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Ujiji, Lake Tanganyika: Saturday, 15 March

THE INLAND SEA WAS slow to reveal itself. Although no more than a few hundred yards away, the longest freshwater lake in the world, 420 miles from north to south and covering almost 14,000 square miles, was quite invisible.

I stood at the top of the village where the matatu dropped me from Kigoma, looking round for some indication of the direction in which it lay. A faded wooden sign painted ‘memorial’ was the only clue. A rutted dirt path sloped down through an avenue of palms and mud-and-pole huts from which children chirruped like crickets, ‘Mzungu, hello mzungu.’ Finally, out of the black-green foliage of a mango tree, an iridescent shard emerged.

In Burton’s case the disclosure was so gradual that he was initially dismayed. His first glimpse of the Sea of Ujiji was a streak of light that suggested little more than a pond and he cursed his folly for having endured such hardships over the eight-month march for so poor a prize. Then, advancing a few yards, ‘the whole scene burst upon my view, filling me with admiration, wonder and delight. Forgetting toils, dangers and the doubtfulness of return, I felt willing to endure double what I had endured.’

This coyness of the lake to show itself is part of its allure. Since arriving in Kigoma yesterday I have come to it from different points and there seems always to be a moment of revelation. Moreover, like all natural features with the power to enchant, its mood shifts constantly. At dawn today it was a tranquil sheet of colourless glass. Later it turned ugly and brown under a heavy sky and choppy little waves broke on the beach. Yesterday at sunset I sat transfixed at the water’s edge as the sun fell away towards the rumpled blue mountains of Zaire in the west, then dropped over the edge, drawing the two elements of air and water together into a single blazing arc of copper.

It was not just the spell of the place that convinced Burton he had solved the riddle of the Nile, but logic. The mountains visible on the western side are about forty miles away, while to north and south the waters run away seemingly without end. In their explorations of the lake by boat, the explorers reached neither extremity. Even so, it was clear that the Sea of Ujiji, or Tanganyika as it was known by the lacustrine peoples, was the largest freshwater lake yet known outside North America. This had to be the fountain of the Nile.

The mango tree through which I first glimpsed the lake also concealed the memorial. Fourteen years after Burton and Speke became the first white men to reach Lake Tanganyika, a second encounter took place. Livingstone and Stanley were here for different purposes, the missionary having been drawn into searching for the still-unresolved source of the Nile, the journalist for a scoop. If African exploration can be said to have had a symbolic nexus, it is surely here at Ujiji.

The memorial to two Englishmen is better kept than most modern state buildings in Tanzania, as if by a secret and capricious hand dedicated to maintaining relics of a forgotten past. A concrete path lined by canna lilies rises to a mound set against the backdrop of a vast mango tree and surrounded by blossoming trees and shrubs – pink and white frangipani, purple bougainvillea and scarlet poinsettia. The monument, erected by the colonial administration, is an ugly thing, a cairn of stone blocks engraved with an outline of Africa superimposed by a cross; a bronze plaque, donated by the Royal Geographical Society, reads: ‘Under the mango tree which then stood here Henry M. Stanley met David Livingstone 10 November 1871’.

Ujiji had been founded by the Arabs as a slave-trading centre around 1840. Its reputation was dreadful. Livingstone, who had learnt to rub along with the slavers when necessary, detested the place. ‘This is a den of the worst kind of slave traders,’ he wrote. ‘Those who I met at Urungu and Itawa were gentlemen traders. The Ujiji slavers, like the Kilwa and the Portuguese, are the vilest of the vile.’

At the water’s edge a dozen or so fishing craft lurched on the crest of small waves. They were handsome and substantial vessels, low and broad in the beam, high at the prow. Similar craft landed here to disgorge slaves in Livingstone’s day, having crossed from the other side of the lake where Tippu Tib maintained the raiding outpost of his empire. Now the boats are bringing across a new human cargo from the distant blue mountains of Zaire to the west. Refugees – albeit refugees able to afford the $15 a head in hard currency demanded by boatmen – are fleeing civil war. African armies are rightly notorious for their handling of civilian populations and there is no sign that Laurent Kabila’s rebel guerrillas are any better than the norm. Even on the boats the refugees are not out of danger. There are stories of engines failing and overloaded boats foundering on the lake with the loss of anything up to eighty lives.

