The long way to Lilongwe.

---

In the cool, blue, pre-dawn hours, I say my goodbyes to Dar es Salaam. I’ve arranged for a taxi to pick me up at the Econo Lodge at a quarter-past four, and after a short, restless, fitful night in bed, I’m hauling my bags onto the curb outside the Mohammed Coach Lines ticket office - a grubby storefront, a concrete box, with three barefoot guys sleeping on mattresses on the floor. The warning from the ticket agent was to arrive by 4:30; he stressed the urgency of my punctuality with a sort of fervor that made me wonder how long he’s actually been in Tanzania. Sure enough, as half-past four becomes five, as traces of daylight start to show over the rooftops, we’re still idling outside the ticket office, a plump woman squatting over a coal fire, boiling a kettle for the morning’s tea.

The bus is already full, though the bulk of the seats - and every inch of available aisle space - are filled not with weary bodies, but with cardboard boxes and fat nylon bags, with suitcases and bundles of inscrutable things piled and stacked at precarious angles. It’s only later that I’ll learn that Mohammed Coach Lines is what’s referred to as a “business bus,” its profits determined less by passengers than by the endless cargo that, even now, as I groggily shift in my seat, is being shoved into the rear. (The dire consequences this will have for our theoretical arrival time I’ll learn later still.) At half-past five, emerging from the shadows like a myth, three husky women arrive with still more bags and bundles making the long haul to Malawi. There’s a brief argument with the ticket agent; the women huff and heave themselves onboard. Massive baggage upheaval commences in the back of the bus. More shouts and exclamations from the sidewalk. An angry man gestures wildly outside; he seems to be suggesting that the bus is full, or that the bags are being shoved in without any of his brutal artistry, or that the women should’ve gotten here an hour ago, so that they, too, could sit around, shifting and sighing and staring blankly at the front of the bus while the driver scratches himself in the gloaming. One of the women takes her bags, grunts mightily, and debarks; seconds later she’s back onboard. There’s a plaintive comedy to all of this, the great shifting and rearrangement of baggage, the angry Arab flapping around like a chicken that’s lost its head. A porter boards the bus, scrambles down the aisle, starts climbing the piles of luggage in the back like a mountaineer. Finally everything seems to be solidly wedged into place; he flashes a thumbs-up and departs. The driver, looking spry and ready for the long haul ahead, gets into his seat, adjusts his mirror, and gives the gas a loving pump.

A shudder, a great mechanical sigh, and we’re off. Murmurs of approval all around. The husky women, the latecomers, have colonized two adjacent rows - a little makeshift quarter where, I suspect, they’ll be hanging laundry and boiling chickens before long. We pass through blue streets, silent streets, streets waking to themselves. There’s bedlam outside Mbungo bus station, shadowy figures with bundles on their heads weaving in and out of headlights. We leave the city. I nod off as the sun climbs above distant hills. When I wake there’s a man jostling for the seat next to me. He’s arrived from nowhere; he flagged the bus down from the side of the road, lunged through the aisle. He’s fresh, animated, he has no suitcase, he’s babbling in Swahili. I catch a single word - “Zambia” - and shake my head in protest.

“Lilongwe,” I say, gesturing toward the front of the bus. “Malawi.”

His face sinks. He leans forward to plead with the others. Debate, confirmation. He sits back and waits for this intelligence to register. Then he shrugs and borrows a newspaper and turns slightly toward the window, so that the bright sunlight falls on the page. Wherever we’re going, his manner suggests, it’s closer to Zambia than here. We settle into a mutual, amicable silence, racing west, our feet now and then brushing together as we jockey for precious floorspace.

It’s a beautiful ride. We pass through Morogoro, the riot of hawkers selling bread and biscuits and orange Fanta at the bus station, the ridges of the Usambaras blue and misty in the early light. In Mikumi National Park, a dried-out savannah, flat and gold and endless, we crane our necks to watch zebra and gazelle loping through the tall grass. We slow to let a family of elephants trundle across the road, ears flapping like sheets in the wind. Giraffe prance, awkward and gangly, like young girls showing their first signs of hips. Everyone is delighted. Near Iringa, the cool highland towns, the road is paved with jacaranda blossoms. We stop to eat chicken and chips at a restaurant. We exchange weary looks and comically shake the kinks from our legs. We share biscuits and look blearily toward the gray line of tarmac, threading endlessly through the hills, speculating on when we’ll get to Lilongwe. A young man, a schoolteacher, says we’ll be there by late morning. I ask if he’s made the trip before. He hasn’t: he lives near Mbeya. When we reach the city he gives a friendly, hopeful wave and disappears with his briefcase down a narrow dirt path. It’s getting late. We’ve broken down twice already - the driver splayed and jutting from beneath the bus, hammering, tinkering, trying to figure out the death’s rattle that’s been hounding us all day - and slowly, with the sun setting, with our exuberance and bonhomie vanishing like the day’s dying light, I’m starting to get awfully pissed.

Toward Mohammed Coach Lines goes the bulk of my wrath, though I manage to reserve - as is so often the case - a fair bit of anger for this country and continent in the abstract, as in (muttered softly), “Fucking Tanzania,” or (more pointedly), “Fuck you, Africa.”

