Farahahi is an ideal companion in a small compartment, a police detective heading back to his post in Kigoma from leave and discretion itself, deflecting my questions about the nature and scale of crime in the lake region with polite vagueness. Like all the Tanzanians I have met, he is beautifully mannered, interested but never intrusive. Last night he showed me how to wedge the length of wood provided in the compartment against the window to prevent thieves breaking in. Cat burglars are said to prowl the roofs of carriages at night in search of open windows through which to swing, although the agility and daring required for such a career defy belief.
Overnight we left behind the palms and swamps of the coastal plain and the sun came up today on the African savannah with which I have been familiar since childhood. It is hard to fathom how so empty a landscape can still hold one in its power. The only features to rise above the scrub and thorn bush that stretches from horizon to horizon are the baobab trees, frozen as if in alarm like giant scarecrows.
This route was followed by generations of Nyamwezi, the indefatigable tribe of porters employed by the explorers and traders. Harry Johnstone remarked: ‘What other race would be content to trudge twenty miles a day with a burden of 60 lb and be regaled on nothing but maize and beans?’; and their skills were so valued that the Germans prevented their movement to British territory. But we are now passing through the land of the Wagogo, Tanzania’s least envied people. Looking out on this void, one is struck by the absence of opportunity for improvement or escape. The odd settlement consists of a few mud and thatch huts of a type unchanged for centuries, a mournful looking cow and a straggly maize patch. No road reaches here, no enterprise, only the train which passes four times a week. What hope does this bring to the naked child squatting in the dust, or the teenage girl in rags, barely out of childhood herself but already with a baby on her breast? No more than did the caravan of the explorers passing by this very way 140 years ago.
My greatest discomfort is that the ice in the zinc tub behind the bar has all melted, and the beer is now warm.
Ujiji, Lake Tanganyika: Saturday, 15 March
THE INLAND SEA WAS slow to reveal itself. Although no more than a few hundred yards away, the longest freshwater lake in the world, 420 miles from north to south and covering almost 14,000 square miles, was quite invisible.
I stood at the top of the village where the matatu dropped me from Kigoma, looking round for some indication of the direction in which it lay. A faded wooden sign painted ‘memorial’ was the only clue. A rutted dirt path sloped down through an avenue of palms and mud-and-pole huts from which children chirruped like crickets, ‘Mzungu, hello mzungu.’ Finally, out of the black-green foliage of a mango tree, an iridescent shard emerged.
In Burton’s case the disclosure was so gradual that he was initially dismayed. His first glimpse of the Sea of Ujiji was a streak of light that suggested little more than a pond and he cursed his folly for having endured such hardships over the eight-month march for so poor a prize. Then, advancing a few yards, ‘the whole scene burst upon my view, filling me with admiration, wonder and delight. Forgetting toils, dangers and the doubtfulness of return, I felt willing to endure double what I had endured.’
This coyness of the lake to show itself is part of its allure. Since arriving in Kigoma yesterday I have come to it from different points and there seems always to be a moment of revelation. Moreover, like all natural features with the power to enchant, its mood shifts constantly. At dawn today it was a tranquil sheet of colourless glass. Later it turned ugly and brown under a heavy sky and choppy little waves broke on the beach. Yesterday at sunset I sat transfixed at the water’s edge as the sun fell away towards the rumpled blue mountains of Zaire in the west, then dropped over the edge, drawing the two elements of air and water together into a single blazing arc of copper.
It was not just the spell of the place that convinced Burton he had solved the riddle of the Nile, but logic. The mountains visible on the western side are about forty miles away, while to north and south the waters run away seemingly without end. In their explorations of the lake by boat, the explorers reached neither extremity. Even so, it was clear that the Sea of Ujiji, or Tanganyika as it was known by the lacustrine peoples, was the largest freshwater lake yet known outside North America. This had to be the fountain of the Nile.
The mango tree through which I first glimpsed the lake also concealed the memorial. Fourteen years after Burton and Speke became the first white men to reach Lake Tanganyika, a second encounter took place. Livingstone and Stanley were here for different purposes, the missionary having been drawn into searching for the still-unresolved source of the Nile, the journalist for a scoop. If African exploration can be said to have had a symbolic nexus, it is surely here at Ujiji.
The memorial to two Englishmen is better kept than most modern state buildings in Tanzania, as if by a secret and capricious hand dedicated to maintaining relics of a forgotten past. A concrete path lined by canna lilies rises to a mound set against the backdrop of a vast mango tree and surrounded by blossoming trees and shrubs – pink and white frangipani, purple bougainvillea and scarlet poinsettia. The monument, erected by the colonial administration, is an ugly thing, a cairn of stone blocks engraved with an outline of Africa superimposed by a cross; a bronze plaque, donated by the Royal Geographical Society, reads: ‘Under the mango tree which then stood here Henry M. Stanley met David Livingstone 10 November 1871’.
Ujiji had been founded by the Arabs as a slave-trading centre around 1840. Its reputation was dreadful. Livingstone, who had learnt to rub along with the slavers when necessary, detested the place. ‘This is a den of the worst kind of slave traders,’ he wrote. ‘Those who I met at Urungu and Itawa were gentlemen traders. The Ujiji slavers, like the Kilwa and the Portuguese, are the vilest of the vile.’
At the water’s edge a dozen or so fishing craft lurched on the crest of small waves. They were handsome and substantial vessels, low and broad in the beam, high at the prow. Similar craft landed here to disgorge slaves in Livingstone’s day, having crossed from the other side of the lake where Tippu Tib maintained the raiding outpost of his empire. Now the boats are bringing across a new human cargo from the distant blue mountains of Zaire to the west. Refugees – albeit refugees able to afford the $15 a head in hard currency demanded by boatmen – are fleeing civil war. African armies are rightly notorious for their handling of civilian populations and there is no sign that Laurent Kabila’s rebel guerrillas are any better than the norm. Even on the boats the refugees are not out of danger. There are stories of engines failing and overloaded boats foundering on the lake with the loss of anything up to eighty lives.
The beach settlement was a seething little place with a hard edge. Among the huts made from plaited palm fronds were the suspicious faces of a community dependent upon illicit or surreptitious trafficking. For the first time I have sensed some of that brittleness of the African trouble zone. It is felt in a place where the easy laughter is suddenly not heard, it shows in stony eyes and hard appraising looks, and it coalesces around groups in which one figure, with the cool contemptuous lip of the strong man, stands out.
KIGOMA LAY JUST up the lake from Ujiji. Like most colonial towns, it was located a decent distance from the native settlement. These days though, Ujiji and Kigoma are consorts and matatus constantly ply the ten-mile run over the hills.
The matatu is the transport system of the African masses, and an agent of almost revolutionary change. Where a generation ago peasants were tied to the land from birth to death, the coming of cheap mobility – in the form of networks of Japanese minibuses criss-crossing the continent, leaping borders – has altered the demographic shape of Africa. It has also made Africa’s roads the most dangerous in the world. I was to travel a good deal by matatu but my