Dark Star Safari

  Several more breakdowns immobilized the train. The Africans in my compartment just yawned and slept. I went to the dining car and stood, marveling at the filth of it.

  ‘What do you want, bwana?’

  ‘I want a smoked turkey sandwich on a seeded roll, with a slice of provolone cheese, lettuce and tomato, a little mustard, no mayo. A glass of freshly squeezed juice, and a cup of coffee.’

  He laughed, because it meant nothing, I was just gabbling. But hadn’t he asked me what I wanted?

  ‘What have you got?’

  ‘Rice and stew.’

  My stash of food was gone and so I sat by the window, eating rice and stew, bewitched by the beautiful landscape, the long enormous valleys, the rim of mountains and hills.

  A small village near the settlement of Chimala made me wonder: How is this grass-roofed village today different from the grass-roofed village that stood here in, say, 1850, before European missionaries and improvers got anywhere near this region? It was a fair question. There was even an answer. In many respects it was the same grass-roofed village – the hut design, the cooking fire, the wooden mortar and pestle, the crude axes and knives, the baskets and bowls, the texture of life was much the same. That accounted for its persistence. The inhabitants had worked their little plots and fed themselves, but had lain mute and overlooked through a century and a half of exploitation, colonialism and independence. They were probably Christians now, and wished for things like bikes and radios, but there were no signs of such contraptions and any prospect for change seemed unlikely.

  Save them, agents of virtue said of such people - yet farmers like these had saved themselves. Subsistence farming was not a sad thing to me anymore. And if this every-man-for-himself attitude was hard on the debt-ridden Tanzanian government, that was tough luck for the bureaucrats who had wasted donor money and planned the economy so badly. The people in this tiny village clearly had the skills to survive and perhaps prevail. At the rate we were going, laboring towards Mbeya, they would outlast the Kilimanjaro Express.

  At a distance the small hillside town of Mbeya looked pretty, the approach to it through deep green coffee plantations and plowed fields. Visiting the town in 1960, Evelyn Waugh wrote, ‘Mbeya is a little English garden-suburb with no particular reason for existence… a collection of red roofs among conifers and eucalyptus trees.’ Five years later, when I passed through, it was still small and orderly, its prosperity based on its coffee crop.

  Nearing Mbeya today, I saw a ruined town of ramshackle houses and broken streets and paltry shops. Most of the shops were selling identical merchandise, dusty envelopes and ballpoint pens, Chinese clothes and sports shoes. The radio rip-off brands were ‘Philibs’ and ‘Naiwa’ and ‘Sunny’ - very subtle, and I knew them to be junk, for I had bought a ‘Sunny’ in Egypt and it broke. More melancholy shops sold cast-off books, which comprised a sort of library of Tanzanian political wrong turns - One Party Democracy, Which Way Africa?, The Speeches of Mwalimu Nyerere, The Tanzanian Road to Development, Marxism in Africa, and so forth. I stood and read a chapter in one of the books, entitled ‘Elections in Ugogo Land,’ by an old colleague from Makerere, a cheery Irishman who was so persecuted and paranoid under Idi Amin that he went haywire, became a Muslim and renounced his Wagogo scholarship.

  I had said goodbye to my friends on the Kilimanjaro Express and decided to stay a few days in Mbeya, because it was a place I had visited thirty-five years before. I wanted to see what time had done to it. I had seen from the moment I laid eyes on it that time had not improved it, though it had certainly changed it. Instead of the garden-suburb with conifers, Mbeya was now big and bare and run-down and creepy-looking. It was still full of gloomy Indians. One Indian family was selling electric stoves, clothes irons, toasters and the like.

  ‘But who has electricity?’ one of the Indians said to me. The irons that were in demand were the old-fashioned hollow ones that you filled with hot coals.

  ‘I was sent from Dar to improve things,’ a young man said to me. ‘But things are still bad. Business is terrible.’

  ‘What’s your most popular item?’

  ‘Pots. Metal pots. That’s the only thing Africans can buy. Who has money? They have no money.’

  I said I was heading for Malawi.

  ‘Malawi is just as bad. He goes that side,’ the first Indian said, pointing to the younger man.

  ‘It is dead city,’ the younger man said.

