Prison visiting

No pictures this time: you're not allowed to take photos of Dodoma prison or surroundings. I suppose they think you might use them to help a prisoner escape. Really I'd be surprised they wanted to escape. The prison is one of the pleasanter spots in Dodoma. It nestles under a rocky hill and once past the outer security fence you are in a pretty village of neat houses (staff accommodation?) and vegetable plots. The prison building itself is a walled fortress with an imposing gateway, but inside there is cobbled courtyard with shady trees and flower beds with the names of the various rooms, eg "Officer's room", picked out in flowers. The prisoners themselves, in their orange suits, bustle about cheerfully, carrying buckets in and out of the gate, sweeping, watering etc. I've only been inside once, not as a prisoner I hasten to add, but to help recruit some cheap labour to put up a fence around a local primary school. (This is quite a regular thing here; you often see a group of them standing in the back of a pick-up truck with a couple of armed guards, all looking very happy to be having a day out somewhere.) Signing in at the gate was a bit of a palaver, with a lot of saluting and clicking of heels, then we were shown into the governor's office where we negotiated our requirements, and checked the work party wouldn't include any dangerous criminals. The prison governor seemed a very nice man, but it was a bit disconcerting talking to him because two of the photos tacked up on the noticeboard behind him were of prisoners who had hanged themselves (we assumed) in their cells. So we kept our eyes everywhere but there and admired the various bits of craftwork on display. "Do the prisoners make these?"we asked. "Yes. Would you like to buy something?" "Yes. We would." We were shown baskets, tablemats and doormats. The latter apparently are sent to the Comoros Islands where they are sold as local handicrafts. So if you go on holiday to the Comoros (does anyone?) and you buy a souvenir doormat it was probably made in Dodoma Gaol.

Family

I realised when I started planning my trip to Kigoma that I have some close relatives living just 25 kms away. We all have. Ninety chimpanzees live in Gombe Stream National Park, by the Burundi border north of Kigoma. Jane Goodall did, and still does intermittently, her research there. It’s on the lake shore and only accessible by boat. One of Ahmed’s “brothers” arranged for us to hitch a ride there in the National Park supply boat.

Coming back we weren’t so lucky. We had to wade out to catch the 7am public boat in pouring rain and shove our way under a big tarpaulin being held up, by the 100 or so passengers, over themselves and their goods. But we were fairly lucky with the chimps. We had a whole day trekking the forest trails with our guide Isaiah and a trainee guide, Wilbrod. Lovely jungly plants and sounds, big butterflies flapping everywhere, yellow baboons and two big troops of Colobus monkeys swooping and whooping through the trees.

They apparently thought we were chimps (thanks) who sometimes attack and eat them. We searched the hills, the valleys, the beaches, but no sign of chimps apart from their nests in trees.

We were in two-way radio contact with a tracker (Isaiah ending every exchange with “Lodger”) but the tracker couldn’t find them either. Just when we had decided to give up and head up to a 25m waterfall, we came upon a mother chimp and baby, right on the path.

I stood very, very still while she mooched past us and climbed a tree. The way she climbed, expertly but not at all monkey-like, made it completely believable that we share 99. whatever it is DNA with her. A bit later we saw another lone female. The “power shower “ of the waterfall set us up nicely for the hike back to camp. The swimming and snorkeling in the lake is also fabulous there although you have to watch out for baboons running off with your stuff while you’re in the water. That’s almost it for the Kigoma trip, except for one more stroke of luck. The indomitable MV Liemba came into port while we were there.

The Liemba was launched as the Graf von Gotzen in 1915 and scuttled by the Germans a year later. In 1924 she was pulled up from the bottom and renamed. She has been doing the 1000km round trip up and down the lake weekly ever since, the oldest operational passenger vessel in the world. Thanks to Ahmed’s mum’s first husband’s brother we managed to go on board and have a look round. The 3rd class seating area below decks didn’t look that inviting for a long voyage but the 1st class cabins above were the picture of shabby elegance. The ship’s wheel and binnacle on the bridge must have been original. Hmmmmm………………How to organize a trip on Liemba? Time to talk to Ahmed again.

Dr Livingstone, I presume

- Ujiji - For me all my life one of those places of legendary remoteness, like Timbuktu. It’s a great feeling to have finally actually been there. If anyone doesn’t know Ujiji is where Stanley found Livingstone. It’s a few miles south of Kigoma so it was the primary purpose of my long train trip. You can fly to Kigoma but that would have been no sort of way to get there. Walking would have been the best, but a slow train was a reasonable second best. Did Ujiji live up to expectations? Yes and no. - I came from Kigoma in a dalla-dalla which dropped me at the edge of town and I walked down towards the lake. The town looked exactly as it should be and as described by Stanley.

