by Ted Simon
When had I last felt like this? To my surprise I realized that it had been quite recent, during the second week in Nairobi, only ten days before. What had that been about? I could think of nothing, except possibly the prospect of departure. But I had actually left Nairobi in excellent humour. There was nothing I could pin it down to.
When else had I felt like this?
Immediately my mind flew to the moment at Mersa Matruh when I had come across the taxi driver picking up my wallet; when I had unaccountably, and shamefully, obeyed his command and passed by, pretending I had seen nothing. The incident rankled deep in me. I squirmed as though touched by something foul. Then the border at Lunga Lunga came in sight, and for a while my speculations had to cease.
The crossing into Tanzania seemed a delicate matter in only one respect, and that concerned the hostility between the Black African states and White Rhodesia. Mozambique at that time was still Portuguese, and Botswana was observing a profitable neutrality, but Zambia was in total confrontation with Rhodesia, supported powerfully by Tanzania and Kenya. The border with Rhodesia was closed, and I would have to make a circuit via Botswana to get there and eventually to South Africa. It was not at all clear in those days what the Tanzanian and Kenyan attitudes were to traffic in and out of Rhodesia. Officially they would be bound to disapprove, particularly Tanzania with its heavily Marxist-oriented ideology and rigid administration.
What made travel in Africa so remarkable was that one never knew, from one week to another or from one frontier to the next, what was going on. The only way to find out was to go and see. I knew that a trickle of people had passed on the same route going north, and I had heard a few stories about how easy or difficult it was, but all I could deduce was that it was worth trying.
The customs officer on the Kenya side raised my suspicions by questioning me in detail about my journey, my plans, my views on Kenya and about the changes in Britain since she had lost her colonies. It was almost certainly just harmless curiosity, but it felt like a polite political screening. I did not have to lie, but I was fairly economical with the truth until he let me go.
On the other side I was received by a schoolmasterish fellow in a light worsted suit and spectacles. I was relieved to find that he was only interested in my money. He asked to see my travellers' cheques, which had to be recorded on a currency form. Then he suggested urgently that he himself could change the bits of Kenyan currency I had left.
'There will be no need to record it on the form,' he said, 'for doubtless you will be spending it immediately.'
Obviously he was planning to change the money himself at the black market rate and since it did not amount to much I let him get away with it, keeping only a few coins. While we did our business it began to rain heavily. I stood under the eaves of the hut looking mournfully down the road which had changed to dirt. The rainwater lay on it in sheets. It looked slippery and difficult, like red mud. It struck me that I had crossed into the monsoons now and that for several thousand miles I might be riding on wet surfaces. I had no idea how much of that would be dirt, but I was troubled by the prospect. I had had virtually no experience of wet dirt and it was not a good day to learn.
Also I was out of petrol. The pump marked on my map at Lunga Lunga had been closed. As I waited, wondering what to do, two tall and expensively dressed Africans on their way to Kenya stepped out of a Mercedes saloon, and I dickered with them for a litre or two of petrol to get me to Tanga.
'You'd better wait and see if they let us through first,' said one of them. 'If not you can take the whole damn car.' But they negotiated their passage, and I got my litre, grudgingly spared at a high price.
The route swung back to the coast and ran through a light red sandy soil, banked and ditched to channel the floodwater. For some way back
from the road, the ground was denuded by goats grazing. Huts thatched with coconut stood among the trees and palms, but very few people were out. Those I saw looked dull and morose. Although I found the going better than I expected, the damp grey skies and the sullen people threw me back into my earlier heavy mood. I passed close to a man walking with a panga swinging from his hand. He looked miserable and hostile. The two-foot long steel blade, razor sharp all the way round, gave me a start. I imagined the damage one vicious swing with that weapon could do. It could take my foot off, I thought.
