by Paul Theroux
Sisal growing was not very difficult. The plant can endure drought and heavy rain and poor husbandry. It was troubled by few pests and diseases and was fireproof except after repeated burnings. It could be inter-cropped with other food crops. It was a wonderful cash crop and still grown in Brazil, Mexico, China and the Philippines, by smallholders. But – no one knew why – it had been a failure in Tanzania.
‘Maybe bad management,’Julius said. ‘The people are just growing food for themselves.’
I said, ‘That’s not a bad idea, is it? If they had been growing sisal they would have used the money to buy food.’
But the people would survive. In such circumstances it was the government that was left in the lurch, with no income, no exports, no hard currency.
I sat by the tracks and listened to the radio: foot and mouth disease was destroying British cattle; there was war in Macedonia, death in Chechnya, Borneo, Israel and Afghanistan; Wall Street was recording steeply declining figures, and ‘Tech stocks are in retreat.’
Kimamba was hot, dirty, and poor. But it was able to feed itself. And it was seizing an opportunity today with the stopped train, selling the passengers food and drinks.
Seeing me, a young boy with a big tin teapot, hot milk and tea cups stopped by.
Good morning, sah.’
What’s your name?’
‘My name is Wycliffe.’
‘What’s the problem, Wycliffe?’
‘The problem, sah, it is money.’
As the hours passed we made a mess of our portion of track in Kimamba. The toilets were dumping sewage on to the ground, passengers were tossing banana peels and waste paper and tin cans and plastic bottles out the windows. Along with this littering was loudness: the rap music that was played now and then in the dining car was being played now. The Kimamba folk came closer to listen.
Drunken Africans in the train became boisterous. This I did not like at all.
Looking for information about the derailment, I ran into an African named Weston who said he was an accountant. He was going to Dar es Salaam to conduct an audit of someone’s books. He said that Tanzania was in a bad way.
‘We are poorer than Malawi. We have no economy. We have nothing,’ he said. ‘But it was worse before “liberalization.” ’
Liberalization was when the Tanzanian government dumped all the money-losing industries, selling them to the private sector. Now they had more or less what they had had before independence: creaky trains, simple agriculture, and a certain number of lions and elephants and quite a few gnus.
Many blasts on the whistle shattered the silence in Kimamba and cut through the rap music. A few more blasts, and passengers leaped aboard and we left Kimamba around noon-time, just as abruptly as we had stopped there in the middle of the night.
We rattled into a wilderness of stunted trees and flat plains and absolutely no people. Settlements such as Kimamba were like flat little islands in a green sea. A few hours later we were among green hills, the hills like high islands in the same sea. The town of Morogoro was in those hills. I wanted to stop here, because it was a road junction: I could go south from here and avoid the urban sprawl of Dar es Salaam. But I had a problem. Because the immigration office had been closed in Mwanza the official had given me a four-day visa. I could buy a visa extension only in Dar, and would have to do it tomorrow.
After all the thunder and the portents of rain en route, the weather finally hit as we approached the coast. We were in a hot, wet flatland of boggy earth and even boggier rice fields. The planting season had just begun here, with the onset of the rains.
Julius joined me at the window.
I remembered something I had wanted to ask him. ‘Ever heard of Kwanza?’
‘As you know it means “first,” ’ he said, pronouncing it fust.
‘Yes. But I am thinking of Kwanza, the festival.’
‘There is no festival. Kwanza means first.’ He rapped the wall of the coach. ‘Gari a kwanza.’
‘First Class carriage,’ I said.
‘That is correct.’
