Two Tales of a City

 To ex-pats around Swaziland, Mbabane is affectionately called "Africa Lite," and the moniker rings true.  It's a fairly Westernized city with two major shopping plazas, modern restaurants, fuel stations that look like anything you find in the US, well-painted street lines, working traffic lights, mechanic shops, real estate agencies, and most everything else you might expect to find in any US city with less than 100,000 people.  At the same time, Mbabane still feels like an African city to me.  [Many people who have been to Africa have been to Nairobi, Kenya; that city does NOT feel African.  If you've been there, you know what I'm talking about.]  While Mbabane is the capital city, Manzini (about 40km to the southeast) is larger than Mbabane and definitely feels much more African.  Still, Mbabane contains all the trademark "must-haves" of an African city: a large, central taxi park; street vendors lining every possible inch of sidewalk space in the middle of town; street performers, beggars, and drunks; street signs of varying quality pointing to anything and everything 'major' within a 50km radius; a mixture of twinkling new and dilapidated old buildings; and everywhere the bright and bold reds, greens, and yellows of Africa.

While stunningly beautiful, the geography of Mbabane is difficult to describe.  The city rests between two mountainous ridges running roughly parallel from northwest to southeast with peaks rising almost a thousand feet above the tallest buildings.  Situated on the Swazi highveld (i.e. high country), it's not technically accurate to say that the city sits in a valley, because it overlooks the Ezulwini valley which lies yet another thousand feet below.  Neither can you say that Mbabane is on a plain, because the area is very hilly, even in town.  From a neighboring peak, it looks as if the city just dropped out of the sky and fell down onto the swollen spaces between the mountain ridges.  To the west, the terrain continues upward for another 20 km, across the border and over the Drakensburg Escarpment that divides Swaziland from the South African province of Mpumalanga.  To the east, down the mountain and across the Ezulwini valley, lies the city of Manzini and, beyond that, the hot and flat lowveld of Swaziland.

Because of the topography and elevation (about 4200 ft.), Mbabane experiences drastic weather changes from day to night and from season to season.  Like all mountainous places, the wind blows fiercely at times, and some times the entire city is engulfed in cloud.  One afternoon I stood on our balcony and watched the entire vale fill with tumbling clouds from top to bottom.  It was magnificent.  In the space of less then ten minutes, the visibility went from several kilometers to a few hundred misty meters.  Now that we are coming into the dry season (i.e. winter), the temperature can rise higher than 80F in the day and drop lower than 60F at night.  For Africa, this is cold.  [As strange as this is to say for an American living in Africa, I didn't bring along enough warm clothes!]  We often start the day wearing socks and fleeces, change to t-shirts and sandals by noontime, and back to jeans and slippers by dinner.  And during the night, the cold sinks down into the concrete walls and tile floor as we pile our blankets on top of us to sleep.  I'm not complaining, though; this effect works to our tremendous advantage during the summer!

These extremes are also reflected in the economy of Mbabane, and of Swaziland as a whole.  We live in Sidwashini, a neighborhood toward the western edge of town.  On the hill just up the road are spacious houses with manicured lawns and gardens.  In the same neighborhood, less than a kilometer away from us below the highway, are mud huts shoe-horned between tiny two-room concrete houses.  Driving around town we have seen BMWs and brand new Mercedes-Benz's, ten-year-old Toyota Corolla's with a hubcap or headlight missing, and twenty-year-old jalopies limping along on long-broken shocks with smashed windows and doors that don't close properly.  I remember making similar observations when I first visited Swaziland in 2004 and being equally jarred by it.

Of all the countries in the world, Swaziland is 21st from the bottom in its 'GINI co-efficient', which represents the inequality of income of all the people of a particular country (the lower the rank, the greater the gap between the richest and the poorest).  Although I haven't been here long enough to have heard people talk about this first-hand, but I've heard that this disparity has caused a lot of underlying tension in Swazi society, especially against the royal family (which lives in opulent wealth).  The scuttlebutt in the international community is that the monarchy will fall soon, but I don't know how much truth there is to that rumor.  In general society, people still speak highly about the king -- but again, I don't know how much stock to put in that, either.  My guess is that I would have to live here a long time, and develop some fairly intimate Swazi friendships, in order to learn the real truth about this issue.

Everywhere, people are looking for employment.  From what Allison and I can tell, it seems common for Swazis from rural homesteads, when they come of age, to come to the cities in order to find work.  I have the feeling (but I don't know for sure) that Mbabane is less inundated with migrant workers than Manzini or Matsapha (Swaziland's industrial center, just outside Manzini), probably because housing is so expensive here, comparatively.  This dynamic has been happening for decades and seems to be part of the cause for non-traditional living arrangements (and subsequent sexual partnerships) that have been adopted in Swazi culture and have doubtlessly exacerbated the tragic AIDS pandemic that rages here.  I realize that a similar story could be written about every major city in the world.  The difference is that here, in Swaziland, all this is still happening even where the HIV prevalency rate hovers around 25%.  Desperation peeks through the glass and steel of Mbabane, and people die.  All the time.  [At some point I'll have a separate post just about this, the constancy of death here.]

Because of my job teaching with ZBC, I have a chance every week to pass through downtown Mbabane around the time the sun is rising.  It's a bit surreal, yet remarkably calming, to observe the busy city before the buzz awakens.  It's a phenomenon that is truly unexplainable, you really have to experience it: first the incredible fury of sound and clamor that typifies a major African urban center; then the serenity of the exact same location with most all the people  --  and goods, and trash, and vehicles, and...  --  removed.  In all of life there is rhythm, sometimes noticed and sometimes not, but Mbabane perfectly resonates with the daily rhythm of an African city.  It's a boisterous cacophony in the light, an eerie deadness in the dark.  That's the other thing about Mbabane, the city completely shuts down after sundown.  

One time, shortly after we arrived in country, Allison had left her cell phone in a kombi coming back from Manzini.  We thought the phone was long gone, but the gracious kombi driver found it and called us to return it.  I drove into town to meet him well after dark in order to recover the phone.  I'm not one to be afraid of the dark, but I was a little freaked out driving into the bus rank (or taxi park) that night.  Scarcely a soul was in sight.  Some cars drove on the road, but none were parked in any parking lot.  No businesses were open.  No one walked the streets.  Thankfully, the downtown area is well lit with streetlights and such, but not all areas of town are like that.  At any rate, we have learned that the general principle of Swazi society is that, after dark, people stay in their houses.

Well, enough morbidity.  Even with its imperfections, Mbabane is a beautiful African city.  I understand why so many ex-pats live here.  Most everything you need to live is readily accessible, and Mbabane quite possibly offers the best mix of political and economic stability, ethnic harmony, scenic beauty, hospitality of climate, cultural interest, and ease-of-living of any place in Africa.  When it comes time for us to leave, I will miss living here.  One could easily call this town, "Africa's Best-Kept Secret."