Prologue

So, here I am in Swaziland. I’m living in Mbabane for two months, until the start of July. I‘m here volunteering at Save The Children Swaziland, working on legal and policy issues to do with education governance and access to information.

It’s my first time in Swaziland and my first time in Africa. Before I came, I knew nothing of what to expect.

My imaginings of Africa were vague and romanticised – a catalogue of calendar motifs – pink sunsets over remote homesteads, a lioness rippling through swaying grass, majestic women stepping slowly from waterholes, balancing water gourds on their heads. The poetry of names, from Madagascar to the Serengeti. I grew up on Nelson Mandela and The Power of One, and then later on Blood Diamond and The Constant Gardener. I imagined Africa as a landscape for heroes. (Pity the land that has no heroes / No – pity the land that needs them.)

Of course, I had information about Africa also. I knew about poverty, corruption, malaria and HIV. I knew about tensions and warfare between interest groups divided on tribal grounds. I knew about growing Chinese interests in the region, and ambivalent US and EU foreign policy. I knew about patriarchal social structures and pervasive domestic and sexual violence. I knew about the ICC and the Rwandan Tribunal and South Africa’s Constitutional Court. I knew about apartheid and I knew about Truth and Reconciliation.

But none of that told me what it would be like.

Until now, the closest I have come to a developing country was Singapore. (And by that I mean, I was geographically more proximate to developing countries in Singapore’s vicinity than I am in Sydney. I suppose also I can say that I was temporally more proximate, since Singapore has rid itself of poverty with such rapidity.)

I have never before been to a country where the government of the day did not have a monopoly on the use of coercive force sufficient to make street crime a rare occurrence.

I had never before encountered poverty – real, widespread poverty.

If I imagined the landscape of ‘poverty’ I turned to film. I imagined a slum or a favela. My mind-picture of a troubled township was a crudely transposed City Of God – Rio de Janeiro reborn as Johannesburg – or perhaps Slumdog Millionaire; Mumbai transformed into Mbabane.

So what is it actually like?

Knowing I had no frame of reference to imagine it, I did my best to arrive in Swaziland without preconceptions, so that I could find out as I go.

I’m still finding out as I go. (Sorry. No enlightenment here.)

Before you close this scene-setter, and click to the meat of my next post, I should say just one more thing. I struggle with the role of the travel writer. I struggled for a fortnight to shape my experiences and thoughts thus far into a letter home that would not bore everyone to death with insane length and travel babble.

It’s the need for narrative that lets me down.

I’m not in a position to offer you a bestseller travel narrative (eg, Romantic Travel Story: girl goes to foreign country, girl meets boy and decides to stay, boy introduces girl to strange foreign customs, hilarity and much anthropologising ensues).

Perhaps the Standard Travel Story applies most closely (Youth enters strange new world, with the help of a wise old mentor comes to understand new customs and way of living, experiences teleological personal growth).

I’ve even got the wise old mentor (sorry, wise older mentor), in the form of Jackson, an Australian lawyer who’s now spent about five years here, is pretty much fluent in siSwati and unlike most foreign NGO personnel, has integrated into Swazi life rather than floated above it – at least as much as an umlungu (white person) can integrate that is.

The problem is, I am nowhere close to understanding Swaziland, and there is no apparent unity to my assorted and contradictory experiences thus far.

So, in the absence of a conventional organising principle to describe my experiences to others, I’ve decided to create this blog. This way, I can reflect, write and post on absolutely anything and everything that is meaningful to me in my time here, for my own sake really.

The benefit of this for you is that you can choose which posts you want to read. If you find my musings on my (legal) work here incomprehensible or dull or both, skip it. If, conversely, you think it’s riveting and have comments, share them! And if you really could not care less about my impending report on Bushfire music festival, but lap up discussion of language and cultural differences, then that’s great too.

So without further ado. To Africa!