But it was a euphemism. Almost three days out of Mwanza the train was very grubby. The staff cleaned all sinks with strong disinfectant, knowing that most of the men lazily used the sinks in their compartments as urinals. Eaters washed their hands with a pitcher and basin, the waiter handing over a crumb of soap. But you couldn’t bathe. No showers made this hot train reek with the smell of unwashed humanity. The toilets were vile. The dining car was filthy, not that there was any food after such delays. I liked riding this train because it crossed a part of Tanzania where roads were impassable. A little activity with a broom, a mop, a scrubbing brush, and the trip would have been agreeable. Delays did not seriously bother me. I had no deadline, nor anyone to meet me. But the dirt, the litter, the shit, and the drunks made this side of travel in Africa hard to bear.
Perhaps it was remarkable that the train ran at all. But how else, except for flying, would this thousand or so Tanzanians be able to travel from Mwanza or Tabora? The train was a necessity. The pressure of numbers and very poor maintenance made smooth running impossible, but there was no excuse for the filth.
The low steep hills indicated we were near the coast. In the hillsides were sharply defined cave entrances.
Kaolin,’ Julius said. The hills were a source of the stuff, the caves – he said – dated from German times. At one time it was a Tanzanian export. Roofing tiles and bricks and pots were made from this useful clay. ‘But these days people sneak in and steal it.’
Another defunct industry, like the sisal and the tobacco and the rice and the cotton and the apiaries in Tabora, started by some Peace Corps Volunteers, that had produced high-quality honey. The volunteers had gone home.
‘What happened to the bee hives after that?’
‘They just failed.’
Dar es Salaam started miles from the coast, with scrappy rice fields and scattered villages and mud houses with pretensions, the buildings closer and closer together. Cement block houses, square one-story affairs, continued, became linked, in an outer shanty town, just poor sheds and too many people, jammed together, everything sitting in puddles.
Yet life went on. In the middle of this muddy slum, in the drizzling rain, a man was propped up, washing his feet with a bucket and a scrubbing brush. People were hacking at the earth with mattocks, preparing a small plot for planting. Some women were stirring soot-blackened pots on smoky fires – cooking outdoors in the rain. Some maize stalks were sprouting by the track, someone’s garden. The passing scene began to resemble a slum picture by Hogarth, even down to the Hogarthian details – people drinking and fighting, sitting around, emptying chamber-pots, a man pissing against a post, a child crying, no one even looking up. At one level crossing an over-excited boy was jumping up and down in a mud puddle and screaming at the train.
I was in no hurry – I wasn’t due anywhere – yet whenever I arrived in an African city I wanted to leave.
Urban life is nasty all over the world, but it is nastiest in Africa – better a year in Tabora than a day in Nairobi. None of the African cities I had so far seen, from Cairo southward, seemed fit for human habitation, though there was never a shortage of foreigners to sing the praises of these snake pits – how you could use mobile phones, and send faxes, and log on to the Internet, and buy pizzas, and call home – naming the very things I wanted to avoid.
One day, in an African newspaper I read: In the year 2005, 75 percent of the people in Africa will be living in urban areas. This was only a few years off. It made me glad I was taking my trip now, because African cities became more awful – more desperate and dangerous – as they grew larger. They did not become denser, they simply sprawled more, became gigantic villages. In such cities, women still lugged water from standpipes and cooked over wood fires and washed clothes in filthy creeks and people shat in open latrines. ‘Citified’ in Africa just meant bigger and dirtier.
Like the person so poor and downtrodden wh
o loses self-respect and any sense of shame, the African cities did not even pretend to be anything except large slums. Once, each city had a distinct look: Nairobi had a stucco and tile-roof style of architecture, Kampala had its harmonious hills, Dar es Salaam was coastal colonial, with thick-walled buildings designed to be cool in the heat. Such style gave the city atmosphere and an appearance of order in which hope was not wholly absent.
Now, one city was much like another, because a slum is a slum. Improvisation had taken the place of planning. Cheap new buildings were put up because the older buildings were regarded as too expensive to renovate. And because no building was properly maintained every structure in an African city was in a state of deterioration. I had a list of Dar es Salaam hotels I might stay in. I mentioned one to a taxi driver. He said, ‘Finished.’ I said another name. ‘Bunt by fire.’ Another: ‘Shenzi’ (dirty). Another: ‘Closed down. Not wucking.’
