Livingstone’s Tribe: A Journey From Zanzibar to the Cape

There was no bus station, just a clearing beside a few wooden stalls selling soft drinks and chicken stew with rice, and a thatch shelter where travellers waited until the bus turned up. After that the driver waited until the bus was full. I had boarded promptly to get a seat, then waited sweating for almost an hour while the bus slowly filled up. It was my first lesson. To avoid being stifled even before the bus departed, the trick was to board at the last moment that seats were still available.

At least I had a seat. The bus was full when we left town; by the time we were a few miles down the road the interior resembled Groucho Marx’s cabin in A Night at the Opera. The aisle was so tightly packed that standing passengers were forced by pressure from the centre to lie on top of those on the seats. To round off the discomfort, the road was abominable. Once the fifty-mile stretch from Bagamoyo to Dar had been under tarmac, but that had long since dissolved and not a trace of bitumen was now left. The dirt surface was gouged by deep rents, forcing the driver to proceed as though ferrying a cargo of precious china. Even so, there was no avoiding all of the troughs, and our crawling progress was punctuated by a series of sickening bangs which shuddered through the length of the bus like rolling thunder. At a speed averaging a little under 20 mph, this seething, broiling caravan of misery crashed down the trail forged by traders and explorers.

My breezy optimism evaporated again. I had barely set out on a journey of some 8,000 miles and, if the next 7,995 were anything like as bad as this, I could not imagine how I was going to last the course. I had to acknowledge to myself that my spell as a foreign correspondent in Africa more than ten years earlier had not done much to prepare me for this. As a tribe, journalists in Africa dwell amid the sweetest landscapes, live off the finest pasture and know all the best watering holes while making fleeting forays – on expenses and usually in packs – into what they like to call the Heart of Darkness in order to tell the rest of the world what a hellhole Africa really is. This time I would be staying in cheap guest-houses, travelling by bus and matatu, the ubiquitous minibus transport of the masses, and eating at roadside kiosks. There was nothing original or intrepid about this; thousands of young travellers did it every year and took the discomforts in their stride. But the thought occurred now that a backpacker entering his fiftieth year was a rather pitiful and ludicrous figure.

The bus had been lurching along for some time when I noticed that among the standing passengers pressing up against me was a child, a girl aged about four. She was out on her feet, slipping into sleep and kept upright only by the press of bodies. Her mother was a few layers of body away. Almost without thinking, I collected the child in my arms and lifted her into my lap. She barely looked at me before falling asleep.

It would have been unthinkable in my own country. For more than an hour the girl slumbered, oblivious of me and the tortuous progress of the bus. I was left to reflect on a curious pleasure; the pride of being accepted by a child, and to realise that I had not enjoyed such a degree of physical contact with one since my teenage son and daughter were that age. Every now and then I was forced to adjust my position, insofar as the human pressure allowed, to avoid cramp. The child would wake, look around for a moment, and go straight back to sleep.

Eventually we reached the outskirts of Dar es Salaam and bodies started to drain away from the bus. Before they got off, the mother looked at me, smiled and said a thank you: ‘Asante sana.’ The child hopped off without a backward glance.

THE HOTEL WAS near the bus station but it served no beer so I set out into the night to find a bar. Down an alley I came to a dimly lit shebeen where a woman dispensed drinks from behind a metal grille. I took a seat on a plastic chair outside. The Safari lager came, icy and foaming, and I sat sipping quietly on my own until a ragged cripple with a deformed foot, vaulting himself along on a pole up the alley, stopped beside me.

‘My friend …’ he began, and I waited for the inevitable gambit, the entreating eyes, the extended hand. Then I looked up and saw that his face was alight with excitement.

‘My friend, let me buy you a beer,’ he said. And he sat down and shuffled through a wad of banknotes. I did a rapid calculation that there was roughly $22 in the hands of a cripple in a dingy quarter of one of the world’s poorest cities.

I thanked him but said I had not finished my own beer yet. We were joined by a man named Jackson who said he was a fish trader, down among the rusting hulks beached in the port. The cripple introduced himself as Joseph, bought beers for himself and Jackson and ordered skewered meat to be brought from a nearby stall.

