LITMIR.BIZ

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he said.

      I was halfway down the hill before it suddenly struck me that I had missed an opportunity. What I should have said was that the Quini Ingrezi (Queen Elizabeth), also lived in Windsor and, if she had known I was going to speak to an Anglican congregation in Africa, she would have wanted me to pass on her greetings. It might have sounded twee, but I know they would have loved it.

      AFTER A FEW days by the water I could imagine how painful it must have been for the explorers to drag themselves away from the lake and start back into that fearful void, back into the inferno described by the most indefatigable of them all, Henry Stanley:

      … the torrid heat, the miasma exhaled from the soil, the giant cane-grass suffocating the wayfarer, the rabid fury of the native guarding every entry and exit, the unspeakable misery of life, the utter absence of every comfort, the bitterness which each day heaps upon the poor white man’s head, and the little – too little – promise of success one feels on entering it.

      Each evening at the hotel I took a table beneath a thatch umbrella on the grass leading down to the edge of the lake. It was the day’s reward, the dried sweat and crusted grime showered off and a cold Safari at hand, looking across that miraculous stretch of water at the fireworks of sunset. One evening a malachite kingfisher, a dazzling creature the size of a large, stubby thumb, preened himself on a reed. He took off, and at a height of about thirty feet above the water poised, a beak almost as long as his body pointing down like a tiny harpoon, body arched and frozen, wings a blur, before plunging like a stone into the water with a surprising splash. For an instant he disappeared entirely, then burst through the surface again with a fish, a filament of silver seemingly impaled on a needle. It was the most exquisite and perfect act of hunting I had ever seen.

      Later, poring over a map, the majesty of the place became even more clear. The world’s longest lake was also the deepest after Lake Baikal, a great cleft in Africa’s surface. Imagine standing on the edge of an escarpment running 200 miles in either direction and falling away almost vertically to a depth of a mile and the dimensions may become more clear. The grandeur does not stop with Tanganyika. The map shows a great chain of lakes. Starting with Lake Malawi, another awesome gash 350 miles in length with fjord-like depth, the chain swings in a curve up through Tanganyika and curls back through lakes Kivu, Edward and Albert. This vast semi-circular fissure in the earth’s crust, almost 2,000 miles in length, is now largely forgotten as the western branch of the Great Rift Valley. That term has come to mean the eastern rift, which breaks away at the top of Lake Malawi and turns north-east through Tanzania, passes through the middle of Kenya, rises into the Ethiopian Highlands, plunges into the Danakil Depression and runs up the length of the Red Sea all the way to the Lebanon.

      There is, however, a symbolic as well as geographic wholeness to the two rifts. Joined at Lake Malawi in the south and Lake Turkana in the north, they enfold in a great oval a bed of territory that might be likened in shape and function to a womb in Africa’s body. For here, at Olduvai Gorge and along the banks of Turkana, were made the discoveries of the Leakey family, culminating in the fossils of Homo erectus and Homo habilis, that have certified this as the cradle of mankind. Burton, infatuated as he was by Lake Tanganyika, was closer to the mark than he realised when he wrote of ‘this African Eden’.

      Burton and Speke were at Ujiji for three months. While Burton interrogated the inhabitants, Speke bartered for the use of vessels to explore the lake. Now, once only, came the chance of a discovery that would have forestalled years of feuding and geographic controversy. They set off in canoes to find the river at the lake’s northern tip. From chiefs and traders they received contradictory reports: some said the river flowed into the lake, some that it flowed out. The point was fundamental: if it flowed in, the river could not be the Nile, and the lake could not be its source. The balance of the reports favoured that alternative, but the issue was destined to remain unresolved. When only a few days from the northern mouth their boatmen refused to go further, for fear of cannibals. Both men were thoroughly done in and one suspects they did not protest much. In any event, they arrived back in Ujiji after a month on the lake, no more certain on this critical question than when they set out.

