Tanzania had reached a dead end on the socialist path, and as an economic failure, both in industry and agriculture, the country was advertising itself as a superior collection of game parks, inviting foreigners to take pictures of its endangered species and to spend money. Great tracts of bush on a principal migratory route for game, at Loliondo, near the Kenyan border, had been leased to a nob in the United Arab Emirates to use as a private unregulated hunting reserve for the very rich who wanted to kill leopards. The locals, Masai warriors, were guides and scrubbers in the game lodge, who resented the intrusion and claimed that when the game was thin in Loliondo the hunters shot animals in Serengeti National Park.
Tanzania was a tourist destination. The comrades, the Maoists, the ideologues, the revolutionaries, the sloganeering Fidelistas, were now hustling for jobs in hotels and taking tourists for game drives. And if as a Tanzanian your village was not near any lions or elephants — and Tabora wasn’t — you were out of luck, and had to put up with crummy schools and bad roads and this amazingly casual railway, once called the Central Line, which had been built almost a hundred years ago by the Germans.
The man in the upper berth introduced himself as Julius, named after the father of his country. He was an educated man in his mid-forties, well spoken and considerate — he always left the compartment to smoke cigarettes, for example. He worked for the Land Use Department, in agriculture, helping farmers make money by growing viable crops. This was a serious subject in Tabora. He was going to a staff meeting in Dar es Salaam next week, leaving home a week early to be sure of being in Dar on time.
‘The local cash crop is tobacco for cigarettes,’ Julius said. ‘There was once a tobacco cooperative. The government bought the crop, the price was all right.’
‘So what happened?’
‘The managers were corrupt. They mismanaged the cooperatives. The cooperatives failed, so the industries were privatized.’
He spoke without any passion, in a chastened, almost defeated tone. Dogmatic motto-chanting Tanzania had been humbled. No one talked of imperialism and neo-colonialism now, nor the evils of capitalism — though they could have, for even capitalism had failed in Tanzania.
‘In Tabora there are many small tobacco farms — an acre or half an acre,’ Julius said. ‘Two years ago private companies bought the crop. The prices were good for flue-cured tobacco. But this year the price is one quarter of what it was. The farmers — well, we call them peasants — they are struggling. They can’t make ends meet.’
I said, ‘In Kenya the coffee growers are planting maize.’
‘Here too,’ Julius said. ‘Many have turned to just growing food for themselves — maize and beans and onions.’
After all this time, the return to subsistence farming. This way of life in Africa was familiar to me. The strong impression I had was not that the places I knew were worse off but that they had not changed at all. After forty years of experimenting with various ideologies and industries they were back to farming by hand and pounding maize into flour, living on porridge and beans. Nothing was new except that there were many more people, grubbier buildings, more litter, fewer trees, more poachers, less game.
In the long delay I got off the train and looked around Tabora. The shelves in the shops were bare, though there was produce in the market — women selling bananas and tomatoes and bunches of dusty onions.
We finally left Tabora in mid-morning in the heat and headed into green wooded bush, of flitting birds and emptiness. It was so little changed from the old unexplored Africa of the nineteenth century, Burton and Speke who had walked through here from the coast 150 years ago would easily have recognized it. It was the Arab trade route, the slave route.
Julius said to me, ‘Why don’t you go to Arusha and see the animals — lions and elephants?’
That was what visitors did, flying into the international airport that had been built for their convenience, near the animals. But the vast country had no connection with that and was in a sense still undeveloped, even undiscovered. The irony was that Arusha in 1967 was the site of the national assertion of self-determination, an eloquent oration by the president that Tanzania would be self-sufficient. This so-called Arusha Declaration pledged that the government would eradicate ‘all types of exploitation’ so as to ‘prevent the accumulation of wealth which is inconsistent with the existence of a classless society.’ Now the question — here and elsewhere — was not exploitation or class or wealth but how to get a meal.
Zimbabwe was in the radio news — white farms being invaded by Africans demanding land. President Mugabe was siding with the Africans who were breaking the laws of trespass, as well as in some cases murdering the white farmers. I shared this news with Julius.
‘Mugabe wants to last a few more years,’ Julius said. ‘So he makes speeches about land. Yes, they will take that land away from those white farmers. It happened here in Tanzania. Some land will go to rich Africans. The rest will be subdivided among the peasants — small plots. They will grow whatever they want, and they will end up where we are now, just peasants struggling on small farms, growing maize and beans to feed their families.’
I often heard pitiless assessments like this from Africans on trains or people in villages, but never such trenchant good sense from African politicians or from foreign agents of virtue either.
Because of the season and this equatorial spot at noon the sun was directly overhead. We stopped at the station of Kazi-Kazi, just a tin-roofed shed. The dense bush lay all around, the head-high grass, and bunches of yellow wild flowers. Beyond this was an immense flat plain.
The starkness of it all was a wonder. I had come this way in the 1960s and even then had probably seen the old station, the rusty roof, the posts and pylons, the tree clumps, the bales of thorn branches used as a fence, the twiggy whips like barbed wire. This halt could not have changed in forty years, nor even since the railway was built — 100 years. But if it was not improved neither was it seriously deteriorated. Farther down the line, at the halt at Kilaraka, a small boy hurried down the dusty path from a cluster of mud huts carrying a bowl of boiled eggs, hoping to sell some for a few pennies to the passengers. Just as he reached the train the whistle blew and we were on our way, leaving him howling.
We were crossing the Wagogo Plains, the wild heart of Tanzania: no roads, no towns, only this railway. What animals existed here were hunted — poached for food by the Wagogo, who were pastoralists. Had they been as colorful as the Masai whom they somewhat resembled in their earlobe plugs and lethal-looking spears, more attention might have been paid to them. They sharpened their front teeth into points, and they wore beads, but still no one paid them any heed. They might have prospered on their own. But because of drought, dead animals and neglect, they were about as well off as they were when Sir Richard Burton passed through in the 1850s. He had stopped briefly to investigate the Wagogo’s sexual habits, with his customary thoroughness, questioning the women, measuring the men. The women were well disposed towards strangers with fair complexions,’ and one man, ‘when quiescent, numbered nearly six inches.’