ask again.
I wonder what would have happened if I had said yes. He may not have cared at all. He said he wasn’t gay but because he worked in a 5-star hotel on the Zambezi he had seen gay people before.
It didn’t feel right denying who I am, but I had just arrived in a country where homosexuality is illegal. It would have been confessing a crime to a total stranger. And worse than that, who I am and what I do is considered a mortal sin, and in most of Africa the law of God is even more powerful than the law of man.
The next day I went to Victoria Falls with the two young British girls who lent me the 5 dollars and shared a room with me in the hostel. They were only 19, had ridiculously posh accents and referred to their parents as ‘mummy and daddy’. We all did the 150m gorge swing together in the morning, I jumped on my own and they jumped tandem.
“Oh! I would like to buy the video” one said to the other “But I think I may have sworn when we jumped and I simply cannot let mummy know I used such language”.
The smoke that thunders was quite wondrous. You could hear it roaring from kilometers away. We slowly trudged the path around it, yelling at each other over its thunder. All around was just thick white mist that poured down on us like torrential rain. Everything was drenched, including my camera which even though it had been wrapped tightly in plastic it stopped working.
The falls were powerful and impressive, even though we couldn’t actually see much.
I wanted to bunji over the falls, 111m free fall, it would have been awesome. But as I stood on top of the bridge looking down I realized it would only really be fun if there was someone there to egg me on, to cheer loudly for me and pet my back after. And for the first time in a while I felt lonely.
I cooked dinner at the hostel that night. I slipped over in the kitchen and hit my head, I burnt my hand on the fry pan and bit my tongue whilst eating. I cried out of frustration more than anything.
Before I left Livingstone the next day I went to a bureau de change office to get some USD. Yet another framed portrait of the president glared down on me from the wall.
“Why does your president never smile?” I asked the cashier.
“He is confused” he replied, “He is friends with Mugabe”
“That explains why he’s so bitter” I replied.
I would have liked to talk about politics more but his phone rang and he left the room.
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