An important Arab-Swahili terminus in the 19th Century it has long since been overtaken by Kigoma. With its orderly streets of verandahed one-story houses and shady compounds reached by little bridges over the storm drains, it was easy to picture the famous scene: Everyone running out to greet Stanley’s expedition and him pushing his way through the crowds towards an unassuming figure waiting outside his own simple thatched house. We are told that Livingstone’s house no longer exists but I am surprised no enterprising local has “rediscovered” it. From Stanley’s sketch of the place you can see scores of likely candidates still in Ujiji. The tradition here is that the famous meeting took place under a mango tree at the western edge of town, where, I was told, the lake shoreline used to be. (It has receded a couple of hundred metres since then.) There is a monument purportedly commemorating the exact spot. Close by is a brand new and largely empty museum. So, the “yes” is the general look and feel of the town. The “no” is the concrete monument and the horrid intrusive museum.

- Luckily, there is a wonderful Livingstone-Stanley museum near Tabora. When the train stopped there on the way home I raced out of the station and onto a boda-boda (motorbike taxi) shouting “Livingstone House, Kwihara, faster, faster” We left the town and jolted along a dirt road a few miles, then turned off onto a sandy track at a sign for “Livingstone’s Tembe”. At the end of the track stood a large isolated house with two huge mango trees in front. The boda-boda man picked up a little boy who said he knew the curator’s house and they brought him back a few minutes later.

He unlocked the beautiful carved doors and in we went, me thinking of Stanley walking in, arm in arm with Livingstone saying, “Doctor, we are at last home”. I had spent about 20 minutes engrossed in the exhibits of Livingstone memorabilia when my phone rang. It was Ahmed saying, “Didn’t you get my message? The train leaves in 15 minutes.” Very sceptically and reluctantly I clambered back on the bike for the 25 minute ride back to Tabora station. Made it in plenty of time, of course; the train didn’t go for another 35 minutes. - And, I still haven’t quite finished the story of the Kigoma trip. So, followers, you wait ages for a blog post, and then three turn up.

The Central Line

Hello again, followers. Long gap between posts; I've been waiting for something interesting to happen in Dodoma. Or just something to happen. Ever since I got here I have been attracted to the Railway Station and the sight and sound of the occasional big old train arriving or departing. Dodoma is on the Central Tanzanian Railway, built by the Germans just before WW1. It follows one of the old caravan routes from the coast to Lake Tanganyika at Kigoma, the path tramped by Livingstone, Stanley, Burton and Speke, Emin Pasha - all childhood heroes of mine. My favourite reading here (on my Kindle) is by or about those guys, their foolhardy curiosity and sheer guts, with some disturbing glimpses of how little things have changed. One thing has though. In 1871 it took Stanley 5 months to get from Dodoma to Kigoma. (His route must have taken him through Dodoma but, then as now, it wasn’t worth a mention.)Thanks to the railway I did it in 28 hours last week. Getting a ticket wasn’t easy. There are two trains per week with 12 First Class berths per train. Most, sometimes all, of these are reserved for “staff” (TIA). There is no 2nd Class and I was advised that even I (“Well, this is fairly grim, Galloway, so I suppose you’re loving it”) might not cope in 3rd Class. By a stroke of luck I happened to mention my ticket quest to Ahmed who helps in the gym at the Dodoma Hotel. He said “I’m from Kigoma. The station master there is my friend. I’ll get the tickets. In fact I’ll come with you, if you pay.” 180 kilobob later the deal was done and we set off, a trifling 3 hours late, on Saturday morning.

The accommodation wasn’t deluxe. We were sharing the 2-berth compartment with Ahmed’s other friend, Mr Siwingwe, the train supervisor, and his fiancée (who seemed to be met by her husband and 4 children when we got to Kigoma!) Comfort was further compromised by 4 sacks of flour, 2 of potatoes, 16 buckets and various other transportables. Mr Siwingwe’s official duties meant that there were plenty of comings and goings at our door. At Manyoni two women with babies and eight of those big striped nylon carry-alls pushed their way in. After a bit of a shouting match they left, but their luggage stayed in. Mid-afternoon we stopped at Saranda for lunch. Everyone piled off straight into an outdoor trackside “restaurant” the whole 17-carriage length of the train, all grilling and frying and stewing.

