7

Tanzania Through the Back Door

Kyotera to Shinyanga via Bukoba

At dawn the Concern compound’s gnarled trees stood out blackly, like an Arthur Rackham etching, against a greenish sky streaked with slender clouds: smoky blue, old gold, mauve, then suddenly all crimson. Kyotera is a virtual cul-de-sac; the twenty-five miles to the border, on a good gravel road through open rolling country, were traffic-free. To the east shrub-scattered golden grassland stretched all the way to the invisible Lake Victoria and the mountains of Rwanda smudged the south-western horizon. I passed only two wretched hamlets where it bothered me to see World Vision AIDS Advice Centres, an interesting measure of that organisation’s thoroughness; ‘AIDS Orphans’ photographs must delight their fundraisers. As Graham Hancock wrote in Lords of Poverty:

World Vision regularly makes powerful and emotional appeals to our humanitarianism. Operating a survival-of-the-fittest philosophy in a competitive market-place, and apparently defining ‘fitness’ not in terms of the work it does amongst the poor but in terms of the funds raised, it is not above sabotaging the efforts of other charities to fill its own coffers … The onward march of Christianity remains an abiding concern of many voluntary agencies. According to Ted Engstrom, President of World Vision until 30 June 1987, ‘We analyse every programme we undertake, to make sure that within that programme evangelism is a significant component. We cannot feed individuals and then let them go to hell.’

The Mutukula border-post has a make-believe air; one feels the intrusion of reality, in the form of a foreign traveller, can’t be taken seriously. Here bureaucracy has many overlapping layers, as though Mutukula had deliberately set about burlesquing the whole notion. Nobody’s function, as a cog in this hilariously elaborate machine, seems clearly defined – perhaps because so rarely exercised.

Layer One was a teenage policeman found snoozing under a mango tree. Seeing the rifle cradled in his arms I roused him gently, lest he leap to his feet, alarmed, and shoot wildly. He shook hands, asked the usual questions, requested me to unpack. Meekly I did so, assuming him to be also the customs officer. Soon I realised that he was simply curious about the gear needed by a mzungu cycling from Kenya to Zimbabwe. Opening my minuscule first-aid box he exclaimed, ‘Little medicine! Why so little? In our countries we have many diseases!’ Then he seized on my Masta kit and asked, ‘What is this? Please, let me see!’

‘Sorry, that can’t be opened until you need it.’

‘Magic!’ he muttered, turning his attention to my tent. He didn’t believe any tent could be so compact. ‘Make it work, let me see!’ I made it work and, fascinated, he crawled in, then emerged to say, ‘But against lions this is no good!’ I explained that tents don’t aspire to be lion-proof. Luckily my gear is minimal; otherwise I might have been stuck for the day at Layer One.

Layer Two – a sentry-box-sized hut, opposite the mango tree – contained Stage One of Passport Control. The occupant was a small, thin, elderly man wearing an urban suit complete with neatly tied tie. He glared at the policeman and said, ‘Young people are very silly!’ Scrutinising my Ugandan visa he frowned, then reproached me. ‘You are two days late, you should have left on Saturday.’ He looked at me sadly. ‘Why are you two days late?’

Truthfully I replied, ‘I was enjoying myself in your beautiful country, I wasn’t thinking about time.’

The officer sighed. ‘You are silly, you could be in prison.’ With a leaking ballpoint pen he transcribed all my passport details into a tea-stained exercise-book. Then he applied his rubber stamp. ‘I’m happy today because you enjoyed Uganda. I hope you will come back.’

Approaching Layer Three, a hundred yards up the track, I reflected that that had been, according to the mythology of travellers, a classic bribe-seeking situation. Quite likely our expecting the worst often creates bribery demands by injecting hostility into the atmosphere.

Layer Three was unexpected: Stage Two of Passport Control, which I’d fondly imagined was done and finished. A tubby little man rushed out of the shack and said, ‘Fill in the form, I go now for my breakfast.’ He disappeared around the corner, then reappeared on a bicycle and laboriously pedalled away up a side-track and out of sight.

Three youths were sitting on a bench outside the shack. I appealed to them, ‘What form?’ They grinned sympathetically, one entered the shack, there was a grinding noise – a rusted tin trunk being opened – and the youth returned with the document in question. It was unusually rational, not inquisitive about my mother’s maiden name, my father’s date of baptism or my grandfathers’ occupations. When Tubby returned, forty minutes later, I had been informed that the CIA introduced AIDS into Africa so that their compatriots could eventually occupy the depopulated continent-needed because their own was becoming overpopulated.

In the shack I presented my passport and form rather ingratiatingly, hoping Tubby would also be lenient about those two days. He didn’t even glance at the visa, he was too riveted by my journey and in his excitement misapplied an ‘Entry’ stamp while questioning me about Kenya. Were they going to have a civil war? Was Moi as bad as Amin only more clever? Why was I interested in Africa? How could anyone earn a living by writing books? Did I sell mine from a duka in a city? Who read them? Why did they read them? What university paid me to write them? Would I please send him copies of each one; he had an army brother stationed in Karamoja who liked reading books and would be pleased to have them. Briefly I considered asking for an ‘Exit’ stamp, then decided to leave well enough alone.

I almost overlooked Layer Four, Customs and Currency Control, in a small round hut where a long notice above a wicker desk gave awful warnings about CURRENCY REGULATIONS (1987). Logically, this is where my panniers should have been unpacked. A languid young man in a purple and green track suit blinked on seeing Lear and me, then said ‘Yes?’

‘You want to look at my luggage?’

He glanced superciliously at Lear. ‘No.’

‘My currency exchange documents?’ I suggested, eager to display my law-abiding persona.

He blinked again and said, ‘Those are not important.’

I moved on to Layer Five which was Security – a tall young army officer lounging in a wall-less thatch-shelter like a market stall. Severely he demanded, ‘You have a camera?’

