Note: This is a refreshed version of an article that I wrote, which was published on Sunday, October 21, 1990 by the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
We’ve been camping every night since we left Tabora on foot. We are now in Mpanda, which is 150 miles from The Stanley Expedition’s destination of Ujiji, the fishing village where Stanley spoke the famous words, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume.”
The days of hiking are hot, and the nights are cool. None of us have bathed for 11 days, so we smell from dirt and sweat and campfire smoke. Frequently, we’ll come across rivers or mud holes, but nobody bathes for fear of contracting bilharzia, a blood fluke present throughout Tanzania. The fluke burrows through skin and infests internal organs causing painful and cumulative damage. We drink water only after treating it with iodine tablets, or filtering with a Katadyn. The iodine makes already tainted water taste more so, while filtering is laborious and time consuming.
Two-thirds of Tanzania is uninhabitable due to the lack of potable water and the abundance of tsetse flies. Our 14-member group has yet to find potable water, electricity or a paved road. Many of us question our sanity in leaving jobs, homes, families and friends to recreate journalist Henry Morton Stanley’s historic 868-mile journey to find Dr. David Livingstone, a Scottish physician, missionary, and early explorer of Africa.
When Dr. Livingstone was working in remotest Africa, a group of friends wrote him: “We would like to send other men to you. Have you found a good road into your area yet?” Dr. Livingstone replied: “If you have men who will only come if they know there is a good road, I don’t want them. I want men who will come if there is no road at all.”
The men and women in the 1990 Stanley Expedition are ordinary people who were chosen from amongst 300 applicants worldwide. For me, the expedition is an adventurous way of fulfilling a childhood dream to travel to “The Dark Continent,” a phrase first attributed to Stanley in his book Through the Dark Continent. The book is an account of Stanley’s 999-day endeavor to trace the course of the River Congo to the sea. Starting with 356 people, 114 survived of which Stanley was the only European.
Biographers and historians have written that each day of Stanley’s 1871 exploration to find Livingstone was rife with hardship and danger. Late in the 20th century, we also suffer travail. Many times during the expedition, I wished that I was back in the suburbs close to all the day-to-day conveniences and fun activities that the Twin Cities has to offer. Yet, in Africa, I persevere by hiking as far as 26 miles a day across tsetse-fly infested terrain in 100-degree heat saddled with a 30-pound backpack.
We watch our every step so as not to twist an ankle or disturb one the many dangerous animals that inhabit Tanzania. The need to be cautious is reinforced when the expedition team leader informs us that he has banished the medical officer. Also banished by the team leader are the photographer, the cook, the navigator and his buddy. (Both the navigator and his buddy are US Marines.) Those of us who remain with the expedition share the dubious quality of acquiescing to the team leader who favors dictatorship over democracy, a leadership stance made worse after he downs a few beers.
With five expedition members having been dismissed, the tasks of setting up camp and preparing the evening meal are endless and exhausting. Tents must be setup and firewood cut and gathered. The latrine must be dug. Thorns and tall grasses must be cleared away from the campsite. Fortunately, two askaris have joined the expedition bearing rifles and machetes. Their rifles are powerful enough to kill an elephant. The head askari casually hikes along with us and uses his right hand to hold the gun barrel while resting the rifle stock on his shoulder. Impressive, the rifle ammunition is the size of a Tampon Super.
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| Askari with rifle and cigarette. |
The askaris use their machetes to clear the campsite. Both men have paired their government-issued camouflage uniforms with loafers. The head askari wears white, plastic loafers and his assistant wears dark blue leather loafers. Our group provides them with hiking boots, food, water, bedrolls, tents, toiletries, hats, utensils, and flashlights.
While the Stanley Expedition men journal and doze, the Stanley Expedition women prepare the evening meal. Both the men and the women hike an average of 15 miles a day across a harsh and vast wilderness, but only the women are expected to take over cooking duty. We prepare the meals in crude and filthy conditions while sitting on the ground under mosquito netting. Cooking is done over wood fires in pots supported by hunks of termite mound. Most nights, chunky water is the only available liquid and becomes a staple throughout the duration of the expedition.
We cut up vegetables, and then winnow stones and chaff from the rice before throwing everything into a pot. Though our personal hygiene is repugnant, it is important that our ration of rice be free of stones so that no one breaks a tooth. (There are no dentists within hiking distance of our tented, nomadic campsites.) Meals have included rice with cabbage, rice with tomatoes, rice with eggplant, rice with catfish, rice with peanuts, rice with impala, and rice with rice.
Wild game is a treat that comes at an emotional cost. One afternoon several of us women accompanied head askari on what we thought was a wildlife safari. To our astonishment, the “safari” became a hunt for impala, an elegant, beautiful herd animal which the head askari tracked, shot, and dressed. We women, a couple of whom had cried when the impala was killed, prepared the venison for dinner and then consumed it along with freshly caught catfish, boiled potatoes, fried eggplant and tomatoes.