Tanzanians began most assertions with, ‘The problem, you see …’ To any observation or chance remark, Tanzanians I met would start by apportioning blame. Yet they had had a fairly peaceful time of it – no war, no revolution, no coups d’état, no martial law. Once or twice in forty years Tanzanians had even voted in free elections.
You could not spend a more wasted day than in an office of the Tanzanian government, as I discovered one day in Dar es Salaam. This waste of time suggested what might be wrong. Tanzanians complained of unemployment – in the capital almost half the adults had no jobs. But those with jobs did next to nothing, if the Office of Immigration was anything to go by. I had my passport, my fifty US dollars in cash, my filled-out application for a tourist visa, and I stood the requisite hour in line. I was no one special. Everyone else in line was encountering the same obstacles in the open-plan office of twenty employees: apathy, then rudeness and finally hostility.
The mob I was among just watched and waited. The office was dirty, the desks messy, one civil servant was eating a hunk of cake, another one, a woman with curlers in her hair, was reading the morning paper at her desk, yet another staring into space, a man simply drumming his fingers. I tried to detach my personal urgency from this charade (in fact I needed this visa and my passport to buy a train ticket) and watched as though it was a comic documentary. ‘You come back later,’ the surly woman said. But I wanted to monitor my application proceeding through all the stages, moving from desk to desk, getting cake crumbs on it from the gobbling man, tea stains from the fingers of the cup sipper. Six people examined and initialed my form. And then my form was put in a tray, where it remained for twenty minutes. It was then handed through a slot in the wall, a side office.
If I had complained they would have replied, with justification, ‘What’s the hurry?’ ‘Who are you?’ ‘What does it matter?’ ‘Why should we care?’ Nothing had ever worked in Tanzania, all they had ever known was failure, empty political rhetoric, broken promises. True, the unemployed in Dar es Salaam looked desperate, but the workers too looked cheated, envious and angry.
Following my passport, I sneaked to the side office door and opened it, apologizing – pretending to have entered the wrong office – and saw the African visa officer in a white shirt and blue necktie with a tin tray on his desk, a hunk of bread in his hand, tucking into a big bowl of meat stew, slopping gobs of gravy on the stack of visa forms.
‘Sorry,’ I said, and hurried outside to laugh.
There I found Christopher Njau. He was twenty-two, university educated, unemployed, trying to get a passport.
‘The problem, you see,’ he began, as soon as I remarked that I had spent two and a half hours and fifty dollars to wait for a tourist visa – this in a country that was begging tourists to visit.
‘The World Bank won’t give us money,’ Njau said.
‘I don’t see the connection between this inefficient office and a World Bank loan.’
‘Also, there is too much of corruption here.’
‘Should I have offered a bribe?’
He shrugged. ‘Nationalizing the banks was a mistake. Also, we have overpopulation.’
‘So what’s the answer?’
‘I want to leave,’ he said. ‘That’s why I am here. I need a passport to leave – but already it has been months.’
‘Where would you like to go?’
‘My sister is in Texas. She is studying. She has her own car! With a car she can drive to work and also study.’
He shook his head in disbelief. It seemed almost unimaginable that his sister, a woman of twenty-four, would own a car. I found it much harder to imagine that she had actually been to this office and gotten a passport.
Later that day I picked up my visa and bought my train ticket. The ordinary train ticket from Dares Salaam to the middle of Zambia was twenty dollars, First Class was fifty-five. In First Class you shared a compartment with three other people – not my idea of First Class, but it would do.
With time to kill I took the ferry to Zanzibar. Zanzibar remained mostly intact, an island smelling of cloves, its whitewashed houses fronted with decorated parapets and screened verandas. But there were apartment blocks too, as ugly as anything in Romania – and perhaps built by the Romanians – one of Tanzania’s earlier well wishers.
