Читать книгу Livingstone’s Tribe: A Journey From Zanzibar to the Cape - Stephen Taylor - Страница 11

THE OVERNIGHT TRAIN TO Mwanza, seething with passengers in sweaty, hot darkness, brought back memories of long-ago railway journeys in India. Fleeing a swarming compartment, I set out in search of refreshment. In the dining-car an overhead light spread a thin ochre smear on the grimy walls. A few men sat around drinking warm beer. Two figures caught my eye.

One was a peasant woman with her head deep in a book. It came as a shock to realise that she was the first person I had seen reading since setting out. She wore a ragged skirt, a grubby T-shirt bearing the legend ‘The Dark Secret’ and had her hair tied up in a cheap purple scarf. Her book was entitled Chinese Literature. On the back cover was written The Women’s Trilogy.

The second figure was an Asian in his thirties with a moustache and glassy smile who was drinking with a group of Africans. He noticed me and brought his beer over. He was a coffee trader, a wheeler and dealer in a notoriously sharp business, but had been cutting deals of various sorts all his life. He had made big money in the ‘good years’ under Mobutu in Zaire and had interests in Canada and Australia, where he had scraped under the immigration wire – ‘it’s hard to get in, but even harder for them to get you out’. He was tough, shrewd, sleek and cosmopolitan, an artist in the game of survival.

He asked where I was going next. Across Lake Victoria by ferry, I said. His face lit up with a look of demented glee. ‘My wife was on the Bukoba,’ he said, and sat grinning wildly at me.

I was stunned. Nine months earlier the grossly overloaded ferry Bukoba had been approaching her berth in Mwanza when she capsized. Well over 700 people were on the boat, which had a capacity of 430, and only those on the upper levels managed to scramble into the water. Many more could have been saved but rescue workers, who heard shouts and banging from those trapped in the air lock, drilled into the hull. As the air giving the Bukoba buoyancy rushed out, she sank like a stone. Only fifty-three survivors were picked up. Perhaps 700 people died, including a Ugandan businessman on whose body was found $27,000 in cash; the great majority were still entombed in the wreck at a depth of about ninety feet.

I must have looked horrified and muttered an apology. The man was obviously a maniac, perhaps demented by grief. His face was still flushed with mad excitement.

‘No, no, you don’t understand,’ he said. ‘She escaped.’

As he related it, he had always known the Bukoba was ill-fated. ‘Even when it was empty it stood so,’ he said, indicating a list to one side. ‘I have worked in ships and I knew that was a bad one. I said to my wife, “If you are on that ship look out, and if anything happens, don’t fight the water. You can’t fight the water.” When it happened, when the boat went over, she remembered. She just let herself go, and the water pulled her out. She could not swim, but she remembered, “don’t fight the water.” So she floated, and they rescued her.’

He was an Ismaili Muslim, one of a community living around Lake Victoria. I had thought him an unattractive, mercenary fellow. Yet he was typical of the outsider, grafted on to Africa by colonialism, who had endured and persevered as we, the Anglo-Saxons and Celts, had failed to do.

This fact was starting to affect my hopes for the journey. Since leaving Daudi Ricardo in Dar es Salaam, I had encountered not a single white who might be categorised as ‘staying on’. That was not entirely unexpected. The flow of settlers to Tanganyika had been restricted under the British mandate and confined to two main farming areas, the Southern Highlands, where Daudi had his ranch, and the Arusha – Moshi region in the north; even there virtually no white farmers remained as they had lost their land in Nyerere’s disastrous nationalisation of agriculture. Old age had carried off all but the last of a handful of diehards.

Nevertheless, it was a sobering thought that the nation which had once taken such pride in its imperial legacy had left so little of itself behind. A colonial census of Tanganyika in the 1950s recorded a white population of 18,000. In England I had met a number of them, former colonial servants whose task had been to prepare one of the Empire’s most neglected territories for independence, and had been struck by their high-mindedness, their dedication and their genuine love for the country. All continued to wish Tanzania well, many maintained ties of friendship, some were active benefactors. Yet none had stayed on. It was as if their love of Africa had survived because of, rather than despite, their distance from it.

