Around this time last year, I was in Istanbul. I’d just left the Balkans, for good, or so I thought at the time. A few weeks in Croatia, a dash into newly independent Montenegro, a month in Bosnia, one week in Ljubljana and then a couple of weeks in Belgrade was all I’d seen of the former Yugoslavia at that point. I missed it greatly.

That was when I read an article by my former employer called “Kosovo: The Next Yugoslav War.” Protests were mounting in the ethnic Albanian enclave that technically remains to this day a part of Serbia. Upcoming elections in Belgrade looked as if they might go the way of the Radical Party, which had nothing but hostile things to say about the future of the region. Ethnic Serbs in the Republika Srpska (RS) region of the nation technically known as Bosnia-Hercegovina were threatening to secede from BiH in the event of Kosovar Independence. War clouds were gathering on the horizon of the Balkan Peninsula once again, and there didn’t appear to be that much time left.

So I left Turkey, and thought I didn’t know it until months later, abandoned a plan I’d harbored for years, which was to travel through the Middle East at the end of college. I had to get one last taste of life in the Balkans, the Land of Honey and Blood, before it blew itself to hell once again.

Well, it never happened. The elections in Serbia, though not turning out the way it would have in a non-parliamentary system, at least failed to put the Radicals in power. Republika Srpska never had to act on any secession plans, because the UN continued to avoid making definitive statement vis a vis Kosovo’s Independence. Russia has continuously made known its opposition to a non-Serbian Kosovo: the “bad guys” in our prism are seen as fellow Slavs in Moscow, and it would also set a terrible precedent for Chechen affairs. Not to mention Spanish fears of legitimizing a Basque separatist movement, with Romanian and Slovakian paranoia over ethnic Hungarian unrest within their borders not helping the Kosovar Albanian cause much either.

War never came in the Balkans because everyone was able to delay and stall and convince themselves that everything would end up all right. Now, it seems that we’re about to be reminded of that simple truth that exists in the Land of Honey and Blood: very seldom does everything end up all right.

They held elections in Kosovo on November 18. The new prime minister has stated a December 10 date for a unilateral declaration of independence. Russia will not be able to block it. The Western response will dictate the course of events that are to transpire. I'd prepare for the worst.

Four quick photos.

1) Mohammed.


One of the veterans at Soweto, his jumpless J reminds me of a skinny, dreadless Sam Perkins. His day job, though, is mandazi chef on the streets of Arusha.

Mohammed is the man.

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2) One of our several house mates.


We pretty much coexist.

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3) Tanzanian Driving School.


It's an oxymoron: "Tanzanian" and "Driving School" together. People here drive like it's Independence Day; pre-Jeff Goldblum solution to save the world.

I always try to get lifts from these cars. They never pick me up, even though it's something every driver needs to learn here, just as we all learn how to go through the Drive Thru in the States.

Karma took care of them on this day.

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4) An African Teacher, indeed.


Of course, Burning Spear is actually Jamaican, not African. But his message is for the Diaspora, and I'm glad to see some Tanzanians taking note of his lessons.

I love Burning Spear. His show my last semester at UVa was one of the best concerts I saw in college. When I pulled out my camera to snap this shot -- I just had to do it -- they started yelling at me from across the street: "Mzunguuuuu!"

How else could I respond but with the bass line to "Old Marcus Garvey."

"BUM BUM, BUM, BUM-BUM, BUM-BUM, BUM, BUM-BUM, BUM-BUM, BUH DUH-DUH, DUH, DUH-DUH!"

"YEEAHHHHH!!" the African Pupils all screamed. A Mzungu knows Burning Spear!

Seen.

Full mzukah!
cuz I'm a Nako 2 Nako soldier...

A-Town. (*gang symbol copyrighted by Bariki Mdogo, 2007)

“I think it’s so funny how at the beginning, we woulda been like, ‘Yeah! We’re gonna go to this STUDIO, we’re gonna chill with these dudes OUR AGE – maybe we can like, invite them back to our place, and we’ll like, chill with them. Yeah!’” Hunter screamed. Cars whizzed by us on the Nairobi-Moshi Rd., laying on their horns almost as thick as he laid on the sarcasm. He switched back into his normal voice: “Now, I’m totally just looking out for what these guys might try and pull.”

