Safaris and the Swahili Coast
A journey to Tanzania
I have just got back from a three-week trip to Tanzania.
This was my first ever trip to East Africa, and only my second one to Africa below the Sahara. My first time in Africa was a visit to Togo and Benin when I was 19. I came down with malaria while in Benin, which wasn’t fun, but the trip left me aching to see more. And yet, with the exception of a trip to Egypt years ago, I never set foot in Africa again until last month.
My main motivation for this journey was to enjoy a holiday with my parents, who went to Tanzania to attend the World Esperanto Conference. Esperanto is an artificial language created by Polish linguist and visionary L.L. Zamenhof in the late 19th century. Its purpose was to be a neutral and easily learnable lingua franca that people everywhere could learn as a second language.
Although it has yet to fulfil the lofty dreams of its creator, Esperanto is still spoken by a community of idealists scattered around the world. The Esperanto Association holds an annual world conference that attracts several thousand people, and this year it took place in Africa for the first time, in Arusha, a city in the highlands of Northern Tanzania which often hosts diplomatic events.
My parents both speak Esperanto, and regularly go to these conferences. Although I am not strongly involved with the Esperanto movement, I have spoken the language since I was a child and maintain ties with that community.
Nairobi
I began my journey in Nairobi, since flying there from Indonesia is far cheaper than flying directly to Arusha. I spent two nights in the Kenyan capital before taking the bus across the border to Tanzania.
I landed in Nairobi at 5 in the morning, and was surprised by how chilly the air was. Nairobi sits at an altitude of 1800 metres, so the weather is quite cool (and consequently there’s no malaria). As soon as I got hold of my suitcase, I put on a sweater. Then I went outside and looked for a taxi.
I wanted to find the “official” taxi rank, but no matter what I did all the drivers waiting outside the terminal shepherded me towards one particular driver, who had no meter in his taxi and asked me for 3500 shillings (about 25 euros) for the half-hour ride to my guesthouse. I knew this price had to be many times higher than the ordinary fee, but I had little choice and I was tired, so I agreed.
Nairobi is known to be East Africa’s most modern and cosmopolitan city. It looked, in many ways, like the typical capital of a developing country, with wealth and poverty, shiny office buildings and overcrowded buses with no doors all side-by-side. My guesthouse was in a central location, sitting right next to the expressway which cuts through the city.
There was a large shopping mall in walking distance of my guesthouse, but to get there I had to walk for 10 minutes under the expressway, stepping across muddy sidewalks where vendors hawked their wares. The mall had supermarkets with imported products, bakeries and restaurants with international food. The quality and variety of the dining options was rather impressive, although prices were considerably higher than what I am used to in Southeast Asia.
On my one full day in Nairobi I visited the National Museum, which was packed with thousands of schoolchildren, all of them wearing British-style uniforms. Apparently it was close to the school holidays, so lots of schools were organising trips. The throngs of children being frogmarched around the museum made it hard to appreciate the rather interesting displays on the country’s history, culture and wildlife.
After leaving the museum I walked around the city centre a bit, stopping to eat at a very good Somali restaurant that served camel meat. The city is obviously quite diverse and sophisticated, but the streets still have a somewhat edgy feel. I wouldn’t say I felt unsafe, but I certainly stood out, and at one point a group of teenage street urchins tried harassing me for money.
I also couldn’t help noticing that buildings in Nairobi are often surrounded by high walls with barbed wire at the top, and that you have to pass through metal detectors just to enter shopping malls. I was told this is a reaction to Al Shabaab’s shocking terrorist attacks in the city. At the same time, it is clear that common crime is also a problem. Visitors are advised not to walk around Nairobi after dark, and I took this advice to heart.
I walked all the way to the national parliament, where I made the mistake of taking a photo of the parliament’s building from the other side of the street. A man in a suit and dark glasses, who was clearly from the security services, immediately beckoned me over to his side of street, in front of the parliament. I crossed the road. He said I was not allowed to take photos, and I would have to clear things up with two armed soldiers who were standing behind him, on the parliament’s grounds, looking tough.
