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The Distant Smell of Redemption

The five basic human senses, sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell, are
amongst the most magnificent as well as weird and wonderful abilities we
possess … and they are all inexorably tied to experiences and memory.

People often play little mental games with themselves, I know I do … and one of my
favourites is ‘what would you remember best’ from, for instance, a situation, a season,
a place … a country. I often wonder what would be my most vivid and intense
memory of Africa if I ever had to leave this land. It is such a vast continent with
so many varied biomes and habitats that it would be impossible to select just one to
represent the land as a whole.
The sense of sight and hearing is the most used in our everyday experiences and is
also used to capture our most iconic and evocative African memories on photo or
film to the extent that I find that the memories associated with those events are not
as strong or personal to me as those evoked by the lesser used and certainly more
elusive senses of taste, touch and above all, the subtle and insidious sense of smell.
Photo and film, alas, have no ability to translate the taste and feel and smell of
Africa … and therefore we cannot share these sensory memories with a multitude of
strangers in an unaltered and clear form. These experiences remain intensely personal
and therefore incredibly powerful, and to me they become the most interesting.
The sense of smell is one of our most primitive senses and to me it is plugged
straight into my brain stem and galvanizes my limbic system into primal reactions
in response toextremes of disappointment and joy. I find that my strongest sensory
memories are often not my favourite, but are the strongest as they are derived from
these contrasting and often contradicting emotions. This makes them vivid and easy
to recollect as they are indelibly branded into my memory in times of suffering,
despair and hopeful salvation.

To me, the strongest and most intense memory of Africa will always be the times and
places of the most contrast such as at the end of a dry winter, especially one following
on the tail of several years of drought. The moments caught in memory are of when
you stand there with all your senses seemingly bleached pale and brittle by too much
sun and dry dirt and your whole body seems to scream for the salvation of rain.

Standing there in the scorched grittiness of hot baked sand and the dust of forlorn
hope with the skeleton trees silhouetted against the limpid depths of our big skies
and watching the clouds start to boil like the wrath of so many gods. With the taste
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