Lies, Lies, Lies

So I lied about putting up the paragliding pictures. I have been to three different internet cafes now and chewed out three different internet cafe attendants and it still doesn't seem to work. It's hot. I'm hungry. I've gotta pee. I've spent a couple bucks now to have my time wasted and my hair torn out. Sometimes I really hate this place.

In Gil Courtemanche’s book, “A Sunday by the Pool in Kigali,” his main character implies that the Rwandan people are disingenuous, that they lie so beautifully and so often and so simply, the words dripping out of their mouths just as the listener wants to hear them. I think Gen. Romeo Dallaire talks about the same thing, about how loyalty was not a quality he would ascribe to the Rwandans he worked with during the genocide.

This week at the tribunal, the prosecution introduced a young woman who was the first “survivor” I have heard testify. She was giving her testimony from behind a blue curtain, but from what I could piece together from her answers to the prosecutor’s questions, she is a 29 year old mother of at least one small child, a Tutsi who was a 16-year-old school girl when the president’s place crashed and triggered the genocide. She hid in the bush to escape the Interahamwe with an aunt and her cousin, and her cousin was killed. She was beaten up at at least two roadblocks and she was stripped by Interahamwe who stole her fabrics and her skirt. She watched men and small boys be massacred at a commune office, was hit with a machete at another roadblock, saw a military man throw a grenade into a crowd of refugees at a church. She was walking with a huge group of refugees when two vehicles full of soldiers and gendarmes pulled up and started shooting and then was raped twice at a huge “internally displaced persons” camp at some place called TrafiPol.

We all went on break feeling absolutely wretched for this poor girl. Imagine three solid months of fending for your life in the bush, being shot at and beaten and raped. There seemed to be no safe place in the entire country for a Tutsi to go.

But then the defense began to question her. She was born in 1976, so she was 18, not 16, a fact that can be easily forgiven in a culture where birthdays are unimportant. But she couldn’t read – not French, not Kinyarwanda – making her story about being a school child somewhat unbelievable. The beatings at each of the roadblocks consisted of being hit on the back with a club and the strike from a machete was on the buttocks, with the handle, not the blade. In the course of questioning, she told the court her aunt was beheaded and one of her little girls was also decapitated and the other was hit in the leg with a spear. But then the story changed, so that the aunt was simply cut on the neck with a machete – was still alive, in fact – and the little girl was nicked in the heel with a spear. It was never clear whether the second girl actually existed. The defense counsel asked her if she showed up at the commune office naked, having had her skirts stolen by the Interahamwe. Well, no. She was wearing several skirts and they simply took the one they felt was most valuable. Was that the one on top? No, it was on the bottom, like a petticoat. So they stripped you and took the skirt on the bottom, closest to your skin? No. No, it was in the middle.

The vehicles with the soldiers in them, what did they look like? I don’t remember. (At least 10 minutes of questioning on this, even the judges were trying to get a straight answer.) She had said that one vehicle had soldiers, the other had gendarmes, but when asked which one she was closer to – the soldiers or the gendarmes – she said she was exactly in the middle. Then the soldiers and gendarmes were mixed in the vehicles. And even though she was traveling with at least two thousand refugees – according to her estimate, and to be fair, she can’t read so I’m not sure she would be able to visualize two thousand people – she saw all of this from the middle of the pack, yet still only about 50 metres away from both vehicles.

The most damning bit of evidence she gave was in response to the defense asking her to describe who was an Interahamwe. (The Interahamwe, by the by, were the Hutu militias who manned the roadblocks and herded people into churches. They were largely street boys and other thugs who grabbed whatever weapons they could and took full advantage of the chaos of war to indulge in a vendetta against Tutsis and the moderate Hutus who refused to fight alongside them.) Anyway, the girl responded that all Hutus were Interahamwe. “So let me ask you this,” the counsel responded. “What about a three year old Hutu child. Is he an Interahamwe too? Are you born an Interahamwe?”

“Yes,” she answered. “Of course he is Interahamwe. His father was Interahamwe and was hunting Tutsis and he was probably following his father, so yes. He is an Interahamwe.”

So much for this tribunal spreading tolerance and understanding.

I have done interviews with both sides now – the defense and the prosecution – and they both lament this tendency for stories to shift and change, for details to emerge and disappear. The prosecution explained that from their perspective, these kinds of impartial eye-witnesses are the perfect kind of witnesses, since they don’t have blood on their hands. They rely also on “insiders,” who give testimony against their former colleagues in exchange for a cushier sentence in a European court and assistance for their families. Their third option is to put the young boys who did the killing and raping on the stand, to show that they received direct orders from the men on trial for genocide. But Rwanda has the death penalty and for the most part, the defense paints these witnesses as scared boys who will say anything to save their skin.

Part of these ever mutating stories is culture, but some of it is time. Almost 14 years have elapsed, afterall, and with so much happening, there is a tendency to get dates and events confused.

But it leaves a question in the viewer’s mind. An Irish woman and a Brazilian woman were in court yesterday and when we talked on the break, they were both saying how horrible the evidence was. But when we broke for lunch, their minds were changed completely. “At one point I wanted to tell her to shut up, that she really wasn’t doing much to help herself,” the Irish woman said.

A few days ago, one of the Quebecois counselors lost his cool with a witness who was a former soldier, a marksman to be precise, assigned to protect a top-ranking military man. He asked if he was briefed before he took the assignment. “No,” he answered, and he stuck to it. I think the defense was trying to show that the RPF were far more of a threat than most people realized, that that’s why this man needed protection. Or that this man was actually a spy. Who knows? He couldn’t ask the question. You could see him getting increasingly frustrated by what he saw as an obvious lie. It led to the defense counsel saying to him: “Do you think I’m an imbecile? Do you think this whole court is full of imbeciles?”

My favourite quote from the testimony so far belongs to a woman who is a top-ranking police officer who was asked about why she was transferred before the war from active duty to an administrative job. Because she had given more than 10 years of exemplary service, she responded. The defense pointed out that military people might characterized the move as a demotion. She disagreed, said she saw it as a promotion and never asked anyone anything about it. Then the defense asked if her transfer had anything to do with allegations that she was a spy working for the Tutsi-led RPF.

“Oh,” came the translation. “What the counsel has said has jolted my mind.” And then she proceeded to talk about how, yes, she had been found in possession of some very sensitive documents, but it was all a mistake and she was never reprimanded. And besides, look at her how she had climbed the ranks since then. She was now a top-ranking police officer. Under the RPF government.

FF Features
It's a lying shame War criminals are being offered cash, plastic surgery and parole to appear as prosecution witnesses at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, writes Karen Palmer
1250 words
22 March 2006
South China Morning Post
14
English
(c) 2006 South China Morning Post Publishers Limited, Hong Kong. All rights reserved.
Clandestine interrogations between investigators and an alleged war criminal come to an abrupt end when his naked body is pulled from a Belgian canal, his hands so mangled that they are initially reported as missing. Then a letter surfaces - seemingly from beyond the grave - suggesting the very people charged with finding the truth behind the massacres in Rwanda may be on a one-sided witch-hunt, writing a script dictated by western powers and pressuring witnesses to follow it.

It sounds like a racy publisher's blurb on the back of the latest paperback thriller, but the courtroom drama is playing out for real in Arusha, Tanzania, at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, where defence lawyers are crying foul over tales of witnesses paid to testify, plastic surgery for convicted war criminals and testimony created by survivor groups.

"The sad fact is that a lot of people have been convicted on very questionable evidence," said Canadian lawyer Peter Zaduk. Both sides at the tribunal seem to repeatedly fall victim to lying witnesses, said Peter Robinson, a defence lawyer from California.

"Here, it's just rampant," he said.

"I don't know exactly why. Maybe it's a character thing, it may be the culture of Rwanda, maybe the witnesses need to incriminate authorities of the previous regime."

Rwanda's Hutu majority was in power in 1994 when the president's plane was shot out of the sky, triggering a three-month killing spree. International journalists reported on a Hutu campaign of hate, one that included lists of every Tutsi in the country, who were labelled "cockroaches" in radio broadcasts and marked for extermination.

An ex-Tutsi rebel witness known as "BBB" signed an affidavit saying he attended at least three meetings orchestrated by a Rwanda-based survivor's group, Ibuka, where witnesses plotted false testimony.

Another says he listened from his living room while an Ibuka representative dictated the evidence his wife was to give. In some cases, the prosecution paid witnesses, ostensibly for travel-related expenses.

"Witness G", a former leader of the Interahamwe, the Hutu militias blamed for carrying out the killings, admitted in court on October 24, 2005, that he received US$30,000 in cash from the prosecution, explaining it was a reward from the prosecution for helping build cases against Hutus.

Another Interahamwe leader, known as "Witness T", admitted he received US$16,000 in cash.

"These payments were laundered through the United States government and were subject to approval and review by lawyer Neil Karbank of Aspen, Colorado," states a motion filed by Mr Robinson asking the judges to order prosecutors to disclose payments they made to witnesses. The motion was rejected in August, when three judges decided "an oral hearing to investigate these allegations would be no more than a fishing expedition".

Stephen Rapp, a state prosecutor from Illinois who joined the tribunal in 2001 as its chief of prosecutions, admits prosecutors have a very difficult job unravelling the web of political influence in a demure culture with deep ethnic roots and tensions, where lying is not only tolerated but sometimes encouraged.

In Rwanda, as in most of Africa, time is not important, language is imprecise and familial relationships are confusing, making court testimony difficult.

"If you read the accounts of these individuals, it's not the kind of thing that any of us would know enough about to put words in people's mouths, about what really occurred, who was there and how this worked. This is a really Byzantine political situation," he said.

To understand it, prosecutors rely on "insiders". In exchange for their testimony, prosecutors have promised to provide at least five "insiders" - who each admit to war crimes, committing murders or ordering executions - with a new identity as well as at least two years of financial support for the war criminal and their families once they've been relocated somewhere in Europe.