Pulling us out of bed before noon on a Saturday morning was the first thing. One of our boys from our five-on-five pickup games at Soweto had basically tricked us the previous afternoon into coming.

“Beel,” he had said, pulling me aside after the last game (a lot of Tanzanians not only have trouble saying my name, “Bayless,” but also my name-for-people-who-have-trouble-saying-my-name, “Billy”). “You will come to the studio tomorrow?”

Studio? He popped the question like he was just confirming some earlier pledge I'd made.

“Uhh…” It wasn’t that I saw a problem in it, just that I was a little confused.

“Hunta said he will come,” he lied.

“Oh,” well if Hunter said it was cool, “then yeah, what time?”

“Saa tano,” he said, “five o’clock” meaning 11 a.m. in Wazungu time. Our day starts in the middle of the night; East Africans use a more logical method, zero hour coming with the rising of the sun, six hours after what we refer to as midnight.

“Safi,” I said, giving him the Tanzanian slap-shake/thumb-snap that bombs on our boring Anglo-Saxon handshake. “Tutaonana kesho.”

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The only name we’ve ever heard anyone call him is Ice Pee. That includes his brother who also plays at Soweto, Bariki Mkubwa (Swahili for “Big Bariki,” not to be confused with a smaller, flashier guard who also plays at Soweto, Bariki Mdogo). "Ice Pee" is a valiant attempt at a badass rap name that falls tragically short -- it makes you giggle too easily. Until I saw it Sharpied onto the back of his blue Kili Basketball jersey early on in our time at the court, right above the also Sharpied on numbers, printed in big, bold, all-capped letters for all of Soweto to see, I never knew that ice could flow not only through a person's veins, but also through his mushroom tip.

"Do Tanzanian women know about shrinkage??"

Ice Pee.

Hearing it uttered is almost as unintentionally funny as when someone points at a rooster and excitedly exclaims, "Cock!" to impress you with their English. Since I don't know the word for urine in this language just yet, the best I could do for him was to translate "Ice Pee" into the verb form, literally "to urinate ice."

Ladies and gentleman! Putchyo hands togetha for the one and only ... Kukojoa Barafu.

Not quite the same ring to it, huh?

Ice Pee, like my boy from UVa, Big O, has a dream of hitting the big time in the rap game. Though I suspect he’s actually just a 25-year-old virgin, or just really, really scared of getting AIDS, he once told us that he hasn’t had sex in three years, “because of da hip hop, man,” as if being so focused on rapping prevents him from even contemplating making moves upon moves on femininas. In other words, hip hop is Ice Pee’s life; the rest is just details (No. 1a being hoops).

It makes sense that the name of his upcoming album, which he is recording one TSh 50,000 (~$45) track at a time, is “Mpira wa Kikapu,” Kiswahili for basketball. I’ve got two of his songs on my iTunes, and even though I understand very little of the rhymes without Biti’s help in translating, they’re not bad.

Last Saturday, he invited me and Mwindaji to come to the Noizmekah Studio to see where the magic happens.

“Tutaonana pale juu Treepull A,” Ice Pee had said when we were arranging a meeting place. “Treepull A” is a ghetto fabulous Arusha night club that doubles as a hip hop radio station during the day. Hunter and I hear nothing but warnings about it from every Mzungu that’s been – “There’s always at least one fight when you go to Triple A" – but since we have no car, and no desire to pay the TSh 12,000 cab fare each way to see for ourselves, we can neither confirm nor deny. But as we strolled through the AAA gates for the first time that morning, about 15 minutes late because of the unexpected early drop off by the Wazungu aid worker couple that had picked us up on the side of the road, I could see why AAA’s reputation was so notorious.

We were fish out of water, even in the middle of the day, when no one but the early shift was around, save for a few loiterers sprawled across the grass out front. About ten sets of jaundiced African eyeballs scoped us up and down as we made our way through the parking lot, Ice Pee’s not among them. We were the only white boys there, something unremarkable for me and Mwindaji, seeing as we have almost no Mzungu friends at all. For whatever reason, nothing quantifiable, AAA just felt dangerous. I thought this to myself; Hunter later vocalized it.

Thirst had been the only thing on my mind from the time we had hit Mianzini, about a ten minute hike from where the Church’s had dropped us at Sanawari, site of Arusha’s brand new (and only) traffic light, which is about a month old.

