get lost

Sitting in a cafe in Zanzibar. This place is widely billed as an exotic destination, which means it's full of pushy touts and dreadlocked European backpackers. I'm bad at tourism, in a general sense; I don't like looking at monuments, I don't like being lectured by tour guides, I don't take pictures, and I definitely am not interested in hearing what a great time Fran and Lippi had at the full moon party last month. Tourism exhausts me and makes me sad and I typically spend an inordinate amount of time in the hotel room. But I've ducked out briefly to a local cafe, chosen for convenience's sake, for lunch with a few friends. The menu caters to white South African tastes and is singularly unappetizing. I'm not precisely a food snob, but flying halfway around the world to a tropical island in the Indian Ocean and then ordering a pressed panini with french fries and complaining about how long it takes for the bill to come is entirely, entirely insane. I beg off lunch and buy an aluminum foil container of beef pilau with peli-peli from a guy on the road, and bring it back to the restaurant. But the food is unusually spicy, and in a moment of weakness, I order a "Cool Breeze" fruit smoothie to wash it down.


In the modern environment of continuous distraction, there are, broadly, three categories of things that taste good. The first is the category of things that taste good in a sort of ambient way, like junk food or purple grapes or spaghetti bolognese. I mean, sure they taste good, but it's possible to eat an entire box, or branch, or bowl, without even really noticing you've finished it. I mean, turn on America's Next Top Model, and simultaneously eat a box of Crunch 'n' Munch, and see which one commands more of your attention.

The second category would be things that taste good in a noticeable way, foodstuffs that demand your full attention and draw you back from whatever else you are doing, even if you're watching the World Series or on a date or something. They re-focus your consciousness back to that act, often so mindless, of actually eating, of consuming food that really tastes good. The best restaurants will achieve this effect regularly: Sripriphai in Queens, Galaxy in Maputo, Harold's Chicken Shack on the South Side. And, of course, a slice of mom's double-fudge chocolate cake with white frosting, which once won her the blue ribbon at the New Hampshire state fair. You can't really just eat it; instead you experience it. And you might have to lie down afterwards.

Then there is the third category, a category so rare that it's hard to verify it actually exists, and indeed while we can infer its existence from observed behaviors, we can't actually get a first-hand account. To wit, food so good it actually obliterates your conscious mind and leaves you in a dazed and incoherent trance. Your correspondent can count on one hand the number of such experiences in his life: a garlic bulb I once fished out of a simmering hotpot of szechuan peppercorns and bullfrog legs at Little Pepper in Queens; the over-the-coals fried chicken drumstick from AQ Fried Chicken in Bentonville, Arkansas; Grant Achatz' smoked duck with foam, the centerpiece, and masterpiece, of a 25-course tour menu; and a live sea urchin that I peeled off a rock in the Italian Riviera, and whose gonads I ate off a ballpoint pen.

And, against all reasonable expectations, I must add to that list the "Cool Breeze" fruit smoothie. All it is is mango, pineapple and yogurt. But mangoes are already pretty much the best fruit there is, and in high season in Africa they assume a syrupy, almost confectionary, goodness. The pineapples... have you ever had an African pineapple? Sweet, watery, and almost piercingly tangy. Holy crap are they good. And the yogurt! Raw and unpasteurized, alive basically, used to tie it all together, to cut the sweetness, and augment it, to take the sweetness to a level, fruit 2.0, meta-fruit, uber-fruit....

My dining companions ask me how it tastes, but I'm too preoccupied to answer, for with each suck on the straw I court the very brink of consciousness, and slurping out the last precious dregs of the glass, I take the plunge. My last thought before I black out is of Dupin's purloined letter, for if you ever want to hide something well, really well, you make it look like something it's not, something it cannot be, and who would ever think the 3,000-shilling fruit smoothie at the tourist trap on the beach in Zanzibar, advertised on the menu in comic sans font, was actually ambrosia, the nectar of the gods?


Exiting the fugue state, I find myself standing in the central courtyard of some sort of housing project. I am alone, and disoriented, and quite confused. I'm in Africa, clearly, but I'm not sure where, or how I got here, and indeed at this moment I am not even entirely sure who I am. I am wearing two nylon bracelets and a ridiculous mesh trucker hat; in my hand is a bundle of some sort of exotic fruit† that I don't remember buying. The buildings to my left and right are each about seven stories high, some kind of decayed afro-brutalist relics, each maybe thirty years old, and dappled here and there in black (water-stains) and white (sun-blasted concrete.) Like all housing projects, the architecture of the place is menacing and dehumanizing, and though the people in the courtyard are friendly, and return my vacant smiles, I feel the need to make a hasty exit.