Here, on the other hand, was the descendant of one of the 80,000 Asians recorded by the census. They had consolidated and prospered. My companion had his bolt-hole in Australia to flee to if there should be an anti-Asian purge here. In the meantime, he was part of Africa, living from day to day, adapting for survival, disdaining complacency, mixing easily with blacks but totally without sentiment.

‘One day they may send us out,’ he said matter-of-factly as he moved off to rejoin the African drinkers. ‘Sometimes they hate us, sometimes not. It comes and goes.’

THE FEATURELESS, GREEN landscape passing outside the train window had hardly changed in a thousand miles. I was reading Nostromo when Conrad’s description of a hard peasant landscape in South America brought me upright with its echoes from ‘a great land of plain and mountain and people, suffering and mute, waiting for the future in a pathetic immobility of patience’.

So it continued on the route that Speke followed north of Kazeh. Still, he made comparatively rapid progress and had covered about 200 miles in two weeks when a transformation came upon the landscape, hinting at the imminence of discovery. From the plains emerged at first hills, dotted with granite boulders. Then the hills closed in, rising on either side of a valley while the boulders multiplied, piling in chaotic profusion on top of one another but creating strangely logical formations – a great turmoil of grey shapes on which, here and there, improbably balanced, stood a single column of granite. As the train threaded its way down through this grotesque and capricious avenue, the Nyanza came slowly into view, a steely blue plate stretching away under a leaden sky.

From the moment he saw it, Speke was convinced: this and not Tanganyika was the goal of the quest. Standing on a hill near the modern town of Mwanza, he surveyed his prize and decided to name it Victoria in honour of his sovereign. He had no doubt, he wrote, ‘that the lake at my feet gave birth to that interesting river, the source of which has been the subject of so much speculation. This is a far more extensive lake than the Tanganyika, so broad that you could not see across it, and so long that nobody knew its length.’

Speke’s conviction was stronger than his reasoning. While it was true that nobody knew the Nyanza’s size, the same could be said of Lake Tanganyika which, it turned out, was almost twice as long. He stayed at the Nyanza just three days, not long enough for even the rudimentary survey that he and Burton had carried out at Tanganyika. When he returned to Kazeh and declared that he had solved the Nile riddle, without advancing any evidence other than that of his eyes, Burton was dumbfounded; his dull lieutenant had suddenly become a deadly rival. In the furious debate that ensued after the explorers returned to London, each took up his position on the basis of prejudice, Speke because he had found the Nyanza, Burton because he had not.

Speke did not live to see the truth of his conviction verified. A year after their return, by which time he and Burton were bitter foes, Speke went back to Africa, this time with his own obedient deputy, James Grant. In an epic three-year journey they penetrated to the Nyanza and passed up the western shore to Buganda and the court of the Kabaka Mutesa; from there, Speke alone proceeded to the rapids at the northern outlet of the Nyanza where the White Nile took its rise, before rejoining Grant and continuing their march up the Nile to Cairo, cabling ahead ‘the Nile is settled’.

But it was not, and now geographers divided into Burton and Speke factions. Livingstone, back from his own African explorations, joined the Burton camp. A public debate, almost in the nature of a gladiatorial contest, was arranged at the British Association in Bath for September 1864. It never took place. Out hunting on the eve of their confrontation, Speke discharged his shotgun into his chest and died within minutes.

Accident or suicide, it was never resolved. Burton hinted at the latter, aware that the suggestion of Speke having lost his nerve strengthened his own case. All the more bitter then must the truth have tasted fourteen years later when Stanley finally resolved the issue in Speke’s favour. It was the most painful lesson of Burton’s life. The prize had been within his grasp but he had failed to go the extra mile. In a poem reflecting on the tragedy of their venture, he acknowledged privately: ‘I did but half.’ To Speke – plodding, unattractive, repressed Anglo-Saxon Speke – belonged the glory.

