No Hurry in Africa (37 page)

The next morning, Bríd and I set off on our 900km journey to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. These distances always appeared much smaller on a map. The standard world maps tended to portray countries that are closer to the Polar Regions as relatively larger in comparison to the countries close to the equator. This, apparently, is because the European colonial nations pressured early cartographers to distort the reality so that African colonies would not look multiple times bigger than the size of the ‘mother’ country. So, when taking this into account, coupled with the fact that many main thoroughfares are not even tarred, journeys in Africa inevitably take much longer than anticipated.

We crossed the Kenyan border at Namanga, directly south of Nairobi. Just as I was handing my passport over, I suddenly spotted for the first time that when I entered from Uganda in March, the Kenyan official stamped it 23/06/03, instead of 23/03/06. Unfortunately, the immigration officer at Namanga spotted the date too.

‘Mr. Brendan, I see you have been in Kenya for a long time without a valid visa,’ he said menacingly, and threatened to have me thrown in jail!

‘Look, no need for that. I will just leave the country,’ I pleaded.

Luckily, his superior officer believed my story, but made clear in his gruff voice,

‘You should not have been allowed to get that visa in the first place—if you leave now, you will not be allowed back into Kenya again.’

Déjà vu,
not again, I thought. This would be very problematic because my flight home would be from Nairobi; not only that, I had to leave Bríd back to Nairobi Airport in three weeks’ time. By this stage, she was in tears over the whole business. I would have to take my chances.

‘I’ve been through worse before,’ I tried to reassure her, ‘and it always turned out alright.’

A few kilometres inside Tanzania, our bus was found to be slightly overweight at a weighBrídge. Weighing vehicles is a necessary precaution because of the weak structures that pass for Brídges. The bus conductor looked around and up and down, then forced the two fattest women off the bus. The bus circled back onto the weighBrídge and passed muster the second time around. The two women walked ten yards on up the road, and we picked them up again. Negotiating bridges after that, Bríd and I crossed our toes as well as our fingers!

When we finally reached Dar es Salaam, weary from the epic journey, we hired what may have been the only stretch-Lada taxi in all of Africa. I never knew such a thing existed. Our driver demanded the equivalent of sixty euro for a five-minute drive. I handed him about two euros worth and he was delighted. Dar es Salaam proved to be a large city; it is the largest in Tanzania, with a population of over two million people. It is a thriving port on the Indian Ocean, and is the economic capital of the country, as well as being home to most of the government departments. Dodoma, in the centre of the country, houses the parliament and is officially the capital, contrary to what most people would answer in a pub quiz. Tanzania itself is a vast country, nearly twelve times the size of Ireland; it is home to more than 120 indigenous ethnic groups.

‘How much is the pineapple?’ I enquired in Swahili from a fruit seller sitting on the footpath the following morning. I was given an answer that converted to about sixty euro. He settled for a lot less. I could see a pattern emerging.

Exotic Zanzibar Island lies around fifty kilometres from Dar es Salaam, in the Indian Ocean. Our boat to the island resembled nothing more than a refugee ship; noisy multitudes, mostly in Muslim dress, were jammed on deck and in every available corner, some being seasick because of the choppy seas. We only realised, after some time, that Bríd was on the male-only end of the segregated boat. We pleaded ignorance and laughed it off in the Irish language to ourselves, knowing we would not be understood by anyone—unless that amazing
Gaeilgeoir
shopkeeper in Mombasa was on board!

The slow boat to Zanzibar town was supposed to take three hours from the time we boarded at midday. In the end, the engine broke down, and we limped into port in the dark, a full nine boring hours later.

‘Slow boat to China more like,’ I quipped to Bríd.

She was still coming to terms with the strangeness of it all.

At passport controls, we declared our intention of staying for over a week on the island. For historical reasons, Zanzibar maintains its own immigration controls. It gained its independence from Britain in 1963; a year later it voluntarily united with mainland Tanganyika to form Tanzania, and it maintains a very strong degree of political autonomy to this day. After stamping us in and inquiring about our accommodation, the immigration officer immediately morphed into a tout for a particular guest-house—his wife’s!

‘I will show you very good guesthouse. That one you want to stay in is no good. You will find my wife’s guesthouse much superior!’

Zanzibar town and, in particular, the old Stone Town quarter resembles Lamu in many ways: in its narrow winding alleyways, raised terraces, shady squares, bazaars, and mosques. Unlike Lamu however, Zanzibar has a new town attached, a few souvenir shops for tourists and, more significantly, has cars. We were only just off the boat when we saw a car crash into the back of another. The lights were smashed on both cars, but both just drove away without even an exchange of abuse.

Another big difference is that Zanzibar has pet monkeys that attempt to pull the skirts off women walking down the narrow lanes. Had they been trained to do so, we wondered. We heard quite a few high shrieks of annoyance from the women. Being from Mars, I subtly chuckled to myself in amusement; being from Venus, Bríd told me off.

‘Whist, Brendan, you shouldn’t laugh at that!’ she scolded, while laughing herself.

It was a pure delight for us to wander together through the maze of alleyways in the old town, exploring the spice markets with their exotic array of cloves, cinnamon, lemongrass, and vanilla. How could you resist the invitations to taste? Occasionally, we got lost in the labyrinth of laneways, distracted by the brightly painted signs. Some of those in English were more noteworthy for their colourful artistry than their grammar; one read:

The main man in town for motorbikes is a colourful caracter called Ally Keys. He not as disreptable as he looks and her bikes is safe [sic]

On one lane, real daggers and children’s toys were being sold together on the same stand. Beside the market, a crop of maize was growing in the courtyard of the Old Fort in the middle of town. Along the seafront, we discovered one of the highlights of the town; a lively open-air market, lit up from evening by paraffin lamps, that was offering delicious fresh seafood. We regularly re-fuelled there with octopus, squid, shark and such like, that the talkative proprietors barbecued on the spot—all for next to nothing. We savoured eating our feasts as we sat on the seawall, while the pleasant aroma of smoke from the barbeque fires fused with the warm sea-air.