Ducking left into an alleyway I hear the muzzeins, which stir most of the men to action, and making my way through the unfamiliar streets, I can't seem to go two blocks without passing another mosque. I pause at the entrance to one of them, and the men quietly skirt around me to enter, and I peek inside to the washroom and watch their quiet ablutions. Around the corner of the building, through ornate ironwork windows, I watch them bow in unison toward the most holy of places. And there are clues here to be had; I'm in Africa, everyone's a muslim, I'm on an island... Zanzibar, right? And if this is Zanzibar, then I can trace the direction of their salaams on an invisible line to Mecca, several thousand kilometers to the north, and suddenly I'm oriented. I watch them pray several times, but start to feel the weight of my interloping imposture, and turn away in a quiet sort of shame.

This is the slum, I guess, of Zanzibar, but "slum" is a relative term here, and in fact the houses though small, seem clean and well-organized and are spaced at reasonable intervals. And what really perplexes me is that the place doesn't smell bad in the least. Walking further I am surprised to feel metal under my feet, and looking down I see a manhole! A functioning municipal sewer, here in one of the least-developed corners of the globe! And this cynic's heart is warmed, ever so slightly.

Later I reach a courtyard where a small crowd of children is gathered around a game of tabletop carom. They see me, and gesture wildly, and I remember the fruit I'm holding. Peeling one off the branch, and feeling its strange and spiky skin in my hand, I throw it high into the air, and watch the little boys cluster around to catch. I do this several times, until the kids take the game beyond the bounds of fair play. I watch them shove and shout at each other, and having sown my seeds of discord, walk on.

Enter Gabriel, a tout. He knows me already, knows my name and where I'm staying, even though I have no memory of meeting him. He wears a cylindrical hat and a robe and I give him a piece of fruit. He guides me to a main thoroughfare where the hum of electrical generators drowns out all conversation. Zanzibar, I now remember, has been without power for over three months, and those who can afford to do so have moved entirely off-grid. We stop at a roadside vendor in a nook away from the noise, and I buy Gabriel a coffee and ask him about the current state of affairs.

"It is all the fault of Karume," he says. "Karume. We call him simbam kidogo. The little lion."

Then his voice gets quiet.

"Our Mugabe."

I don't know the details, but of course he's probably right. Karume is the "president" of Zanzibar, an island which is notionally a part of Tanzania but exists in a semi-autonomous gray area, with its own president and parliament. Details are hazy at this moment of limited awareness, but I remember reading an account of some of the lesser sins of his venal administration in a recent issue of The Economist. Certainly a kickback scheme involving the mark-up, or even outright theft, of electrical equipment would be right up his alley.

And didn't I just see his face somewhere? Fishing into my pocket I pull out a 200-shilling coin, and there's his face, emblazoned on the front. I show it to Gabriel and he laughs. I dig deeper into my pockets for clues, searching for lost time, and pull out a lesson in history. Here's a 5-shilling coin, from the eighties, entirely worthless, with Nyerere smiling on the front. And here's an annular 1-shilling coin from the British Tanganika Territory, minted in 1949. And here's a coin from Deutsche OstAfrika, minted 1908. And here's one printed in Swahili, older than both of us by a century, still using the original Arabic lettering from which the language originated.

Gabriel is perplexed. "Where did you get these?"

"I don't know."

He looks at me. "I want to show you something."

We walk for a long time, out of the slum, across a soccer field, past several mosques gilded in turquoise and green. Occasionally I peel off another fruit from my bunch and toss it to a little kid. Finally we arrive at a broad thoroughfare flanked by enormous sycamores.

"These trees. Planted by Germans."

"Really?"

"Yes. They are over 100 years old."

In the shade of one sits a crowd of maybe fifty older women, clad in colorful congas and hijabs. They are arranged in a circle, and in the middle is the eldest, who is leading some sort of call-and-response prayer circle. She is singing in Swahili, or maybe Arabic, I can't really tell, and is so old she needs help reading the book. Standing in the shade of the gigantic tree, planted a century ago under the direction of German colonizers, listening to these woman sing and pray, I begin to feel again the weight of my imposture.

Until Gabriel, unexpectedly, begins to hold my hand. I look at him, startled, and then back to the woman, and she looks up suddenly, and we lock eyes. She seems angry at first, but her expression softens, and reforms into something more quizzical, the face itself a question, an expression that asks, what are you doing here, mzungu?

And I don't know.


†Upon later reflection I decided that these were litchees, but, after a long and acrimonious discussion with my Chinese-born co-worker, I now concede that they are in fact rambutans.