Monday, April 13, 2009

 

Ten days, ten regions of Tanzania

It's been a busy week of travel.

Arusha to Manyara to Singida to Shinyanga to Mwanza on Lake Victoria. Mwanza back to Singida and on to Dodoma. Dodoma to Morogoro to Pwani to Tanga. Tanga to Kilimanjaro
and finally, back to Arusha. Somehow, I've managed to visit ten regions of Tanzania in as many days. And take about 4 eight to twelve hour bus rides. It's been a good break. But man, it's good to be home. I think it's time for a good two months in my village without going anywhere farther than the nearest town.

 

Kitu gani kimeibiwa?

It's a weekday evening during break. I'm at a friend's house in a distant region when the phone rings.

Hey, it's Samweli, the guy who's watering my garden while I'm traveling. Hey, Samweli. How's the village? How's my garden doing?

Everything's fine, teacher. But...

Suddenly the network goes bad. Yet I distinctly catch one word: "imeibiwa". Something was stolen.

I panic. "What? What was stolen? Kitu gani kimeibiwa?"

"Sukumawiki yako." Your collard greens.

"What? They stole my sukumawiki?"

The two Peace Corps volunteers sitting next to me start laughing.

"Wait a minute, Samweli. What do you mean they stole my collard greens? Did they just take a few leaves? Or did they pull up the entire plant?"

"They took the entire plant. All the plants. Hawa ni watu wabaya--they're very bad people."

For a minute, I can't help but laugh myself. It's just such a ridiculous thing to have stolen. My collard greens?

But then, I put a lot of work into those greens. I was the only one watering my garden during a two-month drought, so now I'm the only one who has seedlings in my garden. But those seedlings are still small enough that they could be transplanted to another garden and survive. Apparently, someone did just that.

I'm kind of annoyed that someone else is benefiting from my two months of watering work. (It's a pain to water a garden by hand!). I'm kind of resigned: there's a drought, people are hungry, petty theft of greens isn't that bad compared to what they could be stealing. And, a large part of me wants to laugh. The things I've had stolen so far in Tanzania? A bucket, an A-level chemistry book, and three beds of collard greens.

Monday, April 6, 2009

 

Sukuma museum

Tanzania has about 120 tribes, and most of them are fairly small. But there are a few larger tribes. One of them is the Sukuma. At 15% of the population, they're one of the largest tribes in the country.

Yesterday, we went to a Sukuma cultural museum about 40 minutes out of Mwanza. In a way, the museum reminded me of places like Plymouth Plantation and Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts, which show us how our ancestors lived. There was a hut built in the traditional Sukuma style (but of concrete so it would last longer), and inside it held the tools that a Sukuma would have used in the past: traps for catching fish and birds, clay containers for holding drinking water, a cup woven like a basket for drinking traditional beer, a hoe and a spear made by local blacksmiths. There were pavilions with displays on blacksmiths, showing a pit used for extracting iron from ore, and local bellows used to heat the charcoal in the pit. There was a pavilion full of royal drums, huge drums used to announce important events related to the king. Another hut showed tools used by traditional healers, and another was about Sukuma dances and dance competitions.

It's funny that, looking at African cultures, we tend to focus on things that are 'exotic' or different from Western culture. But in many ways, when we look at African tribes, we are also looking at our own past. It's true that the Sukuma entered the Industrial Age later than white Europeans, and that they were forging hoes by hand and using clay pots far more recently. But, with the exception of more culturally-specific items involved in dances or religion, many of the things I saw wouldn't have looked out of place in a museum about how Americans or Europeans lived in the distant past.

Another observation: the Sukuma have a museum to preserve their past. Most tribes don't. The tribe I live with, the Iraqw, seem to have lost most of their traditions. They certainly don't wear traditional clothes, the underground houses they used to build have entirely disappeared, and traditional dance troupes are few and far between. I don't know much about what tribal culture used to be like, so I don't know what else has been lost. But from what the older people tell me, the culture has changed and is changing fast. It's merging with the dominant Tanzanian culture, at the same time as Tanzanian culture is itself Westernizing. This isn't necessarily bad--in some ways, the changes are bringing development and the chance of a better future. But to lose a culture and a history so fast...it's disorienting. And it's hard to have pride in your past when your past is rapidly being obliterated by an outside culture. It'd be good if every tribe at least had a way to preserve their past, and write their history, before it's entirely lost.

 

Sukuma museum

Tanzania has about 120 tribes, and most of them are fairly small. But there are a few larger tribes. One of them is the Sukuma. At 15% of the population, they're one of the largest tribes in the country.

Yesterday, we went to a Sukuma cultural museum about 40 minutes out of Mwanza. In a way, the museum reminded me of places like Plymouth Plantation and Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts, which show us how our ancestors lived. There was a hut built in the traditional Sukuma style (but of concrete so it would last longer), and inside it held the tools that a Sukuma would have used in the past: traps for catching fish and birds, clay containers for holding drinking water, a cup woven like a basket for drinking traditional beer, a hoe and a spear made by local blacksmiths. There were pavilions with displays on blacksmiths, showing a pit used for extracting iron from ore, and local bellows used to heat the charcoal in the pit. There was a pavilion full of royal drums, huge drums used to announce important events related to the king. Another hut showed tools used by traditional healers, and another was about Sukuma dances and dance competitions.

