Approaching Zanzibar, with the green line of the shore scrolling by, I fiddle with my iPod while the sun warms my cheeks. This is not at all a bad way to live. Soon the vegetation gives way to the whitewashed walls of Arab palaces, to church spires and minarets, to the dhows breezing into port with their sails puffed out. There’s a bustle around the ferry terminal, a heaving mass of porters waiting, as I’ll soon learn, to scramble onto the boat, grab at anything in sight, and hope that the owners of a particular bag will – too flustered to argue – fork out a few shillings for them to carry it onshore. Livingstone, arriving at the start of what would be his last visit to Africa, found all the clamor of Stone Town, its duplicitous dealings and hypocrisies, to be distasteful. Raw sewage and human excrement filled the streets; “the stench at night is so gross or crass,” he wrote, of the place he dubbed “Stinkibar,” “one might cut out a slice and manure a garden with it.” Murderous thieves prowled the streets at night. Foreign diplomats and merchants – bent on their own Machiavellian schemes – plotted behind closed doors, eager to cash in on the island’s riches while ignoring its odious role in the slave trade. Livingstone wanted no part of the place. Instead he longed for the pleasures of the bush, far from the tainted influence of the white man, where “the stimulus of remote chances of danger either from beasts or men” was preferable to the coarse designs of the Americans and Brits.
I – no Livingstone, to be sure – will be happy for a month of good eats, steady boozing, and promiscuous Europeans in skimpy swimwear. At the Pyramid Hotel, climbing the vertiginous stairs, dumping my bags in a room on the top floor, I lie in bed and kick off my shoes and stare at the ceiling fan. Outside a crow squawks and beats its wings, lifting from a corrugated iron roof. Children’s cries sing from everywhere. I take a long shower and unpack some fresh shirts and go downstairs to meet with Ibrahim. He’s a handsome, chatty, agreeable man, and his solemn promises to find me some nice digs bode well for the month ahead. I run down my list of non-negotiables – a fully functional kitchen, natural light, plenty of space – and give him a ceiling of 300 bucks. He says he’ll see what he can do.
Outside, with dusk approaching, I lose myself in Stone Town’s twisted nettle of alleyways, visions of the great souqs of the Middle East dancing through my head. My inner Arab approves. I’m feeling upbeat about the month ahead, eager to unravel the mysteries of these winding streets – and, just as importantly, to sit at my laptop and begin the laborious project of getting my writing back on track.
The apartment question, though, is a distraction from the start, desperate for resolution. I’ve arrived on a Tuesday afternoon, and, at the risk of being impulsive – this will be, after all, my home for the next four weeks – I’m hoping to find a comfortable pad by the end of the week. I enlist the help of everyone I meet – the ubiquitous, gregarious beach boys are eager to make a few bucks at my expense – and by day two, I’ve already lined up a half-dozen house calls around town. My hopes and spirits are high: with any luck, I’ll have a place wrapped up by the evening’s sundowners. Ken, a portly kid in a wool-knit hat who, as I’ll soon learn, is one of Stone Town’s most eager hang-abouts, assures me he knows the perfect place. That things are going improbably smoothly at this point doesn’t raise a single alarm. Desperation, when it rears its ugly head, will do funny things to a guy’s capacity for common sense.
Ken, fat and mirthful, prodigiously sweating, takes me to his home and introduces me to his father. Ikrima is tall, angular, athletic. He wears a cut-off Nike t-shirt and running shoes and a look of shellshocked befuddlement at the pudgy, waddling progeny plucking the shirt from his moist man-breasts. He takes me to see a friend’s house on the north end of town, a gated, white-washed building with air conditioners thrumming in the windows. The owner is doing some business in Malindi – a neighborhood nearby – and we sit on a bench in the shaded courtyard, waiting for the keys to arrive. It’s a hot afternoon, and the glare from the walls is severe. Soon four girls in shorts and spaghetti-string tops come outside, chattering in some quick European dialect. Two more girls follow minutes later. I am very pleased with the neighbors.