All will serve their sentences in a European prison and enjoy European guidelines on parole. Some have even been promised plastic surgery once they've finished serving their sentence.

Mr Rapp admits Juvenal Uwilingiyimana, the former Rwandan agricultural minister and one-time minister for national parks and tourism, would have received a similar deal if he'd signed a statement and agreed to testify against his former colleagues.

Instead, on November 21, he disappeared. A month later, his badly decomposed body was pulled from a Belgian canal. Two weeks before he went missing, Uwilingiyimana allegedly wrote a letter to the prosecutors at the international court. In it, he spoke of threats levelled at him by two Canadian investigators working for the court, of pressure to provide false testimony that would "demolish" key members of the Hutu government believed to be the masterminds behind a plan to wipe out the country's Tutsi minority.

"I do not wish to lie to please the investigators," Uwilingiyimana allegedly wrote. "I am prepared to assume all of the consequences set forth in detail by the investigators [Rejean] Tremblay and [Andre] Delvaux: I will be lynched, crushed, my body will be trampled on in the street and the dogs will piss on me [the terms used by the investigators]." Mr Rapp dismissed the letter as a fake and said investigators deny making any threats.

Uwilingiyimana was secretly indicted last summer for his role in helping prepare for the genocide, in which peasants took up hoes and machetes to kill more than 800,000 people in 100 days.

For nearly three months, Uwilingiyimana staved off arrest by travelling each weekday from his home in Brussels to Lille, in France, under the guise of attending a university course. In fact, he was being interrogated by tribunal investigators and was on the verge of landing a sweetheart deal in return for signing a 92-page question-and-answer-style statement that would be the basis for his insider testimony against key purported war criminals.

That is motive enough for desperate defendants to make him disappear, prosecutors say. But more than one defence lawyer claims Uwilingiyimana was going to testify on behalf of their clients.

Montreal lawyer John Philpot expected he would take the stand and help exonerate his client. Investigators working with Mr Robinson met with Uwilingiyimana on November 26, 2002, and December 4, 2003, and expected him to testify in Arusha refuting evidence given by one of the tribunal's "insiders".

"His death actually does more harm to us than the prosecution," Mr Robinson said. Mr Rapp is adamant his investigators are neither building false cases, nor pressuring witnesses to lie.

"You don't gain anything if the insider sits there and tells you a whole pack of lies about what was going on. It's gotta be stuff that's consistent with the human rights reports that were happening at the time, with the people on the inside and the outside that you've had information from," Mr Rapp said.

He also dismisses the fabrication allegations as a diversionary tactic by desperate defence lawyers.

"Those aren't legal arguments. They don't excuse murder, they don't excuse mass murder," Mr Rapp said. "It doesn't win the case. It may make some accused persons feel better to have that sort of argument, but it doesn't make the case."

***

JUSTICE IN JEOPARDY; Clandestine interrogations between investigators and an alleged war criminal come to an abrupt end when his naked corpse is pulled from a Belgian canal, its hands so mangled that they were first reported as missing. Then, a letter surfaces, seemingly coming from beyond the grave, suggesting the very people entrusted with finding the truth behind the brutal massacres in a tiny East African nation could be on a witch hunt, writing a script dictated by governments in the West and pressuring witnesses to follow it.
Karen Palmer
Special to the Star
2087 words
26 March 2006
The Toronto Star
ONT
A10
English
Copyright (c) 2006 The Toronto Star
The accusations read like a racy blurb on the back of a paperback thriller, but the twisting plot actually comes from a handful of Canadian lawyers defending politicians and businessmen blamed for one of Africa's darkest moments.

In real life, the courtroom drama goes something like this:

Last Nov. 5, Juvenal Uwilingiyimana, Rwanda's former agriculture minister and one-time minister for national parks and tourism, allegedly wrote a letter to the ICTR - the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which is prosecuting alleged war criminals in the 1994 genocide.

The letter spoke of threats levelled at Uwilingiyimana by Rejean Tremblay and Andre Delvaux, two Canadian investigators working for the tribunal, of pressure to provide false testimony that would "demolish" key members of the Akazu, the kitchen cabinet of the Rwandan Hutu government that allegedly masterminded a plan to wipe out the country's Tutsi minority in the spring of 1994.

"I do not wish to lie to please the investigators," Uwilingiyimana allegedly wrote.

"I am prepared to assume all of the consequences set forth in detail by the investigators Tremblay and Delvaux: I will be lynched, crushed, my body will be trampled on in the street and the dogs will piss on me (the terms used by the investigators)."

The last words, including the brackets, are the letter writer's, emphasizing that the words used in threats were not of his choosing.

Uwilingiyimana was secretly indicted last summer for ordering executions at roadblocks, for allowing the training of Hutu militias in Rwanda's dense forests and for his role in helping prepare for the genocide, which saw peasants take up hoes and machetes to kill more than 800,000 people in the span of 100 days.

For nearly three months, Uwilingiyimana staved off arrest by co-operating with court investigators.

Each weekday, under the guise of attending a university course, he travelled from his home in Brussels to Lille, France, to be interrogated by court investigators.

Uwilingiyimana was on the verge of landing a sweetheart deal in return for signing a 92-page question-and-answer style statement that would be the basis for his testimony against key war-crimes suspects. Then, on Nov. 21, he disappeared.

Almost a month later, his badly decomposed body was pulled from the Brussels-Charleroi canal.

The United Nations-backed court in Tanzania, already widely dismissed as poorly designed, ponderously slow and lacking in authority, released a statement saying it would review security measures provided for tribunal witnesses to ensure they were adequate.

Prosecutor Hassan Bubacar Jallow said Uwilingiyimana had "voluntarily agreed to co-operate in the search for truth and justice."

The prosecutions office rejects Uwilingiyimana's allegations against its investigators and suggests the letter is a fake, written by people who feared the Rwandan was about to testify against them.

But defence lawyers - including some prominent Canadians - are convinced the mysterious death lends credibility to what they've been alleging for years: that tribunal staff is making up evidence and strong-arming witnesses into supporting it.

"The sad fact is that a lot of people have been convicted on very questionable evidence," says Toronto lawyer Peter Zaduk, best known for his successful defence of O'Neil Grant in the 1999 Just Desserts murder case.

Rwanda's Hutu majority was in power back on April 6, 1994, when President Juvenal Habyarimana's plane exploded while landing at Kigali airport, triggering a killing spree that lasted three months.

International journalists reported on a Hutu campaign of hate, one that included lists of all the country's Tutsis, who were labelled "cockroaches" in radio broadcasts and marked for extermination.

Video footage documented the aftermath of bloody attacks carried out by Rwandan peasants wielding machetes and farm implements.

The Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a Tutsi-led rebel group that invaded from Uganda, emerged the winner of what is now seen as a vicious civil war.

The group's founder, Paul Kagame, took over the presidency and still leads the country today.

As Rwanda's prisons fill up with farmers, clergymen and ordinary folk convicted in Rwandan courts of lesser offences than genocide or crimes against humanity, the UN tribunal in Arusha, near Tanzania's border with Kenya, has completed only 26 cases. All but three ended in convictions.

Most of the convicted genocidaires will remain in prison in Mali, a French-speaking desert country in West Africa, until they die. Another 26 cases are currently before the ICTR court, 19 indictees still at large and at least 20 detainees are waiting for their trials to begin. The tribunal's mandate is set to run out in 2008.

Stephen Rapp, a state prosecutor from Illinois who joined the tribunal in 2001 as chief of prosecutions, admits prosecutors have a difficult job unravelling the web of political influence in a closed culture with deep ethnic tensions, where heavy-handed political regimes have made lying not only tolerable but sometimes encouraged.

In Rwanda, as in most of Africa, time is not important, language is imprecise and familial relationships are confusing.

Defending his staff, Rapp says: "If you read the accounts of these individuals, it's not the kind of thing that any of us would know enough about to put words in people's mouths, about what really occurred, who was there and how this worked. This is a really Byzantine political situation."

Since opening its first trial in 1997, the tribunal has issued nearly 90 indictments. Those charged are virtually all Hutus, leading many to complain the tribunal is nothing more than a theatre of victor's justice.

"The civilian deaths on both sides were roughly equal and substantially less than some of these wild estimates that are out there," says Toronto lawyer Zaduk, adding that human rights groups have blamed the Tutsi-led RPF rebels for 200,000 civilian deaths during raids in neighbouring, resource-rich Democratic Republic of Congo.

Another Toronto defence lawyer, Christopher Black, says the RPF has used the tribunal to finish the annihilation of the Hutu political elite, when it should shoulder the blame for the country's mass killings.

In fact, a high-ranking Tutsi military police officer testifying against Black's client, the former chief of staff for the Rwandan military police, told the court that Tutsi rebels had infiltrated virtually every segment of Rwanda's security forces blamed for the killings.

When she deserted her military unit to join the rebels, the Tutsi officer was initially confused because some were dressed like the unit of the Rwandan government forces she had just left, others were wearing gendarme uniforms and some had berets that suggested they were part of an elite fighting force.

"They were wearing military uniforms when they came toward me," she told the court. "At first, I did not know they were RPF."

While the genocide has always been portrayed as the majority Hutu eradicating the minority Tutsi, an ongoing, controversial University of Maryland study, "GenoDynamics: Understanding Genocide through Time and Space," notes that since 500,000 Tutsis were likely killed during the genocide, that means at least 300,000 also must have been slaughtered.

Chief prosecutor Rapp says the numbers are not the question. What concerns the tribunal are the men and women responsible for three things: the alleged hit lists, the hate propaganda and the training of Interahamwe Hutu militias to ensure the efficient murder of up to 8,000 Tutsis and "Hutu moderates" a day.

"There's no question that a break was crossed and it was decided that the Tutsis were the enemy and then major efforts were then made to create a killing force who would win a total war if that became necessary," says Rapp.