I saw myself struggling with field dressings, riding the bike with one foot. An image flashed before my mind of a white-faced motorcyclist riding up to a hospital, collapsing at the entrance. The nurse pulls off his boot to find only a raw stump. 'We'll never know how far he came,' says the surgeon at the operating table. 'He died without regaining consciousness.'
That's ridiculous, I thought. The panga would have taken the boot off too.
Then, once again, I discovered what was going on. It seemed quite incredible that I could be riding along a dirt road in Africa engrossed in these macabre fantasies. What on earth inspired me to invent them? Anticipating difficulties was one thing, but spinning horror stories to make my own flesh creep was terrible.
It did not occur to me to ask myself whether I was insane. I knew I was more or less as sane as most people, for I had decades of experience to support the view. I could get along in society, and make a living. What other definition of sanity could there be?
Clearly it was all part of the same story that had been unfolding before; the anxiety of a lifetime slowly revealing itself.
I began to see that all these particular fears, of falling, of meeting with violent behaviour, of wildly improbably hazards, were only excuses for a fear I could not recognize. They were false messengers I decided, concealing anxieties of a quite different kind. These noxious vapours arising from some deep well of doubt and despair writhed and curled into whatever shape was convenient to haunt me at my feast. I was making it easier for them by offering them ready-made disguises.
I decided I would have no more of it. From then on let them do their worst unaided. I would no longer lend them the props of my imagination.
So my rational mind issued its tidy instructions and was completely-overwhelmed by the consequences. Fear simply roared up and engulfed me in a waking nightmare, all pretence thrown aside, shrouding me in a clammy grey terror to which I could put no name or origin.
It subsided soon after, and left me in peace for the rest of the day, and I felt some satisfaction at having at least flushed the enemy out. I was very excited by all this mental turmoil. It seemed clear to me that my journey, the entire concept of it, was closely related to my struggles with fear. I had launched myself on a journey to circle the globe, but I seemed to be on another journey, as well, a great voyage of discovery into my own subconscious. And I trembled a little at the thought of what monsters I might encounter there.
The cloud lifted and dispersed, and the road came back to the sea at Tanga. The difference between the two regimes became immediately apparent. The town had been spaciously laid out in colonial days and was physically unchanged. There was none of the bustle and enterprise of Mombasa. Little advertising, little traffic, fewer shops, fewer goods, a quiet provincial backwater in dignified decline, at least to my casual eye.
I sat alone in a fine old cafe where nothing had happened for years. Beautifully made furniture in wonderful African hardwoods stood and seasoned while the proprietor grew older and more lethargic, presiding over an ever more limited range of food and drink. I ate some sambusas, deep-fried triangular pastry cases stuffed with spiced vegetable which are the Asian equivalent of a hamburger. After a cup of tea I moved on. It seemed a pity not to stay, but I had been still too long and needed to make some distance.
From Tanga the road was once again a good tar highway, and struck inland to meet the main highway between Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. The land was richly green, with mountains rising to the right of me, and great sisal plantations all around.
Then I took the turning south towards Dar and Morogoro, and sped over the green hills and under
the overcast sky as far as Mwebwe by the Wami river.
There were two strings of huts, one each side of the road. I was attracted by one on my right painted in a jolly colour and called a hotel. Some pleasant women sitting outside and sewing smiled as I passed, so I stopped and asked how much a bed would cost. They suggested five shillings and showed me a reasonable portion of partitioned hut. I hung my mosquito net and walked up the road to where the truck drivers ate. The staple diet was posho, a mash of cooked corn, like the Italian polenta. With it came a bit of chopped mutton and peppery sauce. You could have a spoon if you wanted. There were sambusas and sticky sweet stuff and tea.
After nightfall the low-powered lamps and wicks ushered in the familiar mysteries of the evening, casting shadows for the imagination to fill. I watched shiny brown fingers dipping into the posho and rising to sharply profiled African faces, listened to the fluid chatter of African voices breaking every now and again into some quaint English cliché, and mused over my morning's discoveries. I knew that I had never known a more intense period of mental activity. There was something almost
physical about it, like riding a tiger in the mind. I was sure it could only be the beginning.