We were the only people in the previous fortnight to stay in our large ornate guesthouse. The most distinguishing feature of Zanzibar town is the exquisitely carved, large wooden doors on the front of the tenement buildings, formerly mansions, dating back to the more prosperous era when the Sultan of Oman ran all the ivory, spice, and human slave trades of East Africa from his palace in the town. Zanzibar fell under the control of the Sultan of Oman in 1698 when he routed the Portuguese rulers. The island boomed as the coastal epicentre for trade with Africa’s interior. The Sultan’s territory in Africa at one time stretched from Mozambique to Somalia, and the island became the ninety-nine percent Muslim it is today.

Trading in slaves and spices became so lucrative that the Sultan had moved his capital from Muscat to Zanzibar in 1840. Then, in a succession struggle between his two sons in 1856, the sultanate was split into the separate sultanates of Oman and Zanzibar. Britain seized control of Zanzibar in 1890 in a dispute over human slavery, but the Sultan was retained as a figurehead. The Sultan took over once again on independence in 1963. However, a mere 32 days later, he was forced to flee on being ousted by a popular uprising of the indigenous Swahili Africans.

Bríd found our visit to the underground slave chambers very moving. The conditions the slaves were forced to endure, before being sold at the slave market, were indescribably callous. It is estimated that over half a million of these unfortunate Africans were sold here in the forty years prior to 1870.

It was in Zanzibar that the pioneering missionary, Dr. Livingstone, first landed in Africa, stayed a few years and invited the British to intervene in order to abolish the slave trade. The British dutifully—some might say opportunistically—accepted the invitation, then won the shortest-ever war in history. It took only forty-five minutes for Zanzibar to surrender. Dr. Livingstone then built an impressive Anglican Cathedral, right on top of the underground slave chambers on the site of the slave market.

I was intrigued and somewhat amused at the end of our guided tour of the holding cells when, without knowing I was living in Kitui, the English-speaking guide explained,

‘There is a tribe somewhere in Kenya, I think they are called Akamba or something like that, who, when every other tribe would be fighting off the Arab slave traders, the Akamba would tell them, “Pssst, I’ll sell you my neighbour here. I’ll go catch him. How much will I get for him?”’

The Akamba indeed had, and have, a reputation as traders. They were always well known to the Arabs, and to the British later on, as the middle-men between the coastal Swahili traders and all the tribes of the interior with whom they wanted to trade beer, ivory, medicinal plants, tools, weapons, ornaments, food, and cattle. Such was the tide of corruption spread by slavery that many African tribes engaged in capturing and selling their tribal neighbours. However, I could not verify the guide’s claim that the Akamba were so willing to trade their own people.

For the next week or so, Bríd and I headed to the near-deserted picture-postcard tropical beaches and coral reefs further up the island towards its northern tip. When we arrived in Nungwi village at 11am, a staggering drunk showed us to nice chalets overlooking the fabulous palm-fringed beach. Then he proudly boasted in almost his only words of English,

‘I am the watchman. I protect the chalets.’

I pointed him out to Bríd later that evening. He was lying asleep on the beach, an AK-47 on his lap.

The security guards at these places, including the upmarket hotels that charge guests hundreds of dollars a night, are paid about one euro for an entire nightshift lasting from 6pm to 6am. Before coming to Africa, I used to hear this tired old ‘dollar a day’ cliché so often from Bono and Geldof that it did not really register. Only now could I fully comprehend it. I was not entirely surprised when our bag was stolen on the second afternoon, while we were swimming at a secluded beach. Luckily, we did not lose anything important.

We found the long white sandy beaches of our tropical paradise largely deserted. Nungwi, and nearby Kendwa, seemed like some of the private islands of the Caribbean; it was so relaxed and tranquil and laid-back under the palm trees. Bríd and I were cocooned in our own state of bliss, waltzing on the sand as the sun set, to the sound of the waves breaking lazily on the seashore.

We fell in with the same English lads I had met while climbing Mount Kilimanjaro in March. Small world, we agreed. They were now in their last days in Africa, having spent a year teaching in Tanzania. They had attended some of the more famous English public schools, but were far from the posh-school stereotypes. We played pool one night with the resident sharks at an outdoor bar next to the beach. Unfortunately, the Africans were much more familiar with the contours of the dodgy table, and we lost a few Tanzanian shillings. Part of the appeal of beautiful Nungwi is that it caters for a variety of people in season. It is one of a tiny handful of backpacker hideouts in East Africa. As such, it can be relatively cheap, provided you stay away from the expensive hotels catering mostly for Western newlyweds.

Bríd and I went snorkelling at the nearby coral reef. In the warm tropical waters, we were treated to a spectacular display of colourful fishes and other exotic marine life, including turtles. It was hugely enjoyable, but I felt slightly seasick coming back on the sailing dhow. On our last evening on Zanzibar, I held Bríd in my arms as we drifted with the tide in a warm turquoise sandy bay. The setting sun produced a magnificent array of colours, from bright orange to deepest purple. It was one of those perfect moments in life, with everything in harmony and the two of us deeply in love.