"Mzungu rabarabara, Mzungu rabarabara, Mzungu rabarabara, ...". I hear children down my road singing. According to my books this could it could mean "A mzungu on the road". But fellow pedestrians told me it means "mzungu very much OK". Whatever, this time the aubade was not for me. Someone else, probably Kees. Climbing uphill from his home. But it was Kees' young new business partner. Choking. "The roof is off down there", he said, trembling. "The've read your web page [Doldrums]. It is already known in Mwanza. This is the death of Kees' business. His wife has gone mad.". He made a waving gesture of his right hand along his forehead. "I thought let me go from there and have a talk with you. Bert you can't do this".
"Well, I think I'll make some coffee", I said, "Come in, this is kind of a surprise to me, because the facts are known and I thought was not expressing myself overly unkind to them."

I gave him time to talk. He was not denying facts, he said he had his own problems there. "We are in the same boat, I also have my money in that yard".
"No, we are not. You decided to be his business partner in the yard. I just gave him privately my money to keep for dhow yard payments. I am involuntarily investing in other people's shipyard on the edge of bankruptcy".
That, he said, unfortunately was, as he had discovered in the past days, not a big difference. Kees' private household and the yard had become one muddle summing up to zero.
For me this crisis is good, he said. It enables me to get hold of the financial data and acquire formal financial authorizations and veto powers. But that is useless if there is no company anymore. What you are doing is simply bad journalism. At least names should have been changed out of decency.
This made me very angry. "If now I am the one to be called indecent, I tell you this: if I get my $3500 before five o'clock I erase those pages from the net immediately after".
A short silence. Then, he said: "Now you have a good grip on their bollocks".
That is pure luck, I said, I did not know, you just came to tell me.
OK, he said, but I am not going to tell them, you go down with me.
Now I am going to play tough, I said smiling.
He also smiled and understood what was coming.
I have no business down there. I am not going. I have just been telling this to you because I like you and I thought it in your interest to know. Do with this information what you want. You are a free man. If you decide not to go down we will share my coffee, beer, food, everything until my last shilling is spent, which is in two or three days.
Thirty one, he kept his self control with ease and smiled at me.
I finally said: I want to tell you one thing: I have won in some very bad situations in my life, and lost too, but I am really used to see my opponents loose their composure!

He laughed. I felt even moved. I tapped him on the shoulder (he is small indeed and hardly would be able to the same with me). We parted as friends. He went down.

Three hours later. "Mzungu rabarabara, Mzungu rabarabara, Mzungu rabarabara, ...". Kees & Partner (though in naming the couple my mind had already reversed the order).
Of course I immediately asked whether indeed my web page was already known in Mwanza. Yes, Kees said, my wife has read it and had gone completely out of here mind.
Others in Mwanza?
Not yet, Kees said, but this could easily happen.
So we are in the lucky situation that we can still avoid the damage.
I would not count on it, Kees said.
But likely damage is at least better than sure damage, I said.
Kees agreed. He apologized again for the situation. His partner put $1000 on the table. Wednesday morning we could meet for hard agreements about the remaining debt. Please now get those pages off the net. It could even lead to expulsions from Tanzania.
This was below my demand, but it would probably even simply be technically unfeasible to meet it.
I first told them that false echo's like "known in Mwanza", "could lead to expulsion" are only helpful if one talks to kind people sensitive to such outcries - to which I don't belong anymore in this case - and that it only increases the confidence that harder types - to which I do not yet belong in this case, but I am drawing near - have in the screws they have put on you, which might raise their demands. Then I agreed and erased the files. I did so with the wireless LAN outside Kees' house, the two men were fearing his wife (45 kilo, 155 cm), who was inside.

Wednesday morning. I am not used to 9 o'clock meetings and would almost pay $2500 to have it cancelled. But I put two alarms at 8, in order to have my mind on track an hour later. At nine thirty Kees' partner called. Sorry, we have a fire among the workers at the yard, we'll have to extinguish that one first. We have no idea when we'll be ready with that.

That was clear enough. The unrest had reached the workers. I lit a cigar, opened my dhow file and raised total expected cost with $2500. I took my chair, put it outside and blew my smoke out over the hill. "Shit happens", I told myself and started to feel better and relaxed. The yard would fail, Kees' wife would find herself another mzungu. Even if Kees' partner would acquire money to buy the yard's assets, the patrol boat, and finish it, he would be crazy to pay my $2500 and I would of course not blame him. I might loose my room here at Isamilo, but the rent was invested in the new table set which I could take and sell. Five tourists two weekends on my dhow and I have earned $2500.

