"I Die, but the Memory Lives on" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mankell Henning)

6

I had gone to Kampala by car from the airport in Entebbe. Kampala is a cluster of hills, seven or eight, and tucked tightly between these hills dotted in elegant houses with large gardens was the town itself, with far too much traffic, far too many people.

Africa is always a conflict of opposites, of urban muddle and vast, empty regions.

I say Africa, but Africa can be divided into any number of parts. Some countries within this continent are the size of all of western Europe. There is no clear-cut, single entity that you can think of as Africa. This continent has many faces, but wherever I have been the dense urban muddle and vast, empty spaces have always been side by side.

Aida's village is like all the other African villages I know. The houses are made of clay or sheets of corrugated iron or the strangest mixture of materials that happened to be at hand for the builders. But all of the lived-in houses I saw in her village had a roof.

On the other hand, there were also abandoned houses that had collapsed. When I asked why this was so, I was told that the people who had lived there had died of Aids.

African houses often have a distinctive character. Perhaps you could say it is the equivalent of the Scandinavian passion for ornate carpentry at the end of the nineteenth century. In Aida's village two doors from an old American car make up the gate in a ramshackle fence round a house where a hairdresser is plying his trade. As we pass, he is cutting a customer's hair in the shade of a tree. Shortly before we came to Aida's house – or rather her mother, Christine's, house – I notice two men, their backs running with sweat, building a wall made of rusty pieces from old petrol drums between two corner-posts.

African houses in rural areas are a hymn to the imagination, if you like. But of course they are also an expression of poverty and destitution. Around the houses are small gardens, gravel roads meandering all over the place, and apologies for fences. Nearly all of the windows have broken panes with curtains flapping behind them.

Life proceeds at a leisurely pace in these villages. Haste is a human error that has not established very deep roots in the African countryside.