This was repeated on a smaller scale at most of the stops, many of them very lovely aging German-style station buildings in a compound of solid old mango trees, palms and frangipanis. In between halts there was always the buffet car, which served basic meals and cheap, if warm, beer. The train rattled on through the bush, with no other sign of human activity for long stretches. Sometimes a dusty track ran alongside and it was easy to picture a long caravan of porters, guides, askaris and the explorer in his pith helmet or battered old peaked cap, all trudging along. Or, coming the other way, a pitiful line of fettered and chained slaves plodding their sad weary path to the coast.

The scenery got gradually greener and at last we had our first view of the Lake. Just after 3pm Sunday afternoon we rolled into Kigoma, whose magnificent terminus would not look out of place on Lake Geneva rather than Lake Tanganyika.

Four days later the train back set off six hours late. A fellow passenger told me the trains get later and later until departure time catches up with the time of the next train, so they cancel one and the process starts again. Our train broke down in the middle of the bush for an hour or so in the late evening. No one seemed bothered, quite the reverse. Bonfires were lit beside the track and groups of passengers stood around eating, drinking and laughing, till the whistle finally blew again.

There were two backpackers/volunteers from Berlin in the compartment next to ours and we had a bit of a party the second night. First topic of conversation was “Is the train German?” Franck said the locomotive was, but not the rolling stock. He was a former graffiti artist and boasted specialist knowledge of train design. After that we discussed Tanzania and its problems, with increasingly incoherent contributions from Vincent, our neighbour on the other side. His main argument was that Tanzania was a “foolish” country. When Vincent was finally incapable of getting his tongue round the word “foolish” any more we decided to pack it in and get some sleep. At 8 o’clock on Saturday morning the train stumbled into dear old Dodoma and we stumbled off the train. I’ve spent so long describing the journey there and back, which admittedly took up a large percentage of the trip, that the story of what I did when I was there will have to wait for another post.

Pat and Passel

VOICE!  This is what Tanzanians shout at someone making a speech in English if they are speaking too quietly.  Like everywhere else in the non-English-speaking world, knowledge of English is seen here as the Open Sesame to wealth and happiness, so I give an increasing number of informal lessons in my spare time. I'm not a very good English teacher (I barely scraped a pass in my CELTA (Tefl)course) so I don't charge anything. The idea of doing something for nothing is considered pretty strange here. Much more popular is the idea of doing nothing for something. Anyway, at first I firmly corrected such usages as Voice!  and idiosyncratic pronunciations such as cloth-es. Now I don't. I have decided that what my pupils need to know is Tanzanian English (Tanglish?); the chances of them getting to Britain or the US and chatting away with the natives being sadly, but realistically, zero. So now I happily respond to such greetings as "How is your condition?" with the expected "Fine", even though it sounds as if a not-very-close colleague wants to know about the embarrassing itching. Another slightly unnerving morning greeting is "How was the night?" How much detail do they want? Don't panic. "Fine" or "peaceful" is enough. Tanglish is certainly not one of those "Him fella belong Mrs Queen" pidgin dialects. The grammar is fairly standard but some of the vocab is strange or quaint. Some Tanglish phrases are so popular that they pop up in a stream of Swahili. When parliament is sitting I eat my dinner to a TV background of MP's debating in Swahili, their speeches peppered with "...part and parcel..." and "...doing his level best..." One of my little classes: Ramadhani and Modestus, studying Financial Management at St John's University and Wu Sheng Nan who is from China and works as a guard at possibly a construction company near the Dear Mama Hotel. We meet once a week at the Hope Corner Bar.

All three want to focus on fluency in spoken English. The two students are hampered by their limited vocabulary and slow sentence construction but their pronunciation isn't too bad, apart from the usual Tanzanian short("shot") vowels and staccato delivery. Mr Wu, on the other hand, has a large vocab and his grammar is pretty good too. But. We can never understand what he is trying to say. Most of the lesson consists of a game of Give us a Clue/Charades with the three of us trying to guess the phrase. I had Mr Wu down as a religious nutter when he first approached me because told me he was God...... Dear Mama God. It's all a far cry from my CELTA course in Covent Garden where we were teaching topics like "Leisure time interests" or "Where I go for my holidays" to assorted Europeans. But at least I don't have to grapple with my Nemesis, the interactive whiteboard. The only technical hitches at the Hope Corner are being plunged into darkness by a power cut. And it's nice to be appreciated. This text from Ramadhani: "Thanks for your kindly heart to help people. God bless you. Gud night"

