It’s something I’ve learned, after nearly a year in Africa – the value of balancing those brief bursts of intense interaction with a few days to myself. It’s the only way to restore my equilibrium, to stay grounded. It’s how I remember who I am. Wholesale transformation, after all, is not what I’m after. Certain peculiarities and annoying habits aside, I’m happy with who I’ve become after two years on the road. I’m happy to feel at ease in surroundings that, when I first left New York, would have felt alien, even hostile. (Picture a younger me bombarded by batiks and Masai machetes in Arusha.) I’m happy to have picked up the local mannerisms – the elbow-touching, the shoulder-squeezing, the hand-holding – that are reliable ice-breakers among strangers. And I’m happy, too, to be gainfully employed, to have a fat Forbes paycheck in my bank account, to have high hopes that the year ahead – should it finally bring me to Cape Town – will find my African adventures on the desks of dozens of New York editors.
In Moshi I’m a recluse: watching Euro 2008 at the hostel, hunkering over cappuccinos at the Tanzania Coffee House, eating plates of fried liver at the auspiciously named Chrisburger. The afternoons are mercifully overcast – the town’s heat can be sweltering – and it’s not until my fourth day that the clouds part and Kilimanjaro appears in the distance. It’s an awesome sight, rising over the mosques and market stalls, and I’m grinning dumbly as twilight paints Kili’s crown in purples, pinks and blues. At the rooftop bar in the Kindoroko Hotel, I buy a bottle of Konyagi – three thousand shilling’s worth of Tanzanian whoop-ass – and drink poor man’s gin-and-tonics while the sun sets. I am getting to be awfully happy with how the days pass. Having set no goals for myself in Moshi, the simple project of passing the time is one I attack with great verve, mild inebriation, and a small bit of slack-jawed wonder at the dumbstruck beauty of my life.
There have been some challenges, few and fleeting. The project of mailing home a package – an almost Sisyphean boulder, at this point, which I’ve been pushing along since Rwanda – finally reaches its conclusion here in Moshi. After a day of wandering town, scouring the dry-goods stores in search of cardboard boxes, I finally find one big enough to fit four Congolese masks, three thick paperbacks, and the accumulated detritus of the past few months. It is a day of great triumph. I haul my load to the Posta, where the customs clerk fills in the necessary forms in triplicate, weighs the package, and then watches me mummify the cargo with enough packing tape to cover Kilimanjaro. We debate costs. Surface shipping, she says, could take three months – maybe six – to finally make it to New York. I tell her I’m in no hurry, so long as it gets there before I do in the summer of ’09. I ask if it will get there in less than a year. She pauses, looks into the middle distance, and says,
“Probably.”
This is hardly reassuring. But in the past few days, I’ve already begun to worry about my finances again, plotting out the months ahead and wondering when the next check will roll in. I pay Tsh30,000 – about 25 US bucks. The clerk fills in a receipt and stands there with her pen hovering, giving me a curious look. I have a brief vision of my package bouncing along in the back of an old lorry somewhere in Chad, or strapped to the side of a camel in Mali. I ask if it’s stupid of me not to shell out an extra fifty bucks for air mail instead. The clerk laughs, shakes her head, and says, “Yes.” Not wanting to trust my fine Congolese masks to the whims of fate and African transport, I fork over the extra money and send the package on its way. Two and a half weeks later, it’s safely on the ground in New York, having most likely beat me there by a solid 14 months.
The more pressing task, by day three in Moshi, has been finding a reliable place to watch the European Championships. After a weekend plopped down on the hostel couch in front of the footie, I’ve learned that local TV programming is terrifically erratic. With no less than four channels to choose from over the weekend – the French EuroSport, the South African SATV, the Kenyan NTV, the Tanzanian TBC – I have no more than zero channels to choose from on Monday night. I wander out in search of a bar with a satellite – no easy task, on the streets of Moshi. I step in and out of grim, rough-and-tumble places where groups of young guys lean drunkenly against the wall and a fluorescent bulbs flare over the pool table. My spirits are low. With the eyes of the footballing world fixed on Austria and Switzerland for these next two weeks, the prospect of following along on ESPN.com is looking both dire and likely.
Until, luckily, improbably, I find a dark, crowded joint on a nearby side-street where forty pairs of eyes are fixed on a tiny TV screen. Success – however mild – boosts my spirits. I take a place by the bar, squinting toward the action, animated more by the cheers and shouts of the guys around me than by what little I can make out from the tiny figures racing across the screen. Beside me is a tall, broad man, solidly built around the midsection, who’s telling a story to a friend with great gusto. He welcomes me to the bar and offers me a seat and introduces himself as Akwilin Chuwa. This, I tell him, is a marvelous name, and one that, with any luck, will someday feature in a novel of bold and heroic exploits in the bush. Akwilin, laughing, shaking his broad shoulders, is in very high spirits. My unlikely appearance here, in his brother’s bar, seems providential. There are whoops and cheers as Spain scores a beautiful goal. We order another round of drinks.
