8

Trivial Trials

Shinyanga to Iringa

During my Bruce-inspired cross-country cycle I set a personal record by not speaking for four days. (At home I often spend more than four days in solitude, but there I have a dog and three cats with whom to converse.) This unwonted silence was a probably needless precaution; I avoided the sparse population, who in general viewed me with considerable alarm and themselves never tried to communicate – Swahili, never mind English, is not much spoken hereabouts. Although I didn’t consciously recall Jill’s warning in relation to this area, it may have been fermenting in my unconscious. Each night I camped, though on all but one a compound was within reach, and despite Bruce’s assurance I couldn’t help feeling slightly neurotic about hyenas. These are notoriously partial to rubber and might eat Lear’s tyres – or even chew me around the edges. Hyenas are much more of a threat to campers than any of the big cats. But of course my neuroticism was just that; monkeys constituted the only visible wildlife.

Here I lost track of my mileage, usually marked on the map, but I must have covered about ninety miles each day on these smooth dust-paths across level terrain: through gloriously variegated bush, red-gold savannah and forests ruled by giant baobabs. The occasional settlement of long, low mud huts had flat grass roofs rarely seen elsewhere. Many of the women went bare-breasted while the men wore loincloths, or nothing. Cylindrical hives hung high on many trees, even where there was no other trace of humanity; honey and beeswax are the only local cash crops, as they have been for centuries. The juvenile herdsmen all fled at my approach, treacherously abandoning their lean cattle and plump goats. This is among the least ‘developed’ areas of East Africa and always has been. From the beginning of the nineteenth century it was controlled by Masai warriors whose reputation discouraged the Arab slavers from moving north of their established route – Bagamoya to Ujiji via Tabora (then known as Kazeh).

Only one problem arose, on the morning of the second day, when my path ended decisively at the edge of a swamp. On either side rose thickly uninviting forest; guidance would have to be sought in the hamlet of Sakamaliwa, a few miles back. I turned – and found myself face to face with an elderly man who might have illustrated Speke’s Journal. His short tunic was of bark-cloth, he had wild shoulder-length locks decorated with leaves, he wore many copper anklets and carried a sheathed spear longer than himself and a leather shield studded around the edges with coloured beads. His unsurprised expression suggested that he had heard of my presence in the area. And of course the path only seemed to end there; below the black mud of the swamp lay a firm causeway of tree-trunks, doubtless visible in the dry season. My companion made no attempt to communicate verbally. Handing me his spear he took charge of Lear, then pointed to my shoes. I removed them and turned up my trousers, wondering if he would remove his anklets. He didn’t. The spear was to be used as a walking-stick, an essential aid as the half-mile causeway was calf-deep in slithery mud. Being unable to estimate its width I could not possibly have negotiated it with Lear, even had I noticed its existence. At the far side my guardian angel silently retrieved his spear and, still without any change of expression, returned the way we had come. Plainly he had followed me to the swamp’s edge, knowing the mzungu would need help. Such gestures are never forgotten.

At Kintinku, thirty-five miles north-west of Dodoma, I rejoined the motor road and found that it had not improved in my absence. A few hours later, approaching the town, another Catholic cathedral caught my eye – red brick and white stone, an interesting mongrel with Romanesque touches, Arab touches, even Georgian Dublin touches. The overall effect, if not exactly appropriate to Africa (or anywhere else), was pleasing enough in its eclectic way. A tall, elderly Tanzanian monsignor, wearing a dog-collar and black cassock, noticed me taking a photograph and with him I broke my silence. He invited me into his little study and took a bottle of Coca-Cola from a crate under the desk. I have to admit it tasted good, after four days of muddy water strongly flavoured with decayed vegetation. The cathedral, Monsignor Mgonda told me, was ‘very old’, built by Italians (I had guessed that) in 1967. Any building that lasts a quarter of a century is ‘very old’ in Africa.

The Monsignor was curious about Uganda. He had heard the people were so traumatised by AIDS they no longer reacted normally to bereavement – was this true? I replied that no casual passer-by could presume to judge whether or not reactions were ‘normal’. When I added that Uganda’s epidemic was not much worse than Tanzania’s my host seemed both surprised and annoyed.

As anti-AIDS campaigners, most African clergymen of all denominations are reprehensibly slack but some effort was being made in Dodoma diocese. Recently, said the Monsignor, religious leaders had got together to discuss a united response to the crisis. But alas! the two-day conference ended in shambolic disunity. The Catholics fell out among themselves about whether or not the use of condoms should be promoted. The Catholics and Protestants fell out about whether or not engaged couples, one of whom was infected, should be advised to disengage. The Protestants fell out among themselves about whether or not condom use should be promoted among schoolchildren. The Muslims fell out with the Christians about polygamy; to preach monogamy as the only solution was anti-Islamic – obviously four faithful uninfected wives are as safe as one wife. ‘So this was a sad waste of time,’ concluded Monsignor Mgonda. ‘The Muslims got so angry they withdrew their funding for our leaflet campaign – and that’s serious, they’re the richest people in Dodoma area.’

Near the cathedral a forgotten campaign is echoed. At one end of a trim military cemetery lie the master-race: Captain P. J. Flytche-Hogg, aged 24; Sister D. A. Fitzhenry, aged 22; many teenagers and one poignant unnamed, ‘A Victim of the Great War – Known Unto God’. Across a fifty-yard cordon sanitaire lie the unWhite, below a dignified stone monument inscribed:

God is One. His is the Victory.

In Memory of the Brave Hindus, Sikhs and Muhammadans

Who Sacrificed their lives in the Great War

For their King and their Country.

What an irony! That the purveyors of Pax Britannica should have required Hindus, Sikhs and Muhammadans to die in the wilds of Africa fighting a White man’s war! At the turn of the century Europeans wallowed in self-righteous condemnations of Black tribal warfare, an acridly amusing reflex in view of imminent events. The Black-controlled ritualistic warfare involved a far lower percentage of casualties than the Whites’ ruthless massacres.

The Chama Cha Mapinduzi party headquarters are in Dodoma and Nyerere once dreamed of moving the capital from the squalid port of Dar es Salaam to this high cool plateau in central Tanzania – hence those many modern government buildings standing irrelevantly around the periphery. Huge name-plates on already disintegrating façades proclaim the presence within of petrified layers of bureaucracy: National Estates and Designing Corporation (NEDCO) or Small Holder Development Project for Marginal Areas (IFAD). In the town’s heart (if it can be said to have one) the Christian Centre of Tanzania faces the recently enlarged Islamic Centre and the very beautiful Shia Ithna-Asheri Mosque – the finest buildings I saw in Tanzania. Full marks to the Muslims for not being seduced by aberrant architectural trends. The combination of evangelical Christian and Islamic influences means that beer is scarce, available only in the archetypically colonial Railway Hotel, where Evelyn Waugh spent a night in 1959. He dismissed Dodoma in one sentence: ‘A railway town, scattered, unlovely, noisy.’ Thirty-three years later it remained scattered and unlovely – but subdued, not at all noisy: in fact so lacking in character and animation that I looked back on beat-up Bukoba with a certain affection.

