Afro-trippin'

It’s the first day back to work after the holiday break, and the place is dead quiet. Besides the birds (and their chicks) that have slowly been building a nest in my office and the swishing of the pool outside the door, there’s a beautifully reflective silence. “I wish it could be this relaxing everyday,” my lone co-worker muses over lunch.

I agree. After blitzing through Southeast Africa for the past three weeks, all I want is peace. Since arriving back in Lusaka last Thursday – sick, stinky and nursing a festering foot sore – I have only left the house for food, internet and to rent the first season of 24. With the rainy season in full effect in Zambia, every cool downpour washes away a layer of mental fatigue and refreshes the soul. The fever broke, the foot is healing and I definitely smell better; I’m ready to reflect on the Afro-trip.

One of the things you have to respect about Africa is its size. Everything is immense. From its distances and poor governance to its heat and natural beauty, it can make you feel impossibly small. Going from Zambia to Tanzania to Mozambique and back again, I covered at least 6000km and only saw portions of a small corner of the continent.

Even within that relatively small slice, there was incredible diversity. The temperate highlands of central Africa gave way to the infernal heat of the east coast; Nyanja and Bemba became Swahili and Makua; mostly Christian places turned mostly Muslim; the thriving port of Dar-es-Salaam contrasted with the economic depravity of northern Mozambique; the black Bantu peoples of the interior diversified into myriad shades of brown as they mingled with Arabs and Asians on the coast. You would even swear there was a twinge of European blood in some of the fairer-skinned Mozambicans.

Maybe it’s a good thing that most African countries are enormous, because one of the miseries of traveling here is crossing borders. Not only do you get hit with gratuitous visa fees and unnecessary waits on the way in, but you have to pay the even more medieval ‘departure tax’ when you leave. Just like living in Zambia, on my trip I ended up paying more for visas than I did accommodation. Again, money that should have been recycled into local economies was being sent somewhere where it was unlikely to help anyone who actually needed it. The benefit of being repeatedly gouged, if there ever was one, was seeing a myopic pattern emerge from the top on down.

In Mozambique, it’s what aid workers call the ‘orphan spirit’. Working with children whose parents have died or are unable to look after them, it’s a struggle to get them to think long-term about anything. When you’re used to fighting only to survive and there might not be a tomorrow, there’s no use investing time, money or effort in anything that doesn’t bring immediate reward, or so the theory goes. As a result, stealing, cheating and general malfeasance ensue.

Since many in the government came out of similarly desperate circumstances, and most African countries were hastily abandoned after colonialism, politicians exhibit the same ‘survive first, ask questions later’ attitude. Even the hospitality industry, which should be based on customer service and satisfaction, is shockingly near-sighted. In heavily touristed Zanzibar, an hour’s wait for food was normal, the hotel staff lost bookings, security deposits and treated paying guests as more of a nuisance than the source of their livelihoods.

As a casual traveler with enough money to pay the fees and time to wait for my food, it only amounted to a small annoyance that added a layer of exhaustion to a long trip. Contrary to what I think is popular belief, travel in Africa (at least where I’ve been) is neither cheap nor that difficult, but you need to be patient and understanding. Perhaps it finally helped me come to terms with the visa fees I feel I’ve been exhorted to pay for the past six months. The more frustrating thing is seeing places like war-scarred northern Mozambique, with its coral reefs, endless sunshine and friendly people, not investing or even believing in the future.

Questions Arising from Zanzibar

“To you [white people], everything is new,” the wild-eyed tout reasoned as he tried to press a polished shell into my hand for five dollars. Dressed in dirty second-hand clothes and trying to light a clearly-foraged cigarette butt, he had a point. Like many things about Zanzibar, the semi-mythical spice n’ slave island just off the coast of Tanzania, it made me think.

How did I end up here with four JHR interns (and their assorted associates)? We only met for a week in Toronto during training and there we were reassembled on a beach somewhere in the tropics. We all got along like old friends, though. Must be something about people that ask a lot of questions and drink heavily – you cover a lot of ground with it-getting difference-makers.

Why does Zanzibar feel so much more developed than mainland Tanzania (Colonial equation: Tanganyika + Zanzibar = United Republic of Tanzania)? The easy answer would be because Arab slave traders made a fortune on trading spices and people, but actually re-invested some of it into law and order. Mandatory seatbelt usage, sewer grates that people don’t steal and a deep sense of its own historical importance: haven’t seen that anywhere on the mainland yet.

