Africa v. London

God knows I’ve bitched about travelling on public transport in Africa. I’m even about to buy myself a car. All that sitting in stuffy uncomfortable dangerous vehicles with livestock and no loo-breaks, well, it’s no longer my idea of getting about. But neither is paying £30 for a train ticket (that’s US$55) and the train breaking down 10 minutes later, and my journey of 1.5 hours taking 3.5 hours, and having to also endure: drunk tattooed skinheads who can’t lock the loo door while they piss, all over the seat; husband and wife fights over who should have listened to who about which train they should or should not have taken; gangs of rugby spectators bellowing rousing anthems on the train platform while they rip open cartons of warm beer; the inability of the English to bond in any way in the face of rail malfunctions.

On this train journey (which I am still on as I write, by the way), there is no live-stock, no coloured outfits, no baby-faced children, no men trying to sell me false teeth, no religious students patrolling up and down the aisles singing angelically for alms

But there are grey-haired men, fat men, drunk men, all singing and chanting “oooohhhhhhh…..weeeeee-heeeeeeh!”, oh, I can hear, “yeah, fucking Eng-a-land, champiooooooons….” And “fuckin’ hell, run out of beer”. I really really really despair of people who have nothing, and I mean nothing, better to do with their Saturdays than get drunk, so drunk that they fall off the train and onto the platform while trying to have a sneaky fag at the station.

The girl next to me is eating salt and vinegar crisps and she didn’t even offer me one. I’m not idealising Senegal, but it really does happen, I know it happens, that when 7 of you are travelling to a town in a sept-place car, and someone has bananas, or someone has oily cakes, or dry old raisins- nothing that you actually want to eat- they offer them around the car. I long for that warmth and generosity and to be surrounded by adults who know how to behave in public.

Having said that, I have just spoken to Naomi, my flat mate, who recounted a tale of arriving back in Dakar, and the person who has the door keys being not where he should have been, and her having to wait 6 and a half hours outside the flat and then having to pay for the guy with the key to come over and deliver the key, but he taking 6 hours to do so, because he used her taxi fare to go to another meeting first. It reminded me that Africa, for all its vitality, is not perfect.