OK so this is about 2 weeks late.
Last week quite busy – actually every day goes by at a good clip, even weekends. But the thing was my colleague and I had back-to-back interviews with Africa’s two largest banks in one day and you can’t beat copy like that. I’m learning to tell at least one African language apart from all the 6-7 others – Xhosa, which is the heritage of Nelson Mandela. There is a soft clicking sound to make every time one encounters the letter ‘X’ so one of the bank CEOs we chatted with was Mr. Nxasana - *click*aasana would be how to pronounce his name.
My colleague and I are off to Gaborone – pronounced Haborone – tomorrow to cram in a slew of interviews with the likes of De Beers, SABMiller, a Shanghai-based private Chinese enterprise and the country’s state power utility to discuss everything from the diamond industry to China-Africa ties to the power crisis facing southern Africa and Africa in general. Neither of us have ever been and we are still a bit puzzled at exactly how spread out Gaborone as that will affect our timeliness from one meeting to the next. Google map isn’t very definitive and I guess it doesn’t help when addresses in the city are listed under plot numbers. Well I guess we lay the best plans possible and the rest we shall just have to fly by the seat of our pants. We come back to Joburg on Wednesday evening.
Funny thing is there are so many cafes and restaurants around where I am but I’ve yet to really have an African meal – though I will say a Castle Lager is great; as are the generous helpings of 1 glass of house wine; as are the spectacular 7pm thunder and electric lightning storms in Joburg that occur like clockwork regularly.
The local cabs – technically minivans – remain mysterious. The ones the locals ride are hailed by how one points one’s hand and the only one I’ve learned is sticking the forefinger up to mean Joburg. But it is different hand signals if you want to go to Sandton or Soweto or Pretoria or any local neighborhood and the only way to learn the hand signals is to ask passengers in the cab – and I have yet to see a non-black passenger crammed in these cabs that can hold 15 people at a time with no seatbelts. And giving the taxi fare is also a collective process whereby the onus is the the persons sitting closest to the front of the cab that has to collect the fare, organize change, and hand over the correct sum to the driver – of course this I learned from the cabs I take – plush cars prearranged by a hotel that are really eating into my budget but are a necessity for staying safe.
Sandton, where our office is, is perhaps the richest square mile in Africa I’ve been told. It is so modern – of course not as shiny new as Beijing’s central business districts – and one could be deceived in thinking the rest of Joburg, or South Africa - and if you are really not thinking about it Africa overall – is this way. It’s fairly fine to walk around during the day, though it is hot in summer. When you see the inner city of Joburg and also Pretoria it is as bad, and at times worse, than the baddest city blocks of Los Angeles or New York. Contrast that with the suburbs here further afield than Sandton and it feels like Green Valley in Las Vegas or middle Missouri – it’s pretty flat around the city – and some of the neighborhoods are like a Desperate-Housewives-but-with-kids feel when you see designer mums out for brunch with their little ones in enclosed communities and huge-ass houses – and why are most kids I see around all barefoot!
Hi folks