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

Speke simply believed in African inferiority because of the biblical curse on the sons of Ham, a notion that Burton dismissed as ‘beastly humbug’.

Brodie summed it up eloquently: ‘Burton was like a sponge, Speke a stone. For Burton the natives were an intoxicant and a passion. Even when repelled he observed and recorded with a minuteness Speke found incomprehensible. Perhaps he sensed too that Burton held his own solid British virtues in contempt and found him to be not only a dull fellow but an intolerable prig. If so it was Africa first of all that came between them.’

Central Line, Tanzania: Thursday, 13 March

LUNCH IN THE dining-car is a pleasant surprise, served by an engaging moonfaced young man whose tie-pin said that his name is Love. He brought a large pitcher of water and a basin to the table and I was about to make a fool of myself when he indicated that it was not for drinking, but washing. Remarkably the beer was still cold and the usual chicken and rice came with a fiery chilli sauce. Even the overhead fan worked.

Briefly the train stopped at a small station where the woman at the next table, one of an exotic trio of prostitutes from Burundi, started to bargain noisily with a youngster outside selling three live chickens. The usual ritual was played out. She lifted one of the birds through the window before proclaiming it inferior and disdainfully handing it back. Before the ritual could reach its proper climax, however, the whistle went for the train’s departure. Suddenly she was up, demanding to know what the youth’s best price was. But now it was his turn to be offhand and as the train jolted into motion she sat down in a furious sulk.

Gaggles of urchins descend on the train at every station with coconuts, fruit and corn cooked over wood but their salesmanship is perfunctory and well before departure they have returned to their game of soccer beside the track. One which I observed today involved a goal of two sticks topped off with plaited palm fronds and a ball made from a chunk of foam rubber sewn into a cotton bag. The boys soared and darted for this object like performing seals, delighted to have an audience before which to display their skills. Sir Richard Turnbull, the last governor of Tanganyika, said that Britain had brought only two things of lasting value to the country; the English language and football. Both have endured.

The Jeremiahs are confounded. This is rail travel as it ought to be: unhurried and comfortable in a basic sort of way, and there is every sign that we will get to Kigoma in the morning. I felt a brief pang of guilt about travelling first class; what would Wilfred [Thesiger] say? But at $32 for a journey covering 800 miles and saving two nights in a hotel there can be no questions about value for money and there will be discomforts enough without looking for them. I shall go second class on the next leg.

Farahahi is an ideal companion in a small compartment, a police detective heading back to his post in Kigoma from leave and discretion itself, deflecting my questions about the nature and scale of crime in the lake region with polite vagueness. Like all the Tanzanians I have met, he is beautifully mannered, interested but never intrusive. Last night he showed me how to wedge the length of wood provided in the compartment against the window to prevent thieves breaking in. Cat burglars are said to prowl the roofs of carriages at night in search of open windows through which to swing, although the agility and daring required for such a career defy belief.

Overnight we left behind the palms and swamps of the coastal plain and the sun came up today on the African savannah with which I have been familiar since childhood. It is hard to fathom how so empty a landscape can still hold one in its power. The only features to rise above the scrub and thorn bush that stretches from horizon to horizon are the baobab trees, frozen as if in alarm like giant scarecrows.

This route was followed by generations of Nyamwezi, the indefatigable tribe of porters employed by the explorers and traders. Harry Johnstone remarked: ‘What other race would be content to trudge twenty miles a day with a burden of 60 lb and be regaled on nothing but maize and beans?’; and their skills were so valued that the Germans prevented their movement to British territory. But we are now passing through the land of the Wagogo, Tanzania’s least envied people. Looking out on this void, one is struck by the absence of opportunity for improvement or escape. The odd settlement consists of a few mud and thatch huts of a type unchanged for centuries, a mournful looking cow and a straggly maize patch. No road reaches here, no enterprise, only the train which passes four times a week. What hope does this bring to the naked child squatting in the dust, or the teenage girl in rags, barely out of childhood herself but already with a baby on her breast? No more than did the caravan of the explorers passing by this very way 140 years ago.

My greatest discomfort is that the ice in the zinc tub behind the bar has all melted, and the beer is now warm.

3. The Inland Sea (#ulink_461c35a3-75bd-58a5-a7eb-d250f95ece01)

Ujiji, Lake Tanganyika: Saturday, 15 March

THE INLAND SEA WAS slow to reveal itself. Although no more than a few hundred yards away, the longest freshwater lake in the world, 420 miles from north to south and covering almost 14,000 square miles, was quite invisible.

