by Paul Theroux
No, for the man was saying in a pedantic way, his mouth filled with cookies, ‘Paul tells us in Galatians…’
The sky at the western horizon began to glow in slow explosions of lightning. The bursts of light widened from the ground up on a jagged stalk of fire, traveling into clouds that swelled hugely as they were illuminated, going from black to bright. The light was more sudden than fireworks, closer in violence and scale to a big battle – one in which the bombers and combatants were too small to see, though their bombs were overwhelmingly hot and destructive. It was an African thunderstorm twenty or thirty miles away. Now and then the whole sky of blackish clouds was convulsed by a bolt of lightning that lingered as a penetrating flash. In that flash I could see the land clearly – could see that it was empty, the storm doing nothing but showing it as empty and indestructible.
‘Another direction he gives in Galatians,’ the man was saying again, and the sky was foaming with fire, and just a chuckle of thunder, the storm was so distant.
Look for the truth in nature, I wanted to say to those cookie-eating missionaries in the next compartment: Nothing is complete, everything is imperfect, nothing lasts. Go to bed.
Before dawn we arrived at the town of Tabora. We were still there three hours later. The missionaries had left the train, most people had left the train, but in the meantime the train had filled up with new passengers. An African joined me in my compartment, assigned to the upper berth.
The train was the only practical way in or out of Tabora. The railway was the link between this good-sized if ruinous town and the capital, 800 miles away. Decades of neglect had left Tanzania’s roads in a terrible state, many of them unusable. The exceptions, as always, were the tourist routes. A safari geek wearing whipcord jodhpurs and a pith helmet, jogging along in a Land-Rover on the way to Ngorongoro Crater to gape at warthogs might marvel at Tanzania’s modernity – great hotels, excellent roads, robust wildlife. But a Sukuma fisherman intending to sell his catch down the line in Shinyanga, just sixty miles away, would be hard pressed to find a passable road, much less a vehicle, and his attainment of Tabora was out of the question, except on this bush train.
Tanzania had reached a dead end on the socialist path, and as an economic failure, both in industry and agriculture, the country was advertising itself as a superior collection of game parks, inviting foreigners to take pictures of its endangered species and to spend money. Great tracts of bush on a principal migratory route for game, at Loliondo, near the Kenyan border, had been leased to a nob in the United Arab Emirates to use as a private unregulated hunting reserve for the very rich who wanted to kill leopards. The locals, Masai warriors, were guides and scrubbers in the game lodge, who resented the intrusion and claimed that when the game was thin in Loliondo the hunters shot animals in Serengeti National Park.
Tanzania was a tourist destination. The comrades, the Maoists, the ideologues, the revolutionaries, the sloganeering Fidelistas, were now hustling for jobs in hotels and taking tourists for game drives. And if as a Tanzanian your village was not near any lions or elephants – and Tabora wasn’t - you were out of luck, and had to put up with crummy schools and bad roads and this amazingly casual railway, once called the Central Line, which had been built almost a hundred years ago by the Germans.
The man in the upper berth introduced himself as Julius, named after the father of his country. He was an educated man in his mid-forties, well spoken and considerate – he always left the compartment to smoke cigarettes, for example. He worked for the Land Use Department, in agriculture, helping farmers make money by growing viable crops. This was a serious subject in Tabora. He was going to a staff meeting in Dar es Salaam next week, leaving home a week early to be sure of being in Dar on time.
‘The local cash crop is tobacco for cigarettes,’ Julius said. ‘There was once a tobacco cooperative. The government bought the crop, the price was all right.’
‘So what happened?’
‘The managers were corrupt. They mismanaged the cooperatives. The cooperatives failed, so the industries were privatized.’
He spoke without any passion, in a chastened, almost defeated tone. Dogmatic motto-chanting Tanzania had been humbled. No one talked of imperialism and neo-colonialism now, nor the evils of capitalism – though they could have, for even capitalism had failed in Tanzania.