"Not that that was always Plan A," he allows. "But it was Plan C and it became Plan B and eventually became Plan A - and there were a number of people working to make it Plan A.

"It needed a moment when it would be kicked in - and that was going to occur as sure as God made green apples because the peace process was aborted."

(The downing of the president's plane ended UN-mediated talks between the Rwandan government and the RPF, and is widely seen as triggering the genocide.

A French inquiry, partially leaked to Le Monde newspaper but never officially released, found the RPF responsible for shooting down Habyarimana's plane. But his death is outside the tribunal's scope.)

Figuring out who devised and implemented the genocidal plan is where "insiders" like the late Juvenal Uwilingiyimana come in.

In exchange for their testimony, prosecutors have promised to provide a new identity to at least five insiders - each of whom admits to committing murders or ordering executions. All will serve their sentences in Europe and enjoy European guidelines on parole.

Their families will be eligible for at least two years' support once they've been relocated in Europe and some of the men have even been promised plastic surgery once they've finished their sentences.

Rapp admits Uwilingiyimana would have received a similar deal if he'd signed a statement and agreed to testify against his former colleagues.

That is motive enough for desperate defendants to make him disappear, prosecutors say.

But more than one defence lawyer claims Uwilingiyimana was going to testify on behalf of defendants.

Peter Robinson, a defence lawyer from California, says investigators met with Uwilingiyimana on Nov. 26, 2002, and Dec. 4, 2003, and expected him to testify in Arusha refuting evidence given by one of the tribunal's "insiders."

"His death actually does more harm to us than the prosecution," Robinson says.

Montreal lawyer John Philpot, who expected Uwilingiyimana would take the stand and help exonerate his client, says the former minister became an embarrassment to prosecutors when he refused to lie.

"This process is very damaging if he came and testified here about how they are trying to string up (defendants)," Philpot says.

Rapp, however, insists his investigators are not building false cases or pressuring witnesses to lie.

"You don't gain anything if the insider sits there and tells you a whole pack of lies about what was going on," he says.

"It's got to be stuff that's consistent with the human rights reports that were happening at the time, with the people on the inside and the outside that you've had information from."

Toronto defence lawyer Black has called for the tribunal to be suspended pending an investigation into the tactics Uwilingiyimana alleges were used by the prosecutor's office.

"How can this tribunal continue to operate when this may be true, when these allegations are happening all the time," he asks.

But the chief prosecutor dismisses the fabrication allegations as a diversionary tactic by desperate defence lawyers.

"Those aren't legal arguments," says Rapp. "They don't excuse murder: they don't excuse mass murder.

"It doesn't win the case. It may make some accused persons feel better to have that sort of argument, but it doesn't make the case."

Karen Palmer is the Star's freelance writer in Africa.

Ah-ha...

From my little bro, who is concerned that I am uncool, the definition of Crunk:

"The creation of beats and hooks so powerful that the audience is instinctively moved to sway, dance, and lose themselves in the moment, gave birth to crunk music. Crunk identifies music so powerful a word hadn't been produced for such a reaction until the imprint of crunk on the American consciousness."

Yah. Um-hmm. A word did not exist to describe it. So they came up with crunk.

And now, for a history lesson:
Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz often claim to be the Kings of Crunk, while Lil Scrappy is referred to as the Prince of Crunk. Shaina is sometimes known as the Queen of Crunk, and Ciara (or Sierra as I would spell it) is often referred to as the Princess of Crunk. While these artists have embodied the term in the hip hop industry, the term was more widely exposed when Lil Jon named his albums Kings of Krunk and Crunk Juice. Serious, the Founder of Crunk Incorporated is known as the Lord of Crunk. Serious Lord discovered both Lil Scrappy and Crime Mob.

Serious Lord. Like Bob Marley, but a different kind of Lord and Saviour.

To "get crunk" means to have an extremely good time, usually at a party.
While the word "crunk" is presumed to be a blend of the words "crazy drunk," being crunk does not necessarily include being intoxicated, but there is a good chance that if one is crunk, he or she is, indeed, intoxicated as well. Crunk artist Will to the E describes getting crunk as "bein' up in the club, maybe havin' a few girls up on you, and feelin' in the zone."

Yep. That's pretty much me here in Africa. Crunked. K-to-the-P

Honouring the dead

“I saw backless pews, just like those in Kibuye church, but these were draped with the mummified and decomposing remains of a lot of people, their clothes both sticking to them and falling off, and everything sort of melting down onto the floor between the benches. It was difficult to see where the bodies ended and the floor began. It was difficult to see the floor at all.” --Clea Koff

In her book, “The Bone Woman,” forensic anthropologist Clea Koff pairs a big, soft heart with a smart, scientific brain to write about her stints in Rwanda digging up mass graves and analyzing the remains. The way she writes with clarity and simplicity is, in a way, more haunting than some of the flowery prose that the genocide evokes – and through her recounting of the way the hundreds upon hundreds of bodies were found and the injuries their skeletons retained, she lets the victims of the country’s 1994 killing spree speak for themselves.

She writes about finding a baby with a plastic pacifier still clamped in its skeletonized jaw; a woman with pink beads looped around her neck; the gouges at the back of hundreds of distal tibias, a sure sign that someone had nicked the Achilles tendon in an attempt to immobilize their victim; the man obviously stomped to death, with a fractured mandible, fractured clavicle, fractured sternum, two fractured ribs, both humerii fractured and his right foot shattered; the rows and rows of skulls lined up in the analysis tent, all with identical smash marks, as though they had been killed on an assembly line.

These images float up as I sit in the back row of the public gallery at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, where lawyers, prosecutors and judges have toiled since 1997, supposedly in an effort to shine a light on the truth of what happened in those horrible 100 days of 1994.

When I arrived here, I thought even the building itself would be pregnant with meaning, that everyone I encountered would walk with a certain stoop under the weight of working for so long on such a difficult subject. I fully expected the hallways and chambers to be hushed, reverent, hallowed, filled with a sense of history for the job that is being done here.

But it is not like that at all.

The chambers are so modern and brightly lit, filled with whites, blacks, Indians, Hispanics, Chinese and everything in between that it’s almost possible to forget you are in Africa. (Of course, just to bring you back to the continent and its quirks, the defense lawyer stood up yesterday to announce he had just lost his senior sister while she was undergoing heart surgery in “Tuck-son, Arizona” and he would have to leave the court for several days while he went to retrieve the body. “I am a chief, she is a princess and she cannot be buried anywhere but Cameroon. That is just how things are.”)

The ITCR building is loaded with security, translators, interpreters, clerks and lawyers – half of the tribunal’s budget goes to safety and administration. It sits at the foot of Mt. Meru, a lush green bump of a mountain, perennially shrouded in wispy clouds, which is appropriate considering Rwanda is known as the land of a thousand hills. But the courtrooms have no windows; you can’t even see it.

The tribunal is an odd tourist magnet, drawing visitors killing time until they leave on safari to see the rhinos in Ngorongoro or the cheetahs of the Serengeti. They come for the same reason I did, outwardly drawn to history, but secretly hoping to hear the gory details, to feel placed among the panic and chaos, to re-live those terrifying moments as the survivors lived them, to hear something, anything, that makes sense of the unimaginable.

But these are not those kinds of trials. These are not the men who slashed people to death with machetes. (I passed a man using a panga, as they’re called, to chop down a tree this morning on my way to the tribunal and could only think about the thud it was making compared to the sound it would have made pounding into human skin, fat, muscle and bone.)

They say that between 800,000 and a million people were killed in the space of three months in those gruesome days, often with tools no more sophisticated than a machete, a club or a sharpened hoe. That’s about 8,000 people a day and those numbers alone are enough to suspect someone somewhere formulated and implemented a plan to keep up a pace of killing that could only be described as a frenzy.

These are the men who are thought to be the genocide’s masterminds. In the proceedings I am watching, known colloquially as “Military II,” two of the defendants were the chief of staff of the Rwandan army and the chief of staff of the military police. It took me at least two days before I realized the defendants were in the room; they come to court so smartly dressed and look so innocuous I mistook them for lawyers. (Talking to their lawyers has made them oddly human – one of them lost his 15-year-old son to leukemia last year and was denied bail to attend either his final days or his burial. He has been detained in Arusha since the boy was 10. I watch him often during the trial and he looks my way frequently, as there is little else to look at. One of the witnesses testifying for the prosecution described him as “not thin, neither dark nor light, but a kind man who did not take things out on his subordinates and earned the respect he received.”)

The police under this man’s command are thought to have encouraged scared citizens to seek refuge in the churches, which they then used as a convenient killing chamber, hacking and slashing until all was quiet. Then, just to be certain they had thoroughly accomplished their goal, they’d push a few bricks out of the structure, toss in some tear gas, wait for the tell tale coughing and then go straight to the sound and kill the survivor.

This man and his co-accused are not the men who did the actual murder, those men are being tried in Rwandan courts and housed in Rwandan jails. These men are accused of writing the script, then pumping up the actors. They are suspected of creating lists of enemies who needed to be killed, of creating a campaign of hate where the enemy was akin to a cockroach awaiting extermination. They are accused of lighting the match, then fiddling while Rome burned.

The testimony – especially about something so horrifying – is neither fast-paced nor gripping like the courtroom dramas shown on TV. Instead, it’s like hearing the cryptic crossword read aloud, a jumble of acronyms and multi-syllabic last names, poetic-sounding place names. (When not called “Military II,” this trial is known as Ndindiliyimana et al, which is pronounced exactly as it’s spelled: n-di-n-did-ee-imana.) Some of the witnesses cannot be identified, apparently for their own protection. (At least two people connected to the tribunal have been killed since it began.) If the public is allowed into the proceedings at all, then the witnesses sit behind a blue curtain, their disembodied voice coming out through the headsets, in snippets, between translations. There are moments when someone is being talked about who cannot be mentioned for some reason that is never explained, so the courtroom sounds like a Harry Potter book, where everyone refers to the “man who cannot be named” as though he were Lord Voldemort. There are very few witnesses that I would consider survivors. In seven days of visiting the tribunal, I have seen a Spanish priest who was best buddies with a mayor now accused of using the church as a death chamber, a British physiotherapist who was evacuated before things escalated, a high-ranking police officer who the defense made sound like a spy and a soldier who apparently survived the genocide without any blood on his hands – a virtual impossibility.

