Imilender's tour in Sub-saharan africa

My appologies for being silent for over a month. I was just back in Finland and had a huge amount of things to setup.

Well now I have been back to South Africa for a bit over a week and I'm starting to get things settled. When you move to a new country there is a lot off hassle. One of the biggest discomforts arises from the fact that it takes only 1 day for people to move from country to another, but for goods it takes a lot longer. So the difficulty is in what to do in the meantime. There is basically three options. Either rent a temporary furnished lodging for you and your family for that 4-6 weeks it takes to get the goods, or then live in an empty house. The third option is to turn into a shopping maniac and shop all the furniture you're going to need in first two weeks. We basically chose a combination of options 2 & 3. We have some goods arriving and when we moved in, all we had was a bed and a mattress. Now we have bought some more stuff and the house slowly starts to look inhabitable. However we are still lacking all the stuff that makes home feel like home, like personal artifacts.

Living in an empty house is a lot more easier for the working one, but when you're moving with a family that includes small childer it puts quite a bit of strain on the ones who stay at home. If it was just a couple, your spouse could go and see all the sights and spend time outside the home, but having a small child forces you to spend quite a bit time at the home as well, and during the nap time of the baby all you practically have is that empty house.

Well fortunately time will cure that problem. I just tracked one of our shipments and it has already arrived to Johannesburg! Now we just need to wait for the customs to release it.

I just read a while ago how Helsingin Sanomat stated that Finland is a class society. That might be true, but compared to South Africa the classes in Finland are very small. If you look at the South African demographics there is appr. 5% white people and 95% black. That's pretty much the same division as there is between the Swedish speaking population and Finnish speaking population in Finland. When you consider the state of the society, they are pretty much still at the same level as what Finland was over 100 years ago. The white majority hold most of the wealth in the country whereas the black people are doing majority of the low paid jobs.

It is really amazing how you can see this in the country. If you are just visiting South Africa you will very likely see a very western country. However once you go a bit outside the developed area you will find these large developments where the poor black population lives. The contrast is amazing. For example when you drive from North into Johannesburg you will first pass a development called Djiepsloot, which is a "compound" for the poor black people. It is amazing to see that in this vast country there huge group of shacks and small huts huddled together. Few of the contructions have running water, when passing you can see the outhouses. Once you drive just couple of kilometers further into south you will see a paradise: acres of green land, large houses, swimming pools and laughing people. All this fenced outside the reach of the local black people. This is the way the poor black people will pass everyday on their way to work.

For a well earning white or also black person, you can choose to see, or not to see the drastic difference there is in the living conditions between these different classes. All the developments for the poorer citizens have been built on the outskirts of the cities. There are no slums littering the scenery in the areas where the wealthier people dwell.

When travelling in Sub-Saharan Africa, forget everything you have learned in Europe. Here's couple of good tips.

1. Yellow fever certificate. Always have the yellow fever certification with. If you're travelling to area with yellow fever it is normally only checked. If you don't have one get ready to pay a small fee (preferably in dollars). If you are coming from area with yellow fever to country without, you will get vacinated at the airport. And who will gurantee that their needle is clean?

2. Travel light. There is actually two reasons for this. First you do not want to release your luggage to the ground handling. Normally they at least sit hours in the sun (or rain). Often they are also opened and anything valuable is taken out. Quite often they are also lost. If nothing bad happens, at least you're normally forced to wait for quite a long for your luggage. Which is actually amazing as the airports are really small. Second the more luggage you have the more interest it arises. There are a lot of people who would like to get some money from you. If you luggage raises interest the customs quys will stop you and search your luggage for something that they can say is against the regulation. If they find a laptop, or phones or what ever, they'll start to tell you that you would have to pay duty on them. Of course what they are truly after is a small bribe from you. Normally the best tactic for this is not to understand. Majority of Africa uses either french or portuguese, so it is easy to act not understanding either of them.

3. Hide everything that might be interesting. If you have anything interesting in your luggage, hide it. Otherwise you'll easily end up paying a bribe at security screening or at customs. I for in Kinshasa went to the security screening the same way as in Europe. I.e. packed everything from my pockets to my jacket pockets and placed that on the conveyor. However that was not okay. What I was forced to do, is pick up my jacket and empty my pockets into this bucket. After that the officer checked everything I had placed into the bucket and handed them back to me. My problem was that I have two passports, as visa proceedings can take time. I happened to have both passports in my jacket pocket and that was of course very interesting... Fortunately I didn't understand any french, so after a five minute discussion: -"plaaplaaplaa", -"sorry I don't understand", -"plaaplaaplaa" - "sorry I don't understand". I got my passports back. At the same airport they had another security screening just before bording the plane (outside in the sun ofcourse). In this phase you just had to open the backs and they searched them. At that point they found my employee badge and started asking me for a phone...

