"This bus is going to fall," I stated and asked concurrently in my Swahili
101. The buddah-bodied, sarong wrapped woman to my right laughed at my big
worried eyes.
"No, young sista," her electric white teeth glowed through me. "Hamna
tabu."
Her corpulent arm, the size of my thigh, fell on my shoulders: a universal
gesture of comfort. Hamna tabu, no problem. I was unaware there are six
different ways to say "no problem" in Swahili, depending on the degree of the
problem. It is not desirable, in Tanzanian society, to be the harbinger of
discouraging news.
In a car, you could travel from Iringa to the mountain-nest village of
Pommerini in four hours. In a bus, it may take up to ten hours to travel the
same distance. The authorities tell you, "this bus departs at nine in the
morning," while pointing to a crude, archaic map of your destination.
However, the bus always leaves well after midday, except the one time you
cleverly arrive at noon, to evade the bus vigilance in the blistering fumes
of the arthropod-infested marketplace. They nod their heads at your
disbelief.
"I told you many times, this bus departs at nine in the morning."
When you purchase a bus ticket this does not guarantee you a seat on the
bus. One voyage, I stood for four consecutive hours, with the physical
support of other passengers' bodies. And no, they would not let me ride on
top of the bus, with all the cargo and the bus attendants, despite my begging.
"It would not look good to have muzungu on the roof," the bus driver
concluded and then sipped his Tuska beer.
Tanzanian buses are really motorized community centers. Some passengers
organize a chorus to drown out the clamorous juju music (African dance music
which parallels Caribbean music stuck on fast-forward), selected by the
driver and his attendants. The driver will play his single cassette
repeatedly the entire ten hour journey. I became an instant celebrity the
day I introduced Bob Marley's Legend on a bus trip.
In the back of the buses men are gambling with a deck of cards, drinking
bamboo juice (a lip-numbing inebriating brew with a Whiskey Sour tang), or
exchanging entertaining personal narratives and dirty jokes. Women
socialize, breast-feed cloth-attached infants (who never cry), sew, coif one
another's hair, and generate beaded jewelry. Children amuse themselves by
watching me or agitating the omnipresent livestock: do goats and chickens
purchase bus tickets, too?
The African "highways", elaborately decorated with lunar-crater sized
potholes and decomposing vehicles, do have Rest Areas. These oases in the
naked bush greatly resemble American truck stops: they offer a bar,
restaurant/disco, and a flop house. But there are no souvenir shops,
refueling stations, or toilets. The length of one's visit is solely the
discretion of the driver, and often the driver does not feel obligated to
notify his customers of departure. At the sound of the engine, individuals
abruptly drop their meals, chase and leap onto a rambling bus. The
passengers, securely on board, enthusiastically encourage boarding attempts
and generously applaud on success.
During the trek, if you must relieve yourself, it is custom to yell, "Choo!" This is vernacular tongue for "john" or "toilet." The bus does not
actually stop on account of your need to recycle your last meal. However,
if the driver favors you, he will slow the bus down significantly and
continue in a dull roll. You alleviate your burden alongside the route,
often without bushes or ravines to conceal your private biological functions.
This means you and often a few peers, are urinating (or worse) in full view
of the bus and its occupants.
You adapt quickly to this humbling situation, eluding a kilometer jog to
capture the bus. I wish not to mislead you, the drivers are not sadistic.
They reasonably fear the decrepit, hand-me-down buses of the West will not
survive frequent stops. In the African country, a defunct bus becomes a
fossil and the occupants are fully exposed to Nature's impulses.
Questions?
If you want more information about this area you can email the author or check out our Africa Insiders page.