The beach settlement was a seething little place with a hard edge. Among the huts made from plaited palm fronds were the suspicious faces of a community dependent upon illicit or surreptitious trafficking. For the first time I have sensed some of that brittleness of the African trouble zone. It is felt in a place where the easy laughter is suddenly not heard, it shows in stony eyes and hard appraising looks, and it coalesces around groups in which one figure, with the cool contemptuous lip of the strong man, stands out.

KIGOMA LAY JUST up the lake from Ujiji. Like most colonial towns, it was located a decent distance from the native settlement. These days though, Ujiji and Kigoma are consorts and matatus constantly ply the ten-mile run over the hills.

The matatu is the transport system of the African masses, and an agent of almost revolutionary change. Where a generation ago peasants were tied to the land from birth to death, the coming of cheap mobility – in the form of networks of Japanese minibuses criss-crossing the continent, leaping borders – has altered the demographic shape of Africa. It has also made Africa’s roads the most dangerous in the world. I was to travel a good deal by matatu but my appreciation of their convenience and reliability as a means of travel was always tempered by apprehension. And at times I was frightened almost to death.

My first experience that morning had been nasty and brutish, if mercifully short. Setting out from Kigoma, I had looked over the white vans jostling with one another on the red earth like termites. Each had a legend stencilled on the windscreen, a sort of mantra to attract passengers. I was not taken with either Bongo Wagon or Sugar Baby. Dear Mama was too wistful and One Lord King too pious. Big Boss and Top Squad were slightly ominous while No Time to Waste and Over The Top ruled themselves out. In the end I opted for the neutral-sounding Mwanga, named after an early Bagandan monarch.

It was a bad choice. The driver was a hatchet-faced cowboy in white shoes and sharp T-shirt determined to pass anything that moved, despite the poor state of a road that obliged oncoming traffic to veer into the middle to avoid pot-holes. His taste in taped music was execrable too, the worst sort of ‘yo-bitch-who-ya-callin-muthafucka’ American rap. Although I was in a privileged front seat position, insulated from the seething mound of bodies in the back, it was an unpleasant journey.

Matatu stands are places where the stratification of African society is immediately visible. Here boys become men and men become demigods, with power not only over mobility but life and death itself. As befits members of a dangerous profession, the drivers are swaggering dudes, their conductors street-wise youths handling fistfuls of banknotes as coolly as any Las Vegas high-roller. In this hierarchy, passengers are only one step up from the vendors who hustle drinks or fruit and dream of becoming conductors.

As ever though, status is a deceptive thing. The most powerful figure in this chain, the matatu owner, is not even visible. Most drivers lease their vehicles and pay out a large chunk of their takings before dividing any profits on an agreed basis with their conductors. Each has a role in maximising the potential of their partnership – the conductor to squeeze as many bodies into the available space and the driver to cover the route as rapidly as possible. The twin imperatives of crowding and speed are what make matatus so perilous.

I decided to return to Kigoma by Cobra Line, for despite the menacing legend the driver had a sympathetic face. It was pleasing to find my instinct vindicated: he had better road manners and his tapes were reggae and Zairean electric; and I realised, as I nestled between a large lady’s bosom and the spare wheel, that the discomfort of the back had its compensations. You felt a lot less vulnerable. Africans tend to opt for the front seat if given a choice, while the few whites I met who used matatus went for the back. Not that there is much difference; in high-speed crashes there are few survivors.

I FOUND THE hotel in Kigoma with the help of a lady I met along the way. Armed only with a sketch map, I had been tramping down a muddy Lumumba Street for about twenty minutes and was beginning to think I had lost my way when she appeared from behind a tree.

Did she know the way to the Lake Hotel? In reply she asked if I spoke Swahili.

