smoke and markets

The heat and the wind set the fields aflame. After crashing at a nearby hostel, Meg and I drove to a restaurant for dinner and we passed a patchquilt of hot white and yellow fires in the distance and right beside the tarmac. The electricity across the region was out because of the wind, and we took showers that night by candlelight. Lying in my bunk bed, nestled in a sleeping bag, I looked outside the window and watched tongues of flame engulf a banana tree then become quiet again, watched dots of light smolder in the adjacent hill. Showers of sparks would drift across the field like fireflies. Even when a tree on the hostel property exploded like a bomb in jets of gas and heat, I was not frightened. Everyone was calm, treated the fires as a common occurrence. Which it was.

I woke up smelling like smoke, and looked outside to see a heavy fog laying across the dull lit world. Except it wasn't fog. It was all smoke. Snow white ashes slid off the glass of our car door when we opened it. Gray ash settled in the corners of our eyes. Some fires still sputtered.

It was Monday. We drove through smoke and rows of pineapple and sugarcane. We set out to explore markets, and found beautiful communities with jacaranda trees and markets set in a tree house. The smoke eventually dissipated and we ventured farther and found another market made from planks of wood lined beside the highway. Each vendor had her own small square of space to sell her goods in this long row of grass baskets, patterned cloth, and beaded bracelets.  The markets were mostly run by women, and it seems that women across 

the world are masters at guilt trips.  Male vendors in Cape Town and Durban will entice you into their shop by showing you a nice carved elephant, a lovely necklace for the pretty lady, promising "a special price for a special customer!"  Women vendors, in contrast, entice 

you into their shops by calling from the entryway, "Please, sissy, just a look.  Just come in and look.  My children are hungry and no one is buying."  One woman even went as far as to say, "We depend on the white people.  The white people haven't been coming."  I felt awful to contribute to this cycle of dependency these woman have on white tourists, because I want them to be able to support their families through sustainable farming, responsible family planning, and selling their handicrafts at fair prices.  Instead, I bought a hand-stitched quilt for the equivalent of USD 25.  I bought a string of beads for 80 cents.  A grass basket with dark and light geometric patterns for USD 5.  And I negotiated down to these prices, insisted that anything higher was exploiting me, the rich white girl.

And then I met Lungile, a wise, beautiful, spirited woman running her own market stall.  We talked for over an hour sharing stories about life, being a woman, laughing with each other and eventually exchanging numbers and addresses.  When I returned to the market the next day 

to say goodbye before we left Swaziland, we talked again for three hours.  After developing these rich friendships with Dumisani, who named me "Fikile," meaning "just arrived" in SiSwati, and with Lungile, who calls me her "American sissy," it was difficult to pull ourselves away from Swaziland.  It is a country with many, many problems of poverty, political corruption, the proliferation of AIDs, and social and gender inequality.  News stories would suggest that the country is utterly helpless in the face of such dire crises, and even Steve Colbert would suggest in a recent skit that Swaziland (and Africa in general) lacks any moral code and Africans are unable to constrain their primitive carnal nature, as evidenced by the thousands of "bare-breasted virgins" parading before the king.  (Note: Reuters, as cited by Colbert, is incorrect in claiming that the Reed Dance was started in 1999 by King Mswati.  I conversed with women in their sixties who remembered their own experiences as maidens in the Reed Dance, and have discussed it and researched it further in my course on African Religion; it is indisputable that the Reed Dance is a very old tradition.  Furthermore, the breast as a sexual object is a Western perspective that is relatively new in African and especially Swazi culture.  In precolonial culture, the breast was not considered something sexy and shameful to be hidden away from the public eye.  It was a part of female reproduction and a symbol of fertility to own and be proud of, still visible in young Swazi women's comfort with their bodies in the Reed Dance.  Other cultures place equal sexual connotations on other body parts, like the ankles or the nape of the neck, and so we must remember that the breast, by nature, is not a sexual object; it is our culture that has defined it as such.  It is a mammary gland.  For my male readers: Really?  You find a mammary gland sexy?)  We cannot and should not pass judgments so quickly on people we have never met or seen, as based upon secondary reporting from biased sources.  In my experience, I have never felt so embraced by a people in my life.