This will hurt me...

  Night-time driving. Midway Point, Tasmania. May 2021. The Famished Road by Ben Okri There is certainly some lovely writing in Ben Okri's  The Famished Road . Lovely writing that delivers many exotic and imaginative stories. Some of these stories are rooted in the certainty of the real world. Others exist on another otherworldly plane. It's just that there is so much of it. So many words, so many deviations, departures and detours from the story and the point that I do believe that you could skip three hundred pages and you wouldn't really notice. The entire novel exists in a kind of fugue state with characters cycling in and out of death and sleep and work and life and reality and unreality that the reader themselves surely also drifts in and out of consciousness (this reader felt like he did). I suspect that this maddening aspect of the tale is itself for life in Africa, so perhaps the point is well made. However, I am not sure that 600-odd pages are required to make it...

Doctor Doctor, help me, I'm seeing stripes ! Melbourne Zoo, April 2011. I like zebras. They look good. They make cute noises. They trot about like show ponies. They have impressive backsides and powerful thighs. There are worse-smelling animals in the world. Yes, if I can swing it, I think that we'll be aiming to get Ezra a zebra for a pet next birth. Zebras keeping an eye out for marauding giraffes. Melbourne Zoo, April 2011. Well, a zebra and a penguin.

There is one pastime that is making extreme headway into our present lives - for both Henry and Ezra - that is, of course, puzzles . Here Henry reconstructs Africa for us, mired deep in the Congo Basism trying to sort out the difference between São Tomé and Príncipe and Gabon . Dare I say it, but our Henry already has a firmer grasp on geography than 98% of adult Australians!

Concrete, bricks, leaves, grass, trees... We've got the makings of a town here! This photo was taken down near the blubber pots here on Salamanca Lawns. As canny readers will have already noted (see the "Currently Reading" section on the side bar), I am very much enjoying Chinua Achebe's thoroughly excellent Things Fall Apart , years later than I first intended! If you've not already, pick it up. Aside from a general Molly Meldrum-esque "do yourself a favour" [and doesn't that pinpoint me in cultural, geographical and temporal place?] I thought it would be nice to share a thought that resonated with me from the text: "No matter how prosperous a man was, if he was unable to rule his women and his children (and especially his women) he was not really a man. He was like the man in the song who had ten and one wives and not enough soup for his foo-foo ." On that score, it shames me to say that I am not much a man! It's a great read thoug...

I have expended quite a few words on Robert Mugabe over the past few months, but really, I think that five words is all that you need: What an odious, obnoxious prick. His comment this time? Prior to his dodgy runoff election he comes out with : "Anyone who tries to undermine our land reform we will challenge. We are prepared to fight for our country or to go to war if we lose it - as happened to our forefathers." This is exactly the rhetoric that one could see in Spain prior to the Spanish General Election of 1936 (albeit from both sides in that case). We know what happened there .

Look at picture: Gambian President Yahya Jammeh. He says he hates gay people and wants to chop all of their heads off . Hmmmmm. Let me look at that photo again: Yeah, the thing is you see, you're still not convincing me...

I was looking at this photo essay from Foreign Policy magazine this morning, and one photo struck me in particular. It essentially was someone packing a briefcase full of cash. As I mentioned yesterday , with inflation running at over 100,000 percent, Zimbabwe's rate of inflation is currently the highest in the world. Now, like most I suspect, I'm struggling to get my head around what that means, and its broader implications for people. Using a couple of different online currency convertors, ZWD$1 million fetches roughly: AUS $37 or US $34 or Euro €21. Now this is achieved using flat currency transaction on market rate. In the real world, Zimbabweans would have to take whatever the black marketers are offering. The scantest of research reveals that the best that they might hope for out of that same ZWD $1 million is somewhere between US $3 to US $5. To be totally honest with you, I still can't get my head around it. Surely wages cannot keep up with that sort of inflation....

You may have heard that there has been an election going on in Zimbabwe. In what will be a test for democracy in southern Africa, the results may well decide the fate of liberal democracy in much of the under-developed world. The BBC has an interesting pictorial essay on the election, and it fits nicely with their streaming of 'on the ground' contributions and observations that have been solicited from all over the country. This is an excellent insight for those of us lucky enough to live in stable countries, and should remind us to be very thankful for our comparatively 'dull' electoral systems. The Times over the weekend featured an excellent article that spoke of the " the electricity of hope " that can be felt in the electoral processes of developing countries. In a result that has – to be frank – stunned me, independent monitoring groups have said that returns posted at about two-thirds of polling stations have given Tsvangirai 55% of the vote to Mugab...

Accra, Ghana Accra is the capital of West African nation of Ghana. First up, I have a declaration to make, perhaps a conflict. Every Ghanaian that I’ve met, I’ve liked, I’m not sure if that indicates bias, but best to declare it straight up. This intuitive ‘liking’ has no doubt influenced my desire to go to the place (and no doubt explains my lack of desire to ever visit Durban!). Anyway, an perhaps rather distressingly for me, the word ‘accra’ apparently derives from the word nkran which means ‘ants’ in the local tongue, a reference to the numerous anthills seen in the countryside around Accra. Now ants annoy me, but I have faith in the Ghanaian people to take care of any potential ant population problem. Accra is one of the wealthiest and most modern cities in the African continent, with a high quality of living by African standards, and according to my Ghanaian sources Accra is also known as being the continent's most ‘fun’ cities. I am told that the best way to visit Accra’s m...