And Home Was Kariakoo (29 page)

As I write this, in the dining hall, where—a rare treat—the coffee is ground on site and brewed in a percolator, a Russian channel describes how the Russians repelled the Germans during the Second World War. The chef comes out to chat and regrets the flight of so many Indians from the country—he worked for an Indian family in Tanga and names some gourmet dishes he used to prepare.

Felix and I first meet at a place called Garden Café, which only partly lives up to its name with its charming outdoor ambience, for it serves no coffee, only beer. There is always a wariness, I’ve noticed, in Africans outside of Dar es Salaam when they meet an Asian (who might well be a businessman), especially one who now lives abroad. But when I tell Felix that I am from Uhuru Street, he grins. I have credentials. Many people today—Asian or African—would balk at the thought of visiting the tumult of the Kariakoo area of Dar es Salaam. And when I tell him I did National Service in Kaboya, outside Bukoba, we break the ice completely. This means that like him I sweated in the countryside “building the nation” in the heyday of patriotism and Nyerere, a school graduate humbled to suffer abuse at the hands of the uneducated sergeants. Not many today carry that badge. Immediately we start exchanging National Service anecdotes. Like all such stories, even when told in Toronto—and they often are—they are accompanied by irrepressible laughter at the comic situations encountered during our service to the nation. He did his service in Ruvu, where the roars of lions in the night were enough to deter you from going AWOL,
more than the fear of the sergeants’ brutal punishment were you to get caught.

Felix is an investigative journalist with perhaps the hardest-hitting Swahili paper in the country. He has many tales of corruption and abuses that happen in the countryside and are not reported; he has become a sort of ombudsman of last resort for the desperate. Two of his stories are particularly disturbing because, told in his unassuming manner, free from rhetoric and high-mindedness, they show in pure form the helplessness of those who live away from the centres of power and wealth.

He was brought into the first story by a telephone call from villagers at a uranium mining location. A South African manager had hired a local man to lure teenage girls to him, and then he raped them. In the most recent occurrence the girl had been pregnant and had been raped anally. Do something, they told Felix. Have you gone to the police? he asked. Are you kidding, came the retort. You think they don’t know? Felix then called some local authorities—he’s not merely a reporter, he has connections—and gave them an ultimatum: if they did not do something about the situation he would release the story. The pimp was arrested, the South African got into his car and fled in the night, but was recognized hiding away at a hotel during the day and was caught. It would have been easy to kill him, Felix says. People’s justice.

The second story is similar but involves Chinese miners in another area who had been molesting local women. If they are not stopped, the villagers warned, we will kill every Chinese in sight. These threats are not empty. There have been cases of vigilante justice reported in the newspapers, where villagers have killed bandits whom they had themselves captured. In one recent case bandits had
already killed four people before one of them was apprehended and promptly dispatched to his maker.

I ask Felix if he will accompany me to Kyela, on Lake Nyasa, close to the Malawi border. He agrees. Kyela is his hometown, though he grew up partly in Zanzibar and has travelled to every corner of the country, which explains his cosmopolitan outlook. And his knowledge of Uhuru Street.

We leave by bus the next morning at around ten. Our route goes directly south, taking us past a countryside that already looks familiar. We speed past wheat, maize, and banana plantations before entering a rice area. The vegetation changes from thick and green forest and farmland to grass and thorn, palm and mango, the temperature steadily rising. We are descending into the great Rift Valley, and Lake Nyasa, to the discerning eye, is visible in the haze. (But not to me.) Felix takes pains to point out how rich the country is, how enterprising the people are; and yet how poor. There’s a communal feel to this bus journey, a measure of intimacy. Men and women are shouting into phones, the radio is blaring; two clucking chickens in a cage in the centre aisle are our co-passengers. The music is an eclectic mix: South African, rap, and suddenly, to my astonishment,
la-la-la
and a Bollywood love duet in Hindi and nobody bats an eyelid, then a Swahili spiritual praising Bwana Yesu, Lord Jesus, at which a friendly argument erupts behind me. Where is this Bwana Yesu, jeers a young upstart, to which a woman answers robustly, He’s everywhere, don’t you see him—here! there!—and she dances in her seat. Police checkpoints once again, the familiar irritants, rude interruptions to the rhythm of the journey. A cop gets into the bus and unctuously addresses the passengers, If you have any complaints, you should let me know, I am here to serve you—do you hear me? Like he is believed.

