Days in Dar Es Salaam

 

The weather was always sweltering hot and humid in Dar Es Salaam. Usually the hotel room had air-conditioning, although that meant that when you came in from the heat and had a shower -- a cold one because there was never any hot water – you usually caught a chill. This time there was not even any air-conditioning, so I just stayed hot. I was not in my usual hotel, but a more modest establishment.

    I had checked in there on my arrival in Tanzania, then spent a few days upcountry in Dodoma for a party conference I was covering for the agency. Now I was back in Dar Es Salaam, where I wanted to do a story on the port, and checked into the same hotel. It was quiet, cheap and clean, and the staff were friendly.

    One of the girls at the reception was especially friendly. Pretty, and charming too. She and I exchanged compliments, I bought her drinks, and she wangled a meal out of me. But when I tried, in what I felt to be the natural course of things, to kiss her, she shied away.

    She had a colleague, and there was also a much older woman who seemed to be in charge of the hotel accounts. They all took an interest in me in their way. With the pretty plump one whom I tried to kiss there was no more than flirting. She was a nice, fresh-faced girl-next-door type. Bright, but happy enough just to talk and be bought a soft-drink and a meal.  Her colleague was quiet and confined herself to darting me hot-eyed looks. Darker and slimmer, she also had a more impressive bosom, from what I could see through the hotel uniform blouse.

   The attitude of the older woman discomfited me a bit. From her heavy hints, I gathered she was offering to arrange for me to have the dark one if I wanted, in exchange for a cash consideration. “Black and white, together, 50 dollars,” she would whisper hoarsely to me, indicating with a nod the one that was apparently available.

    I politely ignored this as if I had not heard or understood. I was here to do a job and such recreation was not uppermost in my mind. Travelling and subsisting on company money, you have to come up with some goods to show for it afterwards, and I hadn’t done enough yet in the way of articles. I spent the next two or three days trying to arrange an interview with a top port authority official. This involved a series of laborious phone-calls with unhelpful bureaucrats. I had to go through the hotel switchboard each time, as there was no direct dialling from the room, so each time I had to solicit the help of the reception desk women.

    Finally I hit on the key bureaucrat who had no-one else to pass me on to. He told me to submit my questions in writing which I did, and was told they would get back in touch with me. Which of course they didn’t. But if I kept myself more or less busy during the days, there were still the hot nights.

    I kind of liked Dar Es Salaam, the beautiful bay of the natural harbour, with its rotting hulks of old freighters, its hot sun and coconut palms. But the city was rather scruffy, its vaguely oriental buildings dank and leprous-looking, its scattering of restaurants, bars and ice-cream parlours seedy, if not downright tatty. At night the city centre seemed very dark and murky.

    Venturing out one night through the jumble of ill-lit streets in the half-mile between the hotel and the bay, I came upon an agglomeration of people: a roast-meat stall in front of a narrow entrance opening straight onto an equally narrow ascending flight of stairs. I realised that I had seen the place before, on my last visit to Dar about a year before. Then, I had decided against going in there, as it looked rather intimidating, dangerous even. This time I was braver and squeezed my way on up past the painted girls in tight dresses waiting for a punter to pay their way into the discotheque.

     I found myself in a large smoky upstairs room. It was dark, very dark, as I shouldered my way to the bar for a beer. Then steering around to get my bearings, I spied an arrangement of chairs facing the dance-floor, which was uncertainly illuminated by one of those ultra-violet lights that make the men’s shirts and the girls’ dresses glow.

    Seated, I presently became aware of the girl on my left. After a stolen glance or two between us, she motioned to me, said or somehow indicated, that I should draw my chair closer. Which I did. It was too dark for me to see her well, but even seated I could see she was very tall.

    We exchanged the basic information of names and origins in a mixture of approximate English and Kiswahili. She was a Maasai, from Arusha. I was pleased with the information. As we whispered her hand moved to rest on my thigh, but delicately. I studied her profile. She had the aquiline nose of an ancient empress, high cheekbones, classic almond eyes, and quite the fullest lips.

    We danced, my eyes playing over the long legs and slim graceful form gyrating and undulating before me, fascinated as if she were some living work of kinetic art. Which of course she was.

Paulina was her Christian name; she couldn’t or wouldn’t give an African name.

