Oh, the thoughts one has, music one enjoys while out walking!

Like, I mean, good, old-fashioned walking, just walking, not even breaking into a trot, just walking: left, right, left right, for five kilometres or more, left, right... In my last piece on “collecting streets” I told you that even the chameleon was once a sprinter — that must have been six hundred million years ago? —but look at him now! So, easy does it, as long as you keep your body moving forward.

Take advantage of the steamy weather if you are in Dar es Salaam or Mombasa because it is easy to break a sweat, and do not complain overmuch about the atmospheric oven that envelopes you as you walk down Ali Hassan Mwinyi Rd in Dar, or any road in Mvita: take it as your natural steam-bath, and thank your stars you are not in Omdurman!

I have taken to just walking with the same fervour I got hooked onto jogging back in the day when Jimmy Carter was president of the US and he had adopted the sport as its patron. There exists an interesting article by Joey Asher, a reporter who once jogged alongside him.

But it is walking I am talking about, not jogging; and I am interested in what you keep your mind on while you move your tired body? Carter told Asher about his jogging outings with presidents, such as Giscard d’Estaing and Anwar Sadat, and Asher says he wanted to kick himself for not remembering to carry a tape recorder, though he got a cute photo courtesy of another correspondent around.

So, one can reminisce about situations, processes and events past— conversations one has had over many years, encounters with different people and impressions retained, funny anecdotes, even annoying characters.

When alone, one can also turn to music. I remember back in the day you would have a ‘Walkman’ —later a ‘Discman’ — which brought you the popular tunes of the time: Lionel Ritchie’s All Night Long, Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean or Bob Marley’s Exodus, etc.

Today, ages hence, (the Discman no longer available but with YouTube on the telephone) I fall back on the Classics. I have been collecting hundreds of the old composers and they are inexhaustible: Ludwig van Beethoven’s Eroica; Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik or Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s Dance of the Little Swans. The list is endless, and so can the walk be too.

One does not have to be an afficionado of any musical genre (I am not one in any meaningful sense), but one should take it as something one wants to carry on one’s way, making one to forget all the creaky bone-joints and breathlessness caused by hyperventilation.

Of course, it goes with taste, the one thing that, together with colour, cannot be debated. Your thing may not be dead Europeans of so long ago, but current African musicians, and there you are spoilt for choice.

One can decide on anyone of the local songbirds, from Diamond’s “Enjoy”; to Duly Sykes and Ali Kiba’s “Zali”; to Vic West’s “Kuna Kuna2; to Vinka’s “Batuleke”, with all of which you can hoof along for 20 kilometres with hardly a thought.

Additionally, recently I stumbled onto a genre I had forgotten since back in the day when I watched Richard Gere and Louis Giossett in “An Officer and a Gentleman” in a movie about the rigours of the military boot-camp where most of the action is scored by cadences or jodies with very little logical sense but which by their beat and rhythm can carry one for miles before one knows they are even marching. One just trots and chants away as if in a trance.

But then you might not be interested in all these musical scores and all you are interested in is the landscapes and people scenes that you pass by, noticing new developments you had never noticed before: A massive new housing estate that has just sprung up like a mushroom; an old slum that has taken on menacing attributes, including youngsters lazing about without a thing to do.

One gets to notice that we live in towns like our forebears lived in the villages, with minimum urban planning, or ignoring if it exists, especially when an opportunity arises for us to be dishonest, even if dishonesty gives us no profit: for instance, what advantage does one gain in cheating the town planner by adding a metre to one’s perimeter fence when one cannot even plant another shrub, and even the extant flowers in one’s garden are poorly tended?

Like Johnnie Walker, keep on walking!

Ulimwengu is now on YouTube via jeneralionline tv. E-mail: [email protected]