For £1.90 the Christian Centre of Tanzania provided a carpeted room with bathroom (and running water!), an untorn mosquito net neatly coiled above the soft bed and a bedside lamp with a bulb which shed light when the switch was pressed. After three nights in the bush, this extremity of comfort was not unwelcome. The canteen served cheap and nourishing meals and had food for thought above the door:

SMARTNESS IS AN ART. BEAUTY IS GOD-GIVEN.
MAINTAIN SMARTNESS.

In the grey-blue dawn, scores of small, lean, very black men were moving towards Dodoma at a half-trot. Each carried two grass sacks of charcoal on a wooden yolk and they had been on the move for hours, coming from settlements ten or twelve miles away. These Wagogos migrated to this area only recently, when the drought of the previous two years killed many of their cattle. Observing their gigantic loads and exhausted faces, I remembered the charcoal-merchant cyclists entering Kampala – and Ali’s comment that only the rich own bicycles.

That first day out of Dodoma is deeply graven on my memory. The tarmac was smooth but over eighty-five miles of open country a powerful wind opposed me – the sort that necessitates pedalling down steep slopes. It kept the tall savannah grass flat on the ground, as though neatly combed, and cyclists with this gale behind them scarcely needed to pedal uphill. There was no moment of respite; I didn’t seem to be sweating but I absorbed six litres of water without peeing until the following morning.

At noon I passed the Kongwa junction; it had taken me six nonstop hours to cover fifty miles. A dirt road leads to the scene of the tragi-comic groundnuts scheme, the prototype for the West’s countless inane African projects. This one was a disaster mainly for the British taxpayer, whose £40,000,000 (a considerable sum forty-five years ago) was never heard of again. At the time the ground-nutters – as they were prophetically known from the outset – caused havoc among the primitive cattle-owning Wagogo who had occupied this territory from time immemorial. A small, isolated, aloof tribe, they were demoralised by the importation of 30,000 workers from other tribes. Great environmental damage was also done but is now being undone by time. All aid planners should be made to compare the observations of Elspeth Huxley, who passed this way in 1947, and of Evelyn Waugh who twelve years later followed in – predictably – ‘a large, new, fast and extremely comfortable Mercedes-Benz’. Elspeth Huxley saw the very start of the disaster:

… between sixty and seventy men are to push down 3,000,000 acres of vegetation – bush that, I suppose, has grown here since Africa took on its present shape … Tanganyika distresses these up-to-date engineers. ‘Not a mile of bituminous road in the whole country! Not a single mile! The roads – you can’t call them roads, they’re enough to make a fellow burst out crying!’ We looked down over the mighty rolling plain earmarked for the ground-nut invasion. The terrain was selected from the air. It is easy to see why this was so … It would take a lifetime to clear the bush by hand. No one can really know what emerges from that ocean of thorns: health or sickness, fertility or desert, good soil or bad. And, most important of all, water or no water … That is a vital point on which too little is known … The ground-nutters are groping in the dark; but from the start they are consulting scientists. A soil chemist and a conservation expert from South Africa are already installed in the camp.

In 1959, Waugh recorded:

A huge clearing in the bush, 90,000 acres of grassland, is all that remains of the Kongwa groundnuts plantation … The scheme was conceived in an ideological haze, prematurely advertised as a specifically socialist achievement and unscrupulously defended in London when everyone in Africa knew it was indefensible … The aim was benevolent; the provision of margarine for the undernourished people of Great Britain. The fault was pride … No considerable quantity of groundnuts was ever produced; nor was there a need for them – they were piling up in mountains in West Africa, needing only transport to make them available. The site at Kongwa had been selected for its emptiness. It was empty because it was waterless.

Much of the grassland has been maintained, carefully fenced, and is now benefiting rich ranchers; their cattle were improved by the importation into the area, following the groundnutters’ failure, of 9,000 head of half-bred European cattle. Meanwhile the Wagogo continue to herd their own tiny animals in the unreconstructed bush. Admiring the baobabs dotted about this pastureland, I recalled Elspeth Huxley’s comments on how difficult it was to fell them – even with the aid of bulldozers. In one poverty-stricken roadside settlement I paused to buy heavily sweetened boiling milk from a kettle balanced on a tin of charcoal. These infrequent hamlets were not relaxing places; repeatedly, drunken men shouted aggressively at the passing mzungu. One wonders how much long-term damage the groundnutters did by bringing so many outsiders to the area, introducing a cash economy and wrecking the Wagogos’ tribal loyalties and social structures.

By now I felt seasonally confused; I was moving towards the southern autumn yet recent rains, the most generous since 1989, had given the landscape a springtime brightness. By the roadside, as I climbed to Gairo on its high mountain, the vivid new grass was brilliantly patterned with flowers in a glorious profusion of colours and shapes: tall clumps, orange and purple – tiny individual blossoms, pink or yellow or blue – sometimes sheets of a delicately scented white flower spreading for miles on either side of the road. During the following weeks I discovered that the rain distribution was very uneven, seeming to depend on topography; within one day’s cycle I often passed from lushness to aridity and back to lushness.

Gairo is a big village – perhaps officially a town – sprawling attractively for several miles around the flanks of a grassy mountain with a distinctive twin-rock summit visible from afar. The friendly guest-house could provide no washing water because it hadn’t rained for twenty-four hours. In a Gujerati restaurant I supped off a compartmented metal platter: rice, beef, greens. Although no alcohol was served in this Muslim establishment the walls were decorated with seductive Page Three girls in glorious technicolor, hanging side by side with texts from the Koran. Watching a group of laughing, gossiping women returning from the well – maybe three or four miles away – I could appreciate the argument against standpipes; these curtail the women’s only form of relaxation and leave more time for harder labour. According to WHO statistics (how compiled?), African women do an average of sixteen hours work daily, their menfolk five. One tends to suspect such statistics, yet those accord with my own impressions.

I retired early; that wind had exhausted me, and nobody in Gairo spoke English.

Such dire afflictions as brucellosis (Indian style), hepatitis (Malagasy style), tooth abscesses (Cameroonian style) or broken bones (Rumanian style) put starch into my upper lip. But the common cold unwomans me. Awakening with a throbbing, inflamed throat and a stuffed nose I at once fell into a morass of self-pity and remained there for the day.

