Tomorrow I will take the train following in his trail.
THE OVERNIGHT TRAIN TO Mwanza, seething with passengers in sweaty, hot darkness, brought back memories of long-ago railway journeys in India. Fleeing a swarming compartment, I set out in search of refreshment. In the dining-car an overhead light spread a thin ochre smear on the grimy walls. A few men sat around drinking warm beer. Two figures caught my eye.
One was a peasant woman with her head deep in a book. It came as a shock to realise that she was the first person I had seen reading since setting out. She wore a ragged skirt, a grubby T-shirt bearing the legend ‘The Dark Secret’ and had her hair tied up in a cheap purple scarf. Her book was entitled Chinese Literature. On the back cover was written The Women’s Trilogy.
The second figure was an Asian in his thirties with a moustache and glassy smile who was drinking with a group of Africans. He noticed me and brought his beer over. He was a coffee trader, a wheeler and dealer in a notoriously sharp business, but had been cutting deals of various sorts all his life. He had made big money in the ‘good years’ under Mobutu in Zaire and had interests in Canada and Australia, where he had scraped under the immigration wire – ‘it’s hard to get in, but even harder for them to get you out’. He was tough, shrewd, sleek and cosmopolitan, an artist in the game of survival.
He asked where I was going next. Across Lake Victoria by ferry, I said. His face lit up with a look of demented glee. ‘My wife was on the Bukoba,’ he said, and sat grinning wildly at me.
I was stunned. Nine months earlier the grossly overloaded ferry Bukoba had been approaching her berth in Mwanza when she capsized. Well over 700 people were on the boat, which had a capacity of 430, and only those on the upper levels managed to scramble into the water. Many more could have been saved but rescue workers, who heard shouts and banging from those trapped in the air lock, drilled into the hull. As the air giving the Bukoba buoyancy rushed out, she sank like a stone. Only fifty-three survivors were picked up. Perhaps 700 people died, including a Ugandan businessman on whose body was found $27,000 in cash; the great majority were still entombed in the wreck at a depth of about ninety feet.
I must have looked horrified and muttered an apology. The man was obviously a maniac, perhaps demented by grief. His face was still flushed with mad excitement.
‘No, no, you don’t understand,’ he said. ‘She escaped.’
As he related it, he had always known the Bukoba was ill-fated. ‘Even when it was empty it stood so,’ he said, indicating a list to one side. ‘I have worked in ships and I knew that was a bad one. I said to my wife, “If you are on that ship look out, and if anything happens, don’t fight the water. You can’t fight the water.” When it happened, when the boat went over, she remembered. She just let herself go, and the water pulled her out. She could not swim, but she remembered, “don’t fight the water.” So she floated, and they rescued her.’
He was an Ismaili Muslim, one of a community living around Lake Victoria. I had thought him an unattractive, mercenary fellow. Yet he was typical of the outsider, grafted on to Africa by colonialism, who had endured and persevered as we, the Anglo-Saxons and Celts, had failed to do.
This fact was starting to affect my hopes for the journey. Since leaving Daudi Ricardo in Dar es Salaam, I had encountered not a single white who might be categorised as ‘staying on’. That was not entirely unexpected. The flow of settlers to Tanganyika had been restricted under the British mandate and confined to two main farming areas, the Southern Highlands, where Daudi had his ranch, and the Arusha – Moshi region in the north; even there virtually no white farmers remained as they had lost their land in Nyerere’s disastrous nationalisation of agriculture. Old age had carried off all but the last of a handful of diehards.
Nevertheless, it was a sobering thought that the nation which had once taken such pride in its imperial legacy had left so little of itself behind. A colonial census of Tanganyika in the 1950s recorded a white population of 18,000. In England I had met a number of them, former colonial servants whose task had been to prepare one of the Empire’s most neglected territories for independence, and had been struck by their high-mindedness, their dedication and their genuine love for the country. All continued to wish Tanzania well, many maintained ties of friendship, some were active benefactors. Yet none had stayed on. It was as if their love of Africa had survived because of, rather than despite, their distance from it.
Here, on the other hand, was the descendant of one of the 80,000 Asians recorded by the census. They had consolidated and prospered. My companion had his bolt-hole in Australia to flee to if there should be an anti-Asian purge here. In the meantime, he was part of Africa, living from day to day, adapting for survival, disdaining complacency, mixing easily with blacks but totally without sentiment.
‘One day they may send us out,’ he said matter-of-factly as he moved off to rejoin the African drinkers. ‘Sometimes they hate us, sometimes not. It comes and goes.’
THE FEATURELESS, GREEN landscape passing outside the train window had hardly changed in a thousand miles. I was reading Nostromo when Conrad’s description of a hard peasant landscape in South America brought me upright with its echoes from ‘a great land of plain and mountain and people, suffering and mute, waiting for the future in a pathetic immobility of patience’.
So it continued on the route that Speke followed north of Kazeh. Still, he made comparatively rapid progress and had covered about 200 miles in two weeks when a transformation came upon the landscape, hinting at the imminence of discovery. From the plains emerged at first hills, dotted with granite boulders. Then the hills closed in, rising on either side of a valley while the boulders multiplied, piling in chaotic profusion on top of one another but creating strangely logical formations – a great turmoil of grey shapes on which, here and there, improbably balanced, stood a single column of granite. As the train threaded its way down through this grotesque and capricious avenue, the Nyanza came slowly into view, a steely blue plate stretching away under a leaden sky.
From the moment he saw it, Speke was convinced: this and not Tanganyika was the goal of the quest. Standing on a hill near the modern town of Mwanza, he surveyed his prize and decided to name it Victoria in honour of his sovereign. He had no doubt, he wrote, ‘that the lake at my feet gave birth to that interesting river, the source of which has been the subject of so much speculation. This is a far more extensive lake than the Tanganyika, so broad that you could not see across it, and so long that nobody knew its length.’
Speke’s conviction was stronger than his reasoning. While it was true that nobody knew the Nyanza’s size, the same could be said of Lake Tanganyika which, it turned out, was almost twice as long. He stayed at the Nyanza just three days, not long enough for even the rudimentary survey that he and Burton had carried out at Tanganyika. When he returned to Kazeh and declared that he had solved the Nile riddle, without advancing any evidence other than that of his eyes, Burton was dumbfounded; his dull lieutenant had suddenly become a deadly rival. In the furious debate that ensued after the explorers returned to London, each took up his position on the basis of prejudice, Speke because he had found the Nyanza, Burton because he had not.
Speke did not live to see the truth of his conviction verified. A year after their return, by which time he and Burton were bitter foes, Speke went back to Africa, this time with his own obedient deputy, James Grant. In an epic three-year journey they penetrated to the Nyanza and passed up the western shore to Buganda and the court of the Kabaka Mutesa; from there, Speke alone proceeded to the rapids at the northern outlet of the Nyanza where the White Nile took its rise, before rejoining Grant and continuing their march up the Nile to Cairo, cabling ahead ‘the Nile is settled’.
But