The testimony is never linear and for the most part, the tourists leave completely confused, not entirely sure what they just saw, although all are certain that in the end, the men will be convicted. They remember well the pictures of 1994, the bodies stacked up like cords of firewood, the streams of refugees carrying nothing more than a fabric-wrapped bowl on their heads as they walked, forever damaged, to the refugee camps of the Congo (Zaire), where thousands more died in a devastating cholera outbreak.

The questioning is like listening to someone read aloud a manufacturers warrantee; it is so sanitized with legalese, so seemingly inconsequential. It isn’t about psychology or hatred, sinister plots or murder most foul; it’s about who was where when and what orders were given to do what and whether someone saw someone do something or just heard about it.

An all-too-typical exchange: “Do you remember telling the investigators at your meeting on 27 May 1995 that after you heard the radio announcement that the president’s plane had been shot down at 10 p.m. you went to Kigali camp on foot?” A pause, while the question, spoken in French, is simultaneously translated into Kinyarwanda and English. “Well, it has been 10 years and I am not a computer…”

Instead of reverence, there is open animosity between the prosecution and defense lawyers, who snipe at each other, answering questions posed to witnesses as though that were standard procedure or giving a disdainful “Oh, sit down!” when an objection is made. There is condescension from defense lawyers who have come to the conclusion that their clients are getting a raw deal. A typical exchange:

Lawyer: “She can’t say that! She can’t say what she heard. She can only say what she saw. She’s saying, ‘I heard they got Kalishnikovs, they got guns.’ That’s hearsay and I want it struck.”

Judge: “It will be evaluated within the scope of its context. You have been hearing that throughout the trial. Are you going to do this every time?”

Lawyer: “Yes, because that’s not justice.”

Judge: “Well, I’ll continue to rule the way I have.”

Lawyer: “And I’ll continue to object; I don’t care.”

Judge: “I don’t care either.”

Lawyer: “I know you don’t.”

In seven days, I have met only one Rwandan, an investigator working with one of the defense lawyers, who cannot sit in the chamber for fear he will recognize and endanger a witness. Instead, he sits in the public gallery, the only man who has his headset on ‘0’ since he understands all three languages and has no need for translators.

News
Accused boycott Rwanda tribunal; Slam prosecution's 'mafia-style' methods Toronto lawyer seeks suspension of trial
Karen Palmer
Special to the Star
459 words
24 January 2006
The Toronto Star
A18

Arusha, Tanzania Prisoners charged with planning the Rwandan genocide boycotted trials at an international tribunal yesterday as a protest against what they called "mafia-style" methods used by prosecution investigators.

Defence lawyers at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda claim investigators collecting evidence against their clients are coercing witnesses into providing false testimony or threatening them with indictments if they don't co-operate.

"We renew our oft-repeated request to assure some transparency filters into these interrogations ... so that the habit of fabricating evidence and influencing witnesses will forever disappear," said a statement signed by the detainees.

"We are requesting that these trials be suspended pending an investigation into what's going on," said Christopher Black, a Toronto lawyer defending a general who was chief-of-staff for Rwanda's military police at the time of the massacres.

The allegations come in the wake of the disappearance of Juvenal Uwilingiyimana, a former Rwandan minister whose body turned up in a Belgian canal before Christmas.

Although an indictment was issued against Uwilingiyimana in the summer, he had apparently been co-operating with tribunal investigators, crossing from Belgium into France each day for almost two weeks to meet with investigators until late November, when negotiations over his testimony broke down.

Uwilingiyimana was believed to be a member of the ex-Rwandan president's inner circle. He disappeared on Nov. 21. On Dec. 17, his naked body, its hands missing, was pulled from the Charlebois canal in Brussels.

A letter written by Uwilingiyimana before he died and released by his wife turned up on the Internet a few days later, claiming investigators - including two Canadians - had told him that if he did not provide testimony against "certain persons," he would be "lynched, crushed, my body will be trampled on in the streets and dogs will piss on me."

The letter has not been authenticated.

The prosecution, meanwhile, claims that Uwilingiyimana wrote a letter stating he was fearful of other Rwandans living abroad.

"How can you ask for these proceedings to be suspended on conjecture?" asked Cire Ba, prosecutor for a group of four high-ranking military men. "We should see who has benefited from this crime. We would not murder our own witness. Up to now it is our witnesses who are being killed, our witnesses being pulled out of canals," he said.

In 1994, between 800,000 and 1 million Rwandans died during a three-month killing spree. At least 50 former army officials and community leaders have been indicted for war crimes; the Rwandan government claims there are hundreds more living in exile.

Random thoughts...

My pen drive has literally changed my life. Why didn’t I twig to this little do-hickey before? No more scuttling home with my laptop clutched under my arm, giving the hairy eyeball to anyone my paranoid brain suspects as a thief. Really, everyone should have one of these.

***

I bought a book in Zanzibar, but have read it roughly 23 times now, so I’ve begun reading the guidebooks cover to cover. According to the alarmist folks at Lonely Planet, Internet costs between $8 and $13 US an hour in Malawi. Please tell me this is a typo. (I suppose it goes without saying: you’ll not be hearing from me when I’m in Malawi.)

***

I admit I’ve never really been plugged in; I say things like plugged in, for example. There are reams of movies I’ve never seen, bands I’ve never heard of, whole genres and movements of literature and pop culture that I’ve yet to experience.

Africa is only furthering my cultural retardation.

On Saturday I popped some new batteries into my wee shortwave and found an English-language radio station that played several hours of reggae (which I hate, due to its affiliation with the Rastafarian movement and my rather pathological hatred of virtually every Rasta I’ve met) but it was mitigated by the news every hour on the hour. (Ah, the Beeb. How I miss the trumpets blasting at the beginning of “Focus on Africa.”)

Even though it’s mid-January, the station aired a pre-Christmas American Top 40 countdown on the top 100 songs, hosted by Ryan Seacrest, who was that boy with the bad highlights from American Idol last time I checked. Did Dick Clarke die?

Anyway, Ryan had the lowdown on the “hook up” between someone named Bowwow and Sierra and the dirt on whether Ryan broke up with Ashlee or whether she dumped him. Who are these people and why don’t they have last names, or even proper first names? At one point he introduced a song by some woman who is a pioneer in the “Crunk and B” movement, a woman who has a much-anticipated second album coming out. At the risk of sounding like my mother, what is Crunk?

Approximately 78 of the top 100 American songs (two belonged to Avril Lavigne, so maybe I should say North American) of last year were completely new to me, and totally annoying. What has happened to the music industry that 50 Cent is considered good? The sad thing about it, to me, is that this continent is being inundated with American poppy, rappy, crunky crap. The kids dress like Eminem, in baggy jeans, twisted baseball caps, oversized T-shirts. Some wear band-aids like Nelly. All the 50 Cent styles that don’t sell across the pond end up in market stalls here, so every fifth kid has 50 Cent’s ugly, bullet-riddled mug on their T-shirts. And the radio stations fill up hours with bad music, when their own musicians are producing far superior sounds and starving while they do it.

After Emily left to go back to Ghana, I did a story on a music school on Zanzibar island whose sole purpose is to save the island’s unique music, a style known as taarab, which has never been transcribed to sheet music and was in serious trouble, since there were virtually no kids interested in learning it and few musicians still playing it. (SEE STORY BELOW) I spent an afternoon at the school, sitting in on a drum lesson while a violin lesson went on right outside. I had the presence of mind to bring my recording equipment, so I could go away and appreciate how amazing the violinist was, how complicated the percussion was. All across Africa there is amazing music, some of it an acquired taste, but all of it complex and socially important, with messages and heritage and roots. This is dying, killed slowly but surely by stupid rap “songs” about spending 50-Gs on the timepiece? As they say on the West Side, “Oh why?!”

***

In the continuing East v. West debate:

• The food over here is soooooo bland. I miss spicy peanut sauce. Even a little “tasty shitor” would be good right now.
• People the continent over say “sorry!” when you trip, stub your toe or otherwise hurt yourself. (Smashed my elbow on the bus window the other day, hard enough to draw blood, and everyone around me was like, “Gasp! Sorry!”)
• Nose picking seems not to be quite as socially acceptable as it is in Ghana, yet still not quite the taboo it is at home.
• I heard someone hiss to get a waiter’s attention today, but the woman seemed rather ill-mannered and uncouth, so the jury’s still out on whether East Africans hiss like West Africans do.
• The ice cream boys announce their presence with a bicycle horn in Ghana; the Tanzania ice cream men – rarely boys – have an electronic thing that goes off and sounds like a siren.
• The incessant horn honking of the West Side Taxi Drivers is replaced with the incessant car alarm triggering of the East African Idiot Car Owner. Jury’s still out on what’s worse. (Can you tell I’m sitting in on legal proceedings? Everything comes down to what the jury thinks.) On the one hand, at least in West Africa it’s just the taxi drivers, but in West Africa roughly four of every five cars on the road is a taxi. That’s gotta be about equal to how many East African cars are equipped with an alarm.
• No one is impressed with my limited Swahili like they are with my limited Twi.

Arts
Zanzibar reclaims its rich musical tradition; Once beloved by sultans, taarab nearly vanished Women, youths and foreigners are reviving genre
Karen Palmer
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
1142 words
28 January 2006
The Toronto Star
H04

Stone Town, ZANZIBAR To see Zainabu Athmani on this island's narrow, winding streets is to see a diminutive woman wrapped head to toe in a brilliant orange buibui.