I confessed.

‘On the border it is forbidden to photograph, this is a sensitive area.’

‘Of course,’ I murmured understandingly, my eyes straying to the tranquil bush, innocent of anything remotely ‘sensitive’ – such as a telegraph pole.

Then bait was cast. ‘In Kampala,’ observed the young officer, ‘you can get a permit to photograph here. Why did you not ask?’ When I involuntarily smiled at this naivety he looked annoyed, hesitated, then decided I wasn’t worth another cast.

Beyond no man’s land the Tanzanian border-post stood back a little from the road – not scattered mud huts but one long shed-like edifice, its grim grey concrete preaching Socialism. There seemed to be no one around and I was tempted to pedal on. Then a Masaka-registered matatu appeared, returning from Bukoba and insanely overloaded with jerry-cans, sacks, cartons and passengers: none black, all fawn with dried mud. Their haggard faces puzzled me until I, too, had experienced those fifty miles.

The matatu’s engine activated officialdom and its passengers were processed first. Momentarily that irritated me: I was at the head of the queue. Then I thought, ‘What a stupid mzungu reaction! My entry is more complicated than their exits, it makes sense to postpone me.’ Evidently everyone knew everyone else; the Customs officers did nothing, the Passport officers were speedy, quite soon the matatu was on its way. These bureaucrats were brisker and less ebullient than their Ugandan colleagues but equally friendly. The form-filling, however, was more arduous; my ability to support myself had to be proved and passport details recorded thrice, in different offices. Yet within forty minutes I was jolting south, between small shambas of stunted matoke surrounding the minute, distinctive straw huts of newly arrived, timid-looking Rwanda refugees; their dwellings were scattered on both sides of this border, wherever they could find free space to grow food. I assured myself that the surface couldn’t possibly be like this all the way to Bukoba. And it wasn’t; it got very much worse. The war is rightly blamed; nothing less than tanks could have so mangled it, gouging out knee-deep crater-lakes that extended right across the track. Given such a surface, cyclists cannot afford to admire the landscape; one’s eyes must be kept fixed on the few yards ahead – or else. So I admired only when I stopped.

The first stop was for elevenses, on a high pine-clad hill. Far below, beyond a matoke slope, lay a boundless savannah plain, golden brown, uninhabited and apparently trackless. Only thirty years ago many elephant herds roamed here. In Bukoba I was told, ‘The elephants have moved on.’ That’s one way of putting it. They were in fact slaughtered, as perks, when politics concentrated the Tanzanian army in their territory.

By noon blue-black clouds were massing to the east, over Lake Victoria. An hour later they delivered as I reached my first Tanzanian village, marred by derelict concrete farm buildings – monuments to Nyerere’s ill-conceived collectivisation programme. The place seemed deserted. Under a giant pine Lear and I shared Joy’s shower-curtain while thunder shook the world and from the slope beside me large pebbles were swept on to the track by the force of the deluge. This pine marked the entrance to a colonial-looking hospital and medicine-less dispensary. As the rain eased off a nurse in starched white uniform and trim red cap came trotting towards the hospital. Her astonishment on seeing me was comical. There was no doctor nearer than Bukoba, she told me, and all her twenty-four patients had AIDS; no treatment being available for other diseases meant no competition for hospital beds. This epidemic came from God who must have some good reason for punishing people. She didn’t believe in ‘unnatural’ condoms; she thought men should pray more and then they wouldn’t need so many women. Tanzania’s Kagera district is no less AIDS-stricken than Rakai but has attracted little international attention; it is not so accessible to journalists and TV teams with limited time to spend on their ‘AIDS story’.

It was still raining lightly when I continued through an area of flat unpeopled bush, the track now so narrow that elephant grass, bowing from banks on either side, met in the middle and tickled my face as I splashed along. Then came the broad brown Kagera river, its rickety plank bridge guarded (against whom?) by a bored young soldier who mumbled something about this bridge being ‘temporary’. Fragments of its more solid predecessor lay in the water. The Ugandan war cost Tanzania some $500 million and no other country contributed to this expensive ousting of Idi Amin. Thus there is nothing left over for bridge-building.

Speke did not exaggerate this region’s beauty. I stopped quite often, to give my shaken frame a rest and gaze at miles of burnished savannah, running to the base of long mountains with grotesque rocky outcrops, and compact shambas in deep fertile rifts, and sweeps of ancient woodland – tall evergreen trees that Speke might have looked upon, united by ropes of flowering creeper. On some slopes the coffee, sugar-cane and matoke were ominously weed-strangled. The poverty of the few desolate villages was starker than anything seen in Kenya or Uganda, or anything reported from hereabouts by Speke in 1861. At intervals, all the way from the border, low electricity pylons could be seen away in the distance – not wired up, many lying on their sides, evidently another ambitious project fallen on evil days.

Beyond the Kagera river bigger villages and occasional vehicles appeared, the latter unable to achieve more than walking speed. Here pedal-power gave me the unique experience of overtaking a jeep and two pick-ups. Between Mutukula and Bukoba there is not one yard of smooth surface. Watching cyclists ahead of me, bouncing along comparatively comfortably on their heavy, well-sprung Indian or Chinese saddles, I reflected that for African journeys mountain-bikes should be similarly equipped; the ‘lightness’ fetish can be taken too far.

Bukoba lies on the shore of Lake Victoria below a high, precipitous mountain which almost defeated me. The gradient was inhuman and underfoot were sheets of raw rock scattered with loose gravel that caused Lear to skid repeatedly as I pushed him up. For several miles the climb continued from ridge to ridge of this mighty barrier, with a few short descents too rough to be cycled. In deep dim ravines below the track frogs were being raucous – the loudest frog chorus I have ever heard. As sunset approached I thought, ‘This is ridiculous, you don’t have to get to Bukoba, you can stop here’ – and so I could have, there were many shambas around. But the chemistry of exhaustion was working: at a certain point one is too tired to be rational. The day’s goal was ‘Bukoba’ – only seventy-five miles from Kyotera – and come hell or high water that goal was going to be achieved.

