9
Highland Fling
Iringa to Tukuyu
Where I crossed the Little Ruaha River, below Iringa, my path again met Joseph Thomson’s, this time on the route of his first expedition (1879), led by the 33-year-old Alexander Johnston who soon died of some undiagnosed tropical disease. The 20-year-old Thomson, continuing alone, walked through the unexplored territory between Dar es Salaam and Lake Nyasa, and from there to the southern end of Lake Tanganyika. This expedition was partly funded by the Royal Geographical Society, with much support from missionary, scientific and commercial interests. Its objective was to advise on the prospects for a road from Dar to the Nyasa region as an alternative to the hazardous Zambezi River route, always threatened by harassment from the Portuguese. The then President of the RGS, Sir Rutherford Alcock, admitted to the subscribers to the expedition fund that many might question the benefit to Africans of such explorations. But, he added, the way to counter such doubts was to show that ‘scientific and practical objects could be carried out without necessarily involving great loss of life or conflicts with the natives.’ For this purpose, Thomson was the ideal expedition leader; he arrived at Lake Tanganyika having lost not even one porter or quarrelled with even one ‘native’.
In this Hehe territory around Iringa Thomson was often delayed; being the first European ever seen in the area, the chiefs were keen both to investigate his motives, which they naturally suspected, and to observe his hilarious habits, like eating with a knife and fork. He found the Hehe ‘noblemen of Nature’s mould – no one put forth his hand to touch what did not belong to him’. This cattle-keeping tribe, who cultivated little, had become powerful earlier in the century when a strong leader united various clans, incorporated (or eliminated) other weaker tribes and accumulated wealth by exporting slaves and ivory to the coast. As fierce but disciplined warriors, the Hehe were to distinguish themselves in combat with the German land-grabbers. They annihilated a German ‘punitive force’ in 1891 and their territory remained ‘unpacified’ until 1898.
Not far from Iringa I dismounted, the better to see a Hehe witch-doctor. He came striding towards me down the middle of the road, robed in a tattered leopard-skin, banging his neck-drum and screaming – then sobbing, then chanting in a high-pitched voice. Bright feathers and withered vegetation decorated his long grey locks; he carried a six-foot spear; bits of animals festooned him – monkey skulls, a snakeskin, a lion’s tail, feline teeth. There was much early morning pedestrian traffic: women carrying loads of grain, bananas, onions or sweet potatoes to Iringa’s market and children on their way to school. One sensed unease as this weirdly powerful figure went on his way – walking faster than any African normally does, his castrato chant becoming hypnotic. The children scuttled off the verge into the bush, openly afraid; the adults looked away, their faces closed – as though to stare at this apparition, as I was doing, might bring bad luck.
Continuing, I caught myself being again unreasonably irritated by the African women’s cheerful acceptance of their beast-of-burden role – all those strong young husbands, strolling along carefree and loadfree, followed by wives carrying weights such as I could not even lift off the ground, yet chatting amiably with their spouses. Why not at least divide the load equally? But of course this is literally unthinkable and She would be as shocked as He if anyone suggested it. Children are conditioned early. Near here I saw many small schoolgirls carrying planks on their heads up a steep hill. These were for a schoolroom extension and on the hilltop stood the male pupils, complacently watching.
A strong tailwind sped me on my way through a landscape of round rocky hills, untidily cultivated shambas, stands of feathery bamboo, swaying pine forests, then mile after mile of newly green bush from which an extraordinary variety of minute and exquisite flowers overflowed on to the verges. Yet the local maize was in a bad way; for it the meagre rains had come too late. So why were gallons of pombe being sold, outside almost every shamba, to passing motorists and truckers? Because – I learned later – the grain shortage had so raised the price that families were selling what had been brewed for domestic consumption.
In the bush, remote from any village, I noticed a few of the distinctive Hehe dwellings – very long, low, flat-roofed communal huts, built of poles and red mud fortified with grain stalks. Traditionally cattle and humans shared accommodation. These homes, though in good repair, were unoccupied; the drought had forced herders to take their animals high into the mountains.