  ‘What city? Lilongwe?’

  ‘Whole of Malawi – dead city.’

  This corner of Tanzania I considered one of the remoter inhabited parts of Africa. It was not wilderness, but it was bush, far from the capital and too near to Zambia and Malawi to invite investment. The southeast corner of the Congo was just over the nearby range of hills; that proximity was another liability. In the 1930s Mbeya had been established as a provincial capital, but now it was off the map and on the wane, attracting smugglers and aimless people like me, just passing through.

  Mbeya, as a habitable ruin, attracted foreign charities. This I found depressing rather than hopeful, for they had been at it for decades and the situation was more pathetic than ever. There were many aid workers in the town, looking busy and deeply suspicious, always traveling in pairs in the manner of cultists and Mormon evangelists, never sharing. They seemed to represent a new breed of priesthood but they were the most circumspect, the most evasive and unforthcoming people, like the most bureaucratic social workers, which in a sense they were, either scolding or silent.

  As a breed, the agents of virtue avoided intimacy with outsiders, especially the likes of me, unattached wanderers whom they seemed to regard as dangerous to their mission. They must have seen into my heart, for at this point in my trip I seriously questioned their mission. They hardly made eye contact. This English habit of averting the gaze was inspired by the fear that any show of friendliness meant they might be obligated to make a gesture - a ride, a favor. They had the most beautiful brand-new vehicles, always white Land-Rovers or white Toyota Land Cruisers and they drove them with ministerial haughtiness.

  Those vehicles were sometimes being washed and polished by Africans in the parking lot of the Mount Livingstone Hotel where I was staying. It was a dismal hotel, empty and clammy, and dead except for the dark room which at six in the evening filled with drunken African men. The reason for the darkness was that most light bulbs were missing from their fixtures.

  The aid workers had the best rooms but they kept to themselves. I tried to approach them, to get any information I could about the road to Malawi, but they shied away, with that squinting expression that seemed to say, Am I wearing something of yours?

  ‘I’m here for a conference,’ one said, before backing away.

  ‘Malawi’s not in my area,’ another informed me. ‘Excuse me, I’ve got a series of meetings.’

  ‘There’s a panel this afternoon,’ was another line I heard.

  Yet another: ‘We’re holding a workshop.’

  I had begun to cotton to the view set out in the anti-donor books, The Lords of Poverty and The Road to Hell that foreign aid has been destructive to Africa - has actually caused harm. Another vocal advocate of this theory was an African economist, George B. N. Ayittey, who in two books, Africa Betrayed and Africa in Chaos, documented the decline in African fortunes as a result of donor aid.

  It is for someone else, not me, to evaluate the success or failure of charitable efforts in Africa. Offhand, I would have said the whole push was misguided, because it had gone on too long with negligible results. If anyone had asked me to explain, my reasoning would have been: Where are the Africans in all this? In my view aid is a failure if in forty years of charity the only people still dishing up the food and doling out the money are foreigners. No Africans are involved – there is not even a concept of African volunteerism or labor-intensive projects. If all you have done is spend money and have not inspired anyone, you can teach the sharpest lesson by turning your back and going home. r />
  It was what Africans did. The most imaginative solution Africans had to their plight was simply to leave - to bail out, escape, run, bolt, go to Britain or America and abandon their homelands. That was the lesson of the Kilimanjaro Express - half the African passengers on it were fleeing, intending to emigrate.

  In a town like Mbeya I understood the sense of futility. Perhaps that was why I liked rural Africa so much, and avoided towns, because in villages I saw self-sufficiency and sustainable agriculture. In the towns and cities of Africa, not the villages, I felt the full weight of all the broken promises and thwarted hope and cynicism. And all the lame explanations: ‘The coffee price is down… The floods hurt the maize harvest… The cooperative was nationalized… The managers were stealing the funds… They closed the factory… The problem, you see, is no money.’

  In such towns I felt: No achievements, no successes, the place is only bigger and darker and worse. I began to fantasize that the Africa I traveled through was often like a parallel universe, the dark star image in my mind, in which everyone existed as a sort of shadow-counterpart of someone in the brighter world.