In the brief equatorial dusk I dragged Lear on to the ridge-top. In darkness I descended at reckless speed, uncharacteristic recklessness being another symptom of exhaustion. Within matoke plantations tiny supper-fires glimmered beside hut doors. On the map Bukoba is a city and I looked for urban lights. There weren’t any. I had been encouraging myself with thoughts of a long descent but it wasn’t like that; the track soon began to switchback through black hilliness – then a half-moon rose, only to be quenched by a wedge of cloud. Here a mysterious convoy of lorries came very slowly towards me: six lorries, seemingly on their way to Uganda. Next day I discovered these were coffee-smugglers doing a regular run. Surely coals to Newcastle? But for some esoteric economic reason their journey – even that journey – would be worthwhile. (Speke noted the Bahaya tribe’s flourishing trade in coffee, a crop often wrongly assumed to have been introduced by Europeans.)

At 8.15 I arrived in what might loosely be described as suburban Bukoba, a row of still active market stalls on a wide ledge, each lit by oil wicks flickering under straw roofs amidst paltry piles of tomatoes, onions, bananas, limes. The smell was of dust and pombe and kebabs (half fat, half offal) spitting on grills. My mental world had long since narrowed to one consideration: beer. Below the track, behind the stalls, a big shack lit by a kerosene lamp emitted loud argumentative sounds suggesting the availability of alcohol. While pushing Lear down the slope I was noticed and a sudden silence spread over the market – all cheerful chat on my arrival. On an outside bench I collapsed, feeling a puerile glow of triumph – day’s goal achieved!

At once Adam, the gentle, elderly bar-owner, took me under his wing. Although shabbily dressed and barefooted he was rich; his twenty acres produced matoke and pineapples, his wife had produced thirteen daughters and three sons – ‘All alive!’ boasted Adam. Mrs Adam was summoned to meet me; she spoke no English but was shyly welcoming. The level dusty area in front of the shack swarmed with toddler grandchildren to whom Adam seemed devoted though he couldn’t remember their names.

That was a weird interlude, my first ‘social occasion’ in Tanzania, shrouded in darkness with gaunt ragged people edging towards the mzungu – tentatively and in silence, not crowding around vociferously like the Ugandans. Quickly I lowered three beers (flat and sour but I wasn’t in a discriminatory mood) and then came back to life. When the usual questions had been asked Adam said thoughtfully, ‘This is very interesting, to write books about the countries you travel in. It is good for us to know about each other. Big problems happen when people make mistakes about other people, because they know not about them.’ Adam then insisted on my sharing with him a glass of throat-flaying banana-spirit.

Two teenage sons were ordered to escort me to the nearest suitable lodging; Adam guaranteed that there I would be ‘safe and well-treated’. As we walked up the track by moonlight one boy asked, ‘Why do you not stay with your grandchildren, to help them? Why do you run around the world when you are old?’

Cheered by beer and inspired by moonlight I quoted in reply:

‘You are old, Father William’, the young man said,
‘And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head –
Do you think, at your age, it is right?’

There was an uneasy silence.

The boys hauled Lear up a steep muddy slope to the Calypso Lodge, standing dark and silent on its hillside. Then they vanished, leaving me in the large square moonlit patio of a standard ‘Africa hotel’ – so handy for cyclists, allowing machines to be wheeled into rooms. A shout brought an agreeable soft-spoken young man to my side; he made friendly noises in Swahili while showing me into a cell. The door was half off its hinges and unlockable, the window’s wire mesh badly torn; the bed sagged like a hammock, neither food nor washing water was available. Then a clinking sound drew my attention to a shadowy corner of the patio where three men sat at a small table drinking, I hoped, beer. A quick nightcap was indicated in lieu of supper; I joined them and it became a multiple nightcap.

Dr Kolimba was elderly, Dr Nyoka not long qualified. Their companion, a Swahili-speaking architect, had come from Mwanza to seek advice on sites for new rural health-centres in the Bukoba area. Both doctors doubted if these buildings would ever get off the drawing-board where they had been congealing for five years, as a direct result of the IMF-imposed Structural Adjustment Programme to which Tanzania reluctantly acquiesced in 1986. The SAP requires debtor nations to cut their spending (never high) on health-care, education and other social services. According to Dr Kolimba, whose English was fluent, the cost of one AIDS test in Tanzania now exceeds the state’s annual expenditure on health for one citizen. Dr Nyoka added that by December 1991 even the World Bank and IMF gurus had admitted that the SAP was not working, or likely to work; no country’s debt had been reduced. But every country’s poorest citizens were suffering extra hardships.

In Kagera district AIDS is now the main cause of deaths in hospitals. The doctors wished more AIDS patients could be hospitalised because of a frightening rise in the incidence of TB. Throughout Africa, this is among the commonest direct causes of AIDS deaths and in crowded huts the infection spreads fast to HIV-free relatives. Apart from AIDS, said Dr Kolimba, malaria and other water-related diseases were resurgent, even where they had become rare, cut-backs having led to deteriorating sanitation systems. And in the Muhimbili Medical Centre – Tanzania’s leading university training hospital, where reliable statistics are kept – shortages of essential drugs and blood had sent the maternal mortality rate soaring. So many women are severely anaemic that post-natal transfusions are frequently needed – another factor putting women at greater risk of HIV infection than men. But in recent years blood supplies have been curtailed, both by lack of transport and the number of HIV + donors. A high percentage of mothers, suffering anyway from overwork, underfeeding and too many pregnancies, develop complications not often heard of nowadays in the West.

