The Magic Tree
By: Jon Humston
Tags: Travel Writing, Hiking, Tanzania, Short Story

Alex called it the Magic Tree and that’s where we headed today. On a typical Saturday morning we would meet at the gates and take off walking. He always picked spots unknown to tourists, scenes I would never find on my own. He knew the places rarely discovered even by the expatriates who call this place home now. He’s the one who lead me to that waterfall deep up the mountain, past the huts and along the narrow irrigation ways. I returned there, but never without him.

After hiking several miles together we typically end up back at the gates. The guards would allow him through because he was with me, and we would go up to my house and cook together. It was always just the two of us in my little room, other than that one time he brought the meat. That was when my father was here. We cooked the tough beef in a stew on my hot plate for hours. It took almost as long to chew the thing.

This was a typical Saturday morning and I headed down to the gates, and there was Alex.

He had come from the boys’ home, which means that even taking all the shortcuts he had walked at least an hour already. I had seen these shorty roads; natural trails weaved through the fields. They were more discovered than planned, as if they had always been there and the people built around them. The paths were logical, declaring the easiest passage around trees and bushes and houses. One sees skinny cows tied to trees outside homes, tormented by boys, prodding them with sticks and climbing up and down the trees. Women prepare breakfast and wash clothes. Without question or protest they fight two of the certainties of life on this land: hunger and dirt.

“Jambo kaka!”

“Mambo vipi.”

We shake hands and start walking. Without missing a beat Alex picks up his stride with purpose, like a man determined to take control of his surroundings. It makes sense. I keep up. I look around and take stock of the beautiful morning. It’s early and the mountain is still clear, floating as if suspended from above rather than supported from below. Hung from something even more massive than itself. An empyrean mass lowered from the heavens. The clouds haven’t converged yet to provide it afternoon respite. This morning we are walking downhill.

Alex is 15 years old. He is an orphan. He is wearing khakis, tennis shoes, and the t-shirt that I gave him last weekend. It says Connecticut Mutual. Neither of us has ever been to Connecticut. We couldn’t be further from the place.

Most of our fellow travelers are going in the same direction. The main market is in the heart of the city, still about an hour away. Young girls come down from the slopes with baskets of bananas, balanced with precision on rolled shukas on their heads. The first time I stopped a girl to buy the fruit, I helped her lower the basket and amazed at the weight of the thing. She was wearing a shuka, blue and yellow with flowers. It matched the one rolled on her head. I thought she was beautiful. Even her eyes smiled at me, though I had no idea what lay behind them. I wanted to keep buying ndizi forever, but she just smiled at my broken attempts to communicate. I helped her replace her load on her head and I watched her walk away. The only real meaningful exchange between us may have been the one of money and bananas. This time Alex does the talking and gets the real price. Nine large, ripe bananas for 300 shillings, about 25 cents. The ndizi grow all around us, but I don’t mind paying. These Kilimandi only grow on these slopes.

I place the new bounty in my bag, next to the plastic bag of peanuts, two bottles of water, a pocketknife, and a towel. We have a long walk ahead.

We talk as we make our way along the side of the wide road. Alex asks me again about my family. He is especially interested in my parents. He doesn’t know what it is like to have parents, but he knows he wants them. He has no siblings, no grandparents, no aunts or uncles or cousins that he knows of. He is completely on his own.

My father used to be a teacher, and then became a firefighter almost thirty years ago. My mother used to be a teacher, but she left that job when the kids came and she took the unenviable job of raising us. My two older sisters are finishing up their graduate degrees and are both teaching. I am here to be a teacher. Alex tells me I am blessed.

When Alex was just three years old his father died in a car accident. I don’t know the details of it. Apparently, his mother died a few years later from high blood pressure, a condition that doctors could have treated in a more developed country. I don’t tell him that, but he knows. He’s been living at the boys home ever since. The home provides his meals, his shelter, his safety, and his school fees. The home provides his means to a life. In two years he will be too old for the place, and will have to make it on his own.

I had seen the home. I stopped by one afternoon with a girl who volunteers there. We went to see the monthly talent show they put on for the community. Caroline and I walked in to the compound, and despite the green space, sports equipment, and nice day, I didn’t see any boys. We heard a loud commotion from the small quarters in the corner of the yard, and walked over. Fifty young boys fixed their eyes to a small television screen, where one man was jumping off of ropes onto another in the middle of a boxing ring. The showcase of second-rate professional wrestling was keeping them occupied, and many of the boys seemed eager to give the moves a try. At the time I didn’t know Alex but he was in that room.