The soldiers spoke to me in a polite tone, but they demanded I delete the photos from my phone while they looked on, and so I did. All I had done was take a photo of the parliament from a busy road, and I was clearly a tourist, but apparently it was still a problem. To be fair, the soldiers might have been jittery after the violent demonstrations that had rocked the Kenyan capital in previous weeks.
Later on, in Arusha, I recounted this episode to the manager of my guesthouse, who was Kenyan. He said I was lucky they didn’t detain me and then ask for some big sum of money to release me. I suppose that’s what might happen to a Kenyan in a similar situation.
Arusha
After two days in Nairobi, I took the bus to Arusha. Shuttle buses between the two cities run daily, used by both locals and tourists. The bus took us through Nairobi’s slummy outskirts, and then on to the big open spaces of East Africa. We drove through a yellowish savannah, interrupted by dusty, impoverished towns, until after about four hours we reached the border with Tanzania.
At the border I had to queue for an hour, show a yellow fever vaccination certificate because I was coming from Kenya, and then pay 50 USD to get a Tanzanian visa. I had tried to apply for the visa online, but the official website is virtually impossible to use. After entering Tanzania we drove another two hours to Arusha, through a similar savannah-like landscape.
Arusha sits at an altitude of 1400 metres and the weather is still chilly, although not as chilly as Nairobi. The city is a diplomatic hub, hosting the headquarter of the East African community and the African Court of the African Union. Peace agreements supposed to end civil wars in Rwanda, Burundi and South Sudan were all signed in Arusha. It is a common place to organise international conferences, like the one I attended. It is also a tourist hub because of its proximity to Tanzania’s major national parks, including the famous Serengeti, and to Mount Kilimanjaro.
Arusha was first settled by the Maasai in the 1830s, and then conquered by the Germans in 1896 during their colonisation of “German East Africa”. The town was dominated by a German fort, built with the forced labour of Africans from the local tribes. The brutality of German colonialism in what later became Tanzania led to the Maji Maji rebellion of 1905-07, which was brutally suppressed.
During the First World War the British took over Arusha (and the whole region), and the German missionaries and settlers were deported. Arusha became a thriving little town under the British, with Greek as well as British settlers moving in to take over the Germans’ farms. In 1961, it was in Arusha that the the documents granting independence to Tanganyka (as the Mainland of Tanzania was then known) were officially signed by the United Kingdom.
The city itself is not particularly large. There is a small touristy area with hotels, international restaurants and travel agencies. The conference centre where the Esperanto meeting took place was in this area. The rest of Arusha looks more like an ordinary Tanzanian city, with run-down, crowded streets. The city has one fancy shopping mall, but it’s all the way out in the suburbs.
The touristy area is not bad to walk around, except for the fact that the incredibly persistent touts can become quite irritating. Swahili phrasebooks, hats, bags… the sale pitches never stop, and they won’t take no for an answer. To be fair, the touts are only a problem in that one neighbourhood. One day my mother and I walked to a different part of the city to look for a shop to buy clothing. Once we left that area, suddenly we found no one was pestering us to buy stuff anymore.
I found the food in Arusha’s restaurants and cafes pretty good, but the waiting times were often quite unbelievable. I literally waited two hours for my food to be served on several occasions. Things worked the same way in my guesthouse. One day I ordered some food and asked the manager how long it would take, explaining that later I wanted to go out again. He assured me it would take 40 minutes. It took exactly two hours.
One of the first Swahili expressions foreigners learn in Tanzania is “pole pole”, meaning “slowly slowly”. This embodies the laid-back attitude and sense of time so typical of African cultures. If you expect everything to be quick and efficient, you’ll go crazy. Indonesia, where I currently live, is often seen as a laid back, inefficient sort of country, at least in the rest of Asia. Still, after travelling in Tanzania I can say that it makes Indonesia seem quite punctual and efficient by comparison.