That night my dreams were interrupted several times by a threatening presence. I would be engaged in quite innocuous or cheerful activities, when this dominating figure rose up to overwhelm me with fear and helplessness. I could not recognize it, but knew it was male. Dark hints echoed through the tunnel of years from a forgotten childhood.
The next day the sense of fear lingered only for a little while as I consciously tried to penetrate the identity of the attacker, but it was followed by a sense of unusual tranquillity. I felt, without quite knowing why, that I had made a significant advance. There had been no victory, the battle would be resumed another time, but I thought I had caught a glimpse of the enemy within and knew that it belonged not to the present or the future but to my own buried past. I had not overcome it, but in that one episode it had lost much of its power to overcome me.
Those who find romance in communications, who delight simply in the idea of spanning vast distances, must dream of the highway from Cairo to Cape Town. If and when it ever comes about, it will certainly be one of the world's great thoroughfares, to compare with the Pan-American Highway and the Bombay-Istanbul route. The plan has existed for some time. I rode on some of its sections; in Southern Ethiopia I saw parts of it under construction by Israeli and Ethiopian teams; north of Nairobi the bed was laid and in use, though untarred. In the south the road was much more advanced, but in both hemispheres it was hopelessly compromised by political upheavals.
For myself, the mere idea of a highway running the length of Africa soon became tedious and without intrinsic merit. A book which I had found by chance in Benghazi and carried with me through Africa had some relevant things to say, though it was written on a different continent in an earlier century by a man who made a virtue of staying in the same place. It was a collection of the works of Henry Thoreau, including the journal he kept when he lived by a pond called Walden.
He wrote: 'We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.'
If Thoreau were alive today he would have full confirmation of his fears. Instant information is instantly obsolete. Only the most banal ideas can successfully cross great distances at the speed of light. And anything that travels very far very fast is scarcely worth transporting, especially the tourist.
The highway from Dar es Salaam to Livingstone is fifteen hundred miles long. It was notorious in 1973 as a 'hell run', known as the Tanzam Highway. When Rhodesia and Zambia closed their border, it was the only natural route from Zambia to the coast. Primarily Zambia had to export copper and import fuel, and the Tanzam Highway was put to maximum use. Unfortunately it was not, at the outset, in very good condition, being only partially tarred. Petrol tankers raced down the highway at suicidal speeds. Maximum turnover meant big money. Reckless, half asleep, drunk or drugged drivers hurtled over the dirt and often enough hurtled off it into the rocks, trees, gullies and each other.
That was how I imagined the highway to be at the time; a dirt road in the monsoon rains, churned up by drivers willing to risk anything for an extra load. In fact when I did reach it the road was being rebuilt as part of a Canadian aid project. If anything, that made it worse. The surface was temporary and dreadful and there were frequent diversions into the surrounding countryside, but the Hell Run traffic had slowed to a crawl and lost much of its terror. I found the going manageable, and by the time I got to Morogoro I was quite at ease.
Outside the bank, where I had changed money at a suffocatingly slow pace, a European came over to admire the motorcycle. I liked him immediately, as I liked most of the white men who had chosen to go on living in African countries after independence. His name was Creati. He was an Italian who had been taken prisoner during the war in the desert; shipped to a camp in East Africa he had taken up the option of staying after the war. He was a motorcycle mechanic and had a workshop in Morogoro. More astonishing still, he had recently bought the entire stock of parts from the Triumph agent in Dar es Salaam who had been forced out of business.
It was a providential meeting, because a minor accident had ruined my speedometer cable. Registering my speed was hardly important. Speed limits, if they existed, were purely nominal, and in any case I knew what speed I was running at just by the feel of the engine. But I found it disconcerting to have no record of distance. Petrol stations were far apart, and the quality of the fuel was poor. The octane value, I was told, might be in the seventies or even less, and I needed badly to know what my consumption figure was to avoid running dry out in the bush. Creati had one cable.