Perhaps staring at witch-doctors does bring bad luck. Towards noon I was pedalling slowly up a long, gradual, jungly slope where tall wayside bamboo limited visibility. The collision caught me completely off guard. Out of the bush he cycled fast, a huge jerry-can of pombe lashed to his carrier – and then I was spreadeagled under Lear, being soaked in pombe. For one of those brief but memorable moments we were both lying on the road, staring at each other with astonishment. Simultaneously we scrambled to our feet and my expectation of some sign of apology or concern was not fulfilled. The young man ignored me. Understandably, his main worry was the spillage of all that precious alcohol – as usual corked inadequately with a hunk of cane. Hastily he righted the container, peering anxiously at the contents to estimate his loss. When I offered to hold his bicycle while the jerry-can was being re-lashed, he looked scared; at no stage, during our unfortunate encounter, did he utter a syllable in any language. I walked on then, feeling slightly shaken but thankful that Lear was undamaged and trying to diagnose the damage to myself. My right hip and knee protested as I remounted on the hilltop. Arriving in Mafinga an hour later, I stiffly dismounted; a half-day off was indicated.
Mafinga stands on high ground, its little red mud-brick buildings, with pale grey tin roofs, strewn for miles over wide, lightly wooded slopes. On the main road seedy guest-houses-cum-bars abound, this being a popular truckers’ halt. Seediness doesn’t usually put me off but these establishments were both super-seedy and unwelcoming to the mzungu. Wandering up a dusty track, through acres of failed maize, I came upon a congenial doss-house, its façade half-smothered by a scarlet flowering creeper – a lodging for locals rather than truckers. My room had a disintegrating earth floor, like a well-harrowed field, and the door was unlockable – but that didn’t matter, so amiably reassuring were the proprietress and her teenage daughter. Having chained Lear to the bed, I went in search of food.
Mafinga’s motel – crudely smart, advertising a nightly disco – was newly built and evidently designed to pull in the best-paid international truckers. The restaurant boasted clean tablecloths and for £1.80 provided an ample meal of soup, bread, butter(!), steak, chips and tomato salad. The dual-purpose waitresses wore tight satin frocks with much cheap jewellery; their lips and nails were dark purple. Mine was a tall slender girl from Bukoba, her darkness accentuated by a sleek shimmering crimson gown, her diamante and gold watch not acquired in the bush. I invited her to have a coffee with me. Three years previously her parents had died of AIDS, aged 42 and 40. She had five younger siblings dependent on her earnings and nothing to sell but her body. AIDS naturally worried her; intelligent and forceful, she claimed to have converted many men to condom use. ‘I argue,’ she said. ‘I tell how my father and mother died slowly and it was like hell. Men are surprised when I tell about my parents but they like me and want me. I show my report, I’m tested and clean. I say I want to stay clean and – OK, they want me, they use condoms! And carefully, not like a joke. Men are not so bad, if women are strong they listen. Many are scared now and like to find a clean girl. I make good money – they come and ask for Margaret because their friends tell them I’m clean. It’s not true men won’t use condoms but women must be strong – very strong!’
Later, in a main-road bar, I watched nineteen trucks from half a dozen African countries coming to rest on a vast dusty area by primitive repair depots. At dusk teenage girls swarmed out like mosquitoes to forage among the truckers. For them to reckon ‘It can’t happen to me’, when it has already happened to at least 26 per cent of this town’s married women, seems suicidal. But then of course they know nothing about these statistics. This aspect of the epidemic was troubling me increasingly. In Iringa Dr Makwetta had assured me that Tanzania ‘keeps to the UN rules about AIDS and human rights’. This means that no one knows which individuals in sentinel towns such as Mafinga test positive. But is it ethically admissible to test people – even anonymously – without their consent? Arguably such testing is necessary to determine the rate at which the virus is spreading. Yet what practical purpose does that serve? How does it help infected communities? Statistics are of absorbing interest to the countless academics now so profitably riding on the AIDS industry gravy-train, but how does their collection help Africans? Is there not something intolerably paternalistic about this refusal to treat the infected as responsible human beings, entitled to know the worst and make appropriate decisions? The husbands of those infected Mafinga mothers may well develop AIDS first, causing some of their wives to sleep around to earn money to buy alleviating medicines – or witch-doctors’ ‘cures’. What right do experts have to reduce individuals to statistics, using their tragedies as ‘research material’? Does this happen in the West? Were it discovered that 26 per cent of pregnant women in some English town were HIV + would all agree that they should have been tested without their knowledge and should not be given the opportunity to respond to their condition as they judge best? Is this choice not a human right?
