I. The Scam

When did I realize I’d made a terrible mistake? Probably when they manhandled him onto the table, tethered him to a ceiling water-pipe and pulled his trousers down round his ankles. For weeks I’d been consumed with hatred for the man on that table. But it’s funny how your perspective changes when someone is about to be tortured, especially when you’re the one who put them there.

It had begun, like many tales of misadventure, in that most anarchic staging post for travel: the Tanzanian bus station. If you’ve never had the pleasure of being in one, here’s a primer: What schedules exist are routinely ignored. An arbitrary tourist-tax on the price of your ticket is inevitable. The long-distance buses tend to leave at dusk or before to accommodate the vast distances and the disintegrating roads. Like transport hubs the world over, they’re a magnet for the wretched, the transient and the dispossessed. And you endure it all for the privilege of cramming yourself into a stifling, overcrowded coach driven by some boy-racer with amphetamine eyes, in a country with one of the worst traffic-related death-rates in the world.

Arriving in the southern town of Mbeya at 10pm one balmy evening in May, shattered after a 14-hour kick from Dar es Salaam and in a hurry to cross Tanzania’s southern border to reach Malawi, I’d steeled myself for another onslaught. At the bus station, bracketing an expanse of cracked concrete, an arc of ticket offices advertised destinations from a chaotic matrix of hand-written signs and sheets of printed A4 pinned to the wall.

And then — and this should have been warning number one — the guy came to me. He was a stocky man with a salesman’s smile and protruding eyes that gave him the look of a toad. He wore a white polo shirt with a breast-label marked “AXA Coach Service” — Malawi’s biggest people carriers. We’ll call him “Mwizi”, which is Swahili for “thief”.

His gift was manna from heaven: a bus ticket, also reassuringly marked with the blocky AXA logo, that promised to take me all the way from Mbeya to Blantyre, Malawi’s commercial hub — a journey I’d expected to do in broken stages— 620 miles south.

Too good to be true.

Sure enough, the next morning it all felt wrong. Mwizi seemed agitated as he half-cajoled, half-bundled me onto a minibus bound for the border post. And as the bus pulled away, through the window, there was something in his eyes — guilt, I figured later, for when I got to the Malawian side of the border there was no onward bus to Mzuzu. The ticket was fake. And having got my passport stamps, relinquished my Tanzanian visa, it would have cost more than the price of the ticket to return — the perfect swindle.

I wasn’t alone. Relaying my tale of woe to other travellers in Malawi, it soon became clear that just about every credulous backpacker taking the same route had fallen for an identical routine, and had their shillings trousered by Mwizi.

But hapless Mwizi hadn’t reckoned on one thing. I was due to travel up to Rwanda for an assignment in a few weeks’ time, and to get there I needed to pass back through Mbeya. Vengeance loomed.

II. The Revenge

One month on, a dusk arrival at Mbeya Station. Looking back, I wonder what retribution I could have pursued to avoid what came later. Perhaps I could have been more subtle. I could have waited for a sight of my foe then ambushed him to demand my money face-to-face. But I didn’t do subtle. Instead, I stormed over to the ticket offices like the colonial big-man, shamefully exploiting my white-skin impunity, and prowled about barking maniacally until some policemen noticed my aggressive deportment and waddled over to investigate.

Word spread. The culprit was found, bundled through a sea of onlookers by many hands. When he saw me, his eyes fell to the ground. Without ceremony, Mwizi was roughly handcuffed and frogmarched out of the station, with me following. At first my nemesis seemed unconcerned by his new predicament, almost defiant as the police led us north through unlit backstreets, along laterite paths and over ditches. This bravado evaporated as soon as Mbeya’s Central Police Station loomed into view.

The station was a squat, nondescript oblong surrounded by barracks, with a wide portico leading into a reception room bisected by a high counter. Police officers strutted in and out, each of them sporting the paunches that seem to go hand-in-glove with power in Tanzania. The lieutenant at the desk — a brutish, heavy-browed man in a bomber jacket — confiscated Mwizi’s personal belongings. Another officer dragged him behind the scenes, “for processing”.

Then, through the doorway behind the counter, that horrifying scene: the table, the water-pipe, the trousers round ankles, a pair of trembling legs sticking out of green boxer-shorts. Reality dawned.

Looking up from his ledger, seeing my face crumple with dismay, the lieutenant kicked the door closed with his heel. Ten seconds later, the screaming began.