After dinner, the women clean the cooking pots using sticks followed by a scouring with a handful of sand or small stones. One evening a hyena assisted with the cleanup by charging through camp just as the meal was cooking, grabbing the pot from the fire, and running off into the dark. The next morning, we found the pot a short distance outside the campsite. The pot, now dented with canine-like tooth markings, had been licked clean.
While the women clean up the primitive kitchen, the Stanley Expedition men tell drunken tall tales around the campfire while mapping out the next day’s journey.
The bedtime routine consists of brushing one’s teeth with minuscule amounts of treated water and wiping one’s face with moist towelettes, a singular luxury in a harsh environment. By the end of the day, my face was so layered with dirt that when I took off my sunglasses, I looked like a raccoon. All trips to the latrine include a flashlight and a shovel. Exhausted, everyone crawls into grubby sleeping bags. Everyone, that is, except for the person assigned to the first shift of guard duty.
Guard duty begins at 9 p.m. and ends at 6 a.m. when we are roused in the dark from our two-person tents. Guard duty detail consists of stoking the fire and protecting the camp from poachers, bandits, and carnivorous animals. My watch, which is about to begin, is a two-hour shift.
The night sky is beautiful and filled with constellations only visible in the southern hemisphere. Across from me, on the other side of the campfire, is the head askari. I watch as he inserts the blade of his machete into the fire, and then balances a glowing cinder on the tip of the blade before drawing it close to his mouth to light his cigarette. After the askari turns in for the evening, I begin to journal. Suddenly, out of the darkness and into the campfire light, six men approach carrying automatic rifles.
Until that moment, I had never pictured myself dying by gunfire in a foreign land. I sit quietly, tending the fire in silence and in fear. On the ground beside me rests a .357 Magnum. I push the holstered gun behind me, out of the firelight and into the shadows. The armed men begin to speak to me in Kiswahili, which I do not understand. The noise alerts the askari – a game scout with military training – whose job it is to warn and protect us from dangers.
After a show of documents and some discussion with the askari, the armed men depart. The askari explains that the men are regional police. Apparently, our group has created an uproar by inadvertently tenting near a refugee camp populated by Ugandans who fled the country during the Idi Amin regime. The askari handled our blunder wisely and well: the police allow us to continue along our historic route through Uriwira.
While the Southern Cross is still visible in the wane morning light, we are given the signal that it is time to break camp. Weary, we crawl out of our tents and huddle in the chill air around the fire. If we are lucky, there is leftover rice for breakfast. If not, we forage through baskets in the Toyota Land Cruiser, which is a service vehicle that carries food and equipment. On the best mornings, we find juicy oranges, roasted peanuts, and ripe bananas. On the worst mornings, we subsist on air and chunky water.
After our meager meal, the morning routine begins with a trip to the latrine followed by tooth brushing and swathing our blistered feet in moleskin. Moleskin was voted the single most important non-food commodity in camp. One fellow with size 13EE feet suffers greatly in spite of using mega amounts of the stuff. Except for the lack of potable, water foot problems are the team’s most common complaint, though not the most serious. Other afflictions include malaria, typhoid, pancreatitis, heat exhaustion, diarrhea, burns, hives, ringworm, assorted insect bites, a botfly infestation, a sprained ankle, and a dislocated jaw when one female tent mate hauls off and hits another.
All of these maladies occur after the medical officer is long gone, though nothing matches the botfly infestation for sheer dreadfulness. Alone in her tent with a flashlight clenched between her teeth, one of the women cleans a swelled area on her thigh, then watches as botfly larvae hatch from the wound. Her scream raises the hair on the back of my neck.
We begin hiking at 7:30 a.m. The terrain may be dry and woodsy (reminiscent of an Indian summer day in Minnesota), steep and mountainous, or wet and marshy. Some days, razor sharp elephant grass towers over our heads and we must constantly push it aside to see the next step in front of us. Other days the blood-sucking tsetse flies dive bomb us, taking bites which leave huge welts and the threat of encephalitis.
We take breaks every three to four miles in the morning, and every hour in the heat of day when temperatures can climb to 118-degrees Fahrenheit. Breaks are used to apply moleskin to fresh blisters, rehydrate with clouded water, and eat a sour orange or two. Occasionally, biscuits acquired from a village magically appear and are a shared reprieve from an otherwise grim journey.
Villagers are warm and welcoming. The women wear khangas, rectangles of colorful cloth long enough to both clothe a woman and enfold the baby that she carries on her back. Many villagers have never seen a white person. Our group is repeatedly mobbed by the curious. Sometimes children cry when we pass through a village. Tears are turned to smiles as balloons and pencils inscribed with “The Stanley Expedition” as handed out.
Tanzania is an economy of scarcity. Unlike Westerners who habitually stock up on household provisions, the villagers go to market each day to buy or barter what they need. The day we wanted to purchase several dozen eggs, there were only four available in the entire village. Occasionally an egg contains a balut, which isn’t discovered until cracking the egg open and spilling its foul contents into a sizzling pan of fresh eggs.