My cigar was not even half way when Kees' partner's Land Cruiser came, not from Kees' house downhill, but from the other side, from the top of the hill, a daring approach steep down on a narrow soft dirt road carved with rain water channels. Kees walked in front, exploring the mud to pilot his partner down.
Kees' partner had projected the yard's liquidity for the coming months. The trough would be in 2-3 weeks, 23^d of September, after having paid the wages. I was ranked the number two creditor after the workers.
What to say? If I would be put before the workers the work would stop and that would surely mean no refunding of my money. So I should save the yard if I would keep some chance on my money.
If we settle for October 15 do we have a hard agreement? I asked.
Kees' partner's eyes went straight into mine. I tore a page out of my Kiswahili exercise book. I wrote "We Owe You....TSh 2 520 000".  Kees seemed to be startled by seeing the figure. He he not known at all or was the fog in his mind dissolving? He uttered some words of me enjoying his internet service and bank cost to be substracted. We decided to settle minor clearings seperately after I had received the remainder of my deposit half of October.

About the high risk credit I unknowingly turned out to have supplied: on average it was thus far $ 6000 over 6 months. A good bank would refuse. A bank bad enough to grant, would do so at $ 500 interest withheld from credit payment and secured by watertight claims on yard assets.

In the evening my house mates (one of them had just refunded to me his $ 20 debt) came home very late. Of course it occurred to me they might not like to be home, but I tried to keep that out of the range of certainty. When they asked me how I was, the standard Kiswahili meeting ritual, I took the opportunity to say: OK, but I heard your sister (Kees' wife) is upset about me.
Yes even me. The eldest of my house mates fell open like a full box, spreading its content over the floor. He felt accused of bad morality, that was why he had been at pains to collect $ 20 to repay me quickly.
Had he read the internet pages?
No he had not, he was not in such things, but this is what he had been told.
I printed the now blocked pages, and handed them to him.
It it still in your computer? he asked with horror. You should erase it!
Read it. Give me your opinion. If you want me to erase it, I will do it.
After all, he does not need to know I have a backup on an external hard disk.
What followed was a long conversation in the corridor in which he told about many important moments in his life and of the principles these different episode had made him decide to adhere to. This was clearly very personal and emotional. Though the link with the subject stayed fully unclear to me, it restored his calm. Some days later I came to understand, after I heared the Kees and his sister Jane had been accusing him of lack of integrity for borrowing $20 from me. The very people who just took without asking $ 3 500 from me had told him that borrowing $ 30 from me with my personal consent is a bad thing to do!  In this long conversation he had been defending to me his entire person.
The next day I had another short conversation with this in law of Kees, in which I told him that if he wanted to know about me, he should listen to me and nobody else. I told him I still would like to know his opinion about those pages I gave him. He had, he said, not even read them. His way of saying made it evident that he would not be going to either. The air was first polluted and now cleared, both the African way: orally (may be he even read it but chose to ignore the written word by claiming he did not, but I would not bet on that).
But now, I am truly going to criticize you, I said with a laugh. Last Sunday you celebrated with your friends and drank my crate of beer. You said you would replace it, but you didn't.
Now he confessed he was out of cash.
I restored his debt of $20, he promised to buy beer for it.
He even came with bear the next day, though adding that he needed to borrow another $ 30 for one day only. Kees had promised his delayed salary tomorrow. By SMS answer on SMS question. He showed me Kees' promise his cellphone's display. I was sure he would not be payed the next day but he got his loan: having my house mates, Kees' staff, on my side is of course a great boost to my efforts to regain my money.
To my surprise, he got payed and refunded the next day.

To avoid Kees a bit, I now do my internet now in Hotel Tilapia. I offered them $50 for the service. The manager refused. Too much. An Indian! I was going to pay the same rate as the hotel guests do for using one of the two internet computers, a dollar per half hour, I simply got a logon for their network and plugged one of their PC's cable in my laptop. Slow but stable bit flows, no server timeouts, but remote outgoing mail servers like mine have a relay block at their provider. It is still common for ISP's here to sell email services separately, so they block their competitors. As everywhere in the world, the main commercial skill you need if your company collects money with the internet is to isolate your customers from it as much as you can that is: internet commerce is the art of welding your digital roadblocks.

Similarly: universities are institutes serving the purpose of blocking the road to knowledge.

Thus, for my outmail I still need Kees' wireless router. I hoped his wife would be inside, I could send from the balcony and leave. But she was there. She looked at me with big eyes of suffering, as if she was still recovering in silent sorrow from me having killed her mother. But she stayed polite.
No power, so no router signal. I closed the lid of my laptop.
If you want to say what is on your heart I am willing to listen.
No I am all right, I want to be alone, she said.
OK, bye.
Bye.

