Africa smells like smoke. If you were to ask me what Africa looks like I could give you 1000 answers. It is colorful, it is brown, it is vast and crowded, it is mountainous and flat, it is the endless ocean of water or the endless ocean of sand. It is forests and deserts and rivers and lakes and cities and farms. If you asked me about taste I could tell you about the blandness of pap or the insane spice of suya. I could describe grilled fish and grilled meats and grilled corn and the sauces that come with them all. I could tell you about teas and coffees and fruit drinks I have only tasted here. If you asked me about sound I could tell you about music and the rhythms of drums that you can sometimes hear deep into the night. I could describe the unrelenting honking of horns, the puttering of motorbikes and roar of trucks with no mufflers. I could tell you about all the languages you hear and the birds like the hadedas that scream out a cry at 4am that wakes you from a dead sleep. Touch? You have the bumping of bodies in the urban areas, the wind on your face as you drive through a rural area with the car windows down, the insane heat of the Sahel, the unexpected cold of Lesotho. But smell? That is a constant throughout the continent. Africa smells like smoke. I notice it the second I get off the plane. Before anything else, the smell of smoke. It welcomes me back, and sometimes brings me to tears (nostalgia or fine particulate matter are both possible causes). I will say it turns out that not all smoke smells the same. The worst smelling smoke is the burning of plastic, and sometimes old tires. Trash burning is common and the smoke rises black and pungent. It’s not all plastic, but includes paper, waste (of various animals, but often time cow patties), and metal all smoldering together creating a smell that can take your breath away. You then have the smoke that is exhaust from cars. Acid that makes you cough but that only lasts a few seconds or minutes as the car rushes past. In the dry months you have brush fires, some accidental and some intentionally set to clear brush. These can be big and if you are close they are hard to bear, but from afar just leave a hanging scent of wildfire in the air. These fires last for weeks though, so sometimes you get to the point you don’t smell it anymore, but then they flare up and the smell rushes back.
Then there is my favorite- the early evening smoke. Around 5pm, as people are arriving home the women start fires to cook dinner and heat the house. In the villages all the houses start around the same time and it smells like one big barbeque. You can see the smoke rising from the houses or the outdoor kitchen and if I didn’t have any way to know the time of day it was, I could always tell you when it is 5pm in Southern Africa based on when the smoke starts. I love this smell. It is the smell of families coming together, of the wrapping up of a day. It is a welcoming smell of home.
Smoke filling the air in Abuja, Nigeria as women cook fish.
I do often think of the health of people living in all this smoke. I once went into a Maasai house in Kenya. The ceiling was so low I couldn’t stand upright, and there were no windows in this fully mud house. There was a small fire in the middle though. The house was dark. So dark I could not see my hand in front of my face at 3pm. But I could see the small smothering fire and could barely take a full breath due to the smoke. How people breathe in that I have no idea. My guess is they don’t, or not for long. The rates of pneumonia are extremely high and premature death due to lung issues are common.
Working in a place so tied to smoke makes me realize how tied to fire humanity is. Humans depend on fire. In my house in the USA, we used fire for fun, to build a fire pit to roast marshmallows or to start a fire in winter in the fireplace to cuddle up next to with a glass of wine. But this use of fire is so far removed from the fire that much of the world uses and depends on. Humans and fire co-exist. Livelihoods are lost when firewood runs out. Deforestation is making it necessary for women (it’s almost always women) to travel for miles to get to the nearest source of wood. They risk attacks (from humans and animals) to collect wood- it is that vital to life that they risk their own to get it. We sometimes forget just how close we are to fire with our stoves and central heating. A house with a fireplace is not a necessity for most of us in the USA. Most Americans use gas grills so they don’t need to go through the time and hassle of starting the fire. But in much of the world fire is life, and when I step off the plane in Africa, I know there will be smoke, and where there is smoke, there is fire, and where there is fire, there is life.