by Paul Theroux
‘How do they get to South Africa?’ I asked.
‘The train from here to Zambia, then the bus.’
‘How’s the train?’
He made a face, wrinkled his nose, perhaps intending to discourage me. But I was not discouraged. I wanted to leave, too.
13 The Kilimanjaro Express to Mbeya
The Tazara Railway, a gift from the Chinese, had been inspired by the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Its construction by Chinese workers – engineers, grunt laborers, and Red Guards – had occupied the whole of China’s disastrous decade, 1966–76. The Chinese intention, a worthy one, was to liberate both Tanzania and Zambia from their dependency on ‘imperialist,’ white-dominated South Africa as a supply line. The building of the railway was also intended to demonstrate what willing hands could accomplish when hard-working peasants became rustless screws in the revolutionary machine (as the Maoist saying went). Unfortunately, there were no revolutionary peasants, only pissed-off peanut farmers getting short-changed in the Tanzanian heartland, but the Red Guards seemed not to have noticed that. The railway was completed ahead of schedule and was, by any reckoning, a magnificent Chinese achievement.
As a way of showing their thanks to China, Tanzanian bureaucrats parroted Maoist slogans for years afterwards, called each other ‘comrade,’ and affected Mao suits. In the mid-eighties the Chinese pronounced the Cultural Revolution a horrible mistake. This revision did not reach Dar es Salaam. Long after the Chinese ceased to regard Mao as the Great Helmsman, and saw his platitudes as embarrassing, and adopted neckties and sunglasses, along with the new line, ‘To get rich is glorious,’ Africans were chanting, ‘Serve the People,’ though it was the last thing anyone in Tanzania wanted to do. They were still pissed-off peanut farmers.
The Tazara Railway went into decline the moment it was finished, though over the years there were spells – convulsions, really – during which attempts were made to repair it. Some years it was unrideable. Foreigners were banned from it for a while. At least now it was running and it had been renamed ‘The Kilimanjaro Express,’ though it had no connection with the mountain. ‘It’s always late,’ I was warned in Dar. As if I cared.
The main station itself was an indicator of how little trouble anyone look to maintain the Tazara Railway. The Dar es Salaam terminus was the sort of building in which I had spent a great deal of time buying tickets and eating noodles, while riding various Iron Roosters through China. Large, stark, like a Marxist mausoleum, no waiting rooms, no annexes, it was entirely open, Chinese style, designed to make it easy for police to manage crowds and keep everyone visible. Nowhere to hide, was the subtext of Chinese urban planning. This station was from a standard Chinese blueprint, and would have suited the center of Datong – there was an identical station in most Chinese cities. Though it seemed out of place here, it was no odder than the colonial structures, the old German office buildings or the British clubs in the center of Dar or the Arabesque architecture of Zanzibar.
Assuming there would be delays, breakdowns and shortages, I brought a box of food and enough bottles of water to last four days. The two-day trip to Mbeya usually lasted three. At Mbeya I intended to go by bus to Malawi. Altogether, I was pleased with my overland African effort. I had not left the ground since my Sudan Air flight to Addis Ababa.
Three Africans awaited me in the compartment, Michel, a Congolese, Phiri, a Zambian, and a Zanzibari named Ali.
Ali said, ‘You are going to Malawi? Malawians make good houseboys. They are educated. They speak English. We ourselves prefer to sell things.’
Phiri, a 53-year-old railwayman on the point of retirement, agreed with this. He added, And they like working for white people.’
I had the feeling this was criticism rather than praise.
We left at eleven in the morning. About twenty miles south of Dar we came to a tunnel, the first tunnel I had seen in East Africa – a long one, cut under a big hill, because the point about Chinese railway building was that obstacles were blasted through and the tracks laid straight.
On the other side of that tunnel was the bush, nothing but deep grass and flat-topped trees, everything green from the recent heavy rain. Yet the day was sunny and warm. Though Michel, the Congolese man, did little else but sleep – he was a great heavy fellow with a sick mother in Lubumbashi – the others were chatty and informative.