    We sat holding hands like teenagers. She rested her head on my shoulder; I held and admired her beautiful long-fingered hands. How gentle she was!

“You, married?” she asked.

“Yes,” I replied grudgingly, knowing it was not the right answer.

“Children?”

I shook my head.

“Kwanini?”

I shrugged uncomfortably and examined her nail varnish.

    Back in my hotel room, the night was sticky but her body was smooth and cool. It slipped out of her thin modish tee-shirt and well-cut white cotton pants as if by magic. Her breasts were small but their nipples were large and long.

    She lay back on the bed, drawing up her knees slightly, and with a coquettish smile parted her thighs wide. I bent myself to her, noticing as I did that not only was her pubic mound almost hairless, but that she appeared to have little or no clitoris. I wondered if she had been excised; it was a traditional practice among the Maasai.

    But as I wrapped her long thighs around my neck and paid her homage, it hardly seemed to matter. As we fucked, she ground her hips in time with mine. She was 19 years old, and a fine young woman.

    In the morning, I gave her some money and she asked if I would be going to the discotheque again that night. I said that I would. We had breakfast together in the hotel restaurant and she then took her leave.The fat woman who did the hotel accounts made some knowing ironical remark about my having found “a new little friend”. I remained aloof.

    As it happened, when the next night came I decided not to go out, persuaded that I had better or at least more important things to do.

    It was not until the following day that I saw Paulina again, late in the afternoon. We met by chance in an ice-cream parlour-cum-bar. She was with some girlfriends.

    I was pleased at finding her and she seemed pleased too, though she reproached me for not going to the discotheque the night before. I made some excuse. But she was also amorous and we went back to my hotel to make love.

    She first went into the bathroom. Coming out, she held a finger under my nose for me to smell and gave a short laugh. Her finger smelled of cunt, and while the gesture did not seem improper, I felt I was being mocked or led on. We fucked unmemorably this time. After, when I again gave her a few banknotes, she looked from them to me with a peculiar expression I had seen somewhere before: no doubt disappointment that I hadn’t given more.

    She wanted to go back to the discotheque. We picked up a girlfriend of hers on the way, and as we walked she announced to the friend that I had promised to marry her. She thought this a great joke. I did not find it very funny. In the discotheque, I found us a table and ordered beers. We  all danced together a bit. She then excused herself saying she would be back, and I went on dancing with the friend.

   After Paulina had been gone a long time, I went to look for her, and saw her drinking with a tall, craggy and prosperous-looking man. He looked a bit like a white hunter, though he was more likely to be a German businessman.

    “Forget her, take another one, she’s not coming back,” advised one of the denizens of the discotheque, a shaven-headed painted woman approaching middle-age who was evidently keeping an eye on matters.

    “Go with this one,” she said, pointing with her chin at a dumpy little girl in a short skirt who promptly flashed me a winning smile. I didn’t much like the look or sound of my shaven-headed advisor, and persisted in waiting for Paulina to come back. But as the night grew late, it became clear that she was not returning.The advice to seek a substitute was repeated, I found myself dancing with the little one, and by that time things were decided.

    She was from Zaire, the little one, and very good-natured too. Back in my hotel bed, I fucked her as hard as I could, ramming myself into her repeatedly with all my force. She gasped, and I felt I must have hurt her, but she didn’t complain. She took it well. Like a woman, I told myself. I could be a real cad with women in those days.

    She taught me some useful Swahili: the respectful greeting “Shikamoo”, and the reply, which is “Marahaba”. And she was pleased to accept my meagre cash offering.

    Waiting for the port people to reply, I investigated an intriguing illicit open-air brewery and drinking den under the palm trees on a peninsula across the bay, reached by a ferry.That made another article for the agency, particularly as the venture got me arrested by an unpleasant secret government agent as a suspected spy.

    Despite my loud appeals the man insisted I follow him to the nearest police station. There in full view was a cluster of half-naked wretches crammed into a single cell who cheered loudly to see a white man apparently about to join them. It was a nasty moment, but fortunately for me it did not last too long.

     Once out of that jam and escorted back to the city, it was time for me to catch a  plane back to Nairobi, and so I never did get to do a story on the Dar Es Salaam port, but wrote a colourful piece about the illicit drinking den and my arrest. Rumour had it that the drinking den was run by the army...