‘In Tabora there are many small tobacco farms – an acre or half an acre,’ Julius said. ‘Two years ago private companies bought the crop. The prices were good for flue-cured tobacco. But this year the price is one quarter of what it was. The farmers – well, we call them peasants – they are struggling. They can’t make ends meet.’
I said, ‘In Kenya the coffee growers are planting maize.’
‘Here too,’ Julius said. ‘Many have turned to just growing food for themselves – maize and beans and onions.’
After all this time, the return to subsistence farming. This way of life in Africa was familiar to me. The strong impression I had was not that the places I knew were worse off but that they had not changed at all. After forty years of experimenting with various ideologies and industries they were back to farming by hand and pounding maize into flour, living on porridge and beans. Nothing was new except that there were many more people, grubbier buildings, more litter, fewer trees, more poachers, less game.
In the long delay I got off the train and looked around Tabora. The shelves in the shops were bare, though there was produce in the market – women selling bananas and tomatoes and bunches of dusty onions.
We finally left Tabora in mid-morning in the heat and headed into green wooded bush, of flitting birds and emptiness. It was so little changed from the old unexplored Africa of the nineteenth century, Burton and Speke who had walked through here from the coast 150 years ago would easily have recognized it. It was the Arab trade route, the slave route.
Julius said to me, ‘Why don’t you go to Arusha and see the animals – lions and elephants?’
That was what visitors did, flying into the international airport that had been built for their convenience, near the animals. But the vast country had no connection with that and was in a sense still undeveloped, even undiscovered. The irony was that Arusha in 1967 was the site of the national assertion of self-determination, an eloquent oration by the president that Tanzania would be self-sufficient. This so-called Arusha Declaration pledged that the government would eradicate ‘all types of exploitation’ so as to ‘prevent the accumulation of wealth which is inconsistent with the existence of a classless society.’ Now the question – here and elsewhere – was not exploitation or class or wealth but how to get a meal.
Zimbabwe was in the radio news – white farms being invaded by Africans demanding land. President Mugabe was siding with the Africans who were breaking the laws of trespass, as well as in some cases murdering the white farmers. I shared this news with Julius.
‘Mugabe wants to last a few more years,’ Julius said. ‘So he makes speeches about land. Yes, they will take that land away from those white farmers. It happened here in Tanzania. Some land will go to rich Africans. The rest will be subdivided among the peasants – small plots. They will grow whatever they want, and they will end up where we are now, just peasants struggling on small farms, growing maize and beans to feed their families.’
I often heard pitiless assessments like this from Africans on trains or people in villages, but never such trenchant good sense from African politicians or from foreign agents of virtue either.
Because of the season and this equatorial spot at noon the sun was directly overhead. We stopped at the station of Kazi-Kazi, just a tin-roofed shed. The dense bush lay all around, the head-high grass, and bunches of yellow wild flowers. Beyond this was an immense flat plain.
The starkness of it all was a wonder. I had come this way in the 1960s and even then had probably seen the old station, the rusty roof, the posts and pylons, the tree clumps, the bales of thorn branches used as a fence, the twiggy whips like bar
bed wire. This halt could not have changed in forty years, nor even since the railway was built – 100 years. But if it was not improved neither was it seriously deteriorated. Farther down the line, at the halt at Kilaraka, a small boy hurried down the dusty path from a cluster of mud huts carrying a bowl of boiled eggs, hoping to sell some for a few pennies to the passengers. Just as he reached the train the whistle blew and we were on our way, leaving him howling.
We were crossing the Wagogo Plains, the wild heart of Tanzania: no roads, no towns, only this railway. What animals existed here were hunted – poached for food by the Wagogo, who were pastoralists. Had they been as colorful as the Masai whom they somewhat resembled in their earlobe plugs and lethal-looking spears, more attention might have been paid to them. They sharpened their front teeth into points, and they wore beads, but still no one paid them any heed. They might have prospered on their own. But because of drought, dead animals and neglect, they were about as well off as they were when Sir Richard Burton passed through in the 1850s. He had stopped briefly to investigate the Wagogo’s sexual habits, with his customary thoroughness, questioning the women, measuring the men. The women were well disposed towards strangers with fair complexions,’ and one man, ‘when quiescent, numbered nearly six inches.’