I stood at the top of the village where the matatu dropped me from Kigoma, looking round for some indication of the direction in which it lay. A faded wooden sign painted ‘memorial’ was the only clue. A rutted dirt path sloped down through an avenue of palms and mud-and-pole huts from which children chirruped like crickets, ‘Mzungu, hello mzungu.’ Finally, out of the black-green foliage of a mango tree, an iridescent shard emerged.

In Burton’s case the disclosure was so gradual that he was initially dismayed. His first glimpse of the Sea of Ujiji was a streak of light that suggested little more than a pond and he cursed his folly for having endured such hardships over the eight-month march for so poor a prize. Then, advancing a few yards, ‘the whole scene burst upon my view, filling me with admiration, wonder and delight. Forgetting toils, dangers and the doubtfulness of return, I felt willing to endure double what I had endured.’

This coyness of the lake to show itself is part of its allure. Since arriving in Kigoma yesterday I have come to it from different points and there seems always to be a moment of revelation. Moreover, like all natural features with the power to enchant, its mood shifts constantly. At dawn today it was a tranquil sheet of colourless glass. Later it turned ugly and brown under a heavy sky and choppy little waves broke on the beach. Yesterday at sunset I sat transfixed at the water’s edge as the sun fell away towards the rumpled blue mountains of Zaire in the west, then dropped over the edge, drawing the two elements of air and water together into a single blazing arc of copper.

It was not just the spell of the place that convinced Burton he had solved the riddle of the Nile, but logic. The mountains visible on the western side are about forty miles away, while to north and south the waters run away seemingly without end. In their explorations of the lake by boat, the explorers reached neither extremity. Even so, it was clear that the Sea of Ujiji, or Tanganyika as it was known by the lacustrine peoples, was the largest freshwater lake yet known outside North America. This had to be the fountain of the Nile.

The mango tree through which I first glimpsed the lake also concealed the memorial. Fourteen years after Burton and Speke became the first white men to reach Lake Tanganyika, a second encounter took place. Livingstone and Stanley were here for different purposes, the missionary having been drawn into searching for the still-unresolved source of the Nile, the journalist for a scoop. If African exploration can be said to have had a symbolic nexus, it is surely here at Ujiji.

The memorial to two Englishmen is better kept than most modern state buildings in Tanzania, as if by a secret and capricious hand dedicated to maintaining relics of a forgotten past. A concrete path lined by canna lilies rises to a mound set against the backdrop of a vast mango tree and surrounded by blossoming trees and shrubs – pink and white frangipani, purple bougainvillea and scarlet poinsettia. The monument, erected by the colonial administration, is an ugly thing, a cairn of stone blocks engraved with an outline of Africa superimposed by a cross; a bronze plaque, donated by the Royal Geographical Society, reads: ‘Under the mango tree which then stood here Henry M. Stanley met David Livingstone 10 November 1871’.

Ujiji had been founded by the Arabs as a slave-trading centre around 1840. Its reputation was dreadful. Livingstone, who had learnt to rub along with the slavers when necessary, detested the place. ‘This is a den of the worst kind of slave traders,’ he wrote. ‘Those who I met at Urungu and Itawa were gentlemen traders. The Ujiji slavers, like the Kilwa and the Portuguese, are the vilest of the vile.’

At the water’s edge a dozen or so fishing craft lurched on the crest of small waves. They were handsome and substantial vessels, low and broad in the beam, high at the prow. Similar craft landed here to disgorge slaves in Livingstone’s day, having crossed from the other side of the lake where Tippu Tib maintained the raiding outpost of his empire. Now the boats are bringing across a new human cargo from the distant blue mountains of Zaire to the west. Refugees – albeit refugees able to afford the $15 a head in hard currency demanded by boatmen – are fleeing civil war. African armies are rightly notorious for their handling of civilian populations and there is no sign that Laurent Kabila’s rebel guerrillas are any better than the norm. Even on the boats the refugees are not out of danger. There are stories of engines failing and overloaded boats foundering on the lake with the loss of anything up to eighty lives.

The beach settlement was a seething little place with a hard edge. Among the huts made from plaited palm fronds were the suspicious faces of a community dependent upon illicit or surreptitious trafficking. For the first time I have sensed some of that brittleness of the African trouble zone. It is felt in a place where the easy laughter is suddenly not heard, it shows in stony eyes and hard appraising looks, and it coalesces around groups in which one figure, with the cool contemptuous lip of the strong man, stands out.