‘Nafurahi sana kukuona’ I said. This was my standard conversational gambit and means roughly, I am very pleased to make your acquaintance.

Up to now this had been greeted with hoots and guffaws of derision, but now it produced a crow of delight and a high five. She pointed the way to the hotel and in English invited me, entirely without archness, to her club in the evening. ‘Cold beer, fish and chips, dancing …’ Clearly, my accent was improving.

The Lake Tanganyika Beach Hotel was a relic of colonial times, rather frayed but clean and a travellers’ delight. Its appeal had nothing to do with nostalgia: there was no faded sign pointing to the Ladies’ Powder Room, as at the African House Hotel in Zanzibar, or the Dornford Yates novels in a glass-fronted bookcase at the Outspan Hotel in the Kenya Highlands. What the Lake Tanganyika Beach offered was courtesy and a view overlooking the lake that one might happily contemplate in the hour of death. The English convention that breakfast is not complete without an egg endures, and here, under a thatch umbrella, I feasted beside the lake every morning on an omelette and fresh fruit.

Courtesy was the feature of Tanzania which, I confess, had surprised me the most. My only previous attempt to visit the country had not been encouraging. Travelling on the Tazara railway with my wife in 1976, we were set upon by immigration officials, abused, arrested, marched off the train under armed guard and sent packing back to Zambia on no more than the suspicion that we might recently have passed through South Africa. The fact that we had done so did not reconcile me to the treatment we received.

Power and Africa appear uncongenial companions. Too often the meek and affable young man has been transformed by the possession of a Kalashnikov into an unstable brute, the earnest graduate by some minor bureaucratic office into a vindictive pedant, the new leader assuming office with the promise of reform into yet another egregious autocrat. Yet now it was not only the grace of the humble which was touching, but the politeness, and an even rarer quality, kindness, of officials: the railway clerk going out of his way to find me a place on a packed train, the policeman taking pains to see me to my destination after being asked for directions. These services were all the more unexpected for being offered without any hope of reward.

Kigoma was a leafy and attractive little place with a single tarmac road curling up the hill towards Ujiji, lined with mango trees distinctive for the density of their foliage and fleshy leaves of a green so dark that the tree sometimes appeared black. The town was a combination of rusty native shanties and ponderous Germanic architecture, the yellowing railway station built to last until Doomsday and the whitewashed pile of the Kaiserhof on the hill which remained the headquarters of the local administration. Kigoma was comfortable with this ambiguity. A few streets had been renamed to reflect the era of independence but the changes were not wholesale, and imperialists had been left to co-exist with revolutionaries and nationalist heroes, Burton with Lumumba, Stanley with Nyerere.

This tolerance was reflected in Kigoma’s attitude towards the refugees, not just those from Zaire, but the hundreds of thousands who had fled the holocausts of Rwanda and Burundi. Whereas the mood in Ujiji was edgy because of the refugee traffic, here the migrants were being left to improvise new lives. By night they found shelter at one of three United Nations camps. By day they emerged to trade. Private enterprise was flourishing by the roadside – a Burundian man barbering a customer on a wooden stool, a woman whose two children played under a mango tree while she roasted maize cobs over charcoal, a youth at a shoeshine stall bearing the legend ‘Customer is the KING!’

The most striking thing about the refugees was the matter-of-fact way they went about their affairs. These were not the faces one associated with the images of African crises, haunted and dislocated casualties, enduring but helpless. The elderly woman and her daughter, calling out a greeting as they walked gracefully by with little bundles of possessions balanced on their heads, did not look like victims.

