by Paul Theroux
Then he handed me a pair of earmuffs, the sort you see clamped on the heads of cannoneers, to block the loud engine roar. And he led me on into the heat.
One of the oddest sights I was privileged to observe in many months of travel from Cairo to Cape Town I glimpsed below decks, in the engine room of the Umoja. At the lowest depth of the engine room, in the most deafening noise, the worst heat, the hottest pipes – most of them unlagged, some of them spitting jets of steam from their iron elbows – a young African crewman was sitting at a wet wooden table, doing complex mathematical equations. He seemed at first glance to be naked. His thumb was stuck in a book of logarithmic tables, and a textbook was open in front of him. The sheet of paper he used was covered with algebraic equations – numbers and letters, from top to bottom. To me the heat and noise were terrifying in their intensity. But the young man was serene, and he worked with the stub of a pencil, wearing nothing but undershorts, with pink rubber plugs in his ears.
He was so engrossed in his work, which looked like school homework, he did not greet us. Only when I lifted the book cover to read the title did he look up and smile, but then he went back to his work. The book was Principles of Diesel and High Compression Engines.
‘English is the language of the imperialists,’ Tanzanian officials had often said in the past. One of the stated policies instituted by the much-loved first president of Tanzania, Mwalimu (Teacher) Julius Nyerere, was the translation, at great expense, of all school textbooks into Swahili. To prove it could be done, he personally translated Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar into this coastal idiom. It struck me in the engine room of the Umoja that it might be a little time before Principles of Diesel and High Compression Engines was available in Swahili.
Conversation in this noise was impossible. I took a piece of paper and wrote, What is he doing?
John nodded and took the paper and pen. He wrote, He is studying.
What for? I wrote in reply.
Perspiring in the heat, his jaw fixed – for he was not wearing earmuffs – John wrote, To boost up his academic qualifications for his employment.
Still in the din, we sat down in a caged control room and had a cup of hot coffee out of a Thermos. Once, I removed my earmuffs, but the engine howl was unbearable. John laughed at my reaction – which was like being hammered on the head. He did not seem to mind but perhaps many years of this noise had rendered him partly deaf. I also noticed that the engine room was very tidy and efficient, much more orderly and better maintained than the upper decks of the ferry. Pointing to dials he showed me the boiler pressure, the fuel levels, the temperature and the fact that we were proceeding at between eleven and twelve knots, a pretty good clip.
After twenty minutes or so of drinking coffee in the boiler room I could not take any more of this. I signaled that I was going topside. There, in the cool air and the sunshine we were still at sea, no land in sight.
‘You don’t take passengers anymore?’ I said.
John said, ‘This is designated a cargo vessel. If we take more than six people, we are regarded as a passenger vessel and therefore must enforce very careful safety regulations. Number of life jackets. Lifeboats. Give lifeboat drill.’
‘Because the Bukoba sank?’
‘Yes. We will pass it. It was sailing to Mwanza.’
Later I read that Lake Victoria had never been properly surveyed and that all the available data on hazards was collected in 1954 by the British colonial government. The information about landmarks and warnings was now out of date. The only people qualified to pilot a large vessel in Lake Victoria were those with local knowledge and experience.
John and the captain had worked together on the Umoja since the late seventies. At that time it was a military vessel.
‘During the war against Idi Amin we made trips bringing many soldiers. Five thousand of them, standing like this’ – John tightened his face and stood rigid to show how tightly packed the men were. ‘We took them to Jinja Port and they hid when they went ashore.’
‘What do you bring into Uganda now?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know. It is all in freight cars and sealed and packed up,’ John said. ‘Out of Uganda we take, coffee and tea. We ourselves produce cotton, coffee, tea, cashews, and cloves in Zanzibar.’
‘What about cloth?’
‘We have only one textile factory now,’ John said. ‘We sell our cotton, we don’t make it into cloth.’
