The things we do to Africa...

We used to rape the continent, for gold and slaves, and we still keep kicking Africa around like a football. We dump our worst products on it. We charge it more in loan interest than we give in aid. And every now and then we send in troops to various bits, usually from the former colonial power, to make sure the locals know they’re not really in charge.

Why, we even use it from time to time as a source of photo ops for our failing politicians. Did you see David Cameron, at the Mandela funeral, trying to get in on the Danish PM’s selfie with Barack Obama? The man’s shameless.

Is that Cameron trying to muscle in on Helle Thorning Schmidt's 
selfie with an actual world leader?

Now it’s emerged that ‘Boris Bikes’ are beginning to turn up in the Gambia. For the uninitiated, ‘Boris Bikes’ are bicycles available for hire in various places in London, which can be ridden to other places and dropped off again. They’re called ‘Boris Bikes’ in honour of the modest and self-effacing Mayor of London, Boris Johnson.

You get what honour you can, I suppose.

It seems they’re now being stolen in large numbers and shipped off to the Gambia where they’re being spotted in villages. Perhaps we should be grateful that Britain is at last making a little restitution for all the exploitation of the past, even if only unofficially and as a result of criminal action.

Photo from the Daily Telegraph of a Boris bike in the Gambia

My only regret is that they’ve only taken Boris’s bikes, and not Boris himself. Still, the Gambia is run by an unhinged egomaniac convinced he’s God’s gift to mankind, so they really don't have a need for Boris, unlike his bikes.

Someone who does seem to be invading Africa in the near future is former Barclays Bank Chief Executive, Bob Diamond. You may remember that he had to leave Barclays under a bit of a shadow: the bank had just been caught fiddling the rates at which banks lend money to each other.

Diamond provided a striking demonstration of the principle by which senior executives only receive their astronomical remuneration because they take responsibility for what happens in the organisations they lead. On his watch, the bank lost about half its share value, and he claimed not to have known anything about the rate rigging. So he suffered the penalty of giving up some £20 million of bonus, meaning he left with only about £3 million. Practically destitute.

And now he’s back. He and a mate have launched a new company, Atlas Mara Co-Nvest, which is designed to go looking for exciting new prospects in Africa.

Aaah. Doesn't Bob Diamond look like an amiable rogue?
But I'm not sure of the amiability

Things don’t look promising. I mean, the company’s an investment vehicle and they can’t even spell ‘invest’. And it’s likely to focus on Financial Services, the field in which Diamond has won such a reputation. Or do I mean notoriety?

We blessed Africa with the trans-Atlantic slave trade, constant colonial wars, borders that don’t correspond to ethnicity, a white regime in South Africa that gave the world apartheid. 

And now we’re sending them Bob Diamond. Haven’t they suffered enough?

This lady keeps returning

Surrounded by miserable stories, of wars getting nowhere and radioactivity getting everywhere, it’s a relief to come across at least one piece of good news. That was provided by the Lady of the Loch.

She’s a female osprey, apparently also known as a fish eagle, who has made it back to Scotland from her annual migration to the Gambia for a record 21st time. She’s the oldest osprey in Britain and perhaps the oldest in the world. Her nest is now the size of a double bed, she’s laid 58 eggs and has launched 48 fledglings onto the world.

Lady keeps adding to her nest

What I particularly liked about her story is that it reminded me of part of my own family. My son and daughter-in-law live in Scotland too. There they inhabit a pleasant nest significantly larger than a double bed and which, like Lady, they enjoy improving. It's a great place for a fledgling, in this instance our granddaughter Aya.

And in January they joined us for a memorable trip to the Gambia.

Of course, there are differences. They brought the fledgling with them. What’s more we didn’t spend the whole of the autumn and winter there, but just a week – work commitments and budgetary limitations affect us rather more than Ospreys. But like Lady, I felt invigorated by the trip and today, as I walk around London in shirtsleeves enjoying the return of spring, I feel that the brief break in the sun gave me just the strength I needed to get through all the greyness of the winter.

Aya: a fledgling in Lady's wintering place, The Gambia

Now we need the sun to last a while over here. For Lady’s sake as well as our own.

The Gambia: stalker's paradise

There's stalking and stalking, there's pulling a bird on a beach and finding an extraordinary bird on a beach.

I did some stalking of my own during our recent trip to the Gambia. As usual, the victim objected; as usual, I persisted in my stalking.

The setting was a particularly wonderful area of the beach, where the waters of a creek flowed across it into the sea.

The bird in question was a glorious white Egret who liked to hang around this place, taking the sun, enjoying the calm and, presumably, occasionally swallowing the unwary fish (it turns out she was a bit of a stalker too).

Because I liked the place so much I kept going down to this favourite spot of hers and giving her a bad time. I have the photos to prove it.