On "The Road of East Africa," as a wise man once said, things are getting better and better and worse and worse, faster and faster

We’d walked about 25 minutes in all from the point where we watched our ride turn left into town. It was hot outside. Africa hot. As you could imagine, I wasn’t lacking in the back sweat department. Now, though, finally safe under the shade, my eyes locked onto the centerpiece of the semi-circle shaped bar in the corner of the canteen. It was a fridge, gleaming with fluorescent light and stocked with a whole truckload of the Real Thing, and it sucked me in like a tractor beam.

“Coca Cola mbili,” I said to the woman standing behind the counter, theoretically at work, though doing very little.

“Baridi?”

“Ndiyo.” Tanzania is the first place I’ve ever been where a server will ask you if you want your Coke to be cold. Not “Ice or no ice?”, but simply “Hot or cold?” A chronic lack of refrigerators and regular power outages has produced a populace that often prefers warm beer or soda.

Mwindaji and I each take down an average of three Cokes per day. Sometimes we drink more, sometimes we drink less, but we never do we drink none.

Without a trash disposal service in our village, we've stockpiled enough of these babies to melt down a month's worth of bullets for our boys in Anbar Province

It’s a guilty pleasure that I don’t feel guilty about. I feel like I owe it to myself to drink as many Cokes as I can when in the land of the omnipresent glass Coke bottle. Plus, for whatever reason, my usual favorite Pepsi sucks here. And with nothing to do after work except play basketball and watch the Africandle pick up wax ...

The Africandle on Halloween. Lookin' good...

... I look forward to the Cokes. Our nightly routine, usually when we get home from playing, is one person cooks, while the other goes to the duka up the dark path from our house and gets four bottles – one each with dinner, one each for chilling afterwards. At 300 shillings a pop (no pun intended, bahahaha), or about 25 cents each, I’m pretty sure Hunter and I are going to put the grandchildren of our local duka’s owner through college with our constant business. That, and I am probably going to personally pay off Dr. Nick Pigneri’s mortgage with the amount of dental work I’m going to need to repair all the damage being wrought to my teeth -- they use pure sugar cane in the syrup around these parts, not high fructose corn syrup like we’re fed in the States.

Ordering a Coca Cola baridi to combat the East African heat is not a good idea, especially in November -- summertime in the southern hemisphere, remember? Six sips – or three mega gulps, if you go by The Bob’s definition of the word “sip” – and it's kicked. And you're still really thirsty afterwards. I knew all of this when I walked up to the bar at that AAA canteen, and I didn't care. We killed those Cokes.

Twenty-five minutes after that, we were still waiting. Big surprise. It's for inevitable delays such as those that I always try to go around town with a book in my backpack. Three weeks ago, I was in the middle of a 59-year-old man’s story of his solo journey from Cairo to Cape Town, Dark Star Safari, by Paul Theroux. I was chillin'. Hunter, on the other hand, had nada. He was restless.

“Dude,” I heard an impatient voice say from across the plastic table after a good half hour of waiting, “you ready to roll?”

Really restless.

"Africa Time" is the name Wazungu use in these parts describe the chronic lateness of Africans. A rule of thumb for newcomers: when someone says “five minutes,” they really mean, “at some point in the next ten hours.” That, or simply, “when I feel like it.”

Hard at work

“Just give me five more minutes,” I said, hardly bothering to lift my eyes from the book, engrossed as I was in the chapter on Zimbabwe. Africa Time is beginning to infect me, too.

(*Note the striking similarity between what my Uncle Tom McNearney refers to as “The Parsley Shuffle” and Africa Time.)

Like I said, I didn’t even lift my eyes from my book, but I’m almost positive he rolled his. When Mwindaji gets homesick, he can usually count on the regular phone calls Mr. and Mrs. Flint make to his TZ cell phone. When I get homesick, all I have to do is remind myself that I’m basically living in an entire nation of black Parsley’s, where everyone is late, all the time.

