Yet life went on. In the middle of this muddy slum, in the drizzling rain, a man was propped up, washing his feet with a bucket and a scrubbing brush. People were hacking at the earth with mattocks, preparing a small plot for planting. Some women were stirring soot-blackened pots on smoky fires — cooking outdoors in the rain. Some maize stalks were sprouting by the track, someone’s garden. The passing scene began to resemble a slum picture by Hogarth, even down to the Hogarthian details — people drinking and fighting, sitting around, emptying chamber-pots, a man pissing against a post, a child crying, no one even looking up. At one level crossing an over-excited boy was jumping up and down in a mud puddle and screaming at the train.
I was in no hurry — I wasn’t due anywhere — yet whenever I arrived in an African city I wanted to leave.
Urban life is nasty all over the world, but it is nastiest in Africa — better a year in Tabora than a day in Nairobi. None of the African cities I had so far seen, from Cairo southward, seemed fit for human habitation, though there was never a shortage of foreigners to sing the praises of these snake pits — how you could use mobile phones, and send faxes, and log on to the Internet, and buy pizzas, and call home — naming the very things I wanted to avoid.
One day, in an African newspaper I read: In the year 2005, 75 percent of the people in Africa will be living in urban areas. This was only a few years off. It made me glad I was taking my trip now, because African cities became more awful — more desperate and dangerous — as they grew larger. They did not become denser, they simply sprawled more, became gigantic villages. In such cities, women still lugged water from standpipes and cooked over wood fires and washed clothes in filthy creeks and people shat in open latrines. ‘Citified’ in Africa just meant bigger and dirtier.
Like the person so poor and downtrodden who loses self-respect and any sense of shame, the African cities did not even pretend to be anything except large slums. Once, each city had a distinct look: Nairobi had a stucco and tile-roof style of architecture, Kampala had its harmonious hills, Dar es Salaam was coastal colonial, with thick-walled buildings designed to be cool in the heat. Such style gave the city atmosphere and an appearance of order in which hope was not wholly absent.
Now, one city was much like another, because a slum is a slum. Improvisation had taken the place of planning. Cheap new buildings were put up because the older buildings were regarded as too expensive to renovate. And because no building was properly maintained every structure in an African city was in a state of deterioration. I had a list of Dar es Salaam hotels I might stay in. I mentioned one to a taxi driver. He said, ‘Finished.’ I said another name. ‘Bunt by fire.’ Another: ‘Shenzi’ (dirty). Another: ‘Closed down. Not wucking.’
Tanzanians began most assertions with, ‘The problem, you see …’ To any observation or chance remark, Tanzanians I met would start by apportioning blame. Yet they had had a fairly peaceful time of it — no war, no revolution, no coups d’état, no martial law. Once or twice in forty years Tanzanians had even voted in free elections.
You could not spend a more wasted day than in an office of the Tanzanian government, as I discovered one day in Dar es Salaam. This waste of time suggested what might be wrong. Tanzanians complained of unemployment — in the capital almost half the adults had no jobs. But those with jobs did next to nothing, if the Office of Immigration was anything to go by. I had my passport, my fifty US dollars in cash, my filled-out application for a tourist visa, and I stood the requisite hour in line. I was no one special. Everyone else in line was encountering the same obstacles in the open-plan office of twenty employees: apathy, then rudeness and finally hostility.
The mob I was among just watched and waited. The office was dirty, the desks messy, one civil servant was eating a hunk of cake, another one, a woman with curlers in her hair, was reading the morning paper at her desk, yet another staring into space, a man simply drumming his fingers. I tried to detach my personal urgency from this charade (in fact I needed this visa and my passport to buy a train ticket) and watched as though it was a comic documentary. ‘You come back later,’ the surly woman said. But I wanted to monitor my application proceeding through all the stages, moving from desk to desk, getting cake crumbs on it from the gobbling man, tea stains from the fingers of the cup sipper. Six people examined and initialed my form. And then my form was put in a tray, where it remained for twenty minutes. It was then handed through a slot in the wall, a side office.
If I had complained they would have replied, with justification, ‘What’s the hurry?’ ‘Who are you?’ ‘What does it matter?’ ‘Why should we care?’ Nothing had ever worked in Tanzania, all they had ever known was failure, empty political rhetoric, broken promises. True, the unemployed in Dar es Salaam looked desperate, but the workers too looked cheated, envious and angry.
Following my passport, I sneaked to the side office door and opened it, apologizing — pretending to have entered the wrong office — and saw the African visa officer in a white shirt and blue necktie with a tin tray on his desk, a hunk of bread in his hand, tucking into a big bowl of meat stew, slopping gobs of gravy on the stack of visa forms.
‘Sorry,’ I said, and hurried outside to laugh.
There I found Christopher Njau. He was twenty-two, university educated, unemployed, trying to get a passport.
‘The problem, you see,’ he began, as soon as I remarked that I had spent two and a half hours and fifty dollars to wait for a tourist visa — this in a country that was begging tourists to visit.
‘The World Bank won’t give us money,’ Njau said.
‘I don’t see the connection between this inefficient office and a World Bank loan.’
‘Also, there is too much of corruption here.’
‘Should I have offered a bribe?’
He shrugged. ‘Nationalizing the banks was a mistake. Also, we have overpopulation.’
‘So what’s the answer?’
‘I want to leave,’ he said. ‘That’s why I am here. I need a passport to leave — but already it has been months.’
‘Where would you like to go?’
‘My sister is in Texas. She is studying. She has her own car! With a car she can drive to work and also study.’
He shook his head in disbelief. It seemed almost unimaginable that his sister, a woman of twenty-four, would own a car. I found it much harder to imagine that she had actually been to this office and gotten a passport.
Later that day I picked up my visa and bought my train ticket. The ordinary train ticket from Dares Salaam to the middle of Zambia was twenty dollars, First Class was fifty-five. In First Class you shared a compartment with three other people — not my idea of First Class, but it would do.
With time to kill I took the ferry to Zanzibar. Zanzibar remained mostly intact, an island smelling of cloves, its whitewashed houses fronted with decorated parapets and screened verandas. But there were apartment blocks too, as ugly as anything in Romania — and perhaps built by the Romanians — one of Tanzania’s earlier well wishers.
There were dhows at the Zanzibar waterfront, and boats, and traders, stall holders, fruit sellers, with the usual medieval touch, on this day a boy about to walk along a high rope strung between two trees. He had attracted fifty or sixty spectators, Zanzibari boys with nothing to do but be entertained by the patter of the acrobat’s build-up — he made much of the fact that he had no safety net.
‘I might fall! I might die!’
So dazzling white as it loomed from the sea, Zanzibar was an island of smelly alleys and sulky Muslims. I looked around the bazaar and found a grouchy Indian merchant.