‘Oh God, not you again… You were here yesterday’

Her body language was clear. ‘Go away,’ she was saying, ‘I don't know what you're after, and whatever it is, I'm not selling it. Leave me in peace.’ But I was persistent.

‘Look, I’m moving away. Don't follow me. Stay where you are.’

But not even the clearest of signals could put me off. I kept right on stalking until she was forced to resort to her last option, flight.

‘That’s it, I’ve had enough, I’m out of here’

To be fair, Danielle too had her infatuations. And of course she takes better photos. So here’s one of a bird that she took a shine to and then forced to take flight, just as I did with mine.

‘Crawl away and die somewhere, why don't you, if you want me to show an interest?’

Good picture, isn’t it? Fine creature, too. But a vulture? Doesn’t quite have the the grace of my Egret, does it? I mean she was special.

If she even was a she.

Africa, land of dreams where even nightmares can be fun

Isn’t it great when things happen just as you’d expect them to? Even if the events themselves are far from pleasurable.

At the back end of the sixties, my parents were living in what had once been the Congo, was the Zaïre then, and today has reverted to being the Congo again (the one wittily referred to as the ‘Democratic Republic’). They took my brother and me for a Christmas holiday in the bush, and as we drove at nightfall into a market town which, it turned out, the President of the Republic was visiting the next day, we were arrested by trigger-happy, drunken soldiers. Or perhaps it was the police. The town had been taken over by detachments from both forces, they were much the worse for drink, they were armed and loathed each other, so they were generating the kind of atmosphere that would make a meeting of Sarah Palin supporters look tame.

The rifles across the bonnet of our Land Rover might have been the start of something classically African with an ugly ending involving bodies in a ditch, although generally that’s the kind of thing that happens to locals rather than to European visitors. In any case, things weren’t quite as nasty in the Congo then as now, and in the end it only took the half bottle of whisky that reduced our sentry to maudlin complaints about the difficulties that beset his life and a few dollars that made them easier to contemplate, to persuade him to turn his back and let us drive away.

Now fast forward over four decades and our recent trip to the Gambia. We decided to visit a game reserve in Senegal, partly to see some impressive animals – and there were a few – partly to tick another box: ‘Senegal – been there’. Unfortunately, although those of us who had British passports had no trouble, three of us were travelling on French papers and for some reason the Gambians have it in for the French. Odd, isn’t it? I mean, the Brits were the colonial power. Why the special aversion towards the colonialists of the country next door?

Anyway, the French passport holders had had to get themselves visas, at the last moment, before we even set out for the Gambia. And at the border, we ran into difficulties again.

‘I’m afraid your visas are for a single visit,’ said the grey-clad corporal behind the desk, ‘if I stamp your passports now to authorise your exit from the Gambia, you’ll have to buy new visas on the way back. At 350 Dalassis.’ Mental calculators went to work, contents of wallets were brought to mind. Yes, three times 350 – we could do that. We’d come this far, we’d go ahead.

The cynical among us thought ‘yep, this is Africa. You can fix anything with a few banknotes.’ For a moment I felt a burst of superiority because we don’t have that kind of corruption in Western Europe, but then it occurred to me that at least African corruption is democratic: we can all practice it, whereas in Britain you can buy the whole government, but only if you own a bank or a major company.

We visited the game park, we returned to the border. Our little corporal in grey had been replaced by a large sergeant in khaki.

‘Ah, yes, my colleague talked about you. He made a mistake. A big mistake. As of January the first, the price for the visa has gone up.’ Why wasn’t I surprised? ‘It’s now a thousand Dalassis.’

Now that wasn’t so funny, even though it’s actually only £25. The problem was that we didn’t have the cash with us. Besides, I don’t mind being bent, but I dislike being chiselled. We all burst into protest.

‘But if we’d known we wouldn’t have gone...’

‘We don’t have the money...’

‘It was your colleague who told us...’

The colleague reappeared. ‘Yes, yes, I know,’ he said, ‘it was my mistake. Just wait here. I’ll go and see my manager.’

He reappeared a few minutes later. He sat and the desk and changed an entry in a hand-written ledger.

‘It was our fault. This time you will pay nothing.’

‘We want you to come back,’ explained the sergeant, ‘so even though it was you Westerners who invented visas and charges, we will waive the payment on this occasion. But next time be more careful.’

‘Next time,’ I said, ‘we’ll come to the Gambia and stay in the Gambia.’ The sergeant liked this idea, and suddenly everyone was laughing and smiling.

‘I want to give you a kiss,’ said Danielle to the corporal.

There was a horrified silence followed by pandemonium. The corporal was trying to back his chair through the wall, giggling hysterically as he tried to keep away from Danielle who had come round to his side of the desk. The sergeant was guffawing; then he issued an urgent instruction:

‘No, no, wait,’ and turning to another policeman, he said, ‘don’t let him go,’ pointing to the corporal.