“I just wanted my money back,” I gibbered.

What had I been expecting? I knew that Tanzania’s constabulary wasn’t about to win any prizes for its human rights record. Deaths in custody are common here; extra-judicial killings are widely reported. Even as Mwizi’s shrieks rang through the building, there seemed to be no consistency in the way the police were dealing with the succession of desperate characters crossing their threshold. One man who came in beside a cowering woman, her eyes submerged by bruises that he had just punched onto her face, looked destined to escape with a reprimand.

I’d known that this was a possibility, but I’d been so blinded by rage that I hadn’t cared. Now, faced with the consequences, I wanted out.

Ten minutes later, Mwizi was dragged back into the vestibule, subjugated and watery-eyed. It was immediately evident from his hobbled walk and hunched posture that they had beat him in the legs and stomach.

He grimaced as he was forced back to the ground. “It was a mistake,” he whimpered, more for the benefit of his tormentors than for me. Then, fixing my eye: “I have a family.” He cradled his wrists, which had been welted by the cuffs. His upper lip was trembling.

“You did it from your own free choice,” bellowed a policeman. “Why are you complaining about torture?” — it still seems amazing that he said the word aloud — “You have to pay for your crime.” He turned away to castigate a bandy-legged prostitute, just dragged in.

Basic compassion demanded a change of tack. “I have no interest in seeing this man punished further,” I said with false authority.

“Mzungu, we have already treated him,” spat a burly officer in plain clothes. “His relatives will be coming tomorrow morning with your money.”

Seeing me waver, Mwizi snatched his chance. “If they torture me like this again, it is better to die.” I looked on helpless, as he was dragged away again.

At nine the next morning, I was being led through the bowels of the police station and into a dingy ante-room stacked high with yellowing case-files. A female officer, as obese as any of her male comrades, sat behind a desk in a creaking wooden chair. Mwizi was there, the picture of exhausted contrition.

A deal was struck. Mwizi would have a month to gather the money he’d pilfered. His friends paid the necessary bribe and we walked out, blinking into the sunshine, at 10am. We did the obvious thing and went for a beer. Slurping greedily from a bottle of Nile Gold, he told me what they did to him in the room: hung him over a ceiling water-pipe by his cuffs and smashed him about the legs and stomach with an iron bar. He’d spent the night in a lightless cell, 100 men stuffed inside. “They kill people for less here,” he murmured pitifully.

I still felt a nagging urge to have it out with Mwizi, but by now my anger had all dried up. Here was this man with a wife and two boys, seeing a weekly drip of pampered western travelers pass through his town, their rucksacks full of laptops, Kindles and $500 cameras. Even on my paltry journalist’s income, the money he’d half-inched — around $30 — was pocket-change to me. For him it was food, shelter and survival for his family. In a country where everyone has to fight for themselves, where corruption is rife and the police respond to a foreigner’s bidding with an iron bar, would I have been above doing the very same thing?

III. The Comeuppance

Three weeks later, as I disembark from the Abood bus from Morogoro, Mwizi is waiting at the door. He gives me a bear-hug and, over another beer, he tells me of his efforts to start making an honest living in the tourism sector, an industry to which — with his blarney and his impeccable English — he is naturally predisposed.

He admits that he has not obtained all of my money. I tell him that I am glad he has tried, and grateful for the 30,000 Tanzanian shillings (around $14) he has amassed in so short a time*. I reiterate that I had never intended to have him so severely punished.

“If you hadn’t done it, I might have made the same mistake again,” he declared, suddenly grandiose. “God is very clever. I am thinking of you as a prophet. Now I want to change my life.” We have both learned something, I perhaps more than he.

That afternoon, back at the Malawi border-post, I step into the money-changer and reach into my pocket for Mwizi’s hard-earned penitence. But my fingers paw at nothing. The crumpled notes are gone. And then I remember the minibus I took to get here: the crush, the squealing livestock on the roof, the man who’d pressed rather too emphatically against my side to let a woman get off. And I realize that my pocket has been picked.

I shake my head, suppress a moan, and shuffle off to get the hell out of Tanzania.

* People have since criticized me for taking Mwizi’s money. In retrospect, I find it hard to justify. But the truth is, he’d amassed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of dollars by swindling travelers like me. Even though his punishment at the hands of Tanzanian police was sickeningly disproportionate, I guess I still felt he owed me some symbolic penance. Mwizi and I have since remained in contact, and bear each other no ill-will.