They had been walking for two weeks. When the ethnic killings started near their home in southern Burundi they wrapped a few essentials in bright cloths and turned away from the shamba where they lived by cultivating matoke, the plantain which is the staple of these parts. Living under open skies and by their wits, they walked south-east towards the Tanzania border. As Tutsis, they avoided Hutu settlements when it was possible, although in one place it had been a Hutu woman who gave them food when their few grubby banknotes, hoarded and wrapped in an even grubbier handkerchief, ran short. They also avoided the men in uniform whose behaviour could never be predicted. Nearing the border, they simply walked off into the bush – which in these parts is very thick, and dramatically beautiful – and crossed into Tanzania without even knowing it. They had probably covered 160 miles since setting out, and now were about to present themselves at the local office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

A local UN worker told me the flow of Burundian refugees had slowed but there were still around 170,000 in the district. Now it was Zaireans who were arriving at the rate of about 1,500 a day and this influx of a further 90,000 from across the lake had strained local patience as well as aid resources. The Burundians were thought of as placid folk, amenable to administration, but the Zaireans had a reputation for being difficult.

‘It’s as if they believe we owe them,’ the UN worker, an Australian, said. ‘I mean, of course we’re here to help. But we had a riot at a Zairean camp the other day because there was a hold-up in food supplies. They can be awkward bastards.’

He paused. ‘Weird too,’ he went on. ‘There’s been talk about witchcraft at one of the holding centres for weeks. A few days ago an old couple arrived on their own. One of our people saw them going down to the water supply. The next thing a mob attacks them, starts stoning them. By the time our people got there they were dead. Everyone was standing around yammering that these were the witches who had come to poison the water supply.’

He was a gawky young engineer just three months out of Melbourne. He shook his head. ‘Weird,’ he said again.

I STARTED UP the hill to find the grave of a missionary failure. It was a good sweaty climb to the little Anglican church, but before reaching it I was hailed by an elderly gent with white whiskers in a dark three-piece suit.

‘Are you going to pray up ther?’ he asked. I said what I was really looking for was the missionaries’ graves.

‘There are no graves up there,’ he said emphatically.

‘Where are the missionary graves, then?’

‘Well,’ he said, swaying, ‘we have many graves. Over there’ – sweeping a hand towards the hill opposite – ‘we have Christian graves, Muslim graves, all sort of graves.’

I laughed. ‘I am sorry,’ he said, swaying again, ‘I am a little drinked. Come, and we will look together for the graves of your missionaries.’

We finally found them on the hill opposite, at the end of a track. Bushes and shrubs grew restlessly across the little plot and billowed around the entrance, two stone pillars on which mould sharpened the blackened outline of a crucifix. Amid the turmoil of grass and weeds were two or three mounds. The headstones were gone and the resting place of John Boden Thomson was unmarked. This was all that remained of the London Missionary Society’s expedition to central Africa in 1878.

Like so many of his calling, Thomson was a Scot, but he grew up knowing none of the wretchedness in which the young Livingstone was forged. Indeed, childhood indulgence made him a bit of a prig. In 1870 he was assigned to his first missionary posting, among the Matabele people of central Africa.

A new mood was on the rise in Britain. That year the writer and philosopher John Ruskin delivered a lecture at the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford that inflamed a generation. ‘Here is what England must do or perish,’ Ruskin said. ‘She must found colonies as fast and as far as she is able, formed of her most energetic and worthy men; seizing every piece of fruitful waste ground she can set her foot on … If we can get men, for little pay, to cast themselves against cannon-mouths for love of England, we may find men also who will plough and sow for her, who will behave kindly and righteously for her, and who will bring up their children to love her.’

Thomson was not the best example of the new generation and his first mission was an utter failure. His companions, a melancholy Yorkshireman named William Sykes and Thomas Morgan Thomas, a manic-depressive Welshmen, were ill-suited, and the Matabele were a warlike folk forbidden by their king, Lobengula, to follow the Gospel. After a demoralising encounter with the king Thomson wrote: ‘He told me that God had given the Bible to the white man, but as He had not given it to the black man also, it was clear He did not mean the black man to have it.’

After five despairing years among the Matabele, Thomson’s heart lifted at the receipt of orders to join an expedition to plant a new mission at Lake Tanganyika. The objective was nothing less than a living monument to the society’s most revered son, Livingstone, in the place with which his name was synonymous, Ujiji. Thomson sailed for Zanzibar to join the expedition leader, Roger Price.

