Victoria Falls

After my time in Senegal for the Fulbright ETA seminar, I decided to take a continental trip to visit a few other countries. As a side project, I’m working on a toolkit for United States embassies in the Sub-Saharan region on how to best run their new or old Fulbright ETA programs. To do that, I’ve been collecting information on how the program is run across the region from other ETAs, embassy staff, and Fulbright itself. What I quickly learned was that there is no uniform way the program is run, and most of the challenges and complaints held by the ETAs across the region are actually rooted in miscommunication or unclear expectations of responsibilities and the distribution of those responsibilities on the part of embassies and Fulbright. So yours truly, being the efficiency driven economist he is deep down, set out to fix this colossal set of inefficiencies and miscommunication which has subsequently and unintentionally made me the most knowledgeable human being on the planet when it comes to the Fulbright ETA program.

So where exactly did I go? Well, there are a total of 4 countries in my portfolio. These include Madagascar, Malawi, Zambia, and Rwanda. All of these countries are in south-central Africa, east/south of the DRC if you know where that is. I went to Zambia first and spent some time in the quiet capital of Lusaka where I met with the ETAs there, checked out their communities, had a meeting with the embassy staff, and just kind of walked around.

My visit to Zambia presented me with an interesting linguistic observation. For some background information, nearly all African countries have some sort of official language that is one of the colonial languages. The two dominant colonial languages are French and English; however, a few places speak Portuguese and some of the countries along the Sahara consider Arabic as a colonial language even though the influence of this language mainly roots itself in the Islamic cultures and religious sects in the northern part of the lower continent. The degree to which each country speaks the colonial language varies greatly. Nonetheless, something I noticed was that those countries where there are many tribal languages, are also the countries where the colonial language is spoken most proficiently.

I’ll give you two pairs of examples. First, Senegal and Zambia. Senegal is francophone whereas Zambia is anglophone. Although Wolof is the predominant tribal language in Senegal, there are dozens of other tribal languages that don’t mix at all. The same is true in Zambia where there are dozens of tribal languages. Although one could consider the Swahili of nearby Tanzania and other neighboring countries as the “Wolof” of East Africa, it doesn’t really apply to Zambia. The French in Senegal and the English in Zambia are excellent. The locals speak these colonial languages with high degrees of proficiency, and communication is pretty easy once you pick up some of the phrases they use or how they pronounce certain words. For example, instead of saying “for here” when talking about eating at a restaurant rather than getting take-out, they’ll say “from here” in Zambia. Small things that don’t’ really affect daily communication. When it comes to academic English or French on the other hand, the story is very different.

Contrast these two countries with Madagascar and Rwanda, my second example pair. Both countries have one national local language, Malagasy and Kinyarwanda. With the exception of dialects which are sometimes compatible and sometimes not, these languages dominate Madagascar and Rwanda. The colonial languages in both countries, French in Madagascar and formerly French and now English in Rwanda, see relatively little use except in the higher ends of society, business, and education. Consequently, the proficiency of these colonial languages in both countries for the average person is quite abysmal. Think of the average American’s Spanish level for those who live outside Hispanic communities. To be brutally honest, the English and French in both Madagascar and Rwanda are pretty terrible. Although my French is useful in SOME parts of Madagascar, it’s pretty useless with the average Malagasy on the street. My prime example is my first time looking for a confessional in the capital. Naturally, I went to one of the nuns who runs the little gift shop at the cathedral. I asked her in French when and where I could go to confession, and she told me 11am. I knew she didn’t speak French because 11am is the time of the French mass, which means she thought I was asking about mass and not a completely different Catholic sacrament. I thought to myself, “who would know how to go to confession? Little old ladies in the back of the church.” So I found one and asked her. She was quite frank with me and told me in what little French she knew that she doesn’t speak French. So I went to the sacristy to ask one of the sacristans, who also didn’t speak French and went to get the music director, who was the ONLY French speaker in the church that he knew of. The music director was finally able to help me find the priest and explain to me how the process works. And despite this anecdote, Madagascar is a “francophone country.” In fact, this series of events was the last piece of evidence I needed to convince me to invest so heavily in learning Malagasy. It’s just easier.

The pattern which emerged from my observations and travels was pretty obvious. Countries where there are many local languages that don’t mix trend towards higher proficiencies in the colonial languages because the presence of a lingua franca, despite being colonial in origin, is welcomed to make communication, education, and business on a national scale easier. This is evident that everything in Senegal and Zambia is in French and English. Signs, advertisements, new reports, church services, etc. On the contrary, countries where there is a single language, even one with several semi-mixed dialects, the proficiency of the colonial language is rather low because there is no need to use the colonial language on a daily basis. In Rwanda and Madagascar, all the signs, advertisements, new reports, church services, etc. are in the local Kinyarwanda and Malagasy with only a few of the big companies choosing to use English or French. There is also a stigma held when people speak the colonial languages in these places. For example, there are parts of Tana here in Madagascar where you will ONLY hear French, even between Malagasy. On one occasion, my friends and I were out to eat when in the room next to us we could here a large group of young girls laughing and speaking loudly. “You can tell they’re considered rich or social media influencers, or at least trying,” I said to my company. How did I know? “They’re all Malagasy but they’re speaking only French. That’s a common trend. You can’t make it big on the internet if you’re going to use a language spoken on only one island.”

Anyways, back to my travels. I wanted to seize the opportunities I had to see as much of the continent as I could. So I scheduled some time for some much needed sightseeing. I headed down to Lusaka’s intercity bus terminal, made my way through the boisterous and pushy crowd, finally bought a ticket for a good bus, and waited for the bus to leave after 2.5hrs of delay before making my way to the southern part of the country. My first stop was a long weekend in Livingstone, home to the eastern part of Victoria Falls.

