Magnificently sad...

Bad roads, speed bumps, detours, traffic and a border crossing. It took us close to eight hours to cover just under three hundred kilometres from Nairobi to Arusha on the first leg of the journey. At the Kenyan border G discovered that there was an oil leak and when he tilted the cab to check what was wrong, he discovered that the repair done in Nairobi was shoddy and one of the plugs on the diesel pump was missing – probably because it had not been tightened – but with the help of a piece of broom stick and a couple of screwdrivers, the immediate problem was quickly solved even though G had to (casually) walk across the border into Tanzania with some locals to buy twenty litres of oil.

From the outskirts of Arusha, the bustle slowly intensified with over-laden trucks labouring at the lead of an unruly assortment of cars and buses and motorbikes weaving in between. Ramshackle wooden structures lined the sidewalks with interspersed buildings of a more ‘conventional’ design and every single one conducting some sort of business. Blackened young men selling large bags of coal piled high and held in place with woven string. Down the side roads people were busy living profusely!

We camped at a site just outside of the city where a week before there was a serious flood leaving one of the overland trucks bogged down in more than a meter of mud. Mop up operations were underway and while the group went off to the Serengeti, I stayed behind to breathe. The owners of the Snake Park Camp site are a beautiful elderly South African couple who moved to Tanzania twenty years ago to establish a sanctuary for snakes. Deon helps to manage the facility and is a friend of one of their sons and the few nights I spent chatting to them at the bar reminded me of similarly pleasant times spent with good friends in the Karoo.

On Tuesday morning I walked along the highway to the weekly vegetable market for potatoes and hundreds of traders with bags and boxes of goods were arriving by the busload. As I took it all in, I wondered what the streets of South Africa would have been like if bylaws and policy had not killed informal trade.

Before we eventually left Arusha, we stopped at the Cultural Heritage Museum which has curated the most magnificent collection of African painting and sculpture that I had ever seen – a collection of such scope that it alone could one of ensure the City’s title of being the Capitol of African Art. Intricate sculptures from massive ebony logs, of entire families over the generations, others of folk tales or mythical characters and all with such exquisite craftsmanship and exact detail with one of the larger pieces reputed to have taken eighteen years to complete. And then, housing this mind-blowing overload is the museum itself. Designed by a local architect and artist who created a spiral of continuous wall-and-floor space to accommodate what could comfortably be called a home for the artwork on display. And yet, once again reflecting on my moment of awe, I think about the state of the South African National Gallery in Cape Town with its mostly insipid colonial paintings and marked lack of support of local contemporary artists – let alone the privately owned galleries (such as this) that follow every mindless commercial trend to ensure that great South African art is deemed a foolish cousin to the purely decorative clichés that get scooped up by a piddle of buyers.