Dark Star Safari just happens to explain the historical origins of Africa Time, a.k.a. “The Black Parsley Shuffle,” in its chapters on Tanzania:

I sat on the platform among the delayed passengers. No one really minded the delay. If there was anything to learn on a trip such as this it was that in East Africa urgency was a foreign concept. Though there were a number of words for urgency in Swahili, lazima and juhudi and shidda [sic] and haraka, none had Bantu roots; all were based on loan words from Arabic. In East African culture, hurrying had a negative connotation, illustrated in the rhyming maxim, Haraka, haraka, haina Baraka – Hurry, hurry makes bad luck [that’s not actually what it means; “quickly, quickly, without a blessing” is more on point]. Of course, some Africans were driven mad by such lack of urgency and tried to emigrate. But in general such complacency made people patient, as well as accounting for the utter indifference to things going wrong. In a place where time seemed to matter so little, there existed a sort of nihilism which was also a form of serenity and a survival skill.

Right, on, the head. A ten.

Two minutes into my “five more minutes,” Mwindaji’s phone rang.

“Ice Pee,” he said once he hung up, after spitting a few Swahili sentences into the receiver. “He’s here.”

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Ice Pee is always good for a smile. I love Ice Pee. I don’t see him nearly enough. Every time he rolls up to the court -- usually once we’ve already started warming up with two teams taking shots from the elbow to 20, or the old fashioned left handed lay up drill -- I can count on a big grin and some sort of slang Swahili salutation: “Niaje msela!” (What up dude!), “Inakuaje mchizi?” (How’s it goin’ homey?), “Mzukah, mzukah! FULL mzukah!” The last in that series isn’t exactly a greeting so much as the current darling of the meaningless street Swahili lexicon – if you speak Kiswahili cha mtaa, you’re using “full mzukah” for everything these days. “Mzukah, FULL!” this, “FULL mzukah!” that. Full means exactly what you would think. Mzukah is the word for some sort of ghost. Think of the equivalent in street Kiingereza: “phat,” “badass,” “word.”

Ice Pee loves to yell “FULL mzukah!”

“Mambo jamaani?” he roared as he approached the canteen. How are things y’all?

“Umechelewa bwana,” I said, pointing to the watch that no longer covers my left wrist. “Inakuaje?”

“Mzukah, mzukah!” he yelled with a big smile, strutting that strut of an MC in training. “FULL mzukah!”

Classic.

He was wearing the red jersey this time, a big, solid No. 13 colored in carefully on the back with magic marker -- a poor man gangsta’s making do for his lack of Mitchell & Ness threads. On his head was a blue and white striped train conductor’s hat, something I’d definitely rock myself if I ever found one that fit my Kevin Mench sized skull.

"It's YUGE!"

People here shop for used clothes at the outdoor sokoni with the intention of finding something they think looks brand new and hip. I shop for the same used clothes at the outdoor sokoni with the intention of finding something that looks old and alluringly ugly. Poor black Africans, rich white Americans – we’re all trying to be something we’re not.

The ridiculousness of my attempt to "relate" to people mired waist deep in Third World poverty is made especially clear when I'm walking around poor neighborhoods in Arusha. Who the hell do I think I am to try and "study" these people? So I'll stop and eat with the commoners at a dive rice-and-chicken bar; it doesn't change the fact that all I really am is just another slum tourist.

When I really check my motives, that's what I am: a slum tourist. Lots of guilt and embarrassment are involved – guilt that I could have ever felt deprived because my parents wouldn’t buy me a Nintendo; embarrassment that my yearning to “understand” what life is like for those Bob Nesta calls the sufferahs has taken me halfway across the globe to gawk. I feel so superior to all the "rich Mzungu tourists," and yet I know deep down that I'm no different in the end.

The fascination I have with the former Yugoslavia has been called “war porn” by several of the journalists who wrote books about their time on the front line in the 1990’s. Images of a big, happy family tearing itself apart at the seams seems to make those of us from boring old Western countries feel more alive. Since Independence in 1961, Tanzania has been unable to provide headlines as juicy as those describing the disintegration of Yugoslavia, but it can still offer a traveler from a boring old Western country the opportunity to feel more alive.

I’ve already called it slum tourism; maybe “poverty porn” fits as well.

I’m no rookie to poverty porn: in Trenchtown, Jamaica, in the Balkans, even in Houston’s own Third Ward (or should I say “Developing Ward?”), I experienced the sensation: I am one of the lucky ones. The rat race in Tanzania outdoes them all.

