Talk's Meaty Corner

©  2007  Rose George

It is simple to scare a Tanzanian child. It’s so simple, you can do it accidentally and inevitably. The technique is easy: Be white. Usually, my skin colour here provokes the Muzungu Double-Take: child looks; child looks away; child looks back and says “Muzungu!.” Muzungu is translated as “white man” or European but I have a feeling it means more than that, or used to. In the slum areas I’ve been hanging out in, muzungus are few and far between, so children are entertained. Except the ones who have been told by their mothers that if they’re naughty, the muzungu will take them away/eat them/do something nasty and horrible. So far Steve and I have inadvertently caused two children to burst into tears, and one child to run away and hide behind a bush, before his mother yelled at him - probably saying “get out from behind the bush or I’ll tell the muzungu to eat you” - and he hung onto her skirt for dear life, crying all the way up the hill. When we passed him in the car, though, he nearly smiled. Car-trapped muzungus are safe.

Anyway, it’s quite sweet and everything but as Steve pointed out last night, as we emerged from the hotel to find a kid who said “Muzungu!” and everyone around him laughed, what would happen if English kids yelled out “black man!” and then everyone laughed indulgently? There would be hell to pay. Muzungus would be fetched to eat the transgressor.

All that said, Tanzanians and Tanzania, as juggzy has pointed out, seem mighty pleasant. So much so that my six words of Swahili consist of hello (jambo), how are you (habari gani), fine (muzuri), welcome (karibou sp?) and thank you very much (asante sana), because they are said so often, they’re easy to remember. This morning was spent talking to a very chatty pit-latrine-emptier, who I thought was known as “one who makes the toilet vomit” (kutapishu) but in fact in his area is known as “the shit-ladler” (kulakuwa kupakuwa). He is a nice clean young man who empties 6 pits a month. I asked him what the weirdest thing is that he finds in pit latrines. He said aborted fetuses.

Then we went to find the operators of the vacuum tankers who hang out at the top of Garden Road. Hussein and Kisheri, who accompanied me, said I should stay in the car while they asked the tankers to talk. “Otherwise they’ll probably ask you for money.” This is the Muzungu effect (yesterday, I was accompanied by a young man who seemed not to speak English until it came to the point where he was hungry and he said in a perfectly formed English sentence, “Rose, what about some money for food?” then never spoke English again). The tanker drivers though were perfect gentlemen.. Even though they’re known by kids as “shit-suckers” and don’t earn much, they didn’t ask for a shilling. I increasingly wonder about this: I take their time and I give them nothing for it. The usual argument is that people’s stories get told, with the implication that the story will somehow do the teller of the tale some good. I think that’s generally nonsense. But big clever books have been written about this that explore that far better than I intend to on a hot rainy day in Dar es Salaam.

Charles, the main tanker talker, wore a smart shirt and trousers and brown pointed brogues. I said, “you’re very smartly dressed to suck out shit from latrines.” He said, “being smart is a matter of choice.” Later he admitted that his boss, the tanker owner, wouldn’t supply money to buy gumboots.

Gumboots. Or is it gum boots? Either way it was nice to hear wellies called that. Did the Famous Five wear gum boots? And did they ever actually drink lashings of ginger beer?

Such are the questions that occupy me when I’m not thinking about the ladling, vomiting or sucking of shit.

Talk’s Meaty Corner is round the corner from WaterAid’s office. It’s on the corner of the Talk Parade. It supposedly sells meat. It was shut.