Traveling by Train
My friend and colleague Forrest and I haphazardly travelled across east Africa to Zanzibar in July of 2017 using any and all available means of transportation. This particular segment of our trip was by train.
In part to poor planning, and part from a complete submission to the present moment, we shelved our itinerary in Zambia. Our original thoughts on reaching Dar es Salaam, Tanzania - the country’s largest city, and Zanzibar ferry hub - combined boat, train, and bus. However the uncertainty of transport in rural Africa, if anything, impressed upon the casual disregard for time. We knew the TAZARA (Tanzanian-Zambian Railway) had a station near us in Kasama, northern Zambia, and that it left twice a week for Dar. It seemed reasonable and straightforward enough, and simplified our travel through a country that neither of us had any practical experience with. After a brief discussion we both agreed to take the train east.
We arrived at the station at 2:00am, a comfortable time between the 11:00pm and 5:00am window the train “could be expected to arrive,” according to the desk clerk. The terminal smelled of sweat and urine and intensified in nauseating waves. Sleeping bodies and luggage were piled indistinguishably against the wall at a distance from the bathrooms. The smell of human feces was wounding, and naturally, all available floor space had been taken farthest away from the toilets. Four indignant drunks harangued about the plight of sobriety, which adverted my attention from the sordid bathroom affair. I wanted to believe it was their right by occupation to be given beer, and getting drunk provided a civic service commensurate to extinguishing fires or educating children. The terminal’s big box architecture amplified the drunks’ tirade to pernicious levels, testing the limits of my patience for sleeping on cold ground and breathing shitty air. We slept as much as irritable, sleep-deprived foreigners could in a cold defunct train station, and hoped that we didn’t have to use the toilets.
Buying an class ticket granted us exclusive privileges to the VIP waiting room in the station. The room was furnished with sagging couches, a broken television, and an empty bar; outwardly extravagant but structurally broken. The one functioning perk however was a heater. The details described herein are meaningless because the room remained locked for the extent of our time at the station. We stayed put in the terminal overflowing with growls, cries, drunks, piss, shit, goats, birds, old women, young boys, and a restless desire to get on the tracks. The train was dependably late, looking like a warhorse withered from attrition, and it drove me up the goddamn wall.
The single engine pulled ten assorted carriages identifiable from the amount of humans piled in them. Economy was boisterously overloaded with children and elderly, the dining car sparsely populated with delicate but eager travelers, and first and second class timorous with locked windows for fear of thieves. The engine pulled strongly and the heavy jolts betrayed the state of the rail. After the first 24 hours of travel however, I felt adequately acclimated to the steely undulation of steel on steel. I had my proverbial sea legs for the sway of train across the country.
We had purchased second-class tickets wanting first class. Our failure to acquire first class was a blessing however, realizing after boarding that second-class accommodation was in a newly renovated train car, compared to the outdated and unmaintained first. Our cabin was no larger than a bathroom found in a modest American household, but it comfortably slept six grown men. Leave it to the Chinese to economize space on trains. The four others in our cabin were a general cross section of central and east Africa. One was a Zimbabwean by nationality but lived in Zambia and did business in the DRC. Another was Zambian but spoke more Kiswahili than his Zambian mother tongue (Kiswahili is one of the official languages of Tanzania and the lingua franca used throughout east Africa, but rarer in Zambia). While quietly absorbing these personalities in confinement I couldn’t help but think, when juxtaposed, our monoculture, monolingual melting pot in the US appearing more shibboleth than monolith. The average amount of languages spoken by a sub-Saharan African is three, and it embarrassed me that these very respectable and intelligent men spoke my language, but I did not speak theirs.
I began this trip with two expectations: to see another part of Africa and form a working understanding of the language Kiswahili. Hesitant at first to take a train because of the limited exposure to the language and culture, I considered the predominantly local demographic of the TAZARA, and the ease of making conversation when confined and restive. The close proximity to Kiswahili and its speakers on the train was at a sacrifice though. We traversed the entire country by train, rendering the experience to what began to feel like a prepackaged safari by train rather than Land Cruiser, observing people instead of big game. Although I was learning about Kiswahili, it felt decontextualized like learning Spanish from a textbook rather than over tapas.
The conductor in Kasama told us the trip would take one day, but online reviews said expect two to three. The bulk of those 47 hours traveling across continental east Africa were spent in a rumbling dining car smelling of burnt oil and fish. The kitchen maintained a steady output of beer and coffee keeping us caffeinated, buzzed, or both for the hours we had our eyes open. Head throbbing from last night’s cocktail of stimulants, we’d watch the passing hills and make small talk with English-speaking Africans and an occasional European on vacation. At lunch and dinner hours the tables would fill with patrons bantering in Kiswahili, Chinyanja, or Ichibemba, all unfamiliar to me beside a fleeting word-in-common with Sierra Leone’s Krio or Temne. Immediately after crossing into Tanzania the various languages used amongst the crowd dwindled to only Kiswahili, as did the accepted currency, the Tanzanian Schilling. “I’m not Zambian, I’m Tanzanian,” rebuked a TAZARA employee after I greeted them in Ichibemba, a widely spoken Zambian language. “And we only take Schillings now.” What little working vocabulary I had of the Zambian language was lost at the Tanzanian border, as was my pocketful of Zambian Kwacha.
The real observations were made not of the countryside but of the mercurial temperament of people stuck on a train for three days. For the majority of passengers, sleep was grasped vertically, and often on the shoulder of a stranger. Tickets insured entrance onto the train, not for physical seating. One European traveler boarded mid-way through the trip with a first class ticket in hand, soon to realize all first class rooms were full. The self-entitlement of the west’s customer service culture doesn’t translate well in Africa, and little sympathy was given for his predicament. It was one of many signs that purchasing second class tickets was the right decision. The closer we crawled to Dar es Salaam, the more congested the train became. At one point I could not reach my cabin because of the unrelenting line of women in wait for the bathroom, and the growing heaps of luggage and cargo that doubled as beds for children. Any and all available space was utilized, and in typical African fashion, the discomfort was inured as an immutable reality.
Wikipedia states the current state of the railway is “minimally operational and near collapse,” which seems drastic after riding. Perhaps by western standards, yes, however the train connects over 100 stations, most of which are rural communities to larger urban centers that lie across international boundaries. The railway is a lifeline in many ways, moving not just freight and people, but capital. At every station we’d stop and await the local vendors selling fruits, nuts, meats, trinkets, phone minutes, bags of rice, chickens, fish; a ramshackle market enlivened for a mere 5-10 minutes twice a week simply because of access to disposable income. These stops are what protracted the trip to 47 hours, but they are what made the experience unique. For me, the raucous, invigorating dysfunction that I’ve come to love and admire in many African communities was incorporated and reinvented in my conception of America’s tradition of locomotive travel. Would I ride the train again? Probably not, but I am glad I did when I had the chance.