Both doctors shared the general scepticism about those African AIDS statistics so confidently announced by the World Health Organisation. All African statistics are suspect and those more than most. Only in certain situations, like the screening of donated blood and the testing of pregnant women in chosen ‘sentinel’ towns, can the figures be taken seriously. However, the screening of blood (almost always donated by a close relative) was also being hampered by lack of funds. Many healthy people anxiously seeking a test have to be turned away; the limited supply of test-kits must be reserved for screening, or to confirm that patients with significant symptoms are HIV +. The countrywide lack of laboratories prevents most AIDS infections, among HIV+s, from being diagnosed – and even prosperous prostitutes can no longer afford to have their STDs treated. ‘From a dozen points of view,’ said Dr Kolimba, ‘poverty makes it impossible to cope with AIDS in Africa. But we go on trying.’

Dr Nyoka saw a need for many more Western counsellors to help HIV+s adjust to the verdict and live constructively with the threat. His older colleague disagreed; Western counsellors were worse than useless, what Tanzania needed was a TASO. (The AIDS Support Organization, founded in Uganda in 1987 by Noerine Kaleeba, herself an AIDS widow, combines counselling techniques learned in Britain, where her husband died, with the cultural – or spiritual – resources provided by traditional African society. Its emphasis is on Africans learning to cope with the crisis in their own way.)

I applauded Dr Nyoka’s next suggestion. ‘America looks now for a new enemy, why not have AIDS for that enemy? Why not put all weapons research money into AIDS research? And into helping us with screening and testing and giving soothing medicines to the dying?’

The architect, for whom Dr Kolimba was translating, asserted that could never happen. He was bitterly pessimistic, expecting AIDS research funding to be cut as the West learns how to deal with the virus and comes to see it as a major threat only to expendable others. Drug companies, he was certain, would not continue expensive research if the main market for the end-product lay in the world’s poorest countries.

Before this unjolly party broke up, Dr Kolimba invited me to visit his hospital next day. It stood on a hilltop above the Calypso Lodge and had three syringes for 300 patients. A recently built mud-brick annex for AIDS orphans might interest me. Those infants were only being housed pro tern; another solution would somehow have to be found … While expressing gratitude for this invitation I knew I would shirk accepting it. My resistance to the sufferings of AIDS patients was decreasing – a curious reversal of the normal emotional pattern.

Trebly painful was my first Tanzanian dawn. That multiple nightcap generated the sort of wish-I-were-dead hangover I thought I’d grown out of; an empty stomach must have exacerbated over indulgence. Then there were my dully aching bones; those fifty malign miles had left me sore all over. Finally, my body was a measled mass of itchy bites – a result of that torn insect-screen. In addition, hunger audibly gnawed at my vitals and I had squandered on beer the small sum changed at the border. Then I felt guilty about feeling self-pity about feeling hungry when thousands of Africans were at that very moment dying of starvation. I was, in short, a mess.

Happily the staff grasped my predicament, though none spoke English, and granted me four cups of weak tea on account: there was still no food in the restaurant. Then I tottered out to find a bank, shrinking from the dazzle of the rising sun.

On the previous evening I had not, after all, reached my goal. Bukoba proper lay two miles away at the foot of the mountain with Lake Victoria beyond, all silver and still. The town is overlooked by colonial remnants on well-wooded ridges separated by cultivated valleys – deep green valleys, in which women do the family washing beside racing muddy streams.

At 7.30 pedestrians were thronging down the battered remains of a tarmac road, past shambas, dukas, closed hotelis and roadside women traders desperate to sell their produce. Cyclists were far fewer than in Uganda and the blatant poverty shocked me. Why such poverty, where hundreds were on their way to work in government offices, banks, schools, markets, factories? Evidently my route was taking me down the scale. Uganda had seemed much poorer than Kenya, Tanzania seemed incomparably poorer than Uganda. But then, entering Tanzania via Bukoba was perhaps like entering a house through the back door and first seeing the neglected scullery. Surely other towns must be less impoverished …? Well, yes – but only marginally so.

Once upon a time things were different. Several large mosques, temples and churches bespoke wealthy worshippers. An enormous filthy covered market, reeking of rotten fish and neglected latrines, offered few goods but proved past prosperity. Two- or three-storeyed colonnaded shops-cum-dwellings, with fine wrought-iron balconies and Asian family names proudly moulded on plaster façades, lined wide streets now almost impassable to wheeled traffic. Many unemployed young men loitered about looking hungry and, like jobless youths everywhere, exuded the musk of latent aggression. Amin’s planes bombed Bukoba in 1978 but fourteen years later, in a town so beat-up, it was hard to distinguish between bomb damage and economic collapse. At least half the shops and merchants’ residences have been boarded up and abandoned; Asians still run the other half but trading is limited – I couldn’t find a pair of shoes. Pale-faced, delicately featured, large-eyed children – dressed as though for a party – gazed down from their balconies or walked decorously beside grown-ups along the dusty streets. I also noticed an unusual number of mixed-race young adults, allegedly the consequence of failing businesses during the Nyerere era. Then the traditional Asian aloofness became impractical and the unthinkable had to happen – marriage into Black families whose political affiliations allowed them to thrive when all around was an economic wasteland. The Asians, too, speak Swahili rather than English, which illogically surprised me; they have, after all, been settled in Tanzania for three or four generations.

While waiting for the bank to open I wandered down to the nearby shore and birdwatched, not very successfully, through shaky binoculars. Then I sat on the edge of the beach, in already hot sun, talking to three amiable characters who saw the Kagera district as ‘doomed like with a plague in the Bible – only God can save us!’

