An Westener's Guide to Life in Rural Afrika

My mother has been pestering me for a while now about an address and phone number for our new bachelor pad in rural Afrika. I still have nothing to offer her, as far as I can tell the house doesn’t have anything constituting an address and I have still failed to secure a phone number. and it suddenly dawned on me that in all my posts so far, I have completely failed to mention anything about the place which has now served as our home for a month, and will continue to do so (foundations holding, by no means a guarantee) for a further two months. Therefore this latest post is to be put aside to describing our new surroundings including the assortment of Afrikan insects we now share our house with, and our seamless integration into rural Tanzanian life.

I was not overly concerned about the house we were due to live in. If anyone saw my house in Sheffield you will understand why, (after two years at 76 Heavygate Road, I figured Afrika would be a walk in a sub-Saharan park). Its owned by one of the charity directors, and we live here rent-free as payment for our work for the charity (which I will explain at a later date), so considering that is a whole £58 a week cheaper than Heavygate Road its one up to Casa del Afrika! There are subtle differences, the view from our concerete shack out here is of Kilimanjaro, largest mountain in Afrika, the view from my room at Heavygate Road was 78 Heavygate Road, a group of middle aged blokes from Barnsley...2-0 Afrika. Admittedly, this place is smaller, consisting of two rooms; one with a small table and a gas stove, (The living room), and the other with two rickety wooden beds and a mattress crammed between the beds and the wall affectionately known as ‘The Bitch Bed’. Toiletry matters are dealt with outside in a corrugated iron shack, where you do your business down a very small hole, never thought I’d write this sentence but dear lord I miss the feeling of porcelain when sitting on the crapper. (I’d say thats Sheffield 2-2 Afrika). Showering is done in the same shack, which is convenient and ultimately a tremendous time saver, if not particulary hygienic. A simple set up; a hole, a bucket, a reasonably clean white fellow, Sheffield 3-2 Afrika. Who’d have thought?

Our party pad is located in a bizarre little place called Njiapanda (meaning the junction in Swahili), and even amongst the locals it has a pretty bad reputation, to acquire a bad reputation out here a town really has to put the effort in and bless ‘em, Njiapanda really has. Our hosts at the charity told us that we should not be out after dark because at that point the entire clientele of the town are either truckers or hookers, (a shame as in my experience, truckers and hookers are amongst the most sociable and fun-loving demographic group). And it seems to be true that there are a disproportionate amount of drunks wandering the streets, heckiling and muttering at us, harmless for the most part, but saying that nobody wants to be shouted at by a local drunk at seven o’clock in the morning. This isn’t Glasgow. Despite the drawbacks on this destitute, wild west-esque town we have established ourselves as the laughing stock of the community; we have a couple of  local haunts (the regulars at both seem both bemused and suspicious every time we enter their bar), one of which is possibly the only place in town which doesn’t turn into a brothel after midnight, and has the good grace to show premiership football and provide us with cheap, cheap Afrikan beer. (80p a bottle).

We have become very popular with the neighbouring children, of which there are many, more seem to rock up at our house every day demanding all sorts of things. Partly because we give them pens, and paper and whatnot, let them use our cameras (not GameBoys though, any kid messes up my game of Pokemon and I’ll give Afrika a new problem), but mostly because we do funny western things such as put on sun cream, attempt to farm the local land, and, of course, try and speak Swahili. All the local mothers have an opinion on our attitudes to household chores and are not, it seems, afraid to voice them, its true our house is a mess, it does have a peculiar smell and we are terrible at washing our clothes using the local detergent/skin remover Toss. (Yeh, its a funny name). On the nights when we are not mixing it up with the truckers ‘n’ hockers in the local bars, theres very little to do apart from get through an decent amount of reading or watch pirate DVD’s (probably from China, you know what they are like), which are so fake you can actually see the other people in the cinema stand up and move around during the screening.