We pass a stretch of road called Uwanda wa Ndege, or “airport,” a downhill bend where speeding vehicles would fly off the curve into the valley below; now there are speed bumps to prevent such deadly accidents. Another patch of road is the site of a recent oil tanker crash; the local residents rushed to the toppled tank to help themselves to the oil, while someone thought it smarter to steal the battery, which sparked. Some forty people were killed in the explosion. As a reporter Felix had to go and view the gruesome remains of charred bodies; for months afterwards the mere sight of meat turned his stomach. He points to a coal-mining site in the distance, developed by the Chinese, subsequently sold to a politician’s relative, and now more or less defunct. It would have generated 3MW of power. It has been proposed now to let the Chinese run it. Finally we are down inside the valley, and arrive at Kyela and get off on the main road, where Felix’s brother runs a hotel and restaurant. We find him inside a large barnlike hall, relaxing at a table with two other men. Business looks dull. It’s around noontime, the place is empty. I’m asked if I wish to stay the night, and I say no. We have sodas, the talk is politics. The local MP has been investigating corruption, and the men believe there have been attempts on his life.

Kyela is a thriving rice market. In the milling area, a large and busy square surrounded by shops, rice is spread out on the ground to dry, people free to walk on it, trucks to pass over; heaps of bags wait to be taken away, while a loud and cheerful bunch of women wait around for their rice to return from the mills. The town is compact, with a frontier feel to it. The Malawi border is close by and easily crossed. Kyela is known for Malawi marijuana—the best, they say—and sugar, and street vendors walk by calling out biscuits from Blantyre. On the main road, buses come and go, and the side streets are busy with shops, restaurants, guest houses, and hotels. After
walking around the town, and treating ourselves to a simple meal of soda and roasted muhogo, we depart on one of several buses clamouring for custom; but not before witnessing a fight between competing bus conductors.

You think the constant police presence on the highways is an irritant, placed there by a harassing government; but when your bus stops on the highway and you are summarily transferred to another one, which then keeps piling up passengers and dropping them off regardless of space and safety, and it’s getting late and dark and there’s no electricity anywhere, you feel you need them to check the runaway overcrowding and violation of contract—but where are they now, these police? One of them finally appears at a stop, gets in, looks around; the conductor quietly takes him outside to the side of the bus and returns, and we are off. A bribe has been paid. Of course, to be fair, this overcrowded bus in the dark, chickens included, unsafe as it is, is the only means by which many people can get home.

We departed Kyela at four, arrive at the Mbeya bus station at close to nine; a car ride would have taken us not more than two hours.

An SMS from Mpeli says there’s no electricity at the Karibuni, there’s a blackout, and therefore I should go to the Mbeya Hotel, which is what I do. I find him sitting near reception with his laptop, preparing notes for the
TEKU
board meeting the next day. Such are the frustrations of getting things done.

In 1958, a “tourist” arrived in Mbeya, and wrote about it as follows:

The visitor was Evelyn Waugh, travelling from Mombasa to Rhodesia, mostly by road. He had already visited Tanga, Dar, and Kilwa. Back in Dar, he was driven to Iringa in a Mercedes, and from there came to Mbeya in a Land Rover, where he stayed with a Mrs. Newman, who forbade him to stay at the Railway Hotel with its disreputable clientele.