From a cycling point of view Tanzania’s Southern Highlands were even more enjoyable – because more varied – than my bush shortcut from Shinyanga to Dodoma. Beyond Mafinga, a seventy-mile detour through the Mufindi Tea Estates allowed me to glimpse another world – high, cold, wet, windy, very beautiful. This was a magical world of noble forests, steep terraced slopes neatly clothed in tea-bushes, sudden heart-stopping views over many lower mountain ranges and criss-crossing valleys all wooded and secret-looking. On the Kilima Estate I was lavishly entertained – by pampering servants and affectionate dogs – in Kibwele House, the home of Mary and Jonny Niblett, who unfortunately were on leave.
Then down and down to Makumbako, a larger than usual township where I rejoined the main road and next morning continued to descend along a narrow ridge, many miles in length, with tremendous expanses of low, golden-brown bush and jungle stretching away on either side – only limited, on far horizons, by the faint irregular blueness of other mountain ranges. Where this ridge merged into savannah I was surrounded by a red-gold ocean, restless in the strong wind – and then I saw, in the distance, what seemed to be quite a large though short-legged animal moving slowly by the roadside. Moments later it became apparent that this creature was a grotesquely crippled young man, dragging himself through the dust, using only his stick-like arms. His destination, I assumed, was an isolated compound five hundred yards away, just visible through its pathetic crop of failed maize. I braked. Should I stop and try to help him, or would he mistake my concern for vulgar curiosity and feel angry and humiliated? Then I realised that he was unaware of my presence, being totally absorbed in the pain of his effort to move. I dismounted and suddenly felt overwhelmed. All the strong but futile emotions generated by Africa’s manifold problems and tragedies, and normally half-suppressed, took over and shattered me. The young man’s breath was coming in short wheezy gasps, saliva dribbled from the corners of his wide-open mouth, his small thin face was twisted with agony and despair, his filthy rags revealed an emaciated torso and dreadfully distorted legs. Leaving Lear in the middle of the road, I approached him; possibly he would accept a piggy-back home. Then he noticed me. Terror filled his eyes and he whimpered and writhed like a wounded trapped animal. Hastily I turned away and remounted, abandoning him to his lonely misery and confusedly wishing that someone would put him down, as though he were indeed a disabled animal. Obviously he was uncared for and unloved – a piece of human trash in his community – otherwise he would not have had to move thus, nor would he have given off such a powerful aura of every sort of suffering.
Soon after came a grim drought area: mile after mile of stunted maize and withered sunflowers. The trees too were burned up, the few inhabitants looked wretched. Their square or oblong huts, unusually neatly built, were thatched to match the dead maize and blended almost invisibly into the shambas. Amidst thorny scrub wandered flocks of brown and white fat-tailed sheep and herds of small skinny cattle tended by small skinny boys.
I spent that night in the rather unfriendly township of Igawa – low-lying, dusty, hot – where begins the long climb to the Mbeya escarpment. Tanzania’s main-road townships keep the mzungu at a distance, though one always meets a few welcoming individuals. Unlike homogeneous bush villages, these are mongrel communities of uprooted people from disparate regions – a bit of this tribe and that, everyone hoping somehow to scratch a living by selling something (food, charcoal, pombe, poultry, handicrafts, bodies) to the comparatively rich who pass that way. Even bus or matatu passengers are comparatively rich, otherwise they couldn’t afford a ticket. International truckers are very rich; their smuggling opportunities, if not their wages, see to that. Passing expatriates – rich beyond imagining – like to get a wayside handicraft bargain and boast to their neighbours who paid three times as much for the same thing in an urban market. And so on … Yet in my experience most Tanzanians, however poor, do not beg or seek sponsorship from the mzungu; their activities are proudly commercial.