After a night of torrential rain the wind had dropped and the air was humid as I crossed the 5,000-foot pass above Gairo – where wandering torn clouds hung so low they seemed touchable. For the next forty-five mainly downhill miles dense forest lay below the road, still and dark, extending from wide valley floors to distant rock-scattered ridges and peaks. Where an earth-track leads off to Kilosa, I stopped for a cup of black tea and three nauseating maize buns, the flour adulterated with something unimaginable. Here I reluctantly started a course of antibiotics. I was beginning to wheeze; since infancy my common colds have always become full-blown bronchitis – a tiresome Achilles’ heel. Happily another Concern team is based at Kilosa; Irish hospitality and cherishing were indicated.

This was a lowish, fertile, well-wooded region, the red huts seeming to grow from the red earth amidst maize and manioc shambas. I paused on a rickety wooden bridge spanning the boisterous young Wami which rises in the mountains near Gairo. By the water’s edge grew masses of hibiscus: yellow and maroon, or purple-grey, or dark violet. And here too were a few extraordinary trees with round, compact crowns above soaring smooth white trunks – dazzling in the sunlight. Further on, the track was lined with pink jacaranda – its flaky grey bark is popular as an immunisation against witchcraft – and sausage-trees with their dangling sausage-shaped fruits or purple bell-shaped flowers.

Then, about two miles from the junction, Lear’s back tyre went flat. I pumped, pedalled on hopefully – he went flat again. I pumped again – again he went flat. I gave up hope and walked. There are certain gifted folk who can mend punctures; I am not among them. Instead, I have a gift for attracting puncture-menders. Within ten minutes a kind fellow-cyclist had offered assistance. He was an odd young man named Saul, one short of the shilling but amiably determined to help. His lack of English didn’t matter; sorting out practicalities rarely requires a common language. We agreed that water was needed, walked on for about a mile, then turned into the bush and found a huddle of semi-ruined concrete farm buildings surrounding a selection of long-dead agricultural machinery and – I couldn’t believe it – a bicycle mechanic repairing someone’s brakes. Two other men, tattered and rather hard-faced, stood under a mango tree queuing with their own diseased bicycles. They ignored the mzungu.

Lear’s tyres are supposed to be virtually puncture-proof and when Saul water-tested I saw at once that this was not a puncture but a defective seam in the tube. I hesitated. A new tube, the obvious remedy, would involve removing the back wheel. And could men who had never before seen a bicycle with any gears, never mind Lear’s twenty-one-speed system, successfully perform such an operation? I decided on conventional puncture treatment. If that failed I would have to walk to Kilosa; the Concern team must surely be equipped with a talented mechanic. Tensely I watched the patching and replacement of the tyre, like an anxious mum in an operating theatre. Then, as I was reattaching the panniers, one of the silent, sullen men under the mango tree suddenly stepped forward and truculently demanded, ‘Give identity papers!’

Smiling sweetly, I handed him my passport. He pretended to read it attentively, before putting it in his trouser pocket and saying, ‘Is wrong visa, I keep!’

Discarding my sweet smile, I asked for his identity papers. He had none but claimed, ‘In this district, I Big Man!’ Maybe his filthy raggedness belied his status and he was some sort of Chama Cha Mapinduzi mini-boss; as a political party the CCM suffered grievously from the poor quality of its minor officials. I didn’t like this situation. Lear and the panniers were tempting; we were miles from anywhere; the Big Man was memorably unendearing. Out of the corner of an eye I could see Saul looking frightened; but only out of a corner, this being an occasion to use my tried and trusty weapon of eye-contact. Staring fixedly at the Big Man I moved towards him slowly, with hand outstretched, and said, ‘Give me my identity papers – now.’ There was a long pause – there always is – while my opponent’s eyes showed uncertainty and unease. Then he looked away and a moment later the passport was handed over.

As Saul and I returned to the track I felt slightly limp; the psychic effort required by this eye-contact technique takes its toll. Saul turned to me, before we remounted, and shook hands; I was being congratulated. Here flat bush replaced cultivation, the golden grass tall between acacias and junipers. The track was execrable, grotesquely humpy and very dusty. In the oppressive afternoon heat we made slow progress; it does a cyclist no good to ride fast into deep dust. Since turning south at the junction the Rubeho Mountains had been a long, low, blue wall on my right, not high but steep; now they were nearer and greener. At the next hamlet Saul and I parted; his patch was holding, despite the testing surface.

Now mighty trees lined the track, their canopies disturbed by the capers of unafraid capuchin monkeys. Beyond the big – and rather unwelcoming – village of Msowero came long miles through an elephant-grass tunnel that reduced visibility all round, while the sky darkened. This tunnel led, unexpectedly, to an area being ‘developed’ (vast sisal and tobacco plantations) by, among other consortia, a Dutch company. I was approaching the village of Rudewa, fifteen miles from Kilosa, when the rainstorm broke at 4.30. As I sheltered, with several plantation workers, in an empty machinery garage, an English-speaking foreman came running through the torrent. He had noticed the mzungu, I must spend the night with the project director. It is taken for granted everywhere, by Blacks and Whites alike, that the travelling mzungu should be entertained by the resident expatriate.

Will was a fabulously hospitable Dutchman, born in Zimbabwe when his parents moved there from Indonesia. His wife and children were on leave in Harare and my bed had to be moved to the nursery from the guest-room, just then given over to drying long thin red-brown strips of elephant biltong. The meat came from one of a group of five elephants who had been invading the tobacco and sisal. ‘On our plantations shooting them’s legal,’ explained Will. ‘If you shoot one the rest push off.’

I thought, ‘A bit confusing for the Africans, when it’s illegal for them to kill elephants – who presumably damage maize and manioc as much as tobacco and sisal.’ And what happens to the ivory handed over, as it must be, to the local police? An obvious solution would be to compel expatriate developers to employ more game-wardens to shoo away the intruders.

Will struck me as a typical White African, not interested in – scarcely aware of – the world outside Africa. As we were talking he noticed one of his servants, a frail elderly man, having difficulty hauling a heavy motor bicycle on to the veranda and at once rushed out to help him. When he said ‘we’ he meant all Africans, Black and White, yet moments later he could veer to condemning all Blacks as ‘bastards’. Or even ‘randy swine’ which made me wince so perceptibly that he thought it necessary to use AIDS to justify the epithet. The virus was rampant among his work-force, most of whom were migrant seasonal labourers from remote bush villages – the main source of rural infection. Ageing prostitutes whose urban business had declined, because city men reckoned teenagers were less likely to be infected, tended to move to such places as Rudewa. It is almost impossible, Will said, to convince migrant workers that the danger is real because they have not yet seen AIDS killing within their own communities.