Given his girth, his crisply tailored shirt, his thoughtful eloquence, it doesn’t surprise me to hear that Akwilin is a politician – a local councilman with the opposition party, Chadema. We talk at great length about the failures of CCM, the ruling party, and the economic tailspin that began under the reign of Benjamin Mkapa – the first Tanzanian president to be elected under the multi-party system. Mkapa, says Akwilin, ushered in a period of graft, corruption, and bad governance. The results are still plain to see, more than a decade later. Akwilin sweeps his hand across the room, where local boys – ragged, out of school, unemployed – crane their necks to follow the football, or jostle for the pool cue to gamble away some pocket change. There is, he implies, little for Tanzania’s youth to look forward to, with the cost of school fees too high, and the prospects for employment slim. Most of the boys come to his brother’s bar each night, joking and passing the time around the pool table, the 100- and 200-shilling antes passing back and forth between them.
Yet Akwilin is proud of his country, and of his countrymen. Look across the border to Kenya, he says, where just a few months ago, warring tribes were fighting in the streets. Despite the failure of his socialist policies, it was to the credit of Julius Nyerere – Tanzania’s founding father – that he was able to create a single national identity.
“There are more than 100 tribes in Tanzania,” says Akwilin. “But we are not Chagga and Meru and Masai. We are Tanzanian. When I meet someone from my tribe, I do not greet him in my mother’s tongue. I greet him in Kiswahili.”
The history of post-colonial Tanzania is notable – and remarkable – for its stability. Though independence in Kenya came at the bloody cost of the Mau Mau Rebellion, and though the Zanzibar uprising brought a swift and violent end to Arab rule on the island, the transition from colonial rule on mainland Tanganyika was auspiciously peaceful.
“We did not have a revolution,” says Akwilin. “We had white men writing agreements and signing papers. When I was a child, I would watch them coming to gather with the elders in the village, signing papers. There was no revolution in Tanzania.”
In the morning I wander the streets of Moshi, past the arched and domed mosques, past the old railway depot, past the primary schools where students in khaki shorts run screeching out the door, massive bookbags bouncing on their backs. I have lunch at the police canteen, where two giggling waitresses watch my every move. I buy a terrible painting from a guy who looks like he could use a break, I buy a CD of Tanzanian hip-hop, I buy another six-month supply of Lariam, though I’ve already been popping pills for the past year. The days are happy and peaceful here, and I’m not in the mood to go anywhere just yet.
One night I take a taxi to the Glacier Bar, a popular ex-pat haunt on the outskirts of town, rumored to be showing the football on a big-screen TV. On that count the Glacier Bar disappoints, but on the count of drunken, orange-bedecked Dutch girls cheering for Holland, it’s a rousing success. I have a few drinks with an old Dutchman, Albert, who runs a safari company in Moshi. We talk about my work, and about his travels in Africa. He’s deep into a bottle of Konyagi by half-time, and his attention starts to wander in the second half. Suddenly, precipitously, he grows blindingly drunk. He staggers and sways and offers apologies at his drunkenness. Nearby a husky Tanzanian guy stands up, steps back from the bar, and collapses in a pile on the hardwood floor. We collect him into a chair and call for a taxi. Albert, leaning heavily on the bar, looks at me in a boozy haze.
“You are one of the ones who really understands,” he says, and then his voice trails off. I lean forward, eager for the sage-like pronouncement he was about to levy on the world. What, exactly, do I understand? He stands up and sways boozily to the side, and then he, too, is in a heap on the floor. Certain morals involving the Glacier Bar and Konyagi are becoming crystal clear. I help him into a chair and call for another taxi. While I’m hunched over him, offering reassurances and giving his shoulder a sympathetic squeeze, I notice our Tanzanian friend has staggered off. In the distance I see his large, tipsy silhouette making its way toward the front gate. He stops to exchange a few words with the askari, rocks heavily to the side, and then he staggers into the night.