Three hours after we set off, speeding south, we came to a halt. ‘There is something wrong. We should not be stopping here.’ Four hours later we were still there. ‘See what I mean?’ It seemed there was a problem with the track. ‘The heat of the sun has caused the iron rail to expand and buckle. We must wait until it cools.’ This was an unconvincing explanation.
Killing time, two Africans, a pair of muscular boys, were standing on their heads beside the track. They dropped to their knees and did back flips. Then one climbed on to the other’s shoulders and somersaulted to the embankment. It was unusual in the East African bush to see such strong Africans with well-developed muscles. But they told me they were professional acrobats.
‘We are going to Botswana,’ one told me. ‘There is no work here for acrobats.’
A young blonde woman sat by the track reading a thick, torn paperback – one I recognized.
‘What do you think of that book?’
‘Fantatic. It’s about this bloke in Africa, shagging all these African women.’
‘But it’s a novel.’
‘Reckon so.’
‘Funnily enough, I wrote it.’
‘Get out! Did you?’ She had a lovely smile and her accent had a soft South African slant. She called out, ‘Conor, come here!’
A young energetic man hurried over and confronted me, saying, ‘Kelli, is this bloke touching you up?’
Then he laughed – accusing me of fondling his wife was his matey way of greeting me. He was Irish, his wife from Cape Town, but both now lived and worked in San Francisco. They were on their way to South Africa, they said, traveling in the next carriage.
Because many passengers had spilled on to the line I could size them up: Most were Africans returning home, but there were a scattering of European backpackers, some aid workers, a shocked-looking Finnish woman, a white missionary couple traveling with small barefoot children, some Indian families, and many Tanzanians heading out of the country to seek their fortune.
‘They’re waiting for the track to cool,’ Conor said. ‘Do you fucking believe it?’
Yet as dusk gathered, and the air grew cool, the train whistle blew and off we went.
Sunset is breath-taking but so brief in East Africa that it seems fast forwarded – the sun descends into the risen dust of day, the clouds above it blaze and the whole western sky becomes a canopy as hot pink as molten gold, fringed with orange and purply blue, with beaky faces and filigree, a scattering of mashed hyacinths, a shattered syllabub, a melting light show. Or it might be corporeal, incarnadine, a great bleeding liver slab of sky that slips into separate slices, discoloring, drying into crisp fritters, and fragments of friable light, before being spun into cotton and vanishing. You can look only at parts of the sunset, because the whole is too wide. But this magic enchants for a matter of minutes and the best of it lasts seconds before darkness falls.
The sun was gone but the sky was alight, the backcloth of the color of Tanzania’s unique gem, the bluey-lavender tanzanite, and strands of yellow, braids of thick golden sky light illuminating the bush.
Peering into shadows by the track, what I took to be a tall slender tree was a giraffe and just as I saw it I heard the Swahili word from the corridor, ‘Twiga.’ There were two more, loping among the trees. We were passing a wilderness area, where animals were gathering at waterholes in the fading light – warthogs, a couple of elephants, some bush buck, so beautiful painted in the unexpected afterglow of the sunset, purples and yellows, mauve warthogs, golden elephants.
Then night fell, the animals dissolved into darkness and there was silence except for
the frogs’ gleep-gleep.
Wandering through the train later that night I came upon a lounge car. Loud American rap music was being played – angry obscenities, accusations, incomprehensible slang. The place was full of drunken shouting Africans. One stuck his sweating face into mine and demanded that I buy him a beer, ‘Kesho, kesho,’ I said; tomorrow, tomorrow, and my saying it that way took the edge off the confrontation.
I was about to leave when I saw Conor and Kelli drinking Tuskers at the far end. They invited me to join them and their friend, the Finnish woman, who still seemed shocked. She was pretty, but her pinched expression of worry made her beauty look somewhat alarming.
‘This is Ursula,’ Kelli said. ‘Paul’s a writer. His Secret History book’s all about this guy shagging African girls.’
