The Arusha Expat Experience

The locals in Arusha were uniformly friendly, but some people definitely had questionable motives. It was nearly impossible for me to walk anywhere for more than a few minutes without someone chatting me up, usually asking if I had booked a safari already. Going for hundreds or thousands of dollars, safaris are where tour operators really make money, and the desire to make a cut as a middleman is strong. Some interactions – like David, and Richard who will feature in the next post – were convenient, but others were really grating. Mostly, it became exhausting to try and make friends when I never knew whether people really wanted to get to know me or just saw me as a potential source of income. In some ways, though, these interactions were better than those with the people who couldn’t speak English, who would address me as “mzungu” (white person) and speak to me in rapid-fire Swahili, which made me feel like a zoo animal. I had come to hate the term “mzungu” a bit less after realizing that lots of people were addressed by their identities. If you wanted to tell your tuktuk driver something, you addressed him as “bajaji”; Maasai watchmen were simply referred to as “Maasai”; and the same went for Rastafarians.

Speaking of ambiguous intentions, being Jewish and Israeli in Arusha was quite a ride. Anywhere with a significant Christian population in Africa will probably have some degree of fawning over Israel and the Jewish people (sometimes for different reasons), but Arusha was the most extreme I had experienced. At least a quarter of dala dalas had Israeli flags on them (sometimes with “ISRAELI” in big letters), cars and trucks had little Israeli flags on their dashboards, and the pharmacy next to my hostel was called “El-Shaddai”. The best flag sightings were probably the official portrait of Netanyahu in a random mobile phone store and the Israeli flag sandwiched between the Saudi flag and that of Tanzania’s longstanding ruling Revolution Party outside a watch store. The strangest part about the whole thing was that displaying an explicitly Jewish symbol was a sign of Christian faith, but the admiration for Israel ran deeper than that. Not only did numerous people tell me that they “knew” the people of Israel were chosen by God or that the United States was an Israeli lapdog, but one piki piki driver even gave me a lecture about Israeli history which included the 1947 Partition Plan and how the Yom Kippur War prompted the Camp David Accords between Begin and Sadat. I was flabbergasted on multiple occasions, but none of the locals seemed to understand my surprise – to them, it was just another aspect of their faith.

Influencers Go Free

The main nature spot in town was a waterfall called Napuru, which I decided to visit with two girls visiting from Dar. Maryam had quit an NGO job after studying risk management and Norah was a recent college graduate; professional aspirations were now on hold as they had become Tanzanian travel influencers. I don’t normally find influencers infuriating, but I welcomed the rare opportunity to get to know Tanzanian women outside of a nightlife setting. We piled into a tuktuk and headed up the southern slopes of Mount Meru, which form the natural northern boundary of the city. The combined weight of the three of us and the driver proved to be too much for the poor 200cc engine, so we had to walk up the steepest slopes as the driver navigated them. As we reached villages near the top, we were chased by groups of waving kids.

The scenery became almost alpine as we reached the nature reserve, with grassy meadows and deep green pine forests. If it weren’t for the enormous mahogany trees, I would have believed it were Europe. The influencers got me half-price admission to the nature reserve and we were joined by a guide named Leonard. After climbing down a steep slope, we found ourselves in a canyon so narrow we had to hop back and forth perhaps a dozen times across the stream at its base. The waterfall itself was beautiful, if shockingly cold. As I attempted to warm up after swimming, the girls conducted an entire photo shoot with a can and a bottle of juice on a partially-submerged tree trunk, getting completely drenched in the process.

As I looked around, I realized all the Tanzanians (except Leonard) were completely inappropriately dressed, which has been a recurring experience for me in Africa. Norah was in chic cargo pants and a leather jacket, Mariam was in purple flares and a matching hijab, and a bunch of local men had turned up in fashionable jackets and jeans. Outdoor-wear had not quite made it to Africa, it would appear – or perhaps were presentable urban clothes too important a class marker to shed?

Back on top of the hill, we got a free lunch (chips mayai again!), but the girls had to take more photos to promote the reserve and restaurant online. Leonard offered to take me on a walk through the forest, and I gladly obliged. It was almost European again, but that notion rapidly evaporated as I saw groups of Maasai girls returning from school with machetes in hand to cut wood. The boys, meanwhile, were hauling sacks of grass for cattle feed and logs for firewood out of the forest. In contrast to the villages on the slopes, most of the kids here just stared at me with blank expressions, even when I waved to them. The tuktuk driver ran into some unspecified trouble on the way up, so we waited for him for an hour and descended back to Arusha as darkness fell.

Muzungu vs. the King of Vibes

Perhaps the most unexpected thing about Arusha was the quality of nightlife. This divided roughly into two: the places where the white volunteers went, and the local places. With the help of David and Rajab, I ended up spending some time in both. Thursday nights were karaoke nights at a place called Zeze, and I nearly broke my leg falling into a ditch on a pitch-black road the first time I went there. The floor was dirt, there were Basque and Catalan flags on the wall, the crowd had a slight white majority, and anyone could request a song. This went about as well as you might expect, resulting in a playlist that brought me back to middle school, and eventually devolving into a group of French volunteers chanting “MUZUNGU” at the top of their lungs to the beat.

Karaoke nights helped me meet other foreigners, though, who were mostly on volunteering projects of a wide range of purposes and levels of usefulness. There was Clara, a Syrian-French girl who was getting a law degree in the UK and promised to come visit me when I was there next month. We got coffee one day, and it predictably devolved into a 2-hour conversation about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The other good contact was Sara, an Egyptian girl also studying in the UK, with whom I visited the waterfalls a second time. She brought a few friends along, including the first person I had ever met from the French island territory of Réunion.

The local places were quite different. First, the beer was usually 2,000 shillings instead of 5,000 (85¢ and $2.2). I was generally the only white person in sight, and the bars were much more nicely designed than the other businesses the same crowd frequented (especially restaurants). One place with the tagline “king of vibes” stood out as a particularly good time, with a six-pack of Guinness for 10,000 shillings ($4.3), a great Afrobeats playlist, and paintball (!) facing empty beer bottles in one corner. The contrast with American clubs in flashy cities like Miami was enormous – people were there to actually have a good time, and not so they could post videos of overpriced bottle service on social media.

One day, I told David that I wanted to drive a tuktuk. The following evening, a friend of his picked us up in one, and set me up on a quiet street to practice my skills. It was fully dark by then, and impossible to see anything with no streetlights and other drivers exclusively using their high beams, but I managed to get going. It was a strange sort of vehicle, with the gear shift in the left grip, the throttle in the right, and a pedal brake, and the biggest challenge was remembering to never fully close the throttle because it would quickly stall. Other tuktuk drivers were astonished once they noticed my skin color, and after I came to a stop at a red light a random SUV rammed us from behind. My heart sank, but these things are built to last and there was no damage apart from a tiny dent in the fender. I was a little shook up and let the driver take over, but he asked me to drive again once we had entered an unfamiliar neighborhood. The road was painfully bumpy on our toy wheels, and we had to physically shake the vehicle into neutral after hitting a big bump. We reached a group of his friends who all cracked up when they saw me, and drank a few beers as Wiz Khalifa blasted from the tuktuk’s Bluetooth speaker – they all insisted on popping the tops off with their teeth. One of the guys was a safari driver who had just returned with several hundred dollars of tips, so he was treating everyone. With the stars above, the music, the strangers, the surroundings, and the beer, time slowed down and I briefly wondered: how the hell did I end up here? I felt more alive than I had in a long time, and realized how far I had to go for that to happen.