The Wa-chagga await us in a large natural atrium encircled by curtain walls of woven tendrils drooping enormous folded flower buds. They number nine: six men, three women. But for the colour of their combat pants, which are Chaga purples, crimsons, lilacs, they are indistinguishable from the Black Simbas. I am a little disappointed, I had been expecting Noble Savages. One of the women’s T-shirts has a picture of the Brazilian international striker Arcangeles printed on it.
They all look very young. They all carry very big guns. They all have red-green things looped around the backs of their heads, with one tendril that goes into the ear and another that brushes the upper lip. They are a combined defence patrol/ trading mission, like the armed merchant adventurers of the age of the navigators. They are all the Tacticals are permitted to see of the Wa-chagga nation and its organic towns scattered across the foothills of Kilimanjaro. I pull the camera out to video this historic moment.
Everything goes horribly quiet.
A Wa-chagga boy with straight-bobbed dreadlocks suddenly exclaims, ‘I know who you are!’ His English is almost accentless. ‘You are from television: Jake Aarons, SkyNet News! And you are Gaby McAslan. You did all these funny end of the news stories.’
And we are deluged with hands wanting to be shaken and smiling faces and voices welcoming us and asking for an autograph and will they get on the satellite news?
Later, Mr Natty-Dread, whose name is Lucius, an Economics graduate from the University of Dar Es Salaam, shows me how it is that we are such big stars among the Wa-chagga. It may have been designed as a Daewoo microvision, but then someone ripped off the casing and half the electronics and shoved in a slab of Danish blue cheese with half a pound of fettucine verde and not only is it somehow working, it can pick up pictures from as far away as Zimbabwe. Organic circuitry, Lucius says. The Chaga can analyse any electronic circuit board and synthesize a smaller and more efficient organic equivalent. The things runs on nuts. Nuts particular to a certain plant; peel them and you have a handful of five-volt batteries. The headsets I noticed are more of the same: organic two-way radios, though most of the time they’re switched to Voice of Kenya. Lucius lets me try his. He has it tuned to the pirates along the north Tanzanian coast, who do radical dance music.
Black Simbas and Wa-chagga sit down to trade. The weapons are swiftly agreed; Sugardaddy, the Black Simbas’ chief negotiator, takes an order for ammunition. The computer software, sealed in metal cases, is taken after animated bargaining in Swahili between Sugardaddy and Lucius, who seems to be a boy of some authority. The cigarettes are set aside while their merits are weighed. The flasks of Coca Cola concentrate provoke great excitement. Sugardaddy personifies superior aloofness while fingers are dipped in the flask and sucked to make sure this is the real thing. If any people are experts on cola, it is Africans. Words are exchanged, hands slapped; all the cigarettes are accepted and the deal is sealed. The Coke, I learn, is a one-off trade; once the Chaga picks its molecules and synthesizes it, the forest will be raining Coca Cola. Will it do Diet too, I wonder?
In return, Sugardaddy gets two steel vacuum flasks. In the first vacuum flask is a powerful all-purpose antibiotic that will kill even penicillin-immune bacteria. In the second is a cure for cholera. The Chaga synthesized both. Lucius tells me that none of his people have been sick since they escaped from the camps and returned to the mountain.
‘You cannot get sick,’ he says. ‘Not with counter-agents to every disease blowing on the wind. You take them in by the million with every breath.’
Including, it seems, something that stops HIV 4 dead in its tracks.
(Later)
I rather think Lucius is trying to come on to me.
The rest of the men are sprawled around the microvision watching women’s kick-boxing relayed from Bangkok and drinking native beer. They mutter doubtless obscene comments at the screen and laugh. The women are sitting in a ring by themselves, talking in Swahili and laughing and clicking their fingers. I sit apart to write, and Lucius comes and sits himself down beside me.
‘They are crass, boorish men,’ he says, looking at the group around the television. ‘You are like me, you are intelligent, sensitive, educated.’
I ask him how intelligent, sensitive, sophisticated college boy becomes gun-toting, camouflage-wearing freedom fighter.
‘Loyalties are long and strong in Africa,’ he says. ‘When I heard what was happening to my family’s farms up on Kilimanjaro, I could not stay away, not while I might have some power to help them. I could do nothing against the Chaga, but when my people escaped from the camp at Moshi, I went with them, because I knew they would need all manner of abilities to rebuild the nation.
‘We found the Chaga at the minimum level of habitability. We were not wise to its ways, we did not trust it to feed and shelter us. Some died, the young, the very old, the vulnerable, and from their bodies the Chaga learned the needs of humans and grew them. From their flesh came the meat we eat, from their blood the water we drink, from their skin our shelters, from their bones our towns and settlements, from their spirits the light and the heat and the electricity that powers them. I say it like religious scripture. It is almost a prayer among us. You are thinking we have made the Chaga our God? Yes, in an African sense; gods who are petty, and practical, and ask you questions like, Lucius, which would you rather have, a perfect soul or a new Series 8 BMW? and do not get upset when you say a BMW. The Chaga gives us both: it weaves outside things into itself and makes them more than they are. And in doing itself, it makes itself more. Outside the Chaga is life. Inside the Chaga is life times life. Life squared.’
I press him on what he means by the Chaga making things more than they are. It echoes Jake, when he said, on the night of the storm, about the Chaga being the gateway into new ways of being human. Lucius is evasive. It is getting late, he says. The others are calling him. No they are not. What they are doing is peering in tense concentration at the Asian Babes All-Action Topless bout. But at least I won’t have to stop him trying to chat me up. Jake takes his place beside me. Topless All-Action Asian Babes hold limited appeal for him, I suppose. Getting bitchy, Gaby. Hot news. While the guys’ brains have been be-fuddled by oiled Asian titties bouncing in extreme close-up, he’s been working on them to let us visit one of their settlements. They would not agree to that under any circumstances, but he did wheedle the promise out of them to take us deeper into the Chaga to see something that they will not specify, but they think will interest us greatly.
‘When do we go?’ I ask.
‘First thing in the morning. Lucius will guide us.’
The women are talking among themselves with great animation, laughing and hiding their faces behind their hands. They must be talking about sex.
Day Five
We made our farewells in the early mist. Rose, Bushbaby, M’zee and Dog are staying to conclude business with the Wa-chagga.
We ascend steadily for about an hour. There are ways between the levels; swooping catenaries of plaited piping that anchor tiers to piers like the cables of a suspension bridge. Lucius runs up them with the cocky ease of one of these spider-men who build the Manhattan skyline. He’s trying to impress me. What it makes me want to do, encumbered by ordnance and acrophobia, clawing for every finger- and toe-hold, is knee him in the nuts. Lucius educates me in Chaga-lore: anything red will always be edible, orange is water, blue electricity, white information. Green and yellow are heat and cold; black is drugs, both pharmaceutical and recreational.