On our first day in the city, I and my parents visited the museum of the Arusha Declaration. The declaration, signed in 1967, codified the beliefs of Tanzania’s first leader, Julius Nyerere, who professed a form of African socialism which he named ujamaa (“fraternity” in Swahili). Nyerere, in common with some other African leaders of his generation, believed that traditional African society had no social classes, and that Africans should move towards a version of socialism rooted in their native traditions.
When we got to the museum, which sits just in front of a roundabout with a monument to the Arusha declaration, we were told that there had been a power cut, so we would have to use torches to see the exhibits. We were about to give up (tickets for foreigners cost 6 dollars), but as we were discussing what to do the lights suddenly came back on again, and we decided to go in.
We were shown around by two guides, both very earnest young students keen to share their history with us. The museum includes the hall were the declaration was signed, and numerous displays about Tanzanian history and Julius Nyerere’s vision. It was rather interesting to learn about Nyerere and his legacy, which I had only vaguely heard about before going to Tanzania.
Nyerere rejected the idea of class struggle as irrelevant to Africa, much to the chagrin of the Soviet Union. Like many leaders who called themselves socialist, he created a one-party state, nationalised industry and greatly expanded education. His government also pushed most Tanzanian farmers to join communal farms known as “ujamaa villages”.
I find it easy to imagine there must have been much genuine idealism and enthusiasm surrounding the idea of “African socialism”. Africans were going to find a new way to live, different from both the exploitative capitalism of the West and the authoritarian regimentation of the Soviet block. There would be no classes or greed, and everyone would give what they could and receive what they needed. Africa would stand up on the world stage and be respected.
Like many such ideologies, ujamaa unfortunately disappointed on the economic front. Education and life expectancy did improve, but the communal farms are generally seen as a failure, and Tanzania didn’t stop being a very poor country. Nyerere stepped down voluntarily in 1985, and lived peacefully until his death in 1999. He ran a one-party state, but he was not generally seen as a brutal tyrant, and he is still remembered fondly in Tanzania. Today there is little sign of the socialism he espoused.
Another museum I visited in Arusha is the Natural History museum, which is located inside the old German fort built with forced labour. On the grounds of the museum there lives a giant turtle that’s estimated to be between 160 and 200 years old. Playing with this giant turtle and feeding it bananas was definitely the highlight of the visit.
A few days later I joined a trip, organised by the Esperanto conference, to visit a Maasai village in the highlands near the city. This was a unique opportunity to see some relatively authentic, non-touristy Maasai life. We were brought to a kind of meeting point for the various villages in the area, the place where ceremonies are held. It was on a mountainous, wind-swept grassland. I was quite struck by how much the scenery reminded me of the Tibetan plateau.
I started chatting with a local girl wearing traditional Maasai clothing. She turned out to be a sort of “Maasai influencer” who makes videos about Maasai traditions on TikTok. She told me she had gone to university in Nairobi. I told her that the scenery reminded me of Tibet, but it turned out she had never heard of Tibet. I showed her some photos I took during a trip to Qinghai, and she immediately saw what I meant.
Most of the Maasai, both men and women, were dressed in traditional clothing. I was told they dress this way every day, and not just for ceremonies. All over Tanzania it is still a common sight to see Maasai men walking around in a Shuka, the traditional Maasai blanket draped over their shoulders.
When we arrived we saw local people cutting up the meat of a cow, with the best bits reserved for elderly or highly placed people in our group and in theirs. There are apparently strict rules about who gets to eat what cut of meat. We were then taken to a Maasai village down in the valley, where we were shown how they pierce the neck of a cow and drink its fresh blood. The Maasai believe that drinking cow blood makes your immune system stronger.
A cow was dragged in front of the crowd, and a man shot at its neck with a bow and a (blunt) arrow until blood trickled down, to be collected in a cup. The cow didn’t die, and the locals emphasised that it was quite unharmed. It was clear the cow did not exactly enjoy the procedure, however, and many of the vegetarians in our group were not amused by the whole spectacle.
