
My tall daughter wakes at teenage-time, somewhere just before lunch.
She shambles, taller than I and still baby-sleep eyed, and hugs me.
I had a dream, Mum, she says, a horrid one: I dreamt about how much I was going to miss you when I go to school in England.
And I will miss you, I say. Because what else is there to say: I know she’s going to miss me. Though probably not as much I will feel her absence here. She’s 5’10 with lots to say: she leaves a big hole.
I don’t want to tell her about the other things she’ll miss.
When I went away to school in England, at the age she is now, I hadn’t ever worn tights before, never owned a winter coat, didn’t know it could get that cold. I knew I’d miss the sun, my mum, dad.
I expected that.
But I hadn’t counted on the myriad characteristics of Africa that I’d long for until it hurt, like a hunger pang, a tummy pain that wouldn’t go away. A lump in your throat. You don’t though, do you, miss a thing until it’s not there? Especially when it’s not necessarily palpable, not something you can quite put your finger on, or catch its essence in the lens of your camera. Or put it in your suitcase.
So. Off I went, barebrownlegged and green as they come.
I learned quickly why I needed to wear tights when barebrownlegs were rendered blue and goose bumped.
And I learned that Africa’s so big that I couldn’t fit all the bits of her into my suitcase and didn’t even know I’d left them behind until I was so far away it was too late.
Too late to bottle the scent of rain on dust, so that I might flick the lid off from time to time when the longing grew so overwhelming I thought I might burst, and inhale deeply: the smell of Home.
I still, nearly thirty years later, can’t put my finger completely on all the things that collide and collapse and combine to make this place so familiar that it feels like a glove, slip it on and you know it fits. (Not that I’d worn gloves before then either).
See. There’s this space. This big spilling space that stretches and leans and reaches so that a spreading sky can cast itself huge and blue overhead, blue calico strung tight and sprigged with the tiniest horsetail white so that it’s out of piercing range of sharp landmarks, so that it’s pulled high and taut and doesn’t dip and sag and steal those landmarks thunder, so that the stage, when the rain comes is generous for the show is always spectacular as it muddies the blueness and steeps it in charcoal clouds which it rips apart with jagged swords of hot light. You can see for miles in Africa, miles and miles: put your flattened palm to your brow and screw up your eyes and see the furthest away horizons, where the earth touches outspread fingers with darkening sky in reassuring gesture as night falls, as if to say, ‘it’s ok, it’ll all be here in the morning’. Before it plunges itself into mad psychedelic dusk, a son et lumiere, a disco in the sky, the moon a high-strung orb.

And it’s the peculiar way the dust hangs, plumes of it kicked up by the hooves of cattle or the tyres of a car so that it cobwebs suspended and its motes morph gold and smudge the picture to soft-edged texture. The way it backlights late afternoon.

And it’s the broadwhitetoothed smiles in black and mocha faces, the hopeful way a woman will sit patiently roadside with three piles of six tomatoes each. Waiting for a buyer. It’s the scent of roasted corn she turns on a small fire. It’s the totos that gather at her skirts and laugh and point and wave. It’s the cheerfulness with which a girl will hold a banana leaf aloft as an umbrella in torrential rain. Getting wet doesn’t matter: not when she has cultivated a field of maize. It’s the determined way Africa’s little people soldier valiantly on in the face of adversity and corruption and the crappiest governance. The way everybody says hello. Even, especially, when they don’t know you.
It’s sitting by a river and watching the gentle, slow-tempo, movement of chocolate brown water, gazing at a distant log wondering if it’ll raise a crocodile’s head, noticing the lion ants scurry and dig and home-build in the sand at your feet. Watching and thinking. About everything and nothing. About where in the river it’ll be shallow-safe to take an evening bath.

And it’s the noises you don’t hear until they’re not there. The click and hiss and high-heel kicking of cicadas. The way the noonday bush broils as if a hundred tiny pressure cookers were on an invisible hob. The muezzin calling the faithful to prayer. The shrikes and doves which become white noise until you can no longer hear their squabbling and songs and mourning calls. Roosters who haven’t learned the rules: you’re not supposed to announce the dawn again at ten to three in the afternoon. Who cares? he laughs shrilly, throwing his head back, this is Africa, man, we bend rules here!

But my daughter already knows: I’m going to miss Home too, Mum.
And I don’t know what to say then.


















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