Dar Es Salaam

Alleys and dirt and bicycles and eyes and signs made by the blind and the sun and painted cars and us. In the middle of all this. Slow moving minute hands. Dead hour hands. Men everywhere. Women without a smile between them. Mobile phones, jandles, sandals. Scowling heat catching a break in sketchy shade from trees that look like photosynthesis is the last thing they want to do. Like their father caught them photosynthesising as a sapling and made them photosynthesis ‘the whole pack’. Black shining faces. Women with wide shuffling walks - in between somewhere they don’t want to be going somewhere they won’t want to be. Limp handshakes. Men with one AK47 between three. Who aims? Who squeezes? Buses tombstone above our car filled with staring faces. Alleys that would swallow us whole if we left the road into them – like the white lines are the blankets of our beds and the monsters under us know that anything under the blankets is ‘safe’. Portraits of a leader. No flags. Sun bleached blue paint. Finger smudged red paint. Tiles swept thin. Vinyl handbags. Vinyl belts. TV’s half on channel. The Indian faces that have come to symbolise ‘middle-man’ in every country I have visited. Nothing uniform – especially uniforms. Streets made with dirt and with sun and with slow deals and with nothing. The smell of coking fires at the airport. The dry mouths that could swallow us. Ungainly gone-ness through sheer numbers that spew out of those dry smoking alleyways. Hot and wide like toothless mouths with plastic bag dentures that cling to fences – caught by surprise like a boxers molar on a canvas… It’s nearly 10am.