Price was no stranger to disaster in Africa. In 1859 he and a missionary named Holloway Helmore led their families, four adults and five children in all, 500 miles through the Kalahari desert to the source of the Zambezi where, one by one, they started to die. The last to go were Price’s daughter and wife, who was so emaciated that in places her bones had broken through the skin. Only Price and two of the children reached safety.

After this harrowing experience, Price may not have been well suited to lead a new expedition. He and Thomson were at odds even before they started away from the coast, in July 1877. This time it was the pack animals which died one by one, bogged down in swamps. The expedition had not yet cleared the coastal belt when the last wagon had to be abandoned and the missionaries started to suffer bouts of fever. At this stage Price, haunted by memories and intimations of catastrophe, recognised that the project was inherently flawed and announced he was returning to advise the directors that a mission could be set up at Ujiji only after supply stations had been established along the route. Now he and Thomson quarrelled openly. The party divided, three other members carrying on with Thomson. They were still 600 miles from Ujiji.

Fever afflicted them all. Thomson was also haemorrhaging internally and had to be supported as they limped along. But his tongue had lost none of its sharpness, especially towards the younger brethren, who came to dread their leader’s disapproval. As the party stumbled agonisingly towards Ujiji, Thomson became increasingly isolated from his companions, and their peril. He wrote to the directors in a shaking hand: ‘Please do not let Mrs Thomson know I have been so ill. It would only make her anxious for nothing.’

On a day in late August, when the weather was fine and mild, he received his reward with the sight of the inland sea. For a few days he rallied. ‘I cannot tell you how pleased we were to get here,’ he wrote to the directors. ‘We have found a most healthy-looking site for our station close on Kigoma Bay. It is the highest hill here.’ Soon afterwards he suffered an apoplectic attack. His companions nursed him for a week, immersing his body in water to bring down the raging temperature. Then he died. He was thirty-seven and in eight years had failed to make a single convert.

Although Price’s judgement had been amply vindicated, the directors were looking for scapegoats rather than explanations and he was disgraced. Now Joseph Mullens, the society’s foreign secretary, determined to find out for himself just what it was that made central Africa so uncongenial to missionary activity. A month after setting out from Zanzibar, he died of fever.

After that the society abandoned Ujiji. In a flash of unusual candour, an official report noted that this ‘painfully fascinating story stands as a striking example of how great missionary enterprises ought not to be attempted’.

THE LITTLE ANGLICAN church stood on a spur of the hill identified by Thomson, across the valley from his grave. I had intended to pause just for a moment but a service was in progress and a sidesman who spotted me bustled up and shepherded me to a pew.

The crude whitewashed walls, unadorned by images or symbols, were surmounted by wooden rafters and a roof of corrugated iron which radiated eddies of heat down on the congregation. Relief came with a light air wafting in through large glassless windows that looked out to the lake. Even so, I was soon sweating profusely. We were tightly bunched on the pews, 350 people or so, and I was pressed up against a corpulent man.

I was in a reverie when he nudged me. ‘You must go up,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘You must go up. The minister wants you to introduce yourself to everyone.’

From the back, I walked up the aisle, aware of the buzz at the appearance of a mzungu which trailed me like a slipstream. Grinning foolishly, I was enfolded in the arms of the minister at the lectern. ‘Now you tell us about yourself,’ he said firmly. ‘I will translate.’

I did it as best I could. I said I was from a town named Windsor, near London, that I brought greetings from Anglicans in Britain. I told them a little about my journey, I said I loved their country and thanked them for their hospitality. At the end I said: ‘Nafurahi sana kukuona.’ This went down very well and I returned to my seat amid applause and shining faces.

The rest of the service occupied almost two hours. An animated pastor, who somewhat resembled Archbishop Desmond Tutu, gave an extended sermon in sonorous tones; a youth group improvised a piece of theatre that I was unable to follow but which induced a general state of hilarity; the singing was lovely.

At the door the minister embraced me again. ‘Come back, Stephen,’ he said.