4. Reserve plenty of time. In africa you cannot expect things to work as smoothly as they would work in Europe. You really need to reserve plenty of time. In Kinshasa for example you first have to show your ticket and passport to one guy, so that they let you into the checking area. Then you need to give your passport to some goverment officials for them to check the ticket. At this point they normally ask you for a bribe. Then you go to next counter where they write you your ticket (in hand) Once you have your ticket you can go to the check in counter to check in your luggage, or if you have followed my advice, just to verify your booking. After that you go through couple of security screenings (bribes asked again) and passport control.

5. Use vip lounges. It's better to pay for the vip lounge that pay the same money in bribes. In Maputo you either have an option to go through the passport control (where they will find something wrong and ask you for a bribe) and after that end up in a very hot waiting room with nothing but hard benches or you can pay 20$ to get into a vip lounge where they handle the immigration for you, while you can enjoy a nice cold drink in a confortable airconditioned space. So in practice which is better, paying 20$ for confort or 20$ in bribes?

6. Board early. As everybody is avoiding to check in luggage the planes are always very full of hand luggage. Board early to get your luggage to the overhead compartments, or otherwise they'll book it into the hold and then you're not sure if you ever see your luggage again.

7. Don't take pictures. At most airports you'll get arrested if you are seen taken pictures. So even if you would love to take some good pictures of the nice planes in the airfield, don't do it. It's better to get out of the country than end up in some local prison.

Maputo is the capital of Mozambique. Even though Mozambique poorest nations of Africa (GDP/capita is 1 389$), it is much more "civilized" than DRC. Still the airport in Maputo is an small airport, something like airport at Oulu in Finland. There is a few planes parked in front of the building. The first control is the yellow fever vacination. Make sure you have a certificate of it, or otherwise you will get vacinated in one of the back rooms. After that it is the passport control. You can get a visa at the border, but I strongly recommend getting one before hand. The queue to the border visa counter is short, but the truth hits you when you go there. The guy takes your passport and walks into an office that states Immigrations. He tells you to wait outside the room. For a loooong time nothing happens, but then after 30-40 minutes he hands back your passport with a Mozambiquean visa. I wonder what can take so long.

When you get to the city you notice that this country has had much more time to rebuild. Main streets are in good shape (only few bumps) and there are some really nice building as well. I'm staying in the Holiday Inn Maputo, which is a really nice and quite modern hotel by the beach. It's a place where you could come even for a holiday. The city is already in quite a good shape. There is even one quite large modern shopping center, which even has a movie complex. Only problem is that they didn't find an entrepreneur to run the movie theater, so the complex is empty.

Of course local people do their shopping in markets that are all around the city. There is food market, goods market etc. In the goods market you can find anything from new to stolen and refurbished. To those markets its best not to go without a local.

One amazing thing here is the deals operators are offering you. If you take 6 contract subscriptions for two years they'll give you a used car. With 8 subscriptions you will get a pickup truck. Quite a bit better than the rubber canoes and winter jackets that the finnish operators used to offer before they could start bundling phones with subscriptions.

Looking at Kinshasa gives one an odd feeling. All the construction and buildings date back to 50ties and 60ties, to the date when the Belgium was still colonizing the country. After that very little has been done in the country. The buildings are decaying and the potholes in the roads have not been repaired. One gets a feeling that the colonialists have left monuments of the past that the people have not been able to maintain. The entire economy has just collapsed due to political instability. There has not been tax collectors collecting money in order to pay for the maintenance of the public roads etc. Just seeing how far the economy has collapsed makes one think. Could this also happen in Europe if we ended up in another war?

Anywhere you look in Kinshasa just strengthens this feeling. The buildings still give away the old purpose of them, but they have been taken into new usage. For example the office of one of the local operators is clearly in one old department store. One can see this from the large windows at the street level and especially from the escalators that are the only stairs to enter the upper floors. It is just ridicolous, as the escalators have clearly not been working for years, but people are still climing up from one side and going down from another. There is unfinished buildings that have been taken into use as apartments for people, retail outlets or even as goverment offices. People have just found a way to use in a way that makes sense, but still a lot of the existing infrastructure is totally left unused. There is a railroad that has certainly not seen a train passing for last 20 years, there is some grand monument that is just growing weeds.