Last week, I travelled from my base in Ottawa, Canada to
Johannesburg, South Africa. It was one of those dreadfully long trips that I
have grudgingly come to accept over the years as an inevitable feature of my
professional calling as a peripatetic man of culture.
As I boarded the first flight in Ottawa, I made a mental
map – as I always do – of how to fill up the void of time. I had an hour ahead
of me to Washington DC, nine hours from Washington to Dakar, and another nine
hours from Dakar to Johannesburg.
Ain’t funny! Add to the distance the fact of not knowing
how and where the pendulum of the international writing prize that was taking
me to South Africa would swing. Only the thought that I would reunite with my
bosom friend, Temitope Oni, a successful medical doctor in Durban whom I hadn’t
seen since the end of our Titcombe college days in 1987, made the distance
bearable. Tope Oni would redefine the meaning of brotherhood, human bond, and
loyalty for me in ways that I am still too positively emotional to talk about.
He is a subject of another essay. Another day.
Suffice it to say that in such long-flight situations, I
usually oscillate between nap time, reading time, writing time (my laptop’s
battery allowing), movie time, and alcohol time – with strong emphasis on the
last. This time, I wish I had skipped movie time and concentrated on alcohol
time. That would have spared me the agony and anger that did not abate until I
landed in Johannesburg.