The next day’s long climb to the Mbeya plateau involved only a few miles of non-gruelling walking and many miles of slow cycling. On one long steep hill, during the hottest part of the afternoon, I walked behind a middle-aged man pushing an old man – who looked at death’s door – to the nearest hospital, ten miles away. I marvelled at the skeletal patient, his eyes glazed with suffering, being able to balance on the carrier. Then an FAO Land Cruiser overtook us, empty but for the expatriate driver who sped past, unseeing, vividly illustrating the reality of Western ‘aid’ to Africa. Hundreds of such vehicles, normally carrying only one or two expatriates, zoom around rural areas; but the locals, to whom transport would be a boon, know better than to expect a lift. Ten minutes later, near the top of the hill, a Toyota pick-up stopped and a well-dressed Tanzanian got out to rescue the old man. A front-seat passenger moved to the back and the patient – too weak to walk – was lifted into the vehicle. His son cycled on, there being no room for a bicycle in the crowded back. Following him, I mused on the manifold uses of bicycles in Africa – as carts, ambulances, bath-chairs, hearses (the rigid corpse, wrapped in sacking or bark-cloth, is laid across the carrier), as mobile dairies and dispensaries and of course as vehicles for a family outing. Later that same day I saw a father transporting two small sons on his cross-bar while his pregnant wife rode side-saddle behind him, with baby on back and toddler in lap.
I arrived at Uyole, a trading centre marking an important international junction, just too late to cover the final ten miles to Mbeya. In these dreary little places one tends to concentrate on bia; food is too hard to find and too repulsive when found. It surprised me to be greeted by three English-speakers, sitting outside a crowded noisy bar; since leaving Mafinga the language-barrier had been insurmountable.
Mr Luhala, from Arusha, had recently moved to Mbeya as sales manager for a tyre company, leaving his wife and four children behind. ‘Education must be a parent’s first priority and here the schooling is bad.’
Mr Maskini, a retired lawyer, told me, ‘The mission schools, with strict discipline, used to produce the best pupils. It’s good our Prime Minister Malecela now says religious communities can again run secondary schools – but not primary, which might too much influence the formation of the child. President Nyerere allowed only secular education, he thought all those different Christian sects would be divisive – as in Kenya and Uganda – against the unified nation he wanted to create.’
‘And did create,’ said Mr Luhala. ‘At least we can be proud of our unity. We’ve hundreds of tribes but could never have tribal troubles like Kenya and Uganda.’
Mr Mpondele, a hotelier and ‘international merchant’ from Mbeya, rather smugly agreed: ‘We have become politically mature, a grown-up nation – thanks to Mwalimu!’
Mr Maskini frowned at his bia bottle and wondered, ‘Politically mature? That remains to be seen, when we have our multi-party elections in 1995. Anyhow you can’t compare us with Kenya or Uganda. We don’t have the same history of conflict. Our tribes were mostly small and scattered over a huge territory, not competing. But it’s true Mwalimu cleverly stopped trouble-makers from stirring up tribalism. He encouraged nationalism instead, using Swahili to give us a sense of superiority – we haven’t remained tied in our thinking by the colonial language.’
‘But that was a two-edged weapon,’ said Mr Mpondele. ‘It also cut us off from the advancing Western world. And people laugh at us for keeping English as the medium of university education while refusing to have it taught in primary schools, and having it taught only very badly at secondary level. Now our academic standards are shameful – most students learning by rote, without understanding!’
‘Soon this may change,’ said Mr Luhala. ‘Lately the expat teachers at our training colleges decided all future exams should be in Swahili.’
Angrily Mr Maskini asked, ‘Why should expats make such decisions for us?’ His question was ignored. This conversation helped me to understand the common Tanzanian assumption that all mzungus should speak Swahili; among the unsophisticated, failure to do so can provoke mild antagonism, as though their collective self-esteem had been wounded.