A fine drizzle, drifting low over the dullness of tobacco plantations and level ploughland being prepared for sisal, made the dawn seem late. Soon this drizzle turned to a steady chilly downpour which did nothing to improve an already appalling track, adhering – beyond the cultivation – to the base of forested sandstone hills, gashed with wound-like gullies. The gloom of that low-skied morning was relieved only by red bottle-brushes, flaming flamboyantly in the dense bush, and the purple and turquoise sheen of lilac-breasted rollers being aerobatic.

While struggling through liquid mud I fretted about the new ‘development’ behind me. Sisal and tobacco … export crops on all those fertile acres, Africa still providing what the West needs at prices decided in the West – a generation after Independence. It would be absurd to suggest that sub-Saharan Africa could now be flourishing had true independence been granted. Not one of the leaders allowed to take over had a coherent policy about where their country should go, and by what route, once the national flag had been raised. All were sitting ducks for the World Bank and IMF – even Nyerere, behind the scenes, for all his posturing about ‘self-reliance’. However, the present shambles would certainly be less shambolic had genuine self-reliance been encouraged by the retreating colonial powers. It is inconceivable that new cash-crop plantations can help to alleviate Tanzania’s poverty. Some employment is of course provided, thus slightly alleviating the poverty of a few hundred families at the cost of all the ills traditionally caused by migrant labour – plus, now, the spread of AIDS. But such projects only happen because the bulk of the profits flow West. Africans should be employed producing food for Africans; not until enough has been produced (including a stored surplus for drought years, as was the habit in pre-Communist Tibet), should any labour be deflected to cash crops grown by Western consortia. That is a truism. Yet African governments seem too befuddled to see it – befuddled by the miasma rising from the swamp of IMF and World Bank calculations and arguments. (Or can it be that the majority of Black politicians are happy with the opportunities for personal gain inherent in neo-colonialism?) Certainly economists are among the most dangerous animals on earth, skilled at making situations look so complicated that only their own solutions can solve the problems they themselves have created. And by combining insidious bribery, blackmailing bluff and intellectual hypnosis they can pressurise even well-meaning leaders into consistently betraying their own people by collaborating with the West.

Fate has been kind to me over the years, usually (though not always) decreeing that misfortune strikes within reasonable reach of help and comfort. I arrived in Kilosa at 8.30 – soaked through, covered in mud, coughing painfully and much in need of what I received: a cead mile failte, a hundred thousand welcomes from the Concern team. Monica – also sniffing and coughing, so I didn’t have to worry about spreading my germ – led me to her bungalow on a high hillside amidst the mountainous beauty that heaves around Kilosa. She then left me alone for an hour or so to clean up, service Lear and browse among her hundreds of books. The titles suggested what was later confirmed: I had found another kindred spirit.

Kilosa is a forlorn little town, haunted by German and British ghosts – once important as a colonial administrative centre, now demoted by the new Dar es Salaam-Iringa road. Apart from an impressively well-kept old hospital – revived by Concern – it seems to have decayed beyond retrieval. The project leader drove me up a precipitous, richly wooded green mountain, strewn with the substantial but now slummy residences of the master-races. From a great height we looked down on Kilosa, Michael pointing out various colonial landmarks – like the Gymkhana Club – and suddenly I was overwhelmed by a ridiculous feeling that here only the past is real. Evidently the antibiotics were distorting my perceptions. To the Kilosa folk the present is what counts and it made me proud to discover how much Concern is contributing to an improvement of that present – their contribution depending less on the funds available than on the quality of the team members.

An item in the Tanzanian Daily News explained why the next day was traffic-free:

The Kilosa-Mikumi road has been closed since April 16 because a bridge across the River Mkondoa, just a kilometre away from Kilosa township, has started collapsing. The bridge is now passable by pedestrians and cyclists only. It was built in 1935. Officials said at least 100/- million is needed to rebuild the bridge.

I mused over that suggestive phrase, ‘has started collapsing’. What about the pedestrians and cyclists who happened to be crossing when it decided to complete its collapse? Swiftly I pedalled over, glancing down at the rumbustiously flooded River Mkondoa; to be leaving this ghost town by a collapsing 1935 bridge seemed fitting enough.

A few days previously floods had demolished a local railway bridge and the first few coaches of the Kigoma-Dar es Salaam train (from which Bruce had deflected me) fell into the Mkondoa. No one knew how many died. In the Third World casualty figures are rarely established with precision; only in the West is each citizen of sufficient importance to the authorities for every death to be recorded. The injured, from the derailed coaches that didn’t fall in, were brought to Kilosa hospital.

A collapsing bridge wasn’t really needed to deter motor vehicles on this road. However, in my view bad surfaces are more than compensated for by that special atmosphere where the worst of the West – an infection carried by motor traffic – is minimal or non-existent.

For five hours the track climbed – sometimes hedged by a fragrant shrub covered in minute yellow blossoms – into the heart of the Rubeho Mountains. This was tranquil country, cloud-swathed and cool, the valleys cultivated, the higher slopes forested.

All day I met only one fellow-traveller, being taken from his village to Kilosa by bicycle-taxi – rare in the bush though common enough in big towns, especially in Uganda. The passenger, riding on a wide soft saddle fixed to the carrier, was an elderly teacher who spoke fluent English. Meeting on the summit of a steep hill we were all happy to rest, leaning on our machines while discussing education, the SAP and AIDS. It had always been difficult, said the teacher, to persuade local parents to send their juvenile work-force to school, even when Nyerere was offering free education. Now it was hardly worth the effort, so adversely had fee-paying and cutbacks affected rural attitudes. As for AIDS, that was a city and main-road problem; there was no need to talk about such dirty things in bush schools. Yet this teacher’s village was only thirty miles from Mikumi, a popular halt for drivers on the Dar es Salaam-Malawi-Zambia run. At such moments (and there were many of them) my heart ached for Africa. Only when it is too late, when the people of a region are dying in considerable numbers, is the AIDS menace recognised. Then some villagers, if given advice from an acceptable (preferably non-Western) source, will be suspicious of outsiders and abandon customs that could spread the virus – like tattooing, scarification, circumcision with a communal razor blade and the ritual cleansing of widows and widowers through copulation with an in-law. Before we parted the teacher pointed south to a towering cliff of black cloud obscuring the mountains ahead. ‘You will get very wet!’ he said. And he was right.

At noon the rain came, from a sky so low and dark that to shelter would have been futile; this downpour was certain to continue until sunset. I pedalled cautiously through russet rushing water, unable to see the eroded channels beneath the opaque torrent and congratulating Lear on his amphibian skills. I had feared immersion might wreck his gears but they continued to function while complaining about the intake of grit. Then, as I reached the edge of Mikumi National Park, the track levelled out and the surface changed to deep, deep mud – the sludgy sort that makes cycling impossible.

