East Africa in Space and Time

Bagamoyo once overshadowed Dar es Salaam as a trading port and colonial capital but today it lays more or less in ruin.

I went there to explore. Not to see the finest things the country has to offer, but rather how it’s people live at this political and economic moment. I did not go swimming, did not attend the festival, I saw the town’s historic buildings from afar.

My friend Mbambadu took me there. He grew up in the north and on the street in Dar es Salaam. He knew Bagamoyo as well as he knew Dar es Salaam, which we’d traversed the weekend before.

Outside of Tanzania’s commercial capital, poverty is the country’s most prominent feature. Once you escape Dar es Salaam there is rarely electricity, and Bagamoyo has very little of it. People who can afford it rely on generators. Most do without entirely. Roads are dirt, houses are wood and cinderblock and tin or they are crumbling old stone.

The shore is gorgeous, all sand and surf, and littered with so many boats you have to climb over them. All are wooden and driven by the wind. The dhows and outriggers favored by the fishermen are ancient designs, and have persisted thousands of years for their simple practicality.

A fish market on the shore provides a glimpse of how the local economy sustains its participants. Men have set up plastic tables to display their fresh catch. You can find everything from tuna to barracuda to grouper to squid, octopus, and lobster. After the fresh fish near the water, there is a much larger area devoted to frying.

It is the preferred and accepted way to cook fish. While it robs the fish of flavor, it acts as a preservative, it is cheap, and hundreds of fish can be fried on any given day. Smaller fish are eaten whole, head and bones. Larger ones are chopped into sections and fried that way.

The smoke and work of the market makes it resemble a factory. Grease bubbles and spits, fire and ash cover the ground. Soon it was oppressive. Behind the market was a small shop doubling as a bar. Mbambadu and I sat down and bought a beer.

No sooner had I taken the first sip than I spotted two very bearded men in dark shalwar kametz approaching from across the market. They arrived as if they were old friends, greeting us as ”brother” and smiling too much. They invited themselves to take a seat and began a conversation.

They were missionaries from Punjab, representing some kind of Sunni sect whose name could not be coaxed out of them. Inevitably, the conversation turned to God with a capital G. I devoted my attention to distracting them them from their preferred subject with questions about Pakistan, about their experience in Tanzania, about their views on politics. Eventually, having gotten only so far as to ask if we believed in God or not, they took the leave.

We continued on to town and cut into a poor section of town. Mbambadu was searching for an old friend. We roamed between houses until he found a door he thought he recognized and knocked.

The man who opened the door was dressed in an old T-shirt and sweatpants cut off below the knee. Mbambadu’s friend had left some time ago, but he insisted that we come in and visit.

The house was simple. Two rooms with dirt floors and no lights, almost nothing inside. A few plastic buckets, a bit of foam to sleep on.

To women sat by a small fire, cooking and cleaning in silence. A half-built room had been repurposed to enclose goats, which weren’t there.

Our host went to the doorway and reached up into the roof. He removed a plastic bag containing photographs.

He started flipping through them. Good-looking young men with bright smiles holding beers on the beach, their lives seemed far from the one our host was living. But every few photos, there he was, grinning at us from another time.

One photograph gave him pause. It was old, its edges had been cut for decoration. There were four adults and a few children. Two of the adults had exes drawn with a pen over their chests. He pointed to a thin man. “Father” he said. And to a woman “Mother,” and to a child “Me” he said. His father had been Xed, as had his grandfather.

The X’s represented the only record, the only acknowledgement of the passage of time and of life for this man whose grasp of reading or writing was likely minimal, whose access to government services or records was less than that, but who had a history and a family and a life exactly as intense, just as momentous and important as yours or mine. The ink on all that survived of his relatives fascinated me, but that fascination was coupled with a wave of sorrow. Or maybe it was only recognition that loss is part of living’s invisible geography.

We walked to the beach as night fell. The Milky Way was out, the moon nowhere to be found. Boys smoked grass on the sand, the ocean whooshed and hissed. This was Tanzania, a point on the earth’s surface in time.