KIGOMA LAY JUST up the lake from Ujiji. Like most colonial towns, it was located a decent distance from the native settlement. These days though, Ujiji and Kigoma are consorts and matatus constantly ply the ten-mile run over the hills.

The matatu is the transport system of the African masses, and an agent of almost revolutionary change. Where a generation ago peasants were tied to the land from birth to death, the coming of cheap mobility – in the form of networks of Japanese minibuses criss-crossing the continent, leaping borders – has altered the demographic shape of Africa. It has also made Africa’s roads the most dangerous in the world. I was to travel a good deal by matatu but my appreciation of their convenience and reliability as a means of travel was always tempered by apprehension. And at times I was frightened almost to death.

My first experience that morning had been nasty and brutish, if mercifully short. Setting out from Kigoma, I had looked over the white vans jostling with one another on the red earth like termites. Each had a legend stencilled on the windscreen, a sort of mantra to attract passengers. I was not taken with either Bongo Wagon or Sugar Baby. Dear Mama was too wistful and One Lord King too pious. Big Boss and Top Squad were slightly ominous while No Time to Waste and Over The Top ruled themselves out. In the end I opted for the neutral-sounding Mwanga, named after an early Bagandan monarch.

It was a bad choice. The driver was a hatchet-faced cowboy in white shoes and sharp T-shirt determined to pass anything that moved, despite the poor state of a road that obliged oncoming traffic to veer into the middle to avoid pot-holes. His taste in taped music was execrable too, the worst sort of ‘yo-bitch-who-ya-callin-muthafucka’ American rap. Although I was in a privileged front seat position, insulated from the seething mound of bodies in the back, it was an unpleasant journey.

Matatu stands are places where the stratification of African society is immediately visible. Here boys become men and men become demigods, with power not only over mobility but life and death itself. As befits members of a dangerous profession, the drivers are swaggering dudes, their conductors street-wise youths handling fistfuls of banknotes as coolly as any Las Vegas high-roller. In this hierarchy, passengers are only one step up from the vendors who hustle drinks or fruit and dream of becoming conductors.

As ever though, status is a deceptive thing. The most powerful figure in this chain, the matatu owner, is not even visible. Most drivers lease their vehicles and pay out a large chunk of their takings before dividing any profits on an agreed basis with their conductors. Each has a role in maximising the potential of their partnership – the conductor to squeeze as many bodies into the available space and the driver to cover the route as rapidly as possible. The twin imperatives of crowding and speed are what make matatus so perilous.

I decided to return to Kigoma by Cobra Line, for despite the menacing legend the driver had a sympathetic face. It was pleasing to find my instinct vindicated: he had better road manners and his tapes were reggae and Zairean electric; and I realised, as I nestled between a large lady’s bosom and the spare wheel, that the discomfort of the back had its compensations. You felt a lot less vulnerable. Africans tend to opt for the front seat if given a choice, while the few whites I met who used matatus went for the back. Not that there is much difference; in high-speed crashes there are few survivors.

I FOUND THE hotel in Kigoma with the help of a lady I met along the way. Armed only with a sketch map, I had been tramping down a muddy Lumumba Street for about twenty minutes and was beginning to think I had lost my way when she appeared from behind a tree.

Did she know the way to the Lake Hotel? In reply she asked if I spoke Swahili.

‘Nafurahi sana kukuona’ I said. This was my standard conversational gambit and means roughly, I am very pleased to make your acquaintance.

Up to now this had been greeted with hoots and guffaws of derision, but now it produced a crow of delight and a high five. She pointed the way to the hotel and in English invited me, entirely without archness, to her club in the evening. ‘Cold beer, fish and chips, dancing …’ Clearly, my accent was improving.

The Lake Tanganyika Beach Hotel was a relic of colonial times, rather frayed but clean and a travellers’ delight. Its appeal had nothing to do with nostalgia: there was no faded sign pointing to the Ladies’ Powder Room, as at the African House Hotel in Zanzibar, or the Dornford Yates novels in a glass-fronted bookcase at the Outspan Hotel in the Kenya Highlands. What the Lake Tanganyika Beach offered was courtesy and a view overlooking the lake that one might happily contemplate in the hour of death. The English convention that breakfast is not complete without an egg endures, and here, under a thatch umbrella, I feasted beside the lake every morning on an omelette and fresh fruit.

Courtesy was the feature of Tanzania which, I confess, had surprised me the most. My only previous attempt to visit the country had not been encouraging. Travelling on the Tazara railway with my wife in 1976, we were set upon by immigration officials, abused, arrested, marched off the train under armed guard and sent packing back to Zambia on no more than the suspicion that we might recently have passed through South Africa. The fact that we had done so did not reconcile me to the treatment we received.

