Dark Star Safari

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.

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.

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 Tukuyu. 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.