And Home Was Kariakoo (27 page)

And then the buses begin to depart, it seems all at once, squeezing through a bottleneck to enter the main Morogoro Road. From Dar es Salaam, there is only one way out westward by road. The sun is now up and toasty; the bus is air-conditioned. The conductor comes along, hands out candies, then bottles of water, and we are set for our luxury trip.

The landscape is coastal green and lush to start with: the ubiquitous mango and coconut trees, small farms and little markets, boy-vendors running after vehicles selling cashews, mangoes, boiled eggs, termites, bottles of water, cans of soda; the bustle of the way station Chalinze, which was once only a quiet pit stop. There is an abundance of food here, an explosion of smells and colours and shapes amidst the hectic cheerful selling and yelling. The Uluguru range appears in the distance, Morogoro arrives, but the bus terminal is outside the town on the highway, and after a brief, businesslike stop we turn south towards Iringa and climb the highlands.

People still live in mud huts in the countryside; the rest stops on the way are roadside bushes, women going to the left side, men to the right, in the open. There is something earthy and intimate about this, though the fastidious will no doubt demur. The road quietly winds up a mountainside. Close to Iringa comes a spot where we speed by a face of sheer cut rock, a vertical slate, where a gang of school youths evidently stopped to picnic and found the time to write their graffiti. The generous roadside here, before the edge falls off into a valley, is littered with plastics, bottles, and wrappers. Happily this is the only instance of highway vandalism that we see.

Iringa arrives, but the bus does not enter the town. The cool highland climate has always drawn white settlers and expatriates to this area, though they’ve been a small minority. For many years the local member of parliament was Lady Chesham; her name was often
in the newspapers, and that memory now invites images from those sunshine days immediately following independence. We did not know this then: she was born a Philadelphian.

Under British rule, Iringa boasted an English-style, exclusive boarding school called St. Michael’s and St. George’s School, which became the prestigious Mkwawa High School after independence. One January, at the beginning of the academic year, the Ministry of Education required a few students to be sent from our high school in Dar to Mkwawa in Iringa. When the notice came to our class requesting volunteers, my hand shot up. I didn’t even think. Why would I want to leave friends and family and go to bhurr, as we called the hinterland? The restless soul, I suppose, was stirring even then. There was only one other volunteer and we were both accepted; but when I went to the headmaster’s office to formalize my transfer, he simply waved me away with a “nenda zako, we”—go away, you—having received a hasty preemptive visit from my physics teacher.

The bus stops and an officious-looking fellow in his mid-thirties gets in and walks down the aisle, then back up. He stops, singles me out, asks for my identification. Who does he think I am? I ask for his ID, he’s an immigration officer, and I show him my passport. The bus goes on. It’s humiliating to be treated this way. Do I so obviously look like a foreigner? Am I a foreigner? I don’t think so. I try to think of circumstances to mitigate this humiliation. My camera, for one thing, marks me out, though I’ve done my best to keep it out of sight; we are in a part of the country beloved to foreigners, and I’m the only brown man in the bus. There are always explanations.

We are in Hehe country. The Hehe under Chief Mkwawa are famous for their fierce resistance to German colonization. Mkwawa fought for more than seven years. In one encounter, the Germans suffered a particularly heavy defeat during an ambush and lost Major
Zelewsky, who had recently hanged Bushiri on the coast. Every schoolchild learns Mkwawa’s name. He was never captured, choosing instead to shoot himself when, on July 19, 1898, he was finally surrounded by German troops. His skull was sent to Germany as a trophy; stipulated to be handed over to the British under the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, it was finally identified among the Bremen Museum’s collection of African skulls by the governor of Tanganyika, Sir Edward Twining—with a bullet hole in it—and returned to the family in 1954. One of Dar es Salaam’s mayors was a descendant of the chief.

