The hot dust of Zambia surround my Land Rover in a thick ocher cloud, and since it was too hot to roll up the windows, the powdery brown haze billowed into the cab. After two weeks in parched Kasama Province, I was ready for a change, and reaching the ridge crest I saw my destination below: a cool green valley cradling a blue ribbon of water stretching to the horizon. Lake Tanganyika is the longest freshwater lake in the world, and I was looking forward to a leisurely 400-mile passage through Zambia, Congo, Tanzania, and Burundi. Little did I know I was also in for a surprising and joyous sacred experience. In the sleepy port of Mpulungu, I boarded SS Liemba, an eighty-year-old steamship from the twilight of another age, lovingly maintained at the pinnacle of late 19th-century technology. Her dark mahogany gets fresh coats of spar varnish, her brass fittings are faithfully polished, and her iron hull receives meticulous applications of marine white. She carries cargo, mail, and market crops, and has eight cabins topside, so at six bells (11:00 a.m.) I clambered aboard just as the creaking deck cranes finished stacking the foredeck with rough burlap sacks of maize bound for Tanzania. I enjoyed a cozy cabin, portside abaft the pilot house, and at dinner in Liemba's dining saloon found my shipmates to be proper and reserved, including two fastidious Belgian nuns heading up lake to their missionary church and a quiet middle-aged couple out from Manchester to see a bit of the world. By day, I enjoyed the calm voyage along the tawny hills of the eastern shore, punctuated by the cacophony of port calls. At night, I felt the throb of the triple-reduction steam engines beneath my feet, and watched moonlit water approach, then disappear beneath the hull and disperse astern in a luminous wake. But I also began to hear muffled voices at night, and to feel a pulse that was not the engine. Three levels below me, a different voyage was taking place. Liemba was also transport for hundreds of Zambians and Tanzanians traveling to weddings and family gatherings and accompanying crops to market. This bustling community existed just thirty feet beneath the polite world of the folded-down bedspread and the mint on the pillow, but was separated by the yawning gulf of social convention. I talked the First Officer into showing me the magic doorway that led to this other realm, and one afternoon I walked out onto the brightly sunlit forward well deck. I opened a heavy hatch cover and began descending a ladder into a darkness that carried me down two levels and into another reality. Immediately, I inhaled the warm scent of mealtime in the tropics: fried yams, served hot with a squeeze of fresh lime and a dash of chili. As my eyes became accustomed to the light at the bottom of the ladder, I found a cavernous space housing an exuberant community-cum-bazaar. Whole families traveled together, their areas marked out with neatly tied bundles and sacks of provisions. Children played hide-and-seek around tall jute sacks filled with mangoes being shipped north. This was a joyful world filled with the scents of ripe tropical fruit and the sound of calabash gourd instruments. The air was alive with the chatter of goods being bartered and sold. A mzungo (white person) below deck was a curiosity, and soon I had a small group of laughing children tagging along behind me as I walked around the sea-borne hamlet. The village welcomed me with an open heart. Everyone was friendly and greeted me warm smiles: "Jambo, karibu. Unatoka wapi?" — "Hello, welcome. Where are you from?" Everywhere I walked, I was offered samples of whatever was at hand, from fabric to food. Everyone was eager to meet me, and many families wanted to adopt me for the duration of the voyage. One family invited me into their area and shared their dinner, after they first washed my hands and feet, a tradition of their upland tribe. The meal was a rich kidney bean stew and ugali (fried maize-meal) accompanied by pombe, sharp homemade beer brewed from millet, and afterward we sat and chatted in sign language. These travelers became my voyage companions, and I was given a carved ebony talisman and an elephant-hair bracelet to ensure good fortune in the balance of my journey. One afternoon, I was included in a traditional ceremony where the blessing of the ancestral spirits was invoked on the little community. We made offerings of dagaa (silvery dried fish) to the ancestors, and our supplication was for rain for the crops, as it had been a very dry summer. My friends also showed me how to make my own invocation to the spirit of the mountains, the nature spirit that guided travelers, and I really used the prayer on the balance of my trip, anytime I was approaching a tricky border checkpoint. I never had any problem as long as the mountain spirit was looking out for me. There were no Western separations between the sacred and the mundane, and people showered blessings and good luck wishes on each other at all times. This invisible village became real shipmates every time I left the restrained world of afternoon tea just by stepping through a deck hatch. On the last day of the voyage when it was time to say farewell, it was in the below-deck world where I said the most heartfelt goodbyes. To the man from Manchester and his reserved wife, the farewells were easier to make. You always learn more about the pulse of life of a country when traveling closer to the ground. In 1937, Albert Schweitzer was on a railway carriage traveling back to his beloved hospital at Lambaréné in the then-Belgian Congo. The conductor asked the Nobel laureate why he traveled Third Class. He smiled and replied, "Because there is no longer a Fourth Class." |