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its big fun to be rich

I saw this graffitied on the wall and wished I could turn myself invisible for a few seconds -- the wide-eyed stares I get when I pull out my camera here only reinforces my slum tourist insecurities. A shame, too. That tag captured the mood of Arusha's streets perfectly. The love of money is greater here than anywhere else I've ever lived -- including Geneva.

“Tumeshafika,” Ice Pee said, letting us know that the approaching gray metal gate in the middle of Sanawari was the place. Hand painted on the left side of the gate was the name of the studio: NOIZMEKAH.

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It was crazy how quickly it happened, and how easy it was. DX, the producer/owner/100 percent of the one-man operation that runs Noizmekah, which is simply a house with a built-in studio, heard from Ice Pee that Mwindaji could beat box, and after exchanging the standard pleasantries in Swahili, came out with it.

“You wanna lay down a track?”

(insert sound of tires screeching here)

Confusedly looking to both sides, Hunter hesitated. “Yeah,” he finally said, still not totally sure whether the offer was genuine or not.

Years of practice have led to this moment

As you can see, it was.

Before he knew what had hit him, Mwindaji found himself inside a small, rectangular room, surrounded by walls lined with egg crates, staring at the rest of us through a plate glass window with his back to the large square mirror hanging on the opposite wall.

“Tayari?” DX asked from his seat at the computer.

Headphones on, Hunter was ready to go. He nodded. Tayari.

What followed was something I’ve heard countless times in the five-plus years we’ve been best friends, but which was new to the rest of the five people in the room. If you haven’t had the pleasure of hearing Hunter beat box, I assure you, he is good. So good that when I found out the car he drove our last year of college didn’t have a radio, I didn’t even care.

Without almost any warm up at all, MC Mwindaji (just came up with that on my own) proceeded to lay it down.

How does one describe such a symphony of sounds? How about mzukah. That’s what a gangsta Tanzanian would probably say on the street. But since Kiingereza cha mtaa is my native tongue, I’ll go with “f***in amazing.”

His first take was just a freestyle beat box session, laying a grid for the next two takes. He added some scratches in on the second go-round, listening to his first cut on the headphones while he worked. The third and final take were just vocals, thought up on the spot to fit in between the beat he’d just created.

“Hot daaaays, cold niiiights, I’ve been playin’ baaaall, my whole liiiiife…” he sang. Ice Pee wanted a song about basketball, and that’s what he got.

“Is that freestyle?” DX asked me, as he popped a 180 on his swivel chair.

“Yeah.”

He shook his head and swiveled right back, staring at a colored screen which was charting all the peaks and valleys of Mwindaji's music. DX, who has worked with tons of Tanzania’s most popular hip hop groups, and who definitely knows what he’s doing, was clearly impressed.

“…my whole liiiiiife, my whole liiiiiife…” reverberated through the computer speakers.

The video I took of the room shows one guy who is straight jamming; huge grin on his face, bobbing his head up and down the whole time. Ice Pee looks pretty pleased that his Mzungu friend is making him look good.

It only took about ten minutes, and the track was ready. Just like that.

Ice Pee said he’s going to put it on his album, a guest interlude of sorts for MC Mwindaji (that rhymes if you pronounce it correctly: mween-die-jee). And even though I can’t beat box or sing, Ice Pee has been pushing me to record the “outro.” Not able to freestyle like Hunter, I’m still in the process of writing my Kiswahilinglish contribution. It’s far from complete, but I came up with a few rhymes that very day, sung to the beat of my favorite Swahili hip hop song, “Hawatuwezi” by Nako 2 Nako:

Wazungu wawiliiiiii
(Two white boys)

Wamekuja Tanzaniaaaa, kucheza basketiiiiii
(They’ve come to Tanzania, to play basketball)

Mwindaji na Billyyyy, also KNOWN as Hatari, au Ticha BPeeee
(Hunter and Billy, also known as Danger, or Teacher BP)

Wazungu wawiliiiii, msiwapimeeee, mkitaka kuishiiiiiii
(Two white boys, don’t try them, if y’all wanna live)

duh duh duh duh duhhh, awwwww ooooo ahhhh
(You’d have to have heard “Hawatuwezi” to really get that)

"Hawatuwezi" and Nako 2 Nako have been as integral to my time in Tanzania as Beogradski Sindikat and "Alal Vera" were to my time in Serbia. If you listen to hip hop in Arusha, you are a "Nako 2 Nako soldier." I will write a lot more on this topic later, I promise. But it's good to know that Ice Pee and Bariki Mkubwa are keeping it real in their alley.