Moreover, because he was the first European to visit Buganda, the most organised state yet to be encountered by the explorers, he became the bridge between Britain and East Africa.

FOR ALL THE grandeur of the approach to the lake, the site of Speke’s discovery had evolved into a seedy, unappealing place. Mwanza is Tanzania’s second largest town, comfortably poised to profit by commerce with Uganda and Kenya and the hundreds of islands on the lake, yet it exuded an air of defeat. I spent a morning walking the town, the sad and barren streets, the broken clocktower, and decided it was not a place to linger. Even the traders were forlorn; the fruit piled up in little pyramids was flaccid and the dull flesh of bog-eyed Nile perch, laid out in rusty wheelbarrows, broiled gently in the sun.

The granite pile of the Bismarck Rocks, rising near the water’s edge, were as solid as the old Iron Chancellor himself. Another lakeside landmark had endured less well. The flowering shrubs and lawns of the Botanical Gardens – ‘those inescapable amenities of the British Empire’, as Jan Morris called them – had long since been consumed by more robust species. But here at least a small flame of spirit flickered. Into the vacuum had moved a woman of majestic proportions and enterprise.

She told me her name was Victoria, the combined legacy of being born by the lake and having a father who served in the King’s Africa Rifles. A cheerful as well as ample sight in a gay rayon dress, she nevertheless had the focused gaze of the born commander. She was waging war on rampant papyrus and supervising a clean-up of botanical corpses that might have been bohenia and crocosmia. Three or four subordinates leapt to her orders.

Off to one side their campaign was starting to show gains. Victoria confirmed that the paddies at the lake edge were rice. Individual plants, flowers and vegetables, were being cultivated in plastic bags. She pointed to a thriving tomato crop. ‘Very popular with the people,’ she said. ‘Veeery popular.’ Her eyes flared in emphasising the point and she trilled it like the climax of a Bellini aria.

Clearly this venture was a relic of Nyerere’s socialism, ujamaa cooperative farming in action. The soil was of excellent quality and water was abundant, so now, instead of providing a gracious setting for the leisure of a colonial elite, the gardens were supplying the needs of the masses. I asked Victoria if the gardens were the responsibility of the ruling party or some public body like the Mwanza council.

She looked blank. ‘The party?’ Then she shrugged. ‘There is no party here. This is good land. We are using it. That is all.’

But what about the money, I asked. Surely under ujamaa the enterprise was regulated by the party.

‘The money is for me,’ Victoria said crisply.

AS WELL AS being a woman, Victoria was successful and a Sukuma. I hoped the combination would not prove malignant in her case, as it had been for so many before.

The Sukuma are the people of the southern lake region. They had a strongly developed chiefly system and a tradition of closely knit communities, a cohesiveness no doubt bolstered by a comparative blessing of resources, including fish from the lake. They were self-sufficient, having proved resistant to Christianity and Islam and suspicious of outside authority, whether colonial or post-colonial. Like most Bantu peoples, they retained their belief that witchcraft, bulogi, can be held responsible for almost any trouble. The concept of good fortune or bad had no validity. That a hardworking grower might have his crop wiped out by a hailstorm while his lazy neighbour was unaffected could be put down not to the caprice of nature, but an intervention from the spirit world. The most likely source of harm was thought to be the magic of an enemy employing sorcerers. In turn, those who felt themselves afflicted would consult a diviner, or nfumu, to identify the source. The nfumu could provide a charm or remedy but in unresponsive cases dealing with witches became the business of elders who considered allegations and meted out punishments, ranging from verbal warnings and fines to ostracism. In rare and serious cases, witches could be clubbed to death. The chief was the ultimate arbiter in all such matters.