Despite the disasters wrought by Nyerere’s head-in-the-clouds socialism, my companions still saw it as a better way of life than unrestrained capitalism. Mr Luhala asked, ‘Why do Western politicians talk so much now about “socialism” being dead? Only Communism is dead and these are different ideas – our Mwalimu is a humanist, not a Communist!’
I explained that at present the West is led by manic capitalists who find it expedient to blur this distinction.
‘You are correct!’ exclaimed Mr Maskini. ‘Not only African politicians are dishonest!’
It was getting late. As the truckers who had been drinking nearby began to move off with their bar-girls Mr Luhala suddenly admitted to being in a panic, as a grass-widower. ‘For me now celibacy is the only safeguard, but even at 48 that’s not easy. I ask myself if castration would be better than the risk of AIDS? I’m only half-joking! Maybe that’s the answer for all men who have completed their families!’
When I too made a move it transpired that Mr Mpondele had already paid for my bia. He then invited me to spend the following night as his guest in Mbeya’s Grand Motel – ‘My wife Janet would like to talk to you about many things. She very much enjoys foreign conversation.’ He had offered a lift – Lear would fit in the back of his pick-up – and had been puzzled by my declining it. The concept of cycling for fun is hard to get across in Africa.
My doss-house cell was decorated with by-now-familiar AIDS prevention posters and on the bedside table lay a six-pack – ‘Made in Alabama: Electronically Tested’. (The notion of electronically tested condoms inspires some interesting but unprintable thoughts.) A graphically illustrated booklet, produced by the Benedictine Ndanda Mission Press, represented a loftier approach to the problem; it emphasised the behaviour change angle, the weakening of self-control when drink has been taken, the miserable lives led by widows and fatherless children. This was an excellent publication, but once a couple have closed the bedroom door are they likely to pause for a read?
Mbeya on its high plateau seems protected by semi-surrounding mountains, their majesty cloud-veiled when I arrived soon after dawn. This provincial capital is thinly spread over the valleys, slopes and ledges of a fertile ridge gradually rising to a blunt, perpendicular central peak. Steep, wide, rough streets alternate with even rougher narrow laneways, winding between huts or dukas or bungalows in shaggy gardens. As in most such cities, the atmosphere is more rural than urban, the bush lifestyle much in evidence. To me the people seemed jollier, and more relaxed and friendlier, than elsewhere in Tanzania. ‘We are like the Malawians,’ said Janet; and I found that she was right.
Mr Percy Mpondele’s Grand Motel is a new one-storey building in a valley opposite the bus station – a hyper-active place at 7 a.m. Recently a law forbidding nocturnal bus journeys had come into force, provoking much indignation. Its laudable purpose was to prevent all those fatal crashes inevitable in the dark on Tanzania’s average road, but its only perceived effect was to add alarmingly to travellers’ expenses. Instead of bussing from A to B by night, doing what had to be done in B during the day and returning to A in a bus departing at sunset, two nights had to be spent in B – and no one considered the extra safety worth the extra cost.
From the road the Grand Motel is invisible behind its high mud wall, fortified with broken glass and softened by overhanging acacia and frangipani. Having pushed Lear up the eroded slope – almost steep enough to be called a cliff-face – I found a locked gate and a sleeping askari. Within, below the veranda, three thatched, bamboo-walled drinking booths were conspicuously labelled ‘Lourdes France’, ‘St Francisco of assis’ and ‘St Bernadett’. These set the tone of the establishment. The Grand Motel was devoid of sex-workers and more genuinely ‘respectable’ than some of the Christian Centres I had stayed in. (Later I discovered why.) By Western standards it seemed ungrand, though clean and comfortable; in contrast to my usual lodgings it seemed Hiltonian.
