Wednesday, 2 July 1986: DAMN! A 13-Hour Train Ride with No Photos Allowed
August 10, 1:00PM, Pretoria; August 11, on the Pretoria-Johannesburg train and Johannesburg train station.
After Lusaka, the next stop on my trip was Livingstone, Zambia, situated 300 miles to the southwest and about five miles from spectacular Victoria Falls. There are two daily trains from Lusaka to Livingstone. The “express” covers the 300 miles in 9½ hours, but it doesn’t arrive in Livingstone until midnight (assuming it is on time – a very unreliable assumption). That would be totally impractical since the employee of a Rotarian was going to meet me at the station. Besides, half the journey would be in the dark, so I would miss seeing much of the countryside. The slow train leaves Lusaka at the revolting hour of 6:00AM and is supposed to arrive in Livingstone at 5:30 in the afternoon. At least most of that journey is in daylight.
Approximate route of my 300-mile, 13+ hour train trip between
Lusaka and Livingstone on July 2, 1986.
I didn’t want to ask
Abe, Vera, or one of their drivers to get me to the station at such an ungodly
hour, so the day before my journey, I jogged about four miles from Abe and Vera’s
home to the Inter-Continental Hotel, the closest taxi stand. I made arrangements with a cab driver there
to pick me up at 5:00AM. The driver said
he would have to drive me back to the house in the daylight so he wouldn’t have
trouble finding it in the morning – actually not a bad idea considering that
the house numbering system changes a couple times along the street and most of
the places don’t have very readable numbers anyway. So the cab ride to the station (including
this recon mission) actually wound up costing more than the “first class” train
fare itself: 45 Kwacha ($6.00) for the
cab and Kw35.80 for the train ticket.
Because of the quantity of gear I’ve been carrying on much of this trip,
including hiking and camera equipment, the extra money for first (sleeper)
class was worth it. Second (standard)
class in a regular coach with open seating costs Kw25.40, while the economy
coaches with their wooden seats for Kw17.80 looked rather grim.
Praise be to the African gods, my driver arrived at 5:00 sharp and dropped me off at the station at about 5:15AM on Wednesday, July 2. When making my reservations a couple days earlier, I had been told that the ticket window would open at 5AM. No such luck. I stood in line with a throng of Africans, barely staying warm in my jacket in the chilly winter morning air. There were no other white people among the one hundred or so people waiting in the station when the ticket window finally opened around 6:00AM. Judging from their dress and appearance, most of the Africans in line were somewhat poor but by no means starving. There were scores of women, some very young, who had babies strapped to their backs in cloth material that went over one shoulder and under the other arm. A few of the passengers appeared to be relatively middle class judging from their dress.
The train was obviously going to start quite late. Later I realized that it didn’t even originate in Lusaka, but had left Kitwe up north in the “copper belt” near the Zaire border at 7:00PM the previous evening. One of the stops before it arrived in Lusaka was Kapiri Mposi, the terminus of the TARZARA railroad which connects southern Africa with Dar-Es-Salaam, the capital and largest city of Tanzania. The journey from Dar to Kapiri Mposi takes about two days not including breakdowns and miscellaneous delays, which according to a friend who has made the trip, are the rule, not the exception. After the Chinese (PRC) completed the TARZARA line in the 1960s, it has been possible to travel by rail from Nairobi, Kenya through Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana and South Africa to Cape Town. That’s assuming all the borders are open and the traveler has a couple weeks to kill.
At about 7:00AM, my train arrived in Lusaka pulled by a rickety-looking silver locomotive with a cover missing exposing the diesel engine. In addition to a guard car (caboose), baggage car, kitchen car, and diner, there were seven 3rd class (economy) cars, one standard (2nd class) car, and the 1st class sleeper in which I was booked. I found my assigned compartment and settled in for the all-day trip.
As soon as the train
pulled out of the station, I figured it was safe to shoot some photos of
Lusaka, so I snapped a few frames of the slowly receding downtown. Abe and Vera had warned me not to take pictures
in Lusaka because the government had become paranoid since the recent South
African commando raids. Apparently,
someone in my car turned me in, because about ten minutes later, a railroad
detective asked me why I was taking photos out the window. I explained I was a tourist and wanted photos
of the landscape. He said that was a
no-no so I acted very cooperative and agreed not to do it anymore. I was scared shitless that he would
confiscate my cameras and/or my film. I
was also really pissed off. One of the
major reasons for my taking this hellacious 12-hour train trip was to get
photos of the countryside, villages, and people in this large chunk of
southwestern Zambia that I would be crossing that day.
