Isn’t Cape Town the most beautiful graveyard you’ve ever seen? Okay, that’s maybe too cynical. But let’s get real about a few things. Cape Town is not the most beautiful place in the world. It doesn’t have the best beaches and neither does it have the greatest value for money. I say this not to…
The invitation letter from the Thought Leader website brains suggests that it would be ideal to post at least one blog entry a week from my fingertips to the aforementioned website. I wish I could do that; be more regular in meeting the “ideal”. But I don’t always have something to say. Well, actually there…
I didn’t know what else to do with these created newsletter things. Posting it on a forum shared by writers and readers from and beyond one of Africa’s strongest nations with hectic identity issues and self-loathing seemed optional. And opted for YES, did I, without much doubt or second-guessing what the repercussions could mean for…
Omar al-Bashir, the Sudanese President, was standing just a metre away from me. I thought of asking him if I could have a picture taken with him. I wanted to show the photo to my neighbours in Khartoum. But then I thought about my friend Huda who had just quit her job with the Sudanese…
Zillions of stars eyeball you from a quiet night sky as you dodge creeping goggas when using the toilet in Dilling, one of the 99 villages surrounding an equal number of Sudan’s Nuba Mountains. I’m still undecided which was more surreal: using the roofless, hole-in-the-ground toilet in the dark or finding a Pepsi bottle cut…
I feel sick in the depths of my stomach. I’ve got that I-can’t-believe-this-is-happening feeling — because I really can’t believe this is happening. I’m sitting inside my room at the Thewodros Hotel in Harar, a small town in eastern Ethiopia, and I want to get out of here. Yes, I was chirpy when I arrived…
I have left behind me the security found in the comfort of friendships. When I reached Khartoum International Airport earlier this week, my friends Abdalla, Asma and Huda were waiting for me. They had been there at least an hour already. I had waited for two other friends, Muddather and Imam, to pick me up…
The event depicted below occurred in December 2007. Today was not the first time that rough-talking “intelligence police” took me to an interrogation room after spotting me with a camera in public in Sudan. It’s the second time. And each time it’s been a deeply unsettling reminder that I am currently living in a country…
As a journalist by profession, writing is something that I usually do for cash. So when an email invitation arrived in the Yahoo! inbox from Thought Leader I was suspicious. Because here was this newly established website staffer who suggested I post bits of writing on here without the promise of a positive reflection in…
If you’re to maintain your sanity, then “Third World Africa” or whichever politically sensitive term you wish to use has to be accepted with all its muddy streets, electricity shutdowns and taps that suddenly offer no life for hours on end. This is the comforting epiphany that hit me during a moment of numbness last…
