The German fortress had stood the test of time better. In the courtyard four young men sat around listlessly. Even my feeble attempt at Swahili was enough to establish that they were not locals but, it turned out, visiting Zambians. ‘We are staying in this place,’ said one, gesturing at the deserted fortress.
I commiserated. It was in better shape than most places in Bagamoyo but not much and now, on a weekend, there seemed little in town to divert four young men. They nodded in mournful agreement.
‘We are here on a United Nations course,’ the same man explained. ‘We have come to learn about preserving our historic buildings.’
Was it my imagination, or did I detect a hint of mockery here? I had spent some time in Zambia and had never thought of it as having a great deal to preserve.
‘You mean like the museum at Livingstone?’
‘Ah, you know our country. No, not Livingstone, Lusaka.’
‘State House,’ said another of them. They giggled.
I had not been wrong. Here, indeed, was irony.
‘The Pamodzi,’ put in a third, in a reference to the capital’s top hotel, a bit of modern grotesquerie. They nudged each other and chortled. This was a routine.
‘Cairo Road’ – Lusaka’s grossly rundown main thoroughfare. They hooted.
‘The bus station’ – perhaps the most blighted on the continent. They roared.
‘And … and …’ the first picked up the thread again, ‘and we are learning about preserving this heritage …’ he struggled to control himself, ‘… in Bagamoyo.’
They shrieked.
We compared dates, but they were still to be in Bagamoyo when I expected to reach Lusaka. It was a big disappointment. I had not met ironic Zambians before.
I started back for town to catch the bus for Dar es Salaam, still savouring the encounter. The truth is, I had been feeling a bit apprehensive. The guidebook had prepared me for trouble in Bagamoyo. ‘[There is] a real possibility of being violently mugged,’ it said. ‘This can happen at any time of the night or day and your assailants will usually be armed with machetes which they won’t hesitate to use even if you don’t resist.’
Just when I was thinking my anxiety had been misplaced, there was a terrific thud to one side, as if from a rock falling from a great height. This was not far from the case. A coconut weighing perhaps 10 lb had dropped from the top of a palm tree and landed just a few feet away. If it had hit me, my skull would have been crushed. This was not as remote a possibility as it might have seemed. I had once read an intriguing item of trivia about some tropical paradise where the highest incidence of accidental death was due to falling coconuts.
Suddenly, an urchin was flying across my path towards the fallen object, an expression of fixed intent on his face. Too late. A young woman on the other side of the road was already swooping. She collected up her prize, chirruping delightedly, and bore it off. The urchin grimaced, then noticed me watching and grinned.
There was no bus station, just a clearing beside a few wooden stalls selling soft drinks and chicken stew with rice, and a thatch shelter where travellers waited until the bus turned up. After that the driver waited until the bus was full. I had boarded promptly to get a seat, then waited sweating for almost an hour while the bus slowly filled up. It was my first lesson. To avoid being stifled even before the bus departed, the trick was to board at the last moment that seats were still available.
At least I had a seat. The bus was full when we left town; by the time we were a few miles down the road the interior resembled Groucho Marx’s cabin in A Night at the Opera. The aisle was so tightly packed that standing passengers were forced by pressure from the centre to lie on top of those on the seats. To round off the discomfort, the road was abominable. Once the fifty-mile stretch from Bagamoyo to Dar had been under tarmac, but that had long since dissolved and not a trace of bitumen was now left. The dirt surface was gouged by deep rents, forcing the driver to proceed as though ferrying a cargo of precious china. Even so, there was no avoiding all of the troughs, and our crawling progress was punctuated by a series of sickening bangs which shuddered through the length of the bus like rolling thunder. At a speed averaging a little under 20 mph, this seething, broiling caravan of misery crashed down the trail forged by traders and explorers.
My breezy optimism evaporated again. I had barely set out on a journey of some 8,000 miles and, if the next 7,995 were anything like as bad as this, I could not imagine how I was going to last the course. I had to acknowledge to myself that my spell as a foreign correspondent in Africa more than ten years earlier had not done much to prepare me for this. As a tribe, journalists in Africa dwell amid the sweetest landscapes, live off the finest pasture and know all the best watering holes while making fleeting forays – on expenses and usually in packs – into what they like to call the Heart of Darkness in order to tell the rest of the world what a hellhole Africa really is. This time I would be staying in cheap guest-houses, travelling by bus and matatu, the ubiquitous minibus transport of the masses, and eating at roadside kiosks. There was nothing original or intrepid about this; thousands of young travellers did it every year and took the discomforts in their stride. But the thought occurred now that a backpacker entering his fiftieth year was a rather pitiful and ludicrous figure.
The bus had been lurching along for some time when I noticed that among the standing passengers pressing up against me was a child, a girl aged about four. She was out on her feet, slipping into sleep and kept upright only by the press of bodies. Her mother was a few layers of body away. Almost without thinking, I collected the child in my arms and lifted her into my lap. She barely looked at me before falling asleep.
It would have been unthinkable in my own country. For more than an hour the girl slumbered, oblivious of me and the tortuous progress of the bus. I was left to reflect on a curious pleasure; the pride of being accepted by a child, and to realise that I had not enjoyed such a degree of physical contact with one since my teenage son and daughter were that age. Every now and then I was forced to adjust my position, insofar as the human pressure allowed, to avoid cramp. The child would wake, look around for a moment, and go straight back to sleep.
Eventually we reached the outskirts of Dar es Salaam and bodies started to drain away from the bus. Before they got off, the mother looked at me, smiled and said a thank you: ‘Asante sana.’ The child hopped off without a backward glance.
THE HOTEL WAS near the bus station but it served no beer so I set out into the night to find a bar. Down an alley I came to a dimly lit shebeen where a woman dispensed drinks from behind a metal grille. I took a seat on a plastic chair outside. The Safari lager came, icy and foaming, and I sat sipping quietly on my own until a ragged cripple with a deformed foot, vaulting himself along on a pole up the alley, stopped beside me.
‘My friend …’ he began, and I waited for the inevitable gambit, the entreating eyes, the extended hand. Then I looked up and saw that his face was alight with excitement.
‘My friend, let me buy you a beer,’ he said. And he sat down and shuffled through a wad of banknotes. I did a rapid calculation that there was roughly $22 in the hands of a cripple in a dingy quarter of one of the world’s poorest cities.
I thanked him but said I had not finished my own beer yet. We were joined by a man named Jackson who said he was a fish trader, down among the rusting hulks beached in the port. The cripple introduced himself as Joseph, bought beers for himself and Jackson and ordered skewered meat to be brought from a nearby stall.
The place bustled with the camaraderie of workers winding down at the end of a week. They were labourers, matatu operators, street traders and perhaps the odd pickpocket. The shebeen owner moved among the tables, replenishing empty beer glasses. Word of Joseph’s hospitality