Tony Weaver's new book

[MikeAG]

For all of us who have eagerly anticipated a collection of Africa stories from the pen of Tony Weaver (Cape Time's "Man Friday" and Assistant Editor) there is some news!


Tony has been approached by a Publisher keen to put his travel adventures and yarns onto our collective shelves.....but......

........he is umming and aahing about whether to do it or not!!!

I wonder if we as fellow forumites might apply a little pressure to help him make up his mind? I for one would buy this book immediately, and suspect I'm not alone. Does anyone else think he would be selfish to keep his tales to himself?

Mike

PS Sorry Tony, but it had to be done!

[Imvubu]

I'd be the first in line to buy a copy. Come on Tony...Mr Weaver.

[Fabfender]

Tony, can we get a signed copy - what the heck I'll by with or without the signature.

[mfuwefarmer]

Come on now Mr Weaver!

[geraas]

It would be utterly selfish not to do it...I need new reading material...

[Henris]

Come on Tony. You can't keep all those stories to yourself.

[FDVisser]

I would definately buy one!

[Spook]

I will try and bribe myself to the front of the buying que. Please Tony!!!!!

[MikeAG]

So Tony, that's 8 copies sold before you've written a word! Actually, I'll have 3 or 4 copies.....I've got friends teetering on the edge of coming exploring Africa with me, and your tales will push them into a decision (one way or the other!!). So, 10 or more sold in one evening!

What are you waiting for man, get on with it!

Mike

[geraas]

I have a better idea:

Should Mr Weaver not accept full responsibility and write the book asap....he should be handed a hefty forum jail sentence....with possible parole should he then start the book.......

[MikeAG]

Methinks 'tis about time we heard from our Tony.......

[Hoffie]

Methinks 'tis about time we heard from our Tony.......

He's either lazy or wants us to beg some more. I agree, chuck him in jail for a few weeks and he'll have plenty time.

[Randy]

Are we making a list?

i will take one, for swambo, something that i can ALSO use.

[mfuwefarmer]

Methinks 'tis about time we heard from our Tony.......

Hope his silence is due to the fact the he is locked up in his study writing the book or maybe he is doing some further research............?

[Tony Weaver]

Hi all,

Thanks for all the kind words and a hex upon that poxy feral Brit architect who started this all off! I've been away for the weekend so only spotted this thread after reading an email from Mike.

Pole, pole, as they say in KiSwahili. Slowly, slowly (it's not for nothing that I drive an old Land Rover). All good things will come to pass (some day).

Tony

[MikeAG]

I'm just not sure that'll satisy your eager public Tony! I think that there is now such pent up demand.......approaching a frenzy I would say, that you may find the pressure difficult to resist.

I've already booked the local pub for the Suffolk leg of your UK promotional tour .......April 2010. I'm afraid you are just going to have to get your finger out.

Mike

[Tony Weaver]

Do they serve cold beer in Suffolk?

[MikeAG]

Do they serve cold beer in Suffolk?

Well, that depends.......

Firstly, they serve beer, traditionally-brewed ale conditioned in the cask, (often in oak barrels), not some gassy homogenised chemical soup that you might call beer, but which we call lager.

Secondly........cold? Well, a proper beer is best served as a decent red-wine is served, at cellar temperature. I'm guessing that would be around 8 to 12 celcius, depending on location and time of the year, which is cold enough to be refreshing, but warm enough to taste. Your stuff needs virtually freezing to hide the chemical taste.....

So, you're just going to have to come and get a bit of an education in the ancient traditions, Tony. Don't forget to bring a few copies of your book with you!!

Cheers

Mike

edit PS: If you really want some Lion or Castle, or Windhoek, or similar, we get those here too. People know better than to drink them, though.....

[Tony Weaver]

Well, that depends.......If you really want some Lion or Castle, or Windhoek, or similar, we get those here too. People know better than to drink them, though.....

That's not beer, that's paint stripper. I was referring to Mitchell's or Foresters etc. On that subject: as a teaser, here's a beginner's guide to African booze (from Living Africa magazine).Warning: contains strong language:

