A Training School For Elephants

This sample extract, taken from about midway through the book, describes arriving at Lake Tanganyika.

The lake was a landscape unlike I had ever encountered. I’d read various nineteenth-century descriptions of Tanganyika’s storms, of ‘the cloud masses joined together like the closing of a skylight in a vaulted roof’, about the waterspouts and pillars of water that sometimes came out of nowhere and barrelled across the surface like a ‘vast, glass-like cylinder’. Sometimes the people woke up to a shoreline scattered with a black substance ‘like bitumen’, as if volcanoes had spewed from some hidden underwater fissure. A friend recounted stories about his lakeside childhood, describing bruised skies, white lightning, three-metre waves and clattering, skin-numbing rain. He talked to me about the lake in the language of an obsession, how the water appeared blue-black from a distance but had a startling clarity up close. He explained how the orographic winds worked, generated by the sun heating up the water and the energy of evaporation, until eventually they might trigger katabatic winds to swoop in from the higher ground. When those two phenomena were funnelled through the lake by the trade winds, chaos would erupt, in blistering electric storms. On days like those, Congo was no longer visible on the far shore, but the notion of it remained, hidden behind the shifting veils of extreme weather.

I walked along the beach past two women washing clothes in the shadow of a swollen hull, the planks like the expanding pleats that form the throat of a gulping whale. A carpenter was caulking the wood in cotton fibres and coconut oil to waterproof the dhow with the same technique described in nineteenth-century accounts. The dhow was being built for shipping rice and maize between Karema, Congo, Zambia to the south and Burundi to the north. I stopped to talk with a group of men disentangling their nets. They described how their boats went out in pairs – they used the term kipe, a local word meaning ‘togetherness’ – with the nets slung between them. There were superstitions about fishing, they said. It was a bad omen if you found an owl, or someone sleeping naked in your boat. Someone else explained how, in the most violent storms, the fishermen would retreat into the safety of a bay, and the ghosts of white people would sometimes appear. ‘You don’t know where they’ve come from and you do not see them again,’ he said. ‘There are strange things in Lake Tanganyika. All I can tell you is there are creatures, and you can’t avoid them, because God put them there.’

As we talked, a young girl played in a wet dress on the top of a drowned palm a few metres out from shore. She stood balanced on the tree stump, her shoulders thrown back like a Degas ballerina. Over the last few years, Tanganyika’s water levels had been rising and eating up the treeline, forcing people to move their homes. Environmentalists said the problem was a combination of global warming and deforestation because the trees could no longer absorb the run-off. Seismologists said it was because of plate movements in the East African Rift, gradually unzipping the region apart. Others argued it wasn’t climate change but a climate cycle. In 1879, the Royal Geographical Society’s explorer Joseph Thomson was mesmerized by a fringe of dead trees, ‘killed by the recent rise in its level’, the stumps ‘standing out in the lake’, and evidence of ‘a sudden lowering’. Another traveller wondered if perhaps some ‘waste-pipe of the lake’ had become unclogged. Had a new outlet opened up, like the plug being pulled in a bath?

The truth is a tectonic pulse has always haunted the everyday existence of people living on the divide. From the beginning of my journey, Lake Tanganyika had felt like it was part of something bigger than the sum of its parts. With the colour of the sky now changing in front of me, I picked up a stone and cast it into the water. I imagined it trying to find a place to settle in the Rift where Africa was being pulled apart, sinking under the surface of the water but never finding the bottom. I thought of the lack of an ending, and how the events of 1879 still haven’t reached their conclusion. Even today, we still haven’t touched the lake’s deepest parts. Tanganyika is an abyss filled with our unknowing, a place that demands you ignore the scant hydrography and accept the largeness of a world we try to pin down but we haven’t yet comprehended.

Etymologists say ‘Tanganyika’ comes from the Swahili words tanga, meaning ‘sail’ or ‘roaming around’, and nyika, meaning ‘wilderness’. A fisherman told me this wasn’t accurate, that these same two words denoted different species of fish found in the lake. Maybe the muddle was the point. ‘Tanganyika, in the Swahili language, can be translated as “the mixture” – the coming together and mingling in the lake cavity of the waters which flow into it from every side down the slopes of its containing basin,’ wrote one of the nineteenth-century diarists. You saw in Tanganyika what you wanted to see: ‘The Great Lake, the supreme goal, the Promised Land’, wrote another. It was the kind of place where you ‘dreamed of fairy things’. For me, it felt like a landscape that had the capacity to shift my thinking – a reminder that perhaps discovery can still mean something today if only we could re-see the world as an opportunity to wonder.