To see the 27-year-old behind the closed doors of the Dhow Countries Music Academy is to see that those scarves hid a shoulder-baring tank top, huge hoop earrings, bleached jeans and black platform boots. To see her wail away on a three-piece drum kit is to know there is nothing diminutive about her.

And to hear her talk about a musical future teaching children to play the traditional instruments she has come to love is to know that Zanzibar's unique musical style - on the brink of extinction as little as three years ago - is undergoing a renaissance at the hands of the island's women and unemployed youth.

"We need to give our culture, our traditional culture, from our school," she said in halting English. "I (would) like to teach little children drums. I'm going to be a strong woman."

"Some of them are playing instruments that have never been played by a woman before," said school administrator Kheri A. Yussuf, adding that about a third of the school's 100 students are female, mostly in their late 20s like Athmani.

"The idea of musical education in Zanzibar is very new. Some parents are not sure it's very useful to their kids," Yussuf said.

Zanzibar, a conservative Muslim island with medieval architecture and white sandy beaches, is a 90-minute ferry ride from the eastern coast of Tanzania. Its musical heritage was shaped by the cultures that visited its shores back in the days when it boasted legendary markets for both spices and slaves.

The roots of the area's traditional taarab music can be traced to the late 1800s, when Zanzibar's ruling sultan imported an Egyptian taarab group, then sent a local musician to Egypt to learn the musical style. When the musician returned, he established a club to teach and share the music.

But the island was also influenced by the musical styles of the visiting traders and explorers from India, Europe and the Middle East, resulting in a taarab with a slight Hindi flavour and a huge African percussion section.

Done well, Zanzibari taarab features huge orchestras offering a harmonious mix of violins, fretless lutes known as ouds, the accordion, a recorder, dozens of drums, a zither and, over it all, a voice singing an epic love story.

Taarab done not so well, however, comes across as depressingly screechy and shrill, with a voice that assaults the ear with its warbling and wavering.

In either case, it rarely appeals to teenagers more comfortable with rap and hip hop.

"It's the kind of music where you sit and listen and ... how can I say this? You sit and listen and you respect it," said Kwame Mchauru of Busara Productions, a non-governmental organization devoted to preserving the island's music.

"You can see in (the players') faces some of the sadness and that reflects on the audience. They start to think, 'Maybe we should go to the disco.'

"They want fun and excitement. It's hard for them to inspire other young people."

Mchauru pinpoints the beginning of taarab's demise in Zanzibar to the advent of breakdancing. When tapes and videos of the Western craze began appearing on the island, Zanzibari kids lapped it up.

"They were excited they could actually take part," Mchauru said. "People wanted something more exciting, they wanted to try new flavours."

Plus, the Western videos showed fancy homes, expensive cars and flashy clothes - things any teenager might covet. "They wanted to be that, they wanted to have that," Mchauru said.

So taarab music, once the preferred entertainment of sultans, faded quietly. The number of taarab orchestras dwindled and at one point the island had only one trained oud player left.

Since taarab was a largely oral tradition, passed on from player to player and rarely transcribed to sheet music, it was in serious danger of dying out.

"Mostly people abandoned their music purely because of economic reasons, because they couldn't make money making this kind of music."

While West Africans were busy cementing a solid musical reputation with the genres of mbalanx and highlife, East Africans were struggling to support a signature musical style and seemed content to import pop tunes from the West or copy the brash dance music of their central African neighbours.

For a time, it seemed the only people willing to sit through a taarab performance were tourists eager to soak up a slice of Zanzibar's unique culture.

"They demand it and they pay well for it," said Yusuf Mahmoud, executive director of Busara Productions. "It's like every place wants us to perform."

Tourist interest became so strong that traditional musicians found themselves once again in demand. In fact, over this past holiday season, there were too few musicians to go around, Yussuf said.

Foreigners also seem to be leading the campaign to save Zanzibar's unique style of taarab. A German woman registered the NGO that funds the Dhow Countries Music Academy. The Ford Foundation, UNESCO, the American embassy, a Belgium-based funder and the Norwegian government provide money for the instruments, education for the teachers and equipment needed to transcribe the taarab melodies.

Even Mahmoud is originally from the U.K., although he now makes his home on the island and is a regular headliner at beach parties.

His NGO organizes an annual Swahili music festival that showcases talent from across East Africa. This year's event begins Feb. 13 with bands from Ghana, Burkina Faso, Swaziland and Kenya, as well as three taarab bands, including a group featuring 93-year-old Bi Kidude, a Zanzibari institution.

Taarab's champions figure if they can get Zanzibar's children to listen to and pick up an instrument associated with taarab, they'll soon find themselves playing - and enjoying - the complex music.

It happened to Mchauru, who grew up in southern Tanzania listening to mostly to traditional drumming, but began violin lessons at the music academy when he came to Zanzibar to supervise a hotel kitchen a few years ago.

"It changed my feelings because I enjoyed it," Mchauru said. "It's the music that taught me to explore other musical styles. Every music has its beauty somewhere."

"Our music is recognized the world over and we need to keep it alive," Yussuf adds.

karen palmer for the toronto star Julieta Stephan (left) and Zainabu Athmani practice traditional Zanzibari music with teacher Harry Kombo at the Dhow music academy. | ;

Backpacker

Had my first “backpacker” experience on Tuesday night, the kind of experience that they write about in all the guidebooks, but never seems to happen to me. I decided after a tough day of fighting a one-woman battle against cretins and low-lifes to retreat to my room, where I spent the afternoon reading my journal – trying to remind myself why this was such a good idea in the first place – and writing a story I am planning to file for the Star. By the time I was finished it was 7.30 and my stomach was rumbling, so I decided to eat dinner. (I have given up dinner since Emily left and reverted to my old ways of eating something snack-y in the morning, having a big lunch around 1.30 or 2 p.m. and then going to bed early, as this entire continent seems to rise at the crack of dawn.)

Anyway, there was an English woman named Kate who’d stayed at the dorm with us in Kendwa and by the time my dinner arrived, a German girl named Marie and an American guy named Dave had joined us. Kate had come up from Jo’burg via Mozambique and Zimbabwe and was looping through Tanzania and meeting up with her mom, where she is volunteering in Malawi. She made me feel much better about the route overall, as she said people were amazingly friendly and she had no problems at all, but warned me that crossing into Zimbabwe takes hours and hours as they check each bag individually. Marie had just left 15 friends who’d traveled to Tanzania to celebrate two birthdays. They’d left on Sunday and the next day she freaked out about traveling alone and changed her flight from three weeks hence to Thursday. By the time we were finished with her, she’d been convinced to spend the $65 and change the ticket back. Dave spent New Year’s on top of Kilimanjaro, summiting as the first sun of 2006 rose. He was still on the mountain when three Americans asleep in their tents were killed by falling rocks. He said the whole mountain has the atmosphere of a cakewalk, even though parts of it can be quite arduous and dangerous. The fees are outrageous and the safari companies seem to justify the cost by promising things like luxury tents and candle light dinners, so at times Dave said he was passed by a porter carrying one dinner chair, another carrying 10kg of meat, another carrying a kg of salt, a kg of ketchup and on and on. All that foot traffic cannot be good for the environment.

Anyway, we swapped stories while commiserating about Dar’s serious lack of beer. I left the next morning on the bus, slightly sad that just when I’d met people I’d like to travel with – who were actually heading in some interesting directions – I was heading back.

I’m now in Arusha, safari capital of Tanzania, where the number of touts outnumbers the number of tourists three to one. I spent my first night at the Meru House Inn, where a couple of French girls Emily and I met on our first trip here were staying. What a dive. When I checked in the guy kept stressing that I needed to lock up my valuables. In the safe. Behind the counter. It was on signs on every floor, behind the door, on hand-outs they gave you at check-in. (It’s fairly common to see signs and things, but I thought this was a bit excessive.) Anyway, I went out in search of Internet and decided I better figure out where the Rwanda war crimes tribunal was being held, as this was my main purpose for being in Arusha. The guy behind the counter assured me I could walk, but after 45 minutes I gave up, as I was just in view of the sign. I ordered dinner (I was on the bus all day and had no lunch) and had to ask the waiter to keep the guys drinking three tables over from bothering me. One went so far as following me to the stairs, calling “Excuse me! Excuse me!” as I left. The hotel is about three blocks from the bus station, but there must have been a dalla dalla stop right outside because all I could hear for the first few hours was the call of what must have been the routes and the sounds of horns. Clearly the drivers think that whoever honks longest and loudest has the right of way. And whoever invented that car horn that goes “be-be-be-be-be-be-be-be-be-beep” should really be rewarded with a looping soundtrack of that to listen to each and every single night. Thankfully it started pouring around 8 p.m. – and I mean pouring, I had earplugs in and a pillow over my head and I could still hear it bouncing off the metal roof – so the streets cleared out pretty quickly. It rained once in the day and twice during the night, so I hope this means the rains have finally arrived.

I got up in the morning, dropped my key at the front desk and slunk out the front door. (I’d told them I was staying at least five days – before realizing how crappy the place was.) I started trudging in the direction of the tribunal, figuring I could pick out a hotel nearby. Luckily – and I do mean that in a serendipitous sort of way – a taxi driver stopped and I quite happily paid the buck and a half to be driven to the Lutheran centre, where the driver is well known and helped me convince the guy with the keys to come in on his day off and give me a room. For five bucks! It’s just like Obruni House, but cleaner and with more God and less Auntie C. Of course, I can only stay until Tuesday. Then the guy told me I have to move to the Roman Catholic guesthouse, as the Lutherans are having a conference. God bless Missionaries.

In fact, there were 33 Ugandan kids at the tribunal this morning, all of them missionaries in training and all of them super-friendly and sweet. Orla told me Ugandans were amazing and it turns out she was right. They were about the highlight of a very boring day, although getting to know some of the other journalists has been pretty interesting too. Finally! Colleagues!

