drinks were for sale by a young lady with no change. As I walked to the tired prop plane, John was on the roof of the airport, shouting goodbye. He’d been waiting the whole time outside in the heat to see me off. The plane flew over Mount Kilimanjaro. Hemingway begins “The Snows of Ditto” by noting that there’s a frozen leopard carcass at the top. “No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude,” writes Hemingway. A clean bathroom is my guess. In Dar, as knowing travelers call it, I was met by a driver named Nzezele (pronounced “Nzezele”). Dar es Salaam is a seaport without the bustle and sin that implies. Probably due to lack of ships and sailors. A few rusty tubs are moored in the harbor. Much of the commerce with nearby Zanzibar is still conducted in sailing dhows. Goats graze in the main rail yard. Dar sports some stucco buildings in the art-deco style but with Arabian embellishments: horseshoe arches and crenellated roof lines, all in a poor state of repair, as if a sheikh had come to Miami Beach with the District of Columbia’s public school system maintenance staff. The dusty moderne, however, is being supplanted by dusty glass boxes. Here and there are signs of history, or history’s ugly half-sister, politics: a squatty palace built by the sultan of Zanzibar when he ran the place and a small, tile-roofed, half-timbered Lutheran church, like a misplaced molecule of Bavaria. The predominant tint of the city is beige, a color with a bad name for being middle class and bland, but Africa can use some bourgeois dullness. There’s a golf course right downtown. Traffic dribbles around unimpeded by many stoplights, none of those being at the busier intersections. Buses and taxis bear pictures of Bob Marley. Pedestrians wear T-shirts emblazoned with Rastafarian slogans. BACK TO AFRICA is—confoundingly—a popular slogan in Tanzania. There are some nice houses up on Oyster Bay, but not ridiculously nice. There are some slums out in Kariakoo, but not horribly slummy. The neighborhoods where Nzezele told me to lock the car door wouldn’t make a New Yorker button his wallet pocket. A Swedish expat told me that he’d been robbed once. The big wad of Tanzanian shillings that it takes to amount to twenty dollars had been picked from his jeans. A crowd chased the thief, who dropped the money. Bystanders picked it up and brought it back to the Swede, asking him to count it, to make sure it was all there. The crowd chasing the thief caught him and beat him to death.
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online