There were dhows at the Zanzibar waterfront, and boats, and traders, stall holders, fruit sellers, with the usual medieval touch, on this day a boy about to walk along a high rope strung between two trees. He had attracted fifty or sixty spectators, Zanzibari boys with nothing to do but be entertained by the patter of the acrobat’s build-up – he made much of the fact that he had no safety net.
‘I might fall! I might die!’
So dazzling white as it loomed from the sea, Zanzibar was an island of smelly alleys and sulky Muslims. I looked around the bazaar and found a grouchy Indian merchant.
‘Business is down.’
‘When was it up?’
‘Sixty-something.’
‘How much are these sandals?’
They were stiff, antique, made of silver. They were a bride’s silver slippers, to be worn on the wedding night, as she went scuff-scuff in the semi-darkness to the bed where her groom awaited his triumph, her defloration.
‘I must weigh them.’
I laughed at the thought that these pretty objects were being sold by their weight.
‘Silver is two-twenty a gram,’ he said, naming a price in shillings.
I calculated the price to be $120. We haggled for a while and then I gave him 1oo in cash and he wrapped them in old newspaper and snapped a rubber band around them. While doing this, he said that his grandfather had come to Zanzibar in 1885. His whole family was here.
‘We want to leave, but how?’
‘You mean, go to India?’
‘Not India. I have never been to India.’
‘You mean America?’
‘Yes. I want America.’
‘Have you ever been there?’
‘No.’
Over the next two days I bought supplies for the train trip south. It was impossible to be in Dar es Salaam and not meet foreigners attempting to solve Tanzania’s problems. What struck me was the modest size of the efforts. No one was handing out large amounts of money anymore. This was mainly ‘micro-finance,’ a popular term for a popular activity. One American man I met was doling out loans of $200 to $500, to be repaid within a relatively short time.
‘I say to them, “Don’t think about another donor. We’re going to get you on your feet. We’re the last donor you will ever need.” ’
‘Do you believe that?’
He laughed and said that Africans were ‘grant-savvy.’ They were so used to getting grants they were aware that the money would dry up in three to five years, and assumed that they would have to look elsewhere for more money for their schemes: small-scale milk processing, retail shops, women’s marketing projects.
‘Maybe we’re wasting our money, but it’s not much money,’ he said.
One day in a coffee shop I overheard an
American preacher who was meeting some Africans, two men and two women, petitioning for grants of money. They said they needed the money soon. The preacher said that while they might be in a hurry he was not. The preacher was seventy perhaps, with bushy white eyebrows that gave him a severely owlish gaze.
‘I am here to look at the situation,’ he said. ‘Yes, we have resources but they are coming to us through God’s concern and God’s love.’
One of the African men mentioned a school that needed cash right now.
The preacher bore down on him, saying, ‘One thing we insist upon is, no government involvement at all.’
‘Just guidance only,’ the African man said.
‘We take our guidance from the Bible.’
‘Partnering,’ one of the women said, just putting a word in, but wincing when the preacher spoke up.
‘We will consider partners but only faith-based partners, who share our principles,’ he said.
The second woman mentioned money again.
‘Submit your forms, so that I can study them,’ the preacher said, and then after he told them what a very great privilege it was for him to interact with them, he led them in a solemn prayer, his head bowed. The Africans watched with pleading eyes, thinking (as I thought): We’re never going to see this guy’s money.
So many donors had been burned in Tanzania that grants were hard to come by – so people told me. Tanzanians might insist that the money was urgent, but donors could point out the visible fact that the enormous amounts that had been handed out in the past had done little good.
It was easier to leave. ‘I want to go to South Africa,’ a young man said to me in the market, prior to his unsuccessful attempt to beg money from me. ‘Many people I know have gone there. My friends just want to leave Tanzania. There is nothing here.’