In the heady mid-1960s, this highway going south, skirting mountains, looking down upon deep ravines, and unpaved at the time, was called the Hell Run. White Rhodesia had unilaterally declared its independence from Britain. Black Africa was in a rage. To bypass Rhodesia’s blockade of Zambia’s access to the Mozambican port of Beira, oil was being trucked all the way from Dar to Lusaka, and copper brought back. Thousands of trucks, originating from as far as Kenya, travelled the route. The pay was high, the road deadly. As
Time
reported, on February 25, 1966 (with a little exaggeration),

It’s the same road we are on now, though it’s paved and much nicer.

Past Iringa the landscape raises those unworldly configurations, the tors, which I already saw on the road to Tabora and Mwanza—heaps of boulders that have all the appearance of having rained down from the heavens. Here individual rocks at the base look as though they simply rolled down from a nearby heap. I recall that they have a rather mundane (and consequently boring) explanation. We pass an area of baobab trees, not single ones as on the coast but hundreds, a weird, ghostly army climbing up the hills like Tolkien’s Ents. Later there comes a forest of coniferous trees, recently planted, and a timber mill. The earth becomes red and we pass a prosperous development with quaint little bungalows of red brick.

Finally, the day turns grey and our destination approaches; the fast super-luxury transforms into an aimless local, discharging and picking up passengers at will. Past Mbeya we reach Tukuyu—the final stop and my destination. It’s just after nine. I step down into a dark square, the stalls all around beginning to pull up shutters and close; touts approach, speaking English, and I turn them away in Swahili. A vigorous rap song plays on some radio, the lyrics partially in Gujarati and very funny. My friend Mpeli arrives in a beat-up Land Cruiser and we head off to his home.

The next morning I sit outside on the front patio of a country cottage straight out of a fairy tale; the view is spectacular and the rest of the world does not exist. The sun is bright but kind, the earth wet, deep green, and hilly, the air cool and woody. I am reminded a little of Bukoba—where I did my National Service—also on the highlands
but in the northwest, and also green and wet. There too the pre-eminent vegetation was banana and the mornings glistened. This looks like a place to retire in, which Mpeli’s mother, whom we call Mama, has done. Water is supplied by a stream and piped. Electricity is both solar and mains—but the latter is frequently off, as it is most of today.

Consider the problems, though. The pipes need to be maintained but neighbours cannot get the money together. The road to the main highway is unpaved and so broken that it’s an agony to drive on; voluntary work is available to fix it but the cost of equipment and supplies comes to about ten thousand dollars. And so, in Tanzanian style, they await donations. A Japanese lady is fondly remembered for her generosity, which made it possible for a portion of the road to be repaired.

Mama is a quiet, graceful woman, always appropriately dressed. Her husband was permanent secretary in the government immediately following independence, and for a time the high commissioner to Great Britain, and so she’s been around, and was present during some of the key moments in the nation’s history—the army mutiny of 1964 and the brief disappearance of the president, the Zanzibar revolution the same year, the Uganda coup, the war against Idi Amin in 1981. She was prominent in the women’s movement. All these she casually mentions. She could be in the city, where the sophisticates of her generation reside, but she prefers the simple country life in this cool weather. She is fluent in Swahili, Nyakyusa—her mother tongue and the language of this area—and English, and before every meal says a simple grace in Swahili. The family are members of the Moravian Christian order, and she visits the local church, a few minutes away by car, on Sunday. The meals come in several courses: meat stew, banana, rice, spinach or
cabbage, and once, for my benefit, chapatis. The latter are rather coarse, but since they are made specially for me, I finish them over several meals. Breakfast: banana, cooked banana, pineapple, bread with margarine.

The house has a large estate that provides plenty of banana, avocado, maharage beans, and vegetables; these could be sold for profit but there are no proper facilities or cooperatives locally to market the stuff. On the roads you see trucks filling up with banana bunches, on their way to Dar.
TAZARA
, the railway which was built in the 1970s with Chinese assistance to link Tanzania and Zambia and provide the latter access to a port, passed through Mbeya and was a godbless. But it is now more or less defunct, and Dar seems farther away. The bus rides are long and only wealthy businessmen can afford to fly. Mpeli, the ambassador’s son, takes the bus whenever he visits the capital. It is difficult to maintain a more civilized life—hot water, food varieties, fresh meat, plumbing. The bathroom I use has a tub and telephone shower; but the latter leaks profusely and supplies for the fixture are not available even in Dar. A massive plumbing job awaits. Every evening a large wood stove is lighted outside the house to supply the hot water. Sunset is a little after six and there is barely light to read in most rooms. The fireplace gets lit as we breakfast. It all looks romantic, but it’s difficult too.