If you’re unfamiliar with Victoria Falls, it is one of the seven natural wonders of the world. There are two halves, one on the Zambian side and one on the Zimbabwe side. The falls themselves stretch for about 1700m, which is just over a mile long, and averages drops of 100m, 328ft. Mind you, I had heard the name of Victoria Falls before. But I had never honestly been intrigued by it nor did the fact that it’s a wonder of the world impress me, initially. Nonetheless, I had been told over and over again that while in Zambia, I had to make my way to Livingstone to see the falls and do some other activities in nearby Botswana and Zimbabwe. So I hopped on the little bus provided by the backpacker hostel I was staying at, zoomed through the streets of Livingstone, waved at the zebra along the side of the road, and found myself at the gate to the falls.

From the road, you can’t see the falls. In fact, from upriver, you would never know there is a 300ft-plus drop of pure death and doom waiting for you over the seemingly calm but swift river. Moreover, the Zambian side of the falls is wooded, meaning you can’t see the falls at all until you’re practically on top of it. Well, in front of it. You would be an absolute idiot if you tried to stand on the falls. Regardless, I paid for my entrance ticket, saw some baboons, which are honestly the ugliest mammals to walk on this earth, and began trekking my way down to the long and winding networks of footpaths that give visitors an assortment of angles of the falls.

I’m not one to be stunned. But my first glimpse of Victoria Falls floored me. I was literally struck with awe. I had never seen something so immense, powerful, and majestic in my life. The sound of the falls can be deafening. The spray of the falls was like a torrential downpour. And the length and depth of the falls themselves provided my eyes with more than they could comfortably capture. It didn’t take long for me to realize why it is one of the seven natural wonders of the world.

As I moved along the paths, I saw a stand selling ponchos. I decided, in my adventurous but honestly more stingy nature, that such a piece of vital equipment was for wusses and pansies, that the spray from the falls couldn’t possibly be that bad. As is always true in my arrogance, I was horribly wrong. And after taking barely a dozen steps past the poncho sellers and seeing the knife’s edge bridge with what looked like a thunderstorm dumping buckets over its handrails, I knew I had made the wrong decision and that for less than a dollar I could have avoided a few hours of misery and the subsequently necessary sun drying. But to turn back so soon to buy a poncho would be a strike to my perceived yet lacking dignity. Thus, I braved the bridge and the falls’ spray for the rest of the time.

I took plenty of pictures, even though they cannot do the falls any true justice. At this point I should tell you that, as was true back in May, I’ve run out of photo storage on the website. So all the photos of the past posts are no longer available. However, I may choose a select group of photos of my entire time abroad and post them with some captions once I’m back in the States. It is all dependent on my motivation levels. Anyways, I spent the entire morning on the Zambian side, making sure that I left no path untrodden. Eventually I decided to make my way to the Zimbabwe side.

As I was on my way, I ran into a group of conservationists who were also staying at the backpacker’s hostel. I realized they weren’t American but their English was quite proficient, as are most European’s who work in the anglophone world. I introduced myself, and in natural backpacker fashion, asked if I could tag along with them for the afternoon as our destination was the same. They agreed and I made some new friends. They have some pretty interesting stories. They’re conservation workers down in the greater Kruger region in South Africa. They live in the bush meaning sometimes they wake up with lions or elephants in their doorways. The stories they have about animal encounters are pretty wild. Apparently lions are kind of lazy though, and it seems that when you do encounter one in the wild, the process is the same as if you were to meet a black bear in the north east. On the other hand, elephants hate movement and the idea is to stand as quiet as possible. The reality of how crazy it all was hit me when we were walking back from the restaurant late at night. There had been an elephant sighting in the area that afternoon, so we had to keep our eyes out for any movement. We would be generally fine because we had flashlights, made plenty of noise by talking with raised voices, and we were in a group. But the gravity of the idea that there was possibly a wild animal, more specifically an elephant, lurking in the trees who could go absolutely berserk at any moment sunk it. I kind of liked it.

My new friends and I made it to the Zimbabwe side of immigration where I experienced the most unpleasant entry into a country yet. It’s easy to get a day pass into Zimbabwe. The lady at the counter handed me off to another lady who gave me a stack of papers and told me to fill out a form. I asked her for a pen. She told me no as she held one in her hand. So I grabbed one out of my bag because I usually have one and started filling out the form, to which the second lady then told me not to do in front of her desk, even though there was no one else there and she was the one I had to give the form back to. Afterwards, I waited about ten minutes as immigration staff sat around and did nothing until they finally took my form, my payment, and then put the visa in my passport in the most horribly crooked way possible. It hangs out of my passport. A toddler could have lined it up better.

This was just the start of my unpleasant experience in Zimbabwe which I would never recommend to anyone to visit. Zambia on the other hand, highly recommend. My friends and I made it to the falls and spent the afternoon there. I liked the Zambia side of the fall more, but having new friends who liked to laugh and joke made the Zimbabwe much more entertaining than it had any right to be. And despite having dried myself in the sun from the Zambian side, we got even more soaked on the Zimbabwe side leaving me with wet boots and socks for the rest of the evening. But that’s nothing new to me.

Eventually we made it back to the backpacker hostel and we said our goodbyes. The next morning they would be headed back to South Africa and I would be on my way to Chobe national park in Botswana for what would be my first safari.

As always, know that you are in my prayers each morning. All I ask is that you do the same for me.

May God be praised.