Darkness. Roadside shops lit by paraffin lamps. Cooking fires, grilled maize and cassava, listless boys playing pool under fluorescent bulbs. We can’t be far from the border; in my cloistered delirium, I manage to convince myself that maybe - just maybe! - we’re in Malawi already. Maybe we’d quietly crept through, our passports secreted out to the immigration agents, the bumpy road being smoothed for our urgent passage to Lilongwe. Rather than bearing the brunt of my balls-out, Old Testament-type rage, the good people of Mohammed Coach Lines should be showered with praise and hamdu’llahs. Shukran, gentle custodians of the Mohammed Coach Lines! I’ve entrusted you with my safe passage, and you haven’t let me down.

We stop. The driver kills the engine. Outside a town sitting in darkness, a loud tropical beat pulsing from a bar lit by neon bulbs. The bus empties, people talking quickly; it’s one of those moments where everyone but me seems to know exactly what’s going on. I doze off. An hour passes. When I wake we haven’t moved, though I can say with a good degree of certainty that this isn’t the border. It’s after ten when the bus fills again, and the driver guns the engine. We surge forward - anguished cheers from the rear. Hardly ten minutes pass before we stop again, and the engine dies with a sort of grim finality. I press my face to the window, but I can only make out a few shadowy figures on the side of the road. A passenger, a young college kid, taps me on the shoulder, points to the front of the bus, and says,

“Border.”

It is, indeed, the border, though in its dark stillness, its utter lack of African mayhem, it’s unlike any border I know. A light bulb dimly flickers in my head: this is the border; the border is closed. It’s half-past eleven, and the immigration agents have long since gone home to their warm homes, their wives over the cooking fire, their unmade beds. We, on the other hand, will be spending the next eight hours of our already wretched lives sitting at the barricade, waiting for the sun to rise. Already the others on the bus are kicking off their shoes and padding jackets behind their heads, settling in for the night. It dawns on me that I’m the only one onboard who finds this whole situation more or less unacceptable. I blink my eyes in blank fury and look around for someone to blame - at times like these, unabashedly American. But the driver has vanished - does he have a girlfriend in this scruffy border town? someone complicit in his underhanded transport scams? - and the others have already begun to doze, their breaths growing calm and even and utterly untraumatized by the fiasco at hand.

Two things quickly become clear: first, it’s a damn good thing I gave myself an extra day to reach Lilongwe; second, there’s something to be said for the patience, the good-humored resignation, with which your average African deals with his daily woes. It comes to me during that brief, blinding rage that takes me as the driver hops from the side of the bus and disappears into the darkness. You’re angry. You’ve been promised something - delivery to Lilongwe by the morning - but there are no plans to make good on that promise. You want to accuse someone - but who? The ticket agent? He’s 800 miles away in Dar es Salaam, maybe chuckling to himself with greedy, mischievous glee. The conductor? The driver? These luckless foot soldiers of the Mohammedan army? Even if you could, if you could take the driver by his ears and rattle his head and let loose with all sorts of unfortunate correlations between the coupling of a woman and a goat and the driver’s eventual conception, what good would it do? The border is closed, and it will stay closed, and you can either sit here, simmering in high holy rage, or you can chuckle and sigh and shake your head and resign yourself to a good night’s sleep.

I think further still: of a woman taking her sick child to the clinic, of the long line of harried mothers ahead of her, the overworked doctor, the bare shelves of the dispensary; or the teacher at the front of his overcrowded classroom, the students sitting barefoot on the floor, their pencil stubs scribbling, a textbook - the teacher’s solitary copy - full of scientific breakthroughs from the year 1974. I think of the woman carrying her cassava to the marketplace, the 10 kilometers she walks each way, because there are no roads into her village, and there is no money for a bicycle, and if she doesn’t make that lonely pilgrimage each day, how will the cassava be sold? I think of the man with his kangas on a blanket by the roadside, of the policeman with the sturdy jaw who asks to see his seller’s permit. Twice a week they go through the same routine - the man has no permit; his informal business is against the government’s newest laws - and so the policeman confiscates the kangas, and he brings them down to the station, and the man pays a day’s wages to get back the kangas that will be confiscated again before the end of the week.

This is a world accustomed to being screwed and forgotten; these are people who get nothing, and expect nothing, and so they take all the shit that life daily flings at them, because the alternative isn’t to call the Better Business Bureau or to write angry letters to the local councilman - it’s to go utterly, raving mad.

Who, if we cried out, would hear us among the angel’s hierarchies? asked Rilke. And who, if I cried out, would hear me at Mohammed Coach Lines? And even if they could hear me, what would they care?

And so my admiration soars for these luckless, screwed-over, trod-upon people. Mohammed Coach Lines be damned.

In the morning the day breaks over distant hilltops, and by six o’clock the money-changers are in a busy caucus outside the bus. I unload some of my Tanzanian shillings - I’d asked a friend in Sweden to SMS me the latest exchange rate; thank you, World Wide Web! - and get into a bit of friendly banter, determined to make the most of the fact that I have nowhere else to go. The money-changers, as is so often the case, turn out to be a fount of local information; and it’s through them that I’ll learn that the infamous Mohammed buses, because of their bellies swollen with cargo, typically take a full day to clear customs. This is a piece of almost stupefying intelligence. When I ask what time we might finally make it into Malawi, they laugh great big belly-shaking laughs; we’ll have to clear customs, too, on the other side of the border. They suspect it will be late in the afternoon before we’re finally en route to Lilongwe - possibly even evening. I ask if there’s a quicker way; they say yes, there is a quicker way. And so I hitch my pack onto my shoulders, give Tanzania a goodbye wave, and walk my way into Malawi.

---