This passing of the buck to God had come to irritate me more than a little and being anyway in a filthy temper, for reasons specified above, I said so. ‘When people have been educated about AIDS each individual can save him or herself from the virus. It’s not God’s decision.’ My companions, all men in the 35-40 age-group, looked awkwardly away. Possibly one or more was, or soon would be, infected, given the scale of the local epidemic. Were this a matter of personal choice – not God’s business – they would have to admit to being responsible for their own fate. Afterwards I reprimanded myself for having lapsed yet again into cultural imperialism; but, like the missionaries, I meant well. Scratch any White, I thought gloomily, and you find a cultural imperialist. And to think that this journey had been planned as a therapeutic exercise!

The Forex desk in Bukoba’s bank does not attract a queue yet a sullen young clerk took one hour and twenty minutes to change my sterling notes. Tanzania’s banking system is surreal. Western banks breed a welter of profiteering bureaucrats whose every devious move costs the customer some hidden charge; but someone (not anyone I want to know) gains. The Tanzanian system has been devised by maniacs to obstruct, confuse, enrage and frustrate without making any profit for anyone. Unlike the Western-owned banks in Kenya and Uganda, they deduct no percentage for charges and ‘postage’. (Postage is an infamous con-trick, as though the individual’s few sterling notes had to be sent to the City of London in a registered packet for which the customer must, naturally, pay.)

In an excellent Gujerati café I wolfed a three-egg omelette, four chapattis, two liver kebabs, a kilo of chips and five cups of cardamom tea. The sad-looking man sitting opposite me exclaimed, ‘You are too hungry! From where you come?’ He taught in a primary school eight miles away, on that mountain which almost defeated me. ‘In my village you get not many strangers to bring disease. But from our 420 pupils 25 family is orphans. That is 174 children from 420. Can you help us?’

I said I could only help with advice. He should teach his pupils about AIDS in detail. They should know it is not like malaria, cholera, measles, that the virus is easily avoided if they choose to avoid it.

‘Not possible!’ lamented the teacher. ‘For me, impossible to tell my pupils all this! You are right, but if I say all this they think I say the dead parents were bad people!’

This Kagera district was a favourite vineyard of the early missionaries. Both the German Protestant Bethel Mission and the Roman Catholic Benedictines arrived in 1910. The Germans were eager to create separate Christian villages, heedless of the grim lesson taught by Uganda’s sectarian wars. They built that huge covered market and started a trade mission, hoping to deter Godless Arabs and Asians from moving in – a hope soon dashed. When Tanganyika became a British mandated territory the CMS took over, abandoned the trading strategy and concentrated on (inappropriate) education, enthusiastically supported by the first British District Commissioner, one Mr Baines, who happened to be an evangelical Anglican. Characteristically, the Roman Catholics rejected a Protestant suggestion that Tanganyika should be divided into ‘spheres of influence’. Thus the Africans were exposed, for half a century, to the unedifying spectacle of White Christians at each other’s theological throats on a daily basis.

Now Bukoba boasts two 1960s cathedrals, Protestant and Catholic. The former is ugly in a stereotypical ’60s way, a see-how-clever-I-am construction, all pretentious angles and curves signifying nothing: it might as easily be a factory, a corporation head office or part of Leeds University. The Catholic effort is something else; I photographed it lest that memory might come to seem, in the future, no more than a hallucination induced by too much bad beer. The photograph lies beside me now, proving that I did see what I thought I saw. Truly there is something diseased about this agglomeration of pigeon-holed concrete walls, decorated by the rains – via leaking gutters – with black, brown and green stripes. The exterior motorway-type pillars are set with plastic tiles, now falling off – and not before time. Little squares and big sheets of pseudo stained glass form a large part of the façade. The whole is surmounted by a metal cross on a metal tripod on a metal globe sprouting four metal objects that might have fallen off a space-craft. Further novelties are available within. The floor slopes steeply down to an altar modelled on a conveyor-belt and the Stations of the Cross appear to have been executed in plasticine by very young untalented children. I sat in a plastic and aluminium pew for half an hour of a Holy Week ceremony conducted by an obese bishop so rotund in his golden robe you felt he would roll away if dropped on his side. He was assisted by twenty priests, in glistening brocade chasubles, and four censer-swinging youths. The congregation was far outnumbered by the pigeons busily flying in and out, shitting on all and sundry. If you will design a cathedral like a grossly magnified dovecote, what else is to be expected? Later I found that local Catholics are almost deliriously proud of this edifice. But no one could tell me who the architect was, where he came from or went to – I fear the poor fellow may have ended up in a psychiatric ward. How much did the Christian Churches spend on their prestige competition (when one built the other had to) during a decade that saw the local schools and hospitals declining fast?

Bukoba’s glory is its lake shore, a golden sandy crescent curving for miles around the wide bay below a vividly green embankment. This sort of place is by now, in most parts of the world, tourist-sodden. I, however, had it to myself as I walked towards the Customs Office. By then the seasonal forenoon wind had risen and white waves frisked on the deep blue water. A few miles off-shore lay a scrubby islet shaped, disconcertingly, like a nuclear submarine – and inhabited, my binoculars revealed. (Post-breakfast, these no longer shook.) Ahead of me a long wooded promontory sheltered Bukoba’s important port. There is no road – not even what Tanzanians call a road – to Mwanza; all traffic must go by water and Tanzanian Railways runs a speedy, efficient ferry service. Now I could see the Victoria, spick and span, painted dazzling white. She would sail at 9 p.m. and dock at 6 a.m.; a nine-hour non-stop journey, as compared to the three hours from Britain to Ireland, which helps get Lake Victoria in perspective. At the Customs Office I booked a berth in a six-berth second-class cabin (£4) and bought Lear’s ticket (80p). And there I met Mumfi, booking a ticket for the first stage of her return journey to the UK a week hence.

During the hot noon hours I sat with Mumfi on the wide veranda of the Lakeside Hotel, a spacious, solid, very British colonial relic. The bwanas would weep to see that the shore directly below the veranda is now defiled by the sprawl of a rectangular, Marxist-grey café, shop and club – all long since closed.