I was halfway down the hill before it suddenly struck me that I had missed an opportunity. What I should have said was that the Quini Ingrezi (Queen Elizabeth), also lived in Windsor and, if she had known I was going to speak to an Anglican congregation in Africa, she would have wanted me to pass on her greetings. It might have sounded twee, but I know they would have loved it.

AFTER A FEW days by the water I could imagine how painful it must have been for the explorers to drag themselves away from the lake and start back into that fearful void, back into the inferno described by the most indefatigable of them all, Henry Stanley:

… the torrid heat, the miasma exhaled from the soil, the giant cane-grass suffocating the wayfarer, the rabid fury of the native guarding every entry and exit, the unspeakable misery of life, the utter absence of every comfort, the bitterness which each day heaps upon the poor white man’s head, and the little – too little – promise of success one feels on entering it.

Each evening at the hotel I took a table beneath a thatch umbrella on the grass leading down to the edge of the lake. It was the day’s reward, the dried sweat and crusted grime showered off and a cold Safari at hand, looking across that miraculous stretch of water at the fireworks of sunset. One evening a malachite kingfisher, a dazzling creature the size of a large, stubby thumb, preened himself on a reed. He took off, and at a height of about thirty feet above the water poised, a beak almost as long as his body pointing down like a tiny harpoon, body arched and frozen, wings a blur, before plunging like a stone into the water with a surprising splash. For an instant he disappeared entirely, then burst through the surface again with a fish, a filament of silver seemingly impaled on a needle. It was the most exquisite and perfect act of hunting I had ever seen.

Later, poring over a map, the majesty of the place became even more clear. The world’s longest lake was also the deepest after Lake Baikal, a great cleft in Africa’s surface. Imagine standing on the edge of an escarpment running 200 miles in either direction and falling away almost vertically to a depth of a mile and the dimensions may become more clear. The grandeur does not stop with Tanganyika. The map shows a great chain of lakes. Starting with Lake Malawi, another awesome gash 350 miles in length with fjord-like depth, the chain swings in a curve up through Tanganyika and curls back through lakes Kivu, Edward and Albert. This vast semi-circular fissure in the earth’s crust, almost 2,000 miles in length, is now largely forgotten as the western branch of the Great Rift Valley. That term has come to mean the eastern rift, which breaks away at the top of Lake Malawi and turns north-east through Tanzania, passes through the middle of Kenya, rises into the Ethiopian Highlands, plunges into the Danakil Depression and runs up the length of the Red Sea all the way to the Lebanon.

There is, however, a symbolic as well as geographic wholeness to the two rifts. Joined at Lake Malawi in the south and Lake Turkana in the north, they enfold in a great oval a bed of territory that might be likened in shape and function to a womb in Africa’s body. For here, at Olduvai Gorge and along the banks of Turkana, were made the discoveries of the Leakey family, culminating in the fossils of Homo erectus and Homo habilis, that have certified this as the cradle of mankind. Burton, infatuated as he was by Lake Tanganyika, was closer to the mark than he realised when he wrote of ‘this African Eden’.

Burton and Speke were at Ujiji for three months. While Burton interrogated the inhabitants, Speke bartered for the use of vessels to explore the lake. Now, once only, came the chance of a discovery that would have forestalled years of feuding and geographic controversy. They set off in canoes to find the river at the lake’s northern tip. From chiefs and traders they received contradictory reports: some said the river flowed into the lake, some that it flowed out. The point was fundamental: if it flowed in, the river could not be the Nile, and the lake could not be its source. The balance of the reports favoured that alternative, but the issue was destined to remain unresolved. When only a few days from the northern mouth their boatmen refused to go further, for fear of cannibals. Both men were thoroughly done in and one suspects they did not protest much. In any event, they arrived back in Ujiji after a month on the lake, no more certain on this critical question than when they set out.

In May 1858 Burton gazed back at the lake for the last time. ‘The charm of the scenery was perhaps enhanced by the reflection that I might never look upon it again,’ he wrote. In later years he could still claim the satisfaction of being the first European to see the inland sea, but by then the memory was tainted by knowledge that what he had discovered was the source not of the Nile, but the Congo.