The backpacker trend continued through the tribunal; in the morning I met Matt, an American who had been traveling for four months, starting in Moscow and overlanding it to Indian, then flying to Jo’burg. He’d spent the past seven weeks blazing through most of the countries I intend to hit on my way to Cape Town and he made me feel so much better about my perception of Tanzania, since he compared the touts and annoyances to what he experienced in India.

In the afternoon I went for lunch at a cafÈ and met with an Austrian woman who was traveling with a friend through her old stomping grounds. She worked for almost a decade in Uganda, Tanzania and northern Kenya as a physician. We met up later that night for a drink and she and her friend proved to be really interesting company.

Then back at the tribunal, I met Suzanne, a fellow Canadian who was traveling from Zambia through Tanzania and down through Rwanda and Burundi, and Leslie, a defense attorney from Alaska on a four-month break. They both made great company, which was fortunate, since all but an hour of the day’s testimony was spent waiting out in the hallway for the lawyers to break from closed session.

Tanzania

Initially when we landed in Dar, I thought it was a city I could really learn to love. It has some great architecture and in some ways a nice, laid back feel to it all. There are lots of men and women out in the streets, including rather liberated South Asian women who dress in beautiful saris and wraps. But now I’ve decided I hate this city and can’t get away from it fast enough.

Traveling alone is such a chore.

First, Dar is ridiculously humid, almost as humid as Ghana. The drought means that Tanzania’s hydroelectric system can’t provide all the power the country needs, so power cuts are common. Yesterday there was no power during the daylight hours and the entire city roared with gas-powered generators. Men flex their idiot muscles to their fullest potential when they see unescorted white women. I’ve had it with being yelled at, even if it’s just “jambo!” the muzungu word for hello. At times it would appear that I am invisible, like when I’m standing in queues or sitting at restaurant tables waiting for a waitron to appear. At the post office, a man managed to squeeze himself in the tiniest wisp of space my Canadian sense of spatial distance demands that I leave between me and the person in front of me. When I cleared my throat and cocked an eyebrow, he had the audacity to act as though he literally hadn’t seen me.

This morning I woke up from a completely restless night determined to get the hell out of Dar. I’ve been here three nights already and was spending money needlessly in a city that had no interesting stories to tell. (As strange as that seems, it’s true. Tanzania is lovely but boring.) I decided to go out to the bus station and buy a ticket for the next day’s bus, using a company that a woman at the front desk recommended. Getting out to the bus station is no mean feat, since the station is 11 km from the downtown. I decided to spend 20 cents and take a dalla dalla, saving myself roughly $5 in taxi fare. The front desk guy told me to walk down to the Starlight hotel and get on a bus heading to . I just nodded my head and hoped for the best. I never found the Starlight, but I found a bus stop and after waiting for a while and not recognizing the unpronounceable Swahili word on a single dalla dalla, I went for one beginning with a ‘U’ and asked if it was for the bus station. Of course. But I considered that dalla dalla full, so I stood back. I am so naïve.

I got on the next one, up in the front seat next to the driver, who spent the majority of the ride alternately adjusting himself, picking at his teeth with a chewed up toothpick and lifting his shirt to rub himself around his waistband. Occasionally he would look over to see if I was enjoying the show. Much eye rolling from my corner.

About halfway there, the young guy next to me got out and an old ornery dude got in, gave a throaty “Jambo” that was probably meant to be sexy but just freaked me out. I got out at the bus station and he followed me. Of course, there were about 30 men following me, all touts looking for a few thousand shillings for the exhausting, backbreaking, labour-intensive, college-degree-requiring work of escorting me to the ticket window of the bus company with the highest commission rates.

In Zanzibar they call these men “papaasi,” Swahili for tick, since they leach on and won’t let go until they’ve got themselves good and bloated on your blood. I was in no mood for it, but I couldn’t find the ticket window I was looking for, so eventually I gave in and told one of them what I was looking for. The ratio, by the way, of papaasi to actual ticket-buying passengers appeared to be 380 to one. So of course a fight broke out because there appeared to be some discrepancy over who had been following me for the longest and who should actually collect the commission from my sale.

Well, well, well. I had already decided that there would be no commission from my sale.

The bus was full, so down to another ticket window, where a guy in a tie who at one point made some nasty remark about how I didn’t speak Swahili (to which I sweetly responded in English, “I speak enough to know you’re insulting me. I’ve only been here a week. Did you speak Swahili fluently a week after you were born?”) and suddenly he was a little more contrite. I was in full-on bitch mode, though. Hot, tired and fed-up. I made it clear I didn’t want any buses that stopped along the way. I didn’t want a bunch of people getting on at dusty corners and I definitely didn’t want any people standing in the aisles. Of course I was assured this wouldn’t happen. The ticket price? Oh first, let’s talk about the bus and where you want to sit on the bus and how the bus only has seating for two passengers on each side of the bus. And the price of the ticket? Oh, 25,000 shillings. Ten bucks more than I paid to get here. “Oh my friend,” I said as I turned away. “Forget it.”

Oh, I didn’t realize you were a student or something. Fine, okay. But the bus only takes two and two passengers, there is only room for 56 passengers, so you pay 18,000 – 3,000 shillings more. Three thousand, that’s all.

Did I mention I was hot, tired and fed up? I paid 15,000 shillings, a third of it with coins.

When Emily and I made this journey a week ago, we arrived at the bus station at 5.30 a.m. and were immediately surrounded by touts. (Who will no doubt be waiting for me when I arrive late tomorrow.) Anyway, they demanded to see our tickets, wanted to know the name of the bus company we were using. We didn’t respond. We’d checked the name on the ticket before we left and besides, we had a guy from the hotel with us. I had a Nakumatt receipt in my pocket, but my ticket tucked into my bra strap. When I pulled out the receipt, a guy grabbed it and took off a few feet ahead of us. When he presented it to the guy at the bus door, the guy just looked at it and handed it back. The tout threw it on the ground in disgust and I managed not to snicker. While Emily loaded our bags on to the bus, the guy at the door told me we would have to pay for our bags and he would issue a receipt, you know, for insurance purposes in case anything happened to the bags. I just smiled and said, “No, thank you.” We got on the bus and sat down and about five minutes later my friend from the door sat down opposite and, with sincere bureaucratic officiousness, proceeded to write out a receipt for bags. Under amount: 5,000 or $5 US. I started laughing. “Oh my friend,” I said. “I don’t think so! Five thousand. That’s too much. Very funny!” He started to say something about how it was 2,500 per bag (that’s all!), but I kept shaking my head no and he ended up muttering “You don’t say no” as he headed for the door.

Anyway, as I was marching away from the ticket stall, a man facing away from me slammed into me with his elbow, smack right into my boob. I just kept walking, but apparently he felt this was rude, as he started yelling at my back, “Hey! Fuck! Fuck you! Don’t push!” For the next forty minutes, all I could envision was me wheeling around, landing a well place kick to his groin, then walking away. As opposed to what I actually did, which was just keep walking.

Now, here’s the thing that really gets me about beach boys, touts and other slovenly morons who make their living by scamming: Africans are keenly aware that they’re perceived as the world’s charity case. They know that no matter how much aid money goes to Latin or South America, or Asia for that matter, everyone always thinks of Africa as the place that can’t manage on its own, the continent of lazy beggars who need a hand up and a handout if they’re going to survive. And it’s unfortunate that the extension of that is that people believe that Africans have become dependent on handouts, that they couldn’t function if the funding dried up. That may be true of corrupt politicians and the district commissioners who see foreign aid as their personal chequing account, but the majority of Africans I’ve met don’t see a penny of foreign aid or NGO dollars and are intensely hardworking. Think about the men of Turkana, digging through solid rock in the blazing heat of a desert sun, all to get food stamps. The women who spend all day on their feet, tending a charcoal fire in the humidity of Accra as they grill plantain. The shoeshine boys, the girls who sell satchets of water, the boys who suck diesel fumes all day as they sell packets of PK chewing gum. They work insanely hard, usually for just enough to survive.

If anyone lived up to the notion that Africans are lazy, that they expect something for nothing, it’s these touts. They think there’s no harm since they’re skimming from the rich whites, but the rich whites lead lives that have nothing to do with them. They stay at fancy resorts and upscale hotels, where all the arrangements are made for them and the transportation is arranged in advanced. They don’t take the bus: they take airplanes, or their companies and NGOs provide cars and drivers. The sad reality is that the only whites who get ripped off by touts are the ones who are volunteers, Peace Corps, the ones who are trying to explore Africa and get an appreciation for the continent and its people. And the only thing they can conclude after visiting any bus station is that Africans are, in fact, corrupt cheats who expect something for nothing.

I walked up to the dalla dalla station where a little more than a week ago Emily and I had hiked with our giant packs and flagged down a vehicle whose driver said it were going somewhere in the vicinity of Libya St. In West Africa, you almost can’t go anywhere without someone demanding to know where you’re going, usually because they figure there’s no way you can get there on your own. For the most part I take it for the gesture that it is: an extension of their unbelievably courteous and generous culture. There are no touts in Ghana and I think this is because people think of it as their moral and civic duty to take care of their visitors and guests, not to leave them to fend for themselves amongst a pack of untrustworthy, thieving bastards.

But here in Tanzania, English is not common and for the most part, no one has spoken to me except to shout “Jambo” or to “hey baby” me – including one idiot who, two days in a row, walked up and demanded I pay for his college, then told me it was very “lude” not to talk to him and that he felt very sorry for my attitude.

Anyway, since I’m an old hand at this dalla dalla stuff, I don’t need any help, right? But I was completely confused by why the vans kept stopping when they were so clearly full. Then I realized that people were actually getting in, standing up, hunched over with their bums hanging out the window. Unbelieveable. I thought matatus were bad. So after 20 minutes, I just climbed in, leaned over a woman and a man, stuck my hand through the “holy shit” bar and held on for one of the most painful half hour rides of my life. Now I understand fully why the women wear conservative clothing: imagine riding like that with a low-cut top!