The Rift Valley lay ahead, a visible dip in the great green plain, shallower and less dramatic than in Kenya, but more wooded, forested in places, another sight of old Africa and its seemingly limitless savanna. By the tracks were purple wild flowers and darting swallows, and in the distance just bush. At great intervals there would be the sort of specimen tree – a mango or a baobab – that indicated a Wagogo village. But the villages were hardly that – no more than five huts in a circle, just the number that could fit in the shade of those few trees.
There were Wagogo at all the small stations, at Itigi and Saranda, some begging, others hawking food and artifacts. They smiled, showing their sharpened teeth, and since I was the only mzungu on this train they clustered around my car, offering carved wooden mortars and pestles, woven reed mats, paddles and wooden spoons and baskets; cooked food, too – chicken and flyblown fish.
The afternoon heat was in the nineties: the sun burning in a cloudless sky. This was something of a disappointment to the local people who needed rain for their newly planted maize. So the sunshine was like a blight – people tried to hide from it, but it was not easy.
At one small halt in this great sunbaked emptiness only one tree grew, a mango tree of modest size, but leafy with dense boughs. There was a circle of shade beneath it. Within that circle were thirty people, pressed against each other to keep in the shade, watched by a miserable goat tethered in the sunshine. What looked like a group game was obviously an afternoon routine of survival. As interesting to me as this packed-together mob of villagers around the one tree trunk was the idea that no one in this hot exposed place had thought to plant another mango tree, or even more for the shade they offered. It was simple enough to plant a tree, this mango itself contained a thousand seeds, yet no one had planted one, or if they had the tree had been cut down. The sight of the Africans in this tiny place in Central Tanzania struggling to keep within the patch of shade stayed with me as a vivid instance of forward planning, or rather the lack of it.
Beyond this halt were the sort of boulders I had seen near Mwanza, but even bigger and gray toned and rounded, looking from a distance like a herd of elephants, great gray elephant-assed boulders, so many of them browsing on a hillside that they obscured the hills: hills like gray elephants.
The only signs of humans were the wrecked and twisted railway cars tipped off the track with some rusty rails from some long-ago train wreck. I was rereading Heart of Darkness and was reminded of this when I read,
I came upon a boiler wallowing in the grass … and … an undersized railway-truck lying there on its back with its wheels in the air. One was off. The thing looked as dead as the carcass of some animal. I came upon more pieces of decaying machinery, a stack of rusty rails.
Broken or scuttled machinery by the roadside is a common sight in Africa. Not one to lament, not any longer, anyway for me.
One of the themes in Heart of Darkness – harped on rather than suggested – was cannibalism. Africans are casually referred to as ‘cannibals,’ by Marlow. Even Kurtz the idealist-turned-bogeyman had developed a taste for human flesh and kept human skulls as household accessories, which is reason enough for his last words to be ‘The horror! The horror!’ The heavy hints of anthropophagy are a bit of stage managing on Conrad’s part. Though mutilation and amputation and massacre by Belgians had been customary, cannibalism had never been institutionalized by Africans in the Congo (as it had been in, say, Fiji). The suggestion of flesh eating was just another racist dig, like that of the Toronto mayor refusing to go to Kenya, ‘because I don’t want to end up in a cooking pot.’ There are similar gibes in Heart of Darkness.
But much more prosaically observed in the book, and so more horrible, were the unsensational examples of ruin and exploitation – roads leading nowhere, collapsed huts, pointless effort, broken machinery, rusty metal. Details like these that, intended to appall the reader in 1902, were now the simple facts of everyday life in Africa, a century later. Long ago I might have said that such ruin represented failed hopes, but now I knew they were not African hopes.
This railway line, built by the Germans, linked Dar to Kigoma on Lake Tanganyika. The idea, like most colonial ideas, was to plunder the country more efficiently. The British had built the spur to Mwanza. Since then not a single foot of track had been added and no improvements had been made. Dodoma, where we arrived in the early evening, was a good example of the colonial period being the high water mark of railway technology in central Tanzania. The station was a hundred years old and, though ramshackle, still functioning.