Power and Africa appear uncongenial companions. Too often the meek and affable young man has been transformed by the possession of a Kalashnikov into an unstable brute, the earnest graduate by some minor bureaucratic office into a vindictive pedant, the new leader assuming office with the promise of reform into yet another egregious autocrat. Yet now it was not only the grace of the humble which was touching, but the politeness, and an even rarer quality, kindness, of officials: the railway clerk going out of his way to find me a place on a packed train, the policeman taking pains to see me to my destination after being asked for directions. These services were all the more unexpected for being offered without any hope of reward.

Kigoma was a leafy and attractive little place with a single tarmac road curling up the hill towards Ujiji, lined with mango trees distinctive for the density of their foliage and fleshy leaves of a green so dark that the tree sometimes appeared black. The town was a combination of rusty native shanties and ponderous Germanic architecture, the yellowing railway station built to last until Doomsday and the whitewashed pile of the Kaiserhof on the hill which remained the headquarters of the local administration. Kigoma was comfortable with this ambiguity. A few streets had been renamed to reflect the era of independence but the changes were not wholesale, and imperialists had been left to co-exist with revolutionaries and nationalist heroes, Burton with Lumumba, Stanley with Nyerere.

This tolerance was reflected in Kigoma’s attitude towards the refugees, not just those from Zaire, but the hundreds of thousands who had fled the holocausts of Rwanda and Burundi. Whereas the mood in Ujiji was edgy because of the refugee traffic, here the migrants were being left to improvise new lives. By night they found shelter at one of three United Nations camps. By day they emerged to trade. Private enterprise was flourishing by the roadside – a Burundian man barbering a customer on a wooden stool, a woman whose two children played under a mango tree while she roasted maize cobs over charcoal, a youth at a shoeshine stall bearing the legend ‘Customer is the KING!’

The most striking thing about the refugees was the matter-of-fact way they went about their affairs. These were not the faces one associated with the images of African crises, haunted and dislocated casualties, enduring but helpless. The elderly woman and her daughter, calling out a greeting as they walked gracefully by with little bundles of possessions balanced on their heads, did not look like victims.

They had been walking for two weeks. When the ethnic killings started near their home in southern Burundi they wrapped a few essentials in bright cloths and turned away from the shamba where they lived by cultivating matoke, the plantain which is the staple of these parts. Living under open skies and by their wits, they walked south-east towards the Tanzania border. As Tutsis, they avoided Hutu settlements when it was possible, although in one place it had been a Hutu woman who gave them food when their few grubby banknotes, hoarded and wrapped in an even grubbier handkerchief, ran short. They also avoided the men in uniform whose behaviour could never be predicted. Nearing the border, they simply walked off into the bush – which in these parts is very thick, and dramatically beautiful – and crossed into Tanzania without even knowing it. They had probably covered 160 miles since setting out, and now were about to present themselves at the local office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

A local UN worker told me the flow of Burundian refugees had slowed but there were still around 170,000 in the district. Now it was Zaireans who were arriving at the rate of about 1,500 a day and this influx of a further 90,000 from across the lake had strained local patience as well as aid resources. The Burundians were thought of as placid folk, amenable to administration, but the Zaireans had a reputation for being difficult.

‘It’s as if they believe we owe them,’ the UN worker, an Australian, said. ‘I mean, of course we’re here to help. But we had a riot at a Zairean camp the other day because there was a hold-up in food supplies. They can be awkward bastards.’

He paused. ‘Weird too,’ he went on. ‘There’s been talk about witchcraft at one of the holding centres for weeks. A few days ago an old couple arrived on their own. One of our people saw them going down to the water supply. The next thing a mob attacks them, starts stoning them. By the time our people got there they were dead. Everyone was standing around yammering that these were the witches who had come to poison the water supply.’

He was a gawky young engineer just three months out of Melbourne. He shook his head. ‘Weird,’ he said again.

I STARTED UP the hill to find the grave of a missionary failure. It was a good sweaty climb to the little Anglican church, but before reaching it I was hailed by an elderly gent with white whiskers in a dark three-piece suit.

‘Are you going to pray up ther?’ he asked. I said what I was really looking for was the missionaries’ graves.

‘There are no graves up there,’ he said emphatically.

‘Where are the missionary graves, then?’

‘Well,’ he said, swaying, ‘we have many graves. Over there’ – sweeping a hand towards the hill opposite – ‘we have Christian graves, Muslim graves, all sort of graves.’