‘Business is down.’
‘When was it up?’
‘Sixty-something.’
‘How much are these sandals?’
They were stiff, antique, made of silver. They were a bride’s silver slippers, to be worn on the wedding night, as she went scuff-scuff in the semi-darkness to the bed where her groom awaited his triumph, her defloration.
‘I must weigh them.’
I laughed at the thought that these pretty objects were being sold by their weight.
‘Silver is two-twenty a gram,’ he said, naming a price in shillings.
I calculated the price to be $120. We haggled for a while and then I gave him 1oo in cash and he wrapped them in old newspaper and snapped a rubber band around them. While doing this, he said that his grandfather had come to Zanzibar in 1885. His whole family was here.
‘We want to leave, but how?’
‘You mean, go to India?’
‘Not India. I have never been to India.’
‘You mean America?’
‘Yes. I want America.’
‘Have you ever been there?’
‘No.’
Over the next two days I bought supplies for the train trip south. It was impossible to be in Dar es Salaam and not meet foreigners attempting to solve Tanzania’s problems. What struck me was the modest size of the efforts. No one was handing out large amounts of money anymore. This was mainly ‘micro-finance,’ a popular term for a popular activity. One American man I met was doling out loans of $200 to $500, to be repaid within a relatively short time.
‘I say to them, “Don’t think about another donor. We’re going to get you on your feet. We’re the last donor you will ever need.” ’
‘Do you believe that?’
He laughed and said that Africans were ‘grant-savvy.’ They were so used to getting grants they were aware that the money would dry up in three to five years, and assumed that they would have to look elsewhere for more money for their schemes: small-scale milk processing, retail shops, women’s marketing projects.
‘Maybe we’re wasting our money, but it’s not much money,’ he said.
One day in a coffee shop I overheard an American preacher who was meeting some Africans, two men and two women, petitioning for grants of money. They said they needed the money soon. The preacher said that while they might be in a hurry he was not. The preacher was seventy perhaps, with bushy white eyebrows that gave him a severely owlish gaze.
‘I am here to look at the situation,’ he said. ‘Yes, we have resources but they are coming to us through God’s concern and God’s love.’
One of the African men mentioned a school that needed cash right now.
The preacher bore down on him, saying, ‘One thing we insist upon is, no government involvement at all.’
‘Just guidance only,’ the African man said.
‘We take our guidance from the Bible.’
‘Partnering,’ one of the women said, just putting a word in, but wincing when the preacher spoke up.
‘We will consider partners but only faith-based partners, who share our principles,’ he said.
The second woman mentioned money again.
‘Submit your forms, so that I can study them,’ the preacher said, and then after he told them what a very great privilege it was for him to interact with them, he led them in a solemn prayer, his head bowed. The Africans watched with pleading eyes, thinking (as I thought): We’re never going to see this guy’s money.
So many donors had been burned in Tanzania that grants were hard to come by — so people told me. Tanzanians might insist that the money was urgent, but donors could point out the visible fact that the enormous amounts that had been handed out in the past had done little good.
It was easier to leave. ‘I want to go to South Africa,’ a young man said to me in the market, prior to his unsuccessful attempt to beg money from me. ‘Many people I know have gone there. My friends just want to leave Tanzania. There is nothing here.’
‘How do they get to South Africa?’ I asked.
‘The train from here to Zambia, then the bus.’
‘How’s the train?’
He made a face, wrinkled his nose, perhaps intending to discourage me. But I was not discouraged. I wanted to leave, too.
13. The Kilimanjaro Express to Mbeya
The Tazara Railway, a gift from the Chinese, had been inspired by the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Its construction by Chinese workers — engineers, grunt laborers, and Red Guards — had occupied the whole of China’s disastrous decade, 1966–76. The Chinese intention, a worthy one, was to liberate both Tanzania and Zambia from their dependency on ‘imperialist,’ white-dominated South Africa as a supply line. The building of the railway was also intended to demonstrate what willing hands could accomplish when hard-working peasants became rustless screws in the revolutionary machine (as the Maoist saying went). Unfortunately, there were no revolutionary peasants, only pissed-off peanut farmers getting short-changed in the Tanzanian heartland, but the Red Guards seemed not to have noticed that. The railway was completed ahead of schedule and was, by any reckoning, a magnificent Chinese achievement.
As a way of showing their thanks to China, Tanzanian bureaucrats parroted Maoist slogans for years afterwards, called each other ‘comrade,’ and affected Mao suits. In the mid-eighties the Chinese pronounced the Cultural Revolution a horrible mistake. This revision did not reach Dar es Salaam. Long after the Chinese ceased to regard Mao as the Great Helmsman, and saw his platitudes as embarrassing, and adopted neckties and sunglasses, along with the new line, ‘To get rich is glorious,’ Africans were chanting, ‘Serve the People,’ though it was the last thing anyone in Tanzania wanted to do. They were still pissed-off peanut farmers.
The Tazara Railway went into decline the moment it was finished, though over the years there were spells — convulsions, really — during which attempts were made to repair it. Some years it was unrideable. Foreigners were banned from it for a while. At least now it was running and it had been renamed ‘The Kilimanjaro Express,’ though it had no connection with the mountain. ‘It’s always late,’ I was warned in Dar. As if I cared.
The main station itself was an indicator of how little trouble anyone look to maintain the Tazara Railway. The Dar es Salaam terminus was the sort of building in which I had spent a great deal of time buying tickets and eating noodles, while riding various Iron Roosters through China. Large, stark, like a Marxist mausoleum, no waiting rooms, no annexes, it was entirely open, Chinese style, designed to make it easy for police to manage crowds and keep everyone visible. Nowhere to hide, was the subtext of Chinese urban planning. This station was from a standard Chinese blueprint, and would have suited the center of Datong — there was an identical station in most Chinese cities. Though it seemed out of place here, it was no odder than the colonial structures, the old German office buildings or the British clubs in the center of Dar or the Arabesque architecture of Zanzibar.
Assuming there would be delays, breakdowns and shortages, I brought a box of food and enough bottles of water to last four days. The two-day trip to Mbeya usually lasted three. At Mbeya I intended to go by bus to Malawi. Altogether, I was pleased with my overland African effort. I had not left the ground since my Sudan Air flight to Addis Ababa.
Three Africans awaited me in the compartment, Michel, a Congolese, Phiri, a Zambian, and a Zanzibari named Ali.
Ali said, ‘You are going to Malawi? Malawians make good houseboys. They are educated. They speak English. We ourselves prefer to sell things.’
Phiri, a 53-year-old railwayman on the point of retirement, agreed with this. He added, And they like working for white people.’