Forty years of independent rule and foreign investment, forty years of mind-deadening political rhetoric about Ujamaa (‘Familyhood’) and ‘African socialism,’ nationalization and industrialization and neutrality, and this vast fertile country of twenty million people had achieved a condition of near bankruptcy and had one factory.
Strangely, I felt I had encountered one of Tanzania’s successes, the ferry Umoja, which had been faithfully crossing and recrossing the lake for the same four decades, in war and peace, carrying citizens and soldiers, cows, cash crops, the necessities for Uganda to function and for Tanzania to make money. The ferry had been a steady earner, and it was staffed by serious and dedicated crew, one of whom was still below decks in his undershorts, boosting up his academic qualifications.
In the southeast corner of the lake, we passed a chain of islands. I went to the bridge to use the captain’s binoculars and check the names of them. The largest one was Ukerewe and the land distantly behind it was the shoreline of Tanzania.
Ukerewe was the name by which the entire lake had been known by the Arabs whom Burton and Speke had met on their 1858 expedition. At Kazeh (Tabora), the widely traveled Arab slaver Snay bin Amir said it was ‘fifteen or sixteen marches’ to Ukerewe, but dangerous because of the unfriendly people. If the folks were unfriendly it might have been because of their unwillingness to become enslaved and marched in chains to the coastal slave port with the melancholy name Bagamoyo, ‘I Leave My Heart Behind.’
Arab traders from Zanzibar and Aden had been in this area for more than a century before Europeans had penetrated it. The Arabs trafficked in slaves, but also in ivory and honey, as they did farther south on the Zambezi. They plundered, of course, but they never controlled this distant savanna. They had made themselves unwelcome through their slave-trading and so they had to stick to the safest routes, in many cases counting on Africans themselves to supply them with slaves or ivory, in return for trade goods.
The most startling sign of this old occupation by Arabs and coastal people were the many dhows I saw on the lake – dhows of considerable size, thirty feet and more, most of them under sail, others with the rigging down, carrying fishermen. This slow but stable boat with its lateen sail, the very emblem of Arab seamanship, was still nodding across the lake, which was the heart of Africa.
In the late afternoon I could see Mwanza clearly, and the coast around it, the headlands and little islands. Every feature of land was composed of smooth tumbled boulders, many of them huge, two- and three-story boulders that dwarfed the huts and made every other dwelling look like a doll house. At first glance the shore looked like Stonington, Maine, with palms instead of spruce trees: piled rocks, a rocky shore, rounded boulders and small low wooden houses set close to the ground.
I was at the rail with Alex, the first engineer, and, watching the shore, I saw a speedboat go by, a white plastic noisy one, bow upraised, going fast.
‘Mzungu,’ Alex said.
Another speedboat followed.
‘Mzungu,’ Alex said.
Maybe missionaries, maybe traders, maybe farmers, maybe doctors or agents of virtue: no one knew. They were just white men in loud white boats.
Pointing to the headland, Alex said, ‘Those rocks we call Bismarck Rocks. After the Englishman who found them.’
Or maybe Otto von Bismarck, who once ruled this distant outpost of Teutonism, along with Samoa and New Guinea and the Cameroons.
Not long after drawing near the port of Mwanza, we circled a while and then hovered, making little forward progress. A Kenyan ferry,
the MV Uhuru, was unloading freight cars and loose cargo. This work was proceeding very slowly.
Most of the crew, including Alex, were at their posts – in the engine room, on deck, at the lines. So I went to the galley and found the captain eating.
‘Don’t worry, mzee,’ the captain said. ‘We will be docking soon.’
I joined him in the usual Umoja meal: rice, vegetables, a withered chicken part, the whole of it reddened with gouts of pili-pili sauce.
‘Thanks so much for having me as a passenger,’ I said. ‘I like this ferry. Everyone is helpful and very friendly.’
‘They are good,’ the captain said.
‘And friendly,’ I repeated, wishing to stress my gratitude.
I was alone, the only alien, a nonpaying passenger, the idlest person on board, they had no idea who I was or where I was going, and I was being treated like an esteemed guest. How could I not be grateful?