Mumfi was strikingly beautiful but her disturbed state had been obvious when we met. She talked very fast, never looking directly at me. Her mother had been a Gujerati Muslim, born in Bukoba like her parents before her and brought up in her own wealthy community – in spirit as strictly segregated from the Africans as any Afrikaner. When she eloped, aged 17, with a Bahaya secondary school teacher her family and the entire community rejected her. ‘Yet my father was a fine man, kind, honest, intelligent. They had a good marriage, my mother didn’t mind becoming a Catholic, they were religious parents who gave me a strict training. Their big problem was only one child! When my mother’s father died there was a sort of reconciliation with the rest of the family. My mother took me to see them once or twice a year but they were always cold, making me feel inferior, never treating me the same as my nice pale-skinned cousins. I remember being 7 or 8 and walking back from their home in a rage. I was still at school when my mother died – cerebral malaria – I missed her so much! Soon I married Jim, from my father’s tribe – he has a good job in the bank. I always wanted to study in England, my mother brought me up to love the English, she said they had no race prejudices. Four years ago I got there, to do computer studies. My father’s sister lives next door, she looks after Jim and the kids. Now she’s lost one son and another is dying, at home. That’s why I came back two months ago, to comfort her. In Croydon I’d decided to stay here, to be with the kids, but this AIDS frightens me too much. I told Jim I wouldn’t sleep with him unless he had the test. He refused. He’s scared, he sweats at the thought – so he has a reason to be scared, maybe many reasons!’

Mumfi hadn’t realised, when she returned, how swiftly AIDS had spread during her absence. I met no other African so openly emotionally upset by the epidemic, and not only because of its impact on her own family. She asked, her eyes wide with horror, ‘You know in Kagera district there are more than 3,000 AIDS orphans in institutions?’ I did know; Dr Kolimba had told me. I wondered then what the full story was; Mumfi seemed one of those unfortunates tossed by the tide of history on to a rocky shore. Glimpsing factual fragments of other people’s lives – when they went where, to do what – can be tantalising if the real ‘whys’ remain hidden.

Suddenly Mumfi invited me to her home, quite a rare event in Africa. ‘I want you to talk to my daughter about AIDS, to back up all I’ve said. She’s 14 but very grown-up – too grown-up! My son should listen, too. He’s only 9 but that’s when we have to put them on full alert. It’s only stupid to pretend they’re innocents, at no risk. In Bernadette’s school some girls say parents invented this AIDS scare to control kids. They say it’s not a virus but witchcraft and how you live has nothing to do with it. Please talk to them in a scientific way, explain like I have it’s a disease in the West, too, where there’s no witchcraft. They may listen to you!’

Mumfi lived down a long, dusty, tree-shaded road not far from the lake shore. The two-roomed concrete hovel – the centre one of three – was entered through a communal yard of extreme squalor bounded by a few matoke plants. Inside all was clean and neat but very cramped. The spectacularly beautiful tortoiseshell cat reclining on a small settee graciously permitted me to stroke him but didn’t move to give the visitor more space – a thoroughly spoiled cat, I know the symptoms. In each corner stood stacks of video and hi-fi equipment and thousands of tapes. Tanzania is one of those few blessed lands still without television, or it was then – perhaps by now it has been infected. Family photographs and mass-produced pious pictures (made in Italy: to be found in Catholic homes on every continent) covered the walls. Most conspicuous was an elaborately framed ‘Special Papal Blessing’ given to Mumfi personally by His Holiness John Paul II on the occasion of his visit to Uganda and allegedly signed by the Pope. What sort of racket is this?

Mumfi made coffee while I talked with her stricken aunt. It was of course instant coffee, made in Bukoba and the best such I have ever tasted. Then Bernadette came in, greeted me rather brusquely, said she had to go to a school drama rehearsal and disappeared.

Mumfi was furious. ‘I told her I wanted her to listen to you, she is rude!’

Bernadette looked 18 – tall, well-developed, dressed in tight slacks and a low-cut blouse, obviously conscious of being nubile. No wonder her mother was worried. According to Tanzania’s Ministry of Health, blood-donor tests had recently revealed a devastating rise in the HIV + rate among 15 to 19-year-olds; and the girls showed an even higher rate of infection than the boys. In Bukoba (population 15,000) the percentage of HIV + women attending ante-natal clinics had risen from 20 per cent to 24 per cent during the previous eighteen months.

Mumfi insisted on both children being involved in the care of their dying cousin in the next-door shack. ‘Seeing and smelling and feeling is better than listening to grown-ups’ warnings. My kids always loved those older cousins, always admired them because they were champion athletes at school – see those photos of them getting prizes. Last evening I gave Bernadette and another girl cousin one big heavy lecture. My mum used to lecture me about sin and sex but this is different – this is life and death. I was naughty when I was their age and I admit that to them – I don’t want to pretend, I’m not preaching like in church. I told them I’m still a young woman of 34 but I don’t need sex so much I’d risk sleeping with my husband now he won’t have the test. My aunt is upset when I talk so straight but she should know the time for being modest is over.’

The 9-year-old – plump, huge-eyed, copper-skinned – was listening impassively, sitting on the floor leaning against his mother’s legs. It baffled me that she should even consider leaving her two children again for the sake of computer studies (if such it was) in England.

I returned to the Calypso Lodge, to collect Lear, by a different route, through old graveyards surrounded by tall pines. The Muslim graveyard was all neatly raked gravel and austere white tombs. Its grassy Christian neighbour was being extended, like many African cemeteries, beyond the original boundary; a man digging out the hedge paused to stare as I counted twenty-seven fresh graves. The dead Christians of past generations were a cosmopolitan lot: mostly Indians and Goans, the rest British, Greek, Lebanese – all in their own segregated plots.