      In May 1858 Burton gazed back at the lake for the last time. ‘The charm of the scenery was perhaps enhanced by the reflection that I might never look upon it again,’ he wrote. In later years he could still claim the satisfaction of being the first European to see the inland sea, but by then the memory was tainted by knowledge that what he had discovered was the source not of the Nile, but the Congo.

       Tabora: Wednesday, 17 March

      THE TRAIN FROM Kigoma got in at 6 a.m. The little second-class compartment was packed and stuffy, heaving during the night with bodies, snoring, grunting, muttering. In the thin light of dawn I wrestled the rucksack from the train and walked the half-mile or so to the first hotel. An omelette and lady-finger bananas restored the spirit.

      In town I met Jemaal, a tall and willowy young man with a battered Toyota for hire. Like most folk here, he was a Nyamwezi, the Bantu people who were the Arabs’ most formidable rivals for control of the trade route. During the mid-nineteeth century, these were badlands, and the Nyamwezi chief, Mirambo, built an empire on porterage, trade and war. I like the description in my history volume of Mirambo’s army of mercenaries, the dreaded ruga-ruga: ‘Distinctive with red cloak, feather head-dress, ivory and copper ornaments, they are somewhat reminiscent of the predatory companies of the European Hundred Years’ War, attaching themselves to whichever leader held out most hope of plunder.’

      Jemaal evidently had hopes of plunder, too, and was saddened to discover that I was a scrawny prize. But pickings are leaner on the old trade route these days and eventually we settled on a price for the round-trip to Kazeh.

      Once a crossroads, Tabora is now more a dead end, isolated by the collapse of Tanzania’s road system. The tarmac broke up as soon as we left town. After about five miles the road trailed off into a track, gouged and rent by stormwaters, that would have challenged a Land Rover. Jemaal, his face set in a rictus of determination, forged gamely on, the Toyota bucking and grinding, until with a shudder and a bang we came to a halt, a rear wheel sunk in a trench.

      I was beginning to have my doubts. The Toyota was not just stuck, it was steaming and looked fit to explode. I feared that Jemaal might decide on reflection that his fee had been insufficient or, worse still, discover damage to the car, turn nasty and summon the local ruga-ruga to secure adequate compensation.

      ‘I could walk from here,’ I suggested.

      He would not hear of it. Gesturing towards a couple of wide-eyed and naked children who had appeared from a thatch hut, he shot out an order. One scurried away and came back with a badza, a short-handled hoe. Jemaal started to hack away at the sides of the trench while ordering us to collect rocks and stones. Within half an hour we had built a bridge under the wheel, and the Toyota rolled free. Jemaal grinned triumphantly and I felt ashamed at my faint-heartedness. Rather more gingerly now, we sailed on.

      It was Evelyn Waugh, in his dazzling little travel diary, A Tourist in Africa, who observed ‘wherever you find old mango trees in East Africa, you are on the Arab slave-tracks’. I knew we had reached Kazeh when large green-black shapes billowed above the maize fields.

      Even Burton, who rejoiced in its Arab inhabitants, never made great claims for the place. There was nothing, he wrote, that could properly be called a town; rather it was a ‘scattered collection of oblong houses with central courts, garden plots, storerooms and outhouses for the slaves’. Only one of these Zanzibari dwellings survived amid the shambas and huts of the little settlement, although it was in remarkably good condition and had been kept as a museum. The Toyota’s arrival was an occasion of astonishment then delight to the curator who had been weeks without a visitor and was slumbering on a chair beside the carved wooden door.

      All the explorers seem to have stayed here, Livingstone and Stanley for a spell during which their friendship acquired a closeness that neither was able to achieve with anyone else. Burton lingered, too. Here, perhaps in the courtyard with the mango tree, he renewed his acquaintance with the Arab, Snay bin Amir, delighted to be back with ‘the open-handed hospitality and the

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