One of the photos I took of downtown Lusaka as my train was
pulling out of the station. My
photography damn near got me busted by the railroad police.
At the next station, a well-dressed African guy with a noticeable scar on his face stopped by my compartment. He was very friendly and asked me about my trip. Then he asked to see my passport and I realized he was a detective. My stomach was turning summersaults. I smiled and said, “Yeah, that’s me in the photo, isn’t it?” He laughed and gave me back my passport and wished me a good trip. Nothing was said about the photos. Since then, I’ve heard several stories of foreign tourists being thrown in jail for innocently taking photos like I had. Suppose I was really lucky although I’m sure that my friendly, cooperative attitude and my American passport helped. Had I been a South African, I’d still be rotting in a Zambian prison.
My Zambian compartment mate agreed that it was bullshit that I could not take photos. What good is it to travel through the country if you can’t record your journey on film, he reasoned. He added that I am suspect here because I’m white and confirmed Abe and Vera’s assessment of government paranoia since the recent South African raids. This guy looked to be in his 30s and was obviously educated. He wore a nice tan topcoat, blue jeans, and running shoes. In Kitwe, where he boarded the train the previous night, he manages a taxicab company. He was going to Choma to visit a sick relative. Choma is a little over half way from Lusaka to Livingstone. He could have driven but petrol is now Kw2.70/liter (about US$1.50 per gallon). That doesn’t sound all that expensive in dollars, but one has to look at prices in relation to local salaries.
As we lumbered slowly across the bush-covered, rolling countryside south of Lusaka, I noticed that this train was nowhere near as nice as those I’d ridden in South Africa, Botswana, and Zimbabwe. There was a hell of a racket in the car produced by a bad coupling with the next car. The inside of the car was somewhat beat up and the outside looked as if it hadn’t been washed or painted since independence 20+ years ago!
Since my new friend lived near the Zaire border, I asked if this train connected with one that went up through Zaire. He said there is no train going across the border, but one can catch a train a few miles over the border in Lubumbashi. It is not recommended. He said that the Zaire trains are very crowded and some people literally ride on the roofs. There are no sleeping cars and the interiors of the coaches are unlighted. Thus, at night anything can happen. Any thoughts of travelling through Zaire by train quickly vanished from my mind and were replaced by visions of, not only my cameras, but the shirt on my back being removed by knife-wielding thugs.
As the train approached Kafue about 30 miles south of Lusaka, the landscape became more rugged. There were steep hills, bush forests, and almost no farms. Just outside Kafue we passed the large Zambia Cement Plant. A large throng of people got on and off at the Kafue station which had white stucco buildings with red tile roofs.
I had breakfast down in the diner for Kw6.00. It included a muffin with jam, French fries, a fried egg which was cold and a fat sausage. The latter looked a bit suspicious. I had a few bites of it, then decided it wasn’t worth the risk of trichinosis or ptomaine poisoning. Oh well, I couldn’t complain for the equivalent of US$0.80.
South of Kafue the train stopped for a few minutes before crossing Kafue Lake, a couple miles above a large dam. Farm people were selling stalks of sugar cane for 20 ngwee (Kw0.20) to passengers leaning out the windows. An interesting steel truss bridge with 13 spans crossed the lake. Man, did I want a photo of that bridge. And man, did I figure it could be my ass if I tried to take one. By now, I was even becoming nervous about taking notes figuring someone would accuse me of being a CIA operative.
Historic photo of the 13-span Kafue Railway Bridge which was
completed in 1906.
Photo source:
After the train
crossed the bridge we went through several miles of bayous and marshland, then
through monotonous flat bush country to Lubambo, our next stop. This village was comprised largely of
rondovals surrounded by mealie (corn) fields and grazing cattle. At the station, an African guy came up to my
window and tried to sell me a wooden chalice.
I was sorry I couldn’t buy some of the attractive but cheap Zambian
handicrafts, but my bags were bulging as it was. What would I do with the stuff anyway
assuming that it didn’t get broken in transit?
At 10:30, the train arrived in Mazabuka. A woman was breast-feeding her baby right next to the track. Other women descended on the cars selling hard-boiled eggs, pastries, and bananas. I was tempted to buy a pastry, but a report on Zambian TV a couple nights earlier on the large number of contaminated local water supplies reminded me that the boundaries between shit and food in the developing world are not always well-defined. I hadn’t had any intestinal problems in Africa so far and didn’t want to tempt fate.