Motorcycle Diaries

Three days ago Mhina, one of my colleagues, asked for a word with me. "It's a secret". So we stepped outside and he told me that a friend of his, Dickson, who lives in a village about an hour away, had found "an asset". (Mhina is the commerce and book-keeping teacher so a lot of his vocab is subject specific.) He said it was something old - maybe English or German. It was neat timing because I've just finished a novel called "The Book of Secrets" by M.G. Vassanji. The eponymous "book" is a diary lost by a colonial officer in 1914 and found in the 1980s by a teacher in Tanzania. So I asked Mhina to find out more. Over the next day or two I learnt the following: The village is called Sejeli. In fact Mhina did his last two years of primary school there, living in his uncle's house because his father heard that the school was better than the one in their village. Dickson is a former classmate. That was all fairly clear, but the information on the asset itself was tantalisingly confused. It is in a building/It is buried in open ground. It is a metal box/It is a machine. It has English or German instructions/directions. There are two assets. There had even been a third but they had shown that to some other wazungu who had taken it away. I decided I could spare a few hours and a few thousand shillings so at 8am on Friday I was waiting for Mhina at the bus station. We got a bus to Mbande on the road to Dar es Salaam where Dickson and another man met us. A dirt road running North-South crosses the main road at Mbande. Dickson first pointed Southwards towards a fairly distant hill and said one asset was on top of that "mountain". Then he pointed North and said the other asset was 10km up that road, beyond Sejeli which Mhina said was one or two km away. But how to get to either of them? The main problems being lack of any suitable transport and not enough money to pay for it anyway. Eventually we settled on the Northern option because a man with a motorbike had some unintelligible (to me at least) connection/claim to that one. The piki-piki man was summoned, we handed over 10,000 shillings, I clambered up behind him, Mhina got up behind me on the luggage rack, and off we went. 30 minutes later we passed through Sejeli and Mhina pointed out his old school and his uncle's house. I pointed out that it was a lot further than 2 km. Mhina said "Sorry, I don't know how to use kilometres." After another hour in the saddle it became clear that none of them did. We travelled along the red dusty track, passing occasional ox carts, bicycles or other piki-pikis, weaving our way through herds of livestock, crossing dry riverbeds, the driver sometimes having to "paddle" with his legs, crossing wet riverbeds, and two more villages. It should have been quite enjoyable - lovely open bush dotted with thorn and baobab trees.

But squashed between the driver and Mhina, having to sit slightly leaning back, became excruciatingly uncomfortable, and of course the lovely African sun was beating down all the time. There were a few shouted conversations across me and then Mhina would point to a hill and say "It's there". But we always just roared on past. I began to wonder how far a bike can go on one tank, and hoping it was about as far as we had come. Then after 2 hours we stopped and asked two ladies the way (I think). We then pulled into a farmstead where Mhina and I detached ourselves with difficulty and tottered over to a shady spot under a tree. We shook hands with the family and after more talk we got back on, this time with four of us, one of the farmers (luckily quite a small chap) perched on the petrol tank. We journeyed on, with our pilot pointing this way and that; the track became a path, weaving through tall maize, the leaves whipping our legs. Then we left the path and bumped across the bush until we ground to a halt in a thicket at the base of a small rocky hill. We fought our way up through thick and thorny bushes with the two locals arguing about where to go. The p-p man said it was two years since he had been there.

After a bit of backtracking we eventually came out on a rock ledge under an overhang and we flopped down to admire the view. It was exactly the kind of place where you find cave paintings and sure enough when I looked round the rock was covered with white geometric doodles and stylised animals (see Ageing Rock Artists blogpost). Leading down from the painted surface was a tunnel-like cave entrance, narrow and carpeted with bat poo - the sort of opening a potholer would describe as "a nice little feet first slide".

Which is exactly what piki-piki man proceeded to do - a few startled bats flew out as he slid in - armed with my torch.

"What's down there?", we shouted. He said there was a sort of cement frame on some rocks. It didn't sound worth the trouble so the rest of us gave it a miss. P-p man then popped up from another unpleasant-looking hole on the other side of the rock, and dusted himself down. Mhina and I decided that that was probably it as far as assets were concerned so we scrambled back down the hill to the piki-piki, except that we couldn't find the piki-piki; we had been all round the rugged rocks and lost all sense of direction and, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, Mhina and I just assumed the local guys knew what they were doing.

We blundered about for an hour or so before Mhina spotted a flash of sunlight reflected from a wing mirror.