Ursula winced. It was a sensitive topic. She was working on an AIDS project in Zambia, heading back there, but not for long.
‘Before I left Finland I understood the problem of AIDS in Zambia and I thought I had some good solutions,’ Ursula said. She rocked back and forth slightly as she spoke, another cause for concern, but somehow part of her faintly sing-song Finnish accent. After I got to Zambia I realized that it’s more complicated than I thought. Now I don’t understand the problem so clearly. It is all so complicated, and I don’t know about any solution.’
‘What did you find out in Zambia that you didn’t know before?’ I asked.
‘The behavior,’ she said, and rolled her eyes. ‘There is so much sex. It is all sex. And so young!’
‘How young?’
‘As if you don’t know,’ Kelli said, teasing me.
‘Ten years old is common,’ Ursula said.
‘But with their own age-group,’ I said, using the term I had learned in the Chalbi Desert, from the Samburu man.
‘Not with their age-group - anyone with anyone,’ Ursula said.
Conor said, ‘Sounds like fun. Just joking!’
Ursula shook her head. ‘It is horrible. There is no sex education. No one will talk about sex, but everyone does it. No one will talk about AIDS and everyone is infected. We were sent an anti-AIDS film and we showed it. But people in the villages said it was shameful - too indecent - and so it was withdrawn. What could we do?’
‘Did you talk to them about it?’
‘I tried to.’
‘And what happened?’
‘They wanted to have sex with me.’
Conor covered his face and howled into his hands.
‘The men follow me. They call me mzungu. I hate that – always calling out to me, “Mzungu! Mzungu!’
‘Racial-profiling,’ Conor said, trying to lighten the mood. ‘Shouldn’t stand for it, if I was you, not a bit of it.’
But Ursula did not smile. For her it was more than outraged decency – it was despair, a recognition of futility, a kind of grief even, along with anger.
‘They ask me for money all the time. “You give me money” – just me, because I am white.’
She was trembling and silent after that, sitting barracked by the hideous rap music and the yelling drunks.
Conor and Kelli had just come from what they had hoped would be a tour of the game parks. It had not been a success.
‘I wanted to leave Arusha almost as soon as I got there,’ Kelli said. ‘Some people saw a thief and chased him. “Thief! Thief!” They caught him and knocked him down and right there they beat him to death. It made me sick.’
I told them how I had seen the same thing my first day in Nairobi, a suspected thief being chased into a muddy creek.
‘So what do you reckon?’ Conor said, to no one in particular.
‘I am going home to Finland,’ Ursula said. She stopped rocking and sat back in her chair and hugged herself into a ball.
The three Africans were snoring when I got back to my compartment. I crawled into my lower berth and let the movement of the train put me to sleep. With the shutters down and the door locked to keep thieves at bay the small space was stifling, and the heat and strangeness gave me disturbing dreams of dangerous stinking machinery that woke me with its violence, cog wheels flying apart, bolts becoming projectiles.
The heat and smell was just as strong outside. We were traveling in the swampland by the Kilombero River for most of the night, but by morning we were in upland, where it was chilly. About an hour after sunrise we came to a station, Makambako, where a great many passengers got out to catch buses for the distant south Tanzanian town of Songea.
The train did not move for an hour. Phiri, who was a railwayman, spoke to one of the staff and confirmed that it was a delay, a problem on the line.
Remembering that I had had no dinner the night before, I went to a shop with a sign saying, Station Canteen, and looked for some safe food. I bought a hard-boiled egg, two chapattis and a cup of hot tea. While I was eating Conor entered the shop.
‘He’s actually putting that stuff in his gob,’ he said, mocking me. ‘Hey, there’s supposed to be a three-hour delay – want to go for a walk?’
We walked half a mile into Makambako, which was not a town at all, but just a, collection of hovels on a stretch of paved road where idle people sat or stood. Boys called out in jeering voices, and pretended that they were going to throw stones at us. Thirty years before, the party line was: This railway will open up this province to progress. People will want to live here. The train will give eryone access to markets. They’ll grow crops. Schools will spring up. Life will change and people’s lives will be better. As Livingstone had called the Zambezi ‘God’s Highway,’ this railway line was ‘The People’s Highway.’
