In 2007, my mother and I took a trip to four East African countries, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania. It was an amazing trip about which I will say more at a later date. But there was one incident on that trip that, to me, crushes, to a diamond, the contradictions of the relationship between Africa and the West in the twenty-first century:
It was important to have a travel agent because every night, at midnight, Addis time, Ethiopian Airlines would “lose” all their reservations. If you didn’t have a travel agent on the case, your plane tickets would vanish if Ethiopian Airlines were not called that morning.
Our travel agent took a day off the day of our Nairobi-Addis flight and so when we got to the airport, our tickets were worthless. So, we went to the desk with copious paperwork and convinced the guy at the wicket that we did indeed have tickets despite the airline having no record of our reservation.
He told us that he would get us tickets. We just needed to sit down and wait. Thirty minutes later, we realized that he had vanished and was not working on our case. So I went to the wicket and went through the same process again, this time obtaining boarding passes that seated us in the gnarly crew seats at the back of the plane.
As we boarded the plane, we noticed that the man who had promised to get us tickets was now serving as the ticket-taker. And shamelessly took our tickets, no guilt that he had promised us that he would solve our problem and then abandoned us.
The stewardesses were pushed out of their seats and we were seated with a man in sandals and a very avant garde business suit. I was seated on the aisle, next to my mom. He was seated on the opposite side of her.
Once we were in the air, he opened his bag and pulled-out a rainbow-coloured blanket which he draped across his lap. He then got out the current edition of The Economist. And, once in the air, pulled down his pants under the blanket and began jacking off vigorously, masturbating until he came. To The Economist.
As the instructor of Global Economic History for the Simon Fraser University School of International Studies 2014-19, let me tell you: this is 100% of the information you need to understand the current global economic order.