'It will cost you forty-five shillings,' he warned.
I agreed readily. It was cheap at the price anyway. In such circumstances one does not argue about shillings. We went back to his shop and I told him where I had come from, and where I was planning to go.
'How about forty shillings?' he said.
'Okay. Fine,' I said.
'I'll tell you what,' he said, handing it to me. 'Give me thirty shillings,' I did. He drove a shrewd bargain, that Creati.
After Morogoro I was prepared for the road to get worse and worse. Instead it improved rapidly and, as Creati had promised, it soon turned into a spanking new tarred highway.
Above me the sky was in a constant turmoil of clouds forming, condensing, collapsing to the ground and reforming. When it was not raining it was generally overcast. The air was very warm and moist. All around stretched the lush green grasses and trees of Mikumi National Park. I rode on a while and came across an elephant. It stood a little way back from the road and faced me, arrested in the act of chewing a trunk load of grass. The grass stuck out on either side of its mouth behind the trunk like a cat's whiskers, giving it a rather undignified and lugubrious look. We stared at each other for a while. Then I got the definite feeling that it was fed up with me and planning to do something about it. I kicked over the engine and rode on.
Further along a small troop of zebras also stood, grazing, and again I stopped. All stood still as statues, heads turned to face me from whatever position they had been in. Their small, round ears strained upwards and seemed to tremble with the effort to pick up any slightest signal. Their markings were immaculate, as if freshly painted on with immense care. All wild animals gave this impression of a sharpness and clarity that was new to me, and I began to remember zoo animals as having lost this edge and looking faded and grubby by comparison.
Nothing ever enchanted me so much as coming across wild animals. I thought often how human society had impoverished itself by driving this element out of its life. In Africa I began to see the human race, sometimes, as a cancerous growth so far out of equilibrium with its host, the earth, that it would inevitably bring about the destruction of both. Not an original thought, but it came to me repeatedly.<
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Viewed in passing, the undulating country attracted me strongly. So far, I reflected, I had not once camped out in the African bush, and I stopped the bike to consider how I would go about it. Immediately the countryside took on a quite different aspect. The grass which had seemed so enticing now looked long and coarse and extremely wet. My small one-man tent would have been lost in it. Even getting to it was a problem. A ditch too steeply cut to cross with the bike ran alongside the road. I went on for twenty miles looking for higher ground, or a clearing, and a way across. Then a small side road appeared and I followed it to Mikumi Park Lodge. The lodge was a palatial hotel built to strip wealthier travellers than I of their foreign exchange. I skirmished briefly with temptation and surrendered to the special off-season rate. My struggles with the long grass could be resumed another day.
The rainy season naturally kept sightseers away and there were few visitors: two Canadian engineers working on power transmission lines alongside the highway; two American embassy wives on their way back to Lusaka, and a young Indian travelling, as all Indians seem to do, 'on business'.
The landscape pushed out to far distant hills, and below the lodge was open pasture and a water hole where an elephant stood in contemplation. Much of the afternoon I spent on the terrace watching and photographing a party of Marabou storks on a hillock close by. Presumably they were hoping for kitchen scraps. They seemed bored and grumpy, and creaked about aimlessly on arthritic-looking legs, occasionally ruffling their seedy feathers. I tried not to be misled by fancied resemblances between animals and humans, but the Marabous defeated me. With their wings folded behind them like the tails of an ancient dinner dress and their stooping rheumatic gait, I could not help imagining them as a group of elderly soup-stained waiters hoping for employment.
The engineers were informative about Tanzania. The country had eleven million people who lived on a very primitive diet, mostly maize, though they said there was no starvation. There was no known mineral wealth and Tanzania depended entirely on agriculture. The gross product per capita came to about $60, and some efforts were being made to introduce cooperative farming. President Nyerere they believed to be scrupulously honest, and though there was some tribalism in government it was nothing compared with Kenya.
