A Tea Room
Morogoro Road and Jamhuri Street
Dar es Salaam
Tanzania
Dear o,
One of the reasons Al and I wanted to go
overland all the way from Europe to Tanzania (see the original route)
was to experience the slow change of culture, language and geography. Though going by our own wheels, or in trains,
buses and bush-taxis, is still too fast and boxed-in, the journey up to now did
not disappoint. The shifts in geography
were typically gradual: the rolling light greens and humid browns of
Meditteranean Spain and Morocco died out to form the immense, hazy, hostile
Sahara, which slowly became the parched, red-tinted but vibrant Sahelian belt
of southern Mauritania and Senegal; through the rainforest coasts of
Guinea-Bissau and the rainforest plateaus of Guinea, and then onto the mudbrick
house-dotted plains of Burkina Faso and Benin; all these transitions took days.
Changes in the way people live and work were
usually more sudden. The cultural
crossing from Spain to Morocco actually occurred in Algeciras, the Spanish port
from which we embarked for Africa. The
central market was more like a souq:
hectic, loud and colourful, with skins a little darker, signs in Arabic, and transactions interrupted by midday
prayers. Just across the Strait of
Gibraltar, the landscape was almost identical to Iberia, but everything else
was altered: the architecture got hardier, squarer, more temporary, the urban
soundscape became louder and more songlike, goods were transported on carts
pulled by donkeys, mint tea and round bread were omnipresent, and yes, women
were treated differently. In Tangier,
there were row upon row of chairs outside huge, atmospheric tea houses, and
every single person reading the paper and sipping sugar was a man. When Al sat down, everyone looked, some
frowned, but still the tea was served.
Though French is the lingua franca of West Africa and remained a constant anchor, the
shifts in other languages were just as distinct and sudden as society. The vast majority of Mauritania occupies the
western Sahara desert, but its southern border is demarcated by the Senegal
River, which is wide, powerful and life-giving.
The people of the Mauritanian right bank are the same as the people of
the Senegal left bank: the Wolofs, distinct in appearance, history and language
from the Arab-Berbers of Nouadhibou and the interior. They speak French and Arabic only as asides
to a deeper, faster, more gutsy – and indigenously African – tongue.
There were other fast transitions: the
sudden and isolated Portuguese of Guinea-Bissau; the bizarre, shameless
propoganda of the equally bizarre, shameless dictatorship in the Gambia (the
man cures AIDS on TV, did you know?); and the devil exorcism day in north
Benin. But how do any of these compare
to crossing the Earth’s second-largest continent? How could such changes hold a candle to jumping on
a plane from the heart of the former European slave trade in lush West Africa,
to get off in the safari-famous East African nation where Dr. Livingstone was lost and presumably found again?
To be honest, I don’t know. We haven’t yet left Dar es Salaam (literally,
“House of Peace”), and maybe it’s just the big city, but there are lot of small
differences. The people are for the most
part friendlier, more welcoming, and more easy-going than we’re used to; could
it be the refreshing prevalence of English, or the obvious preponderance of
tourism? As to the latter, I’ve seen more westerners in 24 hours in Tanzania
than in a month in West Africa – and more 20-something backpackers in that same
period here than in the entire time since we crossed the Sahara. I recognise that’s in part because of the
difference in seasons (it’s wet north of the equator where we were, and dry to
the south where we are now), but the sprawling, spoiled-for-choice tourist
infrastructure here suggests a higher premium placed on visitors from
abroad. There are daytime walking and
cycling tours from several companies on offer, hotels of every range and ATMs of
every colour (Visa and Mastercard both accepted), and billboards advertising
the adventure-travel option everywhere.
Tourism aside, the day-to-day life of the
city is also a half-world apart. There
are mosques with singing muezzins, heaps
of Indian restaurants, and not so many national flags flying at major
intersections. Perhaps because of the
strong Arab influence, the walking-about-town culture is significantly more
conservative: women don’t show their shoulders, kids are out of sight (and the
ones seen are often in British-style school uniform), and the colours people
wear are muted. Contrast this with the
West: bare skin all around, almost celebrated in the sun, kids playing and
dancing at every glance in the same shirt as yesterday, and that gorgeous,
party-like plethora of colour on every shirt and scarf and hat.
