Tanzania

Initially when we landed in Dar, I thought it was a city I could really learn to love. It has some great architecture and in some ways a nice, laid back feel to it all. There are lots of men and women out in the streets, including rather liberated South Asian women who dress in beautiful saris and wraps. But now I’ve decided I hate this city and can’t get away from it fast enough.

Traveling alone is such a chore.

First, Dar is ridiculously humid, almost as humid as Ghana. The drought means that Tanzania’s hydroelectric system can’t provide all the power the country needs, so power cuts are common. Yesterday there was no power during the daylight hours and the entire city roared with gas-powered generators. Men flex their idiot muscles to their fullest potential when they see unescorted white women. I’ve had it with being yelled at, even if it’s just “jambo!” the muzungu word for hello. At times it would appear that I am invisible, like when I’m standing in queues or sitting at restaurant tables waiting for a waitron to appear. At the post office, a man managed to squeeze himself in the tiniest wisp of space my Canadian sense of spatial distance demands that I leave between me and the person in front of me. When I cleared my throat and cocked an eyebrow, he had the audacity to act as though he literally hadn’t seen me.

This morning I woke up from a completely restless night determined to get the hell out of Dar. I’ve been here three nights already and was spending money needlessly in a city that had no interesting stories to tell. (As strange as that seems, it’s true. Tanzania is lovely but boring.) I decided to go out to the bus station and buy a ticket for the next day’s bus, using a company that a woman at the front desk recommended. Getting out to the bus station is no mean feat, since the station is 11 km from the downtown. I decided to spend 20 cents and take a dalla dalla, saving myself roughly $5 in taxi fare. The front desk guy told me to walk down to the Starlight hotel and get on a bus heading to . I just nodded my head and hoped for the best. I never found the Starlight, but I found a bus stop and after waiting for a while and not recognizing the unpronounceable Swahili word on a single dalla dalla, I went for one beginning with a ‘U’ and asked if it was for the bus station. Of course. But I considered that dalla dalla full, so I stood back. I am so naïve.

I got on the next one, up in the front seat next to the driver, who spent the majority of the ride alternately adjusting himself, picking at his teeth with a chewed up toothpick and lifting his shirt to rub himself around his waistband. Occasionally he would look over to see if I was enjoying the show. Much eye rolling from my corner.

About halfway there, the young guy next to me got out and an old ornery dude got in, gave a throaty “Jambo” that was probably meant to be sexy but just freaked me out. I got out at the bus station and he followed me. Of course, there were about 30 men following me, all touts looking for a few thousand shillings for the exhausting, backbreaking, labour-intensive, college-degree-requiring work of escorting me to the ticket window of the bus company with the highest commission rates.

In Zanzibar they call these men “papaasi,” Swahili for tick, since they leach on and won’t let go until they’ve got themselves good and bloated on your blood. I was in no mood for it, but I couldn’t find the ticket window I was looking for, so eventually I gave in and told one of them what I was looking for. The ratio, by the way, of papaasi to actual ticket-buying passengers appeared to be 380 to one. So of course a fight broke out because there appeared to be some discrepancy over who had been following me for the longest and who should actually collect the commission from my sale.

Well, well, well. I had already decided that there would be no commission from my sale.

The bus was full, so down to another ticket window, where a guy in a tie who at one point made some nasty remark about how I didn’t speak Swahili (to which I sweetly responded in English, “I speak enough to know you’re insulting me. I’ve only been here a week. Did you speak Swahili fluently a week after you were born?”) and suddenly he was a little more contrite. I was in full-on bitch mode, though. Hot, tired and fed-up. I made it clear I didn’t want any buses that stopped along the way. I didn’t want a bunch of people getting on at dusty corners and I definitely didn’t want any people standing in the aisles. Of course I was assured this wouldn’t happen. The ticket price? Oh first, let’s talk about the bus and where you want to sit on the bus and how the bus only has seating for two passengers on each side of the bus. And the price of the ticket? Oh, 25,000 shillings. Ten bucks more than I paid to get here. “Oh my friend,” I said as I turned away. “Forget it.”

Oh, I didn’t realize you were a student or something. Fine, okay. But the bus only takes two and two passengers, there is only room for 56 passengers, so you pay 18,000 – 3,000 shillings more. Three thousand, that’s all.

Did I mention I was hot, tired and fed up? I paid 15,000 shillings, a third of it with coins.