We pass a small duka. This one has a door and a shop you can enter and pick your own goods off the shelves. Most have an attendant behind bars who passes the goods out in exchange for money in. Alex tells me he when he finishes secondary school and has to leave the Mkombozi home he wants to be a businessman. Not like a duka, but a real business. Not a retailer, but a producer. Important. Maybe he will start a sports club.

We are still in Shanty Town, the nicest part of the outer city, and turn left off Lema Road. Glacier Bar is on the corner behind a ten-foot wooden fence. I come here sometimes with the other teachers and we get drunk and call Tunzo in the middle of the night to come give us a ride back to the compound. We pay him a couple thousand shillings.

By now people are going in all directions, and most have a casual pace about them. Even Alex has slowed down, like he realizes he has nothing to prove when with me, and we find a comfortable stride. We pass more dukas, and older women with baskets on their heads.

“Shikamoo, mama,” I say.

“Marahaba,” they reply with amusement.

I am mzungu, and they are nice to me. Everyone is nice to everyone. I point this out to Alex and he agrees. The people here all come from different tribes, but are able to live side by side. Many neighboring countries have experienced fighting, exploitation and fierce tribalism. The national borders of today were carved out of this continent with less consideration than a river meandering the curve of the earth toward the ocean. But here they recognize themselves as citizens of the nation before members of a tribe. More so here than any other place on earth, we all share a common history. This is the birthplace of modern man. Where humans first stood upon two feet, looked out upon the serengit, the endless plains, gazed up to the stars, and affirmed, “We are here.” This is the home of Lucy and her cohort at Olduvai Gorge, of the wanderers, the hunter-gatherers, the original man. Primary to tribe or nation, we are members of humanity. When Julius Nyerere became the first president of the new independent country in 1964, his government followed the guiding philosophy of ujamaa. He declared Swahili the national language, and ujamaa, familyhood, became the call to action. They sought to create the present out of a dream for the future.

And it worked. Besides a few uprisings in the early days the country has been calm. We all have the same blood inside of us, Alex told me. We will all die someday, have a funeral, and are buried. “You should make friends now and not enemies,” he said. “You cannot carry your own casket. You cannot bury yourself. Once you are dead there is nothing you can do for yourself.”

We made it into town, and out the other side. This was new territory for me. We immediately left the bustle of J.K. Nyerere Road, also known as Double Road, and we crossed a field. Alex told me the four-story building ahead was a coffee factory. The old train tracks next to it used to transport the coffee to other parts of the country and beyond. The factory has long since abandoned the rails for trucks, just as travelers have in exchange for buses. There was an empty train station with a platform and a sign announcing MOSHI. It used to be impressive, welcoming freight and visitors to the proud city. It is now no more than a reminder of what used to be, and these tracks are just an overgrown steel obstacle between the small village of Njoro and Moshi. We cross the eleven tracks as crowds came and went around us. They walk up and down the bank and across the rails like they have done it thousands of times. They have.

We left behind one type of dirtiness in exchange for another. Mud was everywhere. There is no pavement and it has been raining here for a good month. There are a lot of people out and about in the village. Shops are open and men sit outside in plastic lawn chairs listening to music. The homes would be better called huts, and they look broken down. Everyone looks happy.

If you could call this clearing of mud a road, it is the main one through the village. After a couple blocks we turn off to find a shorty road Alex knows leads to the forest. We quickly found ourselves on a mud footpath, one body wide, winding through a field of tall grass. We are the only ones. The sky is blue and expansive. The mountaintop still floats above the land, watching over us. After about half an hour we come to an impasse. The rains had brought back a seasonal stream that crossed our path, and our way was completely gone on the other side. We backtracked. Alex saw an old woman across the field and asked her the way to the Magic Tree in the Rau Forest.

As we walk Alex asks me to explain American politics. Partisanship is a novel concept. In the name of national unity, Nyerere’s Chama Cha Mapinduzi party was declared the only legal party in the country. In 1992 the constitution was amended to allow other parties, though there was still no competition.