The houseboy arrives and he takes us inside, where we kick off our sandals and march up the dusty stairs. Ikrima shows me the kitchen and living room, the washer-dryer, the bright, airy spaces still inhabited by a lingering, feminine aura. He shows me the master bedroom, handsomely furnished with Swahili dressers and four-posted bed frames; it is about the size of a bowling alley. He shows me the kitchen again, turning the faucets and watching me watch the water that comes gushing out. Downstairs he calls the owner, who offers the room for $20 a night. I ask about long-term rates, but he’ll go no lower than $550 for the month. This is almost twice the price I offered Ken, and suddenly the visions of lazy afternoons on the living-room sofa, slathering sunscreen onto my cohabitants’ pearly backs, are replaced by images of a blunt butter knife slipping easily and bloodily between Ken’s puckered tits.
It’s just the start of what will prove to be an afternoon rife with stupidity. After each disappointment Ken haplessly blubbers about another place just down the road, still grinning beneath his wool-knit hat, marching on through the heat. Before long it grows clear that whatever requirements I’d originally offered for my prospective pad – size, cost, location, general unshoddiness – have been entirely drowned out by Ken’s eagerness to show me something, anything, that might lead to a commission. He takes me to meet a friend, Said, who’s renting a small apartment somewhere in the middle of town. We discuss terms in front of his own home – a tidy, modern little building that’s so new, it practically has a price tag on the window – before he shows me the neighboring rental. The windows are dusty and opaque, the gates rusted; a few stray, feral cats prowl through the high grass, looking hungry and abused. The only thing missing is the chalk outline and the police tape. I tell Said I’ll think it over.
Again Ken leads me through the maze of Stone Town’s back alleys, little kids beating spare tires down the street with sticks, old men sitting scrunched up on the barazas. We stop outside another house and rap on the door. A portly man answers, giving Ken an intolerant once-over before asking my business. Ken explains that we’d like to see the apartment his son is renting, but the man disapprovingly clucks his tongue. The apartment, he says, is a two-bedroom, and while I’m welcome to look around, it’s bound to be out of my price range. His fat head wags sorrily on the thick trunk of his neck. He wears a white t-shirt with armpit stains the color of egg yolk. When Ken, laboring through the heat, retires to the shade nearby, the man says,
“These boys, they cause so many problems.”
“Not problems,” I say. “Frustration.”
“Frustration,” he says. “Yes.”
We soldier on. In Vuga, a quiet, leafy neighborhood next to touristy Shangani, we enter the compound of one Dr. Mehta, his name painted in bold white letters on the building’s blood-red walls. I’m hot and hungry and no closer to an apartment than I was when I rolled out of bed in the morning. My patience with Ken is quickly running out. We trudge up a flight of stairs and find a fat, elaborately made up Indian woman reclined on a divan, looking languid and expectant, as if we’d come bearing gifts of gold and Arab spices. She waves us inside, her gestures slow and sensuous, her little feet tucked up beneath her. The place is decked out in gilt-framed paintings and little elephant statuettes of obscure Oriental gods. The woman tells me in a high, trilling, Hindi-accented voice that she’s from Texas. At the table a bedraggled, one-legged man sits with a crutch across his lap, fussing with a half-dozen pill bottles. When he offers to show us the apartment he swings to his foot with a deft movement, props himself on his crutch, and starts poling himself across the room like a gondolier. I have no fucking idea what’s going on here.
The apartment he shows us is large, musty, dim, depressing. The living room furniture looks like it was pilfered from a Holiday Inn, the bedroom mattresses seem to have fallen prey to hungry rodents, and the cloistered, yellowing light has the air of a place where people go to die. I poke my head into the kitchen, the counter cluttered with rusty knives and a doleful assortment of pots and pans, and wonder what tales of culinary woe might be told if those walls could talk. Outside, careful not to upset my one-legged friend’s balance, I give him a gentle hand-pump and offer to think it over. At which point I explain to Ken in firm, less-than-kindly terms that his services will no longer be needed.