‘They are friendly,’ the captain said carefully. ‘But I am not too friendly with them.’
He was still eating but I could see he was making a subtle point, one that he wanted me to understand, a sort of leadership issue.
‘For me, too friendly is harmful,’ the captain said.
We did not dock, we did not anchor, we hovered. The Uhuru kept unloading. The shoreline was littered with wrecked and scuttled boats. I went to the aft deck, found a barrel to sit on and listened to my radio. I found the BBC, a program about an Azerbaijani novel called Ali and Nino. I had written an introduction to this novel, and had contributed to the program – my two cents’ worth had been recorded, but so long before that I had forgotten about it. So I listened to snippets of my own voice coming from London and another hour passed on Lake Victoria.
‘Don’t worry, mzee,’ the captain said.
‘I am not worried,’ I said, wanting to add, And I am not a mzee either.
What did I care if this ferry docked now or tonight, or tomorrow, or next week? The only plan I had was to find the railway station in Mwanza and take a train to the coast, Dar es Salaam, where no one was expecting me. In the meantime, I was happy here on the Umoja. I did not seriously want to leave this vessel.
As darkness fell, many things happened quickly. The Kenyan ferry swung away from the pier and the Umoja took its place, the captain and Alex working together, one on the bridge, the other in the engine room, a tricky maneuver. Just as we docked, the temperature went up, for without the lake breeze, the air was sultry.
I was in no hurry to leave. But the rest of the crew were scurrying – they were in their home port and eager to get to their villages and wives and children. They could not go ashore until the ferry was unloaded and so they saw me off.
‘Kwaheri, mzee!’ they called out as I stepped off the loading flap on to Tanzanian soil. Farewell, old man.
12 The Bush Train to Dar es Salaam
‘Any guns?’ the Tanzanian customs inspector asked me in the little shed in Mwanza, poking my bag. Never mind his dirty clothes, you guessed he was an official from all the ballpoints leaking ink in his shirt pocket.
Though there was a pie slice of Tanzania lying in Lake Victoria, the southern shore of the lake was the enforceable border.
‘No guns.’
‘You can go.’
I walked through the crowd of people who were welcoming the ferry – the ferry’s irregular arrival being one of the highlights of life in Mwanza. Walking towards town I could understand why. The place was derelict, just ruined and empty shops and an unpaved main street that was almost impassable because of its terrible condition. Old buses swayed, almost toppling as their wheels descended into deep potholes. This was another haunted border post, a dismal and interesting one, that the safari-going tourists who flew into the international airport at Arusha would never see, though they would see some wild animals and colorful natives.
In Mwanza, the natives were not colorful, just numerous and ragged, and so many of them had attached themselves to me that when a taxi came by I flagged it down and got in.
‘What day does the train go to Dar es Salaam?’ I asked.
‘Today night,’ the driver said.
‘What time?’
‘Maybe one hour.’
We went down the lumpy road to the railway station, which was crowded with food sellers and people carrying plastic-wrapped bales of their belongings. This bustle looked odd, the dressed-up people, some of them running, for it was drama in a place where drama and urgency were in short supply.
I roused the stationmaster, who was eating peanuts in his office with the peanut seller, a crouching woman holding a big tin tray of them.
‘Is it too late to get a ticket on this train?’
‘We have space for you, bwana,’ he said.
He went to get me a ticket, and the peanut seller shook her tray of peanuts and said, ‘Njugu? Njugu?’
Within an hour of arriving in Mwanza, Farewell, old man! still ringing in my ears, I was on the train, in a little two-berth compartment but apparently alone, with bottles of water from the drink seller who hawked them by the track.
‘Are you comfortable?’ the stationmaster said, stopping by my compartment to solicit a tip.
‘Yes, thank you,’ I said, handing him some unearned income. ‘When will we get to Dar?’
‘Sometime on Sunday,’ he said, and went on his way.
It was now Friday night, but so what? I had a berth and a window on Africa, in a railway car full of Africans. In a short time we would be in the bush, traveling east through the middle of Tanzania.