I spent much of the day exploring Mbeya and its environs. The large shops are still owned by Asians (or Levantines) and stocked a few ‘luxury’ goods – edible biscuits, coloured candles, tinned butter, powdered milk – imported from nearby capitalist Malawi. But, as one Asian merchant explained dolefully, it was hard to sell those exotic items; inflation was galloping so fast you couldn’t see it, yet no wage increase would be allowed until July. In the bank I discovered that all Forex controls had recently been lifted; it was now possible to exchange hard currency in any freelance bureau de change, at negotiable rates.
Far up in the mountains a coolish breeze blew, even at noon; I was moving into the southern winter. All Mbeya lay below me, hundreds of flat tin roofs glimmering amidst thriving crops: maize, bananas, coffee, cocoa. Here on the heights grew woods of mighty blue gums where women foraged for fuel, then gracefully carried their long heavy loads, tied with vines, in and out of narrow gullies on precipitous paths. This region, enjoying every natural advantage, should be prosperous. Its extreme poverty, being man-made, arouses as much rage as pity. And now it walks, with the rest of Africa, in the shadow of death.
The Mpondeles belonged to the local elite; they owned another hotel in ‘new’ Mbeya, the slightly industrialised zone on the main road to Zambia, and Percy’s international trading was almost too obviously profitable. As Janet and I settled down to a sunset bia session on the veranda she described herself as ‘a pious Catholic’ – then added, ‘But I’m not a spoil-sport or narrow-minded. I’m a liberated woman, if I want a drink I have it in public.’
Soon Janet was confiding that Percy disapproved of her ‘purity policy’. ‘He says it’s impossible to run a successful hotel without bar-girls but I say he’s wrong. This hotel is my personal AIDS prevention programme. Men away from home should have such places to stay, now more and more they want to avoid temptation. If they can have nice surroundings, good food, happy talk in the bar and no women hunting them – then they can safely travel. A year ago I told my husband we must have this sort of hotel, in time it will become popular – and already this is coming true, my hotel is getting a reputation for safety. I had to nag and nag at Percy, he didn’t want to know about the figures that put me in this mood. Sixteen AIDS deaths were reported in Mbeya in ’86. Four years later we had 1,776 reported deaths – and how many more? Now we are the third worst town in the country. That’s what made me do something, it’s crazy to say nothing can be done! If everyone does nothing, it gets like a sort of mass-suicide. If we don’t change, who will be left in twenty years? All my darling children could be dead, there are families who have lost all children … I don’t know how those parents go on living! Everyone has to do something, not only talk about how bad it is – or pretend it isn’t!’
Janet also fretted about her children – should they escape AIDS – becoming drug-addicts. There is, she said, an increasing cocaine problem in Tanzania and her blaming some of the backpacking Whitemen seemed not unreasonable. We were into our fourth beer when she confessed to her major worry – Percy’s behaviour in the other hotel (stocked with up-market bar-girls), where he often spent the night on the pretext of ‘needing to supervise things’. ‘We have a good manager there,’ said Janet. ‘I don’t believe him. I’ve stopped sleeping with him, it’s too risky and my children must come first. Orphan children are the worst nightmare for every African woman educated about AIDS. We are not fools, we know what men are, we must act independently – a complete change of attitude and behaviour is our duty. If husbands lose the wife’s trust, that’s their own fault.’ She spoke briskly, stoically; but there was sadness and hurt in her eyes. I remember her now as another ‘source of hope’, my generic name for those exceptional African women whose response to AIDS is imaginative and courageous, who know their feminist hour has come.
After supper, as I wrote in my room, Max appeared in the doorway – a cheerful, good-looking young man who worked with his wife in the hotel kitchen. Without preamble he asked, ‘What medicine do you have for this ukimwi disease?’ The following dialogue then took place.
Max evaded my stern gaze and asked how much Lear had cost in sterling. Would I sell him at the end of my holiday? If so, please would I bring him back to Mbeya and sell him to Max? At this point Max’s wife summoned him to the kitchen where there were chickens to be plucked for four government officials who had just arrived from Dar es Salaam and sought the temptation-free Grand Motel.
