Africa welcomes me back. I am as you left me. I Am. Unapologetic and uncompromising, the vast blank of the Sahara is a gigantic “why?” after the neat and productive terraforming of Europe. It scrolls past at 800 kilometres per hour, for hour upon hour, horizonless, fading into the distant haze in every direction.

Rocky plateaus form dark scabs and scrapes across the smooth faded-orange desert floor, fringed by deep-shadowed canyons that exist unto themselves, no explanation required. Ancient rivers cut dry, serpentine patterns in the crust, the ghosts of a climate past.

Featureless, country-sized sand plains make it seem like I’m suspended motionless in the sky. This Africa is utterly untamed, effortlessly aloof, ancient, silent. It is a million sunrises, a million sunsets, with sand and rock the only witness, never visited by the hand or foot of man.

I watch fantastical shapes far below. A subtle conspiracy of sun and wind, moving sand and rock a little bit every day over the aeons, rolls out an abstract masterpiece, breath-taking in scale and complexity. A cosmic doodle waiting to be appreciated, given meaning by my act of observation from 11 kilometres up.

Further south, unrelenting geology gradually gives way to biology…tentatively at first, but more robustly a short time later. Dry waterbeds become outlined on either edge by a thin, dark kohl of scrub. Then, the occasional palest blush of green appears on flat ground between these watercourses. Within a few miles, the scrub is ubiquitous, carpeting the land as far as I can see, thicker in the seasonal river beds, thinner on higher ground. That vegetation has taken hold in this most unforgiving of environments, the Sahel, is testament to the harshness of the millions of square miles of the Sahara proper, where I have seen not a single solitary plant.

Now starts the Great Cloud that covers the centre of Africa for much of the year, its clearly-defined northern walls stopping short of the Sahel, wary of that fearsome heat beyond. We dive into it as though flying into a monstrous grey cliff, and in a minute, visibility is cut to nothing. The cloud marks the advent of the gigantic forest that stretches almost completely across the middle of the continent, and with it, the anticipation of East Africa, and home…

Someone came to visit today. A dry matter-of-fact visit to regularise one or the other family Covid-19 Certificates issued by the Ministry of Health. An offer and acceptance of a Sprite to wash the dust down turned our chat from the usual talk. I asked him what he would do for work when the pandemic ended. In his upcountry accent, all teeth, nasal vowels and hard consonants, interspersed with the odd burp from the soda, he said that he’d be just fine in his position as Head of Lab for a major testing laboratory. I goggled, thinking us fortunate to have such easy access to this man of unexpected standing. He’s been doing our covid testing for some time now, coming to wherever we are, at our convenience.

Sprite loosens the tongue, and with his frank, unaffected gaze he told me that he was about to begin a six-year course as a surgeon. He would have started earlier, he said, just after his A-Levels, but his parents were too poor to afford the university fees. Being from the village has its disadvantages in the big city, and he was passed over for university admittance in favour of more well-connected candidates. In response, he gained a bursary and spent three years learning how to be a lab technician in a local hospital, which led to his present job.

He told me that he graduated from primary school in a small village in Eastern Uganda in 2006, and as he was bright, he scored a first division result. He was the first student in the history of that school to do so. And the last. In the intervening fifteen years, not one other student has repeated this feat. Poor facilities, poor teaching, and lack of exposure mean learning in the village is, for nearly everyone, unlikely to be a route out of there. Kampala children have the added advantage of being able to pay to have first sight of the national examination papers, guaranteeing a pass, graduation, and a well-paying job. He said that his early history studies taught him that this is known as a “bourgeois democracy”. I asked him if he knew what happened to the bourgeoisie at other times and, with a wide smile, he said he did.

His three years in the hospital lab and current standing have made it difficult for the university to ignore him any longer, and they admitted him into the surgeons’ course a few weeks ago. When he graduates as a surgeon, he plans to do a master’s degree as a neurosurgeon outside Uganda. A young father of one, he will need to juggle the demands of a full-time course, raising a family, and a full-time job.

There are so many like him who have the deck stacked against them. So much talent squandered. His fragile journey has many years and many pitfalls ahead of it, but his quiet determination gives me hope. His hard-earned village knowledge is the real thing, and he now has the street smarts he needs to get ahead in the big city. We’ll be watching you…best of luck.

All the madness currently going on drove me to pen these. They aren’t cast in stone. And beer helped.

The Ten Commandments of Shah. (Subject to occasional revision)

1. Faith is when you keep it between yourself and the Creator. Religion is when you inflict it on the people around you.

2. Be careful about beating your chest in the service of your religion. You’re far from being a saint, and you will cock it up. Regularly.

3. Never let your religion get in the way of your ability to be a decent human being.

4. Your religion always falls in behind the guiding values of the society you choose to live in. If you don’t like it, move.

5. Religion is nothing to do with your relationship with the Creator. It’s about your need to belong to a group of people you think you have something in common with.

6. The Creator is the Creator of you, me, the dinosaurs, the slime mould and little green creatures on the planet Zog.

7. The Creator doesn’t care if you’re naked, wear a hijab, or wear a flashing dildo on your forehead.

8. The Creator is infinite in time and space. Don’t presume to claim them as your exclusive property.

9. If a human being claims to be able to intercede with the Creator on your behalf, they want your money or your mind.

10. You’re miraculous, one of a handful in a vast, empty Cosmos; the result of an improbable series of events. You didn’t ask to be here, but you are. Live it to the best of your ability, and try not to be too much of an arse.