Azad Essa

Goma: The last outpost

Flashes of lightning illuminate Lake Kivu as thunder crackles above. The storm causes the lights to trip and disrupts the internet connection at our place of rest, the Ihusi Hotel.

The hotel, which overlooks the lake, is a meeting place - or hunting ground - for UN types, election observers, haughty journalists, as well as certain undesirables.

UN cars line the parking lot. French-speaking receptionists ignore requests made in Queen's English and poll monitors insist on parading around in their election observer vests (Can sipping cocktails at the bar could ever be free or fair?

The road from the Rwandan border into Goma is bustling with activity and the construction sites lining it suggest the city is undergoing a facelift.

But when the neatly tarmacked road ends, another Goma presents itself in the form of the gigantic BDGL roundabout.

Back to Dadaab: is there no new story?

It always makes sense to revisit a story, as the adage goes, to deepen one’s sense of time and space and to forcefully interrogate events from a first encounter or journey in a bid to separate one-off incidents from purposeful patterns. But in this brave new world of mass production and consumption journalism -  where stories often have the lifespan of a tweet - revisiting a story is often a mere exercise in luxury.

So naturally, when the opportunity arose to revisit Dadaab, the largest refugee camp in the world, albeit very briefly, a month-and-a-half after we had first explored the humanitarian crisis unfolding there as the worst drought in six decades hit the Horn of Africa, it seemed like one worth embracing.

Cricket the great balancing act

Think of cricket as you would Lady Justice: a blindfolded woman with a sword at her side, scales in hand, and an almost insatiable thirst for being the moral and material leveller of man.

Think of cricket as that nagging marriage: survival is based on partners seeking and successfully servicing the whims and petty needs of each other to maintain the grand mirage of compromise, partnership and long-term planning. 

Think of cricket as a return to simplicity where fancy footwork up and down tall orders takes you nowhere without a still head.

Whichever way you choose to look at it, cricket, like life, though unfair in itself, levels the playing field.  

In one form or another, fate, destiny, karma or sutra, short falls and quick fixes eventually catch up with even the most agile, a type of good riddance. Instead, it will always be discipline, technique and a balanced team that separates the sustainable winners from the one-hit wonders.

Wake me up when the World Cup begins

Rewind some 10 months to June 2010 and Mexico is about to take on hosts South Africa, in the opening match of the Football World Cup in Johannesburg.

Despite being rated poorly, the South African football team turned on the style, courageously holding their own against a highly rated Mexican side. In what has since become one of the defining moments of the 2010 World Cup, Siphiwe Tshabalala in the 55th minute, pulled the trigger and sent the ball careening into the Mexican net.

All of South Africa erupted with an infectious ecstasy.