This brings me onto the shameful finale of this latest Idiots Guide, that of our integration into Tanzanian rural life. The main part of this has been our vain attempt to learn the local language, that of Kiswahili, (though with the amount of variations of it, I fear learning it from a western book is the equivalent of a non-Englishman learning cockney rhyming slang and then going to Newcastle telling the Geordies about ‘Apples and Pears’ and ‘Adam and Eve’). I have never been great with languages, I have been half-dutch for going on twenty-two years now and have spectacularly failed to learn my mother’s native language. I took French at GCSE and was heading towards a grade at the lower end of the alphabet before my dad decided that no son of his was going to fail a GCSE and promptly got me a private tutor to drag my grade into the more respectable letterings. So learning Swahili was an optimistic venture at best. We’ve learnt the basics, I can exchange pleasantries and casual greetings until the cows come home, I can order three beers and ask where the port is, (useful in Zanzibar, not so much now, 300 miles from the coast), but unfortunately the English language is still viewed with a certain amount of suspicion out here, with one drunk shouting at us for being in his country and not learning the language. We could do little about this about from thank him and wish him a good day. 

We have not perhaps, picked the best place to reside whilst out here. Our weekend excursions to nearby city of Moshi, or up into the much greener slopes of Kilimanjaro are greatly anticipated and usually result in us getting over excited and drunk when we do get there. Njiapanda will never be a tourist hotspot, it will, however, always be a drink-fuelled truckers paradise. Still, as long as our roof continues to keep out the majority of the rain, our bar continues to provide us with premiership football, and our neighbours continue to provide us with their opinions on the failings of white people, then we should just about, make it to 2011.

An Idiot's Guide to Afrikan Democracy (Election Special)

When the army rolls into a city, it usually means its time for you to roll out. As two truckloads of heavily armed soldiers piled into Stone Town (Zanzibar’s capital) market, adding to the already sizable military presence on the island, we came to the conclusion it was time for us to leave the city. In fairness, we should have seen this eventuality coming, in the guide book that we are religiously using for this trip, it clearly stated ‘Travel to Tanzania during October 2010 is strongly discouraged as Presidential elections at this time will inevitably increase tensions and possibly put tourists at risk.’ Not only did we choose to ignore this advice, but we also decided to travel to the most politically volatile region of the country; the Spice Islands of Zanzibar and Pemba, and whilst there proceeded to attract trouble wherever we went. Yes, this really is an idiot’s guide to the 2010 Tanzanian Election.

Afrikan politics has been a bit of a laugh ever since the end of the Second World War. They always seem to be having coups, or insurrections, or army takeovers, but it seems that the end product is always pretty much the same, just another bloke with a beret and a load of medals on his chest claiming to be the new Nelson Mandela. Tanzania, apparently, is a shining light of Afrikan ‘democracy’ having successfully traversed twenty years without invading anyone and anyone invading it. And according to the internal Electoral commission, this latest election (31^st October) passed off as democratically as a PTA Meeting, which, quite frankly is bollocks. Only one man could be seen on the countrys TV, his pencil-moustached mug plastered across every spare bit of wall as if he was an Afrikan George Clooney, it was of course, the President Chagua Kikwete. He was so confident of winning (and rightly so as he no doubt filled in half the ballot papers himself) that he announced his new cabinet a week before the election results came out. By all accounts, his superb facial hair and slick army-green suits are reasonably popular on the mainland, but it was on the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba, with their majority Muslim population, dissident parties and penchant for independence were this idiot had most of his fun.

