Creative Non-Fiction

Mitterand Okorie

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Remembering Tanzania

On the fifth day of March, I landed Julius Nyerere International Airport Dar es Salaam via Addis Ababa. There was no tube channel to walk from aircraft into terminal, so we disembarked into a scorching sun. The atmosphere was a humid as hell itself, but there was nothing strange about this at all. Certainly not for me. If anything, it reminded me of the many times I landed at the Ercan Airport in North Cyprus as an undergraduate student. I was just happy to have finally reached my destination, after what had been a long and tortuous journey. In Abuja where it all began, I had been nearly harassed like a common thief. All airport authorities seemed to cast incredulous gazes at me. I couldn’t tell why the sight of a young, well-dressed Nigerian heading to Tanzania for a two week holiday attracted so much interest. My bag had been ransacked to check for any trace of hard drugs, and just before I made my way to the waiting lounge, some officers of the NDLEA (National Drug Law Enforcement Agency) checked me into a room where those suspected for trafficking hard drugs are x-rayed.

“Are you going for an official journey?” one asked. It was, to me, a very stupid question and I did not border to respond.

“Why are you going to Tanzania?” he rephrased.

“Holiday, sir.”

“What do you do?”

“I’m a businessman. I work in my dad’s company as his Personal Assistant. We import used trucks from Europe and sell in Nigeria.”

They continued to gaze at me with a curiosity that got me seriously peeved. I began to wonder what was strange about anything I’d said. That I was off to a two-week vacation? That I was a businessman, or that I was too young to afford either status? It was obvious that a mentality of wretchedness was at play for them, and it must have accounted for their nonsensical suspicion. I have been to a handful of international airports, but only in the ones in my own country do I suffer such abrasive heckling and shameful unprofessionalism.

***
In Dar es Salaam, the cab man skids off the asphalt down to the dusty pedestrian path. The car bounces against the potholes as he tries to manoeuvre against the traffic.

“I’m sorry about that” he said, “Dar has a very terrible traffic and we would not arrive early if I don’t do this.”
It was obvious he had mistaken my shock for censure whereas it was only a moment of discovery. They break traffic rules everywhere in Africa! I found it interesting how traffic wardens were stationed beneath dysfunctional traffic lights. Pray, what is the cost of simply repairing them? Just like in Nigeria, I saw in Addis Ababa, and now here, that these wardens, despite their best efforts are often undone by an army of unruly and impatient motorists.

As we drove on, the cab man who had now introduced himself as John takes time to point out the important buildings or places he thinks I should know in Dar. With the state of the roads, the hawkers in the streets, the rickety tricycles, a picture of the political situation in the country was already beginning to form. But since John looked pretty excited for a conversation, I asked him what he thought about the political leaders in his country.

“Thieves. They are all thieves!”
“I often thought corruption was only rife in my country, and that most other African countries where better off…” I said, goading him to say more.
“No!!! Here… I think here is the worst.”
As we arrived the hotel, a cosy bungalow apartment with a serene beer garden, John hands me his card. When I flip to the other side, I see he’s also a Real Estate agent. I smile. Everyone in Abuja is a property agent too – from penthouse office bosses down to the roadside vulcanizers. I pay him 45,000 Tanzanian Shillings; 5,000 more than the agreed price for being excellent company.

My friend Mr. Kay arrives in the evening to take me out and give me a proper welcome to the city. When I had told him a week before my arrival of where I found a budget hotel with a gym and swimming pool—a place called Masenze, he screamed in horror.

“You can’t stay there, Mitt!” “I don’t think it’s very safe. Street gangs are rife over there. Please, I’d recommend somewhere else for you, tell me exactly what your budget is.”

Mr. Kay is the sales manager at the Double Tree Hilton Dar es Salaam and generally well versed in his country’s tourism and hospitality sector. When I arrived Msasani village and moved around, I understood exactly why Mr. Kay had recommended it. Coco Beach was less than 10 minutes away, my own hotel had been just overlooking the Hilton, and just around the corner was the Oyster Bay, which featured exotic streets and an array of foreign high commissions.

The Double Tree Hilton was magnificent, especially at night – when the outdoor dinner tables were lit with candle lights as they overlooked the shore of the Indian Ocean.
Mr. Kay brings back the Masenze discussion.

“If you were in Masenze now, I swear bro, you’d be crapping in your pants”, he said and then laughs heartily.
I smile and tell him how much I’ve grown aloof to such stories of violent neighbourhoods, and how exaggerated I find them. I had after all lived in Catford, Elephant & Castle, and worked in the Morrison Supermarket by the Peckam Rye. All three were among London’s most notorious areas; yet despite staying there for a year, only on one occasion did I see someone get stabbed with my own eyes.

I was however very pleased to be in that part of Dar, where remarkably, and to my utmost surprise, every restaurant, chicken & chip stall or beer parlour had high-speed WiFi. It’ll be a miracle to get high-speed WiFi in many majority of Abuja’s three or four star hotels.

Over the next few days, I met, first with Jo Msafiri, and then with Quintus Salehe. The first was a childhood friend of my friend Albert—with whom I studied together in Wales five years ago, while the later was his uncle. I had requested for Jo to take me to a normal bar where ordinary citizens had their fun, because everywhere I had been to before then—Hilton, Capetown Fish Market—were all filled with white faces. I felt I needed to see how the locals spent time, how they unwounded, if they were as noisy as Nigerians, how they partied, and whether their girls were as audacious on the dancefloor as ours.

“You are my guest. You let me take to where I want to take you first, and then we can discuss the rest later”, was Jo’s reply. His girlfriend looks at me in a I-think-he’s-right manner, and I could say nothing else. I sensed it was the age-old African hospitality tradition at play.

As we ate, I told Jo that I had gotten around the last few days and not only have I fallen in love with Tanzania but was now thinking of buying a piece of land where I could build a holiday pad in the future.
“I learnt also, that doing so is only possible if I find a local who can co-own with me, and must have at least 50% stake.
“Maybe you should marry a Tanzanian girl”, his girlfriend cheekily interjects, and then smiles.
“This is my problem with this country. Socialism is killing us. Seriously, I keep telling them down here, they don’t know how money works. This year, I bought a piece of land in Uganda and another one in Rwanda. None of this co-owning stuff exists over there. But I tell you, even for us locals, you never truly own a piece of land here, because the government can re-appropriate it after a certain period of time.”
“That’s ridiculous isn’t it?”, Jo continued, “but the people fucking love it, and that’s what I do not understand. Same way they were happy that our President built for them a giant stadium to watch football when that money could have been injected into our comatose healthcare sector.”

His girlfriend argued that his many years of being in American has made him incapable of understanding why socialism worked best for their people.

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