I told them how I had seen the same thing my first day in Nairobi, a suspected thief being chased into a muddy creek.
‘So what do you reckon?’ Conor said, to no one in particular.
‘I am going home to Finland,’ Ursula said. She stopped rocking and sat back in her chair and hugged herself into a ball.
The three Africans were snoring when I got back to my compartment. I crawled into my lower berth and let the movement of the train put me to sleep. With the shutters down and the door locked to keep thieves at bay the small space was stifling, and the heat and strangeness gave me disturbing dreams of dangerous stinking machinery that woke me with its violence, cog wheels flying apart, bolts becoming projectiles.
The heat and smell was just as strong outside. We were traveling in the swampland by the Kilombero River for most of the night, but by morning we were in upland, where it was chilly. About an hour after sunrise we came to a station, Makambako, where a great many passengers got out to catch buses for the distant south Tanzanian town of Songea.
The train did not move for an hour. Phiri, who was a railwayman, spoke to one of the staff and confirmed that it was a delay, a problem on the line.
Remembering that I had had no dinner the night before, I went to a shop with a sign saying, Station Canteen, and looked for some safe food. I bought a hard-boiled egg, two chapattis and a cup of hot tea. While I was eating Conor entered the shop.
‘He’s actually putting that stuff in his gob,’ he said, mocking me. ‘Hey, there’s supposed to be a three-hour delay — want to go for a walk?’
We walked half a mile into Makambako, which was not a town at all, but just a, collection of hovels on a stretch of paved road where idle people sat or stood. Boys called out in jeering voices, and pretended that they were going to throw stones at us. Thirty years before, the party line was: This railway will open up this province to progress. People will want to live here. The train will give eryone access to markets. They’ll grow crops. Schools will spring up. Life will change and people’s lives will be better. As Livingstone had called the Zambezi ‘God’s Highway,’ this railway line was ‘The People’s Highway.’
It hadn’t happened. I had traveled this way before, in 1965, by road and it had looked much the same. What had changed? There was now a makeshift market, women squatting by the road. There was a gas station but it was derelict, abandoned, and few man-made objects are uglier than an abandoned gas station. What had been mud huts before were now shanties made of scrap lumber. The boys were ragged and insolent. Grown men, doing nothing, stood in the street talking, just killing time. The old women selling fruit and peanuts bowed their heads against the cold gritty wind that tore at broken thorn scrub.
We bought some bananas and peanuts, and I found a week-old newspaper. I read the headlines to Conor: ‘Desire for More Beautiful Buttocks Leads to Death’ and ‘Wife (10 Years Old) Admitted to Mental Ward in Dar.’
‘But that’s the one that scares me,’ Conor said, pointing to ‘US Stock Market in Renewed Plunge.’
As he was Irish, I asked him if he had heard of Eamon Collins’s Killing Rage, the remorseful book I had read in northern Kenya about an Irishman’s life as a hitman for the IRA.
‘Oh, sure. Great book. Pity about Eamon, though.’
‘What happened?’
‘He was murdered in front of his family a couple of months back by an IRA hit squad. For writing the book.’
And the gunmen, the Irish generally, would cluck about savagery in Africa.
I sat on the platform among the delayed passengers. No one really minded the delay. If there was anything to learn on a trip such as this it was that in East Africa urgency was a foreign concept. Though there were a number of words for urgency in Swahili, lazima and juhudi and shidda and haraka, none had Bantu roots; all were based on loan words from Arabic. In East African culture, hurrying had a negative connotation, illustrated in the rhyming maxim, Haraka, haraka, haina baraka — Hurry, hurry makes bad luck. Of course, some Africans were driven mad by such lack of urgency and tried to emigrate. But in general such complacency made people patient, as well as accounting for the utter indifference to things going wrong. In a place where time seemed to matter so little, there existed a sort of nihilism which was also a form of serenity and a survival skill.
A man with a runny nose was selling oranges, handing the snot covered fruit to customers. Another man carried a small rack of Chinese-made women’s underwear, bras and panties. Boys followed him, giggling at the merchandise. The missionary children — pink-cheeked and frisky — ran barefoot in the fields next to the platform, in the dirt and dogshit while their parents cheered them on. I did not feel it was my place to warn them of hookworm. The station building, another Chinese design, was empty, the ticket booth vandalized, the floor littered and unswept.
The two acrobats did handstands to the delight of the local people. They were from Zanzibar, one of them told me. They were looking forward to their gig in Botswana.
‘Mister Morris invited us.’
‘For a show?’
‘Something like that. Our contract is for three years.’
They were very happy to be leaving and about to take up a real job.
The young man headed to the Congo to buy artifacts said that it wasn’t much trouble to get to Lubumbashi — he would catch a bus from northern Zambia. He said he knew nothing about masks or fetishes, but that he was meeting a Luba man in Katanga who knew all the tribes. And this was the greatest time to be buying old Congolese carvings and antiques. Villagers were selling their best items.
‘Museum quality!’
I laughed at this trader’s expression.
‘Because they are poor. They sell everything.’
As the morning wore on the sun became hotter. The surrounding countryside was bush but the settlement of Makambako was a blight. I wondered whether, with so much empty land and wilderness around, a littered town seemed of no importance.
Around noon the whistle blew and we were off again, jouncing and shaking into the bush on rails that seemed unfastened. We were crossing a great sloping plain, green hills in the distance. Some gardens nearby were planted with sunflowers and corn but farther into the plain there were no people, nothing planted, only the trackless bush of southwest Tanzania, fat baobabs and woods so dense in places there were many signs of game — hoof prints at the muddy shores of waterholes, battered trees with broken limbs and chewed bark — the signs of hungry elephants.
Several more breakdowns immobilized the train. The Africans in my compartment just yawned and slept. I went to the dining car and stood, marveling at the filth of it.
‘What do you want, bwana?’
‘I want a smoked turkey sandwich on a seeded roll, with a slice of provolone cheese, lettuce and tomato, a little mustard, no mayo. A glass of freshly squeezed juice, and a cup of coffee.’
He laughed, because it meant nothing, I was just gabbling. But hadn’t he asked me what I wanted?
‘What have you got?’
‘Rice and stew.’
My stash of food was gone and so I sat by the window, eating rice and stew, bewitched by the beautiful landscape, the long enormous valleys, the rim of mountains and hills.
A small village near the settlement of Chimala made me wonder: How is this grass-roofed village today different from the grass-roofed village that stood here in, say, 1850, before European missionaries and improvers got anywhere near this region? It was a fair question. There was even an answer. In many respects it was the same grass-roofed village — the hut design, the cooking fire, the wooden mortar and pestle, the crude axes and knives, the baskets and bowls, the texture of life was much the same. That accounted for its persistence. The inhabitants had worked their little plots and fed themselves, but had lain mute and overlooked through a century and a half of exploitation, colonialism and independence. They were probably Christians now, and wished for things like bikes and radios, but there were no signs of such contraptions and any prospect for change seemed unlikely.