It's funny that, looking at African cultures, we tend to focus on things that are 'exotic' or different from Western culture. But in many ways, when we look at African tribes, we are also looking at our own past. It's true that the Sukuma entered the Industrial Age later than white Europeans, and that they were forging hoes by hand and using clay pots far more recently. But, with the exception of more culturally-specific items involved in dances or religion, many of the things I saw wouldn't have looked out of place in a museum about how Americans or Europeans lived in the distant past.

Another observation: the Sukuma have a museum to preserve their past. Most tribes don't. The tribe I live with, the Iraqw, seem to have lost most of their traditions. They certainly don't wear traditional clothes, the underground houses they used to build have entirely disappeared, and traditional dance troupes are few and far between. I don't know much about what tribal culture used to be like, so I don't know what else has been lost. But from what the older people tell me, the culture has changed and is changing fast. It's merging with the dominant Tanzanian culture, at the same time as Tanzanian culture is itself Westernizing. This isn't necessarily bad--in some ways, the changes are bringing development and the chance of a better future. But to lose a culture and a history so fast...it's disorienting. And it's hard to have pride in your past when your past is rapidly being obliterated by an outside culture. It'd be good if every tribe at least had a way to preserve their past, and write their history, before it's entirely lost.

 

Arusha to Mwanza on the fast bus

It's Easter break, and I'm on the road again.

This break, I decided I wanted to visit Mwanza. Mwanza is the second largest city in Tanzania, after Dar es Salaam. Like Dar, it's a port, but not an ocean port. Mwanza is on Lake Victoria, which is both the source of the Nile River and the largest lake in Africa. Well, I thought, I'll probably never have another chance to see Lake Victoria in my life. So I made plans to go to Mwanza for break.

Finding information on transport here was difficult. My guidebook claimed the road was unpaved, and that it could take days to reach the city. Tanzanians told me the road was recently paved and that you could get there in a day from Arusha. Unsure who to believe, I decided to plan a two day trip.

And so, on Saturday, I stood along the paved road from Arusha, trying to flag down a bus going to the town of Singida. The plan was to stay in Singida, the half-way point, for the night, then go to Mwanza in the morning.

By 6:45 am, I was sitting on my bags in the middle of the aisle of a bus. It was going fast. Way too fast, in my humble, I-don't-want-to-die-today opinion. But I was on, and the fare was paid, and the chances of finding a safer and slower bus were rather low.

We turned off the paved road onto the dirt road, and settled in for a bumpy five hour ride to Singida. On dirt roads, buses should slow down. This one didn't. I was like a student sitting on the back of a school bus as it goes over speed bumps: every time there was a bump, I bumped straight into the air with it. The guy behind me asked me if I wanted his seat. 'No, don't worry about it,' I said, not wanting to take the comfortable seat he'd paid good shilingi for. 'Someone will probably get off in Babati, and then I'll get a seat'.

Incidentally, Babati is a beautiful town, green and fertile. But people didn't get off in Babati: they got on instead. The bus was soon filled with students in brown sweaters and black pants, standing in the aisle on their way home for Easter break. Fortunately, I'd gotten a seat by now: when the bus had stopped for people to go to the bathroom, the guy on the seat next to me had gotten off, and had refused to take his seat back when he reboarded the bus. By that point, my arms were tired enough from clutching the seats on both sides of me that I was just happy to sit down.

We pulled into the town of Katesh around 10:30 am. I looked at my watch, amazed. We'd be in Singida by noon. Given my bus's speed, it probably wasn't just going to Singida...it was probably racing all the way to Mwanza. I started texting desperately back and forth with the friend I was supposed to meet in Mwanza. Would he get there today? Could he get there today? Could we meet in Mwanza instead?

And given that I'd already tested my luck for the last six hours, should I really stay on this bus?

Well, my friend wasn't sure he'd make it to Mwanza, but he thought it was likely. Given the choice between spending the night alone in Singida and having a chance of meeting up with him in Mwanza, I'd much rather go straight to Mwanza. The road to Mwanza was supposedly paved...that meant the bus would be slightly better driven. All right. I'll buy a ticket through to Mwanza.

And so, after a brief stop at a gas station for some really sketchy looking chicken and chipsi (french fries), we were off into the unknown.

Two observations about the next six hours:
-the road from Singida to Mwanza is, indeed, paved
-the view on that road is really, really boring
(flat, sparsely populated, farmland...ah well, I've been spoiled by having to pass through a national park every time I leave my town for Arusha)

At 6 pm, after an amazingly smooth journey, we pulled into Mwanza. By 7, I'd found my friend (who had, indeed, managed to arrive) and dropped off my bags at our hotel.

Journeys in Tanzania are usually full of stories of what went wrong: a broken-down bus, a long wait, a three hour engine-fixing break at a gas station in the middle of nowhere. This journey was, by Tanzanian standards, remarkably smooth. Yes, I sat in the aisle for a few hours. Yes, the conductor tried to cheat me and give me a higher fare--twice. But somehow, we covered five regions of Tanzania in twelve hours. That's pretty amazing, and I give thanks for my good luck.

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