Tanzania’s linguistic culture too is
distinctive. Swahili isn’t just the
common language, like Wolof in Senegal or Fon in Benin; it’s the
language of every day, in government as well as business, shoptalk as well as
on the street. The Immigration Office we
visited only had some of its signs in English; the rest in Swahili, and most of
the applicants we saw inside were using Swahili forms. The local African television station showing
in a hotel restaurant was exclusively in Swahili, sung and spoken, and most of
the papers on the newsagents’ racks are in Swahili, with a couple English ones
in the corner. Again, contrast this with
anywhere we’ve been in West Africa, where even if the common man or women only
knows a few words of French, almost all big business, big media and big
government are conducted in that imported European tongue.
What about the similarities? It’s harder to point out what carries over
when you haven’t left, and beneath the superficial changes listed above, there
is surely a bedrock of unity I haven’t yet dug deep enough to find. But there is one thing I found here that
reminds me of West Africa, and it’s something that’s been bothering me for a
while. Go ahead and mark it as the worst
generalisation I’ve made so far, but I’ll say it anyway: African countries
don’t like each other. African countries
don’t trade with each other. And
Africans in Tanzania don’t visit Africans in Sierra Leone.
How can I possibly assume this? Well, the subject of pan-African insularity
is one worthy of its own letter, and the evidence is out there. While sub-Saharan Africa’s economy is growing
fast and furious, and putting most if not every other region of the world to
shame, the rise in intra-African trade is nominal and pathetic. Bureaucracy at borders stifles anyone who
wants to start a cross-national business, while rampant corruption sublimates
most transfer of goods over national boundaries to the black market. As a British-French agricultural consultant explained
to me in Cotonou, Benin, governements have signed countless trade agreements
and created a number of customs-free zones, but to little or no effect. The enviable and hopeful economic growth
across Africa consists mostly of internal success and trade between African
countries and the rest of the world (notably the US, EU and China) – and that
kind of intercontinental trade roughly translates to the big global players
paying bottom-floor prices for Africa’s treasure of natural and labour
resources. And let’s not forget, most of
this continent’s boundaries were drawn last century on a different continent
by arbitrary assholes in suits, and that these lines to this day divide
histories, languages, cultures, ‘nations’, even families.
I won’t go on about that now, but suffice
it to say I’ve seen evidence of this problem across Africa, and now here
too. It seems I cannot find a single
money exchanger in the whole of 3-million strong Dar es Salaam who will buy
West African francs for Tanzanian shillings.
Not only that, but 9 out of every 10 merchants don’t even know what a
West African franc is! When I showed a
CFA 10,000 note (worth about €15), both clerks and their managers held it,
turned it, put it up to the light, and asked, “which country is this from?” to
which I responded, “it’s from 14 different countries in Africa.” I could have gone on to say that, combined with the Central African franc (or Central CFA, identical to the Western CFA in all but name, and just as alien in Tanzania), it is Africa’s
single most-important, widespread currency, that it is permanently pegged to
the euro for a guaranteed rate, and that it services over 150 million people (about 15% of Africa's population). At one bureau de change (funny how they’re still called that here), I
asked, “So, does no one from Tanzania ever go to West or Central Africa?” No, was the flat answer. Is there any trade with West or Central Africa? No.
So, is this just the rambling complaint of
a traveler stuck with a useless currency? I think not.
West Africa is not that far away, and Central Africa is even closer. The big barrier is the Democratic Republic of
the Congo, part of French-speaking (or, to recall its tragic history, Belgian)
Africa, which uses its own currency.
Maybe it should be obvious to any follower of current events why there
is so little or no trade through the eastern corridors of the DR Congo, and
thus between East and West. Perhaps the
insularity that is so apparent in western nations is not such a problem here? Maybe Tanzania and Kenya get along just
great, and send all kinds of goods and services back and forth. Maybe Mozambique sends manufactured products
to Malawi in exchange for foodstuffs, and maybe Ethiopian truck drivers figure
Uganda is a better route to Burundi with their shipments of…
No, I’ll stop while I’m ahead. I know it’s not true. Someone in the Ivory Coast asked us where
Tanzania was. I don’t think it’ll be
long before someone here asks the same in reverse.
In the meantime, the breakfasts are much
improved: I guess I’ll thank the British for that one, and on the other side of
the great divide, blame the French for bread and butter.
Yours,
QM
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| 10,000 West African francs together with 10,000 Tanzanian shillings: a sight never seen? |