  The foreign clothes were like proof of this shadow existence. Most people did not wear the new Chinese clothes from the shops, but rather the hand-me-downs from the market. These second-hand clothes had been handed over by well-meaning people in clothing drives at their churches, or the school Clothes-for-Africa day or the People-in-Need Fund Drive that requested, ‘Any usable articles of clothing.’ In Africa, these clothes are sorted into large bales: trousers, dresses, T-shirts, socks, ties, jeans, and so forth, and the bales are sold cheaply to people who hawk them in markets. This helped fuel my fantasy. I saw Africans wearing T-shirts saying, Springfield Little League and St Mary’s Youth Services and Gonzaga and Jackman Auto Co and Notre Dame College Summer Hockey, Wilcox, Sask., and I imagined the wearers to be the doppelgängers of the folks in that other world.

  I had stopped in Mbeya to see how things were going in the thirty-five years I had been away. The answer was that things were going very badly but that no one seemed to mind. Time to leave.

  There was a bus from Mbeya to Malawi. I bought a ticket. But when I went to catch the bus I was told that it wasn’t running that day, and it might not be running the next day, and that I could not have a refund, because the money I had paid had been sent to the main office in Dar es Salaam.

  ‘The problem, you see…’ someone started to say.

  Hearing that, I walked away.

  The boy who cheated me followed me and asked me to give him some more money. He said, ‘Buy me a soda. I am hungry. I have had nothing to eat today.’

  ‘Don’t you have a mother?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then go find her and ask her to feed you. I am trying to get to Malawi and this ticket you sold me is worthless.’

  Thinking some Indian traders might be going to the Malawi border I found a shop where two Indians were grading long yellow sticks of raw unwrapped laundry soap. They knew nothing about Malawi except that smugglers occasionally came from that direction. They did not speak Swahili. Amazingly, they were not from Mbeya – a newcomer, Prasad, and Shiva, an old-timer, were expatriates, from Bombay.

  ‘Soap is an easy business,’ the old-timer said. ‘We make it in Dar, from palm oil and caustic soda. We sell it by the stick or by the cake – we cut it, see. No one else in the world uses this soap, no one buys it like this. We sell it in villages, but business is flat.’

  ‘No purchasing power,’ the newcomer said.

  ‘Nothing has happened in Tanzania. Nothing. Nothing. And in ten more years, nothing.’

  ‘There was a textile factory here, run by an Indian chap who was born here. It was very successful. Nyerere nationalized it and put in African managers. They stole. It failed. It was shut. In 1987, the factory was sold – to an Indian! The machines were still good. It is working now.’

  ‘Africans are bad managers. The workers are lazy. Lazy! Lazy! Even my people – lazy! I have to kick! Kick! Kick!’ He was kicking air as he repeated this, and looking and sounding like V S. Naipaul on his first visit to Africa. Kick them – it’s all they understand.

  The soap seller seemed hysterical, I had touched a nerve. Raising the subject of Africans he was reminded that he hated Africans, yet he liked being in Mbeya.

  ‘This is like a vacation to me,’ he said. ‘It is peaceful here – no trouble. My children can walk in the streets. Vegetables are very good and cheap. The rice is fine – they grow it here. In Bombay, I spend so much time in traffic – hours every day. Here I can drive the whole town in fifteen minutes.’

  ‘The soap business is so simple,’ Shiva said. Anyone with a little common sense could do my job. Anyone. It is so simple I am ashamed. But not one African can do it. Who can we hire? The Africans can’t even sell one stick of soap.’

  ‘They don’t care, because what do they need? A little food, some clothes, and – what? They don’t think about tomorrow. They don’t have to. Food is cheap. Life is cheap. They don’t think ahead. Next year is – what? Next year is nothing to them.’

  For years I heard Indians uttering these ignorant platitudes. They were still saying them! The difference now was that these men were strangers. They were like the first Indians ever to come to East Africa to trade or build railways, a century before, imported as coolies from impoverished villages in Gujarat and Kutch, like the Indian railway navvies in The Man-Eaters ofTsavo that Patterson calls baboos. And like those bewildered pre-colonial souls, these Indians had no idea how to get to the neighboring countries, did not speak the language, knew no Africans, lived in darkness, and of course were intending – in the fullness of time – to leave.

