In such towns I felt: No achievements, no successes, the place is only bigger and darker and worse. I began to fantasize that the Africa I traveled through was often like a parallel universe, the dark star image in my mind, in which everyone existed as a sort of shadow-counterpart of someone in the brighter world.
The foreign clothes were like proof of this shadow existence. Most people did not wear the new Chinese clothes from the shops, but rather the hand-me-downs from the market. These second-hand clothes had been handed over by well-meaning people in clothing drives at their churches, or the school Clothes-for-Africa day or the People-in-Need Fund Drive that requested, ‘Any usable articles of clothing.’ In Africa, these clothes are sorted into large bales: trousers, dresses, T-shirts, socks, ties, jeans, and so forth, and the bales are sold cheaply to people who hawk them in markets. This helped fuel my fantasy. I saw Africans wearing T-shirts saying, Springfield Little League and St Mary’s Youth Services and Gonzaga and Jackman Auto Co and Notre Dame College Summer Hockey, Wilcox, Sask., and I imagined the wearers to be the doppelgängers of the folks in that other world.
I had stopped in Mbeya to see how things were going in the thirty-five years I had been away. The answer was that things were going very badly but that no one seemed to mind. Time to leave.
There was a bus from Mbeya to Malawi. I bought a ticket. But when I went to catch the bus I was told that it wasn’t running that day, and it might not be running the next day, and that I could not have a refund, because the money I had paid had been sent to the main office in Dar es Salaam.
‘The problem, you see…’ someone started to say.
Hearing that, I walked away.
The boy who cheated me followed me and asked me to give him some more money. He said, ‘Buy me a soda. I am hungry. I have had nothing to eat today.’
‘Don’t you have a mother?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then go find her and ask her to feed you. I am trying to get to Malawi and this ticket you sold me is worthless.’
Thinking some Indian traders might be going to the Malawi border I found a shop where two Indians were grading long yellow sticks of raw unwrapped laundry soap. They knew nothing about Malawi except that smugglers occasionally came from that direction. They did not speak Swahili. Amazingly, they were not from Mbeya — a newcomer, Prasad, and Shiva, an old-timer, were expatriates, from Bombay.
‘Soap is an easy business,’ the old-timer said. ‘We make it in Dar, from palm oil and caustic soda. We sell it by the stick or by the cake — we cut it, see. No one else in the world uses this soap, no one buys it like this. We sell it in villages, but business is flat.’
‘No purchasing power,’ the newcomer said.
‘Nothing has happened in Tanzania. Nothing. Nothing. And in ten more years, nothing.’
‘There was a textile factory here, run by an Indian chap who was born here. It was very successful. Nyerere nationalized it and put in African managers. They stole. It failed. It was shut. In 1987, the factory was sold — to an Indian! The machines were still good. It is working now.’
‘Africans are bad managers. The workers are lazy. Lazy! Lazy! Even my people — lazy! I have to kick! Kick! Kick!’ He was kicking air as he repeated this, and looking and sounding like V S. Naipaul on his first visit to Africa. Kick them — it’s all they understand.
The soap seller seemed hysterical, I had touched a nerve. Raising the subject of Africans he was reminded that he hated Africans, yet he liked being in Mbeya.
‘This is like a vacation to me,’ he said. ‘It is peaceful here — no trouble. My children can walk in the streets. Vegetables are very good and cheap. The rice is fine — they grow it here. In Bombay, I spend so much time in traffic — hours every day. Here I can drive the whole town in fifteen minutes.’
‘The soap business is so simple,’ Shiva said. Anyone with a little common sense could do my job. Anyone. It is so simple I am ashamed. But not one African can do it. Who can we hire? The Africans can’t even sell one stick of soap.’
‘They don’t care, because what do they need? A little food, some clothes, and — what? They don’t think about tomorrow. They don’t have to. Food is cheap. Life is cheap. They don’t think ahead. Next year is — what? Next year is nothing to them.’
For years I heard Indians uttering these ignorant platitudes. They were still saying them! The difference now was that these men were strangers. They were like the first Indians ever to come to East Africa to trade or build railways, a century before, imported as coolies from impoverished villages in Gujarat and Kutch, like the Indian railway navvies in The Man-Eaters ofTsavo that Patterson calls baboos. And like those bewildered pre-colonial souls, these Indians had no idea how to get to the neighboring countries, did not speak the language, knew no Africans, lived in darkness, and of course were intending — in the fullness of time — to leave.
Seeing my patience as a form of desperate fatalism, I spent another day in Mbeya and then made an effort to leave. There was no bus but I could get a minibus, a rusty stinking matatu, to the border.
Seeing me with my bag, recognizing an opportunity, some boys gathered around me, though I tried to back away.
‘Yes, that matatu goes to the border, but when you get to the border you might be harmed.’
‘Why would anyone harm me?’
‘There are bad people there.’
The direst warning: yet what choice did I have?
No vehicle was leaving until noon. Rain began to fall. I walked away, the boys following me, trying to cadge money and, I felt, trying to distract me so that they could steal my bag. I walked from the bus station to town and back again. Then I boarded a filthy dangerous-looking matatu and inserted myself among the sixteen squashed passengers, who smelled horribly, and I thought: I am out of my mind.
The routine was: the driver speeded, swerved, stopped, dropped one person, picked up two, sped away leaning on his horn. Whenever he stopped, there was always an element of petty quarrelling, someone with no money, someone asking him to wait, somebody yelling in Swahili, ‘Hey, I’m walking here!’ Women pressed themselves against the minibus, offering peanuts and fruit. What dismayed me most was that it was now raining very hard. I had a poncho, but that wasn’t it — the road was slick, our tires bald, the man’s driving was terrible.
On that same stretch of road, exactly one week later in a similar rainstorm two vehicles collided head-on, a minibus in which eighteen people died — all the passengers — and a bigger bus, fourteen passengers dead, many injured. The driver of the speeding minibus skidded, trying to avoid hitting a cow, then overturned and rammed the big bus.
According to the paper I read, a busy man appeared at the scene of the accident and began picking up ‘heads and other body parts of the thirty-two victims.’ He described himself as ‘a traditional healer.’ Villagers who had heard the crash and come to gape asked him what he was doing. ‘The man explained that he had cast a spell the previous day for the accident to happen, so that he could get body parts to use for his treatments.’
Hearing this, the villagers beat him to death on the spot.