Here, high in the mountains, the trees are broad-leaved and deciduous – known as ‘miombo’ woodland and a nice change after a surfeit of acacias. Down on the plain this park protects an abundance of wildlife but I saw only one troop of yellow baboons, smaller and lighter in colour than their olive cousins further north. These are expert hunters, often killing the young (when very young) of reed-buck, impala and other antelope.

Within moments of my reaching the miombo the tsetse flies found me and for the day’s last fourteen miles I had to walk – slither – while being driven to frenzy by the pain of their bites. As their favourite food is warthog blood they only laughed at Joy’s nylon shower-curtain. They come – especially when it is raining – not in ones and twos like our horse-flies, which in appearance they quite resemble, but in a persistent swarm that never for an instant stops feeding. Soon I was covered in sore itchy swellings, each the size of a tenpenny piece. I heard myself whimpering with pain; luckily there was no one around to witness the intrepid traveller’s disintegration. Bedbugs used to be my least favourite insects; now these have been supplanted. Why did early travellers not complain more about this entomological torture (then much oftener encountered than now)? I suppose they had real problems on their mind, like dying of thirst, being trampled by an elephant, gored by a buffalo, eaten by a leopard, speared by an unfriendly native. In the bland 1990s, we only have tsetse flies to whinge about. My itch lasted five days and some of the bumps subsequently turned purple; these bites can be so ferocious they actually bruise one. This fly sufficiently explains why much of Tanzania remained unpopulated throughout the centuries. Numerous migrating tribes passed through but none lingered. The tsetse spreads trypanosomiasis, deadly to livestock though Africa’s wild animals are immune. Recent eradication programmes to extend grazing areas – inevitable given the population explosion – will if successful destroy the natural habitats of many wild animals.

As I emerged from the miombo, at the start of a long steep descent to the motor road, the clouds began to lift. Below me lay the 2,000 square miles of Mikumi National Park – the third largest in Tanzania – its extent and flatness dramatic yet looking curiously unAfrican in that dim, wet light. My destination for the night was the Mikumi Training College, an Irish-Tanzanian bilateral aid project. In fact I spent three nights there; a five-hour drenching does nothing for one’s bronchitis and the antibiotics had to be given a chance to prevail.

Mikumi village, ugly and impoverished, is a typical product of Nyerere’s social engineering. Between 1967 and 1977 Tanzania’s rural population grew from eleven million to fourteen million and the percentage living in dreary collectivised townships rose from less than 5 per cent to over 90 per cent. These resettlements were intended to improve agricultural efficiency but disastrously lowered food production. Seventy per cent took place within two years in the mid-’70s. The majority were reluctant to move from their scattered homesteads in the bush, for religious and sentimental as well as practical reasons, yet Nyerere, when accused of cruelty, defended himself thus: ‘Eleven million people could not have been moved by force in Tanzania, we do not have the physical capacity for such forced movement, any more than we have the desire for it.’ Nevertheless, even those most supportive of Nyerere’s ends admitted that his means were reprehensible. In Tanzania: the Struggle for Rural Socialism, Dean E. McHenry refers to ‘a concentrated use of persuasion, inducements, and compulsion by party and state agents – police, militia, and army personnel and equipment – in order to get the job done.’

My hostess took me on a tour of the park, where I saw everything except the big cats, and on our way home we stopped to shop in the market. There people were chattering about an elephant who had been shot during the night on the main street – in theory because he had threatened crops, in reality because there is a lot of meat on an elephant and the Mikumi folk are protein-starved. The game-wardens were furious and rightly so. Yet can one wholeheartedly disapprove of an elephant being shot by hungry people for his meat, as distinct from being shot by greedy people for his ivory?

Mikumi’s bilateral aid project seemed to this Irish citizen a deplorable squandering of taxpayers’ money. It forms a mini-village on a hillside at the edge of the park – a rather European-looking village, many of the construction materials having been sent out from Ireland. Why pay heavy freight charges on sending such materials to a country that is not short of mud, grass and wood? Who was ‘helped’ by the dispatching of that cargo? The too-familiar stench of White self-serving hangs about the setting up of the Mikumi Training College. However, Ireland is so comparatively poor that less money has been wasted here than elsewhere. I wondered how my compatriots viewed their project; as a guest it was not for me to ask awkward questions, as government employees it was not for them to make tactless comments. But I doubt if Mikumi gave them much job-satisfaction. They were too remarkable a group to be wasted there – knowledgeable about the area, sensitive to African viewpoints, genuinely caring. On the whole Irish expatriates seem more dedicated than the average to the people amongst whom they work: and this is not mere bias on my part. Between Kenya and Zimbabwe, I heard many Africans making the same observation, often likening Irish aid-workers to ‘missionaries’ rather than ‘experts’ – a revealing compliment, on more than one level.

Eleven glorious hours, on a smooth(ish) road with a strong tailwind, took me through the weirdly lovely baobab forest of the Ruaha Gorge, across a hot expanse of level, flower-bright bush, where Masai herders tended emaciated cattle, and up the sort of well-graded escarpment that makes one appreciate the special qualities of a mountain-bike.

Then, near the high but otherwise unbeautiful village of Lutundwi, Saul’s patch came undone. This time there could be no postponement of a new tube but Lutundwi looked unlikely to provide expert care. Reluctantly I hitched a fifty-mile lift on a truck bound for Lusaka via Iringa, the next large town. This was a deeply frustrating experience. While toiling up that escarpment, planning to spend the night in Lutundwi, I had been looking forward to fifty level miles on a high cool plateau. As the truck sped towards Iringa, with rock-strewn mountains nearby on the left, I glimpsed on the right tantalising views of jungly plains very far below, empurpled by the evening light. My frustration, I reflected then, was a just punishment for never having come to terms with the mechanical mysteries of life.

The kindly driver was a Muslim merchant from Dar es Salaam, strikingly handsome, with two wives at home and a third beside him in the cab. His ‘travelling wife’, he called her, and she (aged 23, plump, well-dressed, a Catholic Chagga merchant’s daughter from Arusha) smiled at him and said, ‘Now only stupid men travel alone, being tempted!’ She had not become a Muslim: ‘In Dar we don’t think about religion. I like to go to church, to meet my friends and sing, and my husband doesn’t mind.’ While she travelled, the other wives’ children looked after her 2-year-old.

