I heard the word shauri mumbled — meaning a problem, a fuss. Then someone said in the corridor, ‘A derailment.’
The townsfolk of Kimamba gathered on the embankment to stare at the stopped train. Though it was an unscheduled stop, some enterprising people sold bananas and tea, but most just gaped. From a distant mosque a muezzin began wailing.
Beneath distressed façades on the main street of abandoned shops I could read faded signs, one about tractors, another saying New Planters Hotel. After peering at Kimamba for a long while it was possible to see that it had once been a real town, possibly important, with something resembling a local economy. It was now like an ancient ruin.
Julius, the expert in land use, said, ‘They used to grow sisal here.’
Sisal was the vital fiber in all the rope in the world, until nylon came along. Julius explained that sisal had been grown here by European and Indian planters in large estates. There were no smallholders. Sisal production peaked in Tanzania in the mid-1960s and in this boom the estates were nationalized by the government eager to cash in on the boom. The expatriate planters were booted out of the country. Then the bottom fell out of the sisal market. Production dropped to a quarter of what it had been, and in the nineties it was less than one-tenth. At this point the government cut its losses and sold the sisal estates off to private individuals. Sisal growing was back to where it had been forty years earlier, except that the market for it hardly existed anymore. Terrible Tanzanian economics once again.
Sisal growing was not very difficult. The plant can endure drought and heavy rain and poor husbandry. It was troubled by few pests and diseases and was fireproof except after repeated burnings. It could be inter-cropped with other food crops. It was a wonderful cash crop and still grown in Brazil, Mexico, China and the Philippines, by smallholders. But — no one knew why — it had been a failure in Tanzania.
‘Maybe bad management,’Julius said. ‘The people are just growing food for themselves.’
I said, ‘That’s not a bad idea, is it? If they had been growing sisal they would have used the money to buy food.’
But the people would survive. In such circumstances it was the government that was left in the lurch, with no income, no exports, no hard currency.
I sat by the tracks and listened to the radio: foot and mouth disease was destroying British cattle; there was war in Macedonia, death in Chechnya, Borneo, Israel and Afghanistan; Wall Street was recording steeply declining figures, and ‘Tech stocks are in retreat.’
Kimamba was hot, dirty, and poor. But it was able to feed itself. And it was seizing an opportunity today with the stopped train, selling the passengers food and drinks.
Seeing me, a young boy with a big tin teapot, hot milk and tea cups stopped by.
Good morning, sah.’
What’s your name?’
‘My name is Wycliffe.’
‘What’s the problem, Wycliffe?’
‘The problem, sah, it is money.’
As the hours passed we made a mess of our portion of track in Kimamba. The toilets were dumping sewage on to the ground, passengers were tossing banana peels and waste paper and tin cans and plastic bottles out the windows. Along with this littering was loudness: the rap music that was played now and then in the dining car was being played now. The Kimamba folk came closer to listen.
Drunken Africans in the train became boisterous. This I did not like at all.
Looking for information about the derailment, I ran into an African named Weston who said he was an accountant. He was going to Dar es Salaam to conduct an audit of someone’s books. He said that Tanzania was in a bad way.
‘We are poorer than Malawi. We have no economy. We have nothing,’ he said. ‘But it was worse before “liberalization.” ’
Liberalization was when the Tanzanian government dumped all the money-losing industries, selling them to the private sector. Now they had more or less what they had had before independence: creaky trains, simple agriculture, and a certain number of lions and elephants and quite a few gnus.
Many blasts on the whistle shattered the silence in Kimamba and cut through the rap music. A few more blasts, and passengers leaped aboard and we left Kimamba around noon-time, just as abruptly as we had stopped there in the middle of the night.
We rattled into a wilderness of stunted trees and flat plains and absolutely no people. Settlements such as Kimamba were like flat little islands in a green sea. A few hours later we were among green hills, the hills like high islands in the same sea. The town of Morogoro was in those hills. I wanted to stop here, because it was a road junction: I could go south from here and avoid the urban sprawl of Dar es Salaam. But I had a problem. Because the immigration office had been closed in Mwanza the official had given me a four-day visa. I could buy a visa extension only in Dar, and would have to do it tomorrow.
After all the thunder and the portents of rain en route, the weather finally hit as we approached the coast. We were in a hot, wet flatland of boggy earth and even boggier rice fields. The planting season had just begun here, with the onset of the rains.
Julius joined me at the window.
I remembered something I had wanted to ask him. ‘Ever heard of Kwanza?’
‘As you know it means “first,” ’ he said, pronouncing it fust.
‘Yes. But I am thinking of Kwanza, the festival.’
‘There is no festival. Kwanza means first.’ He rapped the wall of the coach. ‘Gari a kwanza.’
‘First Class carriage,’ I said.
‘That is correct.’
But it was a euphemism. Almost three days out of Mwanza the train was very grubby. The staff cleaned all sinks with strong disinfectant, knowing that most of the men lazily used the sinks in their compartments as urinals. Eaters washed their hands with a pitcher and basin, the waiter handing over a crumb of soap. But you couldn’t bathe. No showers made this hot train reek with the smell of unwashed humanity. The toilets were vile. The dining car was filthy, not that there was any food after such delays. I liked riding this train because it crossed a part of Tanzania where roads were impassable. A little activity with a broom, a mop, a scrubbing brush, and the trip would have been agreeable. Delays did not seriously bother me. I had no deadline, nor anyone to meet me. But the dirt, the litter, the shit, and the drunks made this side of travel in Africa hard to bear.
Perhaps it was remarkable that the train ran at all. But how else, except for flying, would this thousand or so Tanzanians be able to travel from Mwanza or Tabora? The train was a necessity. The pressure of numbers and very poor maintenance made smooth running impossible, but there was no excuse for the filth.
The low steep hills indicated we were near the coast. In the hillsides were sharply defined cave entrances.
Kaolin,’ Julius said. The hills were a source of the stuff, the caves — he said — dated from German times. At one time it was a Tanzanian export. Roofing tiles and bricks and pots were made from this useful clay. ‘But these days people sneak in and steal it.’
Another defunct industry, like the sisal and the tobacco and the rice and the cotton and the apiaries in Tabora, started by some Peace Corps Volunteers, that had produced high-quality honey. The volunteers had gone home.
‘What happened to the bee hives after that?’
‘They just failed.’
Dar es Salaam started miles from the coast, with scrappy rice fields and scattered villages and mud houses with pretensions, the buildings closer and closer together. Cement block houses, square one-story affairs, continued, became linked, in an outer shanty town, just poor sheds and too many people, jammed together, everything sitting in puddles.