Under the British, the chiefs were left in charge of grassroots administration. A great deal has been written, much of it critical, about this system known as Indirect Rule, promoted by Lord Lugard in East and West Africa. It was certainly not adopted for idealistic motives, but rather as a cost saving method by which a handful of white officials could exercise a degree of control over a vast domain. But while it is true to say that it did little to prepare the great mass of Africans for the modern world, it did at least keep the traditional social fabric intact during the colonial cataclysm.

At the same time, Indirect Rule set up a tension between the chiefs and the new intelligentsia produced by colonial education, who constituted the first wave of nationalist leaders. Tribal leadership became tainted with the brush of collaboration. One of the first acts of the Nyerere government after independence was to abolish the chiefs and vest their authority in party officials. When I spoke to him, Daudi Ricardo, a party man himself, described this social revolution as ‘the biggest mistake we ever made’.

Whether there was a direct connection between social dislocation and the mass killing of witches among the Sukuma cannot be said with certainty, but both began in the early 1960s. What is clear is that once the killings started they acquired a ferocious momentum of their own. In early reports of witch-killing among the Sukuma it was noted that in Mwanza district, mobs of men had taken to dealing with accused witches – usually women – by chasing them and beating them to death with freshly cut branches. But it was not until the 1970s that the practice became widespread. By then a new factor was aggravating social disruption – the forced relocation under Nyerere’s ujamaa policy of entire communities into model villages. The trauma was felt everywhere but particularly among those whose cultural values were deepest, notably the Sukuma.

It would start with a whispering campaign, usually instigated by an envious or malicious neighbour. A woman with a good crop of sorghum or cotton was a typical target. In communities already suffering confusion, it did not take long for hysteria to take hold. As the killings spread so the ways of witch-slayers became more sophisticated. Instead of being hunted down by mobs, the supposed sorcerer would be hacked to death with a machete by a paid killer, part of whose fee was spent on his own ritual cleansing afterwards. Far from being outcasts, these hired assassins were a focus of public gratitude as, for a while at least, the demons of anxiety and panic that had gripped the community were laid to rest.

By the mid-1970s witch-killing in Sukumaland was serious enough for the government to intervene. Hundreds of suspects were rounded up, and for a while the killings tailed off. Then twelve people died of beatings in custody. Four policemen were convicted and jailed. Government ministers were dismissed and the operation was called off. Here was proof to the Sukuma that even the government feared the witches. The witch-killings resumed and were soon worse than ever, intensifying through the 1980s.

Government statistics show that some 4,518 people were killed in incidents related to witchcraft in Tanzania’s thirteen regions between 1970 and 1988. Of these, 2,946 occurred among the Sukuma. Although Tanzania’s largest tribe, they are still less than 12 per cent of the population in an ethnically diverse country of 120 or so language groups. Yet they have been responsible for 65 per cent of all witch-killings. While the belief in witches is no less pervasive in other regions, suspects were generally dealt with by more traditional and lenient methods. In Kigoma district, there had been fewer than twenty witch-killings, in the regions of Mtwara to the south and Morogoro west of Dar es Salaam, just one each. In Mwanza, there had been 1,924. Of those, 1,365 were women.

Academic studies have been written on why witch-killing became pathological among the Sukuma. A Tanzanian anthropologist, Simeon Masaki, concluded that it was a direct consequence of a clash between a state strategy of modernisation and a peasantry with its roots embedded in tradition – in effect, that social dislocation opened the way to a descent into mass hysteria.

MY FRIEND Randal Sadleir had a few stories about witchcraft. He was a district commissioner in Handeni where the chief was Salim Mhapi, a doughty old warrior who had been decorated for bravery as a member of von Lettow Vorbeck’s Schutztruppe. In 1953 the chief fell ill. A missionary doctor was called in but could find nothing wrong with him.

Randal went to see him. ‘I have been bewitched,’ the chief said. Nothing could shift him from this conviction, and he soon died.

After the funeral, mourners were returning in a lorry which overturned. A number of people were killed, including Randal’s messenger. Deeply distressed himself, he returned the body of the young man to his distraught family. They were adamant that the accident was a result of the original curse on Chief Mhapi.