When Emily and I made this journey a week ago, we arrived at the bus station at 5.30 a.m. and were immediately surrounded by touts. (Who will no doubt be waiting for me when I arrive late tomorrow.) Anyway, they demanded to see our tickets, wanted to know the name of the bus company we were using. We didn’t respond. We’d checked the name on the ticket before we left and besides, we had a guy from the hotel with us. I had a Nakumatt receipt in my pocket, but my ticket tucked into my bra strap. When I pulled out the receipt, a guy grabbed it and took off a few feet ahead of us. When he presented it to the guy at the bus door, the guy just looked at it and handed it back. The tout threw it on the ground in disgust and I managed not to snicker. While Emily loaded our bags on to the bus, the guy at the door told me we would have to pay for our bags and he would issue a receipt, you know, for insurance purposes in case anything happened to the bags. I just smiled and said, “No, thank you.” We got on the bus and sat down and about five minutes later my friend from the door sat down opposite and, with sincere bureaucratic officiousness, proceeded to write out a receipt for bags. Under amount: 5,000 or $5 US. I started laughing. “Oh my friend,” I said. “I don’t think so! Five thousand. That’s too much. Very funny!” He started to say something about how it was 2,500 per bag (that’s all!), but I kept shaking my head no and he ended up muttering “You don’t say no” as he headed for the door.

Anyway, as I was marching away from the ticket stall, a man facing away from me slammed into me with his elbow, smack right into my boob. I just kept walking, but apparently he felt this was rude, as he started yelling at my back, “Hey! Fuck! Fuck you! Don’t push!” For the next forty minutes, all I could envision was me wheeling around, landing a well place kick to his groin, then walking away. As opposed to what I actually did, which was just keep walking.

Now, here’s the thing that really gets me about beach boys, touts and other slovenly morons who make their living by scamming: Africans are keenly aware that they’re perceived as the world’s charity case. They know that no matter how much aid money goes to Latin or South America, or Asia for that matter, everyone always thinks of Africa as the place that can’t manage on its own, the continent of lazy beggars who need a hand up and a handout if they’re going to survive. And it’s unfortunate that the extension of that is that people believe that Africans have become dependent on handouts, that they couldn’t function if the funding dried up. That may be true of corrupt politicians and the district commissioners who see foreign aid as their personal chequing account, but the majority of Africans I’ve met don’t see a penny of foreign aid or NGO dollars and are intensely hardworking. Think about the men of Turkana, digging through solid rock in the blazing heat of a desert sun, all to get food stamps. The women who spend all day on their feet, tending a charcoal fire in the humidity of Accra as they grill plantain. The shoeshine boys, the girls who sell satchets of water, the boys who suck diesel fumes all day as they sell packets of PK chewing gum. They work insanely hard, usually for just enough to survive.

If anyone lived up to the notion that Africans are lazy, that they expect something for nothing, it’s these touts. They think there’s no harm since they’re skimming from the rich whites, but the rich whites lead lives that have nothing to do with them. They stay at fancy resorts and upscale hotels, where all the arrangements are made for them and the transportation is arranged in advanced. They don’t take the bus: they take airplanes, or their companies and NGOs provide cars and drivers. The sad reality is that the only whites who get ripped off by touts are the ones who are volunteers, Peace Corps, the ones who are trying to explore Africa and get an appreciation for the continent and its people. And the only thing they can conclude after visiting any bus station is that Africans are, in fact, corrupt cheats who expect something for nothing.

I walked up to the dalla dalla station where a little more than a week ago Emily and I had hiked with our giant packs and flagged down a vehicle whose driver said it were going somewhere in the vicinity of Libya St. In West Africa, you almost can’t go anywhere without someone demanding to know where you’re going, usually because they figure there’s no way you can get there on your own. For the most part I take it for the gesture that it is: an extension of their unbelievably courteous and generous culture. There are no touts in Ghana and I think this is because people think of it as their moral and civic duty to take care of their visitors and guests, not to leave them to fend for themselves amongst a pack of untrustworthy, thieving bastards.

But here in Tanzania, English is not common and for the most part, no one has spoken to me except to shout “Jambo” or to “hey baby” me – including one idiot who, two days in a row, walked up and demanded I pay for his college, then told me it was very “lude” not to talk to him and that he felt very sorry for my attitude.

Anyway, since I’m an old hand at this dalla dalla stuff, I don’t need any help, right? But I was completely confused by why the vans kept stopping when they were so clearly full. Then I realized that people were actually getting in, standing up, hunched over with their bums hanging out the window. Unbelieveable. I thought matatus were bad. So after 20 minutes, I just climbed in, leaned over a woman and a man, stuck my hand through the “holy shit” bar and held on for one of the most painful half hour rides of my life. Now I understand fully why the women wear conservative clothing: imagine riding like that with a low-cut top!