‘What time?’
‘Maybe one hour.’
We went down the lumpy road to the railway station, which was crowded with food sellers and people carrying plastic-wrapped bales of their belongings. This bustle looked odd, the dressed-up people, some of them running, for it was drama in a place where drama and urgency were in short supply.
I roused the stationmaster, who was eating peanuts in his office with the peanut seller, a crouching woman holding a big tin tray of them.
‘Is it too late to get a ticket on this train?’
‘We have space for you, bwana,’ he said.
He went to get me a ticket, and the peanut seller shook her tray of peanuts and said, ‘Njugu? Njugu?’
Within an hour of arriving in Mwanza, Farewell, old man! still ringing in my ears, I was on the train, in a little two-berth compartment but apparently alone, with bottles of water from the drink seller who hawked them by the track.
‘Are you comfortable?’ the stationmaster said, stopping by my compartment to solicit a tip.
‘Yes, thank you,’ I said, handing him some unearned income. ‘When will we get to Dar?’
‘Sometime on Sunday,’ he said, and went on his way.
It was now Friday night, but so what? I had a berth and a window on Africa, in a railway car full of Africans. In a short time we would be in the bush, traveling east through the middle of Tanzania.
Because of the bright lights of the station yard, people were attracted to the place, and they sat and chatted. A large gathering of children were kicking a football under the lights. It wasn’t a proper game, but it was such hearty playing, with laughter and shouts, that it held my attention. Africa was full of skinny energetic children, shrieking as they played, and the game usually involved kicking a ball. These children did not have a round rubber ball but rather a misshapen cloth ball stuffed with rags. The field was not flat, not smooth — it was a succession of dirt piles and humps, very stony. The children played barefoot, probably twenty or more, not teams but a free-for-all.
Watching them play and call to each other on this hot night, raising dust in the lights of the station yard, I was impressed by their exertion and heartened by their high spirits. The playing field was a wasteland, and part of it lay in darkness. The children ran in and out of the shadows, screeching. The dark didn’t matter, the bumpy field didn’t matter, nor did the squashed ball. By any reckoning, these children were playing and laughing in one of the more desperate provinces of a semi-derelict country. Even after the engine whistle blew and we started to draw out of Mwanza I still heard their tinkling laughter and then I remembered why I had been so fascinated by this happy sight, which made me feel so lonely.
I was reminded of the end of Saki’s novel, The Unbearable Bassington, where there is just such a scene — children playing excitedly, observed by a solitary man, Comus Bassington. That setting was Africa, too, a place much like Mwanza, a ‘heat-blistered, fever-scourged wilderness, where men lived like groundbait and died like flies. Demons one might believe in, if one did not hold one’s imagination in healthy check, but a kindly all-managing God, never.’
Bassington is so lonely and miserable he cannot bear to look upon the happy scene.
Those wild young human kittens represented the joy of life; he was the outsider, the lonely alien, watching something in which he could not join, a happiness in which he had no part or lot … [and] … in his unutterable loneliness he bowed his head on his arms, that he might not see this joyous scrambling frolic on yonder hillside.
There was enough moon for me to see that the landscape outside Mwanza was as bouldery as the lakeshore. But this was a flat plain with interruptions of boulder piles, some as high as hills, others as smooth as burial mounds.
The villages were no more than mud huts with oil lamps flickering inside — but for all their simplicity they had a wholeness that was lacking in Uganda’s villages. The villages of Uganda showed signs of having been attacked, abandoned, repossessed, rebuilt, improved, and battered again, the result of war, expulsion, violent change. Its battle scars made Uganda seem a strong country. In Tanzania there was no such graphic evidence of the past, but just decline — simple linear decrepitude, and in some villages collapse.
Very quickly — twenty miles or less — and we were in the bush: the grassy plains, with low trees, the great African emptiness, as empty as Lake Victoria had looked, and just as ocean-like under the watery glow of the moon.
When clouds covered the moon I looked around the train and found a dining car and some Africans inside already drunk. The attendant asked me in Swahili if I was hungry and to tempt me he showed me some heaped plates, saying, ‘Chakula, chakula,’ food, food.
To the novice this was ‘mystery meat.’ But I knew better. One dish was obviously a purple amblongus pie, the others were a stack of crumbobblious cutlets and some gosky patties, all of which I recognized from The Book of Nonsense Cookery by Edward Lear. The cutlets were done to perfection, the recipe having been closely followed (‘When the whole is thus minced, brush it up hastily with a new clothes brush’). The attendant was still waving them in my face, yet I declined.
‘Just a beer,’ I said.
I took it back to my compartment. On the way I spotted two aliens, the only other ones on the train. They were pale and blotchy and sunburned, a young man, a young woman, probably in their twenties though their bulk made them seem older. They were, it turned out, the sort of podgy, cookie-munching, Christ-bitten evangelists who pop up in places like Mwanza with nothing but a Bible and a rucksack and the requisite provisions: cookies and cake and a hymn book in Swahili. I discovered this because the train windows were open for any available breeze and once when the train slowed down I heard my name. Paul.
Good God, had they seen me? Were they going to mention that their parents liked my books and what an amazing coincidence it was that they were meeting me on a train?
No, for the man was saying in a pedantic way, his mouth filled with cookies, ‘Paul tells us in Galatians…’
The sky at the western horizon began to glow in slow explosions of lightning. The bursts of light widened from the ground up on a jagged stalk of fire, traveling into clouds that swelled hugely as they were illuminated, going from black to bright. The light was more sudden than fireworks, closer in violence and scale to a big battle — one in which the bombers and combatants were too small to see, though their bombs were overwhelmingly hot and destructive. It was an African thunderstorm twenty or thirty miles away. Now and then the whole sky of blackish clouds was convulsed by a bolt of lightning that lingered as a penetrating flash. In that flash I could see the land clearly — could see that it was empty, the storm doing nothing but showing it as empty and indestructible.
‘Another direction he gives in Galatians,’ the man was saying again, and the sky was foaming with fire, and just a chuckle of thunder, the storm was so distant.
Look for the truth in nature, I wanted to say to those cookie-eating missionaries in the next compartment: Nothing is complete, everything is imperfect, nothing lasts. Go to bed.
Before dawn we arrived at the town of Tabora. We were still there three hours later. The missionaries had left the train, most people had left the train, but in the meantime the train had filled up with new passengers. An African joined me in my compartment, assigned to the upper berth.
The train was the only practical way in or out of Tabora. The railway was the link between this good-sized if ruinous town and the capital, 800 miles away. Decades of neglect had left Tanzania’s roads in a terrible state, many of them unusable. The exceptions, as always, were the tourist routes. A safari geek wearing whipcord jodhpurs and a pith helmet, jogging along in a Land-Rover on the way to Ngorongoro Crater to gape at warthogs might marvel at Tanzania’s modernity — great hotels, excellent roads, robust wildlife. But a Sukuma fisherman intending to sell his catch down the line in Shinyanga, just sixty miles away, would be hard pressed to find a passable road, much less a vehicle, and his attainment of Tabora was out of the question, except on this bush train.