It hadn’t happened. I had traveled this way before, in 1965, by road and it had looked much the same. What had changed? There was now a makeshift market, women squatting by the road. There was a gas station but it was derelict, abandoned, and few man-made objects are uglier than an abandoned gas station. What had been mud huts before were now shanties made of scrap lumber. The boys were ragged and insolent. Grown men, doing nothing, stood in the street talking, just killing time. The old women selling fruit and peanuts bowed their heads against the cold gritty wind that tore at broken thorn scrub.
We bought some bananas and peanuts, and I found a week-old newspaper. I read the headlines to Conor: ‘Desire for More Beautiful Buttocks Leads to Death’ and ‘Wife (10 Years Old) Admitted to Mental Ward in Dar.’
‘But that’s the one that scares me,’ Conor said, pointing to ‘US Stock Market in Renewed Plunge.’
As he was Irish, I asked him if he had heard of Eamon Collins’s Killing Rage, the remorseful book I had read in northern Kenya about an Irishman’s life as a hitman for the IRA.
‘Oh, sure. Great book. Pity about Eamon, though.’
‘What happened?’
‘He was murdered in front of his family a couple of months back by an IRA hit squad. For writing the book.’
And the gunmen, the Irish generally, would cluck about savagery in Africa.
I sat on the platform among the delayed passengers. No one really minded the delay. If there was anything to learn on a trip such as this it was that in East Africa urgency was a foreign concept. Though there were a number of words for urgency in Swahili, lazima and juhudi and shidda and haraka, none had Bantu roots; all were based on loan words from Arabic. In East African culture, hurrying had a negative connotation, illustrated in the rhyming maxim, Haraka, haraka, haina baraka - Hurry, hurry makes bad luck. Of course, some Africans were driven mad by such lack of urgency and tried to emigrate. But in general such complacency made people patient, as well as accounting for the utter indifference to things going wrong. In a place where time seemed to matter so little, there existed a sort of nihilism which was also a form of serenity and a survival skill.
A man with a runny nose was selling oranges, handing the snot covered fruit to customers. Another man carried a small rack of Chinese-made women’s underwear, bras and panties. Boys followed him, giggling at the merchandise. The missionary children –
pink-cheeked and frisky – ran barefoot in the fields next to the platform, in the dirt and dogshit while their parents cheered them on. I did not feel it was my place to warn them of hookworm. The station building, another Chinese design, was empty, the ticket booth vandalized, the floor littered and unswept.
The two acrobats did handstands to the delight of the local people. They were from Zanzibar, one of them told me. They were looking forward to their gig in Botswana.
‘Mister Morris invited us.’
‘For a show?’
‘Something like that. Our contract is for three years.’
They were very happy to be leaving and about to take up a real job.
The young man headed to the Congo to buy artifacts said that it wasn’t much trouble to get to Lubumbashi – he would catch a bus from northern Zambia. He said he knew nothing about masks or fetishes, but that he was meeting a Luba man in Katanga who knew all the tribes. And this was the greatest time to be buying old Congolese carvings and antiques. Villagers were selling their best items.
‘Museum quality!’
I laughed at this trader’s expression.
‘Because they are poor. They sell everything.’
As the morning wore on the sun became hotter. The surrounding countryside was bush but the settlement of Makambako was a blight. I wondered whether, with so much empty land and wilderness around, a littered town seemed of no importance.
Around noon the whistle blew and we were off again, jouncing and shaking into the bush on rails that seemed unfastened. We were crossing a great sloping plain, green hills in the distance. Some gardens nearby were planted with sunflowers and corn but farther into the plain there were no people, nothing planted, only the trackless bush of southwest Tanzania, fat baobabs and woods so dense in places there were many signs of game – hoof prints at the muddy shores of waterholes, battered trees with broken limbs and chewed bark – the signs of hungry elephants.