Because of the bright lights of the station yard, people were attracted to the place, and they sat and chatted. A large gathering of children were kicking a football under the lights. It wasn’t a proper game, but it was such hearty playing, with laughter and shouts, that it held my attention. Africa was full of skinny energetic children, shrieking as they played, and the game usually involved kicking a ball. These children did not have a round rubber ball but rather a misshapen cloth ball stuffed with rags. The field was not flat, not smooth – it was a succession of dirt piles and humps, very stony. The children played barefoot, probably twenty or more, not teams but a free-for-all.
Watching them play and call to each other on this hot night, raising dust in the lights of the station yard, I was impressed by their exertion and heartened by their high spirits. The playing field was a wasteland, and part of it lay in darkness. The children ran in and out of the shadows, screeching. The dark didn’t matter, the bumpy field didn’t matter, nor did the squashed ball. By any reckoning, these children were playing and laughing in one of the more desperate provinces of a semi-derelict country. Even after the engine whistle blew and we started to draw out of Mwanza I still heard their tinkling laughter and then I remembered why I had been so fascinated by this happy sight, which made me feel so lonely.
I was reminded of the end of Saki’s novel, The Unbearable Bassington, where there is just such a scene – children playing excitedly, observed by a solitary man, Comus Bassington. That setting was Africa, too, a place much like Mwanza, a ‘heat-blistered, fever-scourged wilderness, where men lived like groundbait and died like flies. Demons one might believe in, if one did not hold one’s imagination in healthy check, but a kindly all-managing God, never.’
Bassington is so lonely and miserable he cannot bear to look upon the happy scene.
Those wild young human kittens represented the joy of life; he was the outsider, the lonely alien, watching something in which he could not join, a happiness in which he had no part or lot … [and] … in his unutterable loneliness he bowed his head on his arms, that he might not see this joyous scrambling frolic on yonder hillside.
There was enough moon for me to see that the landscape outside Mwanza was as bouldery as the lakeshore. But this was a flat plain with interruptions of boulder piles, some as high as hills, others as smooth as burial mounds.
The villages were no more than mud huts with oil lamps flickering inside – but for
all their simplicity they had a wholeness that was lacking in Uganda’s villages. The villages of Uganda showed signs of having been attacked, abandoned, repossessed, rebuilt, improved, and battered again, the result of war, expulsion, violent change. Its battle scars made Uganda seem a strong country. In Tanzania there was no such graphic evidence of the past, but just decline – simple linear decrepitude, and in some villages collapse.
Very quickly – twenty miles or less – and we were in the bush: the grassy plains, with low trees, the great African emptiness, as empty as Lake Victoria had looked, and just as ocean-like under the watery glow of the moon.
When clouds covered the moon I looked around the train and found a dining car and some Africans inside already drunk. The attendant asked me in Swahili if I was hungry and to tempt me he showed me some heaped plates, saying, ‘Chakula, chakula,’ food, food.
To the novice this was ‘mystery meat.’ But I knew better. One dish was obviously a purple amblongus pie, the others were a stack of crumbobblious cutlets and some gosky patties, all of which I recognized from The Book of Nonsense Cookery by Edward Lear. The cutlets were done to perfection, the recipe having been closely followed (‘When the whole is thus minced, brush it up hastily with a new clothes brush’). The attendant was still waving them in my face, yet I declined.
‘Just a beer,’ I said.
I took it back to my compartment. On the way I spotted two aliens, the only other ones on the train. They were pale and blotchy and sunburned, a young man, a young woman, probably in their twenties though their bulk made them seem older. They were, it turned out, the sort of podgy, cookie-munching, Christ-bitten evangelists who pop up in places like Mwanza with nothing but a Bible and a rucksack and the requisite provisions: cookies and cake and a hymn book in Swahili. I discovered this because the train windows were open for any available breeze and once when the train slowed down I heard my name. Paul.
Good God, had they seen me? Were they going to mention that their parents liked my books and what an amazing coincidence it was that they were meeting me on a train?