Two years later Randal was in Dar es Salaam and was invited to meet the rising star of the African nationalist movement, a young teacher named Julius Nyerere. They drank brandy at the Cosy Café and Randal was impressed. Nyerere, a chief’s son but a devout Roman Catholic, had recently returned from Edinburgh University trailing laurels. He was witty and cultivated. Somehow the subject of witchcraft came up.

‘I said that in the rural areas where I had served we came across a good deal of it. I felt a bit of a fool talking to this brilliant chap about witches, and said quickly that I was sure it didn’t happen among educated people in Dar. He looked at me shrewdly and said in his high-pitched voice: “Randal, I can tell you – the most important thing in the lives of people in Dar is witchcraft.”’

THE AMERICAN MISSIONARIES were taking stock of the Sukumaland ministry. We were seated in a comfortable old colonial house outside Mwanza but the prognosis was bleak.

‘I’m pissed off at Satan – I’m pissed off as hell. You see, I know it’s not fake. This is real demonology.’ They murmured in agreement. The speaker was Dale, a pilot and Vietnam veteran. He looked like an ageing hippie, with long locks and beard, cowboy boots and thin legs encased in denims, but his experience was of a medieval world. He was a pastor, his wife a nurse, on the islands of the lake.

I had met them after booking my passage on the ship crossing the lake that night. My instinct was to flee from evangelicals but they had shamed me by their hospitality and as Dale spoke I was drawn in to the dark, outlandish, compelling world he described.

‘The islands have always been a refuge for outcasts, criminals and fugitives. Mainlanders are frightened of the lake, they believe demons collect over the water, and they do everything they can to avoid it. The islanders say “Vita uya bara” – which kind of means that the mainland is at war with them.’

There were about sixty inhabited islands in the Tanzanian sector, forested and jagged outcrops of ironstone rising hundreds of feet from the lake, in two main archipelagos. A few of the bigger ones, such as Ukerewe, were served by ferries and some form of administration, but most existed entirely beyond the pale. Anyone, no matter how heinous their past, would be accepted, provided they submitted to the culture of the island. Each was a kind of independent pariah state.

No one knew the numbers living out in the lake but Dale said they had been growing rapidly. Freed criminals had always been drawn by the absence of formal constraints. In recent years people fleeing accusations of witchcraft and refugees from Rwanda and Burundi had followed. Now outcast Aids sufferers were joining the migration. The upshot was a social laboratory in which all the ills of the mainland were stimulated to grow in hothouse conditions. Dale conjured up a place of terrible dread. Aids levels were 25 per cent higher than the mainland and growing. New schools of witchcraft were being spawned and he was frequently accosted by individuals showing all the signs of possession.

‘These things have always been there but it’s worse now and for one reason – Aids. Once Western medicine could solve the problems. This time we don’t have an answer. We’re not Superman any more. Aids has sent people back to the witchdoctors.’

It was at this point that Dale launched his outburst against Satan. After a while he went on. ‘You know our biggest mistak? We have failed to address the Africans’ innermost fear – that terrible, daily fear of being bewitched.’

‘I agree,’ chimed in Andrew, a young Englishman. ‘We have taken centuries of our gospel benefits for granted. We have our nice cosy security and we don’t talk about sorcery any more. The people are embarrassed to raise it with us, so the whole thing is swept under the carpet.’ It was time, they agreed, to confront the threat. ‘We’ve got to say, “we understand your fears, we know there is evil out there, and we are going to stand by you and see you through this.”’

For all their earnest determination, I wondered whether they were not sometimes tempted to give it all up.

‘I can’t,’ said Dale.

I had noticed that he walked with a limp. A few months earlier he had fallen off his motorcycle. The accident was quite minor but his leg was broken and complications set in. He spent months in hospital and nearly lost the leg.