Tabora: Wednesday, 17 March

THE TRAIN FROM Kigoma got in at 6 a.m. The little second-class compartment was packed and stuffy, heaving during the night with bodies, snoring, grunting, muttering. In the thin light of dawn I wrestled the rucksack from the train and walked the half-mile or so to the first hotel. An omelette and lady-finger bananas restored the spirit.

In town I met Jemaal, a tall and willowy young man with a battered Toyota for hire. Like most folk here, he was a Nyamwezi, the Bantu people who were the Arabs’ most formidable rivals for control of the trade route. During the mid-nineteeth century, these were badlands, and the Nyamwezi chief, Mirambo, built an empire on porterage, trade and war. I like the description in my history volume of Mirambo’s army of mercenaries, the dreaded ruga-ruga: ‘Distinctive with red cloak, feather head-dress, ivory and copper ornaments, they are somewhat reminiscent of the predatory companies of the European Hundred Years’ War, attaching themselves to whichever leader held out most hope of plunder.’

Jemaal evidently had hopes of plunder, too, and was saddened to discover that I was a scrawny prize. But pickings are leaner on the old trade route these days and eventually we settled on a price for the round-trip to Kazeh.

Once a crossroads, Tabora is now more a dead end, isolated by the collapse of Tanzania’s road system. The tarmac broke up as soon as we left town. After about five miles the road trailed off into a track, gouged and rent by stormwaters, that would have challenged a Land Rover. Jemaal, his face set in a rictus of determination, forged gamely on, the Toyota bucking and grinding, until with a shudder and a bang we came to a halt, a rear wheel sunk in a trench.

I was beginning to have my doubts. The Toyota was not just stuck, it was steaming and looked fit to explode. I feared that Jemaal might decide on reflection that his fee had been insufficient or, worse still, discover damage to the car, turn nasty and summon the local ruga-ruga to secure adequate compensation.

‘I could walk from here,’ I suggested.

He would not hear of it. Gesturing towards a couple of wide-eyed and naked children who had appeared from a thatch hut, he shot out an order. One scurried away and came back with a badza, a short-handled hoe. Jemaal started to hack away at the sides of the trench while ordering us to collect rocks and stones. Within half an hour we had built a bridge under the wheel, and the Toyota rolled free. Jemaal grinned triumphantly and I felt ashamed at my faint-heartedness. Rather more gingerly now, we sailed on.

It was Evelyn Waugh, in his dazzling little travel diary, A Tourist in Africa, who observed ‘wherever you find old mango trees in East Africa, you are on the Arab slave-tracks’. I knew we had reached Kazeh when large green-black shapes billowed above the maize fields.

Even Burton, who rejoiced in its Arab inhabitants, never made great claims for the place. There was nothing, he wrote, that could properly be called a town; rather it was a ‘scattered collection of oblong houses with central courts, garden plots, storerooms and outhouses for the slaves’. Only one of these Zanzibari dwellings survived amid the shambas and huts of the little settlement, although it was in remarkably good condition and had been kept as a museum. The Toyota’s arrival was an occasion of astonishment then delight to the curator who had been weeks without a visitor and was slumbering on a chair beside the carved wooden door.

All the explorers seem to have stayed here, Livingstone and Stanley for a spell during which their friendship acquired a closeness that neither was able to achieve with anyone else. Burton lingered, too. Here, perhaps in the courtyard with the mango tree, he renewed his acquaintance with the Arab, Snay bin Amir, delighted to be back with ‘the open-handed hospitality and the hearty good-will of this truly noble race’ and contrasting it with ‘the niggardness of the savage and selfish African’. The indulgence was to cost him dear. For now Speke was galvanised. From the slavers, the white men had heard of a second lake, even larger than Tanganyika, lying to the north. Speke, bored by the company of both Arab and African and tired of being patronised by Burton, decided to go in search of it.

Tomorrow I will take the train following in his trail.