After that we walked back up to the gathering point, and the Maasai held a ceremony to welcome the Esperanto delegation. It involved groups of Maasai dancing, and long speeches in Swahili that were translated into Esperanto. The dancing was fun, but the ceremony just seemed to go on forever. It literally lasted 5 or 6 hours. This was perhaps another example of the local sense of time. There was no suggestion anyone might be in a hurry, or have anything else to do.
Eventually the ceremony ended, and we were served some rather good local food. After the meal was over, I was caught by surprise when a large number of Maasai suddenly started running all around me, heading down to the valley. They had decided the event was over and they wanted to go back to their villages, but the way everyone began to run at the same time was something I was not expecting.
A few days later, once the conference was over and my parents had left Tanzania, I decided to go on a safari. Safaris are quite expensive, with costs reaching at least 200 dollars a day. Visiting the most famous parks, like the Serengeti and Ngorongoro, will usually take days. I decided to go to Tarangire National Park, which can be seen in a single day.
On the day of the safari I was driven through Tarangire in a small bus with other sightseers. The park was full of tour buses identical to ours. The buses drive along the official roads that run through the park, and are not allowed to leave the roads so as not to disturb the animals. The bus had a gap between the roof and the windows to allow you to take photos. There were plenty of animals. We saw big herds of giraffes and zebras close up. We also saw a group of baboons and some waterhogs, which must be among the world’s ugliest animals. At one point we came within 50 metres of a herd of elephants.
Tarangire also has lions and cheetahs, but they’re hard to spot. We only came across one lion, a female sitting under a tree, quite some distance from the path. There were at least eight other buses parked by the side of the road, with everyone trying to get shots of the animal, but it was hard to see her clearly. Apparently if you go to the Serengeti you can see plenty of lions.
Going on the safari was worth it for the experience, although I later read about how Maasai villagers are getting forcibly evicted from their traditional lands in and around the national parks to allow tourists like me to spend money on safaris. The government claims that the Maasai’s presence disturbs the wildlife, but the Maasai claim that they have always lived in harmony with nature, and conservationists agree with them.
Safaris are a major source of foreign currency for Tanzania, and the Serengeti now has fancy hotels built inside the park, where tourists can stay for hundreds of dollars a night. Apparently five-star hotels are ok for the wildlife, but Maasai villages are not.
Zanzibar
After the safari I flew down to Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania’s main city, and from there I took the ferry to Zanzibar, the country’s must-see destination. For centuries, Zanzibar was a centre of trade in the Indian ocean, and a place where Arab, Indian and East African cultures intermingled. For the whole of the 18th, 19th and much of the 20th century the archipelago was run by an Arab sultanate originating in Oman. While the ruling elite was Arab, the trading class was made up largely of Indians, and most of the population was black African (all were Muslim).
The sultanate ruled over a large coastal area in modern Tanzania and Kenya, the “Swahili coast”, which is where the Swahili culture and language developed as a mix of Arab and East African cultures. Swahili is now the official language and lingua franca of both Kenya and Tanzania (and used further afield as well), but it is only in this region that people speak it natively.
The darker side or Zanzibar’s history is that it was a major player in the Indian Ocean slave trade, in which African slaves were trafficked to Arabia. It also used slaves to power its own clove and coconut plantations. At one point, two thirds of the island’s population were slaves. It was the British who put an end to this, just years after ceasing their own massive slave trade across the Atlantic.
Throughout the 19th century, the British government put pressure on Zanzibar to reduce and limit the slave trade. The sultanate became a British protectorate in 1890, and then in 1896 Britain and Zanzibar fought a war lasting exactly 38 minutes, the shortest war ever recorded. The British of course won the war, installed a new sultan more to their liking, and forced them to abolish slavery, much to the consternation of the island’s ruling class. Slavery was officially ended in 1909.