Max’s phrase ‘I must test myself’ reminded me of Dr Makwetta’s comments on polygamy. To have fathered a baby once a year for six years is not enough to prove virility; fidelity to one woman indicates weakness and poverty, even meanness. It must be evident to one’s peers that one can cope, physically, emotionally and economically, with a variety of females. I fell asleep pondering: Could an epidemic like AIDS have inspired – where it was inspired – the religious requirement to be monogamous?
On 6 May Lear had his finest hour – actually eight hours, up to and down from the 7,300-foot Mbogo Pass on a track my map described as ‘non-motorable’. When I noticed it, while considering how to avoid returning to the Uyole junction, my pulse quickened. A Tanzanian route designated ‘non-motorable’ (which is how most people would describe most Tanzanian roads) is guaranteed to be just that. From Makumbako we had been on the main road and, though traffic is light on even the ‘mainest’ Tanzanian road, I craved the solitude of a mere track. This one – the old, history-haunted German road from Mbeya to Karonga – joined the main road near the Malawian border. Decades of disuse render even a German road indecipherable and it took some time to find its starting point in the large village of Mlowa, twelve miles from Mbeya along the road to Zambia. Once I went astray on wide, bright pastureland, silvery green in the rising sun and rippling under a cool breeze. This very beautiful mistake led to a shoddy collectivised dairy-farm where a small boy became hysterical with terror on seeing me. His father spoke no English and seemed almost equally scared, though in a more restrained way. Even the cows took fright and tried to break out of their filthy milking-shed.
From Mlowa ‘the German road’, as it is still known locally, ran level for several miles through lavishly fertile country between blossom-laden hedges. Then cultivation was left behind and gradually the climb began, in a treeful valley where a mountain stream raced and sparkled beside the track – now a sandy path. Amidst the variegated greens of the wayside vegetation wild flowers rioted, their colours matched by darting birds and dancing butterflies. Little can have changed here since August 1914, when Captain von Langenn Steinkeller set out from Mbeya to invade British-held Nyasaland, leading 21 White officers and 800 spearmen and askari.
When the serious climb began Mbeya soon reappeared, away to the north-west and far below. Directly behind me Mount Mbeya dramatically dominated the whole region – an 8,500-foot cone, the only break in a smooth-crested range that stretched north and south as far as the eye could see. On both sides of the track, beyond profound ravines, occasional isolated homesteads overlooked precipitous slopes from their narrow ledges. Each slope was cultivated in long thin contrasting strips: the old gold of ripe maize, the sombre green of potatoes, the rich red-brown of ploughland, the strident yellow of something unfamiliar. Lear should now have been fulfilling his destiny as a mountain-bike but it wasn’t quite like that; perhaps the inventor had another sort of mountain in mind. Sometimes instead of Lear carrying me I had to lift him over rocky protuberances – is it time to invent a jumping-bike?
About halfway up I saw something unexpected, an elaborate complex of ruined red-brick colonial buildings on a distant hilltop. These, I later discovered, were a long-abandoned German Mission. Why missionaries ever settled here I cannot imagine, unless the region was then much more heavily populated. From such remotenesses thousands were drawn to the German cotton and sisal plantations – where workers were regularly flogged and treated as slaves – and, in British days, to the tea estates of Mufindi and Tukuyu.
The Mbogo Pass is not straight up-and-down; having attained an exhilarating 7,000 feet, the grassy path undulates across a series of wide saddles linking mountain to mountain – some slopes bare, short-grassed, boulder-studded, others darkly forested. Here the vast panorama of the Mbeya plateau is no longer visible; this is a world withdrawn and touched by mystery, silent but for the echoing shouts of shepherd boys in deep green valleys and the singing of the wind in isolated pines.
The summit happens amidst a magical forest of indigenous trees, wild bananas, towering ferns, convoluted vines, multicoloured fungi. Rarely does one come upon an unviolated forest – not secondary growth, recovered from past depredations, but the original woodlands of Africa. I paused to nut-munch and commune with those trees, as one feels free to do once well away from the negative vibes of motorised territories.