As the main gateway to Tanzania’s northern safari circuit, its streets crammed with muscular, mud-spattered Range Rovers plastered with logos for local tour companies (Comfort Holidays, Sunny Adventures, Bushbuck Safaris, Leopard Tours), Arusha attracts hustlers, strivers and small-scale entrepreneurs from across the region. Around the clock tower roundabout – the city’s central landmark – there are flurries of greetings and handshakes, obscure combinations of clenched fists and pounded chests I’m still struggling to decipher. Business cards are passed out, paintings unfurled, bracelets dangled on long daisy-chains. A bedraggled old man wags a Masai sword at my chest, suggesting it would make the perfect keepsake. I ask if he’s ever tried to clear customs with a machete. He smiles limply, shaking his head, and offers a few batiks instead.
It is a small but energetic town, the odds always good that if the guy on the street corner doesn’t want to sell you something, he knows someone who does. A painting, a wood-carving, a walking safari into the foothills of Mt. Meru. One portly man, perhaps unimpressed by the slow traffic outside his fruit stand on a Thursday afternoon, ambitiously ventures, “Are you maybe looking to invest here?” In just a few days I’ve been cornered, corralled, forced with a peristaltic push through rows of masks and necklaces and slender statuettes. The days are warm, the sky patched blue and gray. In the afternoon the clouds part over the mountain, and the scalloped ridges around the summit shine gold over a scrawl of lingering clouds.
Despite its reputation for hassles and hard-bargaining touts, I’m already warming to Arusha. The level of ingenuity, of thrifty entrepreneurship here, never fails to impress. Packs of boys roam the streets selling cheap wristwatches, survival knives, thermoses, brass teapots, porcelain mugs, sneakers strung together like sausage links around their necks. Men hunch over a workbench – a derelict coffee table; a wooden plank atop two orange crates – dissecting cell phones and watches. They screw and solder, fingers maneuvering through piles of springs and batteries, cathodes and circuit boards. Tailors and seamstresses work in the shade outside their shops, bare and stockinged feet pumping the pedals of old Singer sewing machines. Cigarette-sellers wear grooves into the sidewalks on Sokoine Road, hawking slim packets of Sportsman and Embassy and Safari, coins rattling loosely in their hands.
On Old Moshi Road I watch a game of three-card monty beneath the leafy boughs of a mango tree. The dealer shuffles three tea biscuits across a cardboard box, one with a bright red logo stamped on the bottom. A man beside me explains, “He buys the biscuits because they are 50 shillings” – cheaper than a deck of playing cards. Deft sleights of hand, the rapid-fire patter of Kiswahili offering the game’s universal, idle promises of fast money. There’s a commotion as two khaki-clad traffic cops come whizzing down the road on a motorbike. The crowd scatters, the biscuits are pocketed. I’m surprised the dealer doesn’t think to devour the evidence. A few men thrust their hands into their pockets and whistle conspicuously in the shade. Minutes later I’ll see them getting harassed by a baton-wagging cop just up the road.
On the way back to my hotel one afternoon I’m accosted by a young Rasta on Sokoine Road. He’s friendly, rambling, prodigiously stoned; behind his milky eyes, I catch just the faintest flicker of the mercantile instinct that ignites most of the touts in Arusha. He introduces himself as Saaduu.
“When you see something, in Kiswahili, you say ‘saa,’” he explains. “And ‘duu,’ duu is like cool. Saaduu. It’s like when you see something cool. You get me, man?”
“Um,” I say.
“That’s cool man,” he says, wagging his Rasta head. “That’s real cool.”
We cross into the shade, where the street vendors are preparing for the evening’s trade. Slouching men peel oranges from the back of a donkey cart, barefoot women roast corn over charcoal grills. Saaduu bobs along beside me, his strides long and slightly springy. He wears a black baseball cap which reins in great coils of hair; when he shows me his identity card, the photo reveals thick braids pronging up from his head, like the limbs of a baobab. He pats a long scroll of canvases tucked beneath his arm, a gesture that’s wistful, slightly paternal. Saaduu is an artist, born in a small coastal town near Dar es Salaam. Like most of the guys I meet around town, he’s come to Arusha because of the bustling tourist trade – a chance to sell his work, meet foreigners, maybe find a sponsor to help him earn a degree at the local college of tourism.
Outside my hotel he shows me his work, tribal masks and village scenes and women’s faces etched from coarse grounds of sand. He tells me about the difficult process of grinding down stones, of the different ones he’ll use to achieve different colors and textures. He tilts one drawing so that it catches the light, grains of sand lit like stardust. When you look at it, he explains, you can pretend you’re lying on the beach, staring up at the sky. It is awful, and I buy it, and I pay way too much for it. Saaduu scrawls his name and phone number across the back. Later I prop it on my desk, tilting my head from side to side to reveal different constellations in the sand. Saa. Duu. Saa. Duu. You get me, man?