The British protectorate ended in 1963, and the unpopular Arab minority tried to remain in power by gerrymandering and rigging the elections. Within a year there was a revolution, carried out by a Party with Marxist leanings representing the black population. The sultan was overthrown, and unfortunately large numbers of Arabs (and to a lesser extent Indians) were slaughtered in the process.
Out of a population of 50,000 Arabs, between 10 and 20,000 were killed, while many other Arabs and Indians fled. Amongst the refugees were a 17 year-old Freddie Mercury and his Indian Parsi family. Dramatic footage of the carnage, filmed from the safety of a helicopter, can be found in the 1966 Italian documentary Africa Addio. The documentary has a colonialist and racist tone, but the footage is real and the only direct proof of the massacre.
A year after the revolution, Zanzibar united with Tanganyka to form Tanzania. The archipelago became an autonomous region. The revolution is now commemorated in Zanzibar as an uprising against slavery and oppression, even though slavery had actually been abolished many decades earlier. The massacres of Arabs are apparently downplayed and generally not discussed.
The ferry from Dar Es Salaam to Zanzibar took two hours. The boarding process was chaotic, with passengers engaging in a physical scramble to put their luggage through the scanner, but luckily there are people who hang around just to help foreign tourists board the ship (for a tip, of course). The ride itself was comfortable enough. When I arrived at Zanzibar’s main port, I had to go through the autonomous region’s own immigration procedures, getting my passport stamped and having my yellow fever vaccination certificate checked again.
I spent my first two nights in Stone Town, the old part of Zanzibar City, the island’s main urban centre. Stone Town is an interesting place, consisting of a maze of narrow alleys built in the 19th century. The Arab influence in the way the town is built is very obvious, and I immediately felt like I was in the Middle East. While most of the population looks black African, you also see local people with evident Arab or Indian features. The population was quite mixed by the time of the revolution, and not all the minorities fled.
Stone Town is quite touristy, but not in a bad way. There is still much local life going on in its narrow streets, and tourist establishments sit next to local butchers and restaurants where few foreigners would dare set foot. Groups of men sit outdoors in the evening and watch the news in Swahili on a single TV set, while children recite holy books in Madrassas nearby. The number of tourists seems sustainable, and the streets are not overcrowded with visitors.
Stone Town has plenty of historic buildings. I visited the Old Fort on the seafront, which was built by the island’s Omani rulers in the 17th century and remains quite atmospheric. I also paid a visit to the Freddie Mercury Museum, since as already mentioned the Queen frontman was born in Zanzibar. This turned out to be a mistake; the tickets cost 6 dollars for foreigners, just like in every museum in the country, and there is nothing of great interest inside, just photos and various paraphernalia connected to Mercury.
After two days in Stone Town I took a local bus to Nungwi, in the Northern tip of the island. The trip took an hour and a half. Nungwi is a small resort town on the sea. I stayed in a cheap guesthouse, run by a Russian lady and her Tanzanian husband. Conditions were basic, but it was the sort of friendly place where it’s easy to get to know other travellers.
Just like Bali and Thailand, Zanzibar also seems to have given refuge to quite a few Russians since the war in Ukraine broke out. There was a middle-aged Russian man who seemed to be living in the guesthouse long-term, who gave the impression of being somewhat crazy and also rather creepy. The owner’s Tanzanian husband was very generous and helpful, but he was also rather odd. Perhaps he was traumatised. One day he started telling some of the guests a story about how, when he was a kid, his brother was taken away by soldiers and never seen again.
The tourists in Zanzibar seemed to be in large part Italians, all the more so since I was there in August, when the whole of Italy goes on holiday at the same time. I knew Italians are very keen on the Kenyan coast, but didn’t realise how many I would find in Zanzibar as well. Most of them come in groups and stay in resorts. I got to know an Italian girl in my guesthouse, and one day we walked to the beach together and sat down on the sand, chatting in Italian. Every ten minutes an itinerant vendor would stop and try and speak to us in Italian.