For some time the path had been dwindling and I saw now that it vanished below the pass, where forest was abruptly replaced by a naked slope of scree and tufted grass. I hesitated. Should I remain on the heights and turn south towards Malawi, plunging into the forest and trusting to luck? No – the undergrowth was too thick for Lear to be forced through without extraordinary effort. The alternative was to descend, traversing the scree and hoping the track would eventually reappear and turn south. Cycling was not of course an option on so fearsome a gradient; the exertion required to restrain Lear was scarcely less than that required to push him up.
On that three-hour descent I completely lost my always feeble sense of direction. Eventually the path reappeared, following the course of a swift sparkling stream, and led me round and round a bewilderment of very steep mountains wearing a seamless garment of dark dense forest. This path might or might not be going to Malawi; given such a topographical frenzy anything seemed possible. Then the landscape widened; expanses of rough grassland separated the mountains, groves of trees replaced the forest and the path again acquired road status. Where it had been hacked out of sheer red cliffs it overhung, on my right, a wooded gorge in which the stream was growing to riverhood. When this gorge broadened to a valley, chequered with plots of maize, bananas and coffee, I knew I was on the wrong road.
In a tiny village I was stared at with wide-eyed disbelief or fear – or a mixture of both. A mile further on I sat astride an old but still sturdy stone bridge, eating bananas bought by the wayside from a brother and sister, aged perhaps 6 and 7, who were too alarmed to indicate the price of their goods. Below me brown flood-water foamed and roared over and between giant boulders, seeming more a waterfall than a river. Not long after I found myself on the main road – ten miles north of Tukuyu and forty miles north of Malawi.
Tukuyu is a biggish town draped over a high mountain; post-Mbogo, that long ascent from river-level used up the last of my energy. Since mid-afternoon clouds had been lurking along the horizon; at 6.15 a cold gale sent them swarming blackly across the sky. Mercifully I arrived at the first bar-cum-guest-house just as the rain came – a torrent that within moments had made a river of the street.
Two English-speakers, an elderly government official and a young doctor, sat morosely drinking in a corner of the grubby lamp-lit bar. (Tukuyu is only erratically electrified.) The official deplored Tanzania’s kow-towing to the IMF and slow drift towards multiparty democracy. ‘This new fashion in Africa, this pretending to want democracy – who wants it? Who understands it in the bush? This is Western racism, forcing Western ways of politics down our throats. Is it right to threaten “No more funding!” if we don’t have “human rights”? Human rights! What do they know about human rights in the bush? All they want is food!’
‘And medicine,’ said the doctor.
His companion snorted angrily. ‘Medicine! What good is medicine now? There is no medicine for ukimwi!’ He glared at me. ‘You see Africa as a nice place for WHO to study this interesting new virus – and for drug companies to make experiments. You think we’re dirty immoral ignorant people who deserve to die! Well, we are dying – around here many, very many.’
The doctor added, ‘We’ll never know how many. Here people are still ashamed, not willing to report the true cause of all these deaths out in the bush. But we see the funerals, more and more every month. You know what’s the problem? Women will do anything for money – that’s the problem!’
I was too cold, tired and hungry to pick up even this gauntlet. Instead I moved to the cramped restaurant behind the bar, where one could see the cook dismembering a bull’s hindquarters in a leaking lean-to while his juvenile assistant fanned a bucket of charcoal.
My last Tanzanian supper was memorable: a pile of pale, limp, grease-sodden chips and three slabs of dauntingly tough fried bull – I spent forty minutes chewing through it and was left exhausted, with aching jaws. My table was half-obstructing the door of a chronically neglected latrine, much used by drinkers from the bar, and each time the door opened ammonia (plus) threatened asphyxiation. Meanwhile two teenage prostitutes were drawing blood while competing over a truck-driver. He had brought one of them from Dar es Salaam as his semi-permanent travelling concubine, thus provoking a despairing local lass to physical violence. She knew the driver, he had always slept with her before, now she would have no supper. For that youngster, no man meant no food. In such places as Tukuyu bodies are sold not to acquire luxuries but to survive.