What’s it like to swim with dolphins? Terrible. You go far too early in the morning after a messy night, get a nasty blister from too-small flippers and ingest litres of seawater for a precious nanosecond of dorsal fin and blowhole.

What was the difference between the east and (more infamous) west coast slave trades in Africa? Zanzibar was one of the main transshipment points for slaves going from mainland East Africa to Arabia, Persia and beyond. But unlike the West African trade – where slaves were cogs in the wheel of industrial farms of the New World, in the east they had more social mobility and were generally treated less as chattels. Also, since intercontinental trade has existed on the Swahili Coast since the sixth century, it outdates its western counterpart by more than 1,000 years. So Europeans didn't invent African slavery after all...

Why am I not hungover after drinking at least five different kinds of alcohol on New Years Eve? Because the air conditioner in the hostel room broke in the middle of the night and I sweated every possible foreign substance out of my body. “These bedsheets ought to be burned,” as my friend Chris aptly put it.

Where do spices come from? Well, thanks to the touristy-but-fun-anyway ‘spice tour’, I got out to a plantation taste fresh cinnamon bark, tumeric roots and vanilla beans. Then they tried to overcharge us.

How come I have no cool ‘Zambia stories’ to tell? It’s the Manitoba of Africa. And Lusaka is its Winnipeg.

Onboard the TAZARA Express

With a Mao-like wave of his hand, an elderly Asian man bid the train goodbye as we squeaked and groaned our way out of Kapiri Mposhi. China had built the TAZARA railway in the 1960s to link the formerly left-leaning countries of Zambia and Tanzania, and judging by its austere stationhouse and poorly translated Mandarin signage, it hadn’t changed much since the Great Cultural Revolution. With 1892km to go to Dar-es-Salaam, I was hoping the tracks weren’t made out of pig-iron.

We clanked through the Zambian countryside for an entire day, the only remarkable occurrences being the odd bone-crushing jolt or clanking past a decrepit rural station. At an estimated trip length of 48 hours, this was the ‘express’ train, not bothering to stop at the ghosts of what used to be tiny country outposts, long since overgrown and stripped of all their valuable materials.

When the train did screech to a halt every now and then, some equally shady figures raced to hawk fruit, freshly roasted chicken, top-up cards and cigarettes at window-side. Though the dining car had shockingly respectable food, it was a real novelty to ‘order’ from your berth, even if it brought about the usual gaggle of beggars and on-lookers. The panhandlers wanted pens, soap or empty bottles while others seemed happy to just observe all the commotion in a place where few people, let alone a train full of wide-eyed travelers, ever visited.

Chugging high up into the central African plateau, we finally crossed into Tanzania – with all the usual arcane hassles with visas, immigration, etc – at about lunchtime on the second day. Newly-planted maize lined the plains at the foot of the ‘serious’ mountains (that’s the only name for the range that people could tell me), checkerboarding the countryside in a mosaic of pastoral life in the highlands. Women and children bent double cultivating would pop up from the field, rudimentary farm implement in hand, to smile and wave at the passers-by. Remembering how I used to do the same sort of thing as a nerdy train-kid, I usually waved back.

This is the Africa I wish everyone could see, I scrawled in my journal (good penmanship was impossible unless the train was stopped). People look happy, the place is clean and even the beggars are shilling for respectable things. Many even dress in the most amazingly coloured local textiles – not the dirty castaways of first-world fashion trends. I think I’ll shed a single tear if I see one more kid in a tattered Quebec Nordiques jersey…

Descending into the infernal heat of the coastal plain on the final morning, I awoke hot, sweaty and hungover to find that I’d slept through the game reserve portion of the trip, missing giraffes, elephants and the like. A fair price to pay for a fun night with some Zambian guys, Finnish journalists and a bottle of tequila.

By the time it hit midday, we were making our way through Dar’s outer slums as the temperature went higher and people’s faces grew longer. This was more of what I was used to – the grudging acceptance of urban poverty and the desolate, filthy landscape it produced. At least if you were poor up in the mountains you had fresh air, beautiful scenery and the TAZARA train to keep you company.