Crazy River by Grant Richard

Author:Grant, Richard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2011-10-24T16:00:00+00:00

THE PAPYRUS BLOCKAGE extended for about ten river miles, and it was flanked with broad marshes and swampy wetlands where the blocked river had spread its waters laterally. We drove around it on a big, flat, treeless floodplain grazed by herds of Tutsi cattle. It felt like one more failure, one more blow to my original hopes of running the entire river from source to mouth. As we approached a village, the sound of the engines brought families out of their huts, and they stood there staring at us as we drove past. They were dressed in ragged cast-off Western clothing, and they looked proud and wary.

We rejoined the river at a bridge outside the town of Malagarasi. Having seeped its way slowly through the swamp and gained the tributary waters of the Moyowosi, it was now flowing steadily again and about forty yards wide. Small boys were fishing on the bald, dusty riverbanks, observed by young men in baseball caps lounging back on their bicycle seats. Thin yellow dogs slept in the slatted shade under the bridge, and over their heads passed the main road west and the tracks of the Central Line, Tanzania’s east-west rail artery, which runs from Dar es Salaam all the way to Lake Tanganyika. Built by the Germans before World War 1, and expanded by the British, it had been out of commission for more than a year because of a dispute between workers and the new Indian management. This was a disappointing situation all around, and among the aggrieved parties were the thieves and bandits who had made their living robbing the passengers on the western part of the line.

When Burton and Speke reached the Malagarasi, “a swift brown stream … swirling through the tall wet grasses of its banks,” there was a ferry system in place to get the slave and ivory caravans across the river, and it was controlled by a chief called Mzogera. This “Lord of the Malagarazi” (Burton’s spelling) lived downstream in Uvinza and sent envoys to negotiate for his crossing fee. After a day of negotiation, the envoys left with forty cloths, six coil bracelets, and a hundred necklaces of coral beads, all of which was worth fifty pounds sterling in London. Burton assumed he had now bought permission to cross the river, but there was also a Lord of the Ferry, who commanded a fleet of flimsy bark canoes, and he demanded a further thirty cloths and two coil bracelets plus a quantity of beads for each load to be ferried across.

Speke at this point was almost blind from inflammation of the eyes, but otherwise in slightly better condition than Burton, who was still unable to walk and half-blind himself. The ulcers in his mouth were so bad that it was difficult for him to eat, drink, or speak. He had just survived an agonizing paralysis of all his limbs that the locals attributed to mushroom poisoning, and leaving Kazeh, he had come down with a malaria

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