We again got to a point where we could go no further. The trail disappeared into the grass. We found a clearing and sat to eat a banana, peanuts, and drink some water. Alex had first been to this forest with some of his friends from school. He had occasional check-ins at the home but was otherwise on his own. He had been most of his life. He did surprisingly well at avoiding trouble. Alex is a Christian. I have been going to a church since I arrived. It is a white church with an Australian minster where a lot of expats and teachers and NGO workers go. I always intended to go to the Swahili service they hold in the early morning but I never did.

We find another way and again get lost and again ask for directions. After a couple hours of this we find some willing guides. Three young boys, all less than five years old, are at their home, among the banana, mango, and avocado trees and coffee bushes. They are getting ready for a shower when we walk nearby. “Mzungu!” They run a couple circles around us, completely naked, and lead us for a minute down to a small stream. They know the land well. They bound over roots and around holes and brush without a thought. We get to the stream and Alex exchanges some quick words with them. They giggle, say “Bye!” and run off, naked and joyful, back to their mud and stick home to have their shower with a bucket.

Alex takes off his shoes and socks and I my sandals. We roll up our pants and tread into the flowing waters. About twenty feet later on the other side, we reassemble and continue. After a few more turnarounds, we make it back to the same main road that we had left back in the village, only a little bit closer. So much for a shorty road. I prefer the scenic route in this land anyways. From here we head into the Rau Forest Reserve.

Somehow it is even muddier in here. I’ve been trying to get a good answer out of Alex all morning, but I am still confused about why it is called the Magic Tree. There is something about it. Some people tried to cut it down but then it was still there. Or you can cut small bits off it and it will grow back healthy. Like bloodletting. Or like a renewable Giving Tree. I don’t know. It may just be that the tree is very old and very big and has been here for many generations, so no one remembers it ever not being here. A constant presence, watching over the people, unchanged. Like the mountain. Like God. We turn a corner and I know that we are there.

It is much bigger than the other trees, but that is all. As we get closer, the background begins to disappear as the tree in front of me gets bigger. I approach the Magic Tree and walk around it. I didn’t pay much attention during the tree unit in biology, and neither Alex nor I know what kind of tree it is. It doesn’t matter. There is a sign nailed to it proudly bragging its numerical statistics: three meters in diameter, 50 meters tall, 190 years old. Born of the tribes of humanity, this tree is the lifeline to the past. It withstood the Germans, the rebellions, the British. It oversaw the independence of a new country, and stands guard over her. This tree is magical, divine, transcendent. I know this. It is impossible to stand before her and not know this.

There is something deeply spiritual about it all, this tree deep in the muddy forest. I take off my pack and we sit with our backs against the great living thing. Another banana each, peanuts and water. With the impulse to speak eliminated in the presence of the Magic Tree, Alex and I sit in silence. Pole, pole. Slowly, slowly is the way of life here. I take a couple of pictures to help me remember, as evidence of what we’ve done. Alex takes some pictures of me in front of the tree, but I don’t take any of him. After all we’ve done together I have very few pictures of the boy Alex.

After leaving the tree, we are soon met on the trail by a man. When we entered the forest reserve, we past a sign declaring the fee of entering. There was no one there, and it was the weekend, so we walked in without paying. The mzungu price was higher than the local price. The man approaching us dressed in the common garb of the men here, sandals, khakis, and short sleeve dress shirt, and nothing about him hinted at authority. He trudged through the mud toward us and claimed to be the forest ranger here to collect the fee.

The man asked for more money than the sign asked, and he had no receipt to give us. There were no receipts because the office is closed and he had run out, he said. Alex accused the man of imitating a ranger and fleecing us. He accused him of being a drunk. The man insisted. Thus began an impassioned and impressive argument in Swahili between the clever boy and the determined man for the next thirty minutes as we three walked out of the forest. I spotted a couple black-and-white colobus monkeys lazing in trees above.

Whether he really worked for the forest or not we didn’t know, but in the end the man earned the 3000 shillings we agree to give him. “You better not spend this on beer. It should go to preserving the forest,” Alex rebuked him.

We traveled back to Njoro along the main path. It was late afternoon by now and the sun was high. The rain had left us alone today. I bought two cold glass bottles of Sprite from a hole-in-the-wall duka and Alex and I squatted, side by side, in the mud along the side of the road and enjoyed the refreshing drink.