The Rift Valley lay ahead, a visible dip in the great green plain, shallower and less dramatic than in Kenya, but more wooded, forested in places, another sight of old Africa and its seemingly limitless savanna. By the tracks were purple wild flowers and darting swallows, and in the distance just bush. At great intervals there would be the sort of specimen tree — a mango or a baobab — that indicated a Wagogo village. But the villages were hardly that — no more than five huts in a circle, just the number that could fit in the shade of those few trees.
There were Wagogo at all the small stations, at Itigi and Saranda, some begging, others hawking food and artifacts. They smiled, showing their sharpened teeth, and since I was the only mzungu on this train they clustered around my car, offering carved wooden mortars and pestles, woven reed mats, paddles and wooden spoons and baskets; cooked food, too — chicken and flyblown fish.
The afternoon heat was in the nineties: the sun burning in a cloudless sky. This was something of a disappointment to the local people who needed rain for their newly planted maize. So the sunshine was like a blight — people tried to hide from it, but it was not easy.
At one small halt in this great sunbaked emptiness only one tree grew, a mango tree of modest size, but leafy with dense boughs. There was a circle of shade beneath it. Within that circle were thirty people, pressed against each other to keep in the shade, watched by a miserable goat tethered in the sunshine. What looked like a group game was obviously an afternoon routine of survival. As interesting to me as this packed-together mob of villagers around the one tree trunk was the idea that no one in this hot exposed place had thought to plant another mango tree, or even more for the shade they offered. It was simple enough to plant a tree, this mango itself contained a thousand seeds, yet no one had planted one, or if they had the tree had been cut down. The sight of the Africans in this tiny place in Central Tanzania struggling to keep within the patch of shade stayed with me as a vivid instance of forward planning, or rather the lack of it.
Beyond this halt were the sort of boulders I had seen near Mwanza, but even bigger and gray toned and rounded, looking from a distance like a herd of elephants, great gray elephant-assed boulders, so many of them browsing on a hillside that they obscured the hills: hills like gray elephants.
The only signs of humans were the wrecked and twisted railway cars tipped off the track with some rusty rails from some long-ago train wreck. I was rereading Heart of Darkness and was reminded of this when I read,
I came upon a boiler wallowing in the grass … and … an undersized railway-truck lying there on its back with its wheels in the air. One was off. The thing looked as dead as the carcass of some animal. I came upon more pieces of decaying machinery, a stack of rusty rails.
Broken or scuttled machinery by the roadside is a common sight in Africa. Not one to lament, not any longer, anyway for me.
One of the themes in Heart of Darkness — harped on rather than suggested — was cannibalism. Africans are casually referred to as ‘cannibals,’ by Marlow. Even Kurtz the idealist-turned-bogeyman had developed a taste for human flesh and kept human skulls as household accessories, which is reason enough for his last words to be ‘The horror! The horror!’ The heavy hints of anthropophagy are a bit of stage managing on Conrad’s part. Though mutilation and amputation and massacre by Belgians had been customary, cannibalism had never been institutionalized by Africans in the Congo (as it had been in, say, Fiji). The suggestion of flesh eating was just another racist dig, like that of the Toronto mayor refusing to go to Kenya, ‘because I don’t want to end up in a cooking pot.’ There are similar gibes in Heart of Darkness.
But much more prosaically observed in the book, and so more horrible, were the unsensational examples of ruin and exploitation — roads leading nowhere, collapsed huts, pointless effort, broken machinery, rusty metal. Details like these that, intended to appall the reader in 1902, were now the simple facts of everyday life in Africa, a century later. Long ago I might have said that such ruin represented failed hopes, but now I knew they were not African hopes.
This railway line, built by the Germans, linked Dar to Kigoma on Lake Tanganyika. The idea, like most colonial ideas, was to plunder the country more efficiently. The British had built the spur to Mwanza. Since then not a single foot of track had been added and no improvements had been made. Dodoma, where we arrived in the early evening, was a good example of the colonial period being the high water mark of railway technology in central Tanzania. The station was a hundred years old and, though ramshackle, still functioning.
Never mind, Dodoma (like Tabora and Dila, Marsabit and Nanyuki) was the sort of place I could have lived in quite happily — doing something worthy, of course, like teaching in the local school or getting the local people as interested in bee keeping as their ancestors had been (another forgotten skill in East Africa). People would say of me, in a praising way, as they always said of such people: ‘He devoted his life to Africa!’ But that was not it at all, for it was just a version of Rimbaud in Harar: the exile, a selfish beast with modest fantasies of power, secretly enjoying a life of beer drinking and scribbling and occasional mythomania in a nice climate where there were no interruptions, such as unwelcome letters or faxes or cell phones. It was an eccentric ideal, life lived off the map.
Dodoma was also where the east — west railway crossed the Great North Road, which penetrated the Masai Steppe. But if the railway was in poor shape, this major highway was much worse, a road to avoid for its bad surface and its potholes and, in this season, its mud. Black clouds were gathering around Dodoma, teasing its farmers with thunder, bolts of lightning exploding inside the dark clouds and illuminating them for seconds, making them seem blacker.
Seeing me scribbling, Julius said, ‘What are you writing?’
‘Just a report,’ I said.
He would understand that; he would not understand that I was writing an erotic story that was becoming a novella in my notebook.
When I was not doing that I was staring out of the window, making notes, listening to the radio. I bought bananas and boiled eggs from hawkers by the tracks, and sometimes risked the crumbobblious cutlets in the dining car. If the train stopped for a period of time I got out and paced and bought a coconut. I had spent some time talking to the station master at Dodoma, who was doing his best with antiquated switching machinery.
Later in the day I discovered that Julius had been summoned from our compartment to deal with a drama.
‘It was very bad,’ he said.
‘What’s the story?’
He did not say anything at first. There was another commotion in the passageway leading down the sleeping car. A group of big boys slouched past, followed by the stern conductor. The boys were the ragged drunken youths I had seen in the dining car — the reason I usually stayed away from the dining car.
‘Those three boys,’ Julius said, lowering his voice. ‘They trapped a girl in the toilet. She went in and when she tried to come out they entered and trapped her.’
‘What did they want?’
‘They were going to rape her, but she screamed and someone heard. They called me because I know her. She was very worried — she is still worried. I will tell the police.’
I expected more trouble, but there was no fuss, there was silence, a conspicuous silence. And around midnight we came to a dead stop. Instead of entering Morogoro, the next-to-last town on the line, we halted at the little town of Kimamba and moved no farther. We were still there seven hours later in the hot, humid morning in sticky air that was filled with mosquitoes.