I went to Cairo in December 2024. The first few days I was there I did three things: listen, watch, and pause. Maybe it was because I had spent too long rushing—from meeting deadlines at work to connecting flights, from one obligation to the next. I needed respite from the relentless demands of life as a career professional, a moment to simply exist outside the pressure to perform.
In Cairo, the pace was varied, stop-start like the traffic. It was teeming with life as the locals ebbed and flowed about their business—moving like people with somewhere to be, and then they stopped for prayer hour.
The city didn’t demand my urgency; instead, it invited my attention. I needed to listen because everything was unfamiliar—the language, the rhythm of the streets, I had to take it all in.
And I paused because, for once, I could.
I listened to the sounds of the city, the way I tune into a John Mayer guitar solo with the hope of making some sort of sense out of life. Even at night when I looked out of the window of the hotel lounge from the third floor, I could hear the city, perpetual motion on the roads, the bleating sound of car horns turning into a pulse that beat continuously. I would open the sliding door to feel the cold, winter wind.
I watched, I fixed my gaze on the sinuous River Nile snaking through a concrete puzzle, and when the river disappeared, I watched the buildings, my rudimentary understanding of architecture trying to make sense of a place that is a sum of its parts—Old Cairo, New Cairo, Greater Cairo, all of it. Sometimes a blur, but always a delight for the eyes.
And finally, I stopped, and remembered to be present in the moment.
In this era where every moment begs to be framed in reels, stitched into stories, captioned and posted, broadcast and hashtagged, I had forgotten the quiet magic of simply being. Our obsession with pixels often overshadows and mutes the richness of presence—we forget to eavesdrop snippets of conversations not meant for our ears, we overlook the poetry in gestures both small and grand—a fleeting glance or a lingering handshake. We forget to look up long enough to truly see—not just the place, but the pulse of it: the people, the culture, the diversity.
When you live through the lens, even while standing amidst the story, you risk becoming a distant spectator, detached from the very things you travel to a place to feel.
You might find yourself in the heart of it—the orchestra of noise, the rhythm of the music, the nuances of language, the flavour of the culinary delicacies—and yet somehow, miss it all, failing to truly experience any of it.
I picked places with sonic overload: the middle of a six-lane dual carriageway road, the corner between a mosque and a busy mall, and the periphery of a conversation that poured tea from Windhoek to Harare to Nairobi.
Auralgraph: Cairo, Egypt, 2024. © Filemon Iiyambo.
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I actually went to Cairo to “eat with my eyes”, to gain knowledge from Africa’s leaders in climate change-adapted groundwater resource management—like any grafting writer I have a day job, my latest one is in hydrogeology—I am literally in the water.
I was in Egypt to attend a conference—actually, a course because a conference doesn’t last a month. The course focused on groundwater resource management for African countries grappling with the effects of climate change, alongside an eclectic cohort of specialists and sector professionals from ten African countries—a calabash of knowledge and experience.
Common struggles transcend geography and international borders, water scarcity is one of them—as the world warms up and the effects of climate change manifest themselves as droughts and unpredictable floods, the one resource essential for survival becomes less readily available, especially in arid climates. Water scarcity is not unique to a country home to the world’s oldest desert; neither is it to a country with one of the most famous of ancient civilisations—perfectly preserved in several grand museums.
Egypt conserves every single drop of water, going as far as injecting surface water into aquifers to bank for the future. With more frequently occurring droughts that turn kraals into graveyards, alongside the complexity of trying to cope with periodic floods that drown whole townships, Namibia experiences seasons in which water is plentiful before it is evaporated by the thirsty climate, plunging the country into water scarcity in the next drought. Egypt has many lessons that Namibia can benefit from—borrowed solutions for a common problem.
For the first time in my life I had classes on a Sunday—a culture shock, but a learning experience, followed by fielding calls in the evening from disbelieving friends who were stressed they could not reach me on a Sunday afternoon. I also experienced the joy of having Fridays off—in many Muslim Arab countries Friday is a holy day.
I met up with an old Namibian friend, two nomads in a land where the language was foreign but the dunes were not. We went searching for semblances of home—a perfectly balanced lager, a seasoned steak—preferably roasted, and Amapiano. We found the food; the music eluded us. No matter where you find yourself in the world, there is a gravitational pull from the universe that draws one towards kinfolk. Inevitably we ended up sharing stories.
The tea break in between lectures was where it went down. Tea was poured piping hot and fresh—everything from sharing recipes on the different ways to cook pap—I learned that Kenyans make ugali the way Windhoek Lager is brewed, plain with no additives, to Sierra Leoneans who prefer everything spicy, and always demand to be given extra pepper. We exchanged invitations to each other’s capital cities.
I judge people by their hospitality, their love for fresh bread and vegetables, and their humour. Egyptians merit all three in equal measure.
We had chaperones who tried tried valiantly to convert us from coffee to tea; they were there in the background, ready to take a picture for us, preventing us from being cheated by camel ride guides at the Great Pyramids of Giza, and getting us breakfast on a Saturday when the hotel restaurant was closed. They made sure we focused on enjoying our stay while they dealt with the logistics of getting over thirty people across Cairo. They made sure we did not forget to do our daily assessments and helped with changing currencies and ordering medicine.
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My first crash course in gastronomy came from Ashish Malik—an Indian vegetarian from Jaipur. He used spices to coax flavours out of sautéed vegetables with effortless grace, rolling them into warm chapatis, so expertly balanced that I hardly noticed the absence of meat. I was too busy fanning my tongue.
I met Ashish in France, a country often hailed as the cradle of haute cuisine. It had its own magic—albeit a bit light on the seasoning, with an assortment of cheeses each with its own unique flavour, but it was the baguette that won me over: fresh, fluffy, warm, and dependable—come rain or snow, every meal was accompanied by a baguette. Fresh bread is my baseline.
In Egypt, the culinary experience was no less remarkable—beans, rice, and of course fresh vegetables. The aubergines in the Mahshi were fresher than Zambezi bream pulled straight from a fisherman’s net. I had my pick of the bread—this bread, that bread. My palate settled on Aish Baladi, the local flatbread, a template onto which spicy combinations could be painted. It was the contrast between spice and subtlety that reaffirmed what my grandmother and the village had taught me: food is more than just sustenance; it is memory, culture, and identity, rolled into every bite.
A few days before I left Cairo, I went out to order a burger. There I was with the most limited Arabic vocabulary and an app on my phone trying to ward off a wine glass salesman who was trying to sell me glasses but no wine—even at the corner of Al Hosary Mosque, someone is always trying to sell you something.
And that is when I started to feel it, the homesickness for the return.
Filemon Iiyambo is a writer, former newspaper columnist, and social commentator currently working as a hydrogeologist. He has written for the Namibian Sun, and for the New Era Newspaper. He holds BA and BA Honours in English Literature and Applied Linguistics from the Namibia University of Science and Technology. His work was included in Brittle Paper’s Erotic Africa and Isele Magazine. His short story “December” was shortlisted for the 2021 Bank Windhoek Doek Literary Awards, while “Their Mother’s Words” was shortlisted in 2023. His short story “A Thousand Ungovernable Voices” was published in Now Now: The 2023 Doek Anthology. He was a fellow of the Narrating Namibia, Narrating Africa Doek Emerging Writers Program and a member of the 2022-2023 Doek Collective. In 2023 he guest-edited Lolwe, one of the most influential literary magazines in Africa, becoming the first Namibian to be invited to do so. Also in 2023, his short story “Nandjila” won second prize at the National Literary Festival of Namibia. He is currently working on a novel.