proper manky

September 22, 2012: Not exactly Night on Earth or a Taxicab Confession, but still a worldly whirlwind of a taxi ride.

I got into a quiet Prius taxi today near downtown to go back home. It was still light out, pleasantly hot on one of the last days of summer. I climbed into the back of the cab and gave my directions. The driver, in his early 30s and perhaps from somewhere in East Africa, right away read my name off his electronic dashboard and asked me where I was from. I told him and he asked what Germans are known for or are really good at. I mentioned the usual: cars, engineering, beer, some wines, food, soccer, the mighty Mittelstand, castles, gummi bears, those sort of things. It was hard to think of a good list. He said he had spent some time in Frankfurt and one thing that had totally amazed him was the cleanliness, “so friggin clean you could do a surgery on the sidewalk.”

He asked what the biggest economic powers were in the EU? Did Germany and France now get along, or were there still animosities over the world wars? What about Alsace Lorraine, was that area part of France again? I told him that had mostly been settled after the first world war and that the countries got along well enough now, had some common goals and principles, but with divergent positions on many things as well.

He wanted to know how Germany recovered after the second world war, whether it was just “through hard work.” I mentioned the German economic miracle, the Marshall plan, the Allies, the dismantling of the German steel industry, the development of Germany as a market for US products, the US interests in the country for its geopolitical place, etc. He said he absolutely loved the PBS show Beyond Our Borders which regularly profiles a different country with every new episode.

He wanted to know whether Germany still had Gypsies and Roma, and whether reparations still had to be paid even today. He had been, he said, to Marseilles once and gypsies were everywhere there and they regularly were being deported by the government. I mentioned Django Reinhard but he had not heard of him. He asked where gypsies came from. We talked about Indian origins and Transsylvania and the corruption of the word Egyptians and the gypsies that came every year through my hometown with big American cars and long trailers and feisty kids that would beat us at soccer and take all our marbles. He didn’t think there were any Gypsies in America but thought the Irish Travellers were just like them.

He asked why the US was not helping Africa develop, why China was everywhere now on the continent building airports, dams, highways, harbors, entire cities, all with Chinese workers. I said I had read the Chinese had been selling loads of heavy machinery to Eritrea for agriculture, construction, mining and so on. I said I had always wanted to go to Asmara in Eritrea, that I had seen pictures of the capital looking like a beautiful city in Italy with modernist architecure from the 1930s and that I would love to one day take that infamous steam train up from the coast to the highlands of Asmara.

He said Asmara was not like Frankfurt but it was also very clean. He scoffed at Italian colonialism in Eritrea saying that the Italians were racists who couldn’t really fight. They were not very successful in taking the farmland they wanted from local tribes and they also never managed to occupy Ethiopia for any length of time, even though they really wanted their coffee beans. They lost the guerilla war against the British fighting “like little children.” Italians, he said, didn’t have much to offer to the region. “What could they give us? Pasta, wine, the Mafia, what were we gonna to do with such things?”

He said he was from Djibouti, a small place on the Horn of Africa. “You can see Arabia from there,” he told me. Djibouti had practically no imports or exports, and many people there still lived like gypsies, like nomads. It would take centuries for a place like his country to look like Frankfurt.

I asked about stability in the region and the pirates. He said they were mostly Somali and from further south. There were no pirates from Djibouti because of a US naval base there.

I asked if Somalia was still a failed state without a unified government. He told me that just last week Somalia had elected a president in the first freely contested presidential election there. Times might be changing, he said. But he also mentioned that many of the clans still fought with each other and true unification would not happen for a long time. Especially the Isaac clan, he said, in the northwestern Somaliland region was trying hard to achieve de facto independence.

We finally formally introduced ourselves. I had seen his name on the driver’s ID card. His name was Hassan B. and we shook hands at a red light. He told me he had become an American citizen seven months ago. He said he spoke English, Arabic, Afar, and French. I hadn’t realized that French was still an official language in Djibouti and that the relationship with France remained very deep, in particular in terms of economic assistance. We continued our conversation in French. He mentioned that he eventually wanted to work for the American Embassy in Djibouti. He had a bachelor’s degree from NAU and with all the languages he spoke he thought he might have a good chance. He said he had met the current US Ambassador to Djibouti and she had encouraged him to take his foreign service exam.

When we got to my place and I paid the fare, Hassan told me that he was saving money and studying downtown at the public library and that he would try taking the exam next year.

Driving time = 25 mins