Firstly, there were the boys with their toys at the market. I have never seen the British Army storm a Tesco’s in Altrincham, there are no guns hidden behind the papaya. End of. On election night, which we spent (again, ignoring all sound advice) at a bar near our house, a local squad of riot police could be seen hunkering down with some beers in the next bar along. They were in full riot gear (AK’s in the truck) so should trouble have kicked off, they could have no doubt stumbled into action and belched all over the nearest rioter. As we left the island of Zanzibar to the ‘deeply religious, conservative and superstitious’ island of Pemba, leaving the under trained and over excited Tanzanian army behind, we got a very different taste of election fever. It would not be an overestimation to say that we were the only white folks on the island at this point (all other travellers apparently listening to the foreign offices warnings), which meant that we were receiving a lot of attention from all quarters, and I don’t mind the good sort of attention you get from the token older gal at a Hen Party. As we walked through the town of Wete (a place with no electricity, and quite frankly, no idea), we noticed a crowd of people descending on a park nearby, curious (and bored) we joined in, only to discover it was a political rally being held by the opposition CUF party. CUF, it should be mentioned, are a separatist party and we suspected, may have been blacklisted by the CIA due to an idea regarding implementing Sharia Law in Zanzibar they floated during the 1990’s. Thinking that this looked like a laugh, and not realising that most opposition rallys got broken up by drunk soldiers firing tear gas everywhere, we joined in and soon became a warm-up act for the main speaker of the day. As party activists spoke to us (curious at our peculiar skin colour and what we were doing on their little island), we noticed that we had attracted a crowd of our own who just stood and watched us, nodding occasionally and looking rather confused at the whole affair. We jokingly claimed we were EU Observers. After about half an hour, a fair amount of chanting and independence chat, we decided it was time for us to retire for the evening, before the gathered police force retired us permanently.

A couple of things could be taken from this whole experience. Firstly, when an Afrikan nation claims to have a democratic election, odds are it is not. (The ironically named Democratic Republic of Congo is neither democratic nor a republic). My second observation is more of a tip for Afrika than anything else, if you want to cut down on the amount of coups you have, don’t send the army to the market, and dear lord, don’t let riot police drink on election night, its just good sense. Thirdly, when the Foriegn Office says ‘travel to this area is unadvised’ they don’t mean it, they are just being killjoys. I was a fake EU Observer, a drunken political commentator and a warm up act for an Islamic Party all in one week, might check the calendar to see when the next Afrikan elections are and do a tour. (I’m joking mother, that would be ridiculous...)

As an potentially tragically comic aside, it should be worth noticing that we could be seeing Blightly and you lovely folks rather sooner than the pre-planned 22^nd February. We were advised (see, that word again, people shouldn’t advise us to do things, they should just tell us, that way we might listen to them) by our charity co-ordinators, that due to the elections, the authorities (those lads with the guns) would be clamping down on volunteers living and working in the country on a cheaper tourist visa. After quickly weighing up the pros and cons of possible deportation versus the extra $70 in the pocket, we pumped for the dollars, (we always have dollars on us, for bribes and whatnot), and are now very conscious of the fact that we are working here on wholly inappropriate visas. See you real soon folks!