CLUB SHAMES, Addis Ababa: -- The long room was floor-to-ceiling mirrors, Simple Minds blasting from the stack of speakers. The mirrors were lined with Iman-wannabes reflection-dancing with one eye on themselves, the other on new men coming through the door. We were halfway through a marathon pub-crawl with our Ethiopian friend, Alemayehu.
Alemayehu was determined we would sample the best pubs, clubs, whorehouses, floor shows, dancing, coffee-drinking and pastry-swallowing Ethiopia had on offer. “This is where you buy your women,” Alemayehu explained. He is a conservative man, and was dressed in a grey suit and maroon tie.
We were more trendy, but still felt like lemons at a jelly tot party.
So far that evening we had been drinking Gouder Export red wine, pressed from grapes grown in the Awash Valley, a smooth Chianti in the best Italian style. When you get to Ethiopia, the first thing you do is to buy a bottle of wine. Gouder Export costs eight Birr (R4) for the wine and six Birr for the bottle. Then you just keep swopping the bottle, and pay your R4 for a refill.
The domestic Gouder costs R2.50 a refill, but purists will snob it because of a high content of what tastes like Cinsaut. Anyway, Gouder Export is the best red wine made anywhere in East and north-East Africa.
Alemayehu warned us not to drink Gouder at the Club Shames because “it is very expensive here.” It was, 25 Birr (R12.50) a bottle, so we ordered local Nyala gin at R1 a shot. They were so cheap we drank a lot of them, then discovered the tonic was R10 a bottle, so we switched to neat, local number 38 Cognac.
It was about then that we decided to get incredibly rich by shooting a Vogue cover story on the girls of Club Shames. We discussed it with Alemayehu, insofar as discussion is possible with a couple of thousand watts of REM threatening to shatter the mirrors and slice a few jugulars.
“It will be very good for Ethiopia to do this, but you must not sell that magazine here in Addis Ababa, these girls are too well known,” Alemayehu concluded.
Alemayehu runs a very discreet little assignation rendezvous in the suburbs. We found it by mistake driving around Addis Ababa late in the afternoon in pouring rain. We were exhausted, nervous and lost. We had just been through a five day desert and mountain crossing of northern Kenya followed by five days freezing our butts off, snowbound in the Bale Mountains.
We arrived in Addis very late because the main bridge across the Awash River had been washed away in floods, and all traffic was diverted 250km over gravel mountain passes on one of the most corrugated roads in Africa. A thirty kilometre stretch was cobbled by the occupying forces of Italy just before World War II, and the cobbles had been pounded into a thirty kilometre stretch of speed bumps spaced a metre apart. That’s 30 000 speed bumps.
And because the Italians occupied the country, the traffic drives on the right hand side of the road, terrifying in a cumbersome old Land Rover after a year-and-a-half in former British colonies, where they do the civilized thing and drive on the left.
So when we finally saw a sign advertising Alemayehu’s lodgings, we stumbled in in a state of nervous exhaustion. Alemayehu loves travellers, so he only charged us 20 Birr (R10) a night for our huge room. He charges locals 30 Birr for rooms. Most of his locals are what he calls “short stay” clients. They arrive in important-looking Mercedes Benz’s, BMWs, Jeep Cherokees and Toyota Land Cruisers, often with diplomatic number plates, or bearing the furtive look of civil servants.
Five minutes later their girlfriends arrive via the side gate. They look like secretaries, idle housewives, models. Lunch times are very busy. Our room had wall-to-ceiling mirrors opposite the double bed.
Ethiopians are great believers in romantic love.
The cognac at Club Shames made us thirsty, and the girls were getting a bit touchy about us occupying a prime couch and not touching the merchandise (‘though Liz got asked to dance a few times) so we hailed a taxi and went back to the suburb of Aware where we were staying. The local bar on the corner was buzzing, so we popped in there for a round or two with the boys.
Alemayehu was ordering round after round of local arak, gin, cognac, ouzo. The room was getting hotter, as the ceiling flew away, then the barman told his tale:
“When I was younger, in 1977, these streets of Aware were filled with corpses from the Red Terror campaign of General Mengistu Haile Mariam. We think 10 000 activists were executed here in the streets of Addis Ababa.” It was reason enough to order more cognac. The barman shook his head, “brothers killed brothers, children killed parents, parents killed their sons and daughters.”
A businessman in the corner who we were told was very rich began weeping quietly. You don’t need a lot of gin to get maudlin remembering the Red Terror.
Africa Watch described the 1977 arrival of the Red Terror in Addis in its book “Evil Days”: “Rural Defense Squads arrived in the capital, and together with local kebele (suburb) officers and soldiers, began a massacre of suspected EPRP (opposition) supporters. The official government estimate is that 732 were killed over the next few days.” Amnesty International estimated that “2 000 or more” were massacred in just a week or so.