At the turn-off for Iringa I asked the driver how much I owed him, as is the custom in Africa, but he firmly refused payment and presented me with a bottle of Pepsi, ‘to get you up the hill’. I soon saw what he meant. The climb from a small new industrial zone, on the main road, was formidable. As I pushed Lear up, the broken-tarmac road wound to and fro under towering trees and dusk became darkness. On a broad ridge-top the road deteriorated to a very rough track: Iringa’s main street. It seemed the population had already retired; lights were few and dim and without the assistance of an amiable young man (‘I good Christian, I want help you’) it would have been impossible to find my destination on the far side of the town.

Iringa’s Lutheran Centre – a German left-over – is a rambling bungalow in a well-kept garden shaded by mature blue gums. The staff at Reception – three young men doing the work of one, as is usual – spoke no English and were bemused by my arrival, but welcoming. My cell, complete with mosquito net, cost only 75p; the grubby sheets were hastily changed for the mzungu’s benefit. At the end of a long corridor two bathrooms supplied running cold water and cleanish Western lavatories. The furnishings and lay-out were institutionally frugal, the atmosphere was restrained but not oppressively pious.

In a nearby would-be tourist hotel the bar was ill-lit and dismal, its décor affectedly ‘contemporary’, its beer warm and blatantly diluted. My only fellow-drinker was a corpulent gentleman, aged perhaps 40, at whose feet lay a bulging padlocked briefcase. Our conversation opened abrasively when he looked me up and down, then asked, ‘You have come to teach us how to run our country? Who pays you? You work for who?’

I explained myself. The corpulent gentleman grunted, thought for a moment, then introduced himself somewhat ambiguously as ‘a senior government officer’. Squinting down, I could read the label on the briefcase: Ndugu Godfrey Munisi.

Ndugu Munisi was a man with an industrious insect in his cranial covering. He had the answer – the only answer – to AIDS. If every man could have as many wives as he wanted there would be no running around with dirty girls, monogamy was an unnatural restriction. Polygamy had always been part of African culture, African men weren’t able to think of having only one woman, AIDS was a direct result of Western interference with African culture.

‘But’, I protested, ‘most men can barely afford one wife! Anyway every population is roughly fifty-fifty, so when many men had more than one wife how did the poor behave? Obviously they shared “dirty girls” – Africa was riddled with STDs long before AIDS came.’

Ndugu Munisi ignored all this boring logic and began to attack the decadent West where men practise a cruel form of polygamy which discriminates against women. Unwanted wives are thrown out, instead of every wife being cared for, throughout her lifetime, as in Africa. His wives were a man’s property, yes, but they were also inferior dependent weak beings. Even wives who were barren or mentally defective or crippled should never be thrown out. A first wife might not like a second wife on the scene, or she and the second wife might not like a third wife – and so on – but for any woman polygamy had to be a lesser evil than divorce. The missionaries’ worst damage was making men throw out all but one wife. If that sort of brutality was Christ’s message he was a bad man and Africans lived better lives before they ever heard of him.

I argued no more. My companion was at that stage of inebriation when one is uninhibited enough to speak one’s mind while remaining articulate. His was a not uncommon handicap; he had heard so much about the West that he imagined he understood its weaknesses, yet he had no inkling of what makes it tick. I returned to the Lutheran Centre in a pensive mood. People as angrily confused as Ndugu Munisi always bother me. And in the Africa of 1992 there were a lot of them around.

Unlike most African towns, Iringa is a place you could learn to love. It has a natural advantage, straddling a high, breezy, wooded ridge top, overlooking immense sweeps of countryside – ochre and green, merging into low, vaguely blue mountain ranges in the far distance. Satellite villages straggle away from it on two sides and rural life seeps in from every side, nullifying the urban feel that might otherwise be generated by handsome though decaying colonial offices, ill-kept churches and mosques, an ugly breeze-block bishop’s palace, an affluent-looking new bank, a few prefabricated office blocks housing either commercial enterprises (usually stillborn) or Tanzania’s superfluity of bureaucrats. I was perhaps becoming used to the incongruity and run-down shoddiness of these remnants of empire where once the District Commissioner and his staff genuinely ‘did their best for the natives’ and where African administrators now genuinely do their best for themselves and their families. Familiarity was blunting the exasperation provoked by an agglomeration of malfunctioning Western imports – tarmac streets as eroded as cattle-tracks, factories closed or operating at 25 per cent capacity, telephones that don’t work, banks that have no currency left, moody electricity, officials who are never in their offices, schools without textbooks, post offices without stamps, hospitals without medicines, courts without justice. Parallel to this world of pretence, the ordinary folk survive – somehow. By setting up a set of bathroom weighing-scales on the pavement outside the bank and charging passers-by a penny a go; by pressing people’s clothes, while they wait, with a charcoal-filled iron; by squatting in the wayside dust selling a few combs, mirrors, razor blades, soap bars (probably stolen) spread on a plastic sack; by turning a bicycle upside-down and sharpening knives and axes on a whetstone attached to the whizzing rear wheel – by 101 stratagems bred of desperation. The phrase ‘subsistence economy’ is cold and hard, an idea in an academic mind unrelated to everyday life. The reality, when one pauses to observe the individuals engaged in it at the lowest level, is harrowing and haunting.

The Lutheran Centre had long since closed its canteen (the reduction of facilities throughout Tanzania is noticeable) and I breakfasted with a fellow-guest in a nearby Muslim-run restaurant – the food good and plentiful. Mr Reweyemamu was expensively dressed, dim-witted and short-legged: he had to trot to keep up with me. He gave me his card – ‘Senior Adviser to the Ministry of Education, Dar es Salaam’ – and told me he had studied in Britain from 1986 to 1989. This coveted privilege often goes to singularly unsuitable candidates, skilled in manipulating the relevant expatriates; one is left gasping at the ineptitude of the selection system at the benefactor’s end (unless of course the cynics are right and such men are chosen to act as lifelong cogs in the exploitation machine). Innocently I asked Mr Reweyemamu what percentage of Tanzanian children attend school. Complacently he replied, ‘95 per cent’, then became quite huffy when I laughed outright. My disbelief being based on personal observations in the bush discomposed him and hastily he sought to cover his tracks – ‘I know nothing about bush people, I work on big educational projects for our cities, I live in Dar.’ It seemed he really had credited that 95 per cent figure, until challenged. How many Tanzanian bureaucrats live in fantasy-land?

A two-mile walk along a dusty road, between shambas and concrete shacks swarming with children, took me to a startling Palladian edifice surrounded by maize fields. Once these were the playing-fields of Tanganyika’s Eton, when Iringa’s Teacher Training College was a boys’ boarding-school (Whites only). Here I found Jason Smith, a young English VSO lecturer who removed Lear’s back wheel and inserted the new tube as effortlessly as I would break an egg. VSO workers are provided with mountain-bikes, in lieu of Pajeros, and Jason – soon to return home – insisted on giving me one of his spare tubes and an extra set of patches. The College atmosphere was unquiet that morning. A 20-year-old girl student had died during the night while trying to abort with chloroquin, quite an effective and very popular abortifacient but too often taken in excess. It can be bought without a prescription and is also the favourite choice of suicides. Moreover, trouble had erupted a few days previously between the students and a gang of local toughs – town versus gown transposed to Tanzania. The College Director was in Dar, the police refused to intervene, the situation ran out of control and, after several students had been beaten unconscious, the gang leader’s ears were cut off.

