Act II: African snapshots

As many of you know (and my friend MW would tease that you'd only have to know me about 10 minutes), I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Cameroon from 1996-1998. It was an incredible experience and (among many other things) instilled in me a deep love of teaching, a basic knowledge of French, an aversion to owning much of anything and the ability to travel many hours smooshed into a cramped space.

I bring this up because the last time I was in Africa (before Tanzania), I was a pretty savvy character. I could take public transportation, bargain with the best, avoid giving offense, evaluate the true cost of most services, evade cons and foil pickpockets.

When planning this trip, I knew things would be different. For one, I was going to another country on the other side of the continent 11 years later. Progress would have been made. Africa is not a monolith, nor should it be treated as such. I knew I couldn't rely on my previous knowledge, but maybe something would come in handy after all these years.

What ended up happening was that I understood what was going on as it unfolded but was often powerless to maneuver in a favorable direction. In short, I was a tourist. A well traveled tourist maybe, but a tourist nonetheless.

Case in point: K and I got off the Zanzibar ferry in Dar es Salaam and were immediately approached by a taximan who offered to take us to the main bus station, a vortex of activity called Ubungo at the northern edge of town. He charged what seemed like a steep price, but I didn't know enough about taxi fares to bargain him down. I told him we wanted to go to Dar Express, a company named in the guidebook as reliable and quick for the 350-km journey up to Moshi and Mt. Kilimanjaro. The taximan assured me that he knew where it was and we set off.

We traveled at a brisk clip through the streets of downtown Dar. Whenever traffic stopped, young men flitted through the lanes of cars selling a wide variety of goods, from dish towels to cologne to peanuts to classroom maps of the country. It was a phenomenon I knew well. In Cameroon (as in Tanzania, it seemed), you could get just about anything--but the place you procured it wasn't going to look anything like Target.

We got to the bus station and pulled up to a kiosk that was most certainly not Dar Express. When I questioned the taximan, he huffed and puffed, insisting that Sai-baba Express was precisely what I'd asked for. At this point, I had a choice. I could demand, loudly, to be taken to Dar Express, which may or may not have been effective, or I could capitulate, pay him (knowing he'd also be getting a cut from this place) and go with the flow. We went with the flow and boarded a bus that would not have made any Western guidebook (but that actually wasn't all that bad, considering everyone had a whole seat to themselves, there was no livestock in sight and no one was sitting on stools in the aisles).

Blissful ignorance may have been more convenient, but as we bounced almost to the ceiling after every pothole, I was glad I hadn't lost my entire frame of reference.

Because the truth is, there were many similiarities between Cameroon of the late 90s and the Tanzania I visited this summer. Too many in a world that experienced unprecedented economic growth (in some places) during those very same 90s. I could have taken countless photographs in Moshi and along the road from Dar es Salaam, and they would have been indistinguishable from pics I have from Cameroon, to say nothing of the full sensory experience of walking down the street. In fact, some things I saw in Moshi, I only had French words for, having last seen them in Bafoussam or Yaounde.

The long, wraparound skirts of colorful fabric that women wore in Tanzania, I call pagne. The guys that call out of the windows of minivans, trying to collect customers are chargeurs. I don't know any other name for them. I saw strapping young men pulling stacked carts through the streets, beanpole young girls trailing a line of younger siblings. There were the policemen on the side of the road stopping cars and searching for bribes, the mud brick houses, the countless children in spotless school uniforms carrying books and small water containers, the silouette of women with large loads of wood balanced on their heads, the overloaded buses cruising for passengers, festooned with optimistic slogans (God is Love! Bismillah Allah! Jesus is coming! Air Obama!). There were the groups of idle men gathered around a broken down car, the neat pyramids of tomatoes or mangoes available for sale on a groundcover of burlap or plastic, music blaring from the bus station, shoes lined up for sale on the street, a dizzying array of clearly donated clothing hanging from market stalls. Corn on the cob roasted on open charcoal grills, bananas hung in bunches from front-yard trees, orange flowers crowned leafy trees, horns honked in alarm or just for attention, people stopped on the street, watching (and commenting) as a woman with a placid baby tied to her back holds forth with larger-than-life gestures and ready laughter. And the sharp odor of burning garbage and red laterite dust hung over it all. (See the bus stop pic at the beginning of this post, which contains many of the visuals described in this paragraph.)

All of these images were startlingly familiar--I had seen them all before, one decade and thousands of miles due west in another African country whose GDP was far too low for the resources within its borders, whose people lacked electricity, running water and access to medicine to cure treatable diseases--but who nonetheless conducted their daily lives with ceaseless energy and, often, optimism; people who were impossible to pity or stereotype.

That is not to say Tanzania and Cameroon are the same place. There are countless differences in language, culture, history, politics and any other category you'd like to name. Anyone reading this understands that Africa is an incredibly diverse and varied place, right? And I certainly saw plenty of uniquely Tanzanian 2009 sights (much more on that in the next post): people talking in cell phones on Sai-baba. The number of private cars on the Moshi roads (as opposed to public minivans and taxis). The food offered in restaurants with its Indian flare and the absence (alas) of hot pimant, spicy beans and bubbling orange vats of palm oil. But during our five days in Moshi waiting for the next act of the trip to begin, I couldn't get these snapshots out of my mind. I wonder what it would take before 10 years represents more than supreficial change.