The place bustled with the camaraderie of workers winding down at the end of a week. They were labourers, matatu operators, street traders and perhaps the odd pickpocket. The shebeen owner moved among the tables, replenishing empty beer glasses. Word of Joseph’s hospitality spread and soon others were drawing up seats to enjoy it. Most drank from the bottle or in a glass, but one sipped fastidiously at his Safari from a straw; insects, centipedes and even small snakes sometimes turned up in beer bottles.

I wondered how Joseph had come by his windfall. Breezily he dismissed the question as though such were an everyday occurrence. Conversation continued but I was unable to get any more out of him before, beer and food consumed, he got up with his pole and vaulted back down the alley into the dark.

Jackson said: ‘Don’t worry. Everyone around here knows him.’

So where did the money come from?

‘He is a gambler. He begs some money, then he comes down to the port to play dice. Sometimes he has very good luck, and you will see him like now and he wants to buy for everyone. Then another time he will lose and you hear him say’ – here he dropped into a theatrically feeble voice – ‘ “Please my friend, help me, I have nothing.’”

‘And people help him?’

‘Oh yes. When he has plenty, he gives, when he has nothing, we give.’

I bought a round myself and left, walking down a teeming street to find an eating-house. By the time they brought the rice with a watery bowl of chicken curry I knew I had picked the wrong place but it was too late to leave. The wall of sound thudding from the music system was nothing new; Swahili pop poured out of ghetto blasters on every corner, garish and cheerful like the streets themselves. In the eating-house, though, the sound came from a CD system. Either the disc or the player was faulty and the music would get through just five bars before skipping back and repeating the same five-bar phrase.

Like any Englishman, I waited in confident expectation for someone to change the track. No one did. The waiters went about their business, the owner sat at his table filling out bills, the diners appeared oblivious. After five minutes I was grinding my teeth. After ten minutes I started humming in an attempt to set up a rival sound world in my head as a distraction. It was hopeless. I gave up and measured the duration of the five bars: just under five seconds. Each minute, the phrase was repeated roughly twelve times.

The other customers seemed heedless of it, their attention fixed on the business of eating. Either their thoughts were in a place where the noise could not reach them, or apathy gave them a kind of protective resilience. In any event, here was evidence of an awesome capacity for detachment that I would do well to mark.

Then the thought came to me: this was the test. Many petty irritations lay ahead, crowded buses, frontier queues, street hassles, experiences more challenging than mere noise. For enduring in Africa, however, this was a starter: one had to be able to pass the Five-Bar Test. When I left half an hour later the same five bars were still playing.

ALLY SYKES WAS an unlikely name for a Zulu and Dar es Salaam an unusual place to find one of Shaka’s people. Ally was one of the most prosperous businessmen in Dar, kept a house on Hampstead Heath and had educated his numerous children at British public schools. Yet he had been a leading light in the founding of Nyerere’s socialist Tanu party.

It was all quite simple, he explained. His grandfather, Sykes Mbowane, came from Zululand, having adopted the name Sykes from an English employer. The Germans recruited Sykes Mbowane in 1888 as part of a mercenary Zulu force to drive the Arabs from the coastal area around Bagamoyo and, after the job was done, he stayed on. His son duly took a German name, Kleist, during the period of the Kaiser’s rule, and fought with General von Lettow Vorbeck’s Schutztruppe, which led the British East Africa Expeditionary Force such a merry dance from 1914 to 1918.

After the war, Germany lost its colonies and the territory fell under a British mandate, so the family dropped the name Kleist and reverted to Sykes. And when the Second World War broke out, Ally volunteered for the King’s Africa Rifles. Thus, while the father fought against the Crown, the son fought for it, seeing action in Burma and ending the war as a staff sergeant, the highest rank attainable by an African.

‘I can tell you, if there had been no war, there would have been no uhuru,’ he said. ‘When I joined up, we thought the whites were gods and the Asians were demigods. Then we got to Asia, and we saw there was poverty – more poverty than in Africa. We mixed with the white soldiers. We saw them get drunk like us, and go out looking for girls. In Bombay we were waiting to go home and I said, “Hey, these Indians are talking about independence. Why not us?” That was even before Nyerere got involved.’