Packaged, processed, or imported foods and beverages are a rarity in the East Africa bush. Soda pop is an exception, including Coca Cola. It can be purchased, unrefrigerated, for 100 Tanzanian shillings, or about 50 cents U.S. In a country where the annual per capita income is $200, this is an extravagance. In contrast, chai, hot tea made with tea, raw sugar and hot milk, costs ten cents a cup. Chai, a small comfort on a difficult journey, was my drink of choice despite the risk of contracting tuberculosis, diphtheria, or scarlet fever due to the use of unpasteurized milk.
Many foods, including cheese, are a rarity despite goats and cattle being plentiful. The villagers eat and drink only what they can produce locally. Food is cooked over open fires, its preparation unaided by blenders or mixers or food processors. Many children are scarred with burns from falling into cooking fires.
Along our historic route, many villagers seeking relief from malaria and chronic pain ask us for medicine and painkillers. These items are simply not available in the African bush. Villagers live in mud huts and sleep on straw mats raised up by roughhewn wooden poles. Chickens and dogs share living quarters with families. The sick and lame are carted around in wheelbarrows. One woman, whose legs were stricken with polio, dragged herself along the rutty roads with her arms.
Since East Africa has some of the toughest terrain and poorest road conditions in the world, most vehicles are four-wheel drive. In an area thick with elephant grass, the Land Cruiser radiator frequently became clogged and overheated. Every time this occurred, the driver had to open the hood to remove the grassy encasing from the radiator, resulting in an average speed of 9 mph.
Roads may be blocked by fallen trees, or may have potholes the size of small craters; wooden bridges may be in a state of collapse due to flooding; areas may be washed out by the rainy season, disconnecting one village from another. One day the Toyota Land Cruiser was stuck in mud so deep that it took an entire day to dig it out. By nightfall, with no way to re-provision, we were out of food, out of water, out of clean clothes, and out of enthusiasm.
Very few Tanzanians have motorized vehicles so journeys near and far are accomplished on foot, by bike, or by hitching a ride on an infrequent work truck headed for a populated area. Almost always, pedestrians carry essentials on their head such as firewood, cooking oil, sacks of flour, sugar cane, or baskets of vegetables for market. Bicycles, usually black in color, are one-speed with fat tires. Unless it’s already occupied by a passenger, bikers strap their load to the rear fender.
While in towns and villages, we are very careful about taking pictures. No photographs are allowed of government structures including schools, regional game offices, banks, post offices, military installations, airports, or train stations. According to a missionary whom I met, she was in a plane taking off when a fellow passenger snapped a photo from his window seat. The control tower ordered the pilot to land, and the man’s camera was confiscated.
In another incident, one of the members of our expedition was mobbed after taking a photo of a storefront. The worst misunderstanding occurred when the proprietor of a hotel thought our video battery pack was a “bugging” device, and that we were a group of spies. Police were summoned to investigate, arriving at 11:30 p.m. with guns drawn and wearing commando gear. After a display of documents, the police were convinced of our benign intentions and politely left. From then on, we always asked permission before snapping a photo or publicly displaying any “suspicious” equipment.
Incidents like these were dramatic, but were few and far between. Most often our group was greeted by villagers with “Jambo,” and “Habari safari.” The Tanzanian government provided the expedition with highly-skilled askaris. The Tanzanian people helped us with everything from washing our grungy laundry to assisting with money transfers, which entail multiple rubber stamps by multiple bureaucrats. In Sikonge, we were offered refreshments and shelter from the heat; in a remote area near Uriwira, a family let us camp on their land and provided chairs and kerosene lamps so those of us on night watch could read comfortably; in Igonye, we were given four papaya as gifts when we bought leavened bread; in Mpanda, a government official loaned us his vehicle and driver so we could visit Katavi, a remote game preserve that boasts the largest cape buffalo, hippo, and crocodile populations in Tanzania.
The Stanley Expedition reached Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika 63 days and several-hundred miles after setting out from Bagamayo on the east coast of Africa. As we approached the monument marking the spot where Stanley “found” Livingstone, villagers danced and sang in loving memory of Dr. Livingstone’s healing powers. When he died in 1873, loyal attendants carried Livingstone’s body over 1,000 miles so that it could be returned to Britain. Though his remains were interred in Westminster Abbey, his heart was buried in Africa.
In 1899, Henry Morton Stanley was knighted in recognition of his service to the British Empire. His grave in England is marked by a large piece of granite inscribed with the words "Henry Morton Stanley, Bula Matari, 1841–1904, Africa.” Translated, Bula Matari means “breaker of rocks.”
As for the leader of the 1990 Stanley Expedition, according to a reliable source, his name was blacked out of the visitor registry at the Livingstone Memorial Monument in Ujiji.
As for the medical officer who was dismissed halfway through the expedition, he signed the visitor registration on July 11, 1990 at 3 p.m. East Africa time, adding the following comment:
In search of the spirit of that which was lost.
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| Sandra with daypack and journal. |
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