Tukuyu is a small, quiet town consisting essentially of a main street and a few smaller roads. It has the look it must have had fifty years ago, minus the Asians who ran the shops. On the main street is a typical Indian-style market strip, with one-storey buildings of cement brick, painted white or yellow. There’s a certain ghostly feel to the street; the shops look meagre and dull and tentative. One easily imagines the well-stocked outlets of yesteryear run by the Indian
men and their wives, their children playing marbles or tag or cricket outside. A neighbourhood, a community. It’s gone.

The old boma is up the red hill from the main street; it has been rebuilt and houses the council office, though the thick ramparts of the former fortified structure are still visible over part of a concrete side-wall and near the front entrance. A man approaches, chatty and digressive, and informs us that there used to be a canon or two in place outside the boma, brought by the Germans, who had come here after first settling at a place called Masoko by a lake—which has the miraculous feature that come rain or drought, the water level never changes. The Germans had fled the mosquitoes of Masoko, preferring the higher ground of Tukuyu, where they used forced native labour to build the boma. They called this town Neue Langenburg.

After five separate handshakes with the informant, a cousin of Mpeli’s mother and reluctant to leave us, we drive off in the Land Cruiser on a rough road in search of Masoko, jerking painfully in our seats. The way is down, in the direction of Lake Nyasa to the southeast, the landscape formed of undulating hills with farms, here and there a simple roadside village. In the distance, the green-coated Mount Rungwe, head in the clouds at ten thousand feet; the streams we cross all head down the Rift Valley to feed Lake Nyasa. It occurs to me that it’s impossible to starve here, provided you have a bit of land; and perhaps even if you don’t have it. We pass farms growing banana, avocado, maharage, occasional mango and palm, tea, coffee, cocoa.

Holding desperately on to my seat, I am treated to Mpeli’s business schemes. His family has farmland, and he’s contemplating a chocolate factory for—of course—the western market. I tell him my objection: the market is cornered, and westerners, partial to Swiss and Belgian, are not likely to buy chocolates made in Africa. He’s
looking for investors, and I am reminded that to an African, anyone with Indian roots is a businessman or has business connections. He may be right. Perhaps he thinks I might have the money to invest. I don’t. I let the idea pass. Here is another one: developing electronic readers for school textbooks, with foreign assistance, naturally. Meanwhile this cheerful man, overeducated in England, earns a sporadic living as a translator.

The roadside through this glorious abundance is well peopled, but the traffic is only pedestrian. Life proceeds at walking pace—or remains stationary—under a cool sun. We pass women drying cocoa beans, men paused on the road to gaze pensively at us. Several times we slow to ask for directions, once we stop at a little market and have sodas—chai and mandazi having run out. The people are helpful and chatty, unwilling to let go of a conversation—which often ends with the Nyakyusa word
ndaaga
, generously stretched out, that carries a spectrum of meanings, used to show sympathy, to bid welcome and farewell, to show thanks. Finally we take a hidden turning past a bridge over a beautiful, burbling, stone-banked river, onto a dirt track. A long line of neatly dressed women, carrying baggages on their heads, comes walking in the opposite direction, returning from church. It’s Sunday. Up on a hill, right at the corner where we’ve turned, are the red-brick ruins we’ve come to look at; we decide to return to them later. Farther along the track, at the church from where the women have spilled out, we stop and park, then follow on foot a gently sloping trail that leads to the miraculous lake that Mpeli’s sticky relative had spoken about. It’s inside a crater and has no overground streams feeding or draining it. It’s a beautiful, still lake, the only activity on it some young men, bathing and washing clothes at the shore.