My first experience that morning had been nasty and brutish, if mercifully short. Setting out from Kigoma, I had looked over the white vans jostling with one another on the red earth like termites. Each had a legend stencilled on the windscreen, a sort of mantra to attract passengers. I was not taken with either Bongo Wagon or Sugar Baby. Dear Mama was too wistful and One Lord King too pious. Big Boss and Top Squad were slightly ominous while No Time to Waste and Over The Top ruled themselves out. In the end I opted for the neutral-sounding Mwanga, named after an early Bagandan monarch.
It was a bad choice. The driver was a hatchet-faced cowboy in white shoes and sharp T-shirt determined to pass anything that moved, despite the poor state of a road that obliged oncoming traffic to veer into the middle to avoid pot-holes. His taste in taped music was execrable too, the worst sort of ‘yo-bitch-who-ya-callin-muthafucka’ American rap. Although I was in a privileged front seat position, insulated from the seething mound of bodies in the back, it was an unpleasant journey.
Matatu stands are places where the stratification of African society is immediately visible. Here boys become men and men become demigods, with power not only over mobility but life and death itself. As befits members of a dangerous profession, the drivers are swaggering dudes, their conductors street-wise youths handling fistfuls of banknotes as coolly as any Las Vegas high-roller. In this hierarchy, passengers are only one step up from the vendors who hustle drinks or fruit and dream of becoming conductors.
As ever though, status is a deceptive thing. The most powerful figure in this chain, the matatu owner, is not even visible. Most drivers lease their vehicles and pay out a large chunk of their takings before dividing any profits on an agreed basis with their conductors. Each has a role in maximising the potential of their partnership – the conductor to squeeze as many bodies into the available space and the driver to cover the route as rapidly as possible. The twin imperatives of crowding and speed are what make matatus so perilous.
I decided to return to Kigoma by Cobra Line, for despite the menacing legend the driver had a sympathetic face. It was pleasing to find my instinct vindicated: he had better road manners and his tapes were reggae and Zairean electric; and I realised, as I nestled between a large lady’s bosom and the spare wheel, that the discomfort of the back had its compensations. You felt a lot less vulnerable. Africans tend to opt for the front seat if given a choice, while the few whites I met who used matatus went for the back. Not that there is much difference; in high-speed crashes there are few survivors.
I FOUND THE hotel in Kigoma with the help of a lady I met along the way. Armed only with a sketch map, I had been tramping down a muddy Lumumba Street for about twenty minutes and was beginning to think I had lost my way when she appeared from behind a tree.
Did she know the way to the Lake Hotel? In reply she asked if I spoke Swahili.
‘Nafurahi sana kukuona’ I said. This was my standard conversational gambit and means roughly, I am very pleased to make your acquaintance.
Up to now this had been greeted with hoots and guffaws of derision, but now it produced a crow of delight and a high five. She pointed the way to the hotel and in English invited me, entirely without archness, to her club in the evening. ‘Cold beer, fish and chips, dancing …’ Clearly, my accent was improving.
The Lake Tanganyika Beach Hotel was a relic of colonial times, rather frayed but clean and a travellers’ delight. Its appeal had nothing to do with nostalgia: there was no faded sign pointing to the Ladies’ Powder Room, as at the African House Hotel in Zanzibar, or the Dornford Yates novels in a glass-fronted bookcase at the Outspan Hotel in the Kenya Highlands. What the Lake Tanganyika Beach offered was courtesy and a view overlooking the lake that one might happily contemplate in the hour of death. The English convention that breakfast is not complete without an egg endures, and here, under a thatch umbrella, I feasted beside the lake every morning on an omelette and fresh fruit.
Courtesy was the feature of Tanzania which, I confess, had surprised me the most. My only previous attempt to visit the country had not been encouraging. Travelling on the Tazara railway with my wife in 1976, we were set upon by immigration officials, abused, arrested, marched off the train under armed guard and sent packing back to Zambia on no more than the suspicion that we might recently have passed through South Africa. The fact that we had done so did not reconcile me to the treatment we received.
Power and Africa appear uncongenial companions. Too often the meek and affable young man has been transformed by the possession of a Kalashnikov into an unstable brute, the earnest graduate by some minor bureaucratic office into a vindictive pedant, the new leader assuming office with the promise of reform into yet another egregious autocrat. Yet now it was not only the grace of the humble which was touching, but the politeness, and an even rarer quality, kindness, of officials: the railway clerk going out of his way to find me a place on a packed train, the policeman taking pains to see me to my destination after being asked for directions. These services were all the more unexpected for being offered without any hope of reward.
Kigoma was a leafy and attractive little place with a single tarmac road curling up the hill towards Ujiji, lined with mango trees distinctive for the density of their foliage and fleshy leaves of a green so dark that the tree sometimes appeared black. The town was a combination of rusty native shanties and ponderous Germanic architecture, the yellowing railway station built to last until Doomsday and the whitewashed pile of the Kaiserhof on the hill which remained the headquarters of the local administration. Kigoma was comfortable with this ambiguity. A few streets had been renamed to reflect the era of independence but the changes were not wholesale, and imperialists had been left to co-exist with revolutionaries and nationalist heroes, Burton with Lumumba, Stanley with Nyerere.
This tolerance was reflected in Kigoma’s attitude towards the refugees, not just those from Zaire, but the hundreds of thousands who had fled the holocausts of Rwanda and Burundi. Whereas the mood in Ujiji was edgy because of the refugee traffic, here the migrants were being left to improvise new lives. By night they found shelter at one of three United Nations camps. By day they emerged to trade. Private enterprise was flourishing by the roadside – a Burundian man barbering a customer on a wooden stool, a woman whose two children played under a mango tree while she roasted maize cobs over charcoal, a youth at a shoeshine stall bearing the legend ‘Customer is the KING!’
The most striking thing about the refugees was the matter-of-fact way they went about their affairs. These were not the faces one associated with the images of African crises, haunted and dislocated casualties, enduring but helpless. The elderly woman and her daughter, calling out a greeting as they walked gracefully by with little bundles of possessions balanced on their heads, did not look like victims.
They had been walking for two weeks. When the ethnic killings started near their home in southern Burundi they wrapped a few essentials in bright cloths and turned away from the shamba where they lived by cultivating matoke, the plantain which is the staple of these parts. Living under open skies and by their wits, they walked south-east towards the Tanzania border. As Tutsis, they avoided Hutu settlements when it was possible, although in one place it had been a Hutu woman who gave them food when their few grubby banknotes, hoarded and wrapped in an even grubbier handkerchief, ran short. They also avoided the men in uniform whose behaviour could never be predicted. Nearing the border, they simply walked off into the bush – which in these parts is very thick, and dramatically beautiful – and crossed into Tanzania without even knowing it. They had probably covered 160 miles since setting out, and now were about to present themselves at the local office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
A local UN worker told me the flow of Burundian refugees had slowed but there were still around 170,000 in the district. Now it was Zaireans who were arriving at the rate of about 1,500 a day and this influx of a further 90,000 from across the lake had strained local patience as well as aid resources. The Burundians were thought of as placid folk, amenable to administration, but the Zaireans had a reputation for being difficult.
‘It’s as if they believe we owe them,’ the UN worker, an Australian, said. ‘I mean, of course we’re