 In
praise of Arusha City
By: Elisha Mayallah
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New Safari Hotel in the heart of Arusha
City |
How does one get to know and remember a Tanzanian city? Is it by
the sights you see — and their distinctive character — or is it something else?
For me Arusha proves the case: it is something else entirely. It is the tangible
feel of a mood you might describe as the emotional aura of the cosmopolitan city
— fast, complex, sensuously alluring, gently aggressive, flowing and twisting,
and pulling you up short over and over and over again.
Being in Arusha is like being in the backyard of your house, garden. Spending
time on and in the massed business establishment in Arusha equals the well-travelled
world-class people, dense with texture; moments of surprised pleasure and happy
encounter come thick and fast. You feel that the people you meet are as minutely
interesting as their traffic flowing yet in formlessly fluid.
The noise is deafening, but the thrust and surge are indefinably exciting.
Unlike a big city like Dar es Salaam, the sheer volume of varied detail — in
crowding, old-world low-rise buildings in the European style, multitudes of
people, street views, fruit shops, shoe displays, food choices, restaurants,
coffee shops, beers, wines, hotels, inns and other utterly seductive sweet stuff
in the curio shops, to name a shortlist — are such that you feel you can never
get enough. And you can't, you really can't. You just have to go back, again and
again.
It is a city for city people. There's not much in the way of rough nature, but
the strong United Nations presence owing to the International war Crimes
Tribunal for Rwanda taking place at the sprawling and heavily guarded Arusha
International Conference Centre [AICC] is like a huge artery of throbbing
microlife linking smaller areas, each with a subtly different feel which,
altogether, create that eternal-city feeling one gets in Nairobi. Only here it
feels more companionable, older and densely lived in.
Arusha is the central point in Africa between Cape Town and Cairo. The nearby
Arusha National Park is one of Tanzania's smallest parks. Its main features are
Ngurdoto Crater, The Momella Lake, and rugged Mt. Meru 4566m. Tanzania second
highest peak has various vegetation zones supporting many animal species.
The city sits in lush, green countryside at the foot of Mt. Meru and surrounded
by many coffees, banana plantations and maize estates tended by the locals
mainly Waarusha and Wameru.
The Arusha city is divided in two parts, separated by a small valley through
which the Naura River runs. The upper part, just off the main Moshi to Namanga/Nairobi
road, contains the government buildings, post office, immigration, most of the
top-range hotels, safari companies, airline offices, curio and craft shops, and
the huge Arusha International Conference Centre (AICC) where the headquarters of
the East African Community [EAC], United National International Criminal
Tribunal for Rwanda (UN-ICTR] and East African Legislative Assembly [EALA] are
based.
Further down the hill and across the valley are the commercial and industrial
areas, the market, small shops, many of the budget hotels and the bus station.
For tourists, Arusha, 1540 m [5053ft] above sea level, is the gateway to
Serengeti, Lake Manyara, Tarangire parks and the Ngorongoro Conservation Area.
As such, it's the safari capital of Tanzania.
Again, in contrast to the branded-goods feel of Tanzania, and many other cities,
a spring-in-the-step walk through Buenos Aires is a revelation of non-standardised
city ecology.
Few restaurants and coffee shops, for example, follow the brand style regimes
typical of franchises or indulge in uniform fittings. And they are not all
pasted together in that depressingly similar, upmarket style that we have become
familiar to, following the Nairobi and Dar es Salaam styles.
In Arusha (formerly called A town to its inhabitants), the coffee shops are
often supplied with simple, rough-hewn tables and chairs, and there are tens of
them. The coffee, served with a glass of milk, sparkling mineral water and a
pastry or two) is simply superb — the real thing.
This is not something to be taken for granted. Go to Dar es Salaam, and the
coffee, in my experience, suddenly goes steeply downhill, as does the cuisine.
The Arushans have a singular knack with food and grilled meat, as they do with
curio shops and the veneration of goat meat. Vegetarians have a very, very hard
time in Arusha, which is a meat-eater's crowning destination. It's cheap,
plentiful and very, very good. The cuts are different but what you get is juicy,
chunky meat that tastes, well, just great.
There's a whole science to the art of meat, meat-cuts and the Arusha version of
the 'nyama choma', which is done on a barbecue pit with a huge grill encased in
bricks and a fat chimney passage.
It's the kind of food that brings you back to ordinary phrases of praise like
"great", "marvellous, hey", "unmatchable, while you wash it down with red wine,
spirits or a Tanzanian beer that costs a fraction of what it would set you back
in Tanzania shillings.
The old Arushan style, that pioneered by the Waarusha [the Wamasai in town], is
to spread a generous variety of braised-meat-cuts on a large grill and other
cuts of succulent red meat. This, however, applies to a minority of the people.
On the streets again, you get the meaning of what the former US President, Mr.
Bill Clinton meant by his discourses on "Arusha is a Geneva of Africa" as a
parable of human improvisation in the face of what appear to be fixed grids.
In Arusha's world, every walker creates his own, ungovernable route through the
narrow streets. There is no absolute order imposed from above, even though the
city may once have been planned as a completely unknown entity.
Walking the streets — perhaps better described as a hive or a dance hall — holds
the pleasant puzzle of being both chaotic and fluid.
You get the feel by reading the traffic. On the surface, it's utterly beyond
ordinary principles of order. No one sticks to lanes, little indicating occurs,
there are no stop signs, and the taxi-dominated flow of (mostly small and
dented) cars proceeds by what I later realised was a form of gentle aggression.
You push but you don't shove. You take the gap but you don't fight for it, or at
least not too much beyond hand waving and expletive hooting.
That's the Arusha style. Things are hectic and complex, but sinuously so.
There's an African sense of living life for living it, mostly, and for the rough
beauty of it, which overrides the angst-version of existence. It's what you
might call the Waiting-for-God-style perfected in more Eurocentric environments
and some other variants of humanity.
That's Arusha city for you, a place where your view of movement and pleasure
will be stretched, as will be your legs, pleasantly.
And, as much as you walk the streets of this enclosing, expanding city, you will
want to come back and walk them again. I can't wait!
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