Mobile Home

On the road again, alone, living like a turtle, my whole house on my back. I expect to be traveling non-stop for the next nine months (sorry, Rose, it’s true) as I work my way from Kenya through Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Zambia, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Swaziland, Lesotho, Botswana and South Africa. (You’re my last stop, Geoff.) My backpack, day sack and rucksack are too much altogether, but I’ve tried and tried to downsize without luck. Herewith, the contents of my mobile home:

1 to-the-knee black skirt
1 green tank top
1 blue skort (yes, I said "skort")
1 yellow tank top
1 pair pink pajama pants
1 pair drawstring black pants
1 pair black pedal pushers
1 red shirt
2 blue T-shirts
2 navy T-shirts
1 navy T-shirt (with buttons)
1 black T-shirt
1 long-sleeve tan blouse (thanks, Mom!)
1 pair navy socks (thanks, Mom!)
7 pairs underwear
3 bras
1 ball cap
1 bikini
1 conservative black one-piece bathing suit
1 package laundry detergent
1 Ziplock baggie clothes pins
1 Masai blanket
1 wrap/towel
1 scarf/wrap/sleeping mask
1 sewing kit
1 iBook
1 Mac to PC converter
1 Mac charger
1 128 MB pen drive
1 English voltage adapter
1 French voltage-to-English voltage adapter
8 pens
1 Highlighter
1 mobile phone
3 mobile phone chips
1 digital camera
1 camera charger
3 USB cords
2 digital camera batteries
2 memory cards
1 telephoto lens
1 lens brush
1 (useless) wide-angle lens
1 notebook
2 spare notebooks
1 day planner
100 business cards
1 Africa guidebook
1 East Africa guidebook
1 digital radio
6 Duracell batteries
3 blank CDs
1 Sharpie
1 Minidisc recorder
10 blank minidisks
1 Minidisc charger
1 microphone
2 sets earphones
1 passport
13 passport photos
26 US dollars
40 Liberian dollars (50 = $1 US)
12,000 Ghanaian cedis (9,000 = $1 US)
1,000 CFA (500 = $1 US)
1 wallet
1 debit card
2 credit cards
1 plane ticket
3 post cards
1 box Ziplock baggies
2 cans bug spray
1 pkg BandAids
1 tube antifungal cream
1 tube polysporin
1 packet oral rehydration salts
1 package Mylanta
1 digital thermometre
1 spare contact lens case
1 pkg condoms
2 bottles contact solution
20 tampons
3 pkg Kleenex
1 roll toilet paper
6 pairs contact lenses
1 Ziplock baggie artesunate, Malarone, mefloquine, imodium, ibuprofen, birth control, ciprofloxin
1 bottle crème rinse
1 bottle body wash
1 stick deodorant
1 Altoid container of jewellery (one silver necklace, one gye nyame pendant, one brass earrings, two silver earrings, one silver bracelet, one sparkly earrings, one cowrie shell necklace, one jade ring)
1 silver “wedding ring”
1 pair nail clippers
1 pair scissors
2 pair earplugs
1 pair glasses
15 elastic hair bands
1 ear funnel
1 pair tweezers
1 Ziplock baggie “feminine products”
1 brush
3 lip balm
1 toothbrush
2 tubes toothpaste
2 containers dental floss
2 tubes hand sanitizer
2 bottles nail polish
1 bottle sunscreen, SPF 30
1 digital watch with alarm
1 Nalgene container
1 travel fetish
1 Ziplock baggie old watches
1 package Canada pencils
1 bag sharpened pencils
1 pair black sandals
1 pair red flipflops
1 flashlight
1 Swiss Army knife

What’s missing? Shampoo and a cell phone charger. A good book, bag of trail mix, a bag of M&Ms and a jar of American-style peanut butter. Other than that, I’m good to go.

Snorkeling for Muzungus

There’s something evil about the watery route from Kendwa to the coral reefs at Mnemba Island. Last time, rolling waves, severe sunburn, dehydration and diesel fumes combined to create motion sickness that left me barely able to crawl out of the boat. I managed to drag myself a few feet to a hammock, where I laid as still as I could until my stomach stopped roiling. This time, we waited in the rocking waves for some really boorish tourists and rode in even rockier waves to the midway point. Emily had turned green and I was afraid to open my mouth to ask about her, fearing what might come out of it. The snorkeling itself was a bit of a bust – so many fat, hairy muzungus you got karate kicked by a flipper in the face a half dozen times. It was murky and half of the coral was dead, so there was a lot less aquatic life. We still saw some zebra, angel and parrot fish, as well as some starfish and lots of sea urchins. (Boo…)

On the return trip, Emily and I decided to get out at Nungwe, the town next to Kendwa and simply walk back to our hotel. I asked someone on the boat if it was possible and they said we might have to wade near the rocks, but it was doable. So, like two sailors without sea legs, we stumbled off in the direction of home, rounded the first set of rocks and realized we were in trouble. There was a good quarter-kilometer of rocks and waves, and with the tide coming in it was harrowing. The surf pounded into us, then into the rocks, then back into us on the rebound. Both of us lost our balance at least once. Emily got pounded a few times and emerged with scrapes on her knees, shoulder and elbow and blood coming out of her toe. She also bonked her head. I lost my wrap, then caught it on the rebound wave.

We emerged about three minutes later, hearts pounding and soaked through. It was the most exhilarating three minutes either of us had had in a long time.

In Praise of Papaya

To me, papaya tastes like dirt, even when doused in lime, whose tartness is supposed to bring out its sweetness. But when I got vicious attacked by a sea urchin, the papaya grew in my estimation – even if only as an herbal remedy.

Swimming in Zanzibar’s uniquely brilliant blue water, murky with waves, its temperature refreshingly warm, I put my left foot down and withdrew sharply, hobbled to the beach and got a trunkload of sand while popping a sliver of something out of the ball of my big toe. It calloused almost immediately and I had thoughts of suddenly emitting a death gurgle as some weird fish-related poison took affect and I slipped below the turquoise sea and floated paralyzed or worse toward Mozambique.

Instead, I walked back into the water and bobbed for another hour or so, drifting with the current. I put the same big toe down on something sharp, like the jagged edge of a conch, then seconds later, ran into a spiny urchin who lashed out with the temperament of a surly porcupine. I swam away like an injured dog, howling, then lifted my right foot above the surf and had Emily pluck out an inch-long spike from my insole. Three black specks, immoveable by tweezers, and two slashes embedded so far under the skin they were only shadows, bore witness to the utter savagery of the attack. (Not to be too dramatic about it.) I hobbled once more up to the beach, then up to our banda, where I broke out the scissors, tweezers and some needles in a fruitless attempt to get rid of the creature’s little gifts. There was only one thing to do: I hobbled down to the bar.

Emily chatted up the locals, who suggested coating the spikes with papaya milk. Neither of us knew papaya had milk, but local small boys were dispatched and arrived about 15 minutes later with two small papaya. With my Swiss Army knife, one of the boys nicked the papaya half a dozen times, causing blisters of milk to form on the surface, then smeared the fruit against my foot. Nothing happened. No burning, stinging or itching and my foot didn’t fall off at the ankle. He nicked some more and then some more, creating a thick paste on my foot. He collected a rather hefty fee – $3 for the papaya and the delicate application; health services here ain’t cheap – and scampered away. I ate some octopus as revenge against the sea, then went to bed for a couple hours and awoke to see that all that remained were two pink marks on my foot.

A Christmas miracle.

The New Year's Curse

New Year’s Eve, circa 1989, would see our family at the monstrous home of the Doanes, family friends who had children our age, a wealth of snacks and a love of board games. One year we watched the Gremlins, ate ourselves nearly sick on snacks scooped up in a paper napkin and set down the dice only when Dick Clark demanded we pick up a glass of something else. New Year’s then was a lot less pressure than it’s become now; more about friends, family and neighbourliness than splashy displays of good cheer.

From a single girl’s perspective, the intense pressure to do something spectacular to bring in the new year makes it worse than Valentine’s day. At least on Valentine’s day there’s a prescribed role for single girls: they’re expected to be miserable in their aloneness, to rail loudly in a post-feminist sort of way about the tyranny of coupledom, the corporate take over of love and romance, to shout in a desperate seeming way about the relative merits of being single.

But New Years Eve is seen more as a bellwether holiday, as though the way the evening progresses cements a pattern for the year and if you were alone knocking back a thimbleful of champagne, or found yourself amongst drunken strangers without someone to kiss meaningfully at midnight, then every other night of the 365 that remain will go exactly the same way.

I have mostly avoided the holiday by working, finding myself freezing in Nathan Philips Square or taking copy from the “warmth” of the newsroom. My best New Year’s to date, ironically, was the night of the Millennium, which started out at the Toronto Hydro offices and carried on to the splashy but poorly attended Star party. Around 2 a.m., after smoking clove cigarettes and talking about nothing, a group of us stole a giant Toronto Star cake and hauled it uptown in a taxi to Renata’s place, where we drank, ate cake and swung on the swings at the park next door until the sun came up.

My worst, hands down, was the year a group of us got rather expensive tickets to a big, faceless party at the convention centre in Hull. We promptly got separated, then spent the rest of the night trying to get the group all re-assembled. When the countdown began mercifully at midnight, we smashed our plastic glasses full of something like champagne with vehemence worthy of the night’s frustrations, shouted “Vive le difference!” and headed straight for the door.

This New Year, Emily and I were in Stone Town, Zanzibar and the evening started ominously enough: on our way to dinner at the waterfront we watched a man on a scooter get mowed down by a car pulling out of a parking lot.

It’s actually amazing that I have lived here this long and not seen a road-related fatality, given how insane the driving is and how poor the road conditions are. I guess I repressed how grueling the travel here can be. Take a routine trip to the refugee camp in Ghana: first the tro-tro to Circle, then fight your way across to the “O’Donna” part, find the Kaneshie bus, listen to the loud-mouth moron shout in Twi as he sells his bright orange “vitamins” on the bus, then get down and fight your way through the market at Kaneshie to where the van should be waiting for the ride to Buduburam.