Then we couldn't find the others, we coo-eed and hollered for ages before first the diminutive farmer then p-p man finally emerged. Readers, you are not going to believe this next bit; p-p man couldn't find the key. He was sure he had it when he heard our shouts so we spent another half hour searching the area before it turned up under the bike. So at 5pm we finally set off back. A lovely long trip in the late afternoon light, first to drop off our pilot, then the long haul to Sejeli. Halfway there the question of how far the bike can go on one tank was settled and Mhina and I sat by the road eating sugar cane while the driver puttered off to find some fuel. Then we got going again and called in to see Auntie and Uncle who gave Mhina a big bag of maize (was this the real reason for the trip?) At 7pm we were back at the main road where Dickson was waiting for news and neither Mhina nor I really knew what to say to him. As we squeezed into a dalla-dalla to get back to Dodoma, Dickson thrust a little package with a few mineral pieces into my hand and asked me to find out if they were precious stones. I got home at 8.30, burnt to a crisp, wind-blown, hungry, thirsty and bemused. If you have read all this expecting something more interesting I can only apologise. That is how it is here. If you try to get to the bottom of things you just go mad. OK. That's it for now. Must go out and talk to myself with my pants on my head and two pencils up my nose.

I'm back

I was away for exactly a month and the place looks completely different – all green and luxuriant everywhere. The maize which wasn't even planted when I left is now as tall as me.

And the mozzies are biting. They seem unconcerned by the “Deet”iest repellent, though I managed to remove a patch of varnish from my dressing table by putting the bottle down on the surface. They even bite through clothes, one layer anyway, so you have the choice of chemically dissolving your own skin or wrapping up well and drowning in your own sweat. Lovely. A quick word on the rest of my trip. Addis Ababa was a bit of an odd few days. I was adopted by a born-again Christian family when I mistakenly climbed into their family minibus thinking it was the local airport transport. It turned out that they had lived in Tanzania for 7 years. Jan 7th is Ethiopian Christmas (because they use a version of the Julian calendar) so I had Christmas dinner with them. Injera of course, followed by panettone, courtesy of Mussolini. Thence to Nairobi which I thought was a really nice friendly, lively city, nothing like I expected from its dodgy reputation. Being a regular user of Lonely Planet's Thorn Tree forum, I had to go on a pilgrimage to its original location (they're on their third tree) in the cafe of the New Stanley Hotel. And asante sana to Katie Donaldson for looking after me so well. Now it's back to the middle of nowhere for the next few months at least.

Out of Africa

Purists, stop reading now. Elaine's not in Dodoma. School broke up for the holidays on December 8th and starts again on January 9th. There was some uncertainty about the dates until the week before and in the end I had a few days to spare before my flight to London from Dar es Salaam. Friends suggested a trip to Zanzibar but I didn't think I would be able to relax with 60km of sea between me and the airport. So I went to Bagamoyo, historically the port for Zanzibar, terminus of the slave routes to the interior, starting point for Livingstone, Stanley etc and, with its dhow port and decaying Arab merchant houses,

arguably a small-scale, quieter, scruffier version of Zanzibar. A very enjoyable couple of days, nosing round the sites and swimming in the startlingly warm Indian Ocean. Then home to London for a slightly early Christmas. Now I'm making my slow way back. Currently sitting by the Red Sea between Nuweiba and Taba at the camp of my old friend Yasser. As usual I'm the only guest, possibly the only one from Nuweiba to Taba. I've forsaken my favourite old Housha (Beach hut) for Yasser's new Bent House.

(Egyptians always have trouble with p's and b's. It took me ages to realise why his black and white dog was called Banda). It's been great checking out some old haunts. Egypt is such a fabulous destination; the picture-book scenes of peasant farming by the Nile, the weird desert moonscapes, and the bustling towns with cars, donkey carts, boys on bicycles with impossible loads of bread on their heads, and men in galibiyas running about shouting. Moustaches range from Hitler to Handlebar and Hercule Poirot would not look out of the ordinary if he decided to take another Nile cruise now. The Winter weather is very pleasant although it gets cold when the sun goes down. I've been catching up on sleep; going to bed early and not getting up till the sun has had a chance to warm things up. Exactly the opposite to Bagamoyo, which was stinking hot. I had to drag myself out early to do my sight-seeing before the midday heat. London was just freezing all the time; perfect for sitting indoors in cosy Christmassy rooms, quaffing, scoffing and opening prezzies, thanks to my lovely family and friends. Next stop: Addis Ababa, hoping to celebrate Leddet (Orthodox Christmas), followed by Nairobi - a very old haunt - I was last there in April 1962.