Back on the road, I heard heartrending screams of pain and fear. A tiny boy was being ignored by his mother – tending her stall – as he writhed on the high step of an empty duka, too afraid to get down by himself. He had been bitten by something; his agonised, terrorised shrieks conveyed that as he grabbed frantically at his buttocks. An even tinier girl slowly toddled over and extended a hand of sympathy but was rejected; the boy’s eyes were fixed on his mother as he roared with pain – a sound that seemed too large to be coming from such a small body. I timed the incident; after six minutes Mama turned, strode over to her son, picked up a slim switch and repeatedly struck him – hard. Then she pulled him off the step and left him lying shuddering in the dust, shocked into silence, with the tiny girl gazing down at him, solemn and puzzled. Despite the decibels, no other passer-by thought this scene noteworthy.

Back at the port, awaiting embarkation hour, I wrote in my journal:

First impressions: the Tanzanians (the few so far encountered) seem more reserved and tougher, in the best sense, than the Ugandans. On one level it’s daft to refer to ‘Ugandans’ and ‘Tanzanians’; on both sides of this border they’re culturally the same. Yet they’ve been set in quite different colonial and post-colonial moulds. My arrival on a scene causes no excitement here, though that catastrophic track from Mutukula is rarely used by non-locals, never mind mzungu cyclists. No inquisitive children came streaming from the shambas, no fellow-cyclist pedalled alongside for miles asking friendly questions, no villager beckoned me to stop for a cup of tea or mug of maize gruel. Of course the language barrier is higher here; Swahili, not English, is the non-tribal language. Yet that doesn’t sufficiently account for the difference. It’s a difference of attitude, a polite detachment from mzungus, no doubt bred by Nyerere’s gospel of self-reliance. The greetings are courteous but delivered gravely, not with the jolly smiling outgoingness so common in Uganda. I have to admit this Tanzanian reserve is rather a relief at present. Being expected to ‘explain oneself, slowly and clearly, umpteen times a day, becomes a bit much.

Nyerere’s ‘agrarian socialism’ was a brave and honest effort to breed Utopia by crossing rural Africa’s social traditions with Christian ethics. But then he inclined towards a sort of African Fabianism, a slippery slope leading to much cruel Ceausescu-type social engineering. Even by African standards his well-meant revolution brought about an economic mega-disaster. But maybe it also, paradoxically, to some extent restored Black self-respect, with its emphasis on the value of African social traditions and their relevance for the future. Yet his determination to make Tanzanians out of the speakers of eighty separate languages must have done more to kill the local tribal traditions of the remoter areas than either the German or British administrators and missionaries.

Looking back: I feel the British, for better or worse, got a very firm grip on the fertile areas of Uganda that they wished to develop and were genuinely appreciated by the more advanced tribes for bringing ‘civilisation’. In Tanganyika, apart from the Southern Highlands and the low-key continuation of Kenya’s White Highlands around Kilimanjaro, they didn’t get so involved. Throughout most of this vast territory – four times larger than Uganda, waterless, tsetse-fly-infested, sparsely inhabited – there was nothing profitable to involve them. Thus their influence was more political than psychological, which made easier (but not easy enough) poor Nyerere’s attempt to defend his country from neo-colonialism.

At sunset I embarked, locked Lear to a strut by my cabin door and for two hours leant on the rail, watching the hectic and strenuous loading of the Victoria. This apparently chaotic process was in fact quite well organised; everyone knew when to take what where. Out of pitch darkness into the boat’s lights (the only illumination) came a whirlpool of strong colours: shirts and long skirts in reds, blues, yellows and greens, gaudy many-hued bodices and striped headscarves. All passengers over the age of 5 carried prodigious head-loads: sacks of coffee beans, coops of hens and ducks, nylon sacks of charcoal, carrier bags of garments, rolled blankets, baskets of sweet potatoes, crates of beer, airline bags, cartons of Bukoba’s justly celebrated instant coffee, bulging smart suitcases – those last the trickiest load, because slippy, yet often with a huge bundle balanced on top. There was even the occasional rucksack, no doubt bought from some destitute backpacker, with long straps hanging over the owner’s face; most Africans are baffled by our preference for loading the back.

A crane received countless loads of ‘orange’ soda, also made in Bukoba, from a badly battered truck. Most of Tanzania’s trucks and buses – Mumfi alleged – had been condemned in Uganda as ‘unfit for use’ and sold off cheap. The Tanzanians naturally enough think these should have been donated, as some meagre reparation for the $500 million spent on Obote’s war. It fascinated me to watch the loaded crane platform very slowly swaying up, and up, and up – the orange sodas glinting in the blackness like some fabulous horde of gold. Sodas and matoke – the latter arriving on a succession of tractor-trailers – formed the main cargo. Around Mwanza the lush matoke-growing world ends and sembe (maize flour) becomes the staple food. This was a vivid, noisy, energetic scene, but not a jolly one. There were few smiling faces among these hungry, stressed, exhausted people, men, women and children all struggling with too-heavy loads, a profusion of toddlers getting in the way and being abused, only the babies on backs content as usual.

In my clean and comfortable cabin the other five berths were occupied by a group of friends, luscious teenage girls going to seek their fortunes in, they hoped, Mombasa – ‘where is many tourists, Bukoba have none’. For generations Bukoba’s main exports have been prostitutes and coffee, in that order. The Bahaya women, I was told all over East and Central Africa, are famous for their beauty and amatory skills and have now become popular scapegoats, castigated for spreading AIDS – as though all African men would live chastely if not lured by Bahaya sirens. In the 1940s, as Elspeth Huxley has recorded, Kagera’s chiefs voted money from the ‘native treasury’ for the founding of a girls’ school to provide the region’s young ladies with ‘other interests’. The scheme failed, as did a chiefs’ proposal to compel every woman boarding the steamer at Bukoba to show a travel permit from her own chief. The British Chief Secretary disapproved of this attempt to ‘infringe the liberty of the subject’. As Elspeth Huxley dryly noted, ‘This answer puzzled and disappointed the chiefs. The liberty of the female subject to go where she pleases is not a concept familiar to African men.’

