The Distance Between Harare and Juba

The first thing I got wrong about Juba was the heat, which I had been warned about and had therefore assumed I would find manageable, in the way one assumes one will find a foreign grief manageable because one has read about it.

The second thing I got wrong was more expensive. I arrived believing that being African would be a shortcut.

It is a comfortable idea and there is truth in it. There is a way of greeting, a tolerance for the long preamble before business, a shared understanding that the schedule is a hypothesis. I did not have to be taught any of that, and it saved me months.

But somewhere in my first weeks I caught myself using the word we in a meeting, and a colleague — South Sudanese, patient, considerably smarter than me — let it sit for a moment and then said, gently, that he was not sure who I meant.

Two thousand seven hundred kilometres

He was right. Harare and Juba share a continent and almost nothing else. Zimbabwe's tragedy is a tragedy of a state that works too well in the wrong direction: an efficient bureaucracy, a competent security apparatus, a highly literate population, all of it pointed at the preservation of a small number of people. South Sudan's is the opposite tragedy. The problem is not a state that has been captured. It is a state that is still, in many rooms, being invented.

Those two conditions require different instincts. In Harare I learned to route around institutions. In Juba that instinct was actively harmful, because the institution I was routing around might be three people and a filing cabinet and it needed to be built, not bypassed.

Pan-Africanism is a good politics and a terrible operating manual.

The particular over the general

The correction, when I finally made it, was not to abandon the idea of a shared continent. It was to demote it. Solidarity is the frame. It is not the content. The content is always local and always specific: this river, this dry season, this clan, this grievance from 2013 that everyone at the table remembers and nobody will name.

I began keeping a notebook of things I did not understand, rather than things I had concluded. It filled much faster. It was also, I now think, the single most useful professional habit I have ever developed, and I recommend it to anyone arriving anywhere.

What travelled

Some things did cross the two thousand seven hundred kilometres intact.

The knowledge that inflation is not an economic statistic but a daily humiliation. The understanding that when a person tells you their situation is fine, they may be protecting their dignity rather than reporting a fact. The certainty that the most capable person in any room is frequently the one who has said the least, and that finding them is most of the job.

And a suspicion, which has since hardened into a conviction, that the people who talk most confidently about Africa have generally seen the least of it.

I still get the heat wrong. Every time.