  Seeing my patience as a form of desperate fatalism, I spent another day in Mbeya and then made an effort to leave. There was no bus but I could get a minibus, a rusty stinking matatu, to the border.

  Seeing me with my bag, recognizing an opportunity, some boys gathered around me, though I tried to back away.

  ‘Yes, that matatu goes to the border, but when you get to the border you might be harmed.’

  ‘Why would anyone harm me?’

  ‘There are bad people there.’

  The direst warning: yet what choice did I have?

  No vehicle was leaving until noon. Rain began to fall. I walked away, the boys following me, trying to cadge money and, I felt, trying to distract me so that they could steal my bag. I walked from the bus station to town and back again. Then I boarded a filthy dangerous-looking matatu and inserted myself among the sixteen squashed passengers, who smelled horribly, and I thought: I am out of my mind.

  The routine was: the driver speeded, swerved, stopped, dropped one person, picked up two, sped away leaning on his horn. Whenever he stopped, there was always an element of petty quarrelling, someone with no money, someone asking him to wait, somebody yelling in Swahili, ‘Hey, I’m walking here!’ Women pressed themselves against the minibus, offering peanuts and fruit. What dismayed me most was that it was now raining very hard. I had a poncho, but that wasn’t it – the road was slick, our tires bald, the man’s driving was terrible.

  On that same stretch of road, exactly one week later in a similar rainstorm two vehicles collided head-on, a minibus in which eighteen people died – all the passengers – and a bigger bus, fourteen passengers dead, many injured. The driver of the speeding minibus skidded, trying to avoid hitting a cow, then overturned and rammed the big bus.

  According to the paper I read, a busy man appeared at the scene of the accident and began picking up ‘heads and other body parts of the thirty-two victims.’ He described himself as ‘a traditional healer.’ Villagers who had heard the crash and come to gape asked him what he was doing. ‘The man explained that he had cast a spell the previous day for the accident to happen, so that he could get body parts to use for his treatments.’

  Hearing this, the villagers beat him to death on the spot.

  We arrived at the town of T
ukuyu. Everyone got out of the minibus - seventeen people, big and small. The driver said, ‘We go no farther.’

  I was glad to get out of this death trap. I found Tukuyu on my map. ‘Meesta. Meesta. You want taxi?’ The usual punks, two of them in a battered car. We agreed on a price to cross the border. ‘We take you to Karonga.’ That seemed so perfect it made me doubtful. We drove thirty miles in silence. Near the border, a scene of disorder and mud, more fruit sellers, people in shanties, the punks pulled off the road (as I had guessed they might), and demanded more money. ‘We need to buy petrol.’

  ‘Let’s discuss it over there,’ I said. I got out and started walking.

  They sauntered after me, they waited while I got my passport stamped at the Tanzanian border post, they demanded more money. The rain let up, while I walked down the road towards the Malawian side, followed by urchins. I suppose I should have felt dismayed – it was late in the day, I was being pestered by kids and money changers and being shouted at by the punks in the taxi who had put the squeeze on me.

  But I was happy. Mbeya was behind me, I had not gotten stuck in Tukuyu and I had circumvented the curse of There are bad people there. The border ahead looked lovely. I could see beyond a range of mountains the Republic of Malawi, a much flatter landscape in the distance. The African boys were still pestering me, but I picked up my pace and walked past the final gate, one they could not cross, leaving them behind, clinging to the fence. Just before dusk, the sun came out, and flashed – a whole gold bar pressed against the earth – and then liquefied and slipped, and I followed the last of the light into Malawi.

  14 Through the Outposts of the Plateau

  I crossed the border, three or four footsteps, striding into a different country, glad to be home again in slap-happy Malawi, land of dusty roads and even dustier faces, eighth poorest country in the world. The amount you paid for one meal in a good American restaurant, a single Malawian earned in an entire year. Here in Malawi, I had spent my two Peace Corps years trying to be a teacher in a schoolhouse at the foot of a hill in the southern province. Here, also, I had encountered my first dictator, had my first dose of the clap, and had a gun shoved in my face by an idiot soldier enraged by my color – three somewhat related events that inspired in me feelings of fear and disgust. But I had been happy here too, and perhaps for similar reasons, since the horror of near-death experiences can swell our capacity for love and fill us with a zest for life.