Railroad employees loaded large metal milk containers into the baggage car behind us. Five kids standing on the platform noticed me and one of them called out, “How are you, Sir?” I’d noticed that kids in Zambia found me a novelty. They waved and smiled a lot so I waved and smiled back. I didn’t see one white face during the entire train trip That didn’t bother me as I detected no hostility, not even from the policemen I had encountered.
After leaving Mazabuka, we passed large sugar cane plantations to the north of the track. The main highway (2-land, paved) ran parallel to the track a couple hundred feet away. As slow as the trains seemed to be going, we actually overtook a new green and white bus which was full of people with bundles on its roof. As we pulled into Magoye, two young black women yelled and waved at me enthusiastically. I did nothing to discourage such greetings as my head was perpetually out the window checking out people and places. The chilly morning air had given way to warm sunshine, and I shed my jacket. I hadn’t seen a drop of rain in four weeks.
At Tambero, we met a Lusaka-bound passenger train. I watched one of the passengers in cracked rubber boots and a ragged shirt. In America, his clothes wouldn’t have been worth donating to the Salvation Army. However, many of the people I saw that day were nicely dressed.
The train was falling further and further behind schedule (based on the timetable I’d picked up in Lusaka) as we pulled into Monze at noon. I noted that this was definitely a “peoples’ train”. A loudspeaker repeating over and over that Mr. Masaka was requested to get off our train and return to Lusaka. Hope he hadn’t left home without his wallet or maybe a relative had died?
Before we left Monze, we met our first freight train in the five hours since we had left Lusaka. As it pulled passed on the siding, guess what? The locomotives and all the petrol, goods, and coal cars were South African Railways equipment. I pondered what sort of message this was sending to the Zambian people given President Kaunda’s acerbic anti-South African rhetoric. I also wondered how Zambia would ever survive a South African boycott. Abe Galaun had said that Zambia would ask for an exemption to imposition of sanctions on South Africa. Vera Galaun felt most of the imported goods were unnecessary anyway and wasted the country’s scarce supply of foreign exchange. Still, I remembered that all the wine I had seen during my six days in Lusaka had been imported from South Africa and the grocery store I had visited near Abe and Vera’s home had numerous South African products.
At Machinga, we met another passenger train. Zambia Railway Police were hanging around every station platform when we stopped, but I noticed that they didn’t carry guns.
The landscape was relatively flat now with hills here and there. West of Batoka, I noticed numerous giant mounds (perhaps five feet tall and twenty feet in diameter) which were covered by large trees and bush. There wasn’t much cultivated land in this area. Here and there, we passed groups of rondovals. Then we me another South African freight train.
My mind wandered off to the South African situation once again. It had been a month since I’d left South Africa, and being away from it gave me some different perspectives especially after having seen a chunk of black Africa. It dawned on me that there was no solution to the South African conflict. Even if reform continues, the blacks are now only interested in majority rule, and that was something most South African whites will never be willing to concede without a fight. Besides, sanctions are inevitable because the Botha government is too stubborn to ever accede to demands from foreign governments. Sanctions wouldn’t change the white South Africans’ unyielding attitudes, but they would gradually push the South African economy into the pits. Still, the whites (and particularly the Afrikaners who effectively run the show) won’t give in as long as they aren’t starving to death or defeated militarily. Neither of those last two options seemed likely to happen for at least twenty years. I felt there is no longer any room for optimism. Recent events in the townships that I’ve been reading about over the past month have done little to change this dismal vision.
At Kalomo, I noted that many of the houses I’d seen in Zambian towns are square little boxes, but they aren’t all that bad for a developing country. Millions of Mexicans or Indians would be happy to have as much.
After a day of seeing Zambians on train platforms smile, laugh, and wave at me as if to say, “Look at the funny white man,” I was wishing that more white South Africans would come north and get infected by the warmth of these people. I wonder how many of them would be capable of appreciating it.
As the red African sun set over the bush, I made the following notes: “There’s something special about riding a train at dusk. The air is cool but not cold. There are the black faces silhouetted against the warm glow of evening light on trees and grass against a blue-grey sky.
The train pulled into
Livingstone almost three hours late, but fortunately, Winter Lemba, a Rotarian
and general manager of Zambia’s auto assembly company had a driver waiting for
me. For the next three days I wondered
around Victoria Falls in awe. It is
truly one of the most spectacular geologic features on the planet.
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