On my way back from the College I paused to inspect ‘The Department for Primary Health Care,’ a long line of new one-storey buildings, as yet unequipped. A smartly uniformed askari leaned out from his sentry-hut to tell me the Director was in Dar, where the Directors of things provincial usually are. The Assistant Director, a welcoming young woman named Lily, arrived just then by Land Cruiser, its driver also smartly uniformed. When I asked about AIDS prevention programmes in the schools, presumably a concern of the Department for Primary Health Care, she cheerfully replied, ‘We’ve no schools programme yet, but maybe in September we can start something.’ With an effort I concealed the effect of her remark on a mzungu aware of the urgency of the problem. ‘There’s nothing to see here,’ she continued, ‘we wait for funding from WHO. But come with me to the hospital, meet the area Medical Director and Dr Makwetta – he runs our AIDS Control Programme and gets funding from Ireland.’

We bumped slowly towards the hospital, passing a well-tended pine-shaded British military cemetery. ‘Too many dead Whitemen’ exclaimed Lily. ‘For why did they fight in Africa?’ The driver interrupted to ask if I could sell him ‘reliable’ condoms and then Lily enthused about all the AIDS seminars, conferences and workshops she had enjoyed in the past and hoped to enjoy in the near future. The African penchant for attending such gatherings (as far from home as possible), instead of taking action on the spot, is of course fostered by Western ‘experts’ for their own reasons.

We were entering the enormous hospital when Lily gave a squeal of dismay – I hadn’t signed the Visitors’ Book! Even in such institutions as Iringa’s virtually non-existent Department for Primary Health Care, Visitors’ Books have become a ludicrous – and in this case infuriating – fetish. At once the Land Cruiser was dispatched (an eight-mile trip) to fetch the hard-backed exercise-book, despite my objecting to such a scandalous waste of fuel. Again innocent of her impact on the mzungu, Lily explained, ‘WHO pays our vehicle expenses.’

The Medical Director was – guess where? Dr Makwetta however raised my spirits; he had never attended a seminar, conference or workshop, being too busy doing his job. Later I heard from several sources that he has a reputation for prudent spending – and for giving back the change, should a project cost less than expected. We established an instant rapport and Lily, who seemed to be in some awe of this Big Man, left us on our own.

Dr Makwetta – a friend of Dr Kolimba’s – had previously worked with the National AIDS Control Programme (NACP) in Kagera. He angrily condemned governmental sluggishness; the authorities refused to launch an AIDS awareness campaign until 1990, three years after a Ministry of Health survey found 24 per cent of Bukoba’s adults to be HIV +. In 1987, officialdom asserted that this infection came from Uganda and would be confined to remote Kagera. And the locals themselves believed this; initially AIDS was known as ‘Juliana’, after a popular dress material imported from Uganda. Wearily Dr Makwetta deplored each region’s scapegoat-hunting and repeated a Ugandan proverb often quoted by Noerine Kaleeba, ‘Finding a snake in the house, you don’t argue about where it came from before killing it.’

By June 1990, 16,250 cases of full-blown AIDS had been reported to NACP from Tanzania’s twenty regions and Dr Makwetta said it was impossible to estimate how many were dying unregistered in their homes – especially in the south – where shame remains a powerful factor. The NACP 1990 surveys found 81,000 pregnant women to be HIV+ and during that year more than 24,300 Tanzanian babies were born infected. Extreme poverty, in Dr Makwetta’s view, was largely responsible for the speed of the virus’s spread. For instance, Kagera’s economy has been devastated during the past decade by a matoke weevil and the falling price of coffee (falling for the grower, not for the consumer). He therefore supported, with reservations, the latest official idea, ‘Intersectoral Co-operation’ – a five-year plan based on the collaboration of several government departments and non-governmental organisations whose responsibilities touch on various aspects of the AIDS crisis. He didn’t need to explain his reservations. I could visualise ‘Intersectoral Cooperation’ all too clearly as a menacing new breeding-ground for delay and dissension leading to paralysis.

Dr Makwetta laughed at the notion of any ‘behaviour change’ campaign being able to avert a catastrophic reduction of the present economically productive age-group. He agreed with Ndugu Munisi that Christianity’s demolition of traditional religion had contributed to the epidemic’s spread; polygamy allowed men to prove their virility without random matings. Now the most urgent need was for direct action among children, whether school-going or not, from the age of 9 or 10 onwards. But here the cultural barriers were even higher than the financial barriers; both parents and Church leaders continued to oppose blunt speaking about sex.

As I stood up to leave, Dr Makwetta pointed to the poster above his desk. It listed the latest chilling statistics from Tanzania’s sentinel towns, below a quote from Camus’s The Plague:‘Calamity has come on you, my brethren, and, my brethren, you deserved it.’

That evening I met a German White Father – tall, gaunt, malaria-depleted – who had laboured long in southern Tanzania and found AIDS unsurprising; for decades he had been observing sexual activity increasing among schoolchildren. Yet he rejected direct action because of its condom constituent; his AIDS prevention campaign was centred on special church services and more frequent and more fervent praying in the schools ‘to deliver these poor young people from temptation’. Such powers of self-deception are doubtless necessary when one has spent a lifetime failing to replace tribal taboos with the imported variety.

AIDS is new, the rest isn’t. In 1947, Elspeth Huxley called on an English missionary in Uganda and recorded Miss Hornby’s lament:

Immorality is rampant, the sense of obligation to family and tribe has gone … Last year three of our (unmarried) women teachers here became pregnant and we had to suspend our senior master, a Makerere man, for seducing a pupil of fourteen.