It’s been an exhausting day, and by the afternoon, bitter and defeated, I go for a long walk around town, wondering if the day’s headaches are an ill omen for what might lie ahead. I pass the old court house and the dispensary, the library sitting handsomely decrepit at the end of Creek Road. I pass the clamor of Darajani Market, the cries of the fishermen unloading their catches onto the slick pavement, the haggling over prices, the colorful chaos. Could this place really be a home for me? Nearby a spice-seller, Said, offers to walk with me through the narrow, winding streets of Malindi. I’m reluctant for more company: after my trials with Ken, after the other predatory touts circled with their own apartment offers, the last thing I need is another guy looking to get something out of me under the pretense of being helpful. I’m cold, brusque, hoping he’ll get the point. Subtlety, however, is about as useful in these parts as a down jacket. Said hangs to my side, points the way. We turn corners, disappear down blind alleys, find a marvelous old building with elaborate balustrades and Swahili doors carved with all the faithful craftsmanship of a Spanish cathedral. Old barefoot men recline on the barazas, women in headscarves fan themselves in doorways. There are kids shouting, scooting, pedaling too-big bicycles with wild abandon. We turn once and then once more and then suddenly we’re in the courtyard of the Aga Khan Mosque, its handsome, elaborate façade flooded with late-day sunlight. The madrassas are out, the girls in bright white hijabs, the boys in swirling caftans and crooked kufi caps chasing each other through the courtyard. Their shouts, their shrill voices, carom off the walls and shoot into the sky like a flight of swallows. And it’s at this very moment, this bright sunshot instant, that I remember what it’s like to fall in love.
Back at the Pyramid, Ibrahim’s friend, a local fisherman, is home from work. His is the last apartment I have the strength to see today. He points to a building just twenty steps from the hotel, jangles his keys, opens the door. The apartment is on the first floor, a cavernous one-bedroom with a modest kitchen and a canopy bed and a gaudy living room decked out with gold tulle curtains and silk floral arrangements. It is, in its own scruffy way, absolutely perfect. He names a price: three hundred US bucks. I ask when I can move in. The next morning I haul my things the short walk from the Pyramid. I unpack my musty old backpack and fuss with the dresser and armoire. I plop down on the living room sofa and turn on the TV and pad around the house with naked proprietorship. The highlight of my day is buying a carton of milk, putting it in the refrigerator, and looking at it. After close to two years, even if it’s just for a few short weeks, I’ve finally found a place to call home.
After such an inauspicious start, I’m expecting little from a few days around Dar: a good cup of coffee, fast Internet, maybe a bit of shopping to beef up my musty wardrobe. In the morning, though, with a warm tropical breeze blowing through the streets, with the candy-colored façades catching the sunlight, I’m finding it a surprisingly agreeable place. The great wagging palms, the weather-stained colonials, the barebacked men pulling rickety donkey carts down the street: there’s something of the sultry clamor, the colorful bustle of Mombasa, that stirs so many fond memories.
Suddenly the prospect of passing a few days, a week, doesn’t seem so unsettling. We watch the clamor from our balcony, the colorful whorls of bougainvillea, the man straining behind a cartful of coconuts. Due south the soaring minarets of Mosque Street, trumpeting the call to prayer, the fervid soul-rocking blasts. One of these, compact and ornate, with green onion domes and elaborate Arabic script etched into the stone, has become my favorite sight in the city. I’ll make a point to pass it once, twice daily in the week ahead, admiring the hysterical whiteness of its walls, the artful arrangement of domes and spires. In the afternoon the beggars sit in the slanted shadows: old men on crutches, colorfully swaddled women with infants crawling across their laps. After the Friday prayers they’ll line the sidewalk outside, hands extended, coins jangling, wrenching alms from the guilt-wracked faithful spilling into the hard daylight.