Two Nako 2 Nako soldiers live this way...

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Anyone who ever goes on safari in East Africa comes home remembering three things in Swahili: jambo, hakuna matata and karibu.

The first two are tourist trap alert words – if you hear them, run. Ninety-eight percent of non-hustling Tanzanians use mambo (the plural form of jambo) for a standard greeting, and NOBODY says hakuna matata, ever, unless they’re singing a children’s song.

Real people say hamna shida; guys who say mzukah say hamna noma.

Karibu is different. It’s not a tourist trap alert word; actually, I’d say it’s one of the most used words in the whole language. It means “welcome.” When you say thank you: karibu sana; when you enter someone’s home: karibu ndani; when you pass a friend on the road: karibu kwetu; when you’re in an awkward conversation with a Tanzanian who doesn’t know what else to say besides more of the same: karibu, karibu sana; when you leave a store after you’ve just bought something: karibu tena; when you’re being harassed by a random drunk at a local bar: karibu Tanzania!

Nobody ever says it just once. They say it over, and over, and over again to the point where I’m not even sure I truly understand the meaning of the word.

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Ice Pee’s dad, dressed to the nine’s for a wedding he was about to leave for is one of those guys who spits out karibu’s at a semi-automatic clip.

“Karibuni, karibuni sana,” he said as soon as Mwindaji and I walked in behind his son. (You add an –ni to the end if you’re saying it to more than one person.)

“Asante sana,” “Asante,” we answered simultaneously.

The man’s football brown suit and crisp white collar gave off the vibe of an evangelical Mississippi preacher. I wondered if the fact that the son he named Pendoheri was now going as “Ice Pee” made him shake his head in the same way a black southern reverend would bristle at his own kid listening to 2Pac. When we shook hands, though, he didn’t seem too worried about it. Baba Ice Pee (a man’s name becomes “Baba [insert name of oldest child here]” when he has a kid) had a big smile on his face. He really seemed honored to have these two random Wazungu as guests in his home; I’m guessing it was a first for him.

“Karibuni, karibuni,” he reiterated.

“Asante sana.”

“Karibuni Tanzania.”

“Asante.”

“Ahhhh,” – (smiling and shaking his head) – “karibuni sana.”

“Asante sana, bwana.”

He paused – but just for a moment.

“Karibuni.”

It would have gone on like this for at least an hour had he not thought to ask what we might want to drink.

After it became clear Hunter wasn’t going to ask, I stepped up to the plate and said it: “Coca Cola zipo?”

Really making a difference with Ice Pee

Trying to translate American rap songs into Swahili would be hard even for a native speaker – there just aren’t enough words in their language to handle that kind of verbal diversification from another. For me, someone who heard his first Swahili just under five months ago, it’s even harder. Is it fun to try? Yes. Does it butcher any semblance of art that could be absorbed from the music? Yes again. Really tough lines that might originally come outta Compton as “whatchyou wearin’ be poppin’ da spot” can only be translated into something like “ulichokivaa kimefurahisha” with four and a half months Kiswahili experience. Literal meaning: “What you’ve worn has made me happy.”

The truth of the matter is that some words don’t have equivalents at all. For example – and this may be hard to comprehend for a lot of other rich white kids out there – there is no concept of “sticky icky icky” in Tanzania. This is the Republic of Shwag we’re living in. They have no knowledge of The Chronic.

If they did, though, it would help to explain the striking similarity between the words kusinzia (“to fall asleep”) and kusizi (“to be stoned”).

“Still … represntin’ fo all tha gangsta’s all across da world …”

Bado … nawawakilisha masela dunia nzima …

Basketball lingo is much easier to deal with than Ebonics.

Ice Pee came back into the room and plopped back down onto the couch beside Mwindaji. He had just gone to his room to grab a thick white binder, like the ones you get for your ninth grade English class. “the mannice p” was written in marker at the top, with newspaper clippings of random NBA players (DeShawn Stevenson? Really?) and big-breasted models plastered all over the front and back covers. The binder was full to the brim with frayed white pages.

“Are those all rap lyrics?”