The island’s touts can all speak some Italian, unsurprisingly. Many of them learn to repeat well-known proverbs, or even swear words; anything to startle and catch the attention of Italian tourists. It’s funny the first time, but by the third time it starts to get old. While I can’t blame Tanzania’s touts for wanting to make some money off much wealthier foreign tourists, I did find them irritating. Even sitting on the beach, it seemed impossible to have some peace.
Zanzibar now has a full-moon party, in imitation of the ones in Thailand. It is held in Kendwa, a village on the coast just south of Nungwi. Coincidentally I arrived exactly on the day of the party, so that evening I and a group of people from my guesthouse went down to Kendwa to join the fun.
The party turned out to be very different from the ones in Thailand. It was held at a posh beach resort, with an entry ticket equivalent to 10 Euros. There were no drugged-out hippies or anything like that. Everyone was nicely dressed, and there was a stage with a DJ. All the same, it was a fun night of drinking and dancing.
I spent a few days in Nungwi, relaxing and going to the sea. One day I went on a snorkelling trip organised by my guesthouse. The trip was pleasant, although the effects of over-tourism were in evidence. We were taken to a point in the sea where you can see schools of dolphins jumping in and out of the water, which is quite a sight. As soon as some dolphins appeared, dozens of tour boats crowded around them, the tourists all hoping to catch a glimpse of the animals or even swim with them.
We were then taken to a point that’s perfect for snorkelling, where you can see the coral reef just a a metre or so below you. It was crowded with boats and tourists, and unfortunately some people would simply stand up in the sea, putting their feet on the coral reef and further damaging it. Warnings not to touch the reef were widely ignored. At one point the crew of our boat also took several large and colourful starfish from the sea and handed them to us to take photos, even though starfish should never be removed from the water as they will quickly suffocate.
After Nungwi I made my way by bus and ferry back to Dar Es Salaam, and spent two nights in the city before flying out of the country. Dar Es Salaam is East Africa’s largest city with over six million people. Nyerere’s socialist government did its best to hamper the city’s growth, by encouraging people to remain in the ujamaa socialist villages rather than move to the cities, and then in 1974 moving the national capital to Dodoma, an anonymous city in the interior.
Nonetheless, Dar Es Salaam is now bursting at the seams, in common with most African metropolises. It’s the second fastest growing city in the world, and by some estimates it will have 13 million people by 2035. I stayed in a hostel located in the Msasani Peninsula, the city’s poshest area, where most of the foreign embassies are located. On the way there, my tuktuk drove along the very long and impressive Tanzanite Bridge, built recently by a South Korean firm, that extends for a kilometre over the sea, bridging two parts of the city.
The peninsula feels like a typical expat neighbourhood, with gated residential complexes, international schools and supermarkets with imported food. I spent a few hours lazying about at the Slipway, a waterfront shopping complex with all sorts of fancy international restaurants overlooking the sea. It was all very nice, although the prices were not cheap by any standards.
Dar Es Salaam may be a dynamic, sprawling city, but there is relatively little to see and do as a tourist. On my only full day in the city I went to the Village Museum, where there are life-size reproductions of the traditional dwellings used by Tanzania’s dozens of ethnic groups. I learnt some interesting things about various peoples I had never heard of, including that most of these groups are polygamous, regardless of their religion; that their houses tend to have separate outdoor huts where the boys have to move after reaching puberty; and that one group built their dwellings underground to hide from the Maasai, their traditional enemies.
I flew back to Southeast Asia with Ethiopian Airlines, changing flights in Addis Ababa. My flight to Addis was five hours late, and my flight to Kuala Lumpur was six hours late. I was supposed to spend the night on a plane, but I spent it at the airport. It was a fitting goodbye to a part of the world where nothing ever happens on time. I hope one day I have a chance to go back and see more.
mi e sciid ka la masaja robo havas la nomon "shuka"