He positively ran out of the room, showing a surprising turn of speed, as big men sometimes do. He returned with another corporal only slightly smaller than him, and in the same dun-coloured uniform.

‘Now kiss him,’ he announced. The chaos started again, with the sergeant and his corporal applauding loudly. Danielle got behind her target and planted a kiss on the top of his head.




Kissing the corporal: an unusual brush with African bureaucracy

And so our gloriously African brush with authority ended without our having to pay anything, after all, and with laughter all round. Because this was the Gambia, and not Rwanda or Eastern Congo, and Gambians, as they never tire of telling you, think that it’s ‘nice to be nice.’

Postscript

The Gambia is basically just a strip of land round a river. We had taken the ferry across on the outward journey; on the return, that would have meant a long wait. So we took one of the open, wooden boats that many Gambians use instead.

They often talk about ‘dancing boats’, meaning that they tip alarmingly to one side or the other at the slightest provocation, but ‘never capsize’, or so they claim. We noticed that a great many Gambians were determined to wait for the next ferry, even for an hour or more, rather than entrust their lives to those boats. Since we've returned, Danielle's turned up any number of blogs warning people never, at any cost, to take these boats.

A dancing boat seen from the ferry

It’s true that on the other side, our boat hit the pier and got caught on a sandbank – we had to help get it off by tipping it from one side to the other, and were nearly precipitated into the water for our pains. But hey, the weather was lovely, the water was calm, and the boat did at least provide life jackets. Not enough to go round, and the flotation material had mostly rotted away, and you couldn’t close them anyway, but it was a nice gesture.

And in any case we made it. And enjoyed chatting to the people round us. And having another fine African experience.

Cold turkey in a warm climate

Addiction is a terrible blight on the lives it affects, isn’t it?

I’ve been a week without internet, and therefore a week without being able to put up any blog posts. Fortunately, this experience of sudden deprivation, this cold turkey treatment as it's known in the business, didn’t reduce me to the status of a gibbering wreck – or at least, not so much as you’d notice if you knew me. I put this down to the compensating features of our surroundings.



Last Tuesday's lunch venue went a long way to compensate for lack of internet access. If only next Tuesday's could be as attractive


High among these were the presence of three generations of our family – Danielle and I representing the oldies, a full complement of sons and partners, and even the lone representative of the next generation, our granddaughter Aya. We had a week's holiday together in the Gambia, enjoying ourselves without any major disputes, which has to be something of a feat in itself.

The place provided blue skies, temperatures of around 30 C, great food, wonderful landscapes. Against that idyllic background, the Gambia provided some of the friendliest people it’s ever been my pleasure to meet. ‘Nice to be nice’ is their motto, and they stick to it, unless you make a big deal of minor irritations such as lifting an i-phone carelessly abandoned without supervision. But then you have to be pretty silly to leave valuable property on the beach while you go for a swim, as was done by one of our party. Please forgive me if I don’t name him, but I want to avoid embarrassing my son Nicky.

Several Gambians also told me that if I smiled at the sunrise, I would turn as black as they were, a statement which they always followed up with a warm-hearted laugh, one of their most endearing characteristics. I put their claim to the test: I had a tendency to wake up early and took advantage of the fact to smile manfully at the sun. I must have looked a complete idiot, and was grateful to have the beach to myself with no-one to witness the event. In any case, it only worked partially, as in the course of the week I merely turned a rather violent shade of pink.

Being up early gave me the opportunity to run along the beach, with the surf splashing around my ankles and the music of Vangelis running through my head. I tried to imagine which of the characters in Chariots of Fire I most resembled. Not, I had to admit, Ben Cross as Harold Abrahams or Nigel Havers as Lord Lindsay, but who knows, perhaps the rather overweight one who didn’t manage to complete the cross-country event. The idea made me positively glow with pleasure, unless that was just a result of smiling at the sunrise.

Anyway, as a break from the sub-zero temperatures of England, it was glorious to bask in sunshine and go into water that lapped at our feet gently and soothingly, rather than being frozen solid enough to support our weights. I like to scoff when Southern Californians tell me of the benefits of summer in the winter months, but I can see now that they might have a point.

As for the internet, the hotel claimed to supply Wi-Fi services. I checked with the reception staff.

‘These days it isn’t working,’ they informed me dolefully, with apparently genuine sorrow at this sad state of things. I don’t know how many ‘these days’ represent, except that it’s certainly more than seven: the WiFi wasn’t working at the beginning of the week, and it still wasn’t when we left at the end. But there’s a Gambian sense that time doesn’t really matter anyway – why should it when every day resembles the next in its perfectly limpid light and warmth? Perhaps I should just learn to enjoy the moment and stop caring so much.

Anyway, I’m going to try to catch up with my missing posts now.