Wait in the mud for the van. Fend off water, biscuit, PK and FanYogo sellers. Get on bus, valiantly guard arm and leg space as though life depended on it. Shoot ugly looks at two Liberians who are obviously traveling together but chose not to sit together and are now speaking at decibel 45,000 about their devotion to Christ across all other passengers. (Liberians have this way of speaking, their accent is like a more ignorant-sounding version of the Alabama drawl and they have a tendency to drop the last syllable of virtually every word and they often talk as though they are only allotted 13 seconds and they’ve got to fit it all in.) Sigh, often, at the state of traffic. Repeat until arrive at destination.

In an unparalleled stroke of urban planning genius, someone in a cushy office at some ministry in Ghana decided to spend Japanese aid money on upgrading the three roads that lead out of Accra. All at the same time.

Ostensibly, this has something to do with forming a trade alliance with the other English-speaking countries of West Africa and the final product will not only see them upping their imports and exports, but sharing a common currency known as the Eco. The deadline for introducing this new currency has long passed; the billboards announcing it have all been replaced by hair-care and skin-bleaching products.

But the road upgrade continues. When Rhonda and I traveled together a year ago, the road out west, to Cape Coast and beyond, moved at a snail’s pace. Frankly, all the roads out of Accra move at a snails pace. Actually, that would be an insult to the snail. He can move faster than that. Today it’s no different. It’s mind-boggling: at one point in the trip to Buduburam, we were driving four abroad on the shoulder of the road while next to us unraveled two perfectly flat, gorgeously paved strips of highway. When we got a chance to get on it, we did, driving on the right strip at some points and on the left strip at others. Sometimes the cars, trucks, tro-tros, vans and bikes would just swerve all over the place, as if they were a bunch of drunken greyhounds fighting for the top spot in the pack. Everything was a legitimate driving surface so long as it was within the boundaries of the deep ditches. Of course, at one point, we just nosed down over the ridge leading to the ditch and drove down there for a while. It was insane, really. We were stopped for ages: it took nearly three hours from the time I left my door to the time I emerged from the tro-tro out into the brilliant sun of the refugee camp, which is probably less than 40 km away.

Mom and Dad, having survived the “road” north in Kenya, can attest to the uniqueness of African highways.

Anyway, this time, the scooter driver swerved defensively, but still managed to slam into the driver-side (passenger side at home) and go skidding, careering and finally bouncing to a stop on the pavement. One tire was ripped to shreds. Everything that could shatter did: lights, mirrors, windscreens. The bike was in two pieces. The poor guy, thankfully wearing a helmet, lay face-down on the pavement. He looked up, then fell back again. He tried several times to get up. Emily and I started to approach and so did a half dozen other men, appearing out of nowhere in the night. No one seemed to know what to do, although the driver managed to get himself up and off the road, in a gingerly way that made me think he’d broken at least his wrist. Emily asked the obvious question, what should we do? Call the police? The police, however, were already there, standing on the other side of the road with assault rifles slung over their shoulders. They were the other drivers. They were driving their car out of the police parking lot without the headlights on and hit the scooter.

I’ve often wondered what I would do when faced with a car accident in Africa and it’s stunning that I haven’t had to face it before this. Turns out I would do nothing. Neither of us speak Swahili well enough to find out what’s wrong medically, and even if we did, there’s little we could do about it, other than offer money for a hospital. Because the cops were involved, no one seemed to know how to respond. (They stood on the opposite side of the road and just watched the man.) We’re women in a Muslim culture and were unsure how the man would respond if we went rushing in, touching him and speaking in a language he might not understand. In the end, we simply walked away.

Happy New Year indeed.

Larium!? Why!?

Watched Mom and Dad pet a giraffe today, then stood amazed as each of them let the giraffe lick their faces. Wonder if their malaria meds are acting up, but so glad that they’re both so into that they’re making their own weird adventures. I can only imagine what they’re telling their friends back home…

Travel
Necking with a giraffe; Okay. What's the one thing that's more disturbing than watching your parents kiss each other? The answer, according to Karen Palmer, is watching them smooch a gentle Rothschild giraffe.
Karen Palmer
Special to The Star
719 words
18 March 2006
The Toronto Star
K05

NAIROBI, Kenya -- Are my parents having an unusual reaction to their malaria meds?

There's my mom, her eyes closed as though waiting for a kiss from a schoolboy crush, while an astonished-looking guide looks on.

And there is my dad, his face squished and mostly obscured by the full, 18-inch-length of a dark grey giraffe tongue eagerly searching for the pellet of maize and sorghum clamped between dad's teeth.

All I can say is: "Eww!"

My father, usually a mild-mannered accountant, compares a kiss from a giraffe to having a warm cloth placed gently on your face. Apparently its tongue is so soft, you barely feel it at all.

My mom agrees, in her retired kindergarten teacher way.

"The tongue is so soft and supple that the giraffe didn't actually lick or kiss me, just happily curled the tip of her tongue around the pellet," she says. "No wonder they can get leaves of the acacia tree without eating thorns!"

The giraffe park, run by the African Fund for Endangered Wildlife, ( www.gcci.org/afew/afew.html ) is a unique way to satisfy a safari junkie's curiosity about the long-necked creatures - and maybe even show them a little affection.

Started in 1980 as an urban home for the endangered Rothschild giraffe, the centre has grown to include a hotel where guests are often visited by the giraffes while they're taking tea and where the giraffes deliver the wake-up call to rooms set on the second-storey.

Its main job, however, is protecting the Rothschild giraffe while building an appreciation for them among Kenya's school children, who visit the park for free.

When Betty and Jock Leslie-Melville created AFEW in 1977, there were only 130 Rothschild giraffes left in Kenya. The giraffe differs from the country's plentiful Masai and reticulated giraffes, thanks to its brown splotches and white socks.

Moving the first two giraffes to the stately Leslie-Melville manor on the outskirts of Nairobi was as much a publicity stunt as it was about conservation.

The couple turned their adventures raising the two giraffes into a book, which was later made into a movie. Interest in the giraffes spawned a school program that now sees thousands of Kenyan schoolchildren visit the giraffes each year for free.

And it has nearly doubled the giraffe population. Now, there are more than 350 giraffes, which share the parkland with a half dozen warthogs.

Standing eyeball to eyeball with a giraffe, there are a couple of things you notice: They look like Muppets, with sweet brown eyes and beautiful long eyelashes most women would kill for.

All this gentleness is good for garnering handfuls of treats, but one well-placed kick from these doe-eyed darlings can kill a lion.

Their coats are somewhat bristly, like a short-haired dog. To show their exasperation that your hands are empty, they're likely to deliver an insistent head butt. And when they snort, it blows your hair back.

To soothe the offspring of tourists getting fresh with the giraffes, the guide tells us their saliva is actually antiseptic, due to a diet of leaves plucked from thorn trees.

That's all well and good, but the only thing more disturbing than watching your parents kiss each other is watching them smooch a giraffe.

Karen Palmer is a former Star reporter travelling through Africa.

Carnivores

Have successfully managed, for the second year in a row, to spend the “holiday season” outside of North America and find this ducking the holidays thing to be habit-forming. Thinking about Christmas back home largely makes me itchy, mostly because Canada is so dry and overheated in December that I’m invariably suffering from dry skin and static-y hair.

Last year on Christmas, my family moved en masse to a time share in a touristy village in Portugal where the television sucked, there was an insufficient number of beds and my mom snapped at me about having too much luggage, which I took to be a richly ironic comment considering the source and stayed surly for hours afterward.

But we were treated to a holiday spread by a friend of my parents who were holidaying in the same village. We swapped driving horror stories, complained about the quality of the television, marveled at the stupidly cheap price of booze, compared a few of our favourite souvenir purchases and swapped ideas for filling the rest of our holiday days. It was, in the end, a restful and somewhat rosy way to spend the day.

The holidays at home are rarely so peaceful. By the time the 25th has arrived, I’ve usually behaved in astonishing Bridget Jones fashion, sluttishly accepting every Christmas party invite that comes my way and eating and drinking and making merry as though the start of January signaled a coming drought. Getting home is usually a hassle; there’s too many people all suffering from dry skin and static cling crowded into too small a space in weather that’s not really befitting Christmas. (In our neck the woods, there’s slush on Xmas day far more often than snow.)

Once I get home, it is rarely serene and relaxing. It’s never enough time to relax properly or catch up properly or sleep properly. It’s usually a mash of running from one place to another: getting last minute supplies, eating in drafty basements, ferrying olive trays to one house or the other, putting up decorations, staying out of the way, fighting over what television shows to watch, fighting in general. On the day of, I’m usually hot and tired and itchy, dressed in too hot a sweater and too tight pants and generally feeling out of sorts that everyone around me seems comfortable and well put together, while I’m dandruffy and big bottomed.

This year, we woke late, five floors of hotels separating me and my parents and 5,000 miles and eight hours separating me from my siblings. Although I’m about to turn 30, “Santa” came with batteries and chocolates and a new, stain-free T-shirt. We watched the Muppet take on the Christmas Story, then my parents made out for a walk (they made it as far as the pool, since the security guard refused to let them roam alone in all their Muzungu glory on a day without police) and we gathered later around the pool.

In the late afternoon, we called home to talk to my sister and brother and my Dad chattered away in a manner I’ve rarely seen before – either he really missed home or really wanted to talk about his African adventures – and then we headed off to Carnivore, to sample some of the very animals we’d paid good money to spot on safari.

I spoiled the Christmas spirit by pulling a Mary Kate in the bathroom almost immediately after wolfing down ham, turkey, spareribs, lamb, beef, chicken wings, camel, ostrich meatballs, a potato, crocodile and some sweet potato soup.

Merry Christmas!