In Kyotera a White fellow-guest, long involved in AIDS work elsewhere, had questioned the effectiveness of European-devised educational programmes. ‘We need to remember’, he said, ‘that in Africa sex is a commodity. Many girls who want what they can’t afford – clothes, cosmetics, a hair-do – will earn the money as sex-workers and genuinely not feel ashamed. And rich men like to show their money by buying a variety of girls – again, as a commodity. It’s another sort of mind-set about sex.’ This expatriate opined that if Africans persist in their happy-go-fucky lifestyle the rest of the world will soon lose sympathy and withdraw all AIDS support groups. I commented that this would not displease some of the Africans I’d met on my way. Nor can the West afford to be censorious; we too use sex as a commodity, in more convoluted but no less degrading ways – and without extenuating circumstances.

After a calm voyage, conducive to sound sleep, we docked at 6 a.m. precisely and disembarked in darkness. The area around the ferry-berth had none of the expected stalls selling snacks or tea and coffee, yet hundreds of passengers were milling about, all certainly yearning for sustenance. This seemed significant. Even at 3 a.m., in any Asian or South American country I know (or in Madagascar), these captive customers would be well catered for by scores of entrepreneurs.

As I pushed Lear up Nyerere Road (the surface was too rough to cycle by lamplight) the dissolving darkness exposed numerous crutches pathetically protruding from under sheets of plastic or sacking. Then the cripples beneath the colonnades began to dismantle their ‘privacy screens’ and prepare to face another day of hunger, humiliation and hopelessness.

Near the bus station other hundreds of passengers were milling but still I could find no sustenance, until I noticed a small bedraggled man squatting in the middle of the road fanning a minute tin of charcoal with a sheet of cardboard to boil a big kettle of coffee. Beside him were incongruously dainty white china coffee-cups, immersed in a large paint-tin of water. The half-dozen men patiently awaiting the magic moment of boiling welcomed me politely but with reserve. That coffee was excellent; feeling uncomfortably greedy, I drank five cups. Each customer’s empty cup was rinsed in the paint-tin before re-use; luckily AIDS isn’t spread through saliva.

Knowing of no reason to dally in Mwanza – African cities don’t grab one – I was on the road to Shinyanga by 6.45. My heart sank when I saw – and felt – that it wasn’t a road, pace the map, but a deeply and relentlessly corrugated track. Here the wild terrain looked bafflingly familiar; then I remembered that Speke had been inspired to sketch in this area and had accurately depicted these tall, isolated hills of rock, weirdly wind-sculpted, with greenery sprouting at odd angles from cracks in their smooth flanks and coppices of glossy vegetation in the intervening hollows. This was the last of Lake Victoria’s surrounding lushness and soon I was in another world, crossing a flat fawn plain, victimised by drought, where withered maize rustled on every side, the few cattle were mere sacks of bones and only Euphorbia candelabra and feral sisal plants flourished. I began to feel apprehensive. Had I left the rainy season behind?

That track defeated me. In Old Shinyanga, only eight miles from the day’s goal, I gave up. After eighty-five corrugated miles, plus the misery of quite heavy truck and matatu traffic suffocating me with dust, I was broken in body and spirit. As I sat drinking vile beer outside an empty-shelved duka, a barefooted youth and two tattered oldish men advanced from different directions, all looking furtive and clutching cigarette packets. They paused at a little distance, keeping apart from each other and eyeing me speculatively. When I smiled encouragingly and said, ‘Jambo!’ they advanced, then stopped to confer, then approached me one by one. The cigarette packets contained putative diamonds, going cheap – £5 the starting price. To me these looked like the duller sort of pebble but they may well have been genuine. One of the world’s largest diamond mines was discovered nearby in 1940 by a Canadian geologist. As gambles go, a £15 investment would not have been too rash; but Tanzanian jails have an indifferent reputation. All three gazed at me with a terrible despair when I declined to trade, whereupon I broke my rule then and presented them with the money. Tanzania’s poverty was getting to me. They uttered no word of thanks, just looked at me incredulously – then rushed away.

I fetched another beer and unfolded my map. In Shinyanga I could get a train to Dodoma from where, if the map were to be believed, a tarmac road led south. At that moment a train seemed a very good – in fact irresistible – idea. Then, miraculously, blond Bruce appeared on his Honda, bouncing down the street in a red penumbra of dust. He had passed me twice during the afternoon and each had wondered about the other. He was an expat with a difference, a Californian who for four years had been setting up windmill pumps in arid regions, always Honda-ing through the bush. Now he sat beside me and said, ‘You gotta be mad! In this neck o’ the woods you can’t cycle on motor-roads!’

‘That’s the conclusion I’ve just reached. It’s the train to Dodoma for me – I’m not in Africa on a penitential pilgrimage.’

Bruce seized the map. ‘Look, see all those little paths? You can hardly see them here but on the ground they’re as plain as motor-roads – and a lot smoother. And that way to Dodoma is shorter in miles. Just watch out for the big thorns – but they’re so big you’ll see them the day before! You don’t mind camping?’

There are two good reasons why cyclists should be wary of camping in Africa. In inhabited regions a bicycle is quite likely to be stolen; in uninhabited regions there is a remote possibility that the cyclist will be stolen – and consumed. Bruce, however, assured me that neither hazard was to be greatly feared between Shinyanga and Dodoma. He was a young man after my own heart, an unfussy realist. Yes, there were a few leopards and hyenas around, but very few. In his four years of intimacy with the region he’d often had to camp out and never met one. So wouldn’t it be very bad luck if I happened to meet one on a four-day trip?

I remember Bruce with gratitude.