I wondered how Joseph had come by his windfall. Breezily he dismissed the question as though such were an everyday occurrence. Conversation continued but I was unable to get any more out of him before, beer and food consumed, he got up with his pole and vaulted back down the alley into the dark.
Jackson said: ‘Don’t worry. Everyone around here knows him.’
So where did the money come from?
‘He is a gambler. He begs some money, then he comes down to the port to play dice. Sometimes he has very good luck, and you will see him like now and he wants to buy for everyone. Then another time he will lose and you hear him say’ – here he dropped into a theatrically feeble voice – ‘ “Please my friend, help me, I have nothing.’”
‘And people help him?’
‘Oh yes. When he has plenty, he gives, when he has nothing, we give.’
I bought a round myself and left, walking down a teeming street to find an eating-house. By the time they brought the rice with a watery bowl of chicken curry I knew I had picked the wrong place but it was too late to leave. The wall of sound thudding from the music system was nothing new; Swahili pop poured out of ghetto blasters on every corner, garish and cheerful like the streets themselves. In the eating-house, though, the sound came from a CD system. Either the disc or the player was faulty and the music would get through just five bars before skipping back and repeating the same five-bar phrase.
Like any Englishman, I waited in confident expectation for someone to change the track. No one did. The waiters went about their business, the owner sat at his table filling out bills, the diners appeared oblivious. After five minutes I was grinding my teeth. After ten minutes I started humming in an attempt to set up a rival sound world in my head as a distraction. It was hopeless. I gave up and measured the duration of the five bars: just under five seconds. Each minute, the phrase was repeated roughly twelve times.
The other customers seemed heedless of it, their attention fixed on the business of eating. Either their thoughts were in a place where the noise could not reach them, or apathy gave them a kind of protective resilience. In any event, here was evidence of an awesome capacity for detachment that I would do well to mark.
Then the thought came to me: this was the test. Many petty irritations lay ahead, crowded buses, frontier queues, street hassles, experiences more challenging than mere noise. For enduring in Africa, however, this was a starter: one had to be able to pass the Five-Bar Test. When I left half an hour later the same five bars were still playing.
ALLY SYKES WAS an unlikely name for a Zulu and Dar es Salaam an unusual place to find one of Shaka’s people. Ally was one of the most prosperous businessmen in Dar, kept a house on Hampstead Heath and had educated his numerous children at British public schools. Yet he had been a leading light in the founding of Nyerere’s socialist Tanu party.
It was all quite simple, he explained. His grandfather, Sykes Mbowane, came from Zululand, having adopted the name Sykes from an English employer. The Germans recruited Sykes Mbowane in 1888 as part of a mercenary Zulu force to drive the Arabs from the coastal area around Bagamoyo and, after the job was done, he stayed on. His son duly took a German name, Kleist, during the period of the Kaiser’s rule, and fought with General von Lettow Vorbeck’s Schutztruppe, which led the British East Africa Expeditionary Force such a merry dance from 1914 to 1918.
After the war, Germany lost its colonies and the territory fell under a British mandate, so the family dropped the name Kleist and reverted to Sykes. And when the Second World War broke out, Ally volunteered for the King’s Africa Rifles. Thus, while the father fought against the Crown, the son fought for it, seeing action in Burma and ending the war as a staff sergeant, the highest rank attainable by an African.
‘I can tell you, if there had been no war, there would have been no uhuru,’ he said. ‘When I joined up, we thought the whites were gods and the Asians were demigods. Then we got to Asia, and we saw there was poverty – more poverty than in Africa. We mixed with the white soldiers. We saw them get drunk like us, and go out looking for girls. In Bombay we were waiting to go home and I said, “Hey, these Indians are talking about independence. Why not us?” That was even before Nyerere got involved.’
He had an unremarkable office in a typically rundown block of Dar. The floor was carpetless, paint peeled from the walls and the only decor consisted of school and university certificates of Ally’s children. Even at the age of seventy-two he was a broad, powerful man with a great hoary head, an African version of Anthony Quinn. When he laughed, which he did easily and frequently, his mouth opened like a walrus’s. There was something unnerving about him though, a lurking ferocity.
Why, I asked, had Nyerere’s socialism failed?
‘We Africans are much more capitalist than Europeans. I told Nyerere. I said, “You know yourself that no African will be respected unless he has a farm and cattle.”’
So why then had Africa failed to develop under capitalism?
‘The problem is the Asians. They corrupt everything. They are here to milk the blacks.’ Suddenly there was real venom in the genial countenance. ‘They must go, by force if necessary.’ He spat it out.
Like Idi Amin did in Uganda?
‘Amin’s mistake was he did not replace the Asians with intelligent Africans.’
But now Museveni had invited the Asians back and Uganda was booming.
‘You can’t trust them. They will always keep to themselves. Take the British Legion clubs here or in Kenya. You will find blacks and whites drinking together. But Asians do not have Africans at their clubs. The Asian is like that. He thinks differently to us.’
The last time I had heard racism expressed as virulently was in South Africa. Now here was this old monster, a regular at the British Legion and a lion of the diplomatic circuit, fêted as a jovial cove with good connections and a deliciously indiscreet line in gossip. If any demur was raised about his attitude to Asians, it was dismissed as an eccentric quirk, Ally’s little thing.
What about the differences between black and white, I asked.
‘That’s another question. We have a similar understanding, we can talk straight,’ he said. He winked conspiratorially. ‘And we can share a joke.’
THE OLD SLAVERS’ route continued to define the way to the interior. When Burton and Speke left the coast, the track swung south-west out of Bagamoyo towards the Uluguru mountains, then turned north-west, through the wilderness of the Wagogo country towards the Arab stockade at Tabora before proceeding directly west across the Malagarasi river to the Inland Sea. Forty-seven years later, the Ost Afrikanische Eisenbahn Gesellschaft was formed, to build a railway that would trace the explorers’ footsteps. To this day it is the only land link from the coast to Lake Tanganyika.
The Germans were late to start African railroads. The Uganda Railway, the British line from Mombasa to the lake region, had been in operation for four years before the first track was laid from Dar es Salaam towards Ujiji in 1905. The terrain was, if anything, more difficult – albeit without the complication of man-eating lions which plagued the British around Tsavo – but the Germans’ work rate was exemplary. Tabora, 530 miles away, was reached in 1912, two years ahead of schedule, and the lake in 1914. The first locomotive completed the 795-mile run from Dar just seven months before the outbreak of war.
In colonial times the journey took thirty-nine hours. The buffet car was well-stocked, compartments offered sleeping accommodation and, as I had heard from a friend who used to be a district commissioner near Kigoma, the journey was regarded as a pleasant prelude or coda to home leave. Now, according to travellers’ reports, there was no certainty of food or drink and even less about the time of arrival.
In the late afternoon passengers and friends milled around carriage windows in a colourful riot involving the wrestling of suitcases and bulky packages through tight openings.