After the scruffy, shambling charms of the north, where whole towns and cities seem to have popped up overnight, there’s something appealing in how this city clings to its roots. It is history, on whatever small scale, that greets you in Dar es Salaam. Founded by the Zanzibari Sultan Majid, son of the great Seyyid Said, the “Haven of Peace” was built as a sort of pleasure palace on the shores of the Indian Ocean. But the early seeds failed to blossom; eclipsed by the more vital port of Bagamoyo to the north, the Sultan’s playground languished in its tropical torpor. By the time the Germans chose its protected harbor for the seat of their colonial government in the 1880s, the little village that would become modern-day Dar was all but buried in the bush. Eventually it grew into a busy trading community, a vital harbor. But the years haven’t always been so kind. In the weather stains that spread across the trading houses and dry-goods shops, the runnels and cracks of history, you see the slow, plodding passage of time. Still, there’s still a tangible presence here, a sense of past lives being lived. Today the dates carved into the city’s façades – 1952, 1931, 1917 – seem, by East African standards, prehistoric. And in a country where the dominant modes of construction – brick, thatch, mud, tin – are almost elemental, these buildings are a reminder of a purposefulness, a care, a modest artistry, that causes a funny little stir in my heart.
For many Tanzanians, of course, they are a different sort of reminder – not so much of the colonial past, but of the long, slow, slouching progress toward modernity. On a broad, stifling, sun-washed avenue, fighting through the heat, I meet a young musician, a reggae singer, who’s moved to Dar from the north. We walk past tall concrete towers – government buildings from the socialist ‘70s – and look with quiet deference toward the Mövenpick, the Swiss-owned luxury hotel, standing stoic and ramparted with its Moorish archways and fluttering flags. It is, to Mass, a symbol of the great economic strides being taken around him, this impregnable, five-star fortress by the sea. Turning away from it, into a chaotic nettle of streets, he shakes his head with distaste at the crumbling colonials.
“For you, these buildings are beautiful,” he says. “But for us, they are old, they are ugly. We want to tear them down and build something new.”
For Mass, the blue-glass skyscrapers of the Nairobi skyline would be a bold leap forward from the colonial claustrophobia of downtown Dar es Salaam. The past, after all, has hardly been kind to most Tanzanians, and for the countless hustlers and strivers who come to Dar in search of better fortunes, the city gives their ambitions a physical shape. It’s grown quickly in recent years; today, the population is estimated at close to three million. But as Mass, smiling, slightly tilted forward, as if rushing toward some unfulfilled promise, tells me about his music and his family – about the private past he’s trying to escape – I get the sense that this city, for all its rapid growth, isn’t growing fast enough.
The road to Dar es Salaam has been long and bumpy for Mass. He left Tanga, a small coastal town in the north, to pursue a music career in the city. Selling bracelets and necklaces, sunglasses and t-shirts, he was able to put together enough money to buy some studio time. He recorded a few songs; later, after performing live around the city, after receiving favorable reviews in the local papers, after aggressively promoting himself to tourists on the streets of Dar, he befriended a German who wanted to support his fledgling career. The man paid for Mass to record a full-length album; he pulls a copy from his backpack, along with a binder filled with newspaper clippings. Now Mass is hoping to raise enough money to produce a short video. If he can show it on EATV, alongside videos from established Tanzanian artists like Professor Jay and T.K.O., it might give his career the big break he needs.
Still, despite his guarded optimism, Mass seems exhausted by his struggles. By day he walks the streets, promoting himself and selling CD’s; at night, spreading a blanket across the pavement near a popular tourist restaurant, he sells more of the hand-made jewelry that helped get him started. It has been an uphill climb; battling the music industry establishment here, dominated by the hip-hop acts that have made Dar the capital of East African music, he’s found it hard to sell his soulful, conscience-raising songs.
“They do not like messages,” he says of the local music executives. “They do not want what is right, they want what is wrong.”
And still he survives, hustles, soldiers on. He sells me two CD’s, and offers the hope that I can promote him through my writing abroad. He’d like to record his video, and another album; if he finds enough modest success, he hopes to visit his family in Tanga, too. It’s been two years since he last saw them; when he speaks to his mother on the phone, she asks when he’ll come home. But the ticket to Tanga is costly; and for a prodigal son returning from the city, it’s expected that he’ll come bearing gifts for his family, for his neighbors. Mass shakes his head, wondering where all the money will come from.
“Life is hard, brother,” he says. “Surviving in the world is hard.”