The Secretary General of Swedish Save the Children reported “one thousand children have been massacred in Addis Ababa and their bodies, lying in the streets, are ravaged by hyenas.”
If you could read or write and were in your 20s, you were automatically defined as a counter-revolutionary. It was a bad year for students. Many of the people in the bar that night would have been of the age of students in 1977.
Bodies were piled up on the streets of Addis Ababa to advertise the killings: “Those who inspected the piles of bodies to see if their friends or relatives were among the corpses were targeted for execution or imprisonment themselves. Relatives were forbidden to mourn. In other cases, relatives had to pay one Ethiopian dollar for each ‘wasted bullet’ to have the body returned,” says Africa Watch.
These days it’s the sh*t that piles up on the streets. The sprawling suburbs of Addis are a series of interconnected rural villages, livestock grazes in the muddy lanes, there are very few toilets, so at night people come out and sh*t on the pavements and streets. The United Nations Centre for Human Settlements says Addis is the worst city in the world for housing -- 79% of its inhabitants are either homeless, or live in “unfit accommodation”.
As we left the corner pub and wove our way through the streets of Aware, it was the sh*t of which we were mindful. We were pretty squiggled, so Liz clung to Alemayehu for support, I prodded the night with the tip of a golfing umbrella. Alemayehu insisted we went for a last drink at Lucy’s Bar. We managed half a beer each then fell apart.
The ladies of Lucy’s were concerned for us, and brought coffee, but Ethiopia had won the night.
Part of the problem was that we weren’t used to strong drink.
A few months earlier on the island of Lamu, off the coast of Kenya, we both contracted Hepatitis A. This is not a nice disease. You get very sick. You feel like you might as well die, and if you’re not careful, you do. Then, for six months after that you are not allowed to touch alcohol.
A few months before full recovery, my brother came to visit from South Africa. He brought with him a bottle of 1984 Welgemeend and a litre of Grant’s whisky. We were gobsmacked. We hadn’t seen such fine likker in nearly two years. So we stashed it in a safe hole in the Land Rover and started marking off six months on the calendar.
Six months passed, the yellow disease faded, we were in Kasese, a wild frontier town close to the Zaire border at the foot of the Ugandan Ruwenzoris.
Early in the morning, before the flies got too bad, we went into a hole-in-the-wall butchery where the blood-soaked merchant carved us a kilogramme of freshly slaughtered cow using two razor-sharp pangas.
That night we made camp on the banks of the Kazinga Channel linking Lakes George and Lake Edward in the Queen Elizabeth National Park, a royal site. As the sun edged down over the channel, we lit a fire and as the hippo emerged from the water and a herd of elephant drifted below us, solemnly decorked the 1984 Welgemeend. It was an important moment. We sniffed the heady fumes rising from the cork, poured tiny mouthfuls into our plastic OK Bazaars tumblers and inhaled. A fish eagle called, saluting the moment.
This was heady stuff and we approached it with caution. The meat from the Kasese Clean Meat shop went into the potjie, and we saluted Africa and Brother Alex, the bearer of fine wine. We got completely p***ed on one bottle of wine. Liz tried to climb into the rooftop tent and fell giggling through the ladder.
It was just as well we drank it then and not 24 hours later: The next night the potjie was just starting to sing when a hippo walked into our camp and headed straight for our fire. Now hippos are dangerous things, so we jumped into the cab of the Land Rover, and when he showed no signs of leaving, switched on the BBC. For the next hour, we listened to a history of the The Who’s Tommy, and watched the hippo systematically destroy our camp, kicking over the potjie, munching the grass.
A bottle of 1984 Welgemeend kicked over by a fat killer with no sense of style would have been too much to bear.
At Lake Naivasha, in Kenya’s Rift Valley, 90km from Nairobi, a German family were camped on a hippo path at Fisherman’s Camp, near a sign that said “hippo are dangerous, do not camp on hippo paths.” That night, a bull got amorous with their hippo-shaped dome tent. The father slapped the hippo through the nylon, and he evidently took this as a challenge from another bull to his mating territory.
Mating hippo are an awesome sight: Angry males are even more awesome. He lunged at the tent with his mouth open, and trampled their baby, snapping her arm. Then he scooped her up in his mouth, bit her in the back, his tooth snapping off in her flesh. He turned on the father, ripping open his leg, tearing his face. They were air-doctored to hospital and survived, just.
The local Naivasha winery makes a dry red which doesn’t travel well. We drank it in Nairobi, and the journey was enough to change permanently its character, and ours.
That Ugandan bottle of Welgemeend broke the hepatitis liquor taboo, so we set out to explore the local beer. A few nights later, we got our hands on litre bottles of potent Zairean Primus and Ugandan Nile lager, a beer with a big kick, and then it was all downhill.
