Save them, agents of virtue said of such people — yet farmers like these had saved themselves. Subsistence farming was not a sad thing to me anymore. And if this every-man-for-himself attitude was hard on the debt-ridden Tanzanian government, that was tough luck for the bureaucrats who had wasted donor money and planned the economy so badly. The people in this tiny village clearly had the skills to survive and perhaps prevail. At the rate we were going, laboring towards Mbeya, they would outlast the Kilimanjaro Express.
At a distance the small hillside town of Mbeya looked pretty, the approach to it through deep green coffee plantations and plowed fields. Visiting the town in 1960, Evelyn Waugh wrote, ‘Mbeya is a little English garden-suburb with no particular reason for existence… a collection of red roofs among conifers and eucalyptus trees.’ Five years later, when I passed through, it was still small and orderly, its prosperity based on its coffee crop.
Nearing Mbeya today, I saw a ruined town of ramshackle houses and broken streets and paltry shops. Most of the shops were selling identical merchandise, dusty envelopes and ballpoint pens, Chinese clothes and sports shoes. The radio rip-off brands were ‘Philibs’ and ‘Naiwa’ and ‘Sunny’ — very subtle, and I knew them to be junk, for I had bought a ‘Sunny’ in Egypt and it broke. More melancholy shops sold cast-off books, which comprised a sort of library of Tanzanian political wrong turns — One Party Democracy, Which Way Africa? The Speeches of Mwalimu Nyerere, The Tanzanian Road to Development, Marxism in Africa, and so forth. I stood and read a chapter in one of the books, entitled ‘Elections in Ugogo Land,’ by an old colleague from Makerere, a cheery Irishman who was so persecuted and paranoid under Idi Amin that he went haywire, became a Muslim and renounced his Wagogo scholarship.
I had said goodbye to my friends on the Kilimanjaro Express and decided to stay a few days in Mbeya, because it was a place I had visited thirty-five years before. I wanted to see what time had done to it. I had seen from the moment I laid eyes on it that time had not improved it, though it had certainly changed it. Instead of the garden-suburb with conifers, Mbeya was now big and bare and run-down and creepy-looking. It was still full of gloomy Indians. One Indian family was selling electric stoves, clothes irons, toasters and the like.
‘But who has electricity?’ one of the Indians said to me. The irons that were in demand were the old-fashioned hollow ones that you filled with hot coals.
‘I was sent from Dar to improve things,’ a young man said to me. ‘But things are still bad. Business is terrible.’
‘What’s your most popular item?’
‘Pots. Metal pots. That’s the only thing Africans can buy. Who has money? They have no money.’
I said I was heading for Malawi.
‘Malawi is just as bad. He goes that side,’ the first Indian said, pointing to the younger man.
‘It is dead city,’ the younger man said.
‘What city? Lilongwe?’
‘Whole of Malawi — dead city.’
This corner of Tanzania I considered one of the remoter inhabited parts of Africa. It was not wilderness, but it was bush, far from the capital and too near to Zambia and Malawi to invite investment. The southeast corner of the Congo was just over the nearby range of hills; that proximity was another liability. In the 1930s Mbeya had been established as a provincial capital, but now it was off the map and on the wane, attracting smugglers and aimless people like me, just passing through.
Mbeya, as a habitable ruin, attracted foreign charities. This I found depressing rather than hopeful, for they had been at it for decades and the situation was more pathetic than ever. There were many aid workers in the town, looking busy and deeply suspicious, always traveling in pairs in the manner of cultists and Mormon evangelists, never sharing. They seemed to represent a new breed of priesthood but they were the most circumspect, the most evasive and unforthcoming people, like the most bureaucratic social workers, which in a sense they were, either scolding or silent.
As a breed, the agents of virtue avoided intimacy with outsiders, especially the likes of me, unattached wanderers whom they seemed to regard as dangerous to their mission. They must have seen into my heart, for at this point in my trip I seriously questioned their mission. They hardly made eye contact. This English habit of averting the gaze was inspired by the fear that any show of friendliness meant they might be obligated to make a gesture — a ride, a favor. They had the most beautiful brand-new vehicles, always white Land-Rovers or white Toyota Land Cruisers and they drove them with ministerial haughtiness.
Those vehicles were sometimes being washed and polished by Africans in the parking lot of the Mount Livingstone Hotel where I was staying. It was a dismal hotel, empty and clammy, and dead except for the dark room which at six in the evening filled with drunken African men. The reason for the darkness was that most light bulbs were missing from their fixtures.
The aid workers had the best rooms but they kept to themselves. I tried to approach them, to get any information I could about the road to Malawi, but they shied away, with that squinting expression that seemed to say, Am I wearing something of yours?
‘I’m here for a conference,’ one said, before backing away.
‘Malawi’s not in my area,’ another informed me. ‘Excuse me, I’ve got a series of meetings.’
‘There’s a panel this afternoon,’ was another line I heard.
Yet another: ‘We’re holding a workshop.’
I had begun to cotton to the view set out in the anti-donor books, The Lords of Poverty and The Road to Hell that foreign aid has been destructive to Africa — has actually caused harm. Another vocal advocate of this theory was an African economist, George B. N. Ayittey, who in two books, Africa Betrayed and Africa in Chaos, documented the decline in African fortunes as a result of donor aid.
It is for someone else, not me, to evaluate the success or failure of charitable efforts in Africa. Offhand, I would have said the whole push was misguided, because it had gone on too long with negligible results. If anyone had asked me to explain, my reasoning would have been: Where are the Africans in all this? In my view aid is a failure if in forty years of charity the only people still dishing up the food and doling out the money are foreigners. No Africans are involved — there is not even a concept of African volunteerism or labor-intensive projects. If all you have done is spend money and have not inspired anyone, you can teach the sharpest lesson by turning your back and going home.
It was what Africans did. The most imaginative solution Africans had to their plight was simply to leave — to bail out, escape, run, bolt, go to Britain or America and abandon their homelands. That was the lesson of the Kilimanjaro Express — half the African passengers on it were fleeing, intending to emigrate.
In a town like Mbeya I understood the sense of futility. Perhaps that was why I liked rural Africa so much, and avoided towns, because in villages I saw self-sufficiency and sustainable agriculture. In the towns and cities of Africa, not the villages, I felt the full weight of all the broken promises and thwarted hope and cynicism. And all the lame explanations: ‘The coffee price is down… The floods hurt the maize harvest… The cooperative was nationalized… The managers were stealing the funds… They closed the factory… The problem, you see, is no money.’