An (Slighty drunkern) Idiot's Guide to Afrikan Travel

It’s so hard to find a good Gin & Tonic in East Afrika. When we realised that over the space of one weekend, we would be spending two nights and a culnmative 18 hours on a couple of ferries, it was unanimously decided that, not only that we would be getting drunk on the voyages (to aid with sleep, nothing more) but also that we would be doing it with the most colonial drink possible. This realisation triggered a frantic city-wide search of Stone Town, Zanzibar, for a lime, some sort of tonic water, and (Most importantly) some Konyagi gin, which, we were informed is Tanzania’s national drink and easy to come-by, but apparently the majority Muslim Zanzibar missed that memo and we spent a good hour trekking through the city’s back alleys asking everyone and anyone if they could fix us up with some of Afrika’s finest gin.
 I am writing this latest blog from the questionable comfort of the SS Majewla’s ‘Foreign Class’  deck, whilst sipping the aforementioned Konyagi mixed (subtley, as the rest of the deck is predominatly children or men in army uniform), with Sprite, and getting ready to settle down for a 9 hour voyage up Tanzania’s east coast to Zanzibar’s smaller sister island of Pemba. The floating health and safety nightmare which is the SS Majewla is oddly indicative of Zaznzibar’s transport system as a whole, something which looks god-awful, but works in an oddly intriguing and hypnotic way, much like Peter Crouch or Stephen Hawking’s voicebox. The roads out here are surprising good, unlike the maniacs who use them, taxi drivers it seems only use two instruments in the car; first and foremost, the horn, which is used in the same way that the Driving theory Hazard perception test works, honking every time a potential hazard (be it a rogue chicken or another car) comes within earshot. The other is the accelerator, used liberally and excessively, usually to scare cyclists (of which there are far, far too many), but also to evade make-shift police roadblocks, where bored policemen demand payment for use of the public road. Just the other day, whilst in a taxi from the northern beaches back to Stone Town, our mentalist taxi driver proceeded to jump roadblock after roadblock, apparently not aware that his taxi was blessed with three pedals not just one, and only stopping to hop out and buy a bunch of bananas, which he proceeded to wolf down whilst cruising through thee rural traffic. We only found out at the end of the trip that his license had expired over a year ago (by the sounds of him probably due to alchoal, or his banana obsession), and that that would probably explain his keenness to tear through the police roadblocks. Saying that though, few taxi drivers seem willing to use the brake unless they are cruising the streets late in curbcrawler fashion late at night, looking for unsuspecting muzungos (white people) to coerce into paying them thousands of shillings for a two minute trip down the road.
So if the taxi drivers are like Schmachur in a family saloon, the Zanzibarian buses (called Dalla-Dallas) are like Mega-bus on crack. Essentially a small mini-van, with a seat for the driver and then a long two parallel benches in the back onto which people cram into for as little as 40p a trip, the most I have seen on one Dalla-Dalla was thirty-three people (not including two babies) condensed into a space which, on our prudish, dull roads, would have fitted six people. The conductors, far from the aging, balding folks on Northern Rail who refuse to accept your railcard once your on the train, hand off the back of the vehicle offering seemingly imaginary seats to perspective customers. A terrifying experience, but without doubt a worthwhile one, as it is much, much cheaper than taxis, and whilst it isn’t the safest of rides, nothing which takes to the roads of Zanzibar can be considered safe.
It has been a combination of mental taxi drivers and excessively social dalla-dallas which has left us on this charming boat. It more resembles a pre-war fishing trawler than a P&O Ferry, and the amount of people sleeping on deck has given it a bit of a refugee ship feel. Our ferry on the way to Zanzibar from the mainland played Rowan Atkinson films on a loop, which was nice in a odd sort of way, but as yet the only thing to flicker onto this TV has been some bloke reading from the Koran. I’m not sure who he is, but it certainly isn’t Mr Bean. Still, with the majority of the Konyagi left, fingers crossed that Mr Bean makes some sort of appearance by the end of the voyage.

No blog about Tanzanian transport would be complete however, without an honorable mention to the country’s jaw dropping rail system. The entire country (40million people, about the size of France) has two rail lines, one from the capital Dar es Salaam heading west and then south, and the other heading north along the coast to Tanga, before following the border to Mwanza on the opposite side of the country. We briefly toyed with the prospect of catching the train from Tanga to our temporary home in Moshi, about half way to Mwanza. However, our arrival at Tanga ‘Train Station’ put paid to that particular idea. The tracks where, remarkably, the greenest and grassiest place in the city, the trains which supposedly use them were built by German colonists prior to the First World War (yes team, thats 1914, almost one hundred years ago), and as much as the prospect of Victorian-era locomotion excited us, having just stepped off a ferry which was probably an pre-second world war creation, there was not a sniff of a timetable, nor scent of a conductor anywhere to be found. In Manchester, I’m upto my eyeballs in conductors and timetables, but then again in Manchester I need to pay 20p for a piss and the tracks don’t resemble the things the Teacups go round on at some local fair. Needless to say, we were gutted.