Dry Africa
This is story form my childhood in Kitwe, Zambia Africa.
Dry Africa belongs to the following groups:
AFRICAN ART AND PHOTOGRAPHYLets begin this one in Darkest Africa, a place close to my heart,
A story from diffused memory, enlarged by a child’s innocent eye.
I remember, the seasons, the skies pale and blue, close enough to touch.
There are but two seasons in Africa, the long dry of winter. Stretching unending blue without horizons, blistering hot in the bright yellow sun, mercifully cool in the shade. This is a time when life slows as the waters dry and the leaves turn brown.
But its also a time of patient waiting, a never ending sense of great anticipation. The sun in the dry season is potent, a force to respect. It burns with unceasing brightness, sucking at all and every bit of moisture from a parched earth. It rises fast in the morning, a brown and yellow orb, blink and you will miss its considered rush over the horizon. Ever eager to spread its warmth on a dry land. In the Midday it hurts your eyes as it blazes high overhead and still those forever blue skies challenge the imagination. In the Afternoon, as it sinks slowly on the horizon. A fiery orange orb that paints that once blue sky in multicolored tones that have no name in human tongues, in its slow descent it seems content with its work.
There are smells, potent and distinct, that assail you in Africa, each passing day is like a smorgasbord of nasal challenges. It starts with the moistness of morning, where the vegetation, as if in relief from the burning sun releases it many secrets. By midmorning you will start to smell the first fires as the day begins. By midday the smell of people dominates the air. Sweat and labor of daily life takes its toll on those eager to fill the mouths of their kin. By afternoon the air carries dust and smoke on the fragrant air. From distant fires that ravage the land, fires that start from as little as a piece of broken glass carelessly tossed by uncaring hands. But evening is the magic time where smell in like a multicolored robe that flits and flutters in cooling breezes. Flowers, despite all hardships release their fragrant scents on the air, in the evening. A calm descends, the group mind uncoils its daily cares, and a strange quiet fills the air. This was my favorite moment of the day.
Then as the early evening progresses the air is filled with the sound of insects, having waited through the heat of the day, the air will fill with all manner of exoskeleton rustling and rubbing’s. By then amongst the floral scents and settling dust the smell of cooking fires spreads on the evening breeze. Soon to be complimented by aromas of cooked treats and dinners. But this is brief and soon passes on the winds. As night descends the parched earth once again relaxes and cool moist air fills the space between you and the universe reeling overhead.
For nine months of the year this is how it goes, but there is change all along. In time there are no more floral blooms in early evening, and the scents of sweat and dust dominate more and more. Morning dew no longer prevails and even fires lack fuel of substance to consume. A kind of dry death envelops the land where shade is a scant luxury of indefinable worth.
And the blue skies are watched with great anticipation, soon everyone will say, it will come. As true as the earth and sky and the burning sun, so is the Monsoon. Perhaps it’s the people as a group mind that set the stage for the emotion. A thing that can be felt and understood, even by the most immature. Instinct is not intrinsic, in my humble opinion, but a heart-set bought about by many minds coordinated by need and repetition, expectation and belief. Soon it will come.
And then, one day you wake up, and the azure blue of the sky seems even clearer and more verdant. The yellow light of the sun becomes a daub paintbrush on a brown land. The air is clear in an exhilarating way, and you know it has begun. You rush to the highest point on a flat land and scan the horizon for an end to the blue sky.
Yet it is but the beginning, a slow build towards an undefined promise. Where I lived we were very high up, and as the weeks progressed and the air grew thick. We could see storm clouds all around, taunting and teasing like a promise of eternal love. Each day we would climb to see if the noose had tightened on us. On every direction you see there would be thunderclouds on the horizon, which in the evenings would flash with lightning and distant rumbles. Oh but what a time this was, for a most strange and unusual trick nature had devised in this place. For as the storms surrounded us, the very air became a lens on the sky. I swear to you that the sun and the moon grew to twice their size and the stars blazed like fairy lights.
Light a truly potent force, passed in strange and wondrous ways, tricking the mind. But still the real force was the anticipation, and nothing in my life has ever measured up to this experience. As the noose would tighten, and the storm clouds grew towering into the sky. The air would grow thick as lead, breathing was a challenge, as humidity and pressure grew to unimaginable discomfort.
And then one morning you would walk out and discover a gray sky above, boiling and rolling like bread dough in a mixer. The heat and pressure an ominous and potent force. The excitement in a young boy is beyond words. The ozone on the air, the brooding oppressiveness and great expectation of wrath and release.
On this particular day, I was in grade 5, And the rains did come that afternoon. Sweeping the dry land in furious rivers. Dried up creeks became rivers to challenge the Zambezi, Overflows seemed like the mighty Mosi a Tunio. The pent up fury of a months build-up would spend itself in a mighty blow that lasted a few minutes. There is a great story I was told; never to get caught out in the first breaking storm of the monsoon, as so much water falls from the sky that there is no air in between the drops. So the cautionary tale goes, a little boy can drown in such a downpour. Thankfully banana leaves make the best umbrellas.
The monsoon lasts for 3 months where the rain falls, and each storm is a memory to behold, the dry land changes in wondrous ways. But perhaps that’s another story.
Damian
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