As I write this I am sat – for the second time in 10 hours – in seat 22C on Fastjet’s flight from Dar es Salaam to a smallish Tanzanian town called Mbeya.
Now you may or may not have heard of Fastjet – depending on whether you travel much in sub-Saharan Africa, but the thing with Fastjet is that it isn’t terribly fast. It also isn’t very communicative.
Having sat on the runway for quite some time watching the sunrise, we were off-loaded because of a technical problem that apparently had something to do with the communication system between the pilot in the cockpit and the crew in the cabin.
This really was the last time anyone at Fastjet concerned themselves with accuracy of communication - for the next 10 hours. For the length of the day, we sat in the small and unedifying Dar airport.
We drank cups of tea, ate airport food and talked endlessly about nothing much; as you do when you are killing an indefinite period of time.
The only thing anyone told us over the course of the day was that the problem would take five to 10 minutes to fix (this was when we were still on the plane) but this was adjusted to an hour to two hours when we were being off-loaded.
Oh, and around three hours in, a tinny Tannoy announcement told us the flight had been cancelled altogether and we should all go back to our homes and hotels.
This was followed immediately by an announcement in Kiswahili proudly telling us that the plane was fixed up and we would board shortly.
Both announcements were wrong. We eventually scrummed our way back on to the plane, elbowing one another out of the way in a desperate attempt to beat the irate passengers of a later flight that had also been delayed. We eventually took off in the late afternoon.
“For those claiming legacy of colonialism was only negative, think of our independent judiciary, transport infrastructure, piped water” - recent tweet from former DA leader, Helen Zille.
The previous day we had landed at Dar airport from OR Tambo.
As a foreigner working in Tanzania you need a temporary visa. This must be re-purchased every time you enter the country (regularly in my case) for $200 (R2 684).
Acquiring this visa can only be done on arrival at the Dar airport and it is damn nearly impossible to do so. In summary: it takes around three hours for two hapless immigration officials to handwrite - no computers, not even an ink stamp – over 100 visas. At 35°C.
No chairs. No water. Again, no communication. During both of these airport experiences it was clear that systems, procedures and an understanding of the critical importance of good communication, were non-existent.
I would say it was organised chaos but there wasn’t any organisation at all. It was just chaos.
I travelled to Tanzania with Zille’s now infamous tweet about colonialism fresh in my mind.
In fact, it occupied much of my thinking during all the many hours we spent in the Dar airport (and later, the extreme Dar traffic). I condemn what she said with contempt but more, with great sadness.
I assume that Zille has travelled extensively to places like Dar es Salaam and other former colonies; that she has experienced life in countries that are years, even decades, behind non-former colonies.
So the issue should not be whether she believes that colonialism had some good points.
The issue is whether - over years of doing battle as the official opposition to the ANC - she has become so hardened, so cynical, so insensitive that she has lost all perspective and, indeed, heart.
One can only assume she is so jaded she has forgotten what it is that she has been fighting for - a free and equal society underscored by a total loathing for all that is and was unjust, oppressive, violent and dehumanising.
She has effectively made herself one of the utterly heartless and brain-dead “things were better under apartheid” brigade. You do not even need to move out of Dar airport to get the picture; to know just
how despicable, how crippling colonialism was.
And the denial of this fact is alive and well far beyond Helen Zille; all-too-often I hear people opining about how Africa (they try to hide their bigotry by
making it a continental indictment
rather than a racist statement) lacks innovation or how uncreative Africa is or how backward.
And I don’t know why Singapore works well as Zille referenced; maybe because it’s so small you can cover its length on your morning jog.
All I know after spending some time in Tanzania and indeed around other parts of Africa, is that colonialism’s negative impact on Africa and her people was beyond measure.
Let us travel our continent, viewing its unequalled beauty and meeting its superb people.
But let’s be forgiving of her faults and her failings because the big white boss gang-raped her and left her for dead.
It is a miracle that she has come as far as she has.
Foxton is founder of The Peace Agency. His writing is dedicated to the memory of Anene Booysens and Emmanuel Josias Sithole