‘I can’t go,’ he said again. ‘The people believe the accident happened because I’ve been bewitched by someone in our village. If I leave it means that power is stronger. I’ve got to stay to show we can take on the powers of darkness and win.’

It sounded like a life sentence. For a moment I thought I detected a hint of fear as if, isolated as they were here, witchcraft was more real a threat than any of them was prepared to admit. For me, it was time to sail. They said a prayer for my safe journey, for which I was grateful, and I left them to their demons.

THE MV VICTORIA was a proper ship. She had wooden decks off which shuttered doors led to neat little cabins, companionways, a single round funnel, and a rail at the stern over which you could watch the foam being churned up by her screws. She was a product of the Yarrow shipyards and was launched in 1959 when colonials might spend a week sailing around the lake, calling at ports in Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika while being well fed and marvelling from the afterdeck over a sundowner on the magnificence of this imperial domain. I settled into a seat at the bar with Nostromo, a cold Safari and a sense of deep contentment.

Impressive though they were, simple dimensions did bare justice to the Nyanza. Roughly rectangular, it was 230 miles at its longest point from north to south and 160 miles in breadth. Its area of 25,285 square miles could contain Wales three and a half times. More than size though, it exuded an elemental power.

Environmentally, it was a mess. Once an evolutionary biologist’s dream, with a range of hundreds of tiny perch-like fish called haplochromine cichlids that offered a unique laboratory for the study of Darwinian theory because they were descended from a common ancestor, the lake had been infested by alien flora and fauna to pernicious effect. Nile perch, Lates niloticus, a large, voracious species, was introduced in the 1950s to stimulate fishing but had caused ecological disaster. The cichlids, potentially more significant for evolutionary studies than the finches of the Galapagos, had been severely reduced in numbers.

Another invader, the water hyacinth, had spread across the lake like an oil slick from a breached tanker. This floating mass of weed, Eichhornia crassipes, appeared in the Nile swamps of Sudan in the 1950s but only reached the lake thirty years later. Since then it had become a plague to those dependent upon the lake for their living, obstructing fishermen, choking ports and disrupting the generation of hydro-electric power.

For the dugout fishermen who had worked these waters for millennia, the Nyanza was the giver and taker of life. Its appearance of calm immensity was deceptive, as storms came blowing out of the darkness with terrifying suddenness and force. Their world was described by John Roscoe, one of the earliest and finest of the missionary anthropologists, who crossed the lake by this same route a number of times in the 1890s. The journey by canoe then took around two weeks, paddlers hugging the shore to evade storms and landing on uninhabited islands at night to avoid attack by raiders. Hippopotamus and crocodile were other hazards, and Roscoe noted quite a few men who had lost limbs on the lake.

Canoes travelled in groups for twelve hours at a stretch, one of the paddlers roasting a meal of plantains for his fellows. Although expert canoeists, few men were able swimmers and to be caught in a storm was usually fatal. Roscoe related an occasion …

when a storm burst upon us with such suddenness that, before we could reach the land, the waves were lashed up into mountains of water so high that even when standing up in the canoe, it was impossible to see land over them. The men began to cry ‘We are dead men,’ and to drop their paddles. I picked up a paddle and ran along the canoe, slapping each man on the shoulders and calling out ‘Vuga’ (paddle). The men responded with alacrity and began to gain in confidence with their exertions. In half an hour we had reached a creek. The water was boiling and lashing itself into a fury and had it not been for the ready help of the natives from the shore, we should have sunk in the surf. The natives shook us by the hand as we landed and congratulated us on our escape, as though we were their relatives. It was most refreshing to find people so interested in our welfare.

The bar of the Victoria was a fine place to reflect that this enigmatic, primitive body of water was the fountain of civilisation’s greatest river. It was dark when I finished my Safari and walked down the deck to the wooden rail at the stern. Looking out over the black lake, I suddenly felt as though I really was at the very heart of the continent, where life was flowing out through riverine arteries into an organic body, and I rejoiced at my own adventure.