Skip to main content

From 1970s England to this

Bagamoyo beach, in 1971 it was pristine


Mr and Mrs R Steinhardt
4, Rue Ronsard
92 Meudon - La Foret
France

November 1971

Dear Granny and Grandpa how are you?

We have been doing a lot and going everywhere. The school has many activities in the afternoon. We are practically always occupied with something or another and we have lots of colourful posters. It's about 90 degrees, a cool day for Dar-es-salaam. The people in this flat we live in are very friendly and we often borrow things from them like knives and forks. We have barbecues over a charcoal grill. Food here is cheap (the barbecue costing 8 shillings).

Every Saturday we go with Pam and Ilundi, her daughter, or Marga and Tana, her daughter, to Karioco market, where you can buy every imagineable kind of fish, ladies fingers, red chillies, artichokes and all manner of seafood is there on sale like shrimp, sea urchins, Tuna, Kingfish, Rabbit fish. There are also lots of live fowl, beef and lamb, but no pork because the Muslim religion says that pork is unclean meat.

We also have a cat called Aboy - strange name - but this was not our choice. We have a Renault 16. It is a very good car, a special model.

We have tons of friends now that we are back in Africa. We always go on picnics with our friends in our car, with: Pam, Ilundi, Marcelino, John, Josiah, Marga, Tana, Mario George French, his giggly sister and about 13 other people. Come with us!

Around the flat I have made a platform as high as the 8th floor in a tall tree, We perform many antics on a rope which hangs down from it.

Yesterday we went to Bagamoyo, the place where Livingston was carried to by his porters. It used to be the capital of Tanganyka. It has lovely carved Arabian doors. When we were there our guide showed us a mountain of salt which we climbed up and later took samples of.

Love Philip

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Guardian: Kate Harding's reactionary censorious blog on CiF

It should go without saying... ....that we condemn the scummy prat who called Liskula Cohen : "a psychotic, lying, whoring ... skank" But I disagree with Kate Harding , (in my view a pseudo blogger), posting her blog in the Guardian attacking bloggers. It's a case of set a thief to catch a thief. The mainstream media is irritated by bloggers because they steal its thunder and so they comission people like Kate Harding , people with nothing to say for themselves, apparently, other than that they are feminists, to attack bloggers. I'm black. So I can legitimately attack "angry white old men". I'm a feminist, so I have carte blanche to call all anonymous bloggers "prats." Because yes, that is her erudite response to bloggers. No I don't say that the blogging medium can't be used to attack progressives in whatever context. Of course it can. But to applaud the censorship of a blogger by a billion dollar corporate like Google, and moreov...

The Guardian books bloggers' poetry anthology

There more to composing poetry online than this. ..isn't there? I don't really like conventional poetry of knowing. I love the poetry of words coming into being. The Guardian is going to publish a printable book online with our poems in it and the Irish poet, Billy Mills is getting it together with Sarah Crown, the literary editor. Good for them. Let's also remember that Carol Rumens got the ball rolling. Does Des feature in this anthology? Taboo-busting Steve Augustine decided not to join in. So what are we left with? In the anthology we will be left with a colourful swatch of well-meant, undeniably conventional, occasionally clever, verses - some of them. But there could be, there should be and there is a lot more to on-line poetry than this. Than agile monkeys, koalas and sad sloths climbing up word trees. Perhaps we should focus in on translation, because in translation there is a looseness of form and a dynamism such as, it seems, we can't easily encounter in our...

Guardian books blog fringe: Norman Mailer

FLASHING THE GUARDIAN -- A BOOKS BLOGGERS' REBELLION :  The unheroic censor with a death wish Part 1: In which Norman Mailer stars in an experiment in search engine optimisation By ACCIACCATURE 3 February 2009 When Norman Mailer died in 2007, informed opinion – in the blogosphere, people who had read at least two of his books – was split. The army of readers who saw him as one of the most despicable misogynists writing fiction in the 20th century was perfectly matched by warriors on the other side, who raged that the label wasn’t just unwarranted but tantamount to heinous calumny. Before commenters returned to bitching-as-usual, tempers were lost on literary sites all over the net in debating temperatures high enough to bring to mind tiles burning off space shuttles re-entering Earth’s atmosphere. After I'd agreed to a spontaneous suggestion by our good friend Sean Murray -- a pioneer and stalwart of the comments section of The Guardian’s books blog – that we re-...