Never mind, Dodoma (like Tabora and Dila, Marsabit and Nanyuki) was the sort of place I could have lived in quite happily – doing something worthy, of course, like teaching in the local school or getting the local people as interested in bee keeping as their ancestors had been (another forgotten skill in East Africa). People would say of me, in a praising way, as they always said of such people: ‘He devoted his life to Africa!’ But that was not it at all, for it was just a version of Rimbaud in Harar: the exile, a selfish beast with modest fantasies of power, secretly enjoying a life of beer drinking and scribbling and occasional mythomania in a nice climate where there were no interruptions, such as unwelcome letters or faxes or cell phones. It was an eccentric ideal, life lived off the map.
Dodoma was also where the east–west railway crossed the Great North Road, which penetrated the Masai Steppe. But if the railway was in poor shape, this major highway was much worse, a road to avoid for its bad surface and its potholes and, in this season, its mud. Black clouds were gathering around Dodoma, teasing its farmers with thunder, bolts of lightning exploding inside the dark clouds and illuminating them for seconds, making them seem blacker.
Seeing me scribbling, Julius said, ‘What are you writing?’
‘Just a report,’ I said.
He would understand that; he would not understand that I was writing an erotic story that was becoming a novella in my notebook.
When I was not doing that I was staring out of the window, making notes, listening to the radio. I bought bananas and boiled eggs from hawkers by the tracks, and sometimes risked the crumbobblious cutlets in the dining car. If the train stopped for a period of time I got out and paced and bought a coconut. I had spent some time talking to the station master at Dodoma, who was doing his best with antiquated switching machinery.
Later in the day I discovered that Julius had been summoned from our compartment to deal with a drama.
‘It was very bad,’ he said.
‘What’s the story?’
He did not say anything at first. There was another commotion in the passageway leading down the sleeping car. A group of big boys slouched past, followed by the stern conductor
. The boys were the ragged drunken youths I had seen in the dining car – the reason I usually stayed away from the dining car.
‘Those three boys,’ Julius said, lowering his voice. ‘They trapped a girl in the toilet. She went in and when she tried to come out they entered and trapped her.’
‘What did they want?’
‘They were going to rape her, but she screamed and someone heard. They called me because I know her. She was very worried – she is still worried. I will tell the police.’
I expected more trouble, but there was no fuss, there was silence, a conspicuous silence. And around midnight we came to a dead stop. Instead of entering Morogoro, the next-to-last town on the line, we halted at the little town of Kimamba and moved no farther. We were still there seven hours later in the hot, humid morning in sticky air that was filled with mosquitoes.
I heard the word shauri mumbled – meaning a problem, a fuss. Then someone said in the corridor, ‘A derailment.’
The townsfolk of Kimamba gathered on the embankment to stare at the stopped train. Though it was an unscheduled stop, some enterprising people sold bananas and tea, but most just gaped. From a distant mosque a muezzin began wailing.
Beneath distressed façades on the main street of abandoned shops I could read faded signs, one about tractors, another saying New Planters Hotel. After peering at Kimamba for a long while it was possible to see that it had once been a real town, possibly important, with something resembling a local economy. It was now like an ancient ruin.
Julius, the expert in land use, said, ‘They used to grow sisal here.’
Sisal was the vital fiber in all the rope in the world, until nylon came along. Julius explained that sisal had been grown here by European and Indian planters in large estates. There were no smallholders. Sisal production peaked in Tanzania in the mid-1960s and in this boom the estates were nationalized by the government eager to cash in on the boom. The expatriate planters were booted out of the country. Then the bottom fell out of the sisal market. Production dropped to a quarter of what it had been, and in the nineties it was less than one-tenth. At this point the government cut its losses and sold the sisal estates off to private individuals. Sisal growing was back to where it had been forty years earlier, except that the market for it hardly existed anymore. Terrible Tanzanian economics once again.
