The train pulled out precisely on time at 5 p.m. I had a 1915 map of Dar es Salaam which showed the town limits ending in a grove of coconut palms about 500 yards down the track. Now the train ran through mile after mile of shanty suburbs, each with a dustbowl football ground at its centre surrounded by breeze-block homes under rusting corrugated iron roofs. Late on a weekend afternoon, the touchlines were packed but the passing of the train, an event which occurred a mere four times a week, was sufficient for a game to come to a temporary halt while crowd and players turned to wave.
When Burton and Speke set out in June 1857 their objective was not so much ‘the coy sources of the White Nile’, as Burton put it, as ascertaining the limits of the ‘Sea of Ujiji’, the vast inland lake known only by repute from Arab travellers. The two men had made one previous journey together, a brief and disastrous foray to Somaliland, but at this stage there was no hint of the tragedy ahead. Burton, the dazzling polymath, soldier, swordsman, linguist, ethnographer and eroticist, was unquestionably the leader. Speke, a rather inarticulate man with a seemingly placid nature, worshipped him like an elder brother.
They were equipped on a heroic scale. In addition to their food and camping requirements, the 130 porters carried books, medicines, tools, cases of brandy, muskets, cutlasses, medicines and scientific instruments including two chronometers, two prismatic compasses, two sextants, a sundial, rain guage, barometer and pedometer, all of which had been lost or stolen long before they reached Lake Tanganyika. Among their miscellanea were two dozen penknives, two thousand fishing hooks, seven canisters of snuff, arsenical paste for specimens and one Union Jack. But neither man had brought adequate clothing and by the end both were reduced to rags stitched together from blankets.
Little navigation was required as the caravan followed trails running from one village to the next and occasionally encountered parties coming the other way with ivory or slaves, but the prevailing mood among the porters was fear of the unfamiliar: stories circulated about hostile tribes who were unerring shots with poisoned arrows; of rhinoceroses able to kill hundreds of men in a single charge; and of armies of elephant which fell upon camps at night. Partly as a result, the expedition was to be plagued by desertion. Burton claimed that over the two years of the journey, every man attempted to desert, including Sidi Bombay, who was in charge of the bearers and was beginning his own considerable career in African exploration.
Of even greater concern was the explorers’ susceptibility to sickness and disease. They had barely left the coast before suffering their first bouts of the malaria that was to afflict them almost constantly. Sunstroke prostrated them. Their legs swelled and their eyes became infected; at various stages both suffered blindness. When ill they initially rode on mules but as the animals were whittled away by tsetse fly they had to be carried in hammocks slung on poles between porters. They were tormented by mosquitoes, scorpions, ulcers, insomnia and flesh-eating ants. One night, Speke awoke to find a beetle burrowing into his ear ‘like a rabbit at a hole’ and in trying to extricate it with a knife succeeded only in perforating his eardrum, which became agonisingly infected.
The coastal belt extended for about ninety miles inland across the hardest country they would encounter, a combination of swamp and jungle ‘monotonous to the eye and palling to the imagination’, as Burton put it, a steaming miasma from which an odour of sulphur arose and where ‘the traveller might fancy a corpse to be hidden behind every bush’. Marching from dawn until late morning, when they made camp and spent the rest of the day writing up their notes and journals, it took them four weeks to clear the coastal belt and reach the Uluguru mountains. Once the high ground was attained the going became easier. By then, however, a problem more intractable than any of the others was emerging.
No two less suitable companions for such a journey could be imagined. Speke’s outward affability concealed a burning ambition and a growing resentment of the older man’s condescending manner. It did not help that he had little interest in their surroundings besides hunting. ‘Nothing could surpass these plains for dull sameness, the people are the same, everywhere in fact the country is one vast senseless map of sameness,’ he wrote in a fit of depression.
Burton, opinionated and domineering, was absorbed by everything. He learnt Swahili and took notes on geology, zoology and botany. He remarked on the quality of the local cannabis indica – ‘a fine large species’ – while demonstrating his breadth of acquaintance with the subject whether ‘the bang of Persia, the bhang of India, the benj of Arabia, the fasukh of northern and the dakha of southern Africa’. Above all, he immersed himself in the study of ethnography and here the contrast with his companion was perhaps most acute.
Burton believed, like virtually all of his contemporaries, that Africans were inferior to Europeans. But, as his biographer, Fawn Brodie, has written, he was unlike most in seeking a scientific explanation for racial differences. He attributed African torpor to the effects of climate and disease, and ‘degradation’ to the slave trade. Witchcraft, he believed, was the source of a debilitating ‘fear which ignores love’. He did a good deal to promote the notion of black men as sexual athletes but did not simply take at face value the envious whisperings about penis size and staying power; he claimed to have measured a Somali ‘who, when quiescent, numbered nearly six inches’, and to have evidence that Africans could prolong intercourse for an hour, yet be ‘capable of performing twice during the night’.
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