Nearly a decade after “Chronic 2001,” American rappers really are still … representin’ fo all tha gangsta’s all across da world. And the streets are still returning D.R.E.’s love on a global scale. Ice Pee’s binder was an organic reflection of that uniquely American form of imperialism, which transplants its values not by force, but by its pop culture’s sex appeal (*Islamic nations not included). In case of a fire, there is no doubt in my mind as to what Ice Pee is going for before all other considerations. It was a Who’s Who List of New World Order Hip Hop in that thing: Biggie, Pac, Wu Tang, Dre, Snoop, a ton of Lost Boyz, Nas, R. Kelly and even Nelly, not to mention dozens of others.

So there we were, Hunter and I, now chilling not just with Ice Pee but also with Bariki Mkubwa, who dominates his big brother on the court, but not in the rap game. Ice Pee had our undivided attention. Two Wazungu with a knowledge of English hip hop slang, in his living room, ready to put the pieces together on any one of those songs that he knew by heart, but without any understanding of its meaning.

He could have chosen any artist.

He chose Lil’ Bow Wow.

“We playin’ BA-SKET-BAAAALLLLL! (Something something) BA-SKET-BAAAALLLLL!”

Don’t even pretend like you don’t know which song I’m talking about.

As hard as it was to believe at first that a person above the age of 10 could still like Lil’ Bow Wow in the year 2007, it wasn’t too hard to put myself in Ice Pee’s shoes once I thought about it for a second. The two burning passions in Ice Pee’s life, American exported hip hop and American exported basketball, coming together, as one, and creating the fullest of mzukah tracks in the binder in the process.

Remember that the name of Ice Pee’s debut album currently in the works is Mpira wa Kikapu, Swahili for “basketball.”

It worked out perfectly, actually. Everybody won. Ice Pee and Bariki Mkubwa finally learned about what an “alley oop” is (no one at Soweto can throw it down, so they have no use for the term), as well as the key to an especially cheesy pun of Lil’ Bow Wow’s about “Darius throwing it down from Miles away” or something.

Mwindaji and I learned how to say “Don’t try me” in Swahili (Usinipime), for use some day when I’ve got the ball at Soweto, and I also jotted down a ton of other terms to use at the court, some taken from the song, others I asked about while we were on the topic:

to block – kuzuia
to stuff a shot – kupiga tawi
to cross over – kupiga chenga
to dribble – kudunda
blind person – kipofo
“He has a big head” (literally just boring old “He is proud of himself”) – Anajisifu
perfect – timilifu
“I am the Truth” – Mindo Mkweli
“I’m in shape” – Niko fiti
“I own you” – Nakumiliki

It was truly one of my best days here. Trust is such a constant issue with us, as two Wazungu in a sea of people accustomed to getting handouts from anyone with white skin. We get cheated, lied to, and stolen from all the time. There are only two or three Africans I will let into our house, for fear of wide eyes translating into big stories about abundant wealth. The only security guard we've got is a machete; I really don't want to have to use that thing.

When we were walking to the studio that morning -- before any notion of Hunter recording a song entered our heads, before we spent more than an hour just chilling, translating hip hop songs into Swahili, before we went to a ghettofied Tanzanian coffee shop nearby Ice Pee's house, and before they went to pay for dinner at one of those dive chicken-and-rice bars I mentioned earlier -- Hunter made a comment about "looking out for what these guys might try and pull.” We were braced for a blow that never materialized, and it made me smile as a result.

The simple fact that neither Ice Pee nor Bariki Mkubwa never pulled a thing meant more to me than anything else they could have done for me. It may sound amazing that the act of not getting played would make me so happy, but that's just life for a Mzungu in an African's world. Besides, even if they tried, hawaniwezi, cuz I'm a Nako 2 Nako soldier.

We went with our three wageni -- Emily, Emily's dad Tom, and her friend Erin -- up to Nkoaranga Orphanage a few days ago, and this is the compassion Mwindaji showed for darling little Wema when she expressed her disappointment with not being allowed into the classroom that we painted earlier this year when the Belk's were in town.




Wema's name means "good" in Swahili.


And then there is Erin, who ironically looks very Anglo-Saxon, while everyone assumes I'm Jewish around town (my question is, how do Tanzanians know what Jews look like?). It's ironic because she actually is a Heeb, and I only feign as one.

That point is not relevant to anything, really. But on a related note, that being Erin Fleischer, what is she looking at??