Miss Hornby was also driven to self-deception:

But we must look to the next generation. We must pin our hopes to them. And I have faith that enough will grow up healthy, self-respecting and God-fearing to leaven the whole …

Back in the Lutheran Centre, an excited gentleman informed me that Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh were about to divorce – yes, it was true, it had to be true, he’d read it in the Daily News (Tanzania’s only English-language daily). Months later, when I heard about the genuine royal troubles, I realised how this rumour had started. Its conduit was Dr Musoke, yet another Senior Adviser, this time to the Department of Health. His elderly companion, Mr Lyoto, wore jungle trousers and an anorak – for which he apologised; he had been gathering some rare herbs on a near-inaccessible plateau in the Southern Highlands. He was a botanist, specialising in medicinal plants, and he too worked for the Department of Health which I found cheering. Both men were sitting on a red plastic settee in the foyer, drinking black tea and eating horrible buns. Opposite them sat Joan Mziray, a petite and demure accountant from the Department of Transport in Dodoma, here to do ‘an estimate’ – of what remained a mystery. I was invited to join the party but excused myself for a moment. After a hard day, I needed something stronger than tea and in my room lurked a bottle of Konyagi, a gut-rotting distillation peculiar to Tanzania. Africa’s Christian hostelries were setting me on the slippery slope to secret drinking.

Why were all these government officals not staying in the nearby hotel? My question brought an unexpected and disarming reply: Tanzania was so down on its luck that even Senior Advisers had to look for cheap lodgings. And this was OK. Mwalimu had always preached (and practised) personal austerity, so at the best of times they’d never been used to high living – just a little higher than the Lutheran Centre.

Dr Musoke and Mr Lyoto were not soul-mates. The former, who had qualified in Edinburgh and sounded faintly Scots, remained devoted to Mwalimu – The Teacher, Dr Julius Nyerere, once esteemed as ‘the conscience of Black Africa’ (even when his collection of imprisoned political dissidents far outnumbered South Africa’s). Dr Musoke boasted that resettling the peasants had been ‘a big health-care success – we could attend to their needs. Before, they were hidden away in the bush.’ Of course many were primitive pagans who made a silly fuss about being separated from their ancestors’ graves and since Mwalimu’s retirement have been moving back into the bush, leaving ‘our excellent free medical care’ behind them.

Mr Lyoto beamed at me as I gave a thumbnail sketch of the five rural health-centres I had paused to inspect between Dodoma and Iringa. Airily Dr Musoke dismissed my findings. ‘Sometimes we can have temporary problems about the distribution of medicines and so on – we have a fine medical work-force, I think the best in Africa.’

I hadn’t been criticising the work-force; those I met struck me as astonishingly dedicated, given their demoralising lack of back-up from Dr Musoke’s Ministry. In Dar es Salaam, on my way home, I prised a report out of that Ministry and discovered how much government expenditure on health had declined – from 7 per cent in 1976 to 3.6 per cent in 1987. For 1988 the per capita health budget came to less than one US dollar. No later figures were available. Dr Musoke’s evident belief in his own lies mirrored Mr Reweyemamu’s illusions about education. When pressed, he admitted that his ‘heavy work schedule’ allowed him little time to move out from Dar – he was in Iringa to attend a colleague’s funeral. As more than 90 per cent of Tanzanians live in rural areas the existence of this segregated urban elite, skilled only at dodging reality, goes a long way to explain the country’s present critical condition.

Mr Lyoto made an odd croaking noise when Dr Musoke defined AIDS as a minor problem. The real global problem was malaria, now killing at least two million people annually. So why all the fuss about AIDS? Why not concentrate on eliminating malaria as smallpox had been eliminated? Was AIDS so important because it had seemed, when first identified, to threaten the West? Was malaria not important because its victims were rarely Western?

Sharply Mr Lyoto intervened. Smallpox was eradicated, he recalled, by paying chosen people generous sums to report at once on victims, who were then isolated. Malaria eradication requires a whole population to be constantly vigilant in the matter of stagnant water; and in Africa it’s not easy to achieve that sort of disciplined communal vigilance. The tsetse fly, he added, presents a similar problem; it cleverly travels underneath trains and vehicles so can’t be controlled without cross-border co-operation and equally rigid standards throughout the affected areas.

Joan scarcely spoke while the men were present, then erupted on their retiring. It heartened me that someone in the Department of Transport felt passionate about Tanzania’s roads. After her initial outburst, delivered so fast that I got only the gist of it, Joan demanded eagerly, ‘You’ll write about our roads? Please! Make our government feel ashamed! Roads are not like weather – people can do something about them!’

I assured Joan that I would indeed write about Tanzania’s roads, unsparingly. She calmed down then and spoke more slowly. Her main concern was humanitarian. Tanzania had been spending precious hard currency importing food for the Dar es Salaam market while hundreds of tons of its own maize were going mouldy and being eaten by rats in the south-west, where trucks couldn’t cope with the roads. ‘So in many areas – you’ve seen some – villagers go hungry while the rats around Rukwa get fat! Now our government declares it has to give urgent food aid to three million in the north – this last drought was worst there. It’s looking for US $3.8 million to transport the surplus from the south. But while it builds new roads the surplus won’t wait! In Rukwa there are no good storage places. Not only our government is mad, most Southern Africa governments wouldn’t take the drought seriously till last December. The peasants knew how things would be but leaders don’t listen to peasants – and they know they’ll never starve!’

Dr Musoke was Joan’s next target. ‘That doctor, he’s stupid and ignorant! This is why so many of our élite are dying, they think believing in AIDS is a bush superstition and as educated men they know better. For working women like me these men are very dangerous.’ Joan repeated what a dozen other women, in Kenya and Uganda, had already told me: many female employees must be prepared to sleep with their bosses to gain promotion – sometimes just to keep their jobs. In Tanzania Nyerere did try to raise the status of women but here too it seems he failed. Joan’s sister’s husband was then dying of AIDS in Arusha. Her sister told her boss this – adding, truthfully, that she had not been tested. But he was not deterred and to secure the promotion she desperately needed, to support four children after her husband’s death, she gave in. Joan said, ‘These men are rich, they can afford to keep women in second homes. But they hate independent working women competing with them in their world – or what was their world. Even junior female staff seem a threat. I’m sure this is our problem, men want to punish us just for being there. They want us to feel always inferior, dependent, in their power – and controlling our bodies is the way to do it. Everyone notices the women best at their job – the biggest threat to the men – get the worst sex punishment even if they’re the ugliest around! When I was in Dar University in the early ’80s another sort of control and punishment went on. There was a custom called “Punch” to bully the girl students, to stop them taking any part in university life outside of studies. It upset our studies, too! It was a system of posting up on notice boards very intimate details about a named girl, using very bad insulting words. Any girl who dared to move into the men’s world by joining a debating society or something – any normal student activity – was intimidated by “Punch”. In ’81 – that was my first year – the decent men students tried to have Punch outlawed and found it had the backing of older men, university staff who thought it was a good way of “keeping the women in line”! Those English words were used – can you believe it?’

I said I could easily believe it, sexual harassment also being a problem in the West, though now driven underground by legislation. I wondered how Joan came to speak such fluent English? Her parents, evidently rich, had disapproved of Nyerere’s language policy and sent her to a convent school in Kenya – across what was then an officially closed border.