He had an unremarkable office in a typically rundown block of Dar. The floor was carpetless, paint peeled from the walls and the only decor consisted of school and university certificates of Ally’s children. Even at the age of seventy-two he was a broad, powerful man with a great hoary head, an African version of Anthony Quinn. When he laughed, which he did easily and frequently, his mouth opened like a walrus’s. There was something unnerving about him though, a lurking ferocity.

Why, I asked, had Nyerere’s socialism failed?

‘We Africans are much more capitalist than Europeans. I told Nyerere. I said, “You know yourself that no African will be respected unless he has a farm and cattle.”’

So why then had Africa failed to develop under capitalism?

‘The problem is the Asians. They corrupt everything. They are here to milk the blacks.’ Suddenly there was real venom in the genial countenance. ‘They must go, by force if necessary.’ He spat it out.

Like Idi Amin did in Uganda?

‘Amin’s mistake was he did not replace the Asians with intelligent Africans.’

But now Museveni had invited the Asians back and Uganda was booming.

‘You can’t trust them. They will always keep to themselves. Take the British Legion clubs here or in Kenya. You will find blacks and whites drinking together. But Asians do not have Africans at their clubs. The Asian is like that. He thinks differently to us.’

The last time I had heard racism expressed as virulently was in South Africa. Now here was this old monster, a regular at the British Legion and a lion of the diplomatic circuit, fêted as a jovial cove with good connections and a deliciously indiscreet line in gossip. If any demur was raised about his attitude to Asians, it was dismissed as an eccentric quirk, Ally’s little thing.

What about the differences between black and white, I asked.

‘That’s another question. We have a similar understanding, we can talk straight,’ he said. He winked conspiratorially. ‘And we can share a joke.’

THE OLD SLAVERS’ route continued to define the way to the interior. When Burton and Speke left the coast, the track swung south-west out of Bagamoyo towards the Uluguru mountains, then turned north-west, through the wilderness of the Wagogo country towards the Arab stockade at Tabora before proceeding directly west across the Malagarasi river to the Inland Sea. Forty-seven years later, the Ost Afrikanische Eisenbahn Gesellschaft was formed, to build a railway that would trace the explorers’ footsteps. To this day it is the only land link from the coast to Lake Tanganyika.

The Germans were late to start African railroads. The Uganda Railway, the British line from Mombasa to the lake region, had been in operation for four years before the first track was laid from Dar es Salaam towards Ujiji in 1905. The terrain was, if anything, more difficult – albeit without the complication of man-eating lions which plagued the British around Tsavo – but the Germans’ work rate was exemplary. Tabora, 530 miles away, was reached in 1912, two years ahead of schedule, and the lake in 1914. The first locomotive completed the 795-mile run from Dar just seven months before the outbreak of war.

In colonial times the journey took thirty-nine hours. The buffet car was well-stocked, compartments offered sleeping accommodation and, as I had heard from a friend who used to be a district commissioner near Kigoma, the journey was regarded as a pleasant prelude or coda to home leave. Now, according to travellers’ reports, there was no certainty of food or drink and even less about the time of arrival.

In the late afternoon passengers and friends milled around carriage windows in a colourful riot involving the wrestling of suitcases and bulky packages through tight openings. Most of the passengers wore their best outfits, as though for a festival. One family boarding a third-class carriage was especially resplendent: the father, a tall, angular young man, wore a tropical suit of Graham Greene era and vintage and an emerald green tie, his wife a dazzling African print outfit; she carried a baby on her back in a vivid swaddling cloth of red, green and orange squares; their son, about four, wore a turquoise jump suit in which his little torso was sweating like a yam cooked in a banana leaf. I saw them again after they had spent two nights in third class; their clothing was a bit dishevelled but their dignity was intact and their appearance remained somehow radiant.

The train pulled out precisely on time at 5 p.m. I had a 1915 map of Dar es Salaam which showed the town limits ending in a grove of coconut palms about 500 yards down the track. Now the train ran through mile after mile of shanty suburbs, each with a dustbowl football ground at its centre surrounded by breeze-block homes under rusting corrugated iron roofs. Late on a weekend afternoon, the touchlines were packed but the passing of the train, an event which occurred a mere four times a week, was sufficient for a game to come to a temporary halt while crowd and players turned to wave.