For the time being, I am unable to have the Kees and Jane think of me as I think they ought, not only because I can't afford it money wise. I can only aim at an image that maintains Kees' outside composure and paying discipline. But Kees' new partner is back in shape. Kees' brothers in law, my house mates, followed. Kees' fog machine makes him still struggle with the idea he has done so much for me and now I am treating him badly, but I accept that as long as one thing keeps peeping through the fog: my capability of treating him worse if he again drops his paying discipline (Macchiavelli: some princes fear they are not nice enough, others fear they are not rude enough). With his wife, I judged I had neither aims nor means, hence should I leave it, but one day later she and Kees' partner's wife paid a visit to our house. We, her two brothers and me, were chatting for a while with them over a drink.. Jokes, laughter and no tension whatsoever. Her brothers had already told me things would probably go like this.

Things seem to get back under control. Inadvertently I started rolling down a big stone down from Isamilo, and once informed what I'd done, quickly improvised an exploitation of its pace. Not too bad, Bert. Now I am keeping one yard dry, another wet. Would I have a floating dhow and $2500 on the 23^d of September? It would of course be utterly unwise seriously to believe that. Now, it is me who is not in a hurry seeing my dhow finished, because security would demand that I would leave this house and live on it. My presence in this house with the two brothers of Kees' wife, both staff in his company, sympathizing with me, themselves frequently fed up with waiting for their money, my car on Kees' compound, my frequent email uploads at his house and my frequent jogging sessions with his business partner surely add welcome pressure needed for the hard job to daily cast an alarming shadow in Kees' mind.

Of course I honour Gerald's request to keep silent about his girlfriend. After all, I can talk about his five cows in Bukoba and his wife and children and house under construction in Dar es Salaam. My secret knowledge makes him a valuable ally in my attempts to regain my TSh 2.5 M presently in use by the semi bankrupt Kees. Since the kitchen alcohol stocks are thoroughly depleted and remain so, all he can do is ask me to use my cell phone because his is empty. After explaining my dhow yard tactics he offered to join me one time and study the situation, but on closer consideration that turned out to be too tiresome, so I did not succeed in taking him to the yard. But he does correct my Kiswahili exercise stories. Gerald buys beer for himself and friends, I'm not offered any. First, I did not want to ask him for any beer when he bought for himself and friends. After some self research, I discovered this to be caused by my wish to keep his record as black as possible and maximise my rights to blame him. Then, realizing nobody here cares about such things, I changed, attacking his beer stocks just as he did mine before.

Gerald asks me money to buy fish. I even have to eat on credit this weekend because I bought an TSh 80 000 mninga log saturday five o'clock.. The water supply still does not work. Gerald is a certified building engineer. But it is Victor who borrows my pliers and climbs to the roof tank. Then he needs Gerald to detach the water tube. Gerald does not understand my block-pliers and calls me for help.
I open, saying: Gerald, you are the engineer of our house, I am a philosopher!. Dirt is coming out. I go to my room.
Gerald calls me: "the job is not done yet".
I go out and while closing the tube, I say: I would expect a certified engineer with five cows in Bukoba, two wives, a healthy apetite for alcohol, a house in Dar es Salaam, a steady job at a shipyard with free housing, saving his money by having his beer and fish bought by me, to be able to close this tube once he has seen me opening it... It relieves me to speak thus, but on a nigger head of Gerald's quality it has no impact whatsoever.
Water pressure returns. Of course, Victor is the man. I tell them every tank like this should have a filter or else have this problem within a week. Everybody agrees. I plan not to buy one, I know they will do neither, so I put a private stock of water in my room.
One tap does not close anymore. Rubber gone.
Bert, sorry, do you have this type of rubber?
I have even many types (imported from The Netherlands!), but not this one.
Fortunately there is another tap completely blocked even with fully opened tap, so we take the rubber from there and put it on the working tap. I see they do not mount the tap properly after replacing the rubber, but it closes. Of course I will leave Gods water to flow over Gods land, as soon as He deems it proper. While washing the corridor floor I have got to know His providence: it has a slope will take it all to Gerald's room, leaving me completely dry.
Gerald, Victor and Gerald's girlfriend Mary get a good mood, have a shower and start frying fish. So there was money for fish after all. Let me see whether I get invited to join. When there is little, I will not. This is a bit too much Africa, but after all, there should be less than six weeks to go.

But in short: truly African company, invaluable for my quick inculturation.