That hotel was posh and European by local standards, serving such exotic delectables as oxtail soup, roast beef, and peas. It is now called the Mbeya Hotel and is owned by Khoja Ismailis—a large photo of the Aga Khan is displayed in the office—who’ve done well with it. There’s a porch, parking, and a garden. The bar is decent, the food is mostly Indian and excellent; no wonder it’s crowded this evening. The manager looks like a recent immigrant, speaking Hindi or Urdu with the owners, who are themselves Gujarati-speakers. At a table nearby sit some foreign construction workers; at another some young Indian men discuss schools, safety, the virtues of Mbeya compared with those of Arusha as places to settle. These are the new Indian entrepreneurs, a world apart from my ancestors who came in dhotis and turbans a hundred years ago; these young men are trim and fit, they wear smart casuals and carry laptops and briefcases and represent the multinationals of a new India. And they are the foreigners.

The next day, starting from Mbeya Hotel I take a walk through the old town. It’s quaint and quiet, with the typical strips of one-storey buildings with businesses; a plain Hindu temple, the priest or
caretaker sitting idly outside—infinitely remote from the bustle of India. On the other side of Karume Avenue are the wealthy houses, where the Europeans, and perhaps Waugh’s Mrs. Newman, must have stayed. The Khoja prayer house has nothing to distinguish it, yet it’s impossible to miss on Jamatkhana Road.

A few years ago, that intrepid American traveller Paul Theroux came by Mbeya. He found it “a habitable ruin.” In his travelogue
Dark Star Safari
, he went on to write,

In other words, a dark continent. How do you explain to a fleet-footed traveller, who speeds through a place like the Road Runner, ignorant of the language and knowing nobody locally, and with naive arrogance reports to his brighter world about it, that there is
life
here, and all that living entails? That the people who live here are not shadows or mere creatures but human; all you need to do is touch them.

My session at the Mbeya Club goes well. The club was once exclusive, of course, and one easily imagines the snooker table, the card tables, liveried waiters, the bar. Mpeli repeats that it once had the best golf course south of the Sahara. What remains now is an underutilized stub of a building. There are some forty to fifty people present, which
is surprising for this dark, cool night when the town looks essentially dead; the food has been donated, as have the drinks. Among the audience are a handful of foreign workers in the medical field, including a young Ethiopian American woman, who explains to me why she is rootless and back in Africa. I read for the audience a story about the trauma of a boy leaving home to go to America; it’s an old one, set at a time when going away was a daunting process portending a perhaps permanent exile, but it has a completeness, and a relevance even today, I think. It tells in fictionalized form how I myself went away. Then I say what I have said many times before, why it’s important to tell our own stories, write our own history. I prove my credentials because I don’t come as an outsider, or speak as one; I am from Uhuru Street, now living in Canada. The Street runs through my veins.

There are many questions, there is overall a great deal of satisfaction. We should have more meetings like this one, goes out the cry.

Early the next morning Mpeli takes me to the bus station; on the way he gives me a tour of the town. We are early and take breakfast at a stall, tea and chapati—which is fried and what I would call a paratha—then we say goodbye, and I leave for Dar.

The bus is an “express,” which means that it does not stop on the way, except for a few rest stops beside bushes, and a quick stop for meals, when we are told to be back in ten minutes, to bring the food with us if necessary. We rush back with fried chicken, cassava, rice, chips. As usual, a candy and a bottle of water from the conductor, and later a soda. There are two television screens to show movies; the intrusion is annoying on one hand, but the local productions are also instructive and amusing, with a very distinctive local humour, and therefore easily engage the passengers. In one, a blustering, bullying man learns that he cannot push around his office-working wife
anymore; by the time she’s finished with him, he’s begging her for attention. The characters live wealthy lifestyles in well-furnished homes, though far from the opulent extravaganzas of Indian film and TV. The women are young and pretty, wear western dresses and have straightened hair. On the other hand many of the women and girls I have seen in Dar and on this trip have beautiful and intricate corn-rows, displaying a fashion taking off in just the opposite direction.