Stranded in Mafinga

Good roads are supposed to be a sign of “development.” Tanzania has great roads; they were the first thing I noticed when I arrived here ten months ago. “This is incredible, nothing like the giant pothole catastrophe of Senegal and The Gambia!”

But last night as I was hurtling along in the passenger seat of a beat-up old taxi at 110 km per hour, straining to make out potential obstacles in the dim yellow beams being eaten up by the blackness beyond, I had an epiphany: good roads, which allow people to drive faster and get places quicker, must be accompanied by good lighting and good signage, neither of which are features of the Tanzanian “barabara.”

Now why was I going so fast in a taxi at 9pm driving away from my home, Iringa? Because my friend Andy Hart got a puncture (apologies for all the British English I’m picking up here) and was stranded somewhere outside of Mafinga, 86 kilometers to the southwest.

His cell phone battery lasted just long enough for him to tell his wife his approximate location, that his spare tire was locked to the back of his car, and that the key had broken off in the lock. Rather than panic, Susie called a cab and asked me to accompany her on the long trip.

Our driver, with his chronic hacking cough, was hunching over the wheel with a torch (flashlight) every ten minutes or so to check the dials on his darkened dashboard. My stomach touched the roof of my mouth every time he floored it on the straightaways and downhills, and I thanked God for my seatbelt as I stared out at the enormous black night.
(Most vehicles here don’t have seat belts, and when you do find one it almost never buckles).

It is bitterly cold in the Southern Highlands now, and at an altitude of 5,000 feet Iringa gets constant gusts of 15-25 knots or more. Fortunately Andy’s car has heating, and he was waiting inside when we found him by the side of the road. Having had no luck flagging down cars after his puncture (no one likes to stop after dark) he was hoping we had come with a spare tyre. We, however, had no luck in getting a spare so late at night.

Although the tyre was deflated and mangled almost beyond recognition as a circular object, Andy resolved to drive his car as slowly as possible to a friend’s house and leave it there for the night so it wouldn’t get looted. I switched cars to keep him company as we crawled and bumped our way at 2km per hour for 45 minutes until we reached his friend’s house.

We pounded on the gate to wake the guard, whose distinctive white sandals I soon saw under the rusty iron gate as he came to let us in. White sandals mean Masai, but this particular Masai was also wearing…a bow and arrow slung around his shoulder! Something about the sight of the blood-colored robes draped so easily about his body, and the bow and arrow hanging there as they have for millennia, made it the perfect African ending to our evening adventure.

For Andy and Susie, last night doesn’t rank anywhere near their top 100 adventurous moments in Africa. Among other harrowing events, Susie has been shot at by drunk policemen in Uganda, Andy has walked for miles in the dark, starving, sick and lost, through Central African jungles, and together they drove away at dawn in a caravan to escape the post-election violence of Nairobi. For us, I’d say last night makes the top 40.