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Published: April 13th 2009
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It’s winter in Arusha, a colorful tourist town sprawled against the slopes of Mt. Meru, just sixty miles from the Kenyan border. Since arriving from Nairobi, I’ve spent a few days ducking touts, ogling tourists, and huddling on my hotel’s rooftop terrace through the cool, windy nights. It’s a busy week, full of fresh impressions and the excitable energies of my first days in a new country. Things are dizzy, swirling, swimming into focus. And already I’ve balanced the thrill of arriving in Tanzania against a laundry list of writer’s worries: the hopes of sniffing out the remarkable, the fear of misstating the obvious, the constant anxiety of finding a place to charge my laptop. It’s the start of something new and the continuation of something old, another chapter in a story that keeps taking me further from and closer to home.
As the main gateway to Tanzania’s northern safari circuit, its streets crammed with muscular, mud-spattered Range Rovers plastered with logos for local tour companies (Comfort Holidays, Sunny Adventures, Bushbuck Safaris, Leopard Tours), Arusha attracts hustlers, strivers and small-scale entrepreneurs from across the region. Around the clock tower roundabout - the city’s central landmark - there are flurries of
greetings and handshakes, obscure combinations of clenched fists and pounded chests I’m still struggling to decipher. Business cards are passed out, paintings unfurled, bracelets dangled on long daisy-chains. A bedraggled old man wags a Masai sword at my chest, suggesting it would make the perfect keepsake. I ask if he’s ever tried to clear customs with a machete. He smiles limply, shaking his head, and offers a few batiks instead.
It is a small but energetic town, the odds always good that if the guy on the street corner doesn’t want to sell you something, he knows someone who does. A painting, a wood-carving, a walking safari into the foothills of Mt. Meru. One portly man, perhaps unimpressed by the slow traffic outside his fruit stand on a Thursday afternoon, ambitiously ventures, “Are you maybe looking to invest here?” In just a few days I’ve been cornered, corralled, forced with a peristaltic push through rows of masks and necklaces and slender statuettes. The days are warm, the sky patched blue and gray. In the afternoon the clouds part over the mountain, and the scalloped ridges around the summit shine gold over a scrawl of lingering clouds.
Despite its
reputation for hassles and hard-bargaining touts, I’m already warming to Arusha. The level of ingenuity, of thrifty entrepreneurship here, never fails to impress. Packs of boys roam the streets selling cheap wristwatches, survival knives, thermoses, brass teapots, porcelain mugs, sneakers strung together like sausage links around their necks. Men hunch over a workbench - a derelict coffee table; a wooden plank atop two orange crates - dissecting cell phones and watches. They screw and solder, fingers maneuvering through piles of springs and batteries, cathodes and circuit boards. Tailors and seamstresses work in the shade outside their shops, bare and stockinged feet pumping the pedals of old Singer sewing machines. Cigarette-sellers wear grooves into the sidewalks on Sokoine Road, hawking slim packets of Sportsman and Embassy and Safari, coins rattling loosely in their hands.
On Old Moshi Road I watch a game of three-card monty beneath the leafy boughs of a mango tree. The dealer shuffles three tea biscuits across a cardboard box, one with a bright red logo stamped on the bottom. A man beside me explains, “He buys the biscuits because they are 50 shillings” - cheaper than a deck of playing cards. Deft sleights of hand, the
rapid-fire patter of Kiswahili offering the game’s universal, idle promises of fast money. There’s a commotion as two khaki-clad traffic cops come whizzing down the road on a motorbike. The crowd scatters, the biscuits are pocketed. I’m surprised the dealer doesn’t think to devour the evidence. A few men thrust their hands into their pockets and whistle conspicuously in the shade. Minutes later I’ll see them getting harassed by a baton-wagging cop just up the road.
On the way back to my hotel one afternoon I’m accosted by a young Rasta on Sokoine Road. He’s friendly, rambling, prodigiously stoned; behind his milky eyes, I catch just the faintest flicker of the mercantile instinct that ignites most of the touts in Arusha. He introduces himself as Saaduu.
“When you see something, in Kiswahili, you say ‘saa,’” he explains. “And ‘duu,’ duu is like cool. Saaduu. It’s like when you see something cool. You get me, man?”
“Um,” I say.
“That’s cool man,” he says, wagging his Rasta head. “That’s real cool.”
We cross into the shade, where the street vendors are preparing for the evening’s trade. Slouching men peel oranges from the back of a donkey
cart, barefoot women roast corn over charcoal grills. Saaduu bobs along beside me, his strides long and slightly springy. He wears a black baseball cap which reins in great coils of hair; when he shows me his identity card, the photo reveals thick braids pronging up from his head, like the limbs of a baobab. He pats a long scroll of canvases tucked beneath his arm, a gesture that’s wistful, slightly paternal. Saaduu is an artist, born in a small coastal town near Dar es Salaam. Like most of the guys I meet around town, he’s come to Arusha because of the bustling tourist trade - a chance to sell his work, meet foreigners, maybe find a sponsor to help him earn a degree at the local college of tourism.
Outside my hotel he shows me his work, tribal masks and village scenes and women’s faces etched from coarse grounds of sand. He tells me about the difficult process of grinding down stones, of the different ones he’ll use to achieve different colors and textures. He tilts one drawing so that it catches the light, grains of sand lit like stardust. When you look at it, he explains, you can pretend you’re lying on the beach, staring up at the sky. It is awful, and I buy it, and I pay way too much for it. Saaduu scrawls his name and phone number across the back. Later I prop it on my desk, tilting my head from side to side to reveal different constellations in the sand. Saa. Duu. Saa. Duu. You get me, man?
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