When Burton and Speke set out in June 1857 their objective was not so much ‘the coy sources of the White Nile’, as Burton put it, as ascertaining the limits of the ‘Sea of Ujiji’, the vast inland lake known only by repute from Arab travellers. The two men had made one previous journey together, a brief and disastrous foray to Somaliland, but at this stage there was no hint of the tragedy ahead. Burton, the dazzling polymath, soldier, swordsman, linguist, ethnographer and eroticist, was unquestionably the leader. Speke, a rather inarticulate man with a seemingly placid nature, worshipped him like an elder brother.

They were equipped on a heroic scale. In addition to their food and camping requirements, the 130 porters carried books, medicines, tools, cases of brandy, muskets, cutlasses, medicines and scientific instruments including two chronometers, two prismatic compasses, two sextants, a sundial, rain guage, barometer and pedometer, all of which had been lost or stolen long before they reached Lake Tanganyika. Among their miscellanea were two dozen penknives, two thousand fishing hooks, seven canisters of snuff, arsenical paste for specimens and one Union Jack. But neither man had brought adequate clothing and by the end both were reduced to rags stitched together from blankets.

Little navigation was required as the caravan followed trails running from one village to the next and occasionally encountered parties coming the other way with ivory or slaves, but the prevailing mood among the porters was fear of the unfamiliar: stories circulated about hostile tribes who were unerring shots with poisoned arrows; of rhinoceroses able to kill hundreds of men in a single charge; and of armies of elephant which fell upon camps at night. Partly as a result, the expedition was to be plagued by desertion. Burton claimed that over the two years of the journey, every man attempted to desert, including Sidi Bombay, who was in charge of the bearers and was beginning his own considerable career in African exploration.

Of even greater concern was the explorers’ susceptibility to sickness and disease. They had barely left the coast before suffering their first bouts of the malaria that was to afflict them almost constantly. Sunstroke prostrated them. Their legs swelled and their eyes became infected; at various stages both suffered blindness. When ill they initially rode on mules but as the animals were whittled away by tsetse fly they had to be carried in hammocks slung on poles between porters. They were tormented by mosquitoes, scorpions, ulcers, insomnia and flesh-eating ants. One night, Speke awoke to find a beetle burrowing into his ear ‘like a rabbit at a hole’ and in trying to extricate it with a knife succeeded only in perforating his eardrum, which became agonisingly infected.

The coastal belt extended for about ninety miles inland across the hardest country they would encounter, a combination of swamp and jungle ‘monotonous to the eye and palling to the imagination’, as Burton put it, a steaming miasma from which an odour of sulphur arose and where ‘the traveller might fancy a corpse to be hidden behind every bush’. Marching from dawn until late morning, when they made camp and spent the rest of the day writing up their notes and journals, it took them four weeks to clear the coastal belt and reach the Uluguru mountains. Once the high ground was attained the going became easier. By then, however, a problem more intractable than any of the others was emerging.

No two less suitable companions for such a journey could be imagined. Speke’s outward affability concealed a burning ambition and a growing resentment of the older man’s condescending manner. It did not help that he had little interest in their surroundings besides hunting. ‘Nothing could surpass these plains for dull sameness, the people are the same, everywhere in fact the country is one vast senseless map of sameness,’ he wrote in a fit of depression.

Burton, opinionated and domineering, was absorbed by everything. He learnt Swahili and took notes on geology, zoology and botany. He remarked on the quality of the local cannabis indica – ‘a fine large species’ – while demonstrating his breadth of acquaintance with the subject whether ‘the bang of Persia, the bhang of India, the benj of Arabia, the fasukh of northern and the dakha of southern Africa’. Above all, he immersed himself in the study of ethnography and here the contrast with his companion was perhaps most acute.

Burton believed, like virtually all of his contemporaries, that Africans were inferior to Europeans. But, as his biographer, Fawn Brodie, has written, he was unlike most in seeking a scientific explanation for racial differences. He attributed African torpor to the effects of climate and disease, and ‘degradation’ to the slave trade. Witchcraft, he believed, was the source of a debilitating ‘fear which ignores love’. He did a good deal to promote the notion of black men as sexual athletes but did not simply take at face value the envious whisperings about penis size and staying power; he claimed to have measured a Somali ‘who, when quiescent, numbered nearly six inches’, and to have evidence that Africans could prolong intercourse for an hour, yet be ‘capable of performing twice during the night’.