Impressions of Urban Tanzania

        As you step off the plane, the stale taste of recycled air is supplanted by the sweet smell of burning brush and so Dar es Salaam has, with a subdued intimation of what will come, begun its assault on your senses.  As you languidly unfold from long hours spent sitting in the ordered universe of your assigned seat, you proceed farther from the world it represents and the city begins to push a little less gently as the customs lines pile up behind imperious bureaucracy, but still you remain in a limnal place, even as you notice the tang of body odor when those in line crush closer in anticipation of the city beyond the security.  Exhale deeply and it comes to you, the new city, Africans press against the glass waiting for arrivals just as at any other airport in the world but here, the similarity to what you know just serves to sharpen your impression of the place’s foreignness.

      And Tanzania is foreign to little western sensibilities and no place more foreign than the bus stands where chaos erupts at the smallest provocation where each man clutching his bread to sell waits, tense with poverty, the need to eat, and crouch and burst after the bus, slap its sides, get attention before it stops, thrust what you have to sell deep into the window with desperate voice implore and hope that the window doesn’t bargain too hard, and when that bus dried up, sprint off for another just arriving, slap the sides, get their attention, and should you, a passenger, disembark, one foot on the ground, soon joined and jostled and pressed by the bodies of so many more as you read the raw need in their eyes, and push your way through the slime, officious, unctuous abuse, not the peace you want nor the ease of travel you expected, throw a coin for a boiled egg, but no more, don’t want to attract his friends, you don’t need oranges nor directions, no, nothing please, step back and what a way to scrape together a living, if you could call it that –  and those idle, with nothing to sell, settle, too, in the bus stand like water down a drain, hollering with malarial eyes, yellowed, sallow cheeks, call to you for nothing more than amusement, confusion, derision, why did you come to my country, can’t you see we’re dying, throw me some change. The strident, deafening horns of the garishly painted, dilapidated buses occasionally obviate all other sound with their raucous tunes, but the faces, voiceless, never cease talking, jostling for some opportunity.

      All a matter of context, the arrival in the city after a long trip abroad to American, or even European cities, and Dar was a shabby little city with noisy, unruly people, and hot, humid, soporific heat, beating down on dirty streets and dirty people. But fresh from a small village where the brightest colour is the white of ugali and a paucity of sensory stimulation pushes one day into the next, and suddenly, experience was alive with the vibrant smells, tastes, and sounds of the Swahili coast and the welcome assault on our senses amplified whatever essential charm that its picturesque streets and people held. And step off the bus and the heavy coastal air, pressed your damp shirt against your body and the dust from the trip ran down your neck in sweaty rivulets, and it all brought anticipation of variety, meaningful choices in what type of food might slake whatever hunger you can muster in the heat, and juices pressed from the fruits that hung heavily off the bicycles that wheeled through the narrow streets of the old city. The choices were endless, and even as you waited through the long last bit of your bus ride, as the stops grew more frequent until the huge hulking bus with the strident horn was little more than a dala dala and passengers hurried off into the dark, past the kerosene lamps in the roadside stalls, even then you’d plan the meals that you’d eat during your stay there, and knew that you’d have to make up for months of salt and fat by gorging yourself on pizza from the South African strip mall, where two guards with shot guns stood ready to protect the customers rich enough to afford the food and where businessmen would hold important lunches during the day.

     Pizza was better for the evening, though, and lunch, there was so much variety, but always sandwiches and french-fries in the air conditioned womb of the American club, recent movies playing on the large television and saucy Australian proprietor signing off bar tabs of American beer and cold sodas with ice. The American club without competition until a French Lebanese opened her café with fresh hummus and romaine lettuce, and she didn’t realize that she was on the wrong side of the continent, that the Indians owned Tanzania, its shops and its foreign cuisine. Indian restaurants were frequented often, and hamburger joints too, Chef’s Pride with its chapati, flaky perfection absorbed most who breakfasted, but the pinnacle, the quintessential, and always the most coveted of all the options after a long layover in the bush, the street chicken, deep masala flavour consumed outdoors as cars rushed by on the dark streets. Wealthy Indians pull up in their Mercedes for takeaway as scruffy Americans indulge in a meal appropriately foreign and delicious to satisfy our hunger for both flavour and experience.

      The food was the heart of any experience in the city, but Dar presented many temptations not found in the confines of claustrophobic communities; gambling, discos, questionably for sale women, painfully beautiful and Western after months of girls too Tanzanian and untouchable in their garish khangas, infants strapped to the back of any child old enough to conceive. Temptation, permissible in humid, exotic nights, wandering home to the morning’s call to prayer, the muezzin drawing the abstemious from behind their private wooden doors, safari beer is only 500 shillings a bottle. The Holiday Hotel sat among 4 mosques, and the nearest, with his voice so deep would wake you in time for the early bus to Songea, and in the dark, the voice so loud and filled you so that nothing else could enter and you thought it was God as you abruptly left sleep behind. I miss the call to prayer most among those things that might instantly remind me how foreign Tanzania was to a boy from Connecticut, and my scratchy recording is less the voice of god than a tinny reminder that not everything can be captured.

      Arusha first opened up to me on the drive home, and as I began to think that the city might be left behind, we’d driven so far, the crowds off to our right parted from the impetus of our surprisingly loud horn and revealed a small dirt lane wending deep into a warren of markedly more ramshackle, confused and derelict buildings that was Sakina, our neighbourhood. He aimed his battered car into this mysterious engulfment of potholed streets walled in closely on either side by the garishly signed pharmacies, dukas, and high, glass-topped cement walls that protected the homes from the desperate crime that ran rampant soon after the sun went down around 6 pm. This near to the equator, the day always ended at 6, dusk would bring a quick emptying of the streets and families huddled around their low wooden table, scooping ugali in their right hands by kerosene lanterns. And this was what I, too, would come to once we completed the maze of streets that climbed higher and less resembled roads the farther the car groaned up the incline littered with boulders, stream crossings, and at least one dead cat. And turn right at the second butcher, “Jesus’ liberty meat of cow,” and then past the “third corner” hairdressers, and up and over rutted, gutted road, deep, grey dust hiding gullies, which we’d hit suddenly and bottom out and throw clouds of the stuff into the air behind us as we came perilously close to a gorge, rusted cars in the bottom, a church on the other side, and up the road climbed and narrowed as it went, banana trees replacing the lively shops of below and not miles, but seeming farther the more foreign it all became. And finally, a left before the gorge engulfed the remainder of the road and up a steep driveway, past the house with electricity into an alley, dark even when elsewhere the hot, African sun shone, and beyond our house.

Adam Dobson is a failure. He hides in foreign countries.

Comments

[flounder]

your novel is on line
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thank you, thank you for your words

[flounder]

your novel is on line
www.buran.it

thank you, thank you for your words