The great thing about African beer is that it is never boring. If you have bad constipation, knock back a few Tanzanian Safari lagers (although it is rumoured to have lost some of its medicinal qualities since South African Breweries sanitized the brewing plant, thereby robbing Africa of one of its great products). No two African beers are ever the same, not even coming from the same case.
We met a man on the Kenyan coast called Aussie Mike. Aussie Mike spent his life trying to find two beers that tasted the same, but never succeeded. It was his holy grail, his yellow brick road, his quest for immortality. Aussie Mike landed on the Kenyan coast a long time ago and sort of never went home. He has a minor reputation in Australia as “Captain Africa”, the name of a television series he once did in which he did brave things like stand next to pygmies, wade bilharzia-infested rivers and wrestle Bedford trucks, Leguan Dundee. Now he tests beer and carves furniture.
His friend, John, had three dogs called Tusker, Premium and Export, named for Kenya’s three premier beers. The dogs were terrible racists and attacked anything black that moved. One day we saw John in the pub, crying, drinking Tusker Premiums: “They poisoned Prem, the bastards poisoned Prem, I’ll kill the whole f***ing lot of them, all those f***ing wogs.” It took us a while to work out he was mourning the end of Premium, the most vicious, ugliest, nastiest, meanest dog in Kenya.
The worst thing you can do in Kenya is get stuck into a serious village drinking session. The local pombe, brewed from fermented sugar, millet or banana, and with roots and herbs added for bouquet, can be mind-altering. Then there’s Chang’aa, a vicious brew-up made from raw spirit and a variety of additives which sometimes include things like aviation spirit, meths or, presumably, DDT. Entire drinking parties are sometimes found dead after a chang’aa session.
But palm wine, or tembo, is a different matter altogether: This is tapped by lopping off the shoots of a coconut palm and decanting the ready-fermented liquor. It makes you s***-faced drunk and induces a tequila-like euphoria which lasts for hours.
Not so Kenyan brandy and whisky. The only whisky that is safe to drink is Bond 7, “licensed to thrill”. The Swahili for the local spirits is bia kali, “hot beer”, or “fierce beer”. Bond 7 can be drunk with relative safety, but the other brands give a hangover so mean that, in Robert Ruark’s immortal phrase, you feel as though you’ve spent the night with your tongue up a kudu’s bum.
The best thing about Bond 7 is that you can buy it in little 50ml sachets. Twenty sachets cost the same as a 750ml bottle of Bond 7 and it doesn’t take a Land Rover mechanic to work out that that means five free sachets. Also, they fit perfectly into backpack pockets for tough hikes when a small dop at the end of the day removes the pain and makes the difference between surrender and success.
There was one place where no amount of Bond 7 could have led to hiking success, ever.
Bvumba Gardens, near Mutare, in Zimbabwe’s magical Eastern Highlands, is one of the authentic wonders of Africa. To get to Bvumba, take the uphill fork when you get to Cloudlands, the downhill road goes to Essex and Burma. F J Taylor, a former mayor of Umtali lived here from the 1920s until the end of the 50s. He and his missus called Bvumba “Manchester Gardens”. Bvumba lies in cloud forest, and from the camp site you gaze down a thousand metres to Lake Chicamba Reial in Mocambique.
Magnolia blossoms drape the campsite in a heavy scent that cannot hide the feral smell of the decaying forest. Bvumba gets more rain in a year than London, and in this wild African forest, the Taylors carved a botanical paradise which oozes the scent of the tropics, the sounds of Africa and misty visions of a formal English country garden rolling down 200 hectares of the Bvumba Mountains. Samango monkeys scream insults from the forest fringes, under a gazebo beside a lake are the best tea and scones in Africa. Massive, candle-lit Victorian baths squat inside the campsite washroom, pumping out steaming water from the donkey boiler.
We arrived in the middle of a tropical downpour. The Land Rover slid down the mud road into the campsite and we managed to find a level spot in a corner just before the world closed down in a thunderous roar of continuous rain.
We sat and waited. It began to get dark. The rain kept coming and started running into the Land Rover cab in streams, so, in a moment of macho stupidity, I stripped naked and leapt into the storm, clambered onto the roof and hauled out every tarpaulin and rain canopy we possessed. I draped the roof, put out the rain canopy, and was clambering down when my sandal slipped on the metal ladder and I fell, cracking my head, whacking my willy and ripping my big toe nail completely off my foot.
The rivers ran red, and I went blind with pain. Liz hauled out the first aid kid, stopped the bleeding, and gave me two Panados. Then another two. They had no effect.
We had with us two bottles of Nyala Petit Cabernet, a youthfully elegant and respectable wine from Marondera on the fringes of the Eastern highlands. This was an emergency, so we uncorked one bottle. That helped the pain, so we uncorked the second. I felt no pain.
At least Liz fell down the